TOPIC 5

Ukraine in the Early 20^th Century

Ukrainians in the First World War

In 1914 a great war started in Europe which involved many countries in the world. Two powerful military blocks - the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria) and the Entente (Great Britain, France, Russia, and others) - tried to redraw the map of the world.

For Ukraine this war was especially tragic as Ukrainian soldiers had to kill each other (3.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Russian army and 250,000 served in the Austrian army).

When Russia occupied Western Ukraine in 1914 it decided to eradicate the Ukrainian national movement there. The tsarist government proclaimed Western Ukraine to be an “ancient Russian land” that now “reunited forever with Mother Russia”. All Ukrainian cultural institutions and periodicals were shut down. Russification policy in school was introduced. Russian officials and Russophiles (Moskvophiles) replaced the old bureaucracy. The Greek Catholic church, a hallmark of West Ukrainian uniqueness, was persecuted. Hundreds of Greek Catholic priests were exiled to Russia and replaced by their Orthodox counterparts who urged peasants to convert to Orthodoxy.

The Fall of the Monarchy and Its Consequences

The war was a heavy burden for all combatant sides. The first country to break down was Russia. In March 1917 demonstrations against food shortages in Petrograd (Russia’s capital at the time)¹ resulted in deposing the Russian tsar Nikolai II.² A liberal government (known as the Provisional Government) assumed the power and proclaimed democratic freedoms in Russia. That was a great mistake as democracy is rarely effective during wars, especially in countries without democratic traditions. Censorship was abolished and newspapers started to criticize the government. Numerous socialist agitators, who had been released from prisons by the Provisional Government, went to the front and started to tell the soldiers that they were fighting for the interests of capitalists and not for their own. As a result of such propaganda the army was demoralized and started to disintegrate. All political parties (including those struggling for autonomy or even independence from Russia) were legalized. The result of such a policy was horrible for Russia’s integrity. Numerous nationalistic organizations in different parts of the Russian Empire emerged and started to demand autonomies for their lands. Ukraine was not an exclusion in this process. Nationally-minded Ukrainians formed a kind of parliament called the Central Rada (with the famous historian M. Hrushevsky at its head) which factually proclaimed Ukraine’s autonomous status on 23 June of 1917 (First Universal).³ Shortly thereafter the General Secretariat (cabinet of ministers) headed by V. Vynnychenko was formed. The Central Rada was quite a democratic organization; one-fourth of the seats were given to national minorities. The political ideology of the Central Rada was socialism.

The Central Rada initially enjoyed wide public support. The Ukrainian peasant believed that the Central Rada would be more effective than a government in far-off Petrograd in helping him obtain more land, while the Ukrainian soldier hoped it would get him out of the war more quickly than a Russian government could.

In time, the initial unity that Ukrainians had enjoyed earlier broke down and the political and ideological conflicts between various political groups emerged. Factually the Central Rada turned into a big discussion club. It seemed that the only aim of the deputies was to talk and accuse each other of a wrong ideology.

The Central Rada made two great mistakes. First, the ideologues of the Central Rada argued that the revolution eliminated the need for standing armies, and second, they pointed out that bureaucrats were “reactionary in essence”, who made careers under the old tsarist regime and, therefore, were enemies of the new order. So a 40,000 army placed at the disposal of the Central Rada by General Pavlo Skoropadsky was disbanded. Many qualified bureaucrats were also fired. But it soon became apparent that without an army and a bureaucracy, government was impossible. Disorder and anarchy spread through Ukraine.