Revolutionary Ukraine, 1917-2017

History's Flashpoints and Today's Memory Wars

Myroslav Shkandrij

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367375577
• eBook ISBN: 9781000145120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This book examines four dramatic periods that have shaped not only Ukrainian, but also Soviet and Russian history over the last hundred years: the revolutionary struggles of 1917-20, Stalin's "second" revolution of 1928-33, the mobilization of revolutionary nationalists during the Second World War, and the Euromaidan protests of 2013-14.

The story is told from the perspective of "insiders." It recovers the voice of Bolshevik historians who first described the 1917-21 revolution in Ukraine; citizens who were accused of nationalist conspiracies by Stalin; Galician newspapers that covered the 1933-34 famine; nationalists who fomented revolution in the 1940s; and participants in the Euromaidan protests and Revolution of 2013-14. In each case the narrative reflects current "memory wars" over these key moments in history.

The discussion of these flashpoints in history in a balanced, insightful and illuminating. It introduces recent research findings and new archival materials, and provides a guide to the heated controversies that have today focused attention scholarly and public attention on the issues of nationalism and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The Euromaidan protesters declared that "Ukraine is not Russia, " but the slogan was already current in 1917. This volume describes the process that led to its reappearance in the present day.

Part I
Revolution, 1917–21

1
Repressed Memory

Bolshevik Accounts of the Ukrainian Revolution

After the Russian Empire collapsed in February 1917, events in Ukraine did not take the same course as in Russia. An autonomous state was formed in Kyiv; no equivalent of the October Revolution occurred; and when the Bolsheviks invaded from the north in January 1918, the Ukrainian government declared independence. In April 1918, Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi was installed by the Germans and ruled until November. When German troops withdrew, a popular revolution restored the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) and simultaneously drove out the Bolsheviks. It took two further invasions from the north, in 1919 and 1920, to secure Bolshevik rule in Ukraine. This occurred because the Ukrainian population was promised self-rule, including linguistic, political, and cultural rights. When these were guaranteed, an influential strata of local activists (of Russian and Jewish, as well as Ukrainian origin) supported Bolshevik rule, and began working to create a Ukrainian republic, albeit a Soviet one. Today, some readers might find this narrative jarringly unfamiliar. This is largely because in later decades, Soviet historians have broadcast a different narrative, and in part also because Western scholars have concentrated on the revolutions that took place in Petrograd and Moscow during February and October 1917, and on ensuing events in Russia.

However, early Bolshevik historians described the complex story of revolutionary Ukraine with candor. Moisei Rafes in 1920 and Moisei Ravich-Cherkasskii (real name Rubinshtein) in 1923, painted a picture that already by the middle of the decade had become an embarrassment to Soviet leaders. As a result, the Communist Party commissioned new works, including studies by Nikolai (Mykola) Popov published in 1927 and 1930. These, too, were not to Moscow’s liking and in the thirties, all previous Bolshevik histories were pulped and most of their authors silenced, either through arrest or murder.

Why were these early accounts considered offensive? First, because they showed that in 1917–18, the Ukrainian and Jewish populations overwhelmingly supported the Ukrainian government in Kyiv, the Central Rada, and opposed the Bolsheviks. Second, because they demonstrated that the transfer of allegiance to the Bolsheviks by most Jewish activists in 1919 and 1920 had been a reluctant and fraught affair. These accounts made clear that the Jewish population desired cultural autonomy—a sticking point in the relationship of Jewish parties, in particular the Bund, with Bolshevism for over fifteen years. Above all, the histories revealed fundamental tensions within the Bolshevik membership in Ukraine. Ukrainians and Jews who wanted to create an autonomous party and republic clashed acrimoniously with Moscow centralists. They accused the latter of Russian chauvinism and an imperialist or colonialist mentality. The centralists leveled the counter-charge of bourgeois nationalism.

Ravich-Cherkasskii on the Party’s Dual Roots and Relations With the Bund

Ravich-Cherkasskii produced his History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CP[B]U) in 1923. He began by pointing out that the proletariat of large-scale industry “in its overwhelming majority” had come from outside the country (Ravich-Cherkasskii 1923, 3). As a result, for a long time, “parallel work” had been conducted in “two parts of the Ukrainian proletariat.” The work of one part had been guided from St. Petersburg/Petrograd and the other from inside Ukraine (ibid., 14). He argued that the CP(B)U was a synthesis of analogous political movements in the Ukrainian and Russian nations. Because the Jewish population often came from smaller towns, and spoke both Ukrainian and Russian, it had been able to act as a mediator between the two groups. Moreover, having emerged from its own national-cultural liberation struggle, it understood the national question better than Russian members of the party (ibid., 5).

The picture of Bolshevism’s origins in Ukraine had some basis in fact. The CP(B)U had been created on 20 April 1918 in Taganrog as an independent party, one not subordinated to the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) (RCP[B]). Mykola Skrypnyk and the Kyiv group of Bolsheviks had insisted on this. However, they had been opposed by the Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro) group. Most founding members were of Ukrainian or Jewish backgrounds, but many of the rank-and-file were workers from the industrial centers of Eastern Ukraine. They were mainly Russians, or Russified Ukrainians, and showed no interest in the national question. From the beginning, therefore, there had been tensions between Ukrainian “republicans” (those who supported the creation of a Ukrainian Soviet republic) and Russian “centralists” (who opposed Ukrainian statehood in any form). At the First Congress of the CP(B)U held in Moscow on 3–12 July 1918, the founding resolution of the Taganrog conference was revoked and the CP(B)U was declared a part of the RCP(B). This set the scene for persistent clashes over the status of the Ukrainian party and state.

Bolshevik histories written in the 1920s focus on these clashes. They complain of the chauvinism and “national nihilism” of Russian centralizers. Ravich-Cherkasskii, for example, informed readers that in 1923, some communists still thought that Ukraine was “an invention of the Germans” and that members of the RCP(B) often persisted in viewing both the USSR and the CP(B)U as “a masquerade, a fiction, a game” (ibid.). His account drew on the author’s experiences in the Jewish Bund during pre-revolutionary years, when he had resisted pressures to assimilate to a monolithic “Russia.” In 1903, the Bund had left the RSDRP (Russian Social Democratic Revolutionary Party, as the Bolsheviks were then known) precisely over the issue of Jewish national-cultural autonomy.

Ravich-Cherkasskii’s book argues that prior to 1917, there had, in fact, been three revolutionary currents in Ukraine (Russian, Jewish, and Ukrainian), that all social-democratic work among the masses had been done within three distinct national party organizations, and that all attempts to unite their activities had failed (ibid., 10). It characterizes all three organizations as suffering “in the same degree” from the nationalism and mutual distrust that were hangovers from tsarist times (ibid.). The Bund, writes the author, played an important role in radicalizing a sector of the urban population. The Ukrainian social-democrats had concentrated on their own relatively small-town proletariat and the RUP (Revolutionary Ukrainian Party) on the peasantry. As for the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP), it had constantly complained of “local particularities,” which, the author explains, referred to its inability to work in the Ukrainian language (ibid., 36).¹

Because of this linguistic and cultural divide, throughout 1917–18 the Bolsheviks remained a very small group in Ukraine.² Their organization in Kyiv, for example, had 200 members, who were mainly Jewish artisans (remeslenniki), since Kyiv never had a large industrial proletariat.³ They had no Ukrainian party center (ibid., 43). Even after General Mikhail Muravev’s troops took Kyiv on 10 February 1918 and the Central Rada had to flee, the Bolsheviks were unable to establish themselves. Naturally, it did not help that Muravev, in a display of remarkable political obtuseness, proclaimed that he was coming “from the distant north” in order “to free Ukraine” (ibid., 50). During the short time the Bolsheviks held Kyiv in February 1918, they created a reign of terror, in which anyone carrying a document written in Ukrainian could be executed. Some 2,000 people were shot. Muravev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Russian imperial army who had served in both the Russian-Japanese War and First World War, soon rebelled against the Bolsheviks and was captured and shot in July 1918.

After Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi was thrown out by the popular uprising led by Symon Petliura and Yevhen Konovalets, a Directory government restored the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). However, supporters of the Directory and Bund were drifting toward leftist positions. In Ravich-Cherkasskii’s words, “there was not a single socialist party that did not split into a left and right wing, while the Bund, which had a fairly long romance with Petliura, even split three ways: left, center, and right” (ibid., 103–04). On 2 February 1919, two days before the Red Army captured Kyiv for the second time, the Bund declared that it “took responsibility for the activities of the Soviet government” and placed all its forces “at the disposition of the Worker-Peasant government” (ibid., 106). On 18 February, part of the membership formed a separate Communist Bund. The Jewish Socialist Party also moved to the left, although it was motivated less by Marxism than by “the Petliurite anti-Jewish pogroms” (ibid.). At the beginning of March 1919, the Communist Bund, with Moisei Rafes at its head, joined the left wing of the Jewish Socialist Party to create the Jewish Communist Farband (Union) (ibid.).

The first two conferences of the CP(B)U had been held outside Ukraine. The third was held in Kharkiv in March 1920. Each conference was marked by violent factional disagreements, which the RCP(B) adjudicated (ibid., 107). In fact, although a Central Committee of the CP(B)U had been elected, some delegates wanted to disregard it and refer “all matters” to the Central Committee of the RCP(B). In Ravich-Cherkasskii’s words, they expressed contempt for the party’s “national Ukrainian face” (ibid., 117–18).

Throughout 1919, the RCP(B) had rejected the idea of creating a federation of communist parties. At its Eighth Congress in Moscow on 18 March, in spite of the fact that Ukraine formally existed as an independent Soviet republic, it had voted for “a single centralized communist party with one central committee leading the work of the party in all parts of the RSFSR [Russian Socialist Federation of Soviet Republics]” (ibid., 120). This was at a time when various warlords such as Danylo Zelenyi, Nykyfor Hryhoriiv, and Nestor Makhno ruled vast parts of Ukraine. Nonetheless, it had become clear to many congress participants that the Red Army’s second expulsion from Ukraine had resulted from the party’s lack of support and the “bankruptcy” of its Ukrainian policy (ibid., 126).

In Ukraine, the number of party members fell by half in 1919 following mass conscription and forced requisitioning of horses, forage, and weapons. As Denikin and Petliura advanced from opposite sides, a decision was taken to unify the armed forces. However, the idea of creating a separate Ukrainian army was refused (ibid., 131). The Central Committee of the CP(B)U dissolved itself on 2 October and several command centers appeared on the small Ukrainian territory that still remained under Bolshevik control. Even as the anarchy grew, the RCP(B) “mechanically transferred” Ukrainian Bolsheviks to various places in Russia, ignoring protests that a Ukrainian center should lead the struggle, that Ukraine should have its own apparatus, and that Russia and Ukraine should relate to one another as equals and as parts of a federation (ibid., 136, 138). At this juncture, two disaffected members from Ukraine, Serhii Mazlakh (whose background was Jewish) and Vasyl Shakhrai, wrote their famous memo arguing that the Bolsheviks were a Russian party, not the party of an oppressed nation. There were effectively two communist groups in Ukraine at the time: one controlled by Moscow and one by the indigenous movement of Borotbists.

The Bolsheviks were aware that they could easily have lost Ukraine at this point. When the Ukrainian question was discussed at the next Russian party conference, on 2–5 December 1919, the fear of another debacle was on the minds of all delegates. Ravich-Cherkasskii reports that the conference showed “a spirit of appeasement” toward “the Ukrainian revolutionary element” (ibid., 139). In January and February 1920, a Ukrainian army was built and former members of the Bund and the Borotbists were allowed to join the CP(B)U (ibid., 112). Even so, during the Fourth Party Congress in Kharkiv, on 17 March 1920, Kristian Rakovskyi complained that the Central Committee still looked upon itself as an oblast organ of the RCP(B) and some members even thought it “a luxury” to have one’s own Central Committee. He posed the issue bluntly: “Are we for reunion with Russia or for an independent Ukraine?” (ibid., 151–52). This Fourth Congress formally decided that Ukraine was “a separate state organism” with “its own characteristic social structure, class composition, etc.” (ibid., 158). Nonetheless, the internal strife continued. At the Fifth Congress of the CP(B)U in Kharkiv, on 17 November 1920, some delegates complained that the party was too influenced by the Borotbists, “yesterday’s enemies” (ibid., 170–71). In the end, the conference recognized that Bolshevik rule could not be established without Ukrainian activists. One delegate said: “Our task is to make the Ukrainian language our weapon” (ibid., 180).

To sum up, Ravich-Cherkasskii’s account describes a party controlled by Moscow, with little support in Ukraine and a poor understanding of local conditions. Realizing that it could not win power without local support, it drew in Ukrainian and Jewish members, and made concessions to their political demands. Eventually, when Russian cadres accepted the existence of a Ukrainian language and nation, a compromise was reached, one that led eventually in 1923 to the declaration of a policy of indigenization (korenizatsiia), which provided support for culture-building in the Ukrainian and Yiddish languages. Even though the attitude toward them remained one of mistrust, it appeared that Ukrainian and Jewish cadres had at last been recognized as indispensable translators and implementers of the CP(B)U’s policy among the broad masses.

Ravich-Cherkasskii’s emphasis on the party’s fractiousness, the smallness of its Ukrainian component, and the chauvinistic attitude of its Russian members can be viewed as a defense of Ukraine’s case against the Moscow center and Russian chauvinists within the CP(B)U. To make his point, statistics dealing with the party’s national composition were attached to the book; the “Party Census of 1 April 1922” (“Partiinaia perepis k pervomu apreliu 1922”) indicates that most members had come from Russian and Jewish parties (ibid., 239).⁴

During the recruitment wave of 1919 and 1920, both Jews and Ukrainians had begun entering the party in larger numbers (ibid., 241).⁵ Membership figures for the previous years were officially reported as 5,014 in October 1918, 16,363 in March 1919, 25,247 in March 1920, and 31,065 in October 1920. After absorbing the Borotbists (who were as numerous as the Bolsheviks), party me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Revolution, 1917–21
• PART II Stalin’s “Second Revolution,” 1929–34
• PART III Nationalist Revolution, 1938–45
• PART IV Euromaidan and War, 2013–17
• Index