The Ukrainian Revolution 1917–1921: how Ukraine ended up in the USSR (09.07.2026)
A long interview with the historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya for the channel of “Oleh from Bavaria” — a sequential account of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 and of how the Ukrainian lands ended up in the USSR. Dribnytsya walks through the state projects of the era (the UNR, the Hetmanate, the ZUNR, the Directorate), the battle of Kruty, the Treaty of Brest, the Hetman coup, Konovalets’s Sich Riflemen and Motovylivka, the Odesa intervention, the Makhnovshchyna, the Polish alliance and internment, and closes with the mechanics of the USSR’s formation. The main source for the article on Ukrainian statehood prior to the Bolshevik conquest.
Key moments
- 05:02 Modern Ukraine has roots in 1917, not merely in 1991
- 09:42 The parties of the Central Rada: SRs, Social Democrats, Mikhnovskyi's independentists
- 22:16 The battle of Kruty: ~500 volunteers against a Bolshevik armored train
- 24:44 The Treaty of Brest: two treaties and a Turkish copy of the Ukrainian text
- 27:52 450,000 German and Austrian troops enter Ukraine
- 28:47 Skoropadskyi: a combat general and a Russian monarchist
- 41:15 Konovalets's Sich Riflemen in Bila Tserkva and the Directorate's uprising
- 42:40 Motovylivka and the Directorate's triumphal entry into Kyiv
- 42:58 The Directorate's membership: five men, but two ran affairs
- 44:44 The Odesa intervention: French, Greeks, Senegalese, General d'Anselme
- 51:32 Makhno: from Huliaipole to Père Lachaise
- 57:37 The Treaty of Warsaw and the internment of the UNR army in Poland
- 59:32 Transcarpathia within Masaryk's Czechoslovakia
- 1:03:38 The formation of the USSR: the positions of Stalin, Lenin and the Georgian Bolsheviks
- 1:13:50 The USSR's founding date: 30 December 1922 or 6 July 1923
- 1:16:11 The central myth: "Lenin created Ukraine"