This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
------------------------

Ukraine 1917: socialism and nationalism in a world turned upside down

By:   []

Date: 2021-11

October 1917 was the climax of a revolution we have always called Russian, but was so much more.

In Petrograd, the Russian Empire’s capital, the provisional government that had ruled since February collapsed and Bolshevik-led workers’ and soldiers’ soviets, or councils, took control. In Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, power fell to the Central Council, or Rada, which had since the summer pressed for Ukrainian autonomy within the Russian state.

The Rada, like all the parliamentary institutions emerging in the empire’s ruins, sat atop a furious movement – in the Russian army and the countryside as much as the towns – which was increasingly beyond its control. In Ukraine, this movement sought an autonomous national government – but in a soviet, not parliamentary form.

This whirlwind year in the life of Ukraine is the focus of a new book by journalist Marko Bojcun, ‘The Workers’ Movement and the National Question in Ukraine: 1897-1918’, – which raises important questions about opportunities lost in 1917 and how coalitions can break apart under severe strain, with tragic human costs.

Bojcun describes the growing support among workers’ councils across the country in 1917 for a national government based on, and elected by, the councils, and that it “maintained solidarity with the Russian Soviet government”.

But within four months, this hope of popular, democratic rule by autonomous Ukrainian soviet institutions lay in ruins. Military forces controlled by the Russian Bolshevik-led government and the Rada were at each other’s throats. Nationalist narratives drowned out emancipatory, class-based ones. On all sides, there were pogroms against Jewish communities, foreshadowing the slaughter of Jews during the civil war of 1919-20.

Unity proves elusive

Bojcun traces the process by which hope for a refashioned Rada, and for unity with the Council of People’s Commissars (that is, the soviet government in Petrograd), escaped the revolution’s grasp. The detail is meticulous, as it is throughout this authoritative history of the pre-revolutionary workers’ movement and of the earth-shaking events between February 1917 and April 1918.

Thus, support for the moderate socialist politicians who dominated the Rada evaporated in the autumn of 1917 – much as it did for their counterparts in Russia – because they resisted the wave of peasant land seizures, and refused to pull out of the war, even as soldiers deserted the front and returned to their villages. In a grim foretaste of the civil war, some returning soldiers attacked Jewish communities – and while Jewish soldiers organised their own self-defence, the Rada vacillated, unable to discipline the forces nominally under its control.

Then, in late November 1917, as the Rada’s leaders struggled to constitute their own army, they stood aside as Alexey Kaledin, a Don Cossack general, assembled a counter-revolutionary military force in south-east Ukraine and prepared to march on Moscow. The Rada agreed that Cossack units could cross its territory to join Kaledin, and its military representatives discussed with the Cossacks possible joint action against the Bolsheviks.

After Kaledin’s troops put down a pro-soviet rising by armed mineworkers in eastern Ukraine, the Bolsheviks in Petrograd broke off relations with the Rada. Leading Bolsheviks in Kyiv threatened the Rada with a military assault. The attack was quickly suppressed by forces commanded by Symon Petliura, the Rada’s minister of defence (and, later, its leader). The Bolshevik leaders departed to Kharkiv, where in December, with the support of local soviets, they formed an alternative government.
[END]

[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-1917-socialism-and-nationalism-in-a-world-turned-upside-down/
[2] url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

OpenDemocracy via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/