Ukraine

THE MODERN HISTORY of Ukraine began with the efforts of the Ukrainian people to throw off Russian Bolshevik rule in the Revolution of 1917. Conquered by Russia in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ukrainians had never lost their zest for freedom. One of their heroes had been the Cossack Bohdan Kmehlnitsky, who had fought for Ukrainian freedom in the 17th century. Tragically, his Cossacks, in fighting for their own rights, savagely murdered thousands of innocent Jews in one of the first pogroms in East European or Russian history. The greatest account of the Ukrainian Cossack struggle for freedom was Taras Bulba, written by one of Russia's greatest writers, Nikolai Gogol. Coincidentally, Gogol was born in the Ukraine in March 1809.

When Tzar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate in March 1917, the Ukrainians took this as the end of their allegiance to Russia. As Basil Dmytryshyn wrote in USSR: A Concise History, “there had been developing and maturing for some time a national movement.” Ukrainian nationalism took form in the establishment of the Rada, or central Executive Council, soon after the fall of the tzar. Premier Alexander Kerensky, head of the Russian provisional government since he replaced Prince Georgi Lvov on July 7, was anxious to come to an agreement with the Ukrainians. Not only would the secession of the Ukraine bring Russia's enemies in World War I, Germany and Austria-Hungary, almost within striking distance of Moscow, it would severely deprive Kerensky of the vital Ukrainian coal and grain reserves that Russia needed for survival.

At first, the Ukrainians simply wished for more autonomy within the empire, and an end to “Russification” the policy followed during the time of the tzars in occupied regions like parts of Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which attempted to erase national culture and language to help cement the peoples to the authority of Russia and its tzars. When there was no [Page 917]immediate response, on June 23, Ukrainians announced in the First Universal Document their intention to begin controlling their own affairs. On July 12, 1917, Kerensky visited the ancient capital of the Ukraine, Kiev, and gave general acceptance of Ukrainian demands. In a time of war, Kerensky simply had no other alternative.

After Vladimir I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained power in the October (new calendar, November) 1917 Revolution, they moved quickly to reincorporate the Ukraine within the bounds of the old Russian Empire. But, as Robert Service noted in Lenin: A Biography, he was “an ideologue, but he was also a sinuous politician in pursuit of his ideological goals. In order to govern Ukraine it was crucial, as Lenin discerned, to attract political groups that had once been hostile to the Bolsheviks.” In January 1918, Russian Red Army troops occupied Kiev.

However, Lenin would die prematurely in January 1924. Josef Stalin, who had become general secretary of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in 1922, did not possess any of the political tact of Lenin. And, although he was the party's resource on “nationalities questions” in the new Soviet Union, he showed no understanding of the dialectics of Ukrainian national development. Under Stalin, the Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union. And, as the “wheat basket” for much of the country, it suffered acutely under the movement to collective agriculture that took place after Stalin consolidated his power with the fall of Leon Trotsky in 1927. (Trotsky, as opposed to the ruthless centralism of Stalin, had countenanced—-at least a measure of—democracy within the party ranks.)

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