1

The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917

Ukrainian people! Your future is in your own hands. In this hour of trial, of total disorder and of collapse, prove by your unanimity and statesmanship that you, a nation of grain producers, can proudly and with dignity take your place as the equal of any organized powerful nation.

The Central Rada’s First Universal, 19171

We shall not enter the kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor.

Leon Trotsky, 1917²

In later years there would be bigger demonstrations, more eloquent speakers, more professional slogans. But the march that took place in Kyiv on the Sunday morning of 1 April 1917 was extraordinary because it was the first of its kind. Never before had the Ukrainian national movement shown itself in such force on the territory of what had been the Russian empire. But only weeks after the February revolution had toppled Tsar Nicholas II, anything seemed possible.

There were flags, blue and yellow for Ukraine as well as red for the socialist cause. The crowd, composed of children, soldiers, factory workers, marching bands and officials, carried banners – ‘A free Ukraine in a free Russia!’ or, using an ancient Cossack military title, ‘Independent Ukraine with its own hetman!’ Some carried portraits of the national poet, Taras Shevchenko. One after another, speakers called for the crowd to support the newly established Central Rada – the ‘central council’ – which had formed a few days earlier and now claimed authority to rule Ukraine.

Finally, the man who had just been elected chairman of the Central Rada stepped up to the podium. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, bearded and bespectacled, was one of the intellectuals who had first put Ukraine at the centre of its own history. The author of the ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, as well as many other books, Hrushevsky had turned to political activism at the very end of the nineteenth century when in December 1899, and in exile, he helped found the Ukrainian National Democratic Party in Habsburg Galicia. He returned to work in the Russian empire in 1905, but in 1914 he was arrested and once again went into exile. In the wake of the revolution, he had returned to Kyiv in triumph. The crowd now welcomed him with vigorous cheers: Slava batkovi Hrushevskomu, or ‘Glory to Father Hrushevsky!’3 He responded in kind: ‘Let us all swear at this great moment as one man to take up the great cause unanimously, with one accord, and not to rest or cease our labour until we build that free Ukraine!’ The crowd shouted back: ‘We swear!’⁴

From the perspective of the present, the image of a historian as the leader of a national movement seems odd. But at the time it did not seem unusual at all. From the nineteenth century onwards, Ukrainian historians, like their counterparts in many of Europe’s smaller nations, had deliberately set out to recover and articulate a national history that had long been subsumed into that of larger empires. From there, it was a short step to actual political activism. Just as Shevchenko had linked ‘Ukrainianness’ to the peasants’ struggle against oppression, Hrushevsky’s books also stressed the role of the ‘people’ in the political history of Ukraine, and emphasized the centrality of their resistance to various forms of tyranny. It was only logical that he should want to inspire the same people to act in the politics of the present, both in words and deeds. He was particularly interested in galvanizing peasants, and had written a Ukrainian history book, About Old Times in Ukraine, especially for a peasant audience. In 1917 it was reprinted three times.⁵

Hrushevsky was by no means the only intellectual whose literary and cultural output promoted the sovereignty of Ukraine. Heorhii Narbut, a graphic artist, also returned to Kyiv in 1917. He helped found the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and designed a Ukrainian coat of arms, banknotes and stamps.6 Volodymyr Vynnychenko, another member of the Central Rada, was a novelist and poet as well as a political figure. Without sovereignty – and without an actual state that could support politicians and bureaucrats – national feelings could only be channelled through literature and art. This was true all across Europe: before they attained statehood, poets, artists and writers had played important roles in the establishment of Polish, Italian and German national identity. Inside the Russian empire, both the Baltic States, which became independent in 1918, and Georgia and Armenia, which did not, experienced similar national revivals. The centrality of intellectuals to all of these national projects was fully understood at the time by their proponents and opponents alike. It explains why imperial Russia had banned Ukrainian books, schools and culture, and why their repression would later be of central concern to both Lenin and Stalin.

Although they began as self-appointed spokesmen for the national cause, the intellectuals of the Central Rada did seek democratic legitimacy. Operating out of a grand, white, neoclassical building in central Kyiv – appropriately, it had been previously used for meetings of the Ukrainian Club, a group of nationalist writers and civic activists – the Central Rada convened an All-Ukrainian National Congress on 19 April 1917.⁷ More than 1,500 people, all elected one way or another by local councils and factories, converged on the National Philharmonic concert hall in Kyiv to offer their support for the new Ukrainian government. Further congresses of veterans, peasants and workers were held in Kyiv that summer.

The Central Rada also sought to build coalitions with a range of political groups, including Jewish and other minority organizations. Even the radical left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party – a large peasant populist party known as Borotbysty after its newspaper Borotba (‘Struggle’) – came to support the Central Rada. Some of the peasantry did too. Between 1914 and 1918 the army of the Russian tsar had contained more than 3 million Ukrainian conscripts, and the Austro-Hungarian army had included an additional 250,000. Many of these peasant-soldiers had shot at one another across the muddy trenches of Galicia.⁸ But after the war ended, some 300,000 men who had been serving in ‘Ukrainianized’ battalions, composed of Ukrainian peasants, declared their loyalty to the new state. Some brought back weapons and joined the new Central Rada militia. They were motivated by a desire to return to their homeland, but also by the new Ukrainian government’s promises of revolutionary change and national renewal.9

In subsequent months the Central Rada did enjoy some popular success, not least thanks to its radical rhetoric. Reflecting the left-wing ideals of the times, it proposed compulsory land reform, the redistribution of property from large landowners, both monasteries and private estates, to the peasants. ‘No one can know better what we need and what laws are best for us,’ declared the Central Rada in June 1917 in the first of a series of ‘Universals’, manifestos addressed to a broad audience:

No one can know better than our peasants how to manage their own land. Therefore, we wish that after all the lands throughout Russia held by the nobility, the state, the monasteries and the tsar, have been confiscated and have become the property of the people, and after a law concerning this has been enacted by the All-Russian constituent assembly, the right to administer Ukrainian lands shall belong to us, to our Ukrainian assembly … They elected us, the Ukrainian Central Rada, from among their midst and directed us … to create a new order in free autonomous Ukraine.¹⁰

The third universal, in November, announced that Ukraine was now the Ukrainian People’s Republic, within the Russian Federation and called for elections to a constituent assembly. In January 1918, the fourth and final Universal would declare the independence of the Ukraine.¹¹

Although some people predictably opposed it, the revival of the Ukrainian language was also popular, especially among the peasantry. As it had in the past, Ukrainian again became synonymous with economic and political liberation: once officials and bureaucrats began to speak Ukrainian, peasants had access to courts and government offices. The public use of their native language also became a source of pride, serving as a ‘profound base of emotional support’ for the national movement.¹² An explosion of dictionaries and orthographies followed. Between 1917 and 1919, Ukrainian printers published fifty-nine books devoted to the Ukrainian language, as compared to a total of eleven during the entire preceding century. Among them were three Ukrainian-Russian dictionaries and fifteen Russian-Ukrainian ones. Heavy demand for the latter came from the large number of Russian speakers who suddenly had to get by in Ukrainian, not a prospect that they all enjoyed.13

During its brief existence, the Ukrainian government also had some diplomatic successes, many of which subsequently faded from memory. Following its declaration of independence on 26 January 1918, the Ukrainian Republic’s twenty-eight-year-old Foreign Minister, Oleksandr Shulhyn (also a historian by training), won de facto recognition for his state from all of the main European powers, including France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey and even Soviet Russia. In December the United States sent a diplomat to open a consulate in Kyiv.¹⁴ In February 1918 a delegation of Ukrainian officials at Brest-Litovsk concluded a peace treaty with the Central Powers, a deal separate from the better-known one signed by the new leaders of Soviet Russia a few weeks later. The young Ukrainian delegation impressed everyone. One of their German interlocutors remembered that ‘they behaved bravely, and in their stubbornness forced [the German negotiator] to agree to everything that was important from their national point of view’.¹⁵

But it was insufficient: the spread of national consciousness, foreign recognition and even the Brest-Litovsk treaty were not enough to build the Ukrainian state. The Central Rada’s proposed reforms – especially its plans to take land from estate owners without compensation – brought about confusion and chaos in the countryside. The public parades, the flags and the freedom that Hrushevsky and his followers greeted with so much optimism in the spring of 1917 did not lead to the creation of a functioning bureaucracy, a public administration to enforce its reforms or an army effective enough to repel invasion and protect its borders. By the end of 1917 all the military powers of the region, including the brand-new Red Army, the White Armies of the old regime, and troops from Germany and Austria, were making plans to occupy Ukraine. To different degrees, each of them would attack Ukrainian nationalists, Ukrainian nationalism and even the Ukrainian language along with Ukrainian land.

Lenin authorized the first Soviet assault on Ukraine in January 1918, and briefly set up an anti-Ukrainian regime in Kyiv in February, of which more later. This first Soviet attempt to conquer Ukraine ended within a few weeks when the German and Austrian armies arrived and declared they intended to ‘enforce’ the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Instead of saving the liberal legislators of the Central Rada, however, they threw their support behind Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Ukrainian general who dressed in dramatic uniforms, complete with Cossack swords and hats.

For a few months Skoropadsky gave a sliver of hope to adherents of the old regime while maintaining some of the attributes of Ukrainian autonomy. He founded the first Ukrainian Academy of Science and the first national library, and used Ukrainian in official business. He identified himself as a Ukrainian, taking the title of ‘hetman’. But at the same time Skoropadsky brought back tsarist laws and tsarist officials, and advocated reintegration with a future Russian state. Under Skoropadsky’s rule, Kyiv even became, briefly, a haven for refugees from Moscow and St Petersburg. In his satirical novel White Guard (1926), Mikhail Bulgakov, who lived in Kyiv during that era, remembered them:

Gray-haired bankers and their wives had fled, as had smooth operators who had left their trusty assistants in Moscow … Journalists had fled, from Moscow and St. Petersburg, venal, greedy cowards. Demimondaines. Virtuous ladies from aristocratic families. Their gentle daughters. Pale Petersburg debauchees with lips painted carmine red. Secretaries to department directors fled, poets and usurers, gendarmes and actresses from the imperial theatres.16

Skoropadsky also reinforced the old ownership laws and withdrew promises of land reform. Unsurprisingly, this decision was deeply unpopular among the peasantry, who ‘hated that very same Hetman as though he were a mad dog’ and didn’t want to hear about reform from ‘bastard lords’.¹⁷ Opposition to what was quickly perceived as a German puppet government began to organize itself into various militant forms: ‘Ex-colonels, self-styled generals, Cossack otamany and batky [local warlords] blossomed like wild roses in this revolutionary summertime.’¹⁸

By the middle of 1918 the national movement had regrouped under the leadership of Symon Petliura, a social democrat with a talent for paramilitary organization. His contemporaries were of radically different minds about him. Some perceived him as a would-be dictator, others as a prophet before his time. Bulgakov, who disliked the idea of Ukrainian nationalism, dismissed Petliura as ‘a legend, a mirage … a word that combined unslaked fury, and the thirst for peasant vengeance’.19 As a young man Petliura had impressed Serhii Yefremov, an activist contemporary, with his ‘boastfulness, doctrinairism and flippancy’. Later, Yefremov reversed his views and declared that Petliura had evolved into ‘the only unquestionably honest person’ produced by the Ukrainian revolution. While others gave up or engaged in petty infighting, ‘only Petliura stood his ground and did not waver’.²⁰ Petliura himself later wrote that he wanted the whole truth about his actions revealed: ‘the negative aspects of my personality, my actions, must be illuminated, not covered up … For me, the judgement of history has begun. I am not afraid of it.’²¹

History’s judgement of Petliura has remained ambivalent. Certainly he was brave enough to seize an opportunity, reckoning that the end of the First World War gave Ukraine’s national movement one more chance. As German troops withdrew from the country, he patched together some of the ‘ex-colonels, self-styled generals, Cossack otamany and batky’ into a pro-Ukrainian force known as the Directory, and laid siege to the capital. Although the Russian-language press reviled the Directory as ‘bands of thieves’ and called their coup a ‘scandal’, Skoropadsky’s forces crumbled with amazing speed, almost without fighting.²² On 14 December 1918, Petliura’s troops marched into a surprised Kyiv, Odessa and Mykolaiv, and power changed hands yet again.

The Directory’s rule would be short and violent, not least because Petliura never managed to obtain complete legitimacy and could not enforce the rule of law. Economically, the Directory, like the Central Rada before it, was far to the left. Reflecting the increasingly radical views of its supporters, the leadership convened not a parliament but a ‘Workers’ Congress’ from representatives of the peasants, the workers and the working intelligentsia. But Petliura’s peasant army was the true source of his authority and, in the words of one of his opponents, it made for ‘neither a good government nor a good army’.23 Many of its members were ‘adventurers’ who wore a wide variety of uniforms and Cossack costumes and were perfectly capable of pulling out their revolvers to rob anyone who simply looked wealthy. The inhabitants of bourgeois Kyiv took turns standing sentry outside their apartment blocks.²⁴

Inside the city one of the few policies that the Directory ‘not only declared but carried out’, in the snide words of one memoirist, was the removal of Russian-language signs in Kyiv and their replacement with Ukrainian ones: ‘Russian wasn’t even allowed to remain alongside Ukrainian.’ Allegedly, this wholesale change was ordered because many of the Directory’s troops came from Galicia, spoke very little Russian, and were horrified to find themselves at sea in a Russian-speaking city. The result was that ‘for a few jolly days, the whole city was changed into an artists’ workshop’, and the deep connection between language and power was driven home to the residents of Kyiv once again.²⁵

Outside the capital, Petliura controlled very little territory. Bulgakov described the Kyiv of this era as a city that had ‘police … a ministry, even an army, and newspapers of various names, but what was going on around them, in the real Ukraine, which was bigger than France and had tens of millions of people in it – no one knew that’.²⁶ Richard Pipes writes that in Kyiv ‘edicts were issued, cabinet crises were resolved, diplomatic talks were carried on – but the rest of the country lived its own existence where the only effective regime was that of the gun’.²⁷

By the end of 1919 the national movement, launched with so much energy and hope, was in disarray. Hrushevsky, forced out of Kyiv by the fighting, would soon go abroad.²⁸ Ukrainians themselves were profoundly divided along many lines, between those who supported the old order and those who did not; those who preferred to stay linked to Russia and those who did not; those who supported land reform and those who did not. The competition over language had intensified and become irreconcilably bitter. The refugees from Moscow and St Petersburg were already moving on to Crimea, Odessa and exile.²⁹ But the greatest political divide – and the one that would shape the course of the subsequent decades – was between those who shared the ideals of the Ukrainian national movement and those who supported the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary group with a very different ideology altogether.

At the beginning of 1917, the Bolsheviks were a small minority party in Russia, the radical faction of what had been the Marxist Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. But they spent the year agitating in the Russian streets, using simple slogans such as ‘Land, Bread and Peace’ designed to appeal to the widest numbers of soldiers, workers and peasants. Their coup d’état in October (7 November according to the ‘new calendar’ they later adopted) put them in power amidst conditions of total chaos. Led by Lenin, a paranoid, conspiratorial and fundamentally undemocratic man, the Bolsheviks believed themselves to be the ‘vanguard of the proletariat’; they would call their regime the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. They sought absolute power, and eventually abolished all other political parties and opponents through terror, violence and vicious propaganda campaigns.

In early 1917 the Bolsheviks had even fewer followers in Ukraine. The party had 22,000 Ukrainian members, most of whom were in the large cities and industrial centres of Donetsk and Kryvyi Rih. Few spoke Ukrainian. More than half considered themselves to be Russians. About one in six was Jewish. A tiny number, including a few who would later play major roles in the Soviet Ukrainian government, did believe in the possibility of an autonomous, Bolshevik Ukraine. But Heorhii Piatakov – who was born in Ukraine but did not consider himself to be Ukrainian – spoke for the majority when he told a meeting of Kyiv Bolsheviks in June 1917, just a few weeks after Hrushevsky’s speech, that ‘we should not support the Ukrainians’. Ukraine, he explained, was not a ‘distinct economic region’. More to the point, Russia relied on Ukraine’s sugar, grain and coal, and Russia was Piatakov’s priority.30

The sentiment was not new: disdain for the very idea of a Ukrainian state had been an integral part of Bolshevik thinking even before the revolution. In large part this was simply because all of the leading Bolsheviks, among them Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Piatakov, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, were men raised and educated in the Russian empire, and the Russian empire did not recognize such a thing as ‘Ukraine’ in the province that they knew as ‘Southwest Russia’. The city of Kyiv was, to them, the ancient capital of Kyivan Rus’, the kingdom that they remembered as the ancestor of Russia. In school, in the press and in daily life they would have absorbed Russia’s prejudices against a language that was widely described as a dialect of Russian, and a people widely perceived as primitive former serfs.

All Russian political parties at the time, from the Bolsheviks to the centrists to the far right, shared this contempt. Many refused to use the name ‘Ukraine’ at all.31 Even Russian liberals refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Ukrainian national movement. This blind spot – and the consequent refusal of any Russian groups to create an anti-Bolshevik coalition with the Ukrainians – was ultimately one of the reasons why the White Armies failed to win the civil war.³²

In addition to their national prejudice, the Bolsheviks had particular political reasons for disliking the idea of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine was still overwhelmingly a peasant nation, and according to the Marxist theory that the Bolshevik leadership constantly read and discussed, peasants were at best an ambivalent asset. In an 1852 essay Marx famously explained that they were not a ‘class’ and thus had no class consciousness: ‘They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’³³

Although Marx believed that peasants had no important role in the coming revolution, Lenin, who was more pragmatic, modified these views to a degree. He thought that the peasants were indeed potentially revolutionary – he approved of their desire for radical land reform – but believed that they needed to be guided by the more progressive working class. ‘Not all peasants fighting for land and freedom are fully aware of what their struggle implies,’ he wrote in 1905. Class-conscious workers would need to teach them that real revolution required not just land reform but the ‘fight against the rule of capital’. Ominously, Lenin also suspected that many farmers of small-holdings, because they owned property, actually thought like capitalist smallholders. This explained why ‘not all small peasants join the ranks of fighters for socialism’.34 This idea – that the smallest landowners, later called kulaks, were a fundamentally counter-revolutionary, capitalist force – would have great consequences some years later.

The Bolsheviks’ ambivalence about nationalism also led them to be suspicious of Ukraine’s drive for independence. Both Marx and Lenin had convoluted and constantly evolving views of nationalism, which they sometimes saw as a revolutionary force and at other times as a distraction from the real goal of universal socialism. Marx understood that the democratic revolutions of 1848 had been inspired in part by national feelings, but he believed these ‘bourgeois nationalist’ sentiments to be a temporary phenomenon, a mere stage on the road to communist internationalism. As the state faded away, so, somehow, would nations and national sentiments. ‘The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.’³⁵

Lenin also argued for cultural autonomy and national self-determination, except when it didn’t suit him. Even before the revolution, he disapproved of non-Russian language schools, whether Yiddish or Ukrainian, on the grounds that they would create unhelpful divisions within the working class.³⁶ Although he theoretically favoured granting the right of secession to the non-Russian regions of the Russian empire, which included Georgia, Armenia and the Central Asian states, he seems not to have seriously believed it would ever happen. Besides, recognition of the ‘right’ of secession didn’t mean that Lenin supported secession itself. In the case of Ukraine, he approved of Ukrainian nationalism when it opposed the tsar or the Provisional Government in 1917, and disapproved of it when he thought it threatened the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat.³⁷

To this complicated ideological puzzle, Stalin would add his own thoughts. He was the party’s expert on nationalities, and was initially far less flexible than Lenin. Stalin’s essay, ‘Marxism and the National Question’, had argued in 1913 that nationalism was a distraction from the cause of socialism, and that comrades ‘must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism, no matter from what quarter it proceeds’.³⁸ By 1925 his thoughts had evolved further into an argument about nationalism as an essentially peasant force. National movements, he declared, needed peasants in order to exist: ‘The peasant question is the basis, the quintessence, of the national question. That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army …’39

That argument, which clearly reflected his observation of events in Ukraine, would become more significant later. For if there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, then someone who wished to destroy a national movement might well want to begin by destroying the peasantry.

In the end, ideology would matter less to the Bolsheviks than their personal experiences in Ukraine, and especially of the civil war there. For everyone in the Communist Party, the civil war era was a true watershed, personally as well as politically. At the beginning of 1917 few of them had much to show for their lives. They were obscure ideologues, unsuccessful by any standard. If they earned any money, it was by writing for illegal newspapers; they had been in and out of prison, they had complicated personal lives, they had no experience of government or management.

Unexpectedly, the Russian revolution put them at the centre of international events. It also brought them fame and power for the very first time. It rescued them from obscurity, and validated their ideology. The success of the revolution proved, to the Bolshevik leaders as well as to many others, that Marx and Lenin had been right.

But the revolution also quickly forced them to defend their power, presenting them not just with ideological counter-revolutionaries but with a real and very bloody counter-revolution, one that had to be immediately defeated. The subsequent civil war forced them to create an army, a political police force and a propaganda machine. Above all, the civil war taught the Bolsheviks lessons about nationalism, economic policy, food distribution and violence, upon which they later drew. The Bolsheviks’ experiences in Ukraine were also very different from their experiences in Russia, including a spectacular defeat that nearly toppled their nascent state. Many subsequent Bolshevik attitudes towards Ukraine, including their lack of faith in the loyalty of the peasantry, their suspicion of Ukrainian intellectuals, and their dislike of the Ukrainian Communist Party, have their origins in this period.

Indeed, the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had ‘no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry’, as a recent biographer has written.40 Born in Georgia, educated in a seminary, his reputation in the underground rested on his talent for robbing banks. He had been in and out of prison several times. At the time of the February revolution in 1917, he was in exile in a village north of the Arctic Circle. When Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, Stalin returned to Petrograd (the name of St Petersburg, the Russian capital, had been Russified in 1914, and would be changed to Leningrad in 1924).

The Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917 unseated the Provisional Government and brought Stalin his first, glorious taste of real political power.⁴¹ As the People’s Commissar for Nationalities, he was a member of the first Bolshevik government. In that role he was directly responsible for negotiating with all the non-Russian nations and peoples who had belonged to the Russian empire – and, more importantly, for convincing, or forcing, them to submit to Soviet rule. In his dealings with Ukraine he had two clear and immediate priorities, both dictated by the extremity of the situation. The first was to undermine the national movement, clearly the Bolsheviks’ most important rival in Ukraine. The second was to get hold of Ukrainian grain. He embarked on both of those tasks only days after the Bolsheviks took power.

Already in December 1917, in the pages of Pravda, Stalin was denouncing the Central Rada’s Third Universal, the manifesto that had proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic and laid out the borders of Ukraine. Who, he asked rhetorically, would support an independent Ukraine:

Big landowners in Ukraine, then Aleksei Kaledin [a White Army general] and his ‘military government’ on the Don, i.e. Cossack landowners … behind both lurks the great Russian bourgeoisie which used to be a furious enemy of all demands of the Ukrainian people, but which now supports the Central Rada …

By contrast, ‘all Ukrainian workers and the poorest section of the peasantry’ opposed the Central Rada, he claimed, which was hardly the truth either.42

Stalin followed up his public denunciations of the Central Rada with what would later be termed ‘active measures’, intended to destabilize the Ukrainian government. Local Bolsheviks tried to establish so-called independent ‘Soviet republics’ in Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih, Odessa, Tavriia and the Don province – tiny, Moscow-backed mini-states, which were of course not independent at all.⁴³ The Bolsheviks also attempted to stage a coup in Kyiv; after that failed, they created an ‘alternative’ Central Executive Committee of Ukraine and then a ‘Soviet government’ in Kharkiv, a more reliably Russian-speaking city. Later, they would make Kharkiv the capital of Ukraine, even though, in 1918, only a handful of Kharkiv Bolshevik leaders spoke Ukrainian.⁴⁴

As the Bolsheviks consolidated their rule in Russia, the Red Army kept pushing south. Finally, on 9 February 1918, even as the Central Rada leaders were negotiating in Brest-Litovsk, Kyiv fell to Bolshevik forces for the first time. This first, brief, Bolshevik occupation brought with it not only communist ideology but also a clearly Russian agenda. General Mikhail Muraviev, the commanding officer, declared he was bringing back Russian rule from the ‘far North’, and ordered the immediate execution of suspected nationalists. His men shot anyone heard speaking Ukrainian in public and destroyed any evidence of Ukrainian rule, including the Ukrainian street signs that had replaced Russian street signs only weeks before.⁴⁵ The 1918 Bolshevik bombardment of the Ukrainian capital deliberately targeted Hrushevsky’s home, library and collections of ancient documents.⁴⁶

Although the Bolsheviks controlled Kyiv for just a few weeks, this first occupation also gave Lenin a taste of what Ukraine could bring to the communist project. Desperate to feed the revolutionary workers who had brought him to power, he immediately sent the Red Army to Ukraine accompanied by ‘requisition detachments’, teams of men instructed to confiscate the peasants’ grain. He named Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a leading Georgian Bolshevik, as ‘extraordinary plenipotentiary commissar’ in charge of requisitioning Ukrainian grain.47 Pravda’s editorial board trumpeted these soldiers’ success, and assured its urban Russian readers that the Soviet leadership had already begun to take ‘extraordinary measures’ to procure grain from the peasants.⁴⁸

Behind the scenes, Lenin’s telegrams to the Ukrainian front could hardly have been more explicit. ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote in January 1918, ‘use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!! Otherwise Petrograd may starve to death. Use special trains and special detachments. Collect and store. Escort the trains. Inform us every day. For God’s sake!’⁴⁹ The rapid loss of Ukraine to the German and Austrian armies in early March infuriated Moscow. A furious Stalin denounced not only the Ukrainian national movement and its recalcitrant peasant supporters but also the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who had fled Kharkiv and set up another messy ‘Soviet Ukrainian government in exile’ just over the Russian border in Rostov. Instinctively, he disliked the idea of ‘Ukrainian Bolsheviks’, and felt they should give up their efforts to create a separate party. From Moscow, he attacked the Rostov group: ‘Enough playing at a government and a republic. It’s time to stop that game; enough is enough.’⁵⁰

In response, one of the few Ukrainian speakers in Rostov sent a protest note to the Council of People’s Commissars in Moscow. Stalin’s statement, wrote Mykola Skrypnyk, had helped ‘discredit Soviet power in Ukraine’. Skrypnyk did believe in the possibility of ‘Ukrainian Bolshevism’ and was an early champion of what would later be called ‘national communism’, the belief that communism could have separate forms in separate countries and was not incompatible with national sentiment in Ukraine. He argued that the brief rule of the Central Rada had created a real desire for Ukrainian sovereignty, and proposed that the Bolsheviks should recognize and incorporate that desire too. The Soviet government, he argued, should not ‘base their decisions on the opinion of some people’s commissar of the Russian federation, but should instead listen to the masses, the working people of Ukraine’.⁵¹

In the short run, Skrypnyk won this exchange, but not because the Bolsheviks had decided to listen to the masses or the working people. In the wake of his first defeat in Ukraine, Lenin had simply decided to adopt different tactics. Using the methods of what would (much later, though in a similar context) be called ‘hybrid warfare’, he ordered his forces to re-enter Ukraine in disguise. They were to hide the fact that they were a Russian force fighting for a unified Bolshevik Russia. Instead, they called themselves a ‘Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement’, precisely in order to confuse nationalists. The idea was to use nationalist rhetoric cynically, in order to convince people to accept Soviet power. In a telegram to the Red Army commander on the ground, Lenin explained:

With the advance of our troops to the west and into Ukraine, regional provisional Soviet governments are created whose task it is to strengthen the local Soviets. This circumstance has the advantage of taking away from the chauvinists of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia the possibility of regarding the advance of our detachments as occupation and creates a favourable atmosphere for a further advance of our troops.52

Military commanders, in other words, were responsible for helping to create the pro-Soviet ‘national’ governments that would welcome them. The idea, as Lenin explained, was to ensure that the population of Ukraine would treat them as ‘liberators’, and not as foreign occupiers.

At no point in 1918, or later, did Lenin, Stalin, or anyone else in the Bolshevik leadership ever believe that any Soviet-Ukrainian state would enjoy true sovereignty. The Ukrainian revolutionary council formed on 17 November included Piatakov and Volodymyr Zatonskyi, both pro-Moscow ‘Ukrainian’ officials – as well as Volodymyr Antonov-Ovsienko, the Red Army’s military commander in Ukraine, and Stalin himself. The ‘Provisional Revolutionary government of Ukraine’, formed on 28 November, was led by Christian Rakovsky, who was Bulgarian by origin. Among other things, Rakovsky declared that all demands to make Ukrainian the official language of the country were ‘injurious to the Ukrainian revolution’.⁵³

The general disorder made it easy to carry out this hybrid war. The Red Army began its assault on the republic at exactly the same time as the Bolsheviks began to negotiate an agreement with Petliura. The officials of the Directory furiously denounced this two-faced policy: Georgii Chicherin, the Bolshevik People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, blandly replied that Moscow had nothing to do with the troops moving onto Ukrainian soil. He blamed the military action on that territory on ‘the army of the Ukrainian Soviet government which is completely independent’.54

The Directory protested that this was a flat-out lie. They could see perfectly well that the ‘army of the Ukrainian Soviet government’ was in actual fact the Red Army. But the Directory went on protesting, right up until January 1919 when the Red Army forced the Ukrainian government to withdraw from Kyiv altogether.⁵⁵

The second Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine began in January and would last for six months. During that period Moscow never controlled the whole territory of what later became the Ukrainian Republic. Even in districts where the Bolsheviks exercised authority in the towns and cities, the villages often remained under the sway of local partisan leaders or ‘otamans’, some loyal to Petliura and some not. In many places Bolshevik authority hardly extended beyond the train stations. Nevertheless, even that short period of partial rule gave the Bolshevik leaders of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic the opportunity to show their true colours. Whatever theoretical independence the Ukrainian communist leaders had on paper, they had none in practice.

Moreover, whatever ideas they had about Ukraine’s economic development were also quickly overwhelmed by another priority. No considerations of Marxist theory, no arguments about nationalism or sovereignty, mattered as much to the Bolsheviks in that year as the need to feed the workers of Moscow and Petrograd. By 1919, Lenin’s telegram – ‘For God’s sake, use all energy and all revolutionary measures to send grain, grain and more grain!!!’ – had become the single most important description of Bolshevik attitudes and practice in Ukraine.

The Bolshevik obsession with food was no accident: The Russian empire had been struggling with food supplies ever since the outbreak of the First World War. At the beginning of the conflict with Germany, imperial Russia centralized and nationalized its food distribution system, creating administrative chaos and shortages. A Special Council for Discussing and Coordinating Measures for Food Supply, a state food distribution organization and a clear precedent for the Soviet organizations that followed, was put in control. Instead of ameliorating the situation, the Special Council’s drive to ‘eliminate middlemen’ and to create a supposedly more efficient, non-capitalist form of grain distribution had actually exacerbated the supply crisis.56

The resulting food shortages sparked the February revolution in 1917 and propelled the Bolsheviks to power a few months later. Morgan Philips Price, a British journalist, described the atmosphere of that year:

Involuntarily the conversation seemed to be drifting on to one main topic, which was evidently engaging the attention of all: bread and peace … Everyone knew that the railways were no longer equal to the transport burden, that the cereals formerly exported to Western Europe were now more than absorbed by the army, that the cultivated area had fallen 10 per cent last year, and was certain to fall more this spring, that the workmen of several big towns had been several days without bread, while Grand Dukes and profiteers had large stores in their houses.⁵⁷

Price saw women queuing for rations: ‘Their pale faces and anxious eyes betrayed the fear that some calamity was approaching.’⁵⁸ He visited the barracks of one of the Moscow regiments, where he found that ‘food rations were the subject of debate, and someone with a louder voice and more initiative than the rest proposed a delegation of three to the commanding officer to demand the immediate increase of these rations’. From food rations, the group moved on to the war, and then to the ownership of land: ‘This embryo Soldiers’ Soviet had, at any rate, become a centre for exchange of views on subjects which till yesterday were forbidden to all outside the charmed circle of the ruling caste. The next stage of the Revolution had been reached.’

Later, Price observed that hunger, at least in its early stages, made people ‘more rapacious’. The lack of food led people to question the system, to demand change, even to call for violence.⁵⁹

The link between food and power was something that the Bolsheviks also understood very well. Both before, during and after the revolution, all sides also realized that constant shortages made food supplies a hugely significant political tool. Whoever had bread had followers, soldiers, loyal friends. Whoever could not feed his people lost support rapidly. In 1921, when an American relief mission was negotiating to enter the Soviet Union, one of its representatives told the Soviet negotiator (and later Foreign Minister), Maksim Litvinov, that ‘we do not come to fight Russia, we come to feed’. According to an American journalist, Litvinov responded very succinctly, in English: ‘Yes, but food is a veppon …’60

Lenin thought so too. But the revolutionary leader did not therefore conclude that the Special Council’s nationalized food distribution system was wrong. Instead, he decided that its methods were insufficiently harsh, especially in Ukraine. In 1919, Rakovsky, the Bolshevik leader in charge of Ukraine, echoed this sentiment in a frank comment to a party congress. ‘We went into the Ukraine at a time when Soviet Russia went through a very serious production crisis,’ he explained: ‘our aim was to exploit it to the utmost to relieve the crisis’.⁶¹ From the very beginning of their rule, the Bolsheviks assumed that the exploitation of Ukraine was the price that had to be paid in order to maintain control of Russia. As one of them wrote years later, ‘the fate of the revolution depended on our ability to reliably supply the proletariat and the army with bread’.⁶²

The urgent need for grain spawned an extreme set of policies, known then and later as ‘War Communism’. Launched in Russia in 1918 and brought to Ukraine after the second Bolshevik invasion in early 1919, War Communism meant the militarization of all economic relationships. In the countryside, the system was very simple: take control of grain, at gunpoint, and then redistribute it to soldiers, factory workers, party members and others deemed ‘essential’ by the state.

In 1918 many would have found this system familiar. The Russian imperial government, tormented by wartime food shortages, had begun to confiscate grain at gunpoint – a policy known as prodrazvyorstka – as early as 1916. In March 1917 the Provisional Government had also decreed that peasants should sell all grain to the state at prices dictated by the state, with the exception of what they needed for their own sowing and consumption.63 The Bolsheviks followed suit. In May 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars followed up on tsarist policy and established a ‘food-supply dictatorship’. The Commissariat of Food Supply created a ‘food-supply army’, which was to be deployed on the ‘food-supply front’.⁶⁴

But despite the militarized language, in practice War Communism meant that most people went hungry. To obtain any food at all, in the years between 1916 and 1918 the majority of Russians and Ukrainians used the black market, not the non-existent state companies.⁶⁵ In Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, the doctor’s wife seeks food and fuel in post-revolutionary Moscow by ‘wandering the nearby lanes, where muzhiks [peasants] sometimes turned up from their suburban villages with vegetables and potatoes. You had to catch them. Peasants carrying loads were arrested.’ Eventually she found a man selling green birch logs, and exchanged them for a ‘small mirrored wardrobe’. The peasant took it as a present for his wife. The two made ‘future arrangements about potatoes’.⁶⁶ Such was the interaction between city and countryside in the years of War Communism.

City-country barter remained an enduring part of the economic system for many years after that. Even in 1921, when the civil war was technically over, an American charitable delegation visiting Moscow discovered a very similar set of arrangements. On Kuznetskii Most, once an important commercial street, old women and children were selling fruit from baskets outside the empty, shuttered shops. Vegetables and meat were unavailable except in the open-air markets. In the evening the Americans discovered the source of these goods. Returning to the railway car where they were due to spend the night, they watched a ‘perfect mob’ of men, women and children push and shove one another in order to get onto a train heading out of the city. What they deemed a ‘very fantastic sight in the half twilight’ was in fact the Russian food distribution network, thousands of individual traders going back and forth from the cities to the countryside.⁶⁷

During those years these illegal markets gave many people access to food, especially individuals not on special government lists. But the Bolsheviks not only refused to accept these street bazaars, they blamed them for the continuing crisis. Year after year the Soviet leadership was surprised by the hunger and shortages that their ‘confiscate and redistribute’ system had created. But because state intervention was supposed to make people richer, not poorer, and because the Bolsheviks never blamed any failure on their own policies, let alone on their rigid ideology, they instead zeroed in on the small traders and black marketeers – ‘speculators’ – who made their living by physically carrying food from farms into towns. In January 1919, Lenin himself would denounce them as ideological enemies:

All talk on this theme [private trade], all attempts to encourage it are a great danger, a retreat, a step back from the socialist construction that the Commissariat of Food is carrying out amid unbelievable difficulties in a struggle with millions of speculators left to us by capitalism.

From there, he needed to make only a short logical leap to the denunciation of the peasants who sold grain to these ‘speculators’. Lenin, already suspicious of the peasantry as an insufficiently revolutionary class, was perfectly clear about the danger of urban-rural trade:

The peasant must choose: free trade in grain – which means speculation in grain; freedom for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer and starve; the return of the absolute landowners and the capitalists; and the severing of the union of the peasants and workers – or delivery of his grain surpluses to the state at fixed prices.68

But words were not enough. Faced with widespread hunger, the Bolsheviks took more extreme measures. Usually, historians ascribe Lenin’s turn towards political violence in 1918 – a set of policies known as the Red Terror – to his struggle against his political opponents.⁶⁹ But even before the Red Terror was formally declared in September, and even before he ordered mass arrests and executions, Lenin was already discarding law and precedent in response to economic disaster: the workers of Moscow and Petrograd were down to one ounce of bread per day. Morgan Philips Price observed that Soviet authorities were barely able to feed the delegates during the Congress of Soviets in the winter of 1918: ‘Only a very few wagons of flour had arrived during the week at the Petrograd railway stations.’⁷⁰ Worse, ‘complaints in the working-class quarters of Moscow began to be loud. The Bolshevik regime must get food or go, one used to hear.’⁷¹

In the spring of 1918 these conditions inspired Lenin’s first chrezvychaishchina – a phrase translated by one scholar as ‘a special condition in public life when any feeling of legality is lost and arbitrariness in power prevails’.72 Extraordinary measures, or chrezvychainye mery, were needed to fight the peasantry whom Lenin accused of holding back surplus grain for their own purposes. To force the peasants to give up their grain and to fight the counter-revolution, Lenin also eventually created the chrezvychainaia komissiia – the ‘extraordinary commission’, also known as the Che-Ka, or Cheka. This was the first name given to the Soviet secret police, later known as the GPU, the OGPU, the NKVD and finally the KGB.

The emergency subsumed everything else. Lenin ordered anyone not directly involved in the military conflict in the spring and summer of 1918 to bring food back to the capital. Stalin was put in charge of ‘provisions matters in southern Russia’, a task that suddenly mattered a lot more than his tasks as Nationalities Commissar. He set out for Tsaritsyn, a city on the Volga, accompanied by two armoured trains and 450 Red Army soldiers. His assignment: to collect grain for Moscow. His first telegram to Lenin, sent on 7 July, reported that he had discovered a ‘bacchanalia of profiteering’. He set out his strategy: ‘we won’t show mercy to anyone, not to ourselves, not to others – but we will bring you bread.’⁷³

In subsequent years Stalin’s Tsaritsyn escapade was mostly remembered for the fact that it inspired his first public quarrel with the man who would become his great rival, Leon Trotsky. But in the context of Stalin’s later policy in Ukraine, it had another kind of significance: the brutal tactics he used to procure grain in Tsaritsyn presaged those he would employ to procure grain in Ukraine more than a decade later. Within days of arriving in the city Stalin created a revolutionary military council, established a Cheka division, and began to ‘cleanse’ Tsaritsyn of counter-revolutionaries. Denouncing the local generals as ‘bourgeois specialists’ and ‘lifeless pen-pushers, completely ill-suited to civil war’, he took them and others into custody and placed them on a barge in the centre of the Volga.⁷⁴ In conjunction with several units of Bolshevik troops from Donetsk, and with the help of Klement Voroshilov and Sergo Ordzhonikidze, two men who would remain close associates, Stalin authorized arrests and beatings on a broad scale, followed by mass executions. Red Army thugs robbed local merchants and peasants of their grain; the Cheka then fabricated criminal cases against them – another harbinger of what was to come – and caught up random people in the sweep as well.75

But the grain was put on trains for the north – which meant that, from Stalin’s point of view, this particularly brutal form of War Communism was successful. The populace of Tsaritsyn paid a huge price and, at least in Trotsky’s view, so did the army.⁷⁶ After Trotsky protested against Stalin’s behaviour in Tsaritsyn, Lenin eventually removed Stalin from the city. But his time there remained important to Stalin, so much so that in 1925 he renamed Tsaritsyn ‘Stalingrad’.

During their second occupation of Ukraine in 1919, the Bolsheviks never had the same degree of control as Stalin had over Tsaritsyn. But over the six months when they were at least nominally in charge of the republic, they went as far as they could. All of their obsessions – their hatred of trade, private property, nationalism, the peasantry – were on full display in Ukraine. But their particular obsession with food, and with food collection in Ukraine, overshadowed almost every other decision they made.

When they arrived in Kyiv for the second time, the Bolsheviks moved very quickly. They immediately dropped the pretence that they were a force for ‘Ukrainian liberation’. Instead, they once again followed the precedent set by the tsars: they banned Ukrainian newspapers, stopped the use of Ukrainian in schools, and shut down Ukrainian theatres. The Cheka carried out rapid arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, who were accused of ‘separatism’. Rakovsky, the Ukrainian party boss, refused to use or even to recognize the Ukrainian language. Pavlo Khrystiuk, a Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary, later remembered that ‘Russian troops’, many drawn from the ranks of the old imperial police, once again ‘shot anyone in Kyiv who spoke Ukrainian and considered himself a Ukrainian’. Hateful, anti-Ukrainian rhetoric became a standard part of Bolshevik language in Kyiv: ‘The unemployed, hungry, toiling masses simply joined the army, they were paid well for their service and provided with “rations” for their families. It wasn’t difficult to raise the “morale” of this army. All one had to say was that our “brothers” are starving because of the Ukrainian-Khokhly [a derogatory term for Ukrainians]. This is how our “comrades” lit the fires of hatred for Ukrainians.’77

As in Russia, they also confiscated large estates and used some of the land to create collective farms and other state-owned agricultural enterprises, yet another harbinger of future policy. But although the Moscow Bolsheviks were keen to try these experiments, the Ukrainian communists were not. More to the point, neither were the Ukrainian peasants. Russia did have a tradition of communal agriculture, and the majority of Russian peasants held land jointly in rural communes (known as the obschina, or mir). But only a quarter of Ukrainian peasants followed the same custom. Most were individual farmers, either landholders or their employees, who owned their land, houses and livestock.⁷⁸

When spontaneously offered the chance to join collective farms in 1919, very few Ukrainian peasants accepted. And although the new Soviet regime organized some 550 collective and state farms in Ukraine in 1919, they were mostly unpopular and unsuccessful: almost all of them were dissolved soon afterwards. The vast majority of the confiscated land was instead redistributed. Peasants received smaller parcels in the western and central part of Ukraine, larger parcels in the steppe regions of the south and east. Small landowners who controlled between 120 and 250 acres kept their property. Although no one said so, this was a tacit admission that Ukraine’s private landowners produced more grain with greater efficiency.⁷⁹

But in 1919 grain was still a far bigger priority for Lenin than the conversion of Ukrainians to the benefits of collective farming. Whenever the republic was discussed, that was his primary concern: ‘at every mention of Ukraine Lenin asked how many [kilos of grain] there were, how many could be taken from there or how many had already been taken’.⁸⁰ He was encouraged in his obsession by Alexander Shlikhter, a Bolshevik with revolutionary credentials who was named People’s Commissar of Food Collection in Ukraine in late 1918. By early 1919, Shlikhter had already placed every person, institute and agency associated with food production in Ukraine under his personal control.⁸¹ A native of Poltava, in east-central Ukraine, Shlikhter thought that the food-producing potential of his birthplace was huge, though he did not imagine that the beneficiaries would be Ukrainians: ‘We have a target, to procure 100 million poods [1.63 million tons] through grain requisition … 100 million for starving Russia, for Russia which is now under threat of international intervention from the East. This is a colossal number, but rich Ukraine, bread-producing Ukraine will help …’82

These numbers were plucked from the sky; later, Shlikhter would be asked for 50 million poods, but the reduction didn’t matter since he couldn’t collect anything close to that number.⁸³ Certainly he found it impossible to purchase grain. As one observer remembered, the peasants refused to give up their produce to lazy city-dwellers in exchange for ‘Kerensky money’ [the currency created in February 1917] or Ukrainian karbovantsi: ‘There was scarcely a home which did not own bales of worthless paper money.’⁸⁴ Although the peasants would have happily bartered their grain for clothing or tools, Russia was barely producing any manufactured goods and Shlikhter had nothing to give them.

Force was again the only solution. But instead of deploying the crude violence that Stalin had used in Tsaritsyn, Shlikhter chose a more sophisticated form of violence. He created a new class system in the villages, first naming and identifying new categories of peasants, and then encouraging antagonism between them. Previously, class distinctions in Ukrainian villages had not been well defined or meaningful; Trotsky himself once said the peasantry ‘constitutes that protoplasm out of which new classes have been differentiated in the past’.⁸⁵ As noted, only a minority of Ukrainian villages followed the practice, more common in Russia, of holding land communally. In most, there was a rough division between people who owned land and were considered hard workers, and those who did not own land or who for whatever reason – bad luck, drink – were considered to be poor workers. But the distinction was blurry. Members of the same family could belong to different groups, and peasants could move up or down this short ladder very quickly.⁸⁶

The Bolsheviks, with their rigid Marxist training and hierarchical way of seeing the world, insisted on more formal markers. Eventually they would define three categories of peasant: kulaks, or wealthy peasants; seredniaks, or middle peasants; and bedniaks, or poor peasants. But at this stage they sought mainly to define who would be the victims of their revolution and who would be the beneficiaries.

In part, Shlikhter created a class division through the launch of an ideological struggle against the ‘kulaks’, or ‘kurkuls’ (literally ‘fists’ in Ukrainian). The term had been rare in Ukrainian villages before the revolution; if used at all, it simply implied someone who was doing well, or someone who could afford to hire others to work, but not necessarily someone wealthy.87 Although the Bolsheviks always argued about how to identify kulaks – eventually the term would simply become political – they had no trouble vilifying them as the main obstacle to grain collection, or attacking them as exploiters of the poorer peasants and obstacles to Soviet power. Very quickly, the kulaks became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution.

While attacking the kulaks, Shlikhter simultaneously created a new class of allies through the institution of ‘poor peasants’ committees’ – komitety nezamozhnykh selian, otherwise known as komnezamy (kombedy in Russian). The komnezamy would later play a role in the Ukrainian famine, but their origins lay in this immediate, post-revolutionary moment, in Shlikhter’s first grain collection campaign. Under his direction, Red Army soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village, recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbours. In exchange, these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the ‘grain surpluses’ of their neighbours. These mandatory grain collections – or prodrazvyorstka – created overwhelming anger and resentment, neither of which ever really went away.⁸⁸

These two newly created village groups defined one another as mortal enemies. The kulaks understood perfectly well that the komnezamy had been set up to destroy them; the komnezamy equally understood perfectly well that their future status depended upon their ability to destroy the kulaks. They were willing to exact harsh punishments on their neighbours in order to do so. Iosyp Nyzhnyk, a loyal member of the poor peasants’ committee in Velyke Ustia, Chernihiv province, joined a komnezam in January 1918, after returning home from the front. As he recalled later, there were fifty members of the local committee. Tasked with confiscating land from their wealthier neighbours, they unsurprisingly met with fierce resistance. In response, a handful of komnezam members formed an armed ‘revolutionary committee’, which, Nyzhnyk recalled, imposed immediate, drastic measures: ‘kulaks and religious groups were banned from holding meetings without the permission of the revolutionary committee, weapons were confiscated from kulaks, guards were placed around the village and secret surveillance of the kulaks was set up as well’.89

Not all of these measures were ordered or sanctioned from above. But by telling the poor peasants’ committees that their welfare depended on robbing the kulaks, Shlikhter knew that he was instigating a vicious class war. The komnezamy, he wrote later, were meant to ‘bring the socialist revolution into the countryside’ by ensuring the ‘destruction of the political and economic rule of the kulak’.⁹⁰ Another Bolshevik stated it clearly at a party meeting in 1918: ‘You, peasant comrades, must know that here now in the Ukraine, there are many rich kulaks, very many, and they are well organized, and when we start founding our communes in the countryside … these kulaks will put up a great opposition.’⁹¹

At one of the low moments of the civil war, in March 1918, Trotsky told a meeting of the Soviet and Trade Unions that food had to be ‘requisitioned for the Red Army at all costs’. Moreover, he seemed positively enthusiastic about the consequences: ‘If the requisition meant civil war between the kulaks and the poorer elements of the villages, then long live this civil war!’⁹² A decade later Stalin would use the same rhetoric. But even in 1919 the Bolsheviks were actively seeking to deepen divisions inside the villages, to use anger and resentment to further their policy.

Shlikhter did not invent this form of grassroots revolution: Lenin had earlier tried it in Russia, in 1918, but it had failed. The poor peasants’ committees in Russia had not only been unpopular – Russian peasants were even less inclined than Ukrainians to think of themselves using strict class divisions, preferring to regard their neighbours as ‘fellow villagers’ – but also corrupt. The committees were quick to use what grain they confiscated for their own benefit, and in many Russian districts they deteriorated into ‘networks of corruption and distortion’.93 Shlikhter knew the political risks of repeating this policy in Ukraine, where the peasantry were less sympathetic to the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, under the slogan ‘Bread for the Fighters, for the Salvation of the Revolution!’, Shlikhter put huge pressure on the komnezamy to collect grain using whatever means they could.

They were not his only tactic: Shlikhter also offered commissions to private groups or warlords. According to official records, eighty-seven separate grain collection teams arrived in Ukraine from Russia in the first half of 1919, deploying 2,500 people. The total number, if soldiers and other unofficial participants were counted, may have been higher.⁹⁴ Others came from within Ukraine, from cities as well as from local criminal networks. Just like the collectivization brigades that would be sent into the countryside from the cities in 1929, many members of these teams were urban followers of the Bolsheviks, if not Russian then Russian-speaking. Whatever their ethnic origin, peasants regarded these militarized collection teams as ‘foreigners’, outsiders who deserved no more consideration than the German and Austrian soldiers who had tried the same tactics a year earlier. Unsurprisingly, the peasants fought back, as Shlikhter also admitted: ‘Figuratively speaking, one could say that every pood of requisitioned grain was tinged with drops of workers’ blood.’⁹⁵

Peasants were not the only instigators of class violence, or the only victims. The Cheka also pursued a harsh and rigid campaign in Ukraine against political enemies. The secret police arrested not only Ukrainian nationalists but merchants, bankers, capitalists and the bourgeoisie, both haute and petite; former imperial officers, former imperial civil servants, former political leaders; aristocrats and their families; anarchists, socialists and members of any other left-wing parties who failed to toe the Bolshevik line. In Ukraine the latter were particularly important. The Borotbysty, the radical left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, had a strong following in the Ukrainian countryside. But although the Borotbysty were very close to the Bolsheviks ideologically – they also favoured radical land reform, for example – they were excluded from the government and treated with suspicion because they had cooperated with the Central Rada.

The list of Bolshevik enemies also included the neighbouring Don and Kuban Cossacks, whose territory straddled Russia and Ukraine and who, like the Zaporozhian Cossacks in southern Ukraine, had always enjoyed a large measure of autonomy. Many Cossack stanitsas – the name given to their self-governing communities – sided with the White Russian imperial armies during the revolution, and some reacted even more radically. The Kuban Rada, the ruling organization of the mostly Ukrainian-speaking Kuban Cossacks, declared itself the sovereign ruling body in Kuban in April 1917, then fought against the Bolsheviks from October, and even proclaimed an independent Kuban People’s Republic in January 1918. At the height of the civil war in 1918, the Russian-speaking Don Cossacks also declared independence and founded the Don Republic, a romantic gesture that won them no friends in Moscow. The Bolsheviks repeatedly described them as ‘instinctive counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘lackeys of the imperial regime’.

In January 1919, after the Red Army entered the Don province, the Bolshevik leadership issued an order designed to dispose of the Cossack problem altogether. Soldiers received orders ‘to conduct mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating them totally; to conduct merciless mass terror against all those Cossacks who participated, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power … To confiscate grain and compel storage of all surpluses at designated points’.96

Josef Reingold, the Chekist in charge, euphemistically referred to this program as ‘de-cossackization’. In fact, it was a massacre: some 12,000 people were murdered after being ‘sentenced’ by revolutionary tribunals consisting of a troika of officials – a Red Army commissar and two party members – who issued rapid-fire death sentences. A form of ethnic cleansing followed the slaughter: ‘reliable’ workers and peasants were imported in order to ‘dilute’ the Don Cossack identity further.⁹⁷ This was one of the first Soviet uses of mass violence and mass movement of people for the purposes of social engineering. It was an important precedent for later Soviet policy, especially in Ukraine. The term ‘de-cossackization’ itself may have been the inspiration for ‘de-kulakization’, which would be so central to Soviet policy a decade later.

But the policy backfired. By mid-March, Cossacks in the Veshenskaia stanitsa, many of whom had originally cooperated with the Red Army, were in full revolt.98 Across Ukraine, Red Army commanders were intensely worried. Antonov-Ovsienko, the Red Army leader in the region, twice wrote letters to Lenin and the Central Committee asking for a relaxation of Soviet policy, and particularly for more cooperation with local groups and Ukrainian national leaders. He suggested that the Ukrainian Soviet government be expanded to include social democrats and Borotbysty, who had more support among the peasantry than the Bolsheviks. He called for an end to the grain requisitions, and for concessions to the Ukrainian peasants who were deserting the Red Army in droves.

Nobody in Moscow was listening. The harsh rhetoric continued. The grain collection policy remained in place. It was unsuccessful: Shlikhter only managed to dispatch some 8.5 million poods of grain – 139,000 metric tonnes – to Russia, a tiny fraction of what Lenin had demanded.⁹⁹

The Bolsheviks were expelled from Kyiv for the second time in August 1919. In their wake, the largest and most violent peasant uprising in modern European history exploded across the countryside.