The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1921: a state before the USSR

The myth: “the state of Ukraine was invented by the Bolsheviks (or in 1991)”

In a street debate, a Russian-speaking interlocutor articulates a widespread thesis: the state of Ukraine, supposedly, appeared only in 1991; before that there was merely the Soviet Ukrainian SSR — and Ukrainians had no statehood of their own before then^[1]. From here it is one step to the Kremlin slogan “Lenin/the Bolsheviks created Ukraine,” which Vox Veritatis examines separately in the article “Did the Bolsheviks ‘invent’ Ukraine?”.

The problem is that between “the old empire” and “1991” — and all the more so before the Ukrainian SSR — lies an entire era of state-building that historians call the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921. It is there, and not in a Soviet decree, that the root of modern Ukrainian statehood lies.

February 1917: the revolution and the Central Rada

Ukrainian statehood of 1917–1921 begins not with the Third Universal but half a year earlier — with the February Revolution. After the Russian Empire fell, power in Petrograd passed to the Provisional Government, and dozens of local bodies of authority arose across its former territory. In Kyiv, Ukrainian political parties created their own representative body — the Ukrainian Central Rada, which acted in effect as a Ukrainian parliament^[10].

The Central Rada arose on 4 (17) March 1917; it was headed by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevskyi. This was a body meant to defend the interests of Ukrainians — for the time being, within Russia^[11]. In other words, Ukrainian self-government took shape almost immediately after the fall of the empire, long before the Bolshevik coup.

The Universals and the bargaining with the Provisional Government

The Central Rada set out its vision in the Universals. By the First Universal (10 (23) June 1917) it proclaimed the autonomy of Ukraine — but within a democratic, federative Russia, rather than as a secession^[12]. The Provisional Government, however, wanted to see Russia as democratic yet centralized, without a federal structure — hence the prolonged bargaining between Kyiv and Petrograd.

Dribnytsia corrects a common confusion in passing: the Provisional Government was headed first not by Alexander Kerensky but by Prince Georgy Lvov; Kerensky became premier only in July 1917^[13]. (The video mentions “June” — Kerensky took over the government at the turn of June and July by the old style, in July by the new.)

A compromise was nevertheless found. At the end of June 1917 (29 June / 12 July), a governmental delegation headed by Kerensky and Irakli Tsereteli arrived in Kyiv. As a result of the negotiations, on 3 (16) July 1917 the Central Rada adopted the Second Universal: the Provisional Government for the first time recognized the Central Rada as a regional body of power — in effect, the parliament of Ukraine^[14]. At the same time, in June 1917, a government of its own arose — the General Secretariat headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, while the Central Rada itself continued to be led by Hrushevskyi^[15]. Thus Ukraine, even before the proclamation of the UNR, had both a parliament and a government recognized by the central authority of the former empire.

All of this was struck out by the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. Soviet Russia did not recognize the Central Rada and launched a war against it: some 60,000 of its troops, under the command of Mikhail Muravyov, invaded the territory of Left-Bank Ukraine, captured Kharkiv, and advanced on Kyiv^[16]. It was in these conditions that the Central Rada proclaimed first the UNR and then independence.

Why there was no army: autonomists versus independentists

Here lies the root of the chief weakness of the Central Rada era — the absence of a regular army. The reason was not accidental but ideological. The majority of the Central Rada consisted of Ukrainian Social Democrats, who saw Ukraine as an autonomy within a democratic federative Russia — and an autonomous state, by the legal thinking of the time, ought not even to have an army of its own^[27]. Those who insisted on independence and a separate military — above all Mykola Mikhnovskyi and his like-minded allies (later the independentist camp would also be joined by Viacheslav Lypynskyi) — remained a minority^[27]. So when Soviet Russia struck, there was almost nothing with which to defend: the UNR proclaimed independence only in the Fourth Universal and already under the pressure of invasion, rather than in advance. This is not “the weakness of the Ukrainian idea” in general, but a concrete political miscalculation by the autonomist majority — a lesson that the eras of the Hetmanate and the Directorate paid for in blood.

The collapse of two empires and the rise of the UNR

The First World War destroyed both empires that divided the Ukrainian lands — the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian. On the territory of nine provinces of the former Russian Empire, the Ukrainian Central Rada, by the Third Universal of 7 (20) November 1917, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic^[2]. At that point the UNR was still conceived as an autonomous part of a future non-Bolshevik, federative Russia — the empire had collapsed, but the form of a new common state was still being sought.

The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd and the war that Soviet Russia launched against Kyiv struck out that prospect. Therefore, on 22 January 1918, the Central Rada adopted the Fourth Universal, by which the UNR was proclaimed an independent, sovereign state^[3]. In other words, an independent Ukrainian state was proclaimed years before the Bolsheviks took control of Ukraine — and in defiance of them, not by their will.

The Treaty of Brest: Soviet Russia itself recognized the UNR

The young republic needed protection against the Bolshevik offensive and sought a way out of the world war. On 9 February 1918, the UNR delegation signed a separate Brest-Litovsk treaty with the Central Powers — the first international treaty of independent Ukraine. Under it, German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered Ukraine and drove out the Bolshevik units.

A telling detail: under the separate Brest-Litovsk treaty that Soviet Russia itself signed on 3 March 1918, Moscow formally renounced Ukraine and recognized the UNR^[5]. That is, the Bolsheviks legally recognized the Ukrainian state as a fact — long before the Ukrainian SSR.

The German ally: a rescuer that became a problem

The Treaty of Brest brought the UNR not only international recognition but also real military force. Around 450,000 German and Austro-Hungarian troops entered the Ukrainian lands, while the Bolshevik forces at that moment numbered only 40,000–60,000 — a tenfold superiority for the allies. The Red units retreated, and they were driven out even beyond the borders of present-day Ukraine^[17]. This very balance of forces shows the scale of events: the young republic was rescued not by “a handful of Petliurists” but by a full-fledged international coalition with a treaty of its own.

The alliance, however, had a price. Under the Treaty of Brest, the UNR was obliged to supply the Central Powers with food, but the Central Rada was unable to do so — it simply had no state apparatus of coercion: neither a police force nor a tax system with which to extract grain from the peasants^[18]. The German command then went over the head of the Ukrainian authorities. Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, who headed the German troops in Ukraine, over the head of the Central Rada issued an appeal to the peasants — ordering them to sow, with the harvest to become the property of the German army. This provoked a direct conflict between the Central Rada and the German command^[19]: the formal ally began to behave like an occupation administration.

It was precisely this conflict, and not “the weakness of the Ukrainian idea,” that drew a line under the era of the Central Rada. On 29 April 1918, with German support, a coup took place: an armed company of German soldiers entered the Rada’s premises and dispersed the deputies^[20]. Ukraine did not disappear — it changed its form of government.

The Hetmanate: a coup, but not the disappearance of the state

That coup brought to power Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and the UNR gave way to the Ukrainian State (the Hetmanate)^[4]. This was a change of the form of government, not the disappearance of statehood: its own administration, army, and diplomacy functioned, and its own money was printed. When Germany lost the war, in the autumn of 1918 power returned to the republicans.

The ZUNR and the Act of Zluka: unification on 22 January 1919

In the western Ukrainian lands, the collapse of Austria-Hungary gave rise to a second Ukrainian state. As a result of the November Uprising, on 1 November 1918 Ukrainian authority arose in Lviv, and on 13 November the Ukrainian National Rada adopted the fundamental law of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, with its capital in Lviv. (In the video debate Dribnytsia gives the date “13 October 1918” — this is a slip: the ZUNR was proclaimed in November 1918.)

On 22 January 1919, on St. Sophia Square in Kyiv, the UNR and the ZUNR ceremonially united — this is the Act of Zluka, the proclamation of a united Ukraine. The ZUNR entered the UNR as a Western Region with autonomous rights^[7]. Two Ukrainian states, on their own, without any Bolshevik or imperial intermediary, united into one — and this is an act of sovereign state will.

War on every front

The Ukrainian states arose surrounded by enemies. From its very first day the ZUNR fought for Lviv and Galicia on several fronts — above all against Poland, which had just restored its independence and laid claim to the same lands^[9]. The Ukrainian Galician Army was led by the UNR general Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko^[8]. The Dnieper UNR of the Directorate fought simultaneously against Soviet Russia and against Denikin’s White Volunteer Army; the stocks of weaponry left over from the Austro-Hungarian army were running out, while Poland was generously financed by France.

Finding itself in a dead end, the head of the Directorate, Symon Petliura, entered into a forced alliance with Poland: under the Treaty of Warsaw (21–24 April 1920), Poland recognized the independence of the UNR, and the armies became allies against the Bolsheviks. In 1920 Ukrainian and Polish troops fought together against Soviet Russia^[6], but the Soviet-Polish war did not end in the UNR’s favor: under the Peace of Riga of 1921, Poland recognized Soviet Ukraine, and the Treaty of Warsaw lapsed.

Neighboring state projects: real and stage-prop

The UNR, the Hetmanate, and the ZUNR were not isolated flashes but part of a continuous map of state-building that covered the former imperial borderlands after 1917. Distinguishing within it the genuine national states from the Bolshevik stage-props is important not least because today’s Kremlin propaganda selectively “inherits” precisely the latter.

A real national project, alongside the Ukrainian one, was the Crimean People’s Republic. Practically simultaneously with the UNR, it was proclaimed by the Crimean Tatars; its leaders, headed by Noman Çelebicihan — a lawyer and mufti — saw Crimea as an autonomy within a democratic federative Russia^[21]. The Bolsheviks shot Çelebicihan as early as the beginning of 1918, and the poem he had written, “Ant etkenmen,” later became the national anthem of the Crimean Tatars. This is a fact inconvenient for the narrative of “Crimea has always been Russian”: there was a statehood of its own on the peninsula — a Tatar one, neither Russian nor “no one’s.”

By contrast, the Bolshevik “republics” of the same period were for the most part paper formations with a political purpose. The most telling is the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic (February–March 1918), the “brainchild” of the Bolshevik Artem (Fyodor Sergeyev). He proposed cutting up states not by a national but by an economic principle — uniting the Donetsk coal basin and the Kryvyi Rih iron-ore basin; this “republic” had essentially neither a government nor a militia of its own, lasted a few weeks, and even Lenin did not support the idea^[22]. A detail that strikes directly at the present day: the pro-Russian “DPR” of 2014 declared itself the heir of precisely this DKR of 1918 — that is, of a project that was neither a state, nor “Russian,” nor viable, and which the Bolshevik leadership itself rejected.

Equally instrumental was the Taurida Soviet Republic: the Bolsheviks created it deliberately, to show that Crimea was “not Ukraine,” at the moment when the UNR signed the Treaty of Brest and German and Austro-Hungarian troops were entering the Ukrainian lands^[23]. Alongside it, the Odesa Soviet Republic (which was largely the work of anarchists) and others held out briefly — all short-lived and mostly nominal^[23]. The common denominator: these “republics” arose not from the will of the local population but as moves in someone else’s game — to cut territory off from Ukraine.

In a category of its own falls the Makhnovshchyna. Nestor Makhno — an anarcho-communist — did not build a state on principle: he fought against all the state formations in southern Ukraine (both against the Hetmanate and against the Directorate, with which he first concluded an agreement and then broke it), trying in his own way to defend the interests of the peasantry of Zaporizhzhia and the Huliaipole region. This is not “a form of Ukrainian statehood” but its anarchist negation — an important backdrop to the era, but not a state project.

Crimea and “Greater Ukraine”: what the UNR sought — and what it did not

It is worth separately dispelling two opposite myths around Crimea — and the very course of events refutes both. On the one hand, the Central Rada did not lay claim to Crimea: the Third Universal explicitly delineated the UNR by nine provinces without Crimea. Only at the beginning of 1919, with the change of the head of government, did a view emerge (and even then not among everyone) that Crimea ought to belong to Ukraine^[24]. On the other hand, certain attempts to gain a foothold on the peninsula did take place: the well-known campaign of Colonel Petro Bolbochan at the beginning of 1918, when War Minister Zhukovskyi gave him only an oral order to occupy Crimea ahead of the Germans. Bolbochan drove the Soviet troops out of there with a bayonet attack, but with the arrival of the German units the Ukrainian detachment had to be withdrawn^[25]. That is, Crimea during the revolutionary era was an arena where the Ukrainian state rather tried to act than possessed it as something “originally its own.”

Kuban in this story is not an abstract “ethnic map” but a real state project that was to unite with Ukraine. In parallel with the UNR, the Black Sea Cossacks (descendants of the Zaporozhians) proclaimed the Kuban People’s Republic, and on 22 January / 16 February 1918 its Rada adopted a resolution to join Ukraine on a federative basis. During the Hetmanate era, direct negotiations between the government of Hetman Skoropadskyi and the Kuban People’s Republic (as well as with the Crimean government of Suleiman Sulkevich) were under way about the entry of Kuban and Crimea into the Ukrainian State^[28]. The union failed only because the Ukrainian State fell in the autumn of 1918, and the Kuban government was later dispersed by the White general Denikin, for whom “a single and indivisible Russia” excluded any Ukrainian Kuban^[28]. That is, the Ukrainian lands beyond the Don are not an “imperial appetite” of modern Ukraine but an interrupted state union of the revolutionary era.

The notion of “a Greater Ukraine from Slovakia to Kuban” also has a concrete, verifiable origin — and it is not a modern fake. The map that periodically surfaces online (with Kuban, the Starodub region, the Kursk region, the Voronezh region, southern Belarus, and Crimea) is the project of the UNR delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919: a vision of Ukraine within ethnic borders, that is, where the Ukrainian population lived compactly^[26]. The conference was dividing up postwar Europe, but the Ukrainian delegations (the UNR and the ZUNR, which moreover acted separately) were effectively not admitted to it — and this “wish” remained on paper^[26]. This is proof neither of “imperial appetites” of Ukraine nor of the “invented” nature of its borders, but the ordinary way of the era of asserting the boundaries of a young state on an ethnic principle — exactly as all its neighbors did.

The pogroms of the revolutionary era: an honest reckoning

The revolutionary era also has its dark side, which can be neither concealed nor shifted onto others’ shoulders alone. In 1918–1921, the Ukrainian lands were swept by a wave of Jewish pogroms — one of the most massive anti-Jewish catastrophes in Europe before the Holocaust. Modern scholarship counts at least around 31,000 documented dead in more than a thousand pogroms (the statistics of Nokhem Gergel, 1928), and taking into account deaths from wounds, hunger, and disease, the estimates reach around 100,000 killed. The higher figures (150,000–200,000) that occasionally appear are impressionistic estimates rather than a verified count. To stay silent about this would mean repeating the very method that Vox Veritatis exposes in others.

The first thing an honest history must say: the pogroms were carried out by different forces, and not only “alien” ones. Jewish shtetls were ravaged by Denikin’s White Guards, by Red Army soldiers, by independent peasant otaman-”fathers” — and by part of the forces nominally subordinate to the UNR. By Gergel’s classic count, about 40% of the pogroms fall to formations associated with the Directorate; the rest to otamans (≈29%), Denikin’s forces (≈17–20%), and the Red Army (≈9%)^[29]. It is fundamentally important what those 40% mean: not “the state policy of the UNR,” but the collapse of military control — the pogroms were carried out by undisciplined units, nominally loyal to a government that at the same time granted Jews an autonomy unprecedented until then. The historian acknowledges this in the video interview as well: the UNR army was “unequivocally involved” in the pogroms, though “Petliura was opposed to this”^[30].

For the official position of the Ukrainian authorities was the opposite of the pogroms. The first UNR was created by parties — Ukrainian Social Democrats and Socialist Revolutionaries — in whose programs there was no antisemitism^[31]. On 22 January 1918, the same day as the Fourth Universal, the Central Rada adopted the Law on National-Personal Autonomy: Jews, Poles, and Russians received the right to their own national self-government, schools, and publications in their native languages. Under the Directorate’s government a Ministry of Jewish Affairs was established — one of the first such departments in world state practice (it was headed by Moisei Zilberfarb, later by Wolf Latsky-Bertholdi), and the first Ukrainian banknotes bore inscriptions in three languages — Ukrainian, Russian, and Hebrew^[32]. This is not retrospective rhetoric but institutions laid into the very foundation of the republic.

The bloodiest episode at the same time poses the question of responsibility most sharply. On 15 February 1919 in Proskuriv (now Khmelnytskyi), the otaman Ivan Semesenko, commander of a brigade bearing Petliura’s name, after suppressing a Bolshevik uprising incited his soldiers against the Jewish population: in a single day around 1,500, by some estimates up to 1,700 people, perished^[33]. Russian propagandists ask for years: “why did Petliura not punish Semesenko?” The answer is more complex than the convenient myth. Petliura issued orders against pogroms (in particular an army order of August 1919, which directed that pogromists be brought before a court as traitors), but in the conditions of complete anarchy in 1919–1920 — when the UNR army, the Poles, the Galician Army, the Entente forces, Denikin’s troops, and the Bolsheviks were all fighting on Ukrainian territory at once — he could not realistically control the otamans^[34]. The UNR ultimately arrested Semesenko himself and shot him by the verdict of a military court in 1920.

Hence the conclusion that modern scholarship shares: the Soviet cliché “Petliura — the chief pogromist” is false — there is no personal order from him to stage pogroms; but there is a real responsibility for not always and not promptly stopping them^[34]. The historian Yuriy Mytrofanenko, a specialist on the otamanshchyna, demonstrates that the pogroms of 1919 were for the most part the work of uncontrolled otamans, a “peasant vendetta” of an era of collapsing authority, and not a policy of the UNR^[35]. A telling counterpoint: the Galician Army of the ZUNR, where discipline was preserved, carried out no organized pogroms on the territory under its control (and the Lviv pogrom of November 1918 was staged by Polish military and civilians already after the Ukrainian forces had withdrawn)^[36]. Where the state held, the security of minorities held too; where it collapsed, banditry and antisemitism gained the upper hand.

Why this matters for the article’s subject. The Kremlin narrative uses the pogroms in reverse — to portray Ukrainian statehood as “Petliurist antisemitism” and to deny its legitimacy. An honest history does otherwise: it acknowledges the crimes openly, but distinguishes the official position of the republic (autonomy, a ministry, orders against pogroms) from the crimes of uncontrolled units in an era of anarchy — and does not pin all the blame on “alien” armies alone. This is the same criterion of truth by which Vox Veritatis examines the instrumentalization of the memory of the Holocaust and Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations: the past does not become brighter through silence — it becomes more honest through completeness.

What this means

The Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 in the end did not hold on to independence — the Bolsheviks militarily conquered the greater part of Ukraine and founded on it the Ukrainian SSR, which in 1922 entered the USSR. But the defeat of a state is no proof of its non-existence. Over those years Ukrainians proclaimed independence (the Fourth Universal, 22.01.1918), unification (the Act of Zluka, 22.01.1919), signed international treaties recognized even by Soviet Russia, and had governments, armies, and money of their own.

That is why the thesis “the Bolsheviks created the state of Ukraine” is false by its very logic: one cannot “create” what one first had to conquer and whose independence one had already recognized on paper. The Bolsheviks did not give Ukraine its statehood — they took away the statehood that already existed. Exactly how they later inverted this history, turning a conquest into a “creation,” is covered in the adjacent analysis of the role of the Bolsheviks; and the heir of the revolutionary statehood in Transcarpathia is covered in the article “Carpatho-Ukraine 1939”.