THERE IS PROBABLY NO MORE IMPORTANT, THOUGH CONVOLUTED and often confusing, term for understanding Russian history than “Russian Revolution.” To begin with, there were three revolutions in Russia between 1905 and 1917. In 1917 alone, two revolutions took place: the February 1917 overthrow of the tsarist government and the October 1917 takeover of state power by Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks. As if that were not enough, the dates of those two revolutions are usually given according to the ancient Julian calendar used in the Russian Empire, and are thus known as the February and October revolutions. However, according to the Gregorian calendar adopted in the former imperial territories in 1918, they took place respectively in March and November 1917. Then there is the issue of the revolutions’ chronology. Under the capacious umbrella of the “Russian Revolution,” historians usually include the civil war in Russia and the international conflicts within the former imperial borders that took place from 1917 to 1921 and claimed millions of lives of combatants and innocent victims. Some scholars extend the term to a good part of the 1920s, or even the entire Soviet period.
The most confusing aspect of the term “Russian Revolution” is that it obscures what actually took place in the multiethnic Russian Empire—a revolution of nations, of which the Russians were only one. Thus, historians have spoken for decades about the Ukrainian and other non-Russian revolutions as part of or coinciding with the revolutionary events in Russia proper. Whatever meaning one ascribes to “Russian Revolution,” it fundamentally changed not only the economic, social, and cultural life of the former subjects of the Romanovs, but also relations among the nationalities. Nowhere were those revolutionary changes more dramatic than in the triangle of imperial Russian national identity—its “Great,” “Little,” and “White” components. Thus, the “Russian Revolution” was indeed “Russian” in more than one way.
As the Provisional Government that came to power in March 1917 did its best to maintain the façade of one all-Russian nationality, one political party in Russia seemingly had no problem with recognizing Ukrainians and Belarusians as distinct peoples and acknowledging their autonomy or even independence. That party was Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks, a small branch of the Russian Social Democrats that was rapidly increasing in popularity and numbers. Like most Marxists of that day, the Bolsheviks denounced capitalism, rejected private property, and believed that the future belonged to the proletariat—the industrial working class, whose vanguard they aspired to be. But unlike their European counterparts, the Bolsheviks, who established themselves as a separate political force in 1903, believed not in an evolutionary but a revolutionary ascension of the proletariat to political power. They needed state power to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and lead the world to socialism. They knew that a proletarian revolution was all but doomed to failure in the largely peasant Russian Empire unless they ignited the fire of world revolution in Central and Western Europe, which had a well-developed proletariat and was thus supposedly ready for the advent of socialism.
Lenin and his cohort were internationalist in composition and outlook and in their conception of the forthcoming revolution. Russian imperial nationalism was anathema to them, and they declared themselves prepared to recognize the separate identity of the Ukrainians and Belarusians. What Lenin and the Bolsheviks thought about the nationality question in general and the Russian question in particular took on unexpected importance after the night of November 7 (October 25 by the Julian calendar), 1917, when they deposed the Provisional Government in a largely bloodless coup and declared themselves the new government of the Russian republic. The extent of that republic’s borders was as yet unspecified.
For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who insisted on the political primacy of social classes, the nationality question was of secondary importance, and for a long time they had all but ignored it. Only the rise of national movements in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary on the eve of World War I forced Lenin and his allies to articulate their view of the nationality question. In 1912, Lenin commissioned the Georgian Bolshevik Joseph Stalin, who read no languages other than Russian and Georgian and was largely unknown outside the Caucasus, to formulate the party’s position on the matter. That position was to be defined in debate with the views of the Austrian Marxists, whose works Stalin could not read in the original. Relying on Lenin’s support and advice, he fully incorporated his leader’s views on the subject of nationalities into a long article published in 1913 that subsequently appeared as a separate pamphlet under the title Marxism and the National Question.
The ideas first presented by Lenin and then spelled out in Stalin’s pamphlet were further developed in Lenin’s own articles published during the first months of the war. Lenin declared the right of all nations of the Russian Empire to self-determination, up to and including secession, but there was one caveat. In the final analysis, it was up to the working class of every nation—or, more prosaically, up to the Bolshevik Party—to determine whether “self-determination” meant secession or not. If secession was in the interest of the proletariat, as understood by the party, then the nation could leave the empire; otherwise, it would have to stay in order to ensure the victory of the working class over its enemies.
The principles looked quite clear on paper, but could they be implemented in practice? The first test came immediately after the Bolsheviks took power in Petrograd. In reaction to the coup, the Kyivan politicians declared Ukrainian statehood, claiming not only the provinces of central Ukraine but also the traditionally Ukrainian-settled territories of Kharkiv, Odesa, and the Donets River Basin in eastern Ukraine that many in Petrograd considered part of Russia. More importantly, the Ukrainians refused to cooperate with the new government in Petrograd, which Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered evidence of counterrevolution.
THE UKRAINIAN ACTIVISTS HAD ORGANIZED THEMSELVES ON March 4, 1917, into a Central Council, or, in Ukrainian, a Central Rada. Its mandate was to coordinate the activities of all Ukrainian organizations, political and otherwise. In political terms, its composition resembled that of the Provisional Government in Petrograd—the Rada consisted of activists close to the Constitutional Democrats as well as increasingly more influential socialists of various stripes. Its initial demands were quite moderate and compatible with the Constitutional Democrats’ program on the nationality question. The Rada wanted finally to achieve something that the Ukrainian activists had demanded for decades—to bring the Ukrainian language into the school system. But Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the newly elected leader of the Rada, who had returned to Kyiv in mid-March after years of exile in Russia, had his eyes on a higher prize—the territorial autonomy of Ukraine.
In late March 1917, Hrushevsky wrote a programmatic article titled “No Turning Back,” in which he threatened the Provisional Government with the prospect of complete independence if it did not agree to grant Ukraine territorial autonomy. He wrote:
Broad autonomy for Ukraine with sovereign rights for the Ukrainian people—that is the program of the given moment from which there can be no turning back. Any obstacles, any vacillation in satisfying it on the part of the leaders of the Russian state or the ruling circles of Russian society will tip the scales in the direction of Ukrainian independentism.… At the present moment, those who support an independent, or, more precisely, a self-sufficient, Ukraine agree to remain on a common platform of broad national-territorial autonomy and federal guarantees of Ukraine’s sovereign right. The flag of independent Ukraine remains folded. But will it be unfurled the moment all-Russian centralists might wish to tear the banner of broad Ukrainian autonomy in a federal, democratic Russian republic?
Hrushevsky’s program soon became that of the Central Rada and was supported by numerous congresses of peasants’ and soldiers’ deputies—the true source of legitimacy and power in the months following the February Revolution. Whereas in the Russian provinces of the empire the revolution brought about peasant revolts against the local nobility, and in the Caucasus and Central Asia it took the form of an insurgency of autochthonous populations against Russian colonists, in Ukraine the peasants were mobilized by Ukrainian activists in support of territorial autonomy. Having played his role in the abdication of Nicholas II, Vasilii Shulgin returned to his native Kyiv, complaining that Ukrainian activists were stirring up the peasants by telling them that if they assumed a Ukrainian identity and supported Ukrainian autonomy, they would assure themselves of the right to obtain land of their own and prevent foreigners, especially Russian peasants, from claiming the rich Ukrainian soil. The soldiers, who had been allowed to form Ukrainian units since June 1917, also supported the Rada, seeing it as the only institution that could end the war and send them back home in time for the redistribution of the land.
Encouraged by such popular support, Hrushevsky and the Rada unilaterally declared the territorial autonomy of Ukraine in June 1917. The genie of the federal restructuring of the Russian Empire and the concomitant partitioning of the big Russian nation was out of the bottle. The Provisional Government tried to put it back by sending its ministers to Kyiv, hoping to convince the Rada to withdraw its declaration of autonomy. Faced with the Rada’s refusal, which was backed by Ukraine’s minorities, including Jewish and Polish socialists, the ministers negotiated a deal in which they recognized the Rada and its government, the General Secretariat, as representatives of the Provisional Government in Ukraine. Thus Ukrainian autonomy, in curtailed form, survived its first encounter with the central government in Petrograd.
The Russian nationalists were outraged by what they interpreted as a surrender of Russian national interests by the socialist ministers of the Provisional Government. Vasilii Shulgin led the charge. In early April 1917, Shulgin had published an article in Kievlianin arguing that if the old regime had persecuted the non-Russians, the new one would go after the Russians, turning the state into a prison for them. Shulgin was prepared to tolerate the rule of the Central Rada, which he called “the despotism of an organized band,” but only if its leaders supported the war effort. The Rada, however, opted for peace. It also wanted autonomy, which in Shulgin’s eyes was tantamount to treason and stabbing Russia in the back in its war against Germany and Austria. He argued that an autonomous Ukraine would become easy prey for Germany.
But Shulgin’s key issue remained the unity of the big Russian nation. He regarded the Provisional Government’s recognition of curtailed Ukrainian autonomy as a betrayal of the Russian nation, of which Ukraine (Little Russia) and its inhabitants were an integral part. Shulgin insisted that Russians constituted the majority in Ukraine. He defined Russianness on the basis of the written rather than the spoken language, and if one could judge by the number of readers of the Kyivan press, it was the Ukrainians, not the Russians, who were in the minority. For Shulgin, the most important question was not the future structure of the Russian state, but the “reclassification” of Little Russians as Ukrainians and Little Russia as Ukraine.
VLADIMIR LENIN NEVER SHARED SHULGIN’S CONCERNS ABOUT the unity of the Russian nation. In June 1917, he went out of his way to manifest his support for the Rada, not only recognizing the Ukrainians as a distinct nation but also endorsing their right to autonomy, or even independence. “The Socialist Revolutionaries and Mensheviks tolerated the fact that the Provisional Government of the Constitutional Democrats, that is, of the counterrevolutionary bourgeois, did not fulfill its elementary democratic duty by failing to announce that it was for the autonomy of Ukraine and its complete freedom to separate,” wrote Lenin.
Lenin saw the Rada as a potential ally in his assault on the Provisional Government, and in November 1917 the Bolsheviks and the Rada did indeed cooperate to expel the government’s supporters from the city. But the situation changed dramatically after the Bolshevik takeover. The Kyiv Bolsheviks tried to gain a majority in the Ukrainian Congress of Soviets convened in Kyiv in December 1917 in order to repeat the Petrograd scenario and seize power in Ukraine in the name of the Soviets, but they found themselves in the minority. The Rada was no longer an ally but an enemy. The Kyiv Bolsheviks moved to Kharkiv, an industrial center close to the border with Russia, and declared the creation of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. It claimed the same territory as the Ukrainian People’s Republic, whose formation was declared by the Rada after the Bolshevik coup.
The Rada, as the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, refused to recognize the Bolshevik clone or to support Lenin in his struggle against anti-Bolshevik forces, which was more than Lenin and his party comrades could take. As far as they were concerned, the Rada had abused the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination. In the “Manifesto to the Ukrainian People with an Ultimatum to the Central Rada,” drafted by Lenin along with Leon Trotsky, the second most powerful party and government official, and Joseph Stalin, the commissar for nationalities, the Bolshevik leaders made a contradictory argument, simultaneously recognizing the right of the Ukrainian people to self-determination and denying it in the name of the revolution. They began by asserting their recognition of “the Ukrainian People’s Republic and its right to separate completely from Russia or enter into an agreement with the Russian Republic on federative or similar mutual relations between them.” They then revoked their recognition of the Ukrainian government, claiming that it had an “ambiguous policy, which makes it impossible for us to recognize the Rada as a plenipotentiary representative of the workers and exploited masses of the Ukrainian Republic.”
At stake was the Central Rada’s neutrality with regard to the conflict between the Bolshevik government in Petrograd and commanders of the former Russian imperial army who had remained loyal to the Provisional Government and established their base of operations in the Don region of southern Russia. Lenin wanted the Rada to stop disarming Bolshevik formations in Ukraine, block the access of the anti-Bolshevik forces to the Don region, and join his government in a war against the opponents of the Bolshevik regime in Ukraine. That was the extent of the “self-determination” permitted by Lenin, who was no longer in opposition to the Provisional Government but in power. The Rada refused. Lacking strength in Ukraine itself, Lenin sent Russian military units to Kyiv led by the former security chief of the Provisional Government and commander of the Petrograd garrison, Lieutenant Colonel Mikhail Muraviev.
In January 1918, Muraviev’s troops began their advance on Kyiv. In early February, he took the Ukrainian capital after firing 15,000 artillery shells at the city. Among other targets, the gunners bombarded the house of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, setting it on fire and causing the death of the elderly mother of the head of the Ukrainian movement. Hrushevsky and the Central Rada left the city, but not before proclaiming Ukraine’s complete independence from Bolshevik Russia. In formal terms, Muraviev was acting on behalf of the Soviet Ukrainian government formed in Kharkiv in December 1917. Its commissar for military affairs was Yurii Kotsiubynsky, a son of the prominent Ukrainian modernist writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. But the army that theoretically reported to that scion of the Ukrainian cultural elite was shooting people on the streets of Kyiv simply for using the Ukrainian language, which Muraviev’s Russian troops considered evidence of nationalist counterrevolution. In February 1918, Volodymyr Zatonsky, the minister of education of the Soviet Ukrainian government, who had earlier served as a personal secretary to Lenin, was arrested on the streets of Kyiv by Muraviev’s soldiers for speaking Ukrainian. Only a paper signed by Lenin that was found in his pocket saved him from execution.
The entire population of Kyiv was subjected to weeks of arbitrary arrests and executions, the kind of “Red terror” that served as a template for subsequent Bolshevik atrocities. After entering the city, Muraviev demanded 5 million rubles to supply his army. He also ordered his troops “mercilessly to destroy all officers and cadets, haidamakas [members of Ukrainian military formations], monarchists, and enemies of the revolution in Kyiv.” According to some estimates, close to 5,000 people suspected of allegiance either to the old regime or to the Central Rada were killed by Muraviev’s thugs. Among them was Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoiavlensky) of Kyiv. In early February 1918, Muraviev sent a report to Lenin stating that “order has been reestablished in Kyiv, and revolutionary authority in the form of the People’s Secretariat, the Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, which has arrived from Kharkiv, and the Military Revolutionary Committee is working energetically.”
The new Bolshevik masters of Kyiv arrested Vasilii Shulgin, who had returned to his native city in the spring of 1917, simply on the basis of his earlier political activity. He was lucky to survive the ordeal. The plan was to send him to Moscow, but that turned out to be impossible because of the changing situation at the front, where the Germans and Austrians were beginning their advance into Ukraine. One day he was called to the head of the investigative unit and informed that he would be released on condition that he return to prison at the first summons. He promised to do so and was released. The reason for this bizarre demand was simple: the Bolsheviks were leaving the city in haste before the advance of German forces and were not sure what to do with their prisoners. Eventually they would develop the practice of executing those whom they could not evacuate, but these were the early days of the Bolshevik regime, and Shulgin not only stayed alive but was set free. Along with him, the all-Russian project would gain a new lease on life.
Shulgin considered the Bolshevik coup of October 1917 in Petrograd a national catastrophe. In an article published in Kievlianin upon receiving the news from the capital, he had treated the Bolshevik revolution as a pro-German coup. As far as he was concerned, the foreign enemy was no longer making inroads into the periphery of the empire but had seized its capital. Shulgin suggested that if a German government were established in Petrograd, then a Russian government would have to be set up somewhere else. Before the end of the year, Shulgin left Kyiv for the Don region of southern Russia, where General Mikhail Alekseev, the former chief of staff of the imperial army, and General Lavr Kornilov were gathering forces to fight the Bolsheviks and continue the war on the German front.
THE WHITE MOVEMENT—THE NAME UNDER WHICH THE DON EXILES became known in opposition to the Red Army of the Bolsheviks—had its origins in the military coup staged by General Lavr Kornilov in August 1917 in an attempt to dissolve the Petrograd Soviet, which was then gaining strength in its competition for political power with the ever weaker Provisional Government. The coup failed, helping the Bolsheviks take control of the soviets in Petrograd and Moscow and stage their own coup in October 1917.
Kornilov’s supporters among the imperial officer corps were imprisoned by supporters of the Provisional Government in the Belarusian town of Bykhaŭ, and it was there, while incarcerated, that they began to discuss their strategy and tactics in detail. Their overall objective was to prevent the disintegration of Russia, which they considered imminent in case of a separate peace with Germany. Escaping from Bykhaŭ in the wake of the Bolshevik coup and the chaos created by the fall of the Provisional Government, the officers made their way to the Don region, where they reached an accommodation with the Don and Kuban Cossacks, whose leaders opposed the Bolshevik coup. A new power center was thus formed to restore the unity of Russia. It was easier said than done.
If 1917 ended with the triumph of the Bolsheviks, 1918 brought in the Germans and Austrians. They occupied the western provinces of the former Russian Empire on the basis of treaties signed first with the leaders of the Central Rada and then with the Bolsheviks in February and March 1918 in the city of Brest-Litovsk. The first treaty allowed the Germans and Austrians to occupy the territory of the formally independent Ukrainian state and exact payment for their nation-building services in the form of agricultural products. As the Austro-German forces began their eastward march, the Bolsheviks, whose army was unable to resist the well-oiled German military machine, withdrew, leaving Kyiv on March 1. Two days later, the Bolsheviks signed their own treaty with Germany and Austria-Hungary. According to that treaty, they ceded control of half the Russian Empire’s European possessions, from the Baltics in the north to Ukraine in the south, to the German and Austrian High Command and undertook to pay 6 billion rubles to Berlin and Vienna. The Germans marched all the way to Taganrog in southern Russia, taking control of all Ukraine and the Crimea.
Erich Ludendorff, the chief architect of the German war effort and Eastern policy, considered that support for nationalist movements and the creation of a belt of client states adjoining Germany on the territory of the former Russian Empire would secure a territorially extended German Reich and keep a future Russia, Bolshevik or not, at bay. In December 1917, Finland had declared its independence from Russia and established close ties with Germany, to be sealed ten months later by the election of a German prince to the Finnish throne. The same happened in Lithuania, where an independent state was declared in December 1917 and a German prince elected to rule it eight months later. A separate United Baltic Duchy was created on the territory of Estonia and Lithuania, again in close alliance with Germany.
In February and March 1918, Ukraine became one more nation-building project supported by the Germans. Austria-Hungary, which had its own plans vis-à-vis Ukraine, joined in and dispatched a member of the imperial family, Archduke Wilhelm, who had long been preparing to become king of a future Ukrainian state closely allied with Austria. He learned Ukrainian and commanded Ukrainian units in the Austrian army. In Ukraine, Wilhelm Habsburg became known as the red prince, gaining the friendship of local elites and protecting the Ukrainian peasantry from the excesses of the Austro-German occupation. The Germans wanted him gone, fearing a coup in the interests of Austria, but Wilhelm, known locally as Prince Vasyl, stayed on.
The German High Command initially tolerated the socialist Central Rada, but in April 1918, frustrated by the Rada’s inability to supply agricultural products to the German army, the High Command engineered a coup, replacing the socialists with conservatives led by a Russian aristocrat of Ukrainian origin, General Pavlo (Pavel) Skoropadsky. Back in June 1917, Vasilii Shulgin had listed Skoropadsky among the Russians of Little Russian origin who were not Ukrainians. But Skoropadsky eagerly took the leadership of the Ukrainian state from German hands, delivering a major blow to Shulgin’s definition of Russian identity by language alone.
Skoropadsky, in fact, was not unique in his political choice, representing a growing group of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who combined allegiance to Russian culture with loyalty to the Ukrainian state and nation. Upon taking power, Skoropadsky proclaimed himself hetman of the Ukrainian state and declared everyone living in Ukraine a Ukrainian citizen. This inclusive approach to Ukrainian citizenship met with a formal protest filed by Vasilii Shulgin and two of his like-minded associates.
Not all proponents of Russian unity were as stringent as Vasilii Shulgin. Skoropadsky’s Ukraine became a safe haven for former imperial government officials, politicians, and officers of the imperial army—anyone trying to escape the Bolshevik regime, which had established itself in central Russia. Many members of the Constitutional Democratic Party supported the hetman’s regime or even joined his government. Since Russia had been taken over by the Bolsheviks, they saw the Ukrainian state led by a former Russian aristocrat as a base from which the traditional Russia might be restored. Independent Ukraine was supposed to save Russia and then trade its independence for a form of federative relationship with Russia. “If Ukraine remains indifferent to the struggle with the Bolsheviks, it will never be forgiven by its neighbors. If, on the other hand, it helps Russia defeat the Bolsheviks, it can be assured of free development in alliance with Russia,” read a statement issued by Constitutional Democrats in the hetman’s government in October 1918.
In November 1918, faced with the imminent withdrawal of German troops from Ukraine after the end of World War I, Skoropadsky indeed opted for federation with a future anti-Bolshevik Russia. “The former vigor and strength of the all-Russian state must be restored on the basis of the federal principle,” read Skoropadsky’s decree surrendering Ukrainian independence. “Ukraine deserves a leading role in the federation because it was from Ukraine that law and order spread throughout the country, and it was within its borders that for the first time the citizens of the former Russia, humiliated and oppressed, found refuge.” Now Russian nationalists in Ukraine, initially skeptical about Skoropadsky’s aspirations, joined his army. Among them was Vasilii Shulgin’s own son, Vasilko, who was killed on the outskirts of Kyiv, defending Skoropadsky’s dying regime against the advancing forces of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
GERMAN NATION-BUILDING INITIATIVES IN EASTERN EUROPE were not limited to support for a Ukrainian state independent of Russia. They also had a major impact on the articulation and development of the Belarusian project, whose rise created additional cracks in the imagined monolith of the imperial Russian nation.
The imperial government lost western Belarus after the disastrous spring and summer campaign of 1915. At first the German occupation authorities were unaware of the Belarusians as a distinct nationality and of their national organizations. They discovered both a few months after the start of the occupation, as they looked for local cadres to limit the influence of the dominant Polish elites in the region. A German report on ethnic policy in the region, now called Ober Ost, blamed the Poles for arresting the national development of the Belarusians and living “off this disoriented group parasitically, drawing upon it for recruits for their own nationality.” The author of the report suggested that “the German future in this land depends on the Weissruthenen [White Ruthenians] experiencing a renaissance and confronting the Poles.”
There was indeed a renaissance. The German commanding officer in the region, General Erich Ludendorff, ordered the creation of Belarusian-language schools to replace the Russian ones. By the end of 1917, the school system in western Belarus had 1,700 teachers educating about 73,000 schoolchildren in Belarusian. In February 1916, with German support and financial assistance (they supplied the paper), the Belarusian-language newspaper Homan (Echo) was launched with a press run of 3,000 copies, astonishing for a non-Russian and non-Polish publication in that time and place. The German military command, seeing Belarus as a nation in the making, also helped organize a Belarusian theater, which was characterized in a German newspaper in a paternalistic and condescending manner as representing “the earliest stages of dramatic sensibility.”
German Orientalist paternalism notwithstanding, the military command’s perception was accurate. The formation of the modern Belarusian nation was retarded in western Belarus, then under German occupation, by a mass exodus of ethnic Belarusians. They left the region, often under the guidance of their Orthodox priests, who were active participants in Russian nationalist organizations. These priests portrayed the Germans as Teutonic barbarians with no other purpose than that of killing and torturing Orthodox Slavs. With almost a million and a half Orthodox Belarusians gone, the national project had difficulty extending its base: political, intellectual, and economic power in the countryside was mainly in the hands of the Polish nobility, and a good part of the urban population was Jewish. Under the circumstances, Belarusian activists were reluctant to declare the creation of a Belarusian state as their political goal. They opted instead for the idea of a joint Belarusian-Lithuanian polity.
Belarusian national mobilization on the Russian side of the World War I front line began in earnest only after the February Revolution of 1917, when it emerged from the cocoon of the all-Russian nationalist project promoted by the imperial government during the war. The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd forced the Belarusian activists and socialist opponents of the Bolshevik regime (many of them ethnic Russians) to mobilize in support of Belarusian statehood. In December 1917, they convened the First All-Belarusian Congress, which recognized Soviet rule in Russia but not in Belarus. The Great Belarusian Rada elected by the congress declared itself the only legitimate authority in the land (meaning Belarusian territory not under German control) and announced plans for the creation of a Belarusian army. That was easier said than done.
The Bolsheviks, in power in Petrograd and Moscow and enjoying strong backing from soldiers’ committees in the Belarusian sector of the Russo-German front, dissolved the congress. They saw no need for a Belarusian government not controlled from Moscow. They barely saw the need for a Belarusian government at all. Instead they formed the Soviet of Commissars of the Western Region, which included not only Belarus but also the Baltic provinces of the former empire. As in Kyiv, however, the Bolshevik triumph in Minsk was short-lived. After signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Ukrainian Rada and imposing their conditions on Bolshevik Russia, the Germans occupied central Belarus, including the city of Minsk.
Now all Ukraine and most of Belarus (with the exception of its eastern lands) was under German or Austrian control. But the Germans treated the two nationalities differently: whereas the Ukrainian Rada had signed a separate peace with the Central Powers at Brest, the Belarusian Rada was not invited to the negotiating table. Whereas Ukraine had a government recognized by Berlin and Vienna, the Belarusian lands were simply occupied by German troops with no provision for a separate state or government—the Brest treaty explicitly prohibited the recognition of any new state on the territory of the former Russian Empire. It was something of a repetition of the mid-seventeenth-century situation in which Ukraine became part of the tsar’s realm on the basis of special rights and conditions negotiated by the Cossacks, while Belarus was merely occupied by Muscovite troops with no such provisions.
After the German forces took Minsk in late February 1918, two groups of Belarusian activists—one that had worked with the Germans from the outset, and another that had been formed on the Russian side of the border in the previous year—got together and decided, after heated debates, on the formation not of a Lithuanian-Belarusian but a separate Belarusian state independent of Russia. Their declaration of March 25, 1918, read as follows: “Today we, the Rada of the Belarusian National Republic, cast off our country the last chains of political servitude imposed by Russian tsarism upon our free and independent land.” The decision to declare Belarusian independence was passed by a slim majority of the Belarusian Rada—the supreme governing body of the newly formed Belarusian Democratic Republic—and its significance was more symbolic than practical. The Belarusians were no longer claiming national-cultural autonomy or federal status in a future Russian state but outright independence.
The German occupation authorities approved the Rada’s declaration, but the Kaiser’s government in Berlin refused to recognize either the creation of a Belarusian state or the Rada as its representative. The Rada now found itself in legal limbo. In a move reminiscent of the installation of the conservative Skoropadsky regime in Ukraine, the Germans helped to put a conservative landowner, Raman Skirmunt, at the helm of the Belarusian Rada. No significant powers were delegated to the Rada, which served as an intermediary between the occupation authorities and the local population, advising German military commanders and running self-government at the local level. Tolerated but not officially recognized by the Germans as a governing body, the Belarusian Rada was neither popularly elected nor supported by the occupation authorities, although its very existence helped promote the idea of an independent Belarus.
It was in this period that Belarus acquired its insignia of statehood: a national flag with white stripes at the top and bottom and a red one in between, and a coat of arms featuring a mounted knight with a sword and shield—a symbol dating from the times of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The Rada dispatched diplomatic missions to Vilnius, Kyiv, Berlin, and other European capitals, issued Belarusian postage stamps, and supported cultural and publishing projects. A leader of the Belarusian movement, Vatslaŭ Lastoŭski, presented the basics of the Belarusian national “faith” in a book titled What Every Belarusian Needs to Know. In fact, the book was nothing if not an attack on religion, as it sought to replace the old confessional identity of the Belarusian peasantry with a new ethnonational one.
“The first important question to answer,” wrote Lastoŭski, “is who are we? When we ask our brother ‘Of what faith are you?’ then the parishioner of the Catholic Church answers: ‘I am a Pole,’ and the Orthodox parishioner answers: ‘I am a Russian.’” “Is that really true?” continued Lastoŭski. His answer was negative. “All those… who go to the Catholic chapel are Catholics—not Polish, not French, not Italian, but Catholic. And he who goes to the [Orthodox] church does not belong to the Russian faith but to the Orthodox faith.… When somebody asks: what people do you belong to, what nationality do you have, you ought to answer: we are Belarusians!—since our language is Belarusian.” Apart from language, other markers of Belarusian identity, according to Lastoŭski, were blood, Belarusian ancestry, and sharing the nation’s land. When it came to blood, one of Lastoŭski’s fellow activists, the author of the first Belarusian geography, Arkadz Smolich, considered his countrymen the purest of Slavs, since Russian blood was contaminated by the Mongols and Finns, and Ukrainian blood by the Tatars.
In the course of just one year, from March 1917 to March 1918, the Belarusian national movement, like the Ukrainian one, made a huge leap from demands for cultural autonomy to full independence. Despite differences in strength—the Ukrainian movement was much stronger and more mature—both benefited from German occupation policies. They were dismissed as mere German intrigue by the leaders of Russian nationalist circles as well as by liberal politicians, both of whom found safe haven in the Don region of southern Russia in late 1917 and early 1918. With the German withdrawal from Ukraine and Belarus at the end of World War I, the proponents of Russia, one and indivisible, in the North Caucasus were presented with their last chance to restore the unity of the Russian state. They took full advantage of the new situation.
IN JANUARY 1919, THE VOLUNTEER ARMY—THE MILITARY ARM OF the White movement, formed in the Don region by Russian generals in late 1917—began its advance on Ukraine and central Russia. It was led by General Anton Denikin, who took first military and then political control of the White movement after the deaths of Generals Lavr Kornilov and Mikhail Alekseev in the course of 1918.
Denikin, who happened to be half-Polish by birth, was a strong proponent of an indivisible Russia. He hated the Bolsheviks for various reasons, blaming them for signing the Brest-Litovsk treaty with Germany and thereby giving up some of Russia’s historical territories. He also opposed his former fellow imperial officer Pavlo Skoropadsky for his alliance with Germany. To Denikin, the Ukrainian movement was a threat, whether based in Ukraine or in his own backyard, the Kuban region of southern Russia originally settled by Ukrainian Cossacks who now dreamed of unity with Ukraine. In the summer of 1918, Denikin sent his troops to the Kuban in order to prevent a takeover by the Bolsheviks or by the Skoropadsky regime. In the fall of 1918, Denikin dissolved the Kuban Cossack Rada and executed its pro-Ukrainian leaders, thereby solving his internal Ukrainian question.
In theory, the leaders of the White movement were not associated with any particular party and took no position on the form of government in a future Russian state. In reality, those leaders were close to former members of the Progressive Bloc in the Duma and relied on their political and intellectual support. The bloc had included not only Constitutional Democrats but also monarchists such as Vasilii Shulgin, who had returned to the Don region in the fall of 1918. He became a key political adviser to General Denikin. Shulgin helped not only to formulate but also to execute the White movement’s policy on the Ukrainian question.
When Denikin took Kyiv in August 1919, Shulgin got an opportunity to apply his solution to the Ukrainian question to the rest of Ukraine. He was the principal drafter of Denikin’s programmatic appeal “To the Inhabitants of Little Russia” on the eve of his entrance into Kyiv. The appeal proclaimed Russian as the language of state institutions and the educational system but did not outlaw the “Little Russian language.” It was to be allowed only in elementary schools to help students master Russian, as well as in private secondary schools. Its use in the court system was also permitted. This approach was very much in line with the program advocated by the Constitutional Democrats before the war and, in particular, with the thinking of Petr Struve, who opposed prohibition of the Ukrainian language and culture but envisioned them as serving the lower classes of society, reserving the higher cultural spheres for the Russian language alone.
The official policy on the Ukrainian question formulated by Shulgin and sanctioned by Denikin was a major blow to the Ukrainian cultural program, especially in light of its positive treatment by the Central Rada and the subsequent Skoropadsky regime. Meanwhile, the leaders of the White movement were not willing or able to deliver to the Ukrainian public even the minimal freedom to use the Ukrainian language that was guaranteed by Denikin’s appeal. In Kyiv and other cities under its control, the Volunteer Army busied itself with closing Ukrainian-language newspapers, schools, and institutions. With the help of Shulgin’s longtime ally Anatolii Savenko, who was put in charge of the local government’s propaganda efforts, Ukrainian-language signs were peremptorily replaced with Russian-language ones, and owners of buildings who refused the change were threatened with fines.
As Ukrainian complaints about the violation of their cultural rights reached the capitals of France and Britain, which supported Denikin’s efforts against the Bolsheviks, the Western powers tried to restrain the anti-Ukrainian zeal of Volunteer Army commanders. Their overriding goal was to promote a joint Ukrainian and White struggle against the Bolsheviks. They needed a united anti-Bolshevik front, as the Volunteer Army was in retreat after having failed to take Moscow from the Bolsheviks in November 1919. It eventually found refuge from the advancing Bolsheviks in the Crimea and adjacent regions of southern Ukraine. General Petr Wrangel, who succeeded General Denikin as commander in chief in March 1920, castigated his predecessor for trying to wage war simultaneously on various fronts against Bolshevik armies and Ukrainian detachments. Under Wrangel, the best that the beleaguered Whites would offer their potential allies territorial autonomy modeled on that which had been granted to the Don Cossacks—ethnic Russians who had a strong sense of historical and social identity distinct from that of the Russian mainstream. In the fall of 1920, Wrangel’s government, which by that time controlled little more than the Crimean Peninsula, would concede no more to the Ukrainians than its willingness to abide by the decision of the Ukrainian question rendered by the future Ukrainian Constitutional Assembly. That concession meant little in political and military terms.
In November 1920, Bolshevik troops entered the Crimea, forcing Wrangel and 150,000 of his troops to seek refuge in Istanbul. Those who decided to stay, close to 50,000 officers and soldiers of the Volunteer Army, were massacred by the Bolsheviks. Those who left the Crimea took with them the idea of Russia, one and indivisible. The political, ideological, and ethnonational project launched by members of the Progressive Bloc in the Duma in March 1917 was now a dead letter. It was up to the victorious Bolsheviks to solve the Russian question on the diminished but still enormous territory of the multiethnic state under their control.