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The Crossroads of the European Revolution: Ukrainian Social-Democrats
and Communists (Independentists), the Ukrainian Revolution and Soviet
Hungary 1917-1920
Chris Ford
Online publication date: 19 November 2010
To cite this Article Ford, Chris(2010) 'The Crossroads of the European Revolution: Ukrainian Social-Democrats and
Communists (Independentists), the Ukrainian Revolution and Soviet Hungary 1917-1920', Critique, 38: 4, 565 605
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2010.522122
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The Crossroads of the European
Revolution: Ukrainian Social-
Democrats and Communists
(Independentists), the Ukrainian
Revolution and Soviet Hungary
1917

1920
Chris Ford
When considering the fate of the revolutionary wave in Europe during 19161921 the
traditional view has been that the failure of European communism to carry the revolution
beyond its point of origin decided the fate of the infant Soviet Union negatively. This article
seeks to demonstrate that in 19171919 the Ukrainian question was pivotal to the success of
the revolution in Europe. It examines the role of the Ukrainian Social-Democrat and
Communist Independentists, the Ukapisty. These Ukrainian Marxists challenged both the
Russian Communist Party and the Ukrainian nationalists in their quest for an independent
Soviet Ukraine. Their campaign had international significance and gained the support of
Soviet Hungary, their alliance brought into question the role of the Russian Communist
Party in undermining the communist project in Europe. An appreciation of the causes of
these little known events is essential to understand the subsequent fate of the revolutions.
Keywords: Ukrainian Revolution; Marxism; national liberation; Nezalezhnyky
(Independentists); Soviet Hungary; Ukrainian Communist Party
Introduction: Contours of Ukrainian Marxism
Volodymyr Vynnychenko, one of the most well known Ukrainian leaders in the 20th
century, coined the phrase vsebichne vyzvolennia * universal liberation.
1
By this he
meant the universal (social, national, political, moral, cultural, etc) liberation of the
1
V. Vynnychenko, Rozlad i pohodzhennia in Ivan L. Rudnytsky Essays in Modern Ukrainian History
(Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), p. 419.
ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2010 Critique
DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2010.522122
Critique
Vol. 38, No. 4, December 2010, pp. 565605
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worker and peasant masses. This striving for such a total and radical liberation
represented the Ukrainian Revolution in the broad historical sense. However the
expression the Ukrainian Revolution may also be used in the narrower sense, of the
great upheavals aimed at this object, the most noteworthy of which marked the years
19171921. According to Vynnychenko, the universal current which strove to realise
this historical tendency of the revolution comprised the most radical of the socialist
parties, the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries*Borotbisty*and the
oppositional federalist currents amongst the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, the Ukrainian
Social-democratic Workers Party (Independentists), or Nezalezhnyky.
The Nezalezhnyky refers to the title by which a current of Ukrainian Marxists defined
themselves who first organised as the Nezalezhnyky Fraction of the Ukrainian Social-
Democratic Workers Party (USDRP), thenfromMarch1919 as a separate party, the USDRP
(Nezalezhnyky) re-launched as the Ukrainian Communist Party (UKP) in December 1919.
The formation of the Nezalezhnyky has traditionally been seen as originating in the
contending perspectives within the USDRP in 19181919, set in the context of the
revolutionary wave which accompanied the post-war crisis. Yet the Nezalezhnyky did not
consider themselves so narrowly; writing to the Communist International in 1924 the UKP
leaders Andriy (Pisotsky) Richytsky and Antin Drahomyretsky explained:
The UKP has a 24-year history of its existence*beginning from the Revolutionary
Ukrainian Party (19001905) through the USDRP (19051919) and finally the
UKP, which is its revolutionary successor, although there are a few old members of
the USDRP whom remained in the mire of the Second International and some
ceased their political existence.
2
As opposed to a sovietophile splinter the Nezalezhnyky represented a re-articulation
of the Ukrainian Marxist tradition. This is not so easily defined; after all we can find
longstanding Russian, Polish and Jewish representatives of the Marxist tradition
organised on the territory of Ukraine, within both the Russian Empire and Austrian-
ruled Galicia and Bukovyna. According to John-Paul Himka:
The Ukrainian Marxist tradition was a particular Branch of a larger tradition which
Perry Anderson refers to as Classical Marxism (as distinct from Western
Marxism). According to Anderson at least three features characterize classical
Marxism. First, it flourished in a specific geographical locale: Central and Eastern
Europe. The languages of its great texts were German, Russian and to a lesser
extent, Polish. Second it flourished in a specific period: from the late nineteenth
century to the 1930s. Its representatives were for the most part murdered or
silenced by Stalin or Hitler. Third, its chief thematic concerns were historical,
political and economic, in contrast to the philosophical bent of Western Marxism.
3
2
Lyst TsK Vikonomy Kominternu Pro Vzayemovidnostini Mizh UKP i KP(b)U, 27 August 1924 in
P. Bachinskyi (ed) Dokumenty trahichnoi ision Ukrainy (19171927 rr), zhurnal Okhorona pratsi, (Kyiv Oblast
Derzhauna Administratsiya, 1999), p. 523.
3
John-Paul Himka, Comments on Manfred Turban, Roman Rosdolskys Reconsideration of the Traditional
Marxist Debate on the Schemes of Reproduction on New Methodological Grounds. In IS Koropeckyj (ed),
Selected Contributions of Ukrainian Scholars to Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research
Institute, 1984), pp. 135147.
566 C. Ford
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Ukrainian Marxismcan be considered as a particular trend of the vernacular movement
that existed in the period fromthe International Working Mens Association through to
the Ukrainian revolution of 19171921. This current consciously organised themselves
as distinctly Ukrainiansocial-democratic/communist organisations; it was not until the
impact of the Ukrainian revolutionthat we find a wider layer of revolutionaries, notably
the Bolsheviks identifying themselves as Ukrainian; the core of the Ukrainian Marxist
tradition remained within the original nucleus.
4
Roman Rosdolsky, probably the best-
known Ukrainian Marxist, considered:
All Ukrainian Marxism (although this is a rather wide concept) in one way or
another emerged from Drahomanovism, i.e., from populism. (This was our specific
Ukrainian local colour.) Therefore, for all of them the passage to Marxism was
bound up with a battle (often a very painful and drawn-out battle) against
Drahomanovist traditions.
5
We may add to Rosdolskys observations that it emerged particularly from an
engagement and divergence from Russian populism, though many of its character-
istics, as opposed to being residual populism, were in fact more consistent with
Marxs original notions than many of the aspects of post-Marx Marxism.
6
Key
features of the ideas that permeated the Ukrainian Marxist tradition were:
. Emancipatory ideals of a universal liberation*the social, national, political,
moral and cultural liberation of the worker and peasant masses.
. Principles of self-emancipationexpressedinterms of boththenational principle of
Ukrainianworkersself-organisationandanindependent workingclass perspective
for social change, distinct and separate from other parties and external powers.
. Conceptions of workers and peasants self-management of a communal,
cooperative economy within a self-governing Ukraine.
7
4
While Georgii Plekhanov has been credited with being the father of Russian Marxism, he was in fact
neither the first Marxist theorist nor the first to popularise Marxs ideas in the Russian Empire. That was Mykola
Ziber, a member of the Hromada of Kyiv. The genesis of the Ukrainian Marxist tradition was already developing
in the activity of Ziber and Serhii Podolynsky when they set up a study group on Marxs economics in 1870.
5
Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the Nonhistoric Peoples: The National Question in the Revolution of 1848
(Glasgow: Critique Books, 1987), p. 13 n. 48.
6
Serhii Podolynsky has articulated a vision of a society of communal self-government which would
transfer land to the peasant communes and of the factories to the workers artels. Roman Serbyn, In Defense of
an Independent Ukrainian Socialist Movement: Three Letters from Serhii Podolynsky to Valerian Smirnov,
Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 7:2, pp. 333 (1982). Similarly Marx had emphasised that the peasant community
could be saved by serving as a point of departure within a communist revolution in Russia, the success of which
was conditional upon a corresponding proletarian revolution in the West. Given such a linkage Russia could
avoid going through the vicissitudes of capitalism. Marx, First Draft of Letter to Vera Zasulich, March 1881;
Marxist Internet Archive: http://www.marxiste.org/archive/marx/works/1881/03/zasulich1.htm. This was in
contrast to Plekhanovs economic determinist antagonism to the peasant community, and statist and
authoritarian conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
7
Mykola Porsh wrote in 1907: Workers parties in Russia and abroad demand that land, water resources and
all the natural deposits should be alienated from the large owners and passed into communal use. They propose
to create communal, cooperative or municipal economy instead of the wasteful and detrimental capitalist order.
The people would greatly benefit from this communal property. Mykola Porsh, Pro Avtonomiyu Ukrainy (Kyiv:
Prosvita, 1907), p. 96.
Critique 567
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. The view that agrarian preponderance diminished neither the revolutionary
potential of the peasantry nor their contribution to the socialist project with the
developing working class.
. Upholding internationalist principles, with linkages to international socialism
through its various organisational initiatives, opposition to imperialism and
locating the Ukrainian revolution in an international framework.
8
These ideas were not necessarily adhered to consistently; there were ruptures and
various efforts to reassert these principles. Such positions as on the national question,
the subjective forces of the revolution and the nature of the post-revolutionary order
were a source of controversy and also marked a point of demarcation with Russian
Marxism.
9
The Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (RSDRP) demanded the
subordination of all Marxists to a single party*their own. As a corollary their leaders
supported the assimilation of workers into the Russian nation as historically
progressive and refused to challenge the integrity of the Russian Empire.
10
In contrast
the Ukrainian Marxists took up the national question as a task of the immediate,
minimum programme of social-democracy, considering that the social revolution and
advent of communist society would ensure the free development of nations and
national culture, promoting a new spring time of nations. In this regard they were
strongly influenced by the Austrian Marxists on the national question and party
organisation.
11
The USDRPs sister party in Galicia, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic
8
Podolynsky participated in the International Working Mens Association, the Revolutionary Ukrainian
Party and USDRP participated in the Second International and the Zimmerwald movement.
9
The antagonism of the Russian Social Democracy towards Ukrainian socialism was deep-rooted. It can be
traced to the very inception of both movements in the 19th century. Indeed it brought Engels into conflict with
Plekhanov, when he failed to support Ukrainian self-determination. This revealing conflict arose in 1890 over
Engelss essay, The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsardom. Plekhanov replied criticising Engels for his consideration
of Ukrainians as a nation. Engels had come to believe that one positive outcome of the overthrow of Tsarism
would be that Little Russia [Ukraine] will be able to choose its political connections freely. The following year
Plekhanov published O Bezvykhodnosti Uukrainskago Sotsializma v Rossii. It depicted the Russian conquest of
Ukraine as an economic necessity and the Ukrainian movement as utopian with no historical basis: The
abolition of serfdom, universal conscription, the development of commerce and industry . . . the influence of
urban life and civilization*these are the factors that have definitively merged the rural population of Ukraine,
even linguistically . . . into a sphere of influences shared with Russia, cited in Rosdolsky, op.cit., p. 189.
10
There is no complete study of the Ukrainian question in these debates. Works which cover this period
include: V. Levynsky, Linternatonale socialiste et les peuples opprimes, (Vienna: Dzuin, 1920); A. Karpenko,
Lenins Theory of The National Question And Its Contradictions, META, 2: 34, (1979); M. Yurkevich, A
Forerunner of National Communism: Lev Yurkevych (18851918), Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 7:1(1982),
pp. 5057. Lenins Struggle for a Revolutionary International: Documents : 19071916 (Communist International
in Lenins Time), Ed. John Riddell, New York, Monad, 1986, Lev Rybalka (Yurkevych) Rosiiski marksysty i
ukrainskyi rukh, Dzvin 78, Kyiv (1913).
11
The Social-democratic Workers Party of Austria (SPO) congress at Brno stated that Austria was to be
transformed into a democratic federative state of nationalities (Bauer, Question of Nationalities, London: 2000,
422). The founding programme of the USDRP demanded the right of every nation to cultural and political self-
determination and that Russia be transformed into a Democratic Republic with broad local and territorial
self-government for the whole population of the state in which there would be equal rights of all languages at
schools, courts, local administrative and government institutions, Stalittia, Ukrainska Sotsiial-Demokratychna
Robitnycha Partiya, (Lviv, 1999), pp. 99100.
568 C. Ford
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Party (USDP), formed a component of the federal Social-Democratic Workers Party of
Austria.
12
The question of the relationship between the social and national spheres proved to
be a repeated source of tension.
13
Conversely, the quest for universality strengthened
the emancipatory attributes of Ukrainian Marxism. It was enriched by being open to
other currents, which significantly deviated, at times unacknowledged, from the
constraints of the established orthodoxy of the Second International. While populism
was rejected as turning back the clock, so too was an economic determinism, warning
against viewing things through the prism of distorted Russian Marxism.
14
The
USDRP criticised the Russian Marxists for limiting themselves to an ideological
connection exclusively with the labour movement of Germany.
15
Lev Yurkevych
summarised the USDRP in the following terms:
A second constitutional congress of the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party took place
in 1905 and adopted the maximum Erfurt programme of the German Social-
Democrats and the minimum programme of the Russian Social-Democracy. It
demanded extreme democratic autonomy for the territory within the ethnographic
boundaries of Ukraine, with legal guarantees for the free development for the
national minorities living within its territory. The principle of national organiza-
tion was based on the organizational model of the Austrian Social-Democracy.
With regard to tactics, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party took the same position as
the left wing of the Russian Social-Democracy (Bolsheviks), and instead of calling
itself the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, adopted the name Ukrainian Social-
Democratic Workers Party, the name under which it still exists today, and to which
the authors of this letter belong.
16
It had, according to Yurkevych, connected the question of national liberation to all
the problems of the emancipation of the proletariat, which he concluded appears as
the sole revolutionary and democratic power.
17
Yet by 1917 these ideas formed but
one part of a spectrum of opinion in the USDRP. This had obvious consequences and
has proved a problem for historiography. An explanation of how this came about can
be found in the period of reaction following 1905, when the entire social-democratic
12
The views of Otto Bauer at the time were outlined in Ukrainian Social Democracy in the Polish Social-
democrat paper Naprzod, 9 January 1912.
13
Symptomatic was the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) where Mykola Mikhnovsky, prioritising
independence, led a split in 1902, his ideas being branded zoological nationalism. The RUP fractured again in
1905, with the Ukrainian Social-democratic Union or Spilka, led by M. Melenevsky-Basok, forming an
autonomous section of the RSDRP (Mensheviks). The Spilka saw the national question as an auxiliary issue.
Though initially successful Spilka was relegated to the role of peasant organisers and suggested it became an All-
Russian section. See: George Y. Boshyk, The Rise of Ukrainian Political Parties in Russia 19001907. With
Special Refrerence to Social Democracy, (PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1981).
14
Haslo No. 3, 1903; Boshyk, op. cit., p. 171.
15
Lev Yurkevych, Peredmova, in Volodymyr Levynsky (ed), Narys Rozvytki Ukrainskoho Rukh v Halychnyia,
Dzvin, (Kyiv 1914).
16
Lev Rybalka (Yurkevych) LUkraine Et La Guerre, Lettre Ouvre adresee a la 2nd conference socialiste
internationale tenue en Hollande en mai 1916, Edition du journal social-democrate Ukrainyen Borotba
(Lausanne, 1916), p. 21
17
Rybalka, op. cit., p. 22.
Critique 569
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movement went into decline. In their reports to the Second International the Central
Committee of the USDRP described a retrogression of the Party and its
organisations, and that a growing influence of bourgeois nationalist ideas were
causing haemorrhaging, notably of the intelligentsia to cultural institutions and de-
politicised nationalism.
18
The leadership challenged this trend as being in sharp
contradiction to the revolutionary tradition of our party.
19
While on a formal level
they were successful it did not stop the corrosion hindering efforts at regenerating the
party on the basis of its traditions.
20
With World War I these divergences became acute. A majority of USDRP leaders
opposed the war, a minority adopting a pro-Russian or a pro-Austrian orientation as
taken by the USDP in Galicia.
21
Efforts to uphold principles that really correspond to
the USDRP traditions were advanced by a foreign organisation of the USDRP, led by
Yurkevych, and supported the Zimmerwald anti-war movement.
22
Under his
editorship Borotba was launched in Geneva, declaring: Above all, we should not
take sides, not besmirch our revolutionary cause in showing solidarity with the war
aims of any of the governments involved.
23
It called for a new International where
the liberation of Ukraine will be the watchword of the Third International, and of the
proletarian socialists of Europe, in their struggle against Russian imperialism.
24
These
views were to resonate in the USDRP revival, though Yurkevych did not participate;
he was terminally ill, and on reaching Moscow he remained there paralysed until his
death in 1919.
25
His absence certainly contributed to the changed complexion of the
18
This was cited in the report to the conference of the Second International in Copenhagen, at which
Yurkevych attended as the USDRP delegate. See: Bericht der Ukrainischen Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiter-Partei in
Russland an den Internaionalen Sozialistfschen Kongress in Kopenhagen, Mit Parteigruss Das Zentralkomite der
Ukrainischen Arbeiterpartei (Verleger P. Buniak, Buchdruckerei Powszechna, Akademicka, Nr. 8, Lemberg,
1910).
19
The USDRP CC reported: A central task will be to develop our national class politics opposed to the
Ukrainian bourgeois national movement and opposed to these intellectuals in the party which have sympathy
for this Ukrainian bourgeois national movement, Bericht der Ukrainischen Sozialdemokratischen Arbeiter-Partei,
op. cit., p. 13.
20
Yurkevych bemoaned: The Ukrainian Marxist intelligentsia has almost no interest in a workers press. Our
generation, carelessly and without perspectives of its own, has gotten involved in Ukrainian bourgeois affairs. Its
path and that of the Ukrainian workers movement have parted ways apparently forever, Lev Yurkevych, Paki i
Paki (V Sparava Ukr Rob, Hazeti), Dzvin (Kyiv, 1914) p. 277.
21
The pro-Austrian orientation that emerged from the ranks of the USDRP was represented by the Union
for the Liberation of Ukraine formed by Melenevskyi and the former USDRP General Secretary Andrii Zhuk.
On the SVU see Roman Rosdolsky, Do istorii Soiuzu vyavolennia Ukrainy, Ukrainskyi samostiinyk, 1 May 1969.
22
P. Diatliv, a Central Committee member of the USDRP, wrote to Levynsky defending the anti-war stance
being espoused by Yurkevych: Thus, your statement that the views of Borotba are the personal views of Mr.
Rybalka [Yurkevych] is contrary to the fact. . . . But you, comrade, as a person familiar with the programme and
tactics of our party, undoubtedly know that the views of Borotba really correspond to the USDRP traditions,
Dymytro Doroshenko, Z Istorii Ukrainskoi Politychnoi Dumky Za Chasiv Svitovoi Viini (Praha, 1935), p. 62.
23
Borotba No. 4, September 1915, pp. 36.
24
Rybalka, op. cit., p. 54.
25
Yurkevych had particular influence on the Retrograd and Moscow USDRP committees who republished
articles of Borotba in their journal Nashe Zhyttya. These branches of the USDRP provided a number of the
leaders of the Nezalezhnyky, see Mykhailo Avdiyenko, Lyutneva, revoliutsia v Petrohrad I USDRP, Letopis
Revolutsii, Kharkiv, No. 1. (1928), pp. 226234.
570 C. Ford
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USDRP, which rapidly revived. Dmytro Doroshenko characterised the conflict which
had surfaced in the Ukrainian movement as between two principles: the state-
national and the social-international.
26
To the revolutionary social-democrats these
were false opposites, the former dismembering an integrated class-based perspective
of universal liberation.
The USDRP that revived in February 1917 nowembraced not only former members,
energised youth and workers, but also, crucially, those who had fragmented in the
retrogression of the preceding years, unchanged in their outlook.
27
In this changed
environment what had been the mainstream became a milieu relocated to the left wing
of their party, in the process of the revolution crystallising into the Nezalezhnyky.
The Social Forces and Causes of the Ukrainian Revolution
On the eve of the revolution Ukraine was partitioned between the Austro-Hungarian
and Russian Empires, the majority of its territory having been held in a colonial
position by Tsarist Russia for over two and a half centuries. Whereas movement of the
Ukrainians of Galicia developed apace, this was not so across the border, where the
Ukrainian movement developed gradually in a protracted struggle with Tsarist
absolutism. Subject to institutional Russification, Moscow responded with a hostility
qualitatively different from that towards other nationalities: Ukraine did not exist
only Malarossia, little Russia. This can be explained by the role Ukraine played in the
foundation of the empire. Its ingestion by the Muscovite state, which usurped
the name of the medieval state of Kyivan Rus, brought with it the acquisition of the
large natural resources of Ukraine. This was the step which transformed it into the
Russian Empire, a factor which is of no small importance in the minds of Russian
nationalists to this day.
The social and economic geography of Ukraine developed into what the Soviet
economist Mikhail Volobuyev characterised as a colony of a European type.
28
The
peculiar mixture of backwardness and modernity arose during the combined drive of
the Russian state and European capital in the development of capitalism. Whilst
European capital appeared to relegate Russian capital to second place, it did not
diminish but compounded Ukraines position.
29
Volobuyev observed a dual process
in the economy of the Russian Empire:
26
Doroshenko, op. cit., p. 37.
27
The USDRP grew significantly in 1917; in early May the USDRP claimed it was transforming itself into a
mass workers organisation; by the end of 1917 it claimed 40,000 members (Robitnycha Hazeta 6 May 1917,
cited in Marko Bojcun, The Working Class and the National Question in Ukraine, 18801920, (PhD dissertation,
York University, Toronto, 1985), p. 71.
28
Volobuyev was an economist and government official heading a branch of the commissariat of education.
His articles On the Problem of the Ukrainian Economy were published in Bilshovyk Ukrainy, 30 January and 16
February 1928. An ethnic Russian, he was a spokesman for the Ukrainian communists and defender of Ukraines
right to control its economy. Volobuyev showed how central control and continued Russian chauvinism
perpetuated the exploitation of Ukraine within the USSR. M. Volobuyev, Do problemy ukrainskoyi ekonomiky,
in Dokumenty ukrainskoho komunizmy, Ivan Maistrenko ed, (New York:, 1962), p. 132230.
29
Volobuyev, op. cit., p. 165.
Critique 571
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Hence, the question of whether there was a single Russian pre-revolutionary
economy should be answered as follows: it was a single economy on an
antagonistic, imperialist basis, but from the viewpoint of centrifugal forces of the
colonies oppressed by her, it was a complex of national economies . . . The
Ukrainian economy was not an ordinary province of Tsarist Russia, but a land
which was placed in a colonial position.
30
The process of urbanisation reflected this position; Ukrainians constituted about
one-third of the urban population; nine out of ten lived in the rural districts,
mostly classed as peasants, with whom Ukrainians were synonymous.
31
Ukraine was
one of the most highly industrialised parts of the empire with a strong penetration
of capitalism in agriculture. This had not ameliorated the agrarian question, which
by 1917 had grown increasingly acute. In the bread basket of Europe the majority
lived at subsistence level, exacerbated by a population growth that outpaced the
peasants ability to purchase land.
32
The agrarian and national questions blended in
an explosive cocktail, into a situation where alongside the Russian state and church,
one-third of arable land was held by a class of which three out of four were
Russians or Poles.
The development of capitalism within this colonial framework impacted on the
state, capital, labour relations and composition of the social classes. The capitalist
class was overwhelmingly non-Ukrainian, prompting Ukrainian socialists to define
the nation as bezburzhaunist: bourgeoisless. The proletariat bore the stigma of
colonialism, emerging at the historic conjuncture when capitalism was shifting into a
phase of imperialism. This witnessed a transformation not only in capital but also
within the working class, seeing the growth of a privileged stratum, an aristocracy of
labour. Whilst it is rarely acknowledged, Russian imperialism was no exception.
According to the 1897 census, of the 23.4 million populace of Russian-ruled Ukraine,
17 million were Ukrainian, 2.8 million Russians and 1.9 million Jews.
33
The
Ukrainian element of the proletariat increased slowly; it was initially comprised of
mainly Russian migrant labour, which provided the source for an upper layer in the
30
Volobuyev, op. cit., p. 167.
31
Vladyslav Verstiuk, Conceptual Issues in Studying the History of the Ukrainian Revolution, Journal of
Ukrainian Studies, 24:1 (1999), p. 14. H.R, Weinstein, Land Hunger and Nationalism in the Ukraine 1905
1917, The Journal of Economic History, 2:1(1942), p. 24.
32
In 1917, there were 4,011,000 peasant households in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Of them, 15.8 per cent had no
land under cultivation, 20 per cent owned between 0.1 to 3.0 desyatinas per farm and 55.6 per cent owned 3.1 to
10.0 desyatinas per farm. These sections lived in relative scales of poverty, whilst the remaining 8.6 percent
owned more than 10.0 desyatinas each and were wealthy peasants*kurkuls (kulaks). The health of Ukrainian
peasants was on a scale markedly worse than European Russia. This was reflected in the higher level of rejection
of peasant conscripts to the Russian army: Weinstein, op. cit., p. 2628.
33
The national composition of the nascent capitalist class in 1832 reveals the composition of factory owners
as: Russian 44.6 per cent, Ukrainian 28.7 per cent, Jewish 17.4 per cent, foreign 3.6 per cent and other 5.7 per
cent. The composition of merchants as: Russian 52.6 per cent, Ukrainian 28.7 per cent, Jewish 17.4 per cent,
foreign 1.9 per cent and other 2.4 per cent. Volobuyev, op. cit., p. 154.
572 C. Ford
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higher paid, skilled posts.
34
Ukrainian new entrants found Russian not only
the language of the state and administration but of the labour regime, of their
immediate class adversary. By 1917 amongst the 3.6 million proletarians almost 50
per cent were in the mining and steel enclave of the Donbas. Inclusive of their
dependents, the working class amounted to some 6.5 million*21 per cent of the
populace. The overall Ukrainians compoment stood at 73 per cent of wage labourers,
and only 50 per cent in industry, trade and transport, 90 per cent of day labourers
and 88 per cent of the agricultural proletariat.
35
These developments posited the national question at the point of production
through a division of labour, which relegated Ukrainians to the low paid, flexible
labour strata, under-represented in heavy industry and over-represented in service
and agricultural sectors. Ukraines position as a colony of Russia and semi-colony of
European capital was summed up by Karl Kautsky, who observed that:
Capitalism develops in only one dimension for the Ukrainian people it
proletarianises them, while the other dimension the flowering of the productive
forces, the accumulation of surplus and wealth is mainly for the benefit of other
countries. Because of this, capitalism reveals to Ukrainians only its negative,
revolutionizing dimension . . . it does not lead to an increase in their wealth.
36
In this historical context we may delineate from the problems that faced Ukraine in
the revolution. Which of the social classes could attain hegemony and transcend these
social cleavages, establishing a cohesive and viable system? It followed from the class
structure and composition that as a nation of workers and peasants with no
nationally conscious bourgeoisie, the leading role in the struggle for hegemony
should correspond to its character.
37
That is a bloc of these subaltern classes
combining the goal of the emancipation of labour with the quest for national
liberation. Ukrainian Marxism from its beginnings grappled with these perplexities,
attempting to develop a totalising perspective, one which reached beyond those
orthodoxies of the time predetermining a bourgeois ascendancy. Concurrently Myola
Porch, the founding theorist of the USDRP asserted that:
Thus only the proletariat can assume the leadership in the struggle for
autonomy . . . the Ukrainian national movement will not be a bourgeois movement
of triumphant capitalism as in the case of the Czechs. It will be more like the Irish
case, a proletarian and semi-proletarianised peasant movement.
38
34
On this aspect of the division of labour see: Andrii Richtysky, Memorandum Ukrainskoi Kumunistichnoi
Partii Kongresovi III Komunistychnoho Internationalu, Nova Doba, in Ivan Maistrenko (ed) Dokumenty
Ukrainskoho Komunizmu, (New York: Prolog, 1962), pp. 4566; Marko Bojcun, Approaches to the Study of the
Ukrainian Revolution, Journal of Ukrainian Studies 24:1 (1999), pp. 2139; Theodore H. Friedgut, Iuzovka and
Revolution, Vol. 1: Life and Work in Russias Donbass, 18691924 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),
pp. 208144.
35
Isaak Mazepa, Bolshevyzm I Okupatsiia Ukariny, (Lviv, 1922), p. 13.
36
Cited in Bojcun, The Working Class and the National Question in Ukraine, 18801920 (Toronto: Graduate
Program in Political Science, York University, 1985), p. 71
37
Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsii, Tom.II, (Kyiv-Vienna, 1920), p. 102.
38
Mykola Porsh, Avtonomiy Ukrainy, (Kyiv, 1907), p. 131.
Critique 573
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Dialectics of the Ukrainian Revolution
With the overthrow of the autocracy in 1917 the Ukrainian Revolution soon
differentiated itself from the wider Russian Revolution, setting as its task the
achievement of national liberation through the creation of a Ukrainian state. The first
phase spanned from the February Revolution to the October seizure of power by the
Central Rada and proclamation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR) in 1917,
the upsurge of the workerpeasant revolution and the dislocation of the revolu-
tionary movement, defeated by the Austro-German and conservative forces in 1918.
This period was one of unprecedented self-organisation and mobilisation of the
Ukrainian masses, the movement comprised a bloc of the middle class, peasantry and
the Ukrainian section of the working class, centred in the Central Rada (Council).
The Central Rada was a mass assembly consisting of councils of peasants, soldiers
and workers deputies elected at their respective congresses; it later expanded its
constituency, drawing in national minorities, and included the pioneering organisa-
tion of Jewish national autonomy.
39
The Ukrainian word rada and Russian sovet, meaning council, are direct
transliterations, the Bolshevik leader Yuri Lapchynsky recalled that there always
seemed to be a Ukrainian who would claim he supported Soviet power and also the
Rada because it was a soviet.
40
Vynnychenko thought the revolution appeared to be
following a course concurrent with Ukraines class composition:
Thus, it seems that it would have been logical to continue establishing only the
workers and peasants statehood, which would have corresponded to the entire
nations character. And it seemed to have been so planned during the first period,
especially during the struggle against the Provisional Government. And our power
seemed to have been established in such a way. The Central Rada really consisted of
councils of peasants, soldiers and workers deputies, who were elected at the
respective congresses and sent to the Central Rada. And the General Secretariat
seemed to have been consisting only of socialists. And the leading parties, Social-
democrats and Social-Revolutionists, seemed to have been standing firmly on the
basis of social revolution.
41
The USDRP grew in size and influence during the struggle with the Provisional
Government: considered by Ukrainian Social-democrats to be their Bolshevik
period, although this Bolshevism was upheld by the national struggle more than by
the class struggle.
42
This leading role contained a duality; on the one hand the
Bolshevism described Andriy Richytsky and on the other what Vynnychenko saw as
39
Solomon Goldelman, Jewish National Autonomy in Ukraine 19171920, (Chicago: Ukrainian Research and
information institute, 1968); Moses Silberfarb, The Jewish Ministry and Jewish National Autonomy in Ukraine
1918/19 (New York: Aleph Press, 1993).
40
Yurii Lapchinsky, Z pershykh dniv vseukrainskoyi vlady, Letopis revoliutsiyi, 1927, No. 56, p. 56,
41
Volodymyr Vynnychenko; Vidrodzhennia natsii, listoriya Ukrainsko Revoliutsii, Tom. 1 (Kyiv-Vienna:
Dzvin, 1920).
42
Memorandum Ukrainskoi Kumunistichnoi Partii Kongresovi III Korrunistychnoii Internatisionaly, 1920,
P. Bachinskyi (ed) Dokumenty trahichnon ision Ukrainy (19171927 rr), Zhurnal Okhorona pratsi, (Kyiv
Oblast Derzhavna Administratsiya, 1999) pp. 532533.
574 C. Ford
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subsequent errors.
43
Underlying these errors were differences over conceptions of the
revolution and requisite strategy. On the burning questions, the war, agrarian
revolution
44
and workers self-management, the leaders of the Central Rada
prevaricated and at key moments lagged behind the pace of the movement from
below, even on the national question with which it was preoccupied.
45
The question which could make or break the revolution was the agrarian
question.
46
The agrarian revolution grew apace, peasants and returning soldiers
proceeded to expropriate estates and redistribute the land, whilst the Central Rada
delayed taking decisive action until the convening of a Constituent Assembly.
47
Relations strained between its leading circles drawn largely from the intelligentsia and
the middle class, and the rank and file of the movement.
48
The prevailing opinion was that the recognition of autonomy was a precondition
of progress; the conference of the USDRP held on 45 April 1917, considered it as
the very first and urgent present objective of the Ukrainian proletariat and the entire
country.
49
This corresponded with the dualist view that while a social revolution
could be achieved in the West, only after the Russian Empire had passed into the
phase of advanced capitalism and democracy would the requisite conditions become
available for such an advance. There were differences over who comprised the camp
of the revolutionary democracy, whether it should be an alliance of the working class
with the liberal bourgeoisie or an independent bloc of the workers and peasantry,
excluding the latter. Either way, few believed that the requisite material and social
conditions were available for a social/communist revolution. The national question
43
Vynnychenko, op. cit., pp. 251252.
44
The USDRP policy was concurrent with the prevailing views of the Second International on the agrarian
question. Favouring highly developed large farms, they considered it necessary to keep them from division,
destruction and partition. This however appeared to be pushing against the tide of the agrarian revolution.
45
Porsh complained that: At first the Central Rada was a bloc of parties united around the slogan of
autonomy and federation. When our party entered the Rada, it replaced its class orientation with a national one.
Some of our comrades said quite plainly that until we achieve the goal of unity there can be no class struggle in
the Central Rada . . . As far as I am concerned, Ukrainian Social-democrats had no right compromising on class
interests in deference to general, national ones, Robitnycha Hazeta, Organ of the Bureau of the Central
Committee and Kyiv Committee of the USDPP, 4 October 1917.
46
Holubnychy writes: This reminds one of Lypynskys comments that the Ukrainian socialist parties gave
away the land in order to be politically popular. Unfortunately, they did not give away enough and therefore
were not sufficiently popular. And this is why they failed, while Lenin succeeded. Holubnychy, op. cit., p. 4647.
47
The Central Radas indecision on the land question undoubtedly reflected division within the Ukrainian
peasantry itself. As early as the spring of 1917 the richer strata were making common cause with the landlords,
fearing that the revolution of the poor and middle peasantry would not leave their holdings untouched. The
Rada tried to appeal to both camps, relying increasingly on the Free Cossacks, the militia of the wealthier
peasantry, while making declarations for the benefit of the poor and middle peasantry.
48
Raya Dunayevskaya identified a similar problem in the anti-colonial revolutions after 1945: The greatest
obstacle to the further development of these national liberation movements comes from the intellectual
bureaucracy which has emerged to lead them. In the same manner the greatest obstacle in the way of the
working class overcoming capitalism comes from the Labor bureaucracy that leads it, Raya Dunayevskaya,
Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism and the Afro-Asian Revolutions (Cambridge: Left Group,
Cambridge University Labour Club, 1961), p. 15.
49
The decisions of the All-Ukrainian Conference of the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers Party held in
Kyiv were published in Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 April 1917.
Critique 575
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brought an additional dimension, as the urban working class was largely Russian;
critics considered the dictatorship of the proletariat would exclude the Ukrainian
peasantry, negating national liberation. In his self-critical history, Rebirth of a Nation,
Vynnychenko believed they had taken Marxs theory of the development of capitalism
in an ideal context; recalling the comparably large size of the French peasantry at the
time of the Paris Commune he wrote:
But socialism of the enslaved is not the socialism meant by those socialists who
have put on a mask in order to obtain the masses trust. And it is not the socialism
meant by the Ukrainian democracy, including our Marxist Social-democrats. We,
the Ukrainian Social-democrats, have emasculated Marxism. We have cut out its
vivid, constructive and active part, having become sterile, inert and fat boars.
50
Traditional opinions were challenged, on the one hand by the popular movement from
below and on the other hand by the antagonism towards the Ukrainian national
democratic movement by the liberal and conservative wings of Russia. The deepening
crisis of 1917 all pointed in one direction*a socialist transformation. The historical
orthodoxies have largely neglected this tendency within the Ukrainian Revolution,
considering its location of origin as Bolshevik influence in the soviets, or in Russia itself.
This view holds but a partial truth, for to grasp fully this conjuncture it is necessary to
recognise that this tendency grew organically out of the development of the Ukrainian
Revolution itself; a fact illustrated by the increased levels of class consciousness of workers
and peasants, confirmed in the evolution experienced by the Ukrainian socialist parties.
Even before Lenins April Theses, the opinion was being voiced within the USDRP
that the revolution needed to advance, symptomatic was the USDRP weekly Nashe
Zhyttya which reminded readers their aim was not only to overthrow the political
dominance of the classes hostile to us, but also the social dominance of the capitalists
and the landlords . . . . We must not stand still.
51
In a number of Soviets, USDRP
deputies described themselves as Bolsheviks, only Ukrainian ones.
52
The lefts
influence was most evident at the Fourth Congress in September 1917, which declared:
The present Russian revolution, bringing in its wake a transformation in socio-
economic relations unheard of in the history of all previous revolutions, finding a
broad echo in the great worker masses of Western Europe, awakening in them an
impulse to abandon the path of capitalism, to make a social revolution and, at the
same time, to stop the imperialist war, which may bring about an uprising of the
proletariat in Western Europe*this revolution is a prologue to and beginning of
the universal socialist revolution.
53
50
Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsii Tom. 2, op. cit., p. 91.
51
Nashe Zhyttya, 24 March 1917, organ of the Petrograd USDRP Committee. Very few projected these ideas
until the return of Lenin with his April Theses. Ironically among the first people he took his opinions to were the
soldiers of the USDRP stronghold, the Izmailovsky Regiment, on 10 April 1917.
52
Bojcun, op. cit., p. 282
53
The principle resolutions adopted by the Fourth Congress of the USDRP was drafted by Mykola Porsh, the
congress itself was influenced not only by the traditional left leaders but the new generation of militants such as
Neronovych and Richytsky. The report and resolutions of the congress were published in Robitnycha Hazeta 1, 3,
5 and 7 October 1917.
576 C. Ford
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The Central Rada was condemned as being composed of representatives of the petty
bourgeoisie, and because of its class composition was incapable of maintaining a
proper and resolute revolutionary-democratic tactic, inclining at every turn toward
petty bourgeois nationalism.
54
In the circumstances that prevailed, the left-wing faced difficulty translating
the resolutions of the congress into actual practice. The contradiction was
pointed out by the Bolshevik Fiyalek, who asked why Ukrainian social
democracy did not dictate its policy to its intelligentsia; on the contrary, the
intelligentsia dictated its instructions to it.
55
Whilst in Russia the radicalisation
saw the different strands of the popular movement brought into unity by the
Bolshevik-Left SRs leadership in the Soviets, which caught up with the changed
mood. In Ukraine the situation stood in sharp contrast, the salient feature of the
revolution was of the divergence between the subjective forces: the division
between the Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian sections of the working class, the
estrangement of the peasantry from the urban workers and the fragmenting of
the social and national dimensions.
56
These cleavages on the social and national questions found their resolution
encapsulated in the idea of an independent Ukraine based upon the organisations of
workers and peasants self-government. On 7 November the Central Rada had issued
proclaimed the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR) in federal union with Russia. A
favourable conjuncture for a rapprochement between the divergent elements now
arose from two trends offering the possibility of a radical reconstitution of the UNR.
The first was the growth in support in the USDRP and the UPSR for the regeneration
of the Central Rada on a thoroughly socialist basis.
57
The second was the surge of
support in the councils of workers and soldiers deputies recognising the UNR and
54
Robitnycha Hazeta, 1, 5 and 7 October 1917.
55
Vynnychenko, Vidrozhennia Natsii, Tom.I, op. cit., pp. 240241.
56
These problems of the revolution were highlighted in the writings of the leading Ukrainian Bolshevik
leaders Vasyl Shakhray and Serhii Mazlakh and in a series of books in 19181919. See Vasyl Skorovstansky
(Shakhrai), Revoliutsiia na Ukraine, 2nd ed, (Saratov: Borba, 1918); Vasyl Shakhray and Serhii Mazlakh in a
series of books in 1918 and 1919, see Vasyl Skorovstansky, (Shakhray). Revoliutsiia na Ukraine, (Saratov, Borba,
1918), Vasyl Shakhray and Shakhrail i Maslakh. Do khvyli: Shcho diietsia na Ukrayni i z Ukrainoiu, (Saratov,
Ukrainian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), 1919). The latter is also in an English edition, Vasyl Shakhray and
Serhii Maslakh, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj, On the Current Situation in the Ukraine, (University of Michigan Press,
1970.) These became key texts of the pro autonomy/independence currents of Ukrainian communism during
the revolutionary years. In 1919 Yury Pyatakov ordered Do Khvyli confiscated and Shahkray exiled from the
Ukrainian SSR, he was later murdered by White troops following the occupation of Saratov. See report by Hryts
Sokura in Chervony Prapor, Organ of the Organising Committee of the Fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP,
Kyiv, 17 April 1919.
57
This was expressed at the Fourth Congress of the USDRP and the Third Congress of the UPSR which
stated that: the national side of the revolution begins to threaten the further successful development of the
socio-economic class struggle warning the Central Rada could lose the support of the peasants and workers in
Ukraine which will also threaten the national gains of the revolution. Pavlo Khystyuk, Zamitky i materiialy, do
istori ukra nsko revoliutsi 19171920, rr Tom II (Prague: Ukrainskyi sociologychnyi instytut 192122),
p. 2325.
Critique 577
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seeking its re-election to widen its constituency.
58
This demonstrated a radical
evolution in working class opinions on the Ukrainian national question, splitting
opinion of the Bolsheviks in the USDRP.
59
However the forces that could bring this about did not combine and moved
unevenly; the rapprochement necessary for its realisation was retarded. Neither the
fractious Bolsheviks, who had no territorial organisation in Ukraine, nor their
leadership in Russia were unified around such a perspective from within the UNR.
60
Their approach was tactless, taking no account of the Ukrainian peculiarities and
attempting to superimpose the model of the Russia.
The initial defence of the uprising of the Petrograd proletariat by the USDRP was
followed by a Menshevik resolution being passed condemning it in the executive
body, the Central Rada.
61
In the large cities and key centres local soviets were already
taking power. Typical of the debates at this time was that in the Katerynoslav soviet,
where the USDRP and Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party-Bolsheviks
(RSDRP(b), united in supporting the uprising in Petrograd, recognition of the
UNR, for soviet power in the city and for the Central Rada to be re-organised along
the same lines as the soviets are based.
62
The All-Ukrainian Congress of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies on 16
December 1917 proved to be a strategic catastrophe. The leaders of the Central Rada
denied urban soviets proportional representation, whilst the USDRP delegates vote to
seek an alliance with the Bolsheviks in order to establish a workers and peasants
government was undermined by the Party resolutions commission.
63
The whole
event was ignited by the surprise ultimatum of the Russian Council of Peoples
Commissars threatening war on the UNR.
64
In an atmosphere of recriminations the
58
In 7 out of ten of Ukraines largest cities, the councils of workers and soldiers deputies supported the
formation of a socialist government with the Central Rada as its supreme organ. This support for re-election
was particularly strong in towns in the northern gubernyas and in Kyiv, Kremenchuk, Kharkiv, Luhansk,
Kherson, Katerynsoslav, Odesa and Mykolaiv. See: Yury Markovych Hamretsk

, Rady Ukra ny v 1917 r (Kyiv,

Nauk dumka, 1974).
59
The Kyiv Bolshevik Yevgenia Bosh records that the Third Universal was welcomed by a significant number of
soviets in Ukraine. Bojcun, Working Class and the National Question, op. cit., p. 306. Similarly Shakhray, a Poltava
Bolshevik, records the Proclamation of the Ukrainian Republic was met with huge demonstrations all over
Ukraine. A significant part of the Soviets also welcomed it. Skorovstanskii, Revoliutsiia na Ukraini, op. cit., p. 74.
60
In their campaign for the re-election of the Rada through a congress of soviets, the Bolsheviks did not seek
unity with like-minded Ukrainian socialists, nor secure support from the soviets which had already backed such
a congress. Instead it was called by the RSDRP Kiev Committee. See Thomas M. Prymak The First All-
Ukrainian Congress of Soviets and its Antecedents, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 6 (1979), pp. 320.
61
Robitnycha Hazeta, 27 October 1917.
62
Robitnycha Hazeta, 3 November 1917.
63
The USDRP pre-meeting before the Congress had decided in favour of seeking agreement with the Bolsheviks.
Porsh, the UNR Secretary of Labour, was actively engaged in negotiations with the Bolsheviks at the time.
64
An appeal to the Ukrainians on 8 December 1917 by the leading organs of soviet power in Russia,
including the Central Executive Committee, demanded the immediate re-election of the Rada with the proviso:
Let the Ukrainians predominate in these soviets. However when the Council of Peoples Commissars declared a
war on the Central Rada behind the back of the CEC it did not receive unanimous or uncritical endorsement for
its action. See John Keep (ed), The Debate on Soviet Power, Minutes of the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee of Soviets, (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1979), p. 195223.
578 C. Ford
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Congress endorsed the Central Rada, but it was a pyrrhic victory, and an opportunity
lost.
65
The internal fragmentation produced two rival bodies claiming the government of
the Ukrainian Peoples Republic. In January 1918 in its Fourth Universal, the Central
Rada declared independence of the UNR.
66
The USDRP then withdrew from the
General Secretariat handing it over to the right wing of the UPSR.
67
Their authority
was challenged by the Peoples Secretariat of the UNR.
68
Formed in Kharkiv at the
rival congress of Soviets this was mainly but not solely a Bolshevik affair, and
comprised the pro-soviet USDRP (left), with several posts including the president,
Yukhym Medvedyev.
69
The role of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers in Ukraine deepened the malaise;
through the substitution of internal elements by external forces, the revolution
consumed itself. Lured by the appeal of the Germans, the General Secretariat entered
a union with them at Brest Litovsk on 9 February 1918. The Germans then deposed
both UNR governments; first, after a bitter struggle, the Peoples Secretariat, and then
the General Secretariat, condemned as unreliable left opportunists.
70
65
As relations deteriorated, Robitnycha Hazeta blamed the Bolsheviks for deepening a divisive wave of
national feelings by struggling against the Central Rada, which the Ukrainian people rightfully regard as the
expression of their interests. So we can note that the Bolshevik party, which is to all appearances the most
revolutionary and democratic, has by its tactics caused a total rupture between the Russian and Ukrainian
democracies and the obfuscation of contradictions among the Ukrainian people in a wave of nationalism,
Robitnycha Hazeta, 5 December 1917.
66
According to the Radas president, Hrushevsky, the first motivation for declaring independence was the
conclusion of the peace. The need for a more decisive policy in the struggle with the crusade of Great Russia
under the leadership of the Peoples Commissars against Ukraine was the second motivation. Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, Ukrainska samostiinist i ii istorychna neobkhidnist, in Mykola Halii (ed), Vybrani pratsi. Vydano z
nahody 25-richchia z dnia ioho smerty (19341959), (New York, 1960), p. 37.
67
The USDRP predicted the worst of the right-wing UPSR: the revolutionary situation is marked now by a
transition to the stage of anarchy, after which it will pass to reaction and entirely other elements that are far from
the proletariat will stand at the helm of the state. At this moment our party cannot be responsible for the
devious policy of the SRs, Robitnycha Hazeta, 16 January 1918.
68
The official title was Peoples Secretariat of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Ukrainian Soviets
of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies, Ukrainian Peoples Republic.
69
The first Soviet government is portrayed in official Ukrainian history as a Russian invention, downplaying
its Ukrainian characteristics and the events of 1917 as a Russian invasion. The role of the USDRP (left) has been
downplayed by both Soviet and Ukrainian national historiography. Vasyl Shakhray (V. Skorovstansky) an
opposition Ukrainian Bolshevik and Minister wrote: When open, armed struggle with the Central Rada began,
Bolsheviks from all parts of Ukraine . . . were of one mind in proposing that a Soviet centre should be
established in Ukraine as a counterweight to the Central Rada, and not one responsible member of this party
ventured to protest against the promulgation and creation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic. On the contrary,
in complete agreement with the programmatic demand of the right of every nation to self-determination, they
openly or at least tacitly stood on its (the Republics) ground. The will of the Ukrainian nation emerged, the
Ukrainian people separated into a Republic in federative union with other parts of Russia. Well and good! We in
this Republic will wage a war not against the Ukrainian Peoples Republic, not against the Ukrainian people, not
in order to strangle it. No! This will be a struggle for power within the Ukrainian Peoples Republic*this will be
a class struggle . . . Skorovstansky, op. cit., 110111.
70
On 9 March 1918 Colonel von Stolzenberg told his High Command: It is very doubtful whether this
government, composed as it is exclusively of left opportunists, will be able to establish a firm authority. Oleh
Fedyshyn, Germanys Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 19171918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
UP, 1971), p. 96.
Critique 579
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The German General Staff replaced it with the even more pliant Hetmanate of
Pavlo Skoropadsky and considered the hetman himself to be only a puppet.
71
Vynnychenko noted that the conservative coup detat of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky
only completed and crystallised in a precise form that which existed during the time
of the Central Rada; on its return to Kyiv its revolutionary essence was dissipated.
72
Reasons for Failure in Year One of the Revolution
The one years experience of 19171918 is a necessary detour to appreciate the upsurge
of the Ukrainian Revolution in pivotal year of 1919. The salient feature of the revolution
had become clear; the question to be examined is the ability of the key actors to
transcend the cleavages which arose in the next more decisive phase of the revolution.
As the revolutionary process radicalised why did was the UNR unable to transform
into a republic based on the soviets. From September many members of the USDRP
sought a social revolution, but in their view, the relationship of the soviets to the
Central Rada presented no consensus. Should it be reformed or overthrown? Mykola
Porsh who had written the Fourth Congress policies had told Stalin: We consider the
Central Rada to be by its composition a soviet of workers, peasants, and soldiers
deputies who were elected at congresses of peasants, workers and soldiers.
73
Increasingly however, considering the ripening of the revolution in the west, the
USDRP did not take the path of socialist revolution, but assumed a waiting position,
setting itself the task of organising the Ukrainian republic internally as a necessary
condition for the successful course of the socialist revolution in Ukraine.
74
The
soviets were also not unified in their course of action and slow in addressing events,
as the Ukrainian Bolshevik Vasyl Shakrai noted:
The disunited scattered struggle of the separate Soviets could not be sufficiently
successful, it was necessary for a Central Organ of Ukrainian Soviets to oppose the
Central Rada. But the Ukrainian Soviets did not have such an organ. The Soviets in
Ukraine devoted little time to the national movement. They were seized with the
struggle with the coalition government in Petrograd, and did not sufficiently value
those organised processes which were going on in their own eyes; they stood, so to
speak, with their face to Petrograd, and their back to Ukraine.
75
The Bolsheviks were very weakly represented in Ukraine prior to the revolution and did
not play a role within the national democratic movement per se, failing to develop a
Ukrainian perspective. When a section of soviets did cohere in a newcentre around the
Peoples Secretariat it represented between 90 and 95 of Ukraines 300 soviets. After the
71
See Ambassador Baron von Mumms report to Berlin, 18 May 1918, quoted in Taras Hunczak, The
Ukraine under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in The Ukraine, 19171921: A Study in Revolution, ed. Taras
Hunczak, (Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 71.
72
Vynnychenko Vidrodzhennia natsii Tom. 3, op. cit., p. 24.
73
Cited in Mace The Ukrainian Problem and how Stalin tried to solve it, op. cit.
74
Chervony Prapor, organ of the Organising Committee of the fraction of Nezalezhnyky of the USDRP, Kyiv,
22 January 1919.
75
Vasyl Skorovstansky, Revoliutsiia na Ukraine, 2nd ed. (Saratov, Borba, December 1918), p. 79.
580 C. Ford
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debacle of an attempted reformation of the Central Rada the left was now divided over
the national question. The USDRP split, some aligned with the Peoples Secretariat but
much of its left were paralysed by the conflict with Soviet Russia.
Correspondingly the weakness of the course taken by the General Secretariat became
apparent in its conflict with the Peoples Secretariat. There were altogether about 12,000
Red Guards and Workers Militia units in Ukraine. Nevertheless the war, which lasted
from December 1917 to early February 1918, was marked by paradox. The war-weary
and revolutionised soldiers were not prepared to fight against Antonov-Ovseenko; the
commander of the Bolshevik intervention forces had to make do with revolutionary
detachments, who concentrated on organising local uprisings. At the same time the
Central Rada was unable to muster troops for its defence.
76
The Rada was not so much
defeated by Bolshevik troops as destroyed by its own unpopular policies.
However, despite its ability to disperse the Central Rada and mount strong
resistance to the occupation the Peoples Secretariat revealed deep problems. Antonov
and others in Soviet Russia refused to recognise its authority whilst sections of the
army had displayed unbridled Russian chauvinism. Nezalezhnyky recognised that if
opportunist elements had sabotaged the Central Rada then:
It must be said that the leaders of the first Soviet government in Ukraine tried to use
the forms, created by the national-bourgeois revolution to advance the proletarian
revolution by recognising the Ukrainian Peoples Workers and Peasants Republic,
establishing Peoples Secretariat as a government body etc. But the masses of the
Russian and Russified urban proletariat and their party organisation*the KP(b)U*
were unprepared for this policy to such an extent that their fight with the petty-
bourgeois Central Rada was combined with destroying everything Ukrainian,
ignoring plans of their official leaders from the Peoples Secretariat.
77
Prior to the final defeat a Second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets took place in
Katerynoslav on 17 March 1918 with 1,100 delegates. The congress adopted a
declaration of Ukraines independence of the Ukrainian Republic.
78
This was already
76
We exerted valiant efforts in order to stop that invasion, as we used to call it, to win over our soldier
masses, which were inert towards us, to our side. But they displayed no wish to fight against the Bolsheviks even
in Kyiv, fraternising with them and taking their side. The Ukrainian Government could not rely on any of the
units quartered in Kyiv; it had no reliable unit even for its own protection. Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennya natsii,
Tom.II, op.cit., p.
77
There was a retreat from the Kharkiv Congress of Soviets decisions with an attempt to establish an array
of splinter Soviet republics and partition Ukraine. The power of the Peoples Secretariat was undermined by the
conduct of the military forces of Soviet Russia and the authorities in Russia. Shakhray complained: What kind
of Ukrainian government is this when its members do not know and do not want to know the Ukrainian
language? They have no influence in Ukrainian society. No-one has even heard their names before. What kind of
Ukrainian Minister of the Army am I when all of the Ukrainised divisions in Kharkiv will not obey me and
defend Soviet power and I am compelled to disarm them? The only military support we have in our struggle
against the Central Rada is the army Antonov brought into Ukraine from Russia, an army moreover that looks
at everything Ukrainian as hostile and counterrevolutionary. Cited in Bojcun, Working Class, op. cit., p. 327.
78
Neronovych gave an interesting report on the situation on the BolshevikUkrainian front, in which he
argued that the struggle with the Central Radas army was hopeless and harmful. He intended to propose a
resolution on this matter, which the Council of Peoples Commissars had already adopted (by four votes to three
with two abstentions). The theses of this resolution were the following: 1) Soviet power in Ukraine, established
Critique 581
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the end of its activity on the territory of Ukraine but it confirmed an important
landmark as regards the trend of the Ukrainian revolution; both authoritative bodies,
the Central Rada and Central Executive Central Executive Committee of Soviets, had
come to independence.
At the Fifth Congress of the USDRP on 10 May 1918 it was agreed that the
revolution had developed beyond the limits of a national revolution, concluding that
the ultimate resolution of the tasks of the Ukrainian revolution is connected with the
growth of the revolutionary proletarian movement in the west.
79
All these factors
would now take central stage.
The November Ukrainian Revolution: Revival and Retrogression in the Ukrainian
Peoples Republic
The Hetmanate of Pavlo Skoropadsky was a regime of comprador capitalists and
landlords aimed at the destruction of the revolutionary gains in the social, then
national spheres.
80
It proved to be a defining moment, sharpening the process of
differentiation in the Ukrainian revolution. The occupation effectively cut Ukraine
off from events in the rest of the former empire. It was sheltered from the excesses of
war communism; the idea of the self-managing democracy of the soviets was
preserved. Whilst in the eyes of many workers and peasants the occupying armies
discredited both the Central Rada who had invited them and its successor Ukrainian
State.
81
As soon as his German guardians were defeated on the Western front, in
1918, Skoropadsky bowed to Entente pressure and declared Ukraine part of an all-
Russian anti-Bolshevik federation. Skoropodaskys fate was sealed.
The primary organisational initiative to reconstitute the Ukrainian Peoples
Republic came from the Ukrainian National Union, a coalition of parties and trade
with the help of the armed revolutionary proletariat, mainly Great Russian, has almost no local forces of support
for its existence; 2) The further struggle with the Central Radas army will lead inevitably to a weakening of the
Central Radas democratic position and may create a situation, in which the Fourth Universal will be lost; 3) It
is, therefore, necessary to conclude peace with the Central Rada and reorganize it immediately, joining its
existing membership to the Central Executive Committee of Ukraine, elected at the Second All-Ukrainian
Congress of Soviets, to implement jointly the principles enunciated in the Fourth Universal. However, the
faction of left Ukrainian Social-democrats itself did not agree with this resolution and it never saw the light of
day. With this, Ievhen Neronovych split completely with the Bolsheviks, left the congress, resigned as Peoples
Secretary and went to Poltava. On 24 March he was arrested in the village of Sorochyntsi by the O. Shapoval
detachment and on 25 March he was shot.
79
Pavlo Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, Tom III, p. 18.
80
Ivan Maistrenko, Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of Ukrainian Revolution, (Hanover: Ibidem-Verlaag,
2007), p. 72.
81
There was also a shift in working-class opinion on the national question, with significant support for an
independent Ukraine. This was confirmed by the Second All-Ukrainian Workers Congress on 13 May 1918;
despite a non-Ukrainian majority it agreed to a united struggle with the peasantry for an independent Ukrainian
Peoples Republic, sentiments further expressed at the All-Ukrainian Conference of Trade Unions, again largely
non-Ukrainian in composition. See Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, Tom III, op. cit., p. 18; Bojcun Working
Class, op. cit., p. 373.
582 C. Ford
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unions.
82
The Directory of the UNR was formed to lead the rising; of the five
members two were bitter rivals, the chair Vynnychenko, and Petlyura. The November
Ukrainian Revolution was conducted exclusively by the indigenous national-
revolutionary forces.
83
What is clear is that from the start the subjective forces were radically to the left of
the Directory. There was a rejuvenation of the idea of soviet power, both in the sense
of workers self-management and the parochial desires of the peasantry for control of
their affairs. Workers Councils revived, leading risings in Poltava and Katerynoslav, in
Kharkiv province and across the Left-Bank peasants support for soviet power was
extensive.
84
Large sections of the insurgent army stood on a soviet platform. When
the Dniprovska Division entered Kyiv it was under red banners and slogans of All
power to the Soviets! and All land to the peasants. Fearing they would make an
attempt to take power, Petlyura transferred them from the city.
85
The pro-communist left of the USDRP began to cohere into a faction, the
Organising Committee of the Independentists, established in early December 1918 in
Kharkiv.
86
The Nezalezhnyky made public their views at the State Conference
convened by the Directory in Vynnytsia on 1214 December. There Mykhaylo
Avdiyenko argued it was necessary:
1. to recognize that a profoundly socio-economic, as well as political, revolution is
taking place in Ukraine; 2. to recognize that its engine is the proletariat and the toiling
peasantry, and3. inaccordance withthis, todeclare the principle of the dictatorship of
the toiling masses in the form of councils of workers and peasants deputies.
87
The Nezalezhnyky also sought to differentiate themselves from the Russian
Communist Party RKP(B), now organised in Ukraine as the Communist Party
(Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (KP(b)U). Founded at the ad-hoc conference at Tahanrih on
19-20 April 1918, the left-communists led by Pyatakov had allied with the Ukrainian
Bolshevik element of Shrink, Shakrai and the USDRP(Left). It was to be an
independent party, a section of Communist International with a particular strategy
82
The decision of the Central Committee to join caused consternation in local committees of the USDRP,
provoking a response in Robitnycha Hazeta insisting that the party would not abandon its distinctive
organisation and working class tactics. Robitnycha Hazeta, 8 October 1918.
83
Bachinskyi, Dokumenty trahichnoyisioriy, op. cit., p. 534.
84
Mark Baker, Peasants, Power and Revolution in the Village: A Social History of Kharkiv Province, PhD
dissertation (Harvard University, 2001), p. 166.
85
K.B.Petrichenko, Malovidomi Fakty z Zhyttya ta Diyalnosti Danylo Ilkovicha Terpylo (Otoman Zeleny),
(Institute of Ukrainian studies Kyiv, December 2006), [unpublished].
86
The Nezalezhnyky counted a number of prominent figures in its ranks: Mykhaylo Tkachenko, their main
theorist, had been Minister of Internal Affairs of the Central Rada; Volodymyr Chekhivsky, the Head of the
Council of Ministers of the revived UNR government. The other leading theorist was Andriy Richytsky; he was
one of the editors of the USDRP central organ Robitnycha Gazeta in 1917. Mykhaylo Avdiyenko was the most
active practical figure, originally from the strong Petrograd USDRP organisation where he was soldier; later in
Kyiv he was close to Vynnychenko. Another prominent member was Antin Drahomyretsky, a Kyiv functionary
and Yurko Mazurenko; he was in command of the USDRP Revolutionary Committee and in 1917 played a key
role in blocking the passage to Petrograd of Kornilov.
87
Khrystiuk, op. cit., p. 52.
Critique 583
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for Ukraine. This was overturned by the RKP(B), as opposed to a party formed
through a process of unification of the vernacular revolutionary left the KP(b)U was
reduced to regional subordinate of the RKP(B). In the Nezalezhnyky organ the
Ukrainian Peoples Socialist Republic the faction considered:
It is a party that aims not for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary
peasantry, but for the dictatorship of a sectionof the proletariat andof its ownparty. It
is, therefore, profoundly violent and it will replace proletarian dictatorial violence
against the bourgeois order with the violence of a small group.
88
It had proven itself a hypocritical party which continually violates its own principles
and in view of this cannot be trusted until it is transformed organisationally and
merges with the interests of the Ukrainian working people.
89
The revival of the UNR was accompanied by an extreme retrogressionist trend, the
Directory having incorporated the conservative elements of the Hetmanate, particu-
larly the military, who engaged in widespread pogroms and indiscriminate repression
of the labour and peasant movement.
90
Otaman Bolbochan*commander-in-chief of
the armies of Left-Bank Ukraine issued a decree on 25 November 1918 declaring
martial law in Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Poltava guberniya*forbidding all congresses
and assemblies without his permission. I will not tolerate any soviets of workers
deputies and monarchist organisations and in general any organisations striving to
seize power.
91
The middle class and moderate elements, though favouring a
parliamentary democracy, found themselves political prisoners of this element on
whom they were reliant.
92
The revived UNR was further divided in its international
position; Vynnychenko and the Nezalezhnykys Volodymyr Chekhivsky, the head of
council of ministers, saw Soviet Russia as their natural ally as opposed to the Entente as
advocated by Petlyura. The Ententes main concern was the Russian volunteer army
fighting to restore the empire.
93
On 18 December 1918, French and VA troops took
Odessa, proclaiming a South Russian government.
The debate on the course of the Ukrainian revolution came to a head at two
congresses in January 1919, at the Sixth Congress of the USDRP on 1012 January
and then on 23 January at the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress. The central question
88
Robitnycha Hazeta, no. 430, 7 January 1919.
89
The pamphlet The Ukrainian Peoples Socialist Republic was published in Kharkiv, December 1918 and
republished more widely in Robitnycha Hazeta, 7 January 1919.
90
An illustration was Colonel Bolbochan, the former Hetmanate commander of the Zaporozhian Division,
who was appointed the Directorys commander in chief in Left-Bank Ukraine. Bolbochan instituted a reign of
terror against the resurgence of the agrarian revolution and the workers councils. Baker, op. cit., p. 167168.
91
Ibid., p. 163.
92
Assessing what had arisen within the UNR Andr. Mykh of the Nezalezhnyky wrote: Whatever was alive
and popular in it has passed to the masses where it works. But remnants of the nationalist bourgeoisie and
intelligentsia cling to the blue and yellow banner, arrange buffoonery, meetings to the sound of church bells,
prayer services and other attributes of national sentimentalism, which only serve to discredit the popular
movement and its leaders. Our task and the task of the Directory at the present moment is to break completely
with remnants of the national front. Robitnycha Hazeta, 25 December 1918.
93
See Anna Procyk, Russian Nationalism and Ukraine The Nationality Policy of the Volunteer Army During the
Civil War (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1995).
584 C. Ford
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was soviet power, and it was already being decided in practice. In Kharkiv on
2 January an independent workers uprising had established the authority of their
Soviet, the troops of the Directory troops refused to fight or were defeated by the
workers militia. The Red Army rushed across the border to enter the city, by mid
January it had captured most of the left-bank in the rest there was insurgency against
the Directory.
The USDRP Congress ended in a split in the Party and with the Ukrainian working
class. The Central Committee member Pisotsky (Richytsky) presented the Nezalezh-
nyky thesis on Soviet power. The task, it was asserted, was the transformation of the
UNR into the sovereign and independent Ukrainian Socialist Republic.
94
Power
would be organised on the principle of the dictatorship of the urban and rural
proletariat and the poorer toiling peasantry, organised in worker-peasant councils.
95
While defending the independence of Ukraine they demanded:
a) a rapprochement with the Russian Soviet Republic, on the basis of mutual
recognition of the sovereignty of both socialist republics, complete and mutual
non-interference in the internal affairs of the neighbouring republic, the immediate
withdrawal of Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine (including the Crimea),
their non-interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine and, in the case of refusal,
an active defence of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic against imperialist attack.
96
It was supported by V. Mazurenko, M. Avdiyenko, M. Tkachenko and others who
pointed to the beginning of the world revolution and demanded that Ukraine have
the closest ties with the German and Russian revolutions, as well as immediate peace
with Soviet Russia and a common armed struggle against the VA and the Entente. A
majority of the Central Committee of the USDRP spoke in favour; the opposition was
Vynnychenko, of the centre, with his Labour Council conception and the right-wing
Katerynoslav group of Issak Mazepa, Panas Fadenko and Ivan Romanchenko, joined
surprisingly by Porsh.
97
It is debatable how representative the conference was in a
situation where members of the Central Committee couldnt sleep in their own beds
for fear of arrest.
98
The Congress resolved that the socialist revolution is a long
process and they were only the beginning preparatory stage; democracy had to be
established first, and until then they endorsed the Directory and the military. This
prompted the Nezalezhnyky to walk out.
94
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 69.
95
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 69.
96
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 69.
97
The discussions that Porsh held with Mazepa on their own do not explain such a volte-face by Porsh. One
can surmise that the experience of 19171918 and the Bolsheviks attitude to the Ukrainian question had
seriously disillusioned Porsh, as it had others. It was his last speech to a USDRP audience in Ukraine after which
he was dispatched as UNR ambassador to Germany. In January 1921 he began to adopt a more sovietophile
politics; he made a speech at a student meeting calling on the emigres to recognise the Soviet Ukrainian
government and return to the Ukraine. Porsh applied to return to the Ukraine himself in 1922; in January 1923
the Ukrainian Politburo decided to allow him to return, though he never took up the offer. He started to drift
away from political activity and suffered a tragic death in Germany in 1944.
98
Vynnychenko, op. cit., p. 242.
Critique 585
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They proceeded to launch the weekly Chervony Prapor as organ of the Organising
Committee of the Fraction of Independentists of the USDRP. It appeared
symbolically on 22 January the day of the act of unification of the Ukrainian Peoples
Republic and the newly created West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, and the first
session of the All-Ukrainian Labour Congress.
99
The launch issue of Chervony Prapor
contained the Declaration of the Fraction written by Tkachenko and Richytsky.
Despite formal similarities the Nezalezhnyky differed sharply from the official party
which had reached a dead end, there was no middle ground for Ukraine at a time
when the world war is breaking up into a whole series of partial wars, on the basis of
the necessity for the socialist revolution being introduced in national-political
forms.
100
Responding to the nationalist criticism that soviet power would lead to the
dominance of the non-Ukrainian urban element, they pointed out that the
proletariat was not entirely foreign and emphasised it can and must come to
power together with the revolutionary peasantry.
101
In the course of the revolution
the non-Ukrainian workers would be drawn more and more into all forms of internal
life in Ukraine and rid themselves of the remnants of old Russia and will join the
Ukrainian people and proletariat.
102
It was necessary also to avoid a repetition of the failures of year one of the
revolution, warning:
A repetition of the Bolsheviks anti-Ukrainian experiments would be very quickly
defeated by the course of the national movement itself. But the workers must not
suffer a new defeat. We believe that the time has come for the non-Ukrainian
workers to be drawn into the work of the social-political construction of the
independent Ukrainian Republic.
103
The Labour Congress was meant to legitimise the UNR in a forum of the popular
movement and realise Vynnychenkos concept of a republic based on labour councils
of workers and peasants.
104
The Nezalezhnyky opposition declaration was read by
Zinovyev on 26 January, damming the whole event as the fruit of the Directorys
vacillating and ambiguous policy the Labour Congress was convened simultaneously
with the destruction of the organs of the working people.
105
It had no right to exist
and must transfer this power to the true representative of the revolutionary masses,
99
Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
100
Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
101
Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
102
Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
103
Deklaratsiya Fraktsii Nazalezhnykh USDRP, Chervony Prapor, 22 January 1919.
104
According to Mazepa the decision to call the All-Ukraine Labour Congress was an obvious concession to
Bolshevik slogans. The landowners and financial and business circles, which had supported the Hetmanate were
excluded. Maistrenko, op. cit., p. 100.
105
At the time of elections to the Labour Congress, the Left Bank of Ukraine had already been taken by
Soviet troops. Thus elections could not be held there. On the Right bank there was a wave of pogroms. In the
south the French army and the Russian Volunteer Army had captured Odessa and were advancing. Whilst the
National Rada of the Western Province of the UNR were invited to participate with full voting rights, in sharp
contrast at the insistence of Petlyura, Konovalets and other otamans, the soldiers of the UNR were deprived of
electoral rights to participate.
586 C. Ford
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the only one capable of carrying out the great tasks of the Ukrainian social
revolution*the worker-peasant councils.
A notable aspect of the Nezalezhnyky declaration was their call for a provisional
worker-peasant government composed of representatives of parties and groups that
stand for the power of the soviets which would be charged with transferring power
to the worker-peasant councils and convening a congress of worker-peasant councils
in Ukraine, which is to create the normal order of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic of
Councils and organize a permanent government.
106
Unsurprisingly the pro-Soviet Bloc failed to convince the congress, in response
they abstained and walked out. The right-wing of the congress ratified the Directory,
which continued its course with its credibility having rapidly eroded. The army of the
UNR had declined from 100,000 to 21,000 by the third week of January, whilst
peasant brigades were defecting en masse to the Red Army and Red militias.
107
In the short period of their participation the Nezalezhnyky had attempted to utilise
their posts within the UNR to broker peace with Soviet Russia.
108
Yurko Mazurenko
headed a diplomatic mission to Moscow on 15 January 1919.
109
The mission was
sabotaged by the right wing securing a UNR declaration of war on Soviet Russia on
16 January 1919.
110
The decision to safeguard Ukraines independence was reduced to
paper policies as the Directory surrendered it to the French. In return for the promise
of aid against the Bolsheviks, the Directory agreed to give the French control over the
army, the railroads, the finances and the composition of the government of the UNR.
Chekhivsky and Vynnychenko resigned from the government over the pro-Entente
turn.
111
After retreating from Kyiv on 4 February, Chervony Prapor concluded the
Directorys positive role was finished.
112
The Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic
The Red Army entered Kyiv on 5 February 1919, welcomed by an announcement of
the Executive of the city soviet signed by the Nezalezhnyky, Bolsheviks and Borotbisty
106
Chervony Prapor, 30 January 1919.
107
Bojcun, The Working Class and the National Question, op. cit., p. 398.
108
There is speculation that it was without Lenins knowledge that the Red Army advanced into Ukraine in
late December 1918. Arthur Adams The Bolsheviks in the Ukraine: The Second Campaign, 19181919 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 8285.
109
I declared that I would go on the condition that decrees on the transfer of local power to the Soviets and
a call for a congress of Soviets (and not a Labour Congress) to be published immediately, as well as on the
condition that the communist party would be legalised. For this, of course, I was ostracised by the Directorate.
Yu.Mazurenko, List chelna Tsk USDRP (Nezalezhnyky) Yu. Mazurenko Kkr. Rakovskomy Pro yoho Stavlnnya
Do Politiki i Diyalnosti KP(b)U, P Bachinskyi, (ed) Dokumenty trahichnoy isiory Ukrayny (19171927 rr),
Zhurnal Okhorona, op. cit., pp. 24853.
110
An act complemented by Red Army commander Antonov also lobbying Moscow against an agreement
stating there was nobody in Ukraine with whom we should negotiate, Matthew Stachiw, Ukraine and the
European Turmoil, Vol. 2 (New York: Shevchenko Scientific Society, 1973), p. 258.
111
Mazurenkos efforts are considered to have been sabotaged by the new head of the Directory of the UNR,
Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsii, Tom. 3, op cit., pp. 279280.
112
Chervony Prapor, 6 February 1919.
Critique 587
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deputies, stating the Directory has been driven from Kyiv and red Soviet battalions
under the leadership of the Worker-Peasant Government of Ukraine are entering the
city.
113
The situation was in stark contrast to 1917, not only in Ukraine but in world
events; the defeat of Central Powers had evoked a revolutionary upsurge in Europe,
Soviet Russia was no longer a solitary beacon and Ukraines role in the international
arena was now pivotal. Yury Lapchynsky recalled that in 1919 the communist
movement and Soviet power in Ukraine were built in a political situation, which was
totally different to the first period.
114
The situation could not have been more
favourable for a convergence between the Ukrainian and the Russian revolutions. The
creation of a soviet republic with a plurality of pro-soviet parties was a viable
possibility.
The Nezalezhnyky, whilst welcoming the new government, had not abandoned
their earlier criticism and remained cautious:
If the Directory stupidly repeated an outdated policy that has already been
condemned by history, then the Russian Bolsheviks have come by the same
outdated path . . . Under the slogan of the struggle for the power of the soviets
arrives a government that calls itself Ukrainian, but which we do not and cannot
describe as such.
115
Formed separately from the revolutionary process, the KP(b)U had established in
Russia a Provisional Worker-Peasant Government of Ukraine in Russia.
116
It was
initially led by Pyatakov who on 16 January 1919 was replaced by Christian Rakovsky
as the Chairman of Provisional Revolutionary Government.
117
But, despite their
disagreement with the Rakovsky government, the USDRP (Nezalezhnyky) did not
reject cooperation. Their Organising Committee stated they were willing:
To enter the government and to take full responsibility for it only if: 1. All official
organs of the supreme government*not only Ukrainian, but also Russian*
recognize the independence and autonomy of the Ukrainian Socialist republic; 2.
If a firm national and social course is taken in Ukraine, and Ukrainian is the only
official language.
118
The views of Rakovsky were already apparent before his arrival in Kyiv; recently
arrived from the Balkans he declared himself a specialist on the Ukrainian question.
Rakovsky endorsed the views of the more conservative Katerynoslavian wing of
the KP(b)U of Emmenuil Kviring. In 1917 they sought to separate the Donets-Kryvi
113
The announcement was From the Executive Committee of the Kyiv Council of Workers Deputies signed
by Bubnov and the following members: P. Syrodenko, P. Dehtiarenko, M. Maior, V. Cherniavsky, H. Volkov, H.
Myhailychenko, P. Liubchenko, I. Kachura, A. Chekhsis, I. Frenkel, and M. Avdiienko, Chervony Prapor, 6
February 1919.
114
Chervony Prapor, 11 July 1920.
115
Chervony Prapor, 6 February 1919.
116
Adams, The Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, op. cit., pp. 2564.
117
Key texts are Christian Rakovsky, Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR 192330, ed. Gus Fagan,
(London: Allison & Busby, 1980); Pierre Broue, Rakovsky, Cahiers Leon Trotsky, no.1718; (Paris: LInstitut Leon
Trotsky, 1984). Neither of them engages critically with the policy of Rakovsky in Ukraine in 1919.
118
Chervony Prapor, 6 February 1919.
588 C. Ford
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Rih from Ukraine as a republic of the Russian proletariat which does not want to
hear anything about so-called Ukraine and has nothing in common with it. In
Izvestiia, he announced the following theses: the ethnic differences between Ukrainian
and Russians are insignificant, the Ukrainian peasantry lacked national conscious-
ness, national consciousness had been submerged in social class consciousness, and
the Ukrainian proletariat was purely Russian in origin. Rakovsky concluded that the
Ukrainian national movement was an invention of the intelligentsia.
119
These ideas
combined with the left-Communists and the Russophile Katerynoslavians in the
KP(b)U laid fertile ground difficulties.
The state administration was constructed on administrators brought from Russia
and largely from the local Russian petit-bourgeoisie who joined the KP(b)U to
qualify for employment. Tkachenko reported that while the KP(b)U government was
establishing itself:
All sorts of Russian nationalist elements from the Black Hundreds to the
revolutionary intelligentsia in Ukraine were joining forces with the Bolsheviks to
help reconstruct a united and indivisible Russia . . . Unreliable elements signed up
with the Bolshevik party and contributed to enhancing the nationalistic and even
chauvinist coloration of the Bolshevik proletarian movement . . . Even the Russian
communist press was writing enthusiastically about the unification of Russia and
this milieu of specialists as well as the nationalism of the Russian communists
themselves deepened the split within the proletariat along national lines . . .
promoting in its midst a fierce struggle out of which the reaction raised its head.
120
The Nezalezhnyky viewed these developments with growing frustration:
. . . the kind of insane and disgraceful Russification sweeping Ukraine right now has
never been seen before even during the Hetmanate rule in its last federative
phase . . .
Not one pamphlet in Ukrainian for the Ukrainian peasant, not one brochure, not
one newspaper of the soviet government in Ukrainian! The Ukrainian language has
been driven out from wherever it was. A whole series of orders on using the
generally understood language is a sign of the times. And to the modest demands
of the Ukrainian citizen that at least his national and cultural rights, like those of
the fraternal people here in Ukraine, be safeguarded, there is but one reply:
chauvinism and the spirit of the bourgeoisie and the counter-revolution.
121
When Rakovsky came to the Kyiv soviet on 13 February he never mentioned the
national question at all. This provoked a string of criticism from Ukrainian and
Jewish deputies who pointed to the mistakes of 1917 and the need for the
involvement of other parties. Avdiyenko attacked this failure to address the
important national question in Ukraine and the question of the proletariats role
in resolving the national question:
119
S. Mazlakh and V. Shakhray, The Current Situation in the Ukraine (Michigan: Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, 1970), pp. 115117.
120
Mykhailo Tkachenko, Borotba Vienna No. 78 April 1920, p. 3.
121
Chervony Prapor, 9 March 1919.
Critique 589
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In every country the struggle with the bourgeoisie is the affair of the proletariat of
that country. For the success of that struggle the proletariat of every country must
be organized. Moreover comrade Rakovsky said nothing about what the provisional
government must do in order to organize the Ukrainian proletariat and draw it
into the revolutionary struggle.
122
Rakovskys defence poured oil on the flames; he ridiculed calls to introduce the
Ukrainian language in education and government as linguistic music branding it a
reactionary and completely unnecessary measure.
123
As opposed to internationalism,
Chervony Prapor charged that behind their cosmopolitanism lies nothing other than
a not very hidden Russification in continuity with Tsarist practices.
124
The rift that grew within The Ukrainian SSR stemmed not only from dissatisfac-
tion with policy on the national question but the breach with previous assurance on
the rebirth of soviet power locally. Despite campaigns by the Bolsheviks to
encourage the formation of soviets the republic was ruled through appointed
revolutionary committees, revkomy, and committees of poor peasants or kombedy
similarly restricted full participation.
125
Workers councils existed largely in an
advisory capacity. In April the Ukrainian trade union movement was purged,
subordinated to the state and absorbed into All-Russian structures.
126
This was compounded by the more dangerous retarding of the agrarian revolution
through excesses of grain requisitioning, in actuality the Ukraine was plundered
randomly, like a vast treasure chest for food and fuel.
127
This was exacerbated by an
attempting in a number of areas to organise agricultural communes, not by the self-
activity of the peasants but on a compulsory basis. The Economic Council of Ukraine
withdrew large tracts of land around nationalised sugar mills and distilleries
transferring them to state farms, leaving peasants with the allotments they had
before the revolution. Simultaneous with action against the Kurkuls (wealthy
peasants), the government was alienating the poor peasantry.
In late February Chervony Prapor pointed out that these policies were starting to
produce centrifugal forces, most violently amongst the peasantry. It emphasised that
there was grain in Ukraine which must be given voluntarily to the starving Russian
worker and as much as he needs, but instead the requisition squads come and take
122
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 90.
123
Khrystiuk, IV. op. cit. p. 90.
124
Chervony Prapor, 15 February 1919. At the time Chervony Prapor ran a string of articles on the official
instructions for the use of the Russian language in the administration of the Soviet Republic; this even involved
the reversal of practices introduced in the Hetmanate. Chervony Prapor, 13 February 1919 reported A letter of
the Commissar of the Chief Military Administration, stating In Soviet Russia only the Russian language is
written, and it is not permitted to spend the peoples money for translators. Please write in Russian.
125
Adams, The Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, op. cit., p. 125.
126
There were major debates between Nezalezhnyky and supporters of statisation in the congresses of the
chemical workers union, trade and industrial office workers, the tobacco workers, the metal workers, printers,
the miners union, sugar refinery workers and the All-Ukrainian Teachers Union; Bojcun, Working Class and the
National Question, op. cit., p. 446449.
127
Thomas Remington, Building Socialism in Bolshevik Russia, Ideology and Industrial Organisation 1917
1921. (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1984), p. 167.
590 C. Ford
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not just grain, but everything that they can take and carry off. It required proper
transparent trade agreements, this is possible only if Ukraine is sovereign not in
words but in reality, only if the workers themselves are masters in their own socialist
republic and not foreign pretenders.
128
The Nezalezhnyky response to the growing crisis was to consider it necessary to
quickly devise a communist programme and organise a Ukrainian Communist Party,
and in this endeavour they were engaged in discussions with a number of critical
Bolsheviks, looking to found the new UKP at a congress on 30 March 1919. This
decision also coincided with the founding of the Communist International. At the
founding congress held on 26 March 1919 in Moscow, Mykola Skrypnyk
representing the KP(b)U gave an upbeat report on Ukraine, welcoming the USDRP
and saying that: Although these Independentist Socialists differ from the Commu-
nists on fundamentals, they are nevertheless working harmoniously with our party
today and participate in the soviets.
129
Yet this was far from the approach being taken
at the Third Congress of the KP(b)U then underway in Kharkiv.
Skrypnyk, a personal friend of Lenin and veteran Ukrainian Bolshevik was not
elected to the KP(b)U leadership. The congress endorsed the policy of war
communism and that Ukrainian SSR enter the RSFSR as an autonomous republic.
More ominously, by a narrow margin of 101 to 96, a resolution was carried against
co-operation with other pro-soviet parties, stating agreements with such parties as
the Right SRs, Independentist Ukrainian Social-democrats and others are admissible.
130
These parties were to be denied any responsible posts in the soviets and excluded from
the government of Ukraine, which should consist solely of the representatives of the
Communist Party of Ukraine.
This approach undermined the previous promise to hand over power in the
country to the soviets.
131
When the Third All-Ukrainian Congress of Workers
Peasants and Red Army Deputies was held between 610 March, of the 1,719
delegates about 80 per cent were Bolsheviks, and out of the minority the
Nezalezhnyky mustered 42 deputies.
132
Formal elections had been held in only parts
of four guberniya, and the majority of delegates were from revkomy not soviets.
133
Far-reaching policies were outlined in the resolutions of the congress and the new
Constitution of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic: the problem was their
implementation. Furthermore Ukraine remained, and was considered by the government,
128
Chervony Prapor, 28 February 1919.
129
John, Riddell (ed), Founding the Communist International, Proceedings and Documents of the First
Congress (New York: Pathfinder, 1987), p. 98.
130
Mazurenko, Bachinskyi, Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., p. 248253.
131
Manifest Vremennogo Raboche Krestianskogo Pravitelstva Ukrainy, 1 December 1918, Serhii Mazlakh
and Vasyl Shakhrai, On The Current Situation In Ukraine, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970),
p. 27.
132
Jujij Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine 19171923, (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies,
1980), p. 419.
133
Bojcun, The Working Class, op. cit., p. 465.
Critique 591
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a regional unit of Russia.
134
Some Communist-Borotbisty were elected to the Central
Executive Committee, comprising 90 KP(b)U and 10 Borotbisty. This concession
complained that the Nezalezhnyky were window dressing in order to show a bit of
Ukrainian colour in what was branded the commissar state.
135
Drahomyretsky wrote from Kyiv that notwithstanding the disillusionment with
the present regime, the masses continue to raise soviet slogans.
136
Indicative of this
was the subsequent Kyiv District Congress of the Councils of Workers and Peasants
Deputies held on 2425 March. The congress called for the inadequate representation
of the peasantry in organs of power to be remedied, stating that Soviet power must
not be undermined by a bureaucratic apparatus. On the national question it declared
the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic must be sovereign and not dependent on
anyone, but in a strong alliance with other socialist republics.
137
In the spring of 1919, in response to their challenge the government turned on the
USDRP(Nezalezhnyky); they were deluged on all sides with accusation of nationalist
chauvinism, of being counter-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois.
138
How the
KP(b)U actually defined these counter-revolutionary politics is revealing. Cheskis,
a member of the Executive Committee of the Kyiv Soviet, had explained:
The most difficult thing is this question with the independent Ukrainian social-
democrats, who have not yet given up their national demands and autonomist view
of the political system of Ukraine. If, of course, the Nezalezhnyky renounce the last
point of their programme and come closer to a true soviet platform, the
participation in the government will certainly be possible.
139
As such the mere adherence to a particular view on the national question was guilt
enough. On the night of 25 March, Richytsky, Mazurenko and other leaders were
arrested by the Cheka and Chervony Prapor was closed down.
140
The planned
congress to launch a Ukrainian Communist Party was thus derailed.
141
After several
days they were released and Chervony Prapor reappeared with an open letter
demanding an end to the repression, in an article by Kachinivsky on the way ahead he
summarised: It is now two months since the soviet authorities occupied Kyiv, but we
134
According to Balabanoff, first Secretary of the Communist International and a friend of Rakovskys sent
to assist him in Kyiv, the Bolsheviks had set up an independent republic in the Ukraine. In actuality that section
of it in which Soviet rule was established was completely dominated by the Moscow regime, Angelica,
Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1938), p. 234.
135
Khrystiuk, op. cit., pp. 131133.
136
Cited in Bojcun, The Working Class, op. cit., p. 464.
137
Khrystiuk, op. cit., pp. 131133.
138
The Ukrainian Nezalezhnyky do not recognise the government; the Ukrainian Nezalezhnyky incite the
workers and peasants against the government; the Ukrainian Nezalezhnyky agitate against helping starving
Soviet Russia with grain from Ukraine; the Ukrainian Nezalezhnyky inflame national hatred; the Ukrainian
Nezalezhnyky insist on drawing the rural proletariat into revolutionary construction and oppose the proletariat,
Khrystiuk, op. cit., p. 134.
139
Chervony Prapor, 9 February 1919.
140
Chervony Prapor, 3 April 1919.
141
Mazurenko, Bachinskyi, Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., pp. 248253.
592 C. Ford
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have yet to see real soviet power or the dictatorship of the proletariat. All we have is
the dictatorship of the communist party.
142
The Intervention of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
The policies of the Rakovsky regime began to produce powerful centrifugal forces;
engulfed by worker and peasant unrest, the Ukrainian SSR started to fragment and
disintegrate into internecine conflict. This crisis saw two tendencies which have
complicated historical analysis ever since: on the one hand the attempted
revolutionary mobilisation of society and on the other fragmentation and class
decomposition.
143
The decomposition of industry became catastrophic with
shortages of electricity, food, materials, and skilled workers.
144
Indicative of this
decomposition were pogroms, brigandage and otaman adventurers. No sides in the
conflict escaped being tainted by the effects of this vortex.
Engulfed by worker and peasant unrest, Soviet Ukraine started to disintegrate into
internecine conflict. This crisis became acute just as the communist revolution in
Europe unfolded; the Hungarian Republic of Councils was founded on 22 March
1919, this was soon followed by the proclamation in April of the Bavarian Soviet
Republic, and in June by the Slovak Soviet Republic. A key revolutionary bridgehead
was established in the Transcarpathian region of Carpatho-Ukraine, where over 500
workers, peasants and soldiers councils were established in November 1918. Soviet
Hungary organised as a federal republic granting autonomy to the minorities. The
councils of Carpatho-Ukraine began organising as a self-governing region on 5 April
1919. The Ukrainian question became the decisive factor in the fate of the soviet
republics as it was from Ukraine that any direct links could be made by which
Russian aid could be provided.
145
Historian Rudolf L.Tokes asserts that Bela Kun was lacking in detailed information
on the Ukrainian situation, and as such he did not appreciate the selfishness of
Russian Bolshevik polices with regards to Soviet Hungary.
146
L. Tokes saw this in
terms of their failure to deploy Hungarian units of the Russian Red Army in a drive
towards Hungary, and putting their own survival before world revolution. In fact the
142
Chervony Prapor, 3 April 1919.
143
The working class had reached the point of exhaustion by the third year of the revolution in Ukraine.
Industrial production plummeted to between 1520 per cent of its pre-war level by 1920. Many unemployed
workers volunteered or were drafted into the armies; 50,000 Donbas workers were in the Red Army by October
1918, and 40,000 were conscripted in May 1919. Many in local areas joined their local militia or irregulars. In
urban areas there were food shortages and a typhus epidemic in 19191920. For many it was better to escape to
the countryside.
144
Vladimir Brovkin, Workers Unrest and Bolshevik Responses in 1919, Slavic Review, 49:3 (1990), p. 353
373.
145
This had been long recognised; Karl Radek had said on 20 October 1918 at the KP(b)U congress that the
our road to aid the workers of the Central Powers lies precisely over Ukraine, over Romania, over Eastern
Galicia and over Hungary, Borys, Sovietization of Ukraine, op. cit., p. 205.
146
Rudolf L. Tokes, Bela Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic (Stanford: The Hoover Institute, 1967),
p. 201.
Critique 593
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opposite is the case; the government in Budapest had a very good understanding of
the Ukrainian situation and sought to assist in bringing about a change in a manner
which stood in stark contrast to the practices of the Russian Communists.
The new government of the Hungarian Republic of Councils proved to be friendly
towards the Ukrainian cause. A Ukrainian diplomatic mission headed by the old
Social-democrat Mykola Halahan was in Budapest, and a Ukrainian communist
group was also organised publishing a weekly Chervona Ukraina along with a free
press in Carpatho-Ukaine.
147
Halahan had already received a sympathetic response in
the socialist daily Nepszava toward coverage of the Ukrainian question. The interest
of the left reached a new level with the formation of the Soviet government.
148
The
Soviet government recognised the West Ukrainian Peoples Republic, establishing
trade links and negotiations on aid in its war with Poland. The Deputy Peoples
Commissar for Foreign Affairs Erno Po r promptly initiated discussions with
Halahan, who advised him that the destiny of Soviet power in Hungary was
dependent on the plight of Ukraine; as long as the conflict with the UNR continued
assistance from Moscow will not come, because between Moscow and Budapest lies
Ukraine.
149
The Hungarian government, proposed Halahan, should not simply
consult but demand from Moscow an end to the war with Ukraine. Bela Kun declared
his own support for an independent Soviet Ukraine and intervened with Erno Po r,
to assist in resolving the Ukrainian question.
Bela Kun followed up these talks emphasising the necessity of a Soviet Ukraine and
seeing no need for peace with the bourgeois Directory. Halahan in turn sought to
convince Kun that it was not possible to impose the Russian model, and the
Ukrainians did support a form of state which corresponded to the interests of the
working masses.
150
In this regard Kuns disdain of Rakovsky became apparent,
describing him repeatedly as an idiot. In Hungary he said communists were able to
work with the social-democrats because the national question did not divide them
into warring camps. Kuns solution was an independent Soviet Ukraine and
proposed establishing contact with those adhering to that viewpoint*Vynnychenko
was the figure they identified to take this forward.
151
Confident that Lenin now
supported an independent Ukraine, Kun agreed to take on the role as mediator in
achieving this outcome.
By the middle of March 1919, Vynnychenko was in Vienna having broken with the
Directory and rightist leaders of the USDRP. Whilst he had begun to advocate the soviet
model, he continued to have misgivings about the Bolsheviks. In his diary he asked
whether their victory and the creation of the socialist order, the birth of which
147
Its critical articles on the great disagreement in the international communist family caused some
consternation with Soviet Russia; as a result one Russian and one Pole were imposed on the editorial staff.
Mykola Halahan, Z Moikh spomyniv, 1880 ti 1920 r (Kyiv: Vidavnitsvo Tempora, 2005), p. 455.
148
Halahan, Z Moi

kh spomyniv, op. cit., p. 419.

149
Halahan, Z Moi

kh spomyniv, op. cit., p. 442.

150
Halahan, Z Moi

kh spomyniv, op. cit., p. 443.

151
Halahan, Z Moi

kh spomyniv, op. cit., p. 444.

594 C. Ford
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I welcome with ecstasy in my soul, would also mean defeat for the Ukrainians. Enthused
by events in Hungary, he placed his hope on the success of international revolution.
152
On 28 March, a mere week after the Soviet Republic was formed, Vynnychenko received
a telegram asking him to go to Budapest; Kun even provided the transport.
On 30 March Vynnychenko arrived in Budapest with another social-democrat,
Yury Tyshchenko, and met Kun on the same day. The ensuing discussion between the
emigres Ukrainians and the Hungarian officials resulted in the following programme
drawn up by Vynnychenko and Tyshchenko, which Kun presented to Moscow:
1. Fully independent and sovereign Ukrainian Soviet Republic within the
ethnographic borders including Galicia with Lviv as per the line of the Syan and
the Kuban region.
2. Until its establishment on an All-European scale, the establishment of a military
alliance between the existing socialist republics on the grounds of equal rights of
each member of the alliance
3. The military of another member of the alliance should remain on the territory of
a member of the alliance only with the consent of that Soviet republic.
4. The Government of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic to consist of the Nezalezhnyky
Ukrainian Social-democrats, the left Ukrainian Social-Revolutionaries [Borotbisty],
and Ukrainian communists as well as those Ukrainian socialist parties who accept
the platform of soviet power.
5. All allied socialist republics are obliged to if necessary provide render all material
aid to another member-republic in defence of its territory in the fight against
imperialist encroachments on behalf of neighbouring bourgeois countries and in the
first place against the Entente, Poland and Romania, as well as the fight against
internal counter revolutionaries which endanger the existence of Soviet republics.
153
Kun assured Vynnychenko that he had been in contact with Lenin by radio and he
accepted the points. But concerning the government, then it would depend on who is
chosen by the councils of workers and peasant deputies of Ukraine.
154
The triple
alliance of Russian, Ukrainian and Hungarian soviet republics
155
caused interna-
tional uproar over a new red plot when the text was intercepted by a Paris radio
station. But there was silence from Moscow.
The only news was of continuing unrest. Vynnychenko felt the Rakovsky
government was turning the Ukrainian peasantry and all national Ukrainian layers
against itself, posing a serious danger especially bearing in mind the necessity as soon
as possible to constitute a direct connection with Hungary.
156
It was a week before
Budapest received a response. It was not from Lenin but Rakovsky. Vynnychenko
was not named but sarcastically described as that poet who was a typical
representative of petit bourgeois ideology who belongs to the left wing of the
152
Volodomyr Vynnychenko, Shchodennyk. Tom 1, 19111920, ed. Hryhorii Kostiuk, (Edmonton and New
York: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1980), p. 328.
153
Halahan Z Mokh spomyniv op. cit., pp. 445446.
154
Volodomyr Vynnychenko, Schodennyk , op. cit., pp. 331332.
155
Halahan, Z Moi

kh spomyniv, op. cit., pp. 445446.

156
Vynnychenko, Schodennyk, op. cit., pp. 331332.
Critique 595
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Directory band.
157
With whom there was no sense in discussing any kind of
alliances. It was not what Por and Kun had expected, they were, said Halahan,
baffled. Vynnychenko met again with Kun and Por, but they made no progress with
Rakovsky.
158
They vehemently believed that Moscow and Kyiv would agree. When
Vynnychenko expressed his doubts they protested: Never in the world, cant Russian
communists be imperialists and nationalists. Vynnychenko said to them: Mark my
words: They will lose you, us and themselves on the Ukrainian question.
159
Exasperated, Vynnychenko returned to Vienna, leaving Halahan to represent him.
Kun became convinced that Rakovsky was engaged in outright sabotage, despite
Lenins repeated reassurances that this was not the case, he was not convinced
otherwise. But it was the Nezalezhnyky who were to be blamed, not their RKP
practices in Ukraine; the representatives of the KP(b)U made precisely this point in
later debates with the Nezalezhnyky at the Comintern. The Nezalezhnyky uprising
they said had:
. . . interfered with the prepared movement of soviet troops into Bessarabia and
Galicia to join Soviet Hungary. As a result of this, the power of Polish and
Rumanian Bourgeois was solidly established in Bessarabia and Galicia, and Soviet
Hungary was strangled under the active participation of that same Rumanian army
which now had no basis to fear for its rear lines.
160
However this view of the USDRP (Nezalezhnyky) was not shared by the Hungarian
communists, importantly it was also not the analysis of the Red Army commander of
the Ukrainian front Antonov-Ovseenko.
161
Antonovs First Army was located west of
Kyiv and responsible for resisting the Poles and Petlyuras forces, then on 18 April he
was ordered by Lenin and Trotsky to go on the offensive towards south-eastern
Galicia and establish ties with Soviet Hungary. Antonov responded with a
memorandum to Lenin on 17 April 1919, in it he attacked the erroneous polices
of the Rakovsky government, writing that in particular the land and national policy
in Ukraine cuts at the roots of the military leadership to overcome these
disintegrating influences. The solution that was urgently proposed was the following:
It is necessary: 1) to bring into the Ukrainian government representatives of the
parties which represent the middle and poorer peasants (the Nezalezhnyky SDs and
Ukrainian SRs); 2) to change the land policy to conform with the interests of the
middle peasantry; 3) to force the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs to work
through the Soviets in the localities; 4) to compel foreigners, Great Russians, to
adjust themselves with the greatest tact to local peculiarities and local people; 5)
to halt the plundering of the Ukraines bread and coal; 6) to persuade the party
to throw two-thirds of its strength into the villages and the army; to reduce
by two-thirds all Soviet institutions, throwing [party and soviet] workers
157
Halahan Z Moi

kh spomyniv op. cit., p. 446.

158
Vynnychenko, Schodennyk, op. cit., p. 331.
159
Vynnychenko, Schodennyk, op. cit., p. 335.
160
Memorandum TsK KP(b)U Vikonkomu kominternu, November 1924, M. Skypnik, A. Shumsky N.
Popov, Bachinskyi, P. ed., Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., pp. 551552.
161
Adams, The Bolsheviks in the Ukraine, op. cit., p. 266.
596 C. Ford
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into practical affairs; to bring the Donets workers into the ranks of our peasant
army; 9) in the food policy to carry out not a requisitional, but a productive
dictatorship.
162
Antonov supported this with a second memorandum of 8 May 1919, but all to no
avail. Through most of April in Carpatho-Ukraine the small Red Army had fought
fierce battles against the intervening Romanian troops, and on 3 May the exhausted
troops retreated with their Hungarian allies. The bridgehead to Hungary and Central
Europe was rapidly retreating. A desperate Kun wrote to Lenin that: Forcing
Rakovsky on the Ukrainians against their wishes, in my opinion, will be an
irreparable mistake.
163
The Ukrainian Kronstadt

All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee

From the time the Nezalezhnyky leaders were released by the Cheka in early April
their own situation and that of the country went from bad to worse.
164
There had
been a rash of strikes in March by impoverished workers who perceived the
Bolsheviks to have departed from their principles of soviet democracy. Kopanivsky
reported in Chervony Prapor that the situation had deteriorated to such a level that
the food detachments have made the peasants discontented, just as those of the
Hetman and the Germans did.
165
The number of peasant revolts soared to a total of
328 from 1 April to 15 June 1919.
166
Unable to see scope to reform the Ukrainian SSR the Nezalezhnyky turned to open
rebellion. The decision of the Nezalezhnyky to start fighting between the Russian
Bolsheviks and Ukrainian Bolsheviks appears closely related to the mutiny of the
First Kyiv Soviet Division led by Zeleny.
167
Chervony Prapor had rose to his defence
arguing that Zeleny stood and stands on the Soviet platform. It was one of numerous
such misunderstandings arising from the reneging on assurances that units would
form part of a Ukrainian Red Army in an independent Republic.
168
An official press
campaign began against Zeleny, whilst on 8 March the Kyivsky Komunist wrote that
Otaman Zeleny and his army, deployed in the region of Obukhiv, Hermanivka and
162
Adams, The Bolsheviks in Ukraine, op. cit., p. 266.
163
Cable sent 8 July 1919; Tokes, op. cit., p. 201.
164
Yu Mazurneko whilst under arrest by the Cheka read he had been arrested in connection to the uprising
led by Sokolovskii and others. After being released he was faced with the reality that some members of his party
participated in the uprising. Dokymenti Trahichnoi Istorii Ukrayini, op. cit., pp. 248253.
165
Chervony Prapor, 16 April 1919.
166
Brovkin, op. cit., p. 358.
167
Elias Tcherikover, The Pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York: YIVO Institute forJewish Research,
1965), p. 373.
168
The cause of the breach between Zeleny and the Bolshevik authorities was their decision to refuse the
redistribution of the land of large sugar factories sought by the peasants. This fed into disagreements over
the units status as a regiment of the Red Army, Chervony Prapor reporting that: Zeleny stood and stands on the
Soviet platform. The reason for the misunderstanding is Zelenys unwillingness to meld into one with the Red
Army, and Antonov knows why he is unwilling. Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 179.
Critique 597
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Trypillia, maintains soviet power, a week later it was boasting Zeleny is finally being
liquidated.
169
The Nezalezhnyky, whilst recognising there was a counter-revolutionary element,
criticised such generalisations about the insurgency which branded the whole
movement as White Guardist, kulak, Black Hundred, and similar terms of a very
large vocabulary of reptilic hack writers. It is characteristic that in the areas of the
Hryhoriiv and Makhno armies i.e. where the writ of the communist party does not
reach, there is no insurgency, also there are no Jewish pogroms, nor is there any
Nezalezhnyky aunt sally.
170
Of course whilst this may have been the case at the time
as regards pogroms, it certainly did not remain so.
Partly pulled, partly pushed, the Nezalezhnyky joined the insurgency spreading
across Ukraine. The Nezalezhnyky presumptuously threw itself into the seething
masses, hoping to prevent their seizure by counter-revolutionary forces and to try to
direct the uprising not against Soviet power as such, not against communist power,
but against the power of the current government as an occupation power.
171
On 10
April they concluded a draft agreement with representatives in Kyiv of the UPSRs and
the official USDRP for an uprising which stated:
The policy of the parties signing this agreement, both in the Council of the
Republic and in other organs of state power, must be built on the following
principles: 1. Strengthening and defence of the independence and autonomy of the
national Ukrainian Republic; 2. Establishment of the government of the Working
People (excluding elements which exploit the work of others); 3. Organization of
the national economy in the interests of the working masses and a planned
transition from the capitalist order to the socialist, with the immediate expropria-
tion of non-working landed property.
172
According to this ambitious plan, the struggle would begin simultaneously on the
territory held by the Ukrainian SSR while on the territory of the UNR they would
oust Petlyuras Directory.
173
The Nezalezhnyky ran into problems from the start. The
Borotbistsy was not prepared to break with Rakovsky government and condemned
the reckless escapades of the Nezalezhnyky.
174
The idea did not rest easy with all
Nezalezhnyky either; at a party conference in Kyiv on 22 April, a small group led by
Hukovych and Pankiv opposed a rebellion. They split, forming the USDRP
(Nezalezhnyky) Left and began publishing the legal daily Chervonyi Styah.
175
169
It is worth noting that Antonov complained of the manner in which the press wrote about the insurgents
describing articles as works of fiction. M. Malet, Makhno and his Enemies, META, Toronto,
170
Chervony Prapor, 24 April 1919.
171
Mazurenko, Bachinskyi, Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., pp. 248253.
172
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., pp. 131133.
173
Mazurenko, Bachinskyi, Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., pp. 248253.
174
Blakitny used precisely these words in telegram to Hryhoriiv, Adams, Bolsheviks in Ukraine, op. cit.,
p. 234.
175
Along with the Borotbisty and the KP(b)U they later signed a joint statement charging Otaman
Hryhoriivs rebellion in the South as betraying the revolution, Bilshovyk 13 May 1919; Bachinskyi, Dokumenty
trahichnoy isioriy Ukrayny, op. cit., pp. 137139.
598 C. Ford
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Having played their hand, events escalated on 30 April when the Central
Committee of the KP(b)U decided to arrest and bring to trial for counter
revolutionary activities all members of the Nezalezhnyky party, regardless of their
point of view.
176
Not waiting for other parties the Nezalezhnyky established an All-
Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee led by Mazurenko, Richytsky, Avdiyenko and
Drahomyretsky, with a Supreme Insurgent Council of Mazurenko and Richytsky,
their forces included the First Kyiv Soviet Division and a number of other Red Army
and red militia units.
Basing itself in the town of Skvyr the Nezalezhnyky Revkom began to issue a series
of proclamations the most famous being Order no.48 calling for a struggle against
the betrayers of the toiling masses, the occupation government of Rakovsky, and for
the arrest of the traitorous Directory, which is negotiating with the French and other
imperialists.
177
In their struggle the Nezalezhnyky stood on the ground of the
Bolsheviks, the rising was not so much a struggle against the Ukrainian SSR but a
struggle for power within it.
178
Though larger than the Kronstadt uprising of 1921 the
Nezalezhnyky rising has remained undistinguished from the wider Ukrainian
jacquerie. Yet it was historically unique: the Russian communists were challenged
with demands for a republic of workers and peasants councils by Marxists committed
to communist revolution. The Nezalezhnyky subsequently explained to the Com-
munist International:
This struggle was a historically unprecedented occurrence, a result of the conflict
between the internal and external forces of the Ukrainian revolution, a result of the
imperialist heritage of old Russia persistence in KP(b)U. All this hindered a
consolidation of the internal social forces of the Ukrainian revolution and
hampered the maturation and the crystallisation of the Ukrainian communist
proletariat.
179
The uprising spread rapidly and within three or four weeks the Revkom ruled several
districts of the Right Bank. According to Bolshevik descriptions the rebel camp
numbered 25,000, though others put it at between 5,000 and 10,000.
180
Buoyed by
their initial success Mazurenko sent an ultimatum to Rakovsky:
Attention; Rakovsky, head of the so-called Ukrainian Workers and Peasants
Government
Executed 25th of June 1919 in the town of Skvyra
176
Dokymenti Trahichnoi Istorii Ukrayini, op. cit., pp. 130132.
177
Signed by Drahomyretsky, Dybichenko, Selyanskyi, Vlasivskyi, Syrotenko, Secretary: Didych, Bachinskyi,
Dokumenty trahichnoy isioriy Ukray ny, op. cit., pp. 125126.
178
Memorandum Ukrainskoi Kumunistichnoi Partii Kongresovi III Komunistychnoii Internatsionaly,
1920, in P. Bachinskyi (ed) Dokumenty trahichnoi isiori Ukrainy (19171927 rr), Zhurnal Okhorona pratsi -
(Kyiv Oblast Derzhavna Administratsiya, 1999), pp. 532533.
A full English translation of this key text of Ukrainian Communism is available in Debatte, 17:2, (2009), pp.
247263.
179
Bachinskyi, op. cit., p. 537.
180
Tcherikover, op. cit., p. 250.
Critique 599
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In the name of the insurgent Ukrainian working people I announce to you that the
workers and peasants of Ukraine have risen in arms against you, as the government
of the Russian conquerors, which, having draped itself in slogans that are sacred to
us: 1) a government of soviets of workers and peasants; 2) the self-determination of
nations, including secession; and 3) the struggle against imperialist conquerors and
plunderers of the toiling masses, desecrates not only these sacred mottoes and
ruining the true power of the workers and impoverished peasants of in the
neighbouring country, but also uses them for aims that are remote from any
socialist order.
It was in Mazurenkos words their swan song. Having believed that they had taken
the leadership of the spontaneous movement, events started to prove otherwise.
They had been misled over a change in the government of the UNR that the
reactionary wing had left, and that a new cabinet composed of socialists was nominated,
which supports Soviet authority.
181
In fact the UNR government was now headed by
Borys Martos on the right wing of USDRP whilst Petlyura remained dictatorial head of
the Directory.
182
A joint letter of the Central Committees of the official USDRP and
UPSR denounced the intention of some parties (Left SRs and SD Nezalezhnyky) to
establish some sort of Ukrainian communism is a complete fantasy.
183
The official USDRP refuted the agreement made in Kyiv and with the Army of the
UNR starting to make advances an additional agreement was made in Chorny
Ostriv on 9 June 1919. The Nezalezhnyky were sidelined with an assurance of legal
existence, on the condition of loyalty to an USDRP-UPSR government.
184
Agitators
were dispatched into rebel areas to undermine the Nezalezhnyky Revkom and to
subordinate rebel units to Petlyura. Meanwhile the forces commanded by Zeleny
suffered serious defeat in a four-day battle between Obukhov and Tripilii in early July.
Zaleny retreated towards Uman, whilst the Supreme Insurgent Council of
Mazurenko, forced to abandon its operations towards Kyiv, fought their way through
towards Kamyanets on 18 July.
The Nezalezhnyky considered that the semi-proletarian elements whom the party had
leadership were beginning to degenerate: The revolutionary armed groupings began to
181
Bachinskyi, op. cit., pp. 248253.
182
It appears the more moderate leaders of the UPSR and USDRP still aligned with Petlyura did not know
about the agreements made by their emissaries in Kyiv with the Nezalezhnyky. They then subsequently refused
to back the pro-soviet positions of the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee. In a joint letter to the insurgent
groups by, they stated: Any party in Ukraine that stands for soviet power is liable to the same fate as the party of
the Bolsheviks. Bolshevism in Russia is collapsing mainly because of internal disorder, because of the
dissatisfaction of the peasants with soviet power. To model Ukrainian Soviet power on Russian Soviet power is
absurd, because in principle these Bolshevisms do not differ from one another. Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy,
Tom. IV, op. cit., pp. 134139.
183
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., pp. 134139.
184
To be implemented with the following additions: (1) Organs of local power must be organized on the
labour principle; (2) All parties (in particular the USDRP Nezalezhnyky), which stand for the defence of
Ukraines independence, must be legalised on the condition that they do not oppose the government with armed
force; (3) This additional agreement must be transmitted by the government of the Directory. Khrystiuk, IV, op.
cit., p. 138.
600 C. Ford
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fill with counterrevolutionary elements; degeneration and a pogrom movement
started.
185
The forces under the command of Zeleny were to become tainted by
controversy over the treatment of the Jews in this period. According to Elias Tcherikover,
Zeleny prevented a pogromin Trypillia which had one-thousand Jewish residents, but in
a number of other places Tcherikover records a litany of brutality against the Jewish
populace.
186
Sources certainly conflict as to the responsibility of Zeleny and other
commanders but there is no doubt that atrocities occurred. This retrogression and loss of
political leadership moved the Nezalezhnyky to end the uprising. Mazurenko concluded:
The party overrated its strength, misread objective conditions and the consequences that
could result fromits false step, and was forced to concede defeat and to withdrawwith its
remaining force.
187
Faced with the advance of the Russian Volunteer Army, a meeting on
1819 July of members of the Organisational Committee and responsible workers took
the decision to abandon the uprising. They later explained:
Some Nezalezhnyky organizations assumed the task of giving the rebel movement
the ideological content of a struggle against the occupation policy of the Soviet
government in Ukraine. They wanted to force the Soviet government to change its
tactics but, lacking the strength to master the movement, were themselves beaten
out of it by the Petlyurite counter-revolution, which itself was beaten by Denikins
counter-revolutionary army.
188
Considered as the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Petlyuras forces disarmed the rebel units
who had retreated into UNR territory; Mazurenko, Tkachenko, Richytsky and others
were arrested.
189
Commander Diiachenko was shot and the others were also ordered
to be shot, they were only saved by the intervention of the UPSRs.
In the summer of 1919 the Ukrainian SSR went into meltdown. This changed the
correlation of power; it provided for a temporary revival of the UNR, whose army
arrived at Kyiv at the same time as the Russian Volunteer Army of Denikin. The
official USDRP saw it as a victory over Russian and Ukrainian Bolsheviks boasting
history, as we foresaw, went according to Marx and not according to Lenin.
190
It was
short-lived; in the face of Denikin the UNR also fragmented; Robitnycha Hazeta
complained citizens saw little difference between Petlyura and Denikin.
191
The
185
Bachinskyi, op. cit., pp. 4566.
186
Tcherikover, op. cit., pp. 250268.
187
Bachinskyi, op. cit., pp. 248253.
188
Chervony Prapor, 25 December 1919.
189
The moderate USDRP declared: We did not believe what seemed to us absurd, that the peasants wanted
to exchange strong Russian Bolsheviks for a sickly Ukrainian bolshevism of those, who began ad hoc to call
themselves left SRs or Nezalezhnyky . . . We declared to the Chief Staff and to the All-Ukrainian Revolutionary
Committee that they had become the victims of self-deception. The peasants rose up not for any Ukrainian
soviet power, but in their own interests, both social and national. The Nezalezhnyky were accused of threatening
to execute those who agitated for the peoples government and Otaman Petlyura, Vyzvolennia, 25 July 1919,
Khrystiuk, IV, op. cit., p. 144.
190
Robitnycha Hazeta, 25 August 1919 in Khrystiuk, op. cit., p. 153.
191
The central organ of the USDRP reported: the growth of uncertainty about the difference between our
government, our system of rule and that of Denikin, Robitnycha Hazeta, 5 October 1919, in Khrgstiuk, op. cit.,
p. 161.
Critique 601
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conservative head of the West Ukrainian government Petrushevych placed the
Galician Army at the service of Denikin, with Petlyura then turning to Pilsudskis
Poland, signing away Eastern Galicia in return for an alliance.
Conclusion
In revisiting the role of the Ukrainian Marxists in the Ukrainian revolution it is
necessary to recognise that the vernacular current has fallen victim to the prevalent
paradigms that have dominated historiography for eight decades.
192
On the one hand, the official Soviet history served as a source of legitimacy for the
system. This current did not consider the Ukrainian revolution to possess an
independent momentum, and presented the Russian Bolsheviks as playing in the
leading role in the entire revolutionary process of 19171920. The omega can be
found in the literature of the national paradigm developed mainly, though not
exclusively, by Ukrainian emigres. It gives the national dimension primary place to
the detriment and subordination of social questions. What is often overlooked is the
similarity of the two paradigms: traits considered negative in one are portrayed
positively in the other. This is notable in the treatment of the socialist/communist
element of the Ukrainian Revolution. Both orthodoxies put emphasis on their more
moderate tendency as if it were their overall character and demean the relative
influence of the vernacular revolutionary left.
193
One criticismmade of the radical Ukrainian parties by the national school is that whilst
the contest remained an internal affair they were defeated by their moderate socialist
rivals; evidence of this is seen in the revival of the UNR in late 1918, and not the soviet
republic they envisaged. The Russian Red Army shifted the balance towards them.
194
In
fact in 1919 the Bolsheviks could not have attained power without a shift internally.
The Ukrainian peasants rapidly went into opposition to the Directory; a string of
additional partisan brigades actively supported the soviet platform of the Borotbisty
and Nezalezhnyky.
195
As the Red Army advanced on Kyiv, its ranks were swollen by
Ukrainian troops who went over en masse, seeing in the revolt the means by which to
realise their social aspirations so neglected by the Directory.
196
192
John-Paul Himka, The National and the Social in the Ukrainian Revolution of 191720: The
Historiographical Agenda. Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte 34, (1994), pp. 95110; Edward Acton, The Revolution
and its Historians, 117, in E. Acton, V. Cherniaev and W. Rosenberg (eds), Critical Companion to the Russian
Revolution 19141921, (London: Indiana, 1997).
193
An example of this is Reshetar who writes that the USDRP saw Marxism as a merely a means by which
national independence could be achieved, John Reshatar, The Ukrainian Revolution 19171920, (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 51.
194
Amongst others, this is the assessment of George Luckyj in his foreword to Ivan Maistrenko, Borotbism,
(New York: Research Program on the USSR, 1954), p. ix.
195
Adams, op. cit., pp. 120123. Even the Sich Rifleman, considered the staunchest of the Ukrainian
regiments, declared their support for the soviet platform in March 1920.
196
Adams, op. cit., p. 93.
602 C. Ford
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In the spring of 1919 the creation of a Ukrainian republic based on workers and
peasants self-governance with a plurality of pro-soviet parties was a viable
possibility. Why was their conception of Ukraine not realised? Could the historical
tragedy of have been prevented? The analysis that maintains its validity was that
outlined by the Ukrainian Communist Party (Nezalezhnyky), launched during the
resistance to Denikin on 16 December 1919.
197
Their analysis was developed more
fully in their Memorandum to the Second Congress of the Communist International in
1920.
Written by Richytsky the Memorandum explained that arising from the tendencies
of the development of world capitalism in its phase of imperialism, new subjective
forces had arisen. While the principal force manifested was world proletarian
revolution which started in Russia, it was necessary to recognise that capitalist
development fosters the tendency of the enslaved colonial peoples into a struggle for
national liberation*towards independent statehood. The task of the national
revolutions was to unshackle the productive forces from the constraints and
distortions of imperialism; creation of independent workers republics was an
indispensable resource if the working class was to transcend world capital. If the
working class sought to create communist society on the basis of only one of the two
contradictory tendencies of the productive forces, then it would result in a
fragmentation and negation of itself. The Memorandum summarised:
It is, therefore, unthinkable and reactionary to attempt any forcible transfer of
the proletarian revolution inside borders of the old imperialist states. The task of
the international proletariat is to draw towards the communist revolution and
the construction of a new society not only the advanced capitalist countries but
also the less developed peoples of the colonies*taking advantage of their
national revolutions. To fulfil this task, it must take an active part in these
revolutions and play the leading role in the perspective of the permanent revolution,
prevent the national bourgeoisie from limiting them at the level of fulfilling demand
of national liberation. It is necessary to continue the struggle through to the
seizure of power and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and to
lead the bourgeois democratic revolution to the end through the establishment of
national states destined to join the universal network of international union of
the emerging Soviet republics based on the forces of local proletarian and
working masses of each country with the mutual aid of all the detachments of
world revolution.
198
The approach of the UKP was unique; they were the only communist party that
referred to the concept of permanent revolution during the entire course of the
Russian Revolution. It was from this understanding of the dialectics of the world
197
(1) The Organisational Committee of the USDRPN proclaims itself to be the Organisational Committee
of the Ukrainian Communist Party (USDRPN), based on the Draft programme of the UKP. (2) All USDRPN
Organisations are to discuss the Draft programme and to proclaim themselves to be the Organisations of the
UKP (USDRPN). Chervony Prapor, 21 December 1919.
198
Bachinskyi, op. cit., pp. 539540.
Critique 603
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revolutionary process that one could comprehend the course and character of the
Ukrainian revolution, and thus determine the tasks of the Ukrainian proletariat and
its communist party.
199
These were the unresolved contradictions of the struggle of
both internal and external social forces in Ukraine which retarded the revolution.
This had affected the entire course of the Ukrainian revolution, which has so far been
unable to develop fully into a communist revolution.
The rift that grew in 1919 within the left stemmed not only from dissatisfaction
with policy on the national question but an overall absence of self-government. The
resulting rebellions most popular demand was that of democratically elected soviets.
A Central Committee member of the UKP, Ivan Maistrenko considered that the
Bolsheviks had more chances than the Jacobins to continue the national revolution,
in other words to organize the creative impetus of the masses which was directed
towards the construction of a new society.
200
One such opportunity was in the calls
in 1919 for the reconstitution of Soviet Ukraine as a genuinely independent and self-
governing republic echoed in Budapest. Lenin wrote that the Hungarian proletarian
revolution is helping even the blind to see.
201
This enlightenment didnt reach
Rakovsky or Lenin. The opportunity was lost.
The experience of this and preceding episodes brings into question the long
accepted explanation for the fate of the Russian Revolution that is the primary role of
external factors in its degeneration and the rise of Stalinism. Coupled with this
assessment is the contention that unfavourable circumstances restricted the choices
available to the Bolsheviks. The Soviet historian Volodymyr Chyrko contended that
the experience of the Nezalezhnyky disproves that a single-party system was
established in our country as a consequence of Bolsheviks not being willing to
collaborate with anyone.
202
There is no doubt that the Bolsheviks did work with
others, but it was a relationship strained by conflicting conceptions amongst the
Bolsheviks and other parties as to exactly what revolution they were creating. A
conflict summed up by the Nezalezhnyky in 1918 as between the dictatorship of the
workers and peasants or the dictatorship of a section of the proletariat and of its own
party. In the end the latter won out.
For the Bolsheviks, socialism could not be developed in a single, isolated, backward
country such as Russia without the aid of more developed countries in Europe. Their
project was predicated on extending the revolution westward. The entire approach in
Ukraine contributed to undermining the very perspective on which the October
Revolution was based.
199
Bachinskyi, op. cit., pp. 539540.
200
A. Babenko, Bolshevist Bonapartism, (Geneva: Nasha Borotba, 1948), p. 6.
201
V. I. Lenin, Greetings to the Hungarian Workers, Pravda, 29 May, 1919 (Moscow: Progress Publishers,
1972) Lenin, Collected Works, (4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972 Volume 29), pp. 387
391.
202
V. A. Chyrko, Khokh ideolohii ta polityky natsionalistychnoi partii ukapistiv, Ukrainsky istorychnyi
zhurnal, 12 (1968): pp. 2435.
604 C. Ford
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What is striking about this key juncture is that despite despair with the Bolsheviks
there was not a collapse or decline in support for the soviet idea. Indeed the opposite
occurred. In winter 19191920 the largely peasant-based Borotbisty, having re-
launched as the Ukrainian Communist Party (Borotbisty) witnessed a surge in
support. One explanation for this mobilisation is that it was based on a choice
between restoration and resistance; however this does not fully explain Ukraine.
Despite circumstances which would appear most favourable to the parties of the
remnant UNR, they did not gain hegemony over the popular resistance in the winter
of 1920. But the pro-soviet surge of 1920 that defeated the Russian Volunteer Army
could not re-create March 1919, as Vynnychenko concluded in his Rebirth of a
Nation, if their plan had been accepted and a common soviet front established the
Hungarian Soviet Republic and Soviet Bavaria would have been saved.
203
203
Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhenia Natsii, III, op. cit., p. 321.
Critique 605
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