2

Rebellion, 1919

Ukrainian people, take the power in your hands! Let there be no dictators, neither of person nor party! Long live the dictatorship of the working people! Long live the calloused hands of the peasants and workers! Down with political speculators! Down with the violence of the Right! Down with the violence of the Left!

Otaman Matvii Hryhoriev, 19191

Great was the year and terrible the year of Our Lord 1918, but more terrible still was 1919.

Mikhail Bulgakov, 1926²

When Nestor Makhno was christened, the priest’s clothing was said to have caught fire. This, the peasants said, was a sign: he was destined to become a great bandit. When Makhno’s first son was born, he had a mouth full of teeth. This, the peasants said, was also a sign: it meant that he was the Antichrist.³ Makhno’s son died, and the story of Makhno’s own christening faded. But the wildly contradictory rumours that swirled around Makhno, the most powerful and probably the most charismatic of the Ukrainian peasant leaders who arose out of the chaos of 1919, continued well after his death. Trotsky memorably described Makhno’s followers as ‘kulak plunderers’ who ‘throw dust in the eyes of the most benighted and backward peasants’.⁴ Piotr Arshinov, a Russian anarchist and admirer of Makhno, described him as the man who brought unity to the ‘revolutionary insurrectionary movement of the Ukrainian peasants and workers’. When ‘throughout the immense stretches of the Ukraine, the masses seethed, rushing into revolt and struggle’, Makhno ‘drew up the plan for the struggle, and coined the slogans of the day’.5

Parting the mists and myths that surround the Ukrainian peasant revolt of 1918–20 is not easy, if only because a large number of the leading protagonists, Makhno among them, played so many roles and changed sides so many times. Originally, Makhno was a revolutionary activist from Zaporizhia in southeastern Ukraine. Arrested several times by the tsarist police, he spent the years 1908–17 in a Moscow prison. There he befriended Arshinov, among others, and became indoctrinated in the ideology of anarchism. This philosophy, although radical and opposed to the status quo in equal measures, never aligned precisely either with the Bolsheviks or the Ukrainian nationalists: Makhno wanted to destroy the state, not empower it. Released in 1917 after the February revolution, he returned to Zaporizhia and began organizing a Peasants’ Union. This grew rapidly into a rowdy peasant army which controlled what Trotsky described in disgust as the ‘little known state’ of Huliaipole, the territory around Makhno’s home village that refused to recognize the authority of Kyiv.

Sometimes called the Black Army – they fought under the black anarchist flag – and at other times referred to as Makhnovists (Makhnovshchyna), Makhno’s men originally took up arms against both Pavlo Skoropadsky and his German and Austrian allies, as well as Symon Petliura and his Ukrainian nationalist forces. Some of their anger was purely local: among other things, they identified the Mennonite landowners of eastern Ukraine as ‘German’ exploiters who deserved to be stripped of their property. But they did have broader goals. Sympathizing neither with the ‘Whites’ nor with the Ukrainian Central Rada, Makhno’s anarchists allied themselves initially with the Bolsheviks. His forces helped the Bolsheviks establish the first, brief Bolshevik Ukrainian government in early 1918.

Unsurprisingly, relations broke down. Makhno’s anarchism hardly sat well with the controlling instincts of the Bolsheviks. Their authoritarian methods didn’t appeal to him either. By 1920, Makhno was calling on Red Army soldiers to desert:

We drove out the Austro-German tyrants, smashed the Denikinist [Imperial Russian] hangmen, fought against Petliura; now we are fighting the domination of the commissar authority, the dictatorship of the Bolshevik-Communist Party: it has laid its iron hand on the entire life of the working people; the peasants and workers of the Ukraine are groaning under its yoke … But we consider you, comrades in the Red Army, our blood brothers, together with whom we would like to carry on the struggle for genuine liberation, for the true Soviet system without the pressure of parties or authorities.6

Despite Trotsky’s scorn, those sentiments proved popular well beyond Huliaipole. The idea that Ukrainians stood for the ‘true Soviet system without the pressure of parties or authorities’ – socialism without Bolshevism – was widespread and deeply appealing, affecting many people who knew nothing about Makhno. Like the Kronstadt sailors and Tambov peasants who also staged rebellions in 1920 and 1921, tens of thousands of rural Ukrainians wanted a socialist revolution but not the centralized power and repression emanating from Moscow. A leaflet passed around in central Ukraine, addressed to ‘Comrade Red Army Men’, put it succinctly:

You are led into Ukraine by Russian and Jewish commissar communists who tell you they are fighting for Soviet power in Ukraine but who in fact are conquering Ukraine. They tell you they lead you against rich Ukrainian peasants but in fact they are fighting against poor Ukrainian peasants and workers …

Ukrainian peasants and workers cannot tolerate the conquest and pillage of Ukraine by Russian armies; they cannot tolerate the oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture as occurred under Tsarist rule …

Brothers, don’t turn your weapons against the peasants and workers of Ukraine but against your commissar communists who torture your unfortunate people as well.⁷

An observer who visited Ukraine on a Red Cross mission at the time paraphrased Ukrainian thinking like this:

A special peasant phraseology was formed: ‘We are Bolsheviks,’ said the peasants in the Ukraine, ‘but not communists. The Bolsheviks gave us land, while the communists take away our grain without giving us anything for it. We will not allow the Red Army to hang the commune about our necks. Down with the commune! Long live the Bolsheviks!’8

So confused was the terminology at the time that those sentences could easily have been written the other way around: ‘Down with the Bolsheviks! Long live the commune!’ But the point was clear: the Ukrainian peasants had wanted one form of revolution, but had got something else altogether.

Similarly left-wing, equally revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik language also appealed to the followers of Matvii Hryhoriev, another charismatic leader who emerged from the chaos of 1919. On the surface, Hryhoriev could not have been more different from Makhno. A Cossack and a former member of the Russian imperial army, he had initially supported the Skoropadsky regime, which granted him the rank of colonel. Disillusion then set in, and his ambition grew. Hryhoriev gathered around him a band of loyal followers – 117 separate partisan bands, by one account, including between 6,000 and 8,000 soldiers – allied himself with a similarly idiosyncratic group of peasant commanders, and transferred his support from the German puppet regime to Petliura.⁹

The Directory, the national force led by Petliura, granted Hryhoriev the title of ‘Otaman of Zaporizhia, Oleksandriia, Kherson and Tavryda’. A braggart and a blusterer, Hryhoriev, like Makhno, used the language of the radical left. He equated the German and Austrian occupiers with the hated ‘bourgeoisie’ who had connived to keep Ukraine poor. In one ultimatum, issued in the autumn of 1918, he declared:

I, Otaman Hryhoriev, in the name of the partisans whom I command, rising against the yoke of bourgeoisie, in clear conscience declare to you that you have appeared here in Ukraine as blind instruments in the hands of your bourgeoisie, that you are not democrats, but traitors of all European democrats.¹⁰

When it became clear that the Directory would fall to the Red Army, Hryhoriev quickly changed sides again and joined forces with the Bolsheviks. This alliance was even more unstable than the pact between Makhno and the Red Army. One Soviet war correspondent travelling with Hryhoriev’s men observed with trepidation the irregular organization of the troops, their fondness for looting, and the anti-semitism ‘embedded in the consciousness’ of the soldiers. He quoted some of the commanders joking about the day they would once again take up arms against the ‘communist-Jews’.11 This kind of talk didn’t, he feared, bode well for a long-term alliance with the Bolsheviks.

It didn’t work in the short term either. Communications between Hryhoriev and the Red Army commanders frequently broke down, especially when he wanted them to do so. Cooperation eventually ceased altogether and in May 1919, Hryhoriev finally called upon his followers to revolt against the Soviet regime that was still then clinging to power in Kyiv. His grandiose statement was a complete mishmash of ideas – nationalist, anarchist, socialist, communist – that probably reflected quite accurately the feelings of Ukrainian peasants who had already watched several armies tramp across their soil:

Let there be no dictators, neither of person or party! Long live the dictatorship of the working people! Long live the calloused hands of the peasants and workers! Down with political speculators! Down with the violence of the Right! Down with the violence of the Left!¹²

The Bolsheviks responded to this rhetoric with their own. They denounced the ‘kulak uprising’, the ‘kulak bandits’ and the ‘kulak traitors’. Evidently the word ‘kulak’ had already acquired a broader meaning, well beyond ‘rich peasant’. As early as 1919, anyone who had extra stores of grain – and anyone who opposed Soviet power – could be damned by it. A decade later, Stalin would not need to invent a new word for the same sort of enemy.¹³

But flinging insults didn’t help the Soviet cause in 1919. By early summer, both Hryhoriev and Makhno had broken away from the Bolsheviks once and for all, as had a host of other partisans, atamans and local leaders, all of whom agreed upon only one thing: their revolutionary aspirations for land and self-government had been thwarted by Ukrainian nationalists, by Germans and above all by the Bolsheviks. Lured by the slogan, ‘For Soviet Power, without Communists!’, peasant soldiers deserted the Red Army in droves and joined other groups. Oleksandr Shlikhter counted ninety-three ‘counter-revolutionary attacks’ in the month of April alone.14 By another reckoning, there were 328 separate revolts in June, incidents of peasant attacks on Soviet officials or the Red Army. In the month of July, Christian Rakovsky counted more than 200 anti-Bolshevik rebellions within twenty days.¹⁵

The word ‘chaos’ fails to explain or encompass what happened next. Makhno and Hryhoriev fought the Red Army, the White Army, the Directory – and eventually one another. A meeting of rebel forces turned into a shootout in July after Makhno’s deputy pulled a gun on Hryhoriev, murdering him along with several aides. Anton Denikin, the White general, began a new campaign, first taking Stalin’s beloved Tsaritsyn and then advancing into Ukraine, capturing Kharkiv and Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) in June. A month later he took Poltava too. Meanwhile, Petliura’s forces advanced from the west and retook Kyiv, only to lose the city again soon afterwards.

All told, Kyiv changed hands more than a dozen times in 1919 alone. Richard Pipes has memorably described that year in Ukraine as ‘a period of complete anarchy’:

The entire territory fell apart into innumerable regions isolated from each other and the rest of the world, dominated by armed bands of peasants or freebooters who looted and murdered with utter impunity … None of the authorities which claimed Ukraine during the year following the deposition of Skoropadsky ever exercised actual sovereignty. The Communists, who all along anxiously watched the developments there and did everything in their power to seize control for themselves, fared no better than their Ukrainian nationalist and White Russian competitors.¹⁶

For ordinary people, lawlessness meant that they were constantly preyed upon. Heinrich Epp, one of Ukraine’s Mennonite minority, remembered that his community was at the mercy of whoever passed through:

Most of the time we were without any real government for all intents and purposes. There were no laws or police … During the day it was mainly the local Russian nationals from the region or young men who visited us repeatedly. Each time they took something which caught their fancy as their own property … But far more fearful were the nights, when the so-called bandits came, for such visits rarely passed without some life being given as sacrifice.17

Each change of power was accompanied by a change in policy. Whenever Denikin’s White Army took over a region, it returned confiscated property to landowners. Following in the tsarist tradition, it also shut down Ukrainian libraries, cultural centres, newspapers and schools. Derisively, Denikin’s men spoke not of Ukraine but of ‘Little Russia’, and thus successfully alienated any Ukrainian forces who might have joined them.¹⁸

Whenever the Red Army took over, Bolshevik commissars organized a slaughter of the ‘aristocracy’ and the ‘bourgeoisie’ – which could just mean anyone who opposed them – and once again empowered the poor peasants’ committees, helping them to rob their wealthier neighbours. In Odessa, Bolshevik leaders armed 2,400 criminals, put them under the control of the city’s most famous crime boss, Misha the Jap – a character in Isaac Babel’s stories – and let them plunder the city.¹⁹ In Kyiv stories were told of a torturer named Rosa:

She would cause a captured soldier to be tied to nails driven into the wall, and would then sit a few feet away from him with a revolver in her hand. She would treat him to a little talk about the proletariat, punctuating her remarks every ten minutes by shooting at and smashing his main joints one after the other.²⁰

Meanwhile, Makhno’s 10,000-man cavalry and 40,000 foot soldiers, dragging their artillery around on wheeled carts, undermined whoever was in power. All told, his Black Army killed more than 18,000 of Denikin’s soldiers, severely weakened his forces, and possibly robbed him of what could have been a victory against the Bolsheviks.²¹ In the regions they occupied, including the Mennonite German settlements of southern Ukraine, some of Makhno’s men also attacked civilians with an abandon that seemed unhinged. In his memoir – evocatively entitled ‘The Day the World Ended: December 7, 1919, Steinbach, Russia’ – Epp remembered going from house to house in the village of Steinbach, and finding that all the inhabitants had been murdered. At each one, he opened the door and found corpses:

The next place was Hildebrandts – my cousin Maria … Here I saw a scene of indescribable horror that I will never forget as long as I live. Mrs Hildebrandt lay in the small bedroom just inside the door to the corner room, completely unclothed. One of her arms had been chopped off and lay on the floor in the middle of the room. Her youngest baby lay dead in the cradle. Its neck had been hacked off. The woman was one of those who had been raped, before or after her murder.

As Epp stood there, mourning his friends and family, peasants began to gather in the village:

The robbery now commenced: all property, movable or unmovable, dead or alive, now went over into their hands. In one place, I witnessed a woman turn a dead body over onto its back and tear off his coat. She dealt with the corpse as if it were a head of livestock.22

Atrocities committed by one side fuelled the anger of the others. When the White Army took over Kharkiv in August 1919, it exhumed the bodies of officers recently buried in shallow trenches in a public park. They found evidence that the men ‘while still alive, had actually had their shoulder badges nailed on to the flesh. In some cases live coals had been pressed into their stomachs, and a number appeared to have been scalped.’ Of course the revelations spurred on those who wanted revenge.²³

Conflicts not only broke out between armies and ethnic groups, but also within villages. In Velyke Ustia, Chernihiv province, violence between the ‘poor peasants’ committee’ and the ‘kulaks’ erupted during elections to the local village council:

The komnezam members got ready, they were deciding who should nominate whom, who should nominate candidates for the presidium, how the vote should be counted and other details … but the kulaks also got ready, and started nominating kulak agents. Seeing that the poor and middle peasants were standing together and winning over kulak agents, the kulaks started a fistfight in the building, trying at least to disrupt the meeting; but the komnezam activists did not hold back, they began to put down the fighting and tossed the bullies out of the window. The meeting went on as it was supposed to, under full democracy.24

Soon after, the same komnezam members were attacking kulaks and forcibly taking their bread, ‘in order to give it to the organs of Soviet power’. They also took part in the ‘fight against banditry’, battling what they called ‘kulak bands’ of various kinds and at one point calling in the militia to help. Together, one remembered, ‘the militia and the komnezam activists caught the bandits near the cemetery. During the shooting, the bandits hid themselves, after which they never again appeared in the village and soon were completely liquidated.’²⁵

Massacre followed massacre in repetitive cycles. The peasants’ resistance infuriated the Bolsheviks, not least because it confounded their historical determinism: the poor were supposed to support them, not fight against them. Conscious that they were a minority fighting against the majority, the Bolsheviks increased their brutality, sometimes demanding the murder of hundreds of peasants in exchange for one dead communist, or calling for the entire adult male population of a village to be wiped out.²⁶

The tragedies of those terrible years would remain in local memory for decades afterwards, feeding the desire for revenge on all sides. But some of the most brutal violence was inflicted on a group that sought to stay as far away from the conflict as possible.

In the autumn of 1914 a young Russian soldier named Maksim wrote a cheerful letter home to his family from the Austrian front. He opened with reverent respect for his father and all his relatives, as well as a wish that ‘the Lord God gives you good health and all of the happiness in the world’. But he continued with concern. His unit had suffered a defeat, which he blamed on Jewish spies who had, he believed, set up an underground telephone line in order to feed information to the enemy. Since then, he and his comrades had been ‘plundering and beating the Jews as they deserve, for they just want to trick all of us’.²⁷

Of course, Maksim wasn’t the first to come up with the idea that Jews were traitors: anti-semitism was rife throughout the imperial army in 1914, as indeed it was rife throughout Russian society, even at the very highest levels. Tsar Nicholas II was a particularly enthusiastic anti-semite, for whom Jews symbolized everything hateful about the modern world. The emperor once defined a newspaper as a place were ‘some Jew or another sits … making it his business to stir up passions of people against each other’.28 During his reign the okhrana, the imperial secret police, had produced the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a notorious forgery that depicted a Jewish plot to govern the world. The state had also had a hand in inspiring a wave of pogroms across Russia in 1905. Given that general attitude, it is not surprising that the army leadership in 1914 suspected Jews of ‘consorting with the enemy through the use of underground telephones and airplanes’ and supplying German troops with gold smuggled across the front line in the stomachs of cattle and the eggs of geese.²⁹ Swirling conspiracy theories about Jewish treachery supplied a plausible explanation for unpalatable facts: the defeat of a unit, the loss of a division, the poor performance of the entire army.

This same belief in Jewish treachery, common enough before the February revolution, laid the groundwork for a series of appalling massacres in the years that followed. Between 1918 and 1920 combatants on all sides – White, Directory, Polish and Bolshevik – murdered at least 50,000 Jews in more than 1,300 pogroms across Ukraine, according to the most widely accepted studies, though some put the death toll as high as 200,000. Tens of thousands were injured and raped as well. Many shtetls were burnt to the ground. Many Jewish communities were blackmailed out of all their worldly goods by soldiers who threatened to kill them unless they paid up. In the town of Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi) a riot started by the Bolsheviks led to the deaths of 1,600 people over the course of two days. Thousands of Jews fled the violence only to die of hunger and disease in Kyiv. When Denikin’s troops left the city in December 1919, some 2,500 Jewish corpses were found in makeshift refugee shelters.³⁰

A complete explanation for this infamous wave of anti-semitic violence is beyond the scope of this book, especially since so much of the evidence was long ago cherry-picked by authors seeking to prove a case for or against the Bolsheviks, the White Army or the Directory. From a wide range of sources it is clear that there were perpetrators on all sides. Hryhoriev made little pretence about his virulent anti-semitism; Denikin and his generals enthusiastically carried out pogroms in retaliation against the ‘Jewish’ Cheka and the ‘Jewish’ Bolsheviks. A British journalist who travelled for a time with Denikin recorded that the White general’s officers and men, in line with their tsarist upbringing, ‘laid practically all the blame for their country’s troubles on the Hebrew’:

They held that the whole cataclysm has been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews who in the pay and at the orders of Germany had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government … Among Denikin’s officers this idea was an obsession of such terrible bitterness and insistency as to lead them into making statements of the wildest and most fantastic character.31

By contrast, Petliura is not known to have used anti-semitic language. He was a former member of the Central Rada, which had deliberately included Jews among its leaders; more than once he went out of his way to discourage anti-semitism in his own ranks: ‘Because Christ commands it, we urge everyone to help the Jewish sufferers,’ he declared. During his brief tenure in power his government had granted autonomous status to the Jews of Ukraine, encouraged Jewish political parties, and funded Yiddish publications.³²

But his Directory soldiers felt varying levels of loyalty to their commander, and the results on the ground were often different. A Red Cross committee met one of Petliura’s generals in Berdychiv in 1921: ‘In a cynical fashion he abused the whole of Jewry and accused them of lending support to the Bolsheviks.’³³ The same committee told another general that the Directory leadership had ordered a halt to the pogroms. In response, he replied that ‘the Directory was a puppet in the hands of the diplomats, most of whom were Jews’, and that he would do as he pleased.³⁴

The Bolshevik leadership also formally opposed pogroms, though that didn’t stop Red Army soldiers from blackmailing Jewish communities or stealing their money. Lenin was informed that Red Army soldiers in Zhytomyr province were ‘destroying the Jewish population in their path, looting and murdering’, in October 1920. Despite his arguments to the contrary, followers of Makhno were also responsible for attacks on Jews, as were some Polish soldiers.35

But the violence was greatest in areas that were not under any political control at all. The worst damage was inflicted by disintegrating military units or bandits with little sense of allegiance to anybody.³⁶ One testimony, written by a Jewish trader, Symon Leib-Rabynovych, describes what happened in the village of Pichky, near Radomysl, when twenty members of ‘Struk’s gang’ took over in 1919. On the first evening the Jews of the village were taken hostage until they agreed to pay 1,800 roubles. A few days later most of them fled temporarily, following a Bolshevik attack on the village. When they returned, they discovered that their homes had been plundered and their possessions distributed among their neighbours. Leib-Rabynovych went to one of them and asked for his feather bed back:

He fell on me like a wild beast; how did I dare to demand of him, the head man of the village? He would arrest me and hand me over to the Strukists as a communist. I saw that some change had taken place in my neighbour. He had previously been peaceable, and extraordinarily conscientious, and had always been kind to me. I understood that I could not stay any longer in the village. I had to get away to save my life.³⁷

Leib-Rabynovych escaped. The next day the Struk gang took the entire Jewish population of the village out into the field, stripped all of them of their clothes and possessions, demanded money, and murdered those who could not pay.

Similar scenes unfolded in Makariv, a large village in the Kyiv district, over the course of 1919. The first attack was organized by one of the local warlords. His gang, which one memoirist described as a band of ‘barefoot teenagers, armed with rifles’, appeared in the village in June. The Jews vanished ‘like mice to their holes’; the young people, ‘having amused themselves with their bullets’, began destroying the stalls in the bazaar. Their leader, Matviienko, encouraged the local peasants to join in. Eventually the Jews agreed to negotiate:

‘50,000,’ said Matviienko.

‘We’ll get it.’

‘In two hours,’ he added gloomily.

They fulfilled the demand.38

A few days later Matviienko came back for more, this time taking valuables and clothes as well. A few weeks after that he demanded six local Jews as hostages: he wanted to trade them for his brother, who had been captured by Bolsheviks fighting in the area. When the Jews asked why it had to be them, he shrugged: ‘Communists are yids, and all yids are communists.’ Six Jews were taken; two weeks later Matviienko demanded that the community provide another 150,000 roubles to buy them back. Soon after, the local villagers decided to play the same game, and began demanding money and hostages too. Then the Bolsheviks arrived, with new demands; then Matviienko came back. The Jews sent a delegation to him, and this time he shot them all on the spot. After that, his men went through the village, looking for Jews and killing those they found: ‘In total, about 100 people were killed. Naturally, all of the property was stolen.’³⁹

The violence against Jews left its mark on those who witnessed it, perpetrated it or experienced it. The pogroms, like the civil war itself, contributed to the brutalization of the population, which quickly learned to conform to the will of men with guns. The methods used in the pogroms would also find echoes in the drive to collect grain in 1921, when Lenin proposed to take hostages in order to force peasants to hand over their supplies. They also haunted the collectivization campaign a decade later, when the kulaks were terrorized using exactly the same methods that had been used in 1919. Like the Jews, kulaks would be rounded up, stripped to their underclothes, blackmailed out of their possessions, mocked and humiliated, and sometimes shot.

The pogroms also foreshadowed later events in another sense. Much as they would one day use history, journalism and politics to cover up the famine and to twist the facts of Ukrainian history, Soviet propagandists also sought to use the pogroms to discredit the Ukrainian national movement. For decades, Soviet historians characterized Petliura as little more than an anti-semite. They denied the Bolshevik role in pogroms; they denied that either the Directory or the Central Rada before it had ever represented a real national movement at all. Instead, they linked Ukrainian nationalism to looting, killing and above all pogroms. Great efforts were made to gather ‘testimony’ against Petliura and the generals who were associated with him, and to publish it in different languages.40 Petliura himself was murdered in Paris in 1926 by a Russian Jew, Sholom Schwartzbard, who claimed to be taking revenge for the pogroms. Even if Schwartzbard wasn’t a direct Soviet agent, as many thought at the time, he was certainly inspired by Soviet propaganda that demonized Petliura.

The Ukrainian community in Paris and elsewhere fought back. They published several Directory pamphlets as well as Petliura’s own proclamations from 1919 calling on Ukrainian soldiers to defend Jews.⁴¹ They didn’t, of course, also explain that many of Petliura’s own generals had pursued a very different policy, in defiance of their leader. Of all the many things that were lost in the propaganda war between the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalism, none disappeared more quickly than nuance.

The Ukrainian peasant uprising devastated the countryside and created divisions that would never heal. It also altered, profoundly, the Bolshevik perceptions of Ukraine. If the Bolsheviks had previously been inclined to dismiss Ukraine as ‘Southwest Russia’, a province of no real interest except for its rich soil and abundant food, the experiences of 1919 taught them to see Ukraine as potentially dangerous and explosive, and Ukrainian peasants and intellectuals as threats to Soviet power.

The rebellion also taught them to see Ukraine as a source of future military threats, for it was thanks to the chaos in Ukraine that Denikin’s last campaign nearly succeeded. Following the bloody summer of 1919, Denikin seized Kyiv in August. He took Kursk on 20 September and Orel on 13 October. He came within 200 kilometres of Moscow – so close that he might have taken the city. Had Denikin formed an alliance with Ukrainian national forces he might well have toppled the Bolshevik regime before it really got started. Yet his unpopular land policies, his opposition to Ukrainian institutions, and his officers’ brutal tactics instead provoked Ukrainian partisans to attack his supply lines. His hold on Ukrainian territory weakened rapidly and so he withdrew.

But Deniken’s offensive also paved the way for one more attack on Bolshevik power. As the White Army pulled back, Petliura prepared one last stand in concert with Józef Piłsudski, the Polish national leader who had just helped his own country re-establish sovereignty. Unlike Denikin, Piłsudski did not seek to occupy central or eastern Ukraine. Although he did incorporate what is now western Ukraine into the new Polish republic, he also hoped to establish a strong Ukrainian state that would serve as a counterweight to Soviet Russia. The agreement made by the two leaders began ‘with the deep conviction that every nation possesses the right to determine its own fate and to decide upon its relationship with its neighbours’.42 Piłsudski himself issued a proclamation to the Ukrainians, using language that the Bolsheviks would long remember:

The armies of the Polish Republic, on my orders, have advanced deep into Ukraine. I want the inhabitants of this country to know that Polish troops will remove from your lands the invader against whom you have risen up in arms to defend your homes against violence, conquest and pillage. Polish troops will remain in Ukraine only until the rightful Ukrainian government assumes power.⁴³

The Poles and the Ukrainians began their joint campaign in the spring of 1920 and at first faced little resistance. On 7 May, Piłsudski’s army occupied Kyiv, which was so poorly defended that his soldiers entered the city riding tram cars. Belatedly, another White Army commander, General Peter Wrangel, agreed to join them from his base in Crimea.

Their occupation was short. On 13 June the Red Army forced Polish troops to retreat. By early August it was just outside Warsaw. Piłsudski pushed them back, following a battle remembered later as the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’. Polish troops again advanced into Ukraine, but ultimately failed to create an independent Ukrainian state. Piłsudski signed an armistice in October and concluded a border treaty between Poland and the Soviet Union the following year.⁴⁴

But even after the Poles withdrew and the remnants of the White Army, stranded in Crimea, scrambled onto boats and sailed across the Black Sea, the problem of Ukraine loomed large in the Bolshevik imagination. Trotsky, in a letter to his colleagues, explained that peace would be difficult to enforce there. For although the Red Army had won a military victory, there had been no ideological revolution in Ukraine: ‘Soviet power in Ukraine has held its ground up to now (and it has not held it well) chiefly by the authority of Moscow, by the Great Russian communists and by the Russian Red Army.’45 The implication was clear: force, not persuasion, had finally pacified Ukraine. And force might one day be needed again.

The security threat waned, in other words, but the ideological threat remained. Ukrainian nationalism had been defeated militarily, but it remained attractive to the Ukrainian-speaking middle class, intelligentsia and a large part of the peasantry. Worse, it threatened the unity of the Soviet state, which was still struggling to find ways of accommodating national differences. Most ominously of all, nationalism had the power to attract foreign allies, particularly across the border in Poland.

The Ukrainian rebellion also posed a broader threat to the Bolshevik project. The radical, anarchic, anti-Bolshevik rhetoric used during the peasant uprising had reflected something real. Millions of Ukrainian peasants had wanted a socialist revolution, but not a Bolshevik revolution – and certainly not one directed from Moscow. Although their leaders represented a wide range of views, from anarchist to monarchist, villagers across the country expressed a coherent set of beliefs. They wanted to vote for their own representatives, not for communists. They wanted big landowners dispossessed, but they wished to farm that land themselves. They did not want to return to the ‘second serfdom’ represented by collective farms. They sought respect for their religion, language and customs. They wanted to be able to sell their grain to traders, and they hated the enforced requisition of their produce.⁴⁶

This critique – socialist but not authoritarian, communist but not Bolshevik – would resonate strongly throughout the 1920s, finding a spokesman, among others, in Trotsky himself. But the first and most damaging appearance of the anti-Soviet ‘left’ was in Ukraine. The ‘cruel lesson of 1919’, as the Ukrainian peasant revolt came to be called, loomed over the Bolsheviks for many years afterwards.⁴⁷