Читать книгу Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist - Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe - Страница 24

The changes to the map of Europe after the First World War served as a very convenient opportunity for the establishment of several new national states on the ruins of the Russian and Habsburg empires. However, this scenario did not work in the case of the Ukrainians and some other nations, such as the Croats and Slovaks. The war revealed how heterogeneous were the Ukrainian people and how ambiguous was the concept of a Ukrainian state at this time. Like many other East Central European nationalities, Ukrainians fought on both sides of the Eastern Front and, like some other peoples, established their own armies to struggle for a nation state. Yet in the case of Ukraine, they struggled rather for two different states than for one and the same.

On 20 November 1917 in Kiev, an assembly of various political parties, known as the Tsentral’na Rada, or Central Council, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic (Ukraïns’ka Narodna Respublika, UNR). On 25 January 1918, the same political body declared the UNR to be a “Free Sovereign State of the Ukrainian People.” The UNR thereby declared its independence from the Bolsheviks, who had in November 1917 taken over power in the Russian Empire, but it was still dependent on the Germans who were occupying Kiev. On 9 February 1918, representatives of the Tsentral’na Rada signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, as a result of which the UNR was officially recognized by the Central Powers (the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman empires, and Kingdom of Bulgaria) and by the Bolshevik government of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR), but not by the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, and so forth).[150]

Between 1918 and 1921, power changed hands in Kiev several times. The first new authority, the Tsentral’na Rada, was unsure whether a Ukrainian state could exist outside the Russian Federation without the help of the Central Powers. The second authority, established on 29 April 1918 around Hetman Pavlo Skoropads’kyi, was a puppet government installed and controlled by the Germans. Skoropads’kyi left Kiev with the German army in December 1918 and at the same time, a group of Austrian and Ukrainian politicians tried and failed to establish the Austrian Ukrainophile Wilhelm von Habsburg as a replacement for Skoropads’kyi. The Directorate, a provisional state committee of the UNR, which replaced Skoropads’kyi in late 1918, was soon forced by the Soviet army to withdraw from Kiev. Most territories claimed by the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev to be part of their state were not under their control.[151]

On 1 November 1918 in Lviv—capital of eastern Galicia—the West Ukrainian National Republic (Zakhidno-Ukraïns’ka Narodna Respublika, ZUNR) was proclaimed. After a few weeks, the leaders of the ZUNR were forced to leave Lviv by the local Poles and by units of the Polish army under the command of Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski. The ZUNR continued its existence in Stanyslaviv (Stanisławów), a provincial city of Galicia. On 22 January 1919, the ZUNR united with the UNR, which had been forced by the Bolsheviks to leave Kiev for the west. However, this unification of the two Ukrainian states was mainly symbolic.[152]

The military forces of the UNR: the Ukrainian People’s Army (Armia Ukraїns’koї Narodnoї Respubliky, AUNR), and of the ZUNR: the Ukrainian Galician Army (Ukraїns’ka Halyts’ka Armiia, UHA) consisted of many different military formations. The most disciplined and best trained among them were the Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Stril’tsi), whose soldiers were recruited from Ukrainians in the Austro-Hungarian army. The armies of the ZUNR and UNR were too weak to resist the Polish and Bolshevik armies. As the result of the various complicated alliances, each Ukrainian force found itself in the camp of its enemies and felt betrayed accordingly. By 2 December 1919, while threatened by the Bolshevik army, the UNR had signed an agreement with Poland. The UNR politicians agreed to allow Poland to incorporate the territory of the ZUNR, if Poland would help to protect their state against the Bolsheviks. Ievhen Petrushevych, head of the ZUNR, on the other hand, had already decided on 17 November 1919 that the UHA would join the White Army of Anton Denikin, which was at odds with the UNR. In February 1920, the majority of the UHA soldiers deserted from the Whites and allied themselves with the Bolsheviks because the latter were at war with both the Poles and the AUNR. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that some Ukrainian politicians, for example Osyp Nazaruk, voiced the opinion that the Galician Ukrainians were a different nation from the eastern Ukrainians.[153]

Although a group of Ukrainian politicians visited the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, they were too inexperienced and too badly prepared to successfully represent the Ukrainian cause at such a gathering, where the new geopolitical shape of Europe was being determined. They also bore the stigma of having supported the Central Powers, who were blamed for the war by the victorious Allies. The Polish Endecja politician Roman Dmowski portrayed the Ukrainians in Paris as anarchistic “bandits,” the Ukrainian state as a German intrigue, and the Ruthenians from the Habsburg Empire as Ruthenians who had nothing in common with Ukrainians. Other Polish politicians at the conference, such as Stanisław Grabski and Ignacy Paderewski, characterized Ukrainians in a similar manner and thereby weakened the chances of a Ukrainian state.[154]

Other participants at the conference were also reluctant to support the idea of a Ukrainian state, partially because of the Ukrainian alliance with the Central Powers, and partially because they did not know much about Ukraine and Ukrainians. They were confused as to whether the Greek Catholic Ruthenians from the Habsburg Empire, as portrayed by the Polish delegates, were the same people as the Orthodox Ukrainians from the Russian Empire. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated: “I only saw a Ukrainian once. It is the last Ukrainian I have seen, and I am not sure that I want to see any more.”[155] By the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921, the borders of the Ukrainian territories were settled between Poland, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Ukraine, to the disadvantage of the UNR and ZUNR. The Allied Powers and many other states recognized this state of affairs, thereby confirming the nonexistence of the various Ukrainian states for which many Ukrainians had struggled between 1917 and 1921.[156]

During the revolutionary struggles, many pogroms took place in central and eastern Ukraine, especially in the provinces of Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia, which were controlled by the Directorate, the Whites, and anarchist peasant bands. The troops of the Directorate and the Whites not only permitted the anti-Jewish violence but also participated in it. The pogroms only ceased with the coming of the Red Army. Nakhum Gergel, a former deputy minister of Jewish affairs in the Ukrainian government, recorded 1,182 pogroms and 50,000 to 60,000 victims. This scale of anti-Jewish violence was much greater than that of the pogroms of 1881‒1884 and 1903‒1907. Only during the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising in 1648 did anti-Jewish violence at a comparable level take place in the Ukrainian territories: according to Antony Polonsky, at least 13,000 Jews were killed by the Cossacks commanded by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi.[157]