Читать книгу Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution - Ivan Maistrenko - Страница 13

With the overthrow of the autocracy in 1917 the Ukrainian Revolution soon differentiated itself from the wider Russian Revolution, setting as its task the achievement of national emancipation through the creation of a Ukrainian Republic. This national and democratic revolution also awoke the social revolution; the unfolding of this threefold revolutionary process constitutes the history of the Ukrainian revolution in its first year.

The first phase spanned from the February Revolution to the October seizure of power by the Central Rada and proclamation of the Ukrainian Peoples Republic (UNR) in 1917, the upsurge of the workers-peasants revolution and the dislocation of the revolutionary movement, followed by defeat by the Austro-German and conservative forces in 1918. It is at this point in the revolutionary process that we witness the emergence of the Borotbisty.

This period was one of unprecedented self-organization and mobilization of the masses, the Ukrainian movement comprised a bloc of the middle class, peasantry, workers and the revolutionary-democratic intellectuals, centered in the Ukrainian Central Rada [Council].

The Central Rada was a mass assembly consisting of councils of peasants’, soldiers’ and workers’ deputies, it expanded its constituency, drawing in the national minorities, included the pioneering organization of Jewish national autonomy.65

Table 4

Ukrainian Central Rada	Number of delegates
All-Ukrainian Council of Peasant Deputies	212
All-Ukrainian Council of Military Deputes	158
All-Ukrainian Council of Workers’ Deputies	100
Representatives of the general (non-Ukrainian) Councils of Workers’ and Soldiers Deputies	50
Ukrainian socialist parties	20
Russian socialist parties	40
Jewish socialist parties,	35
Polish socialist parties	15
Representatives of towns and provinces (elected mainly at peasant, worker and all-national congresses)	84
Representatives of trade, educational, economic and civic organizations and national parties (Moldavians, Germans, Belarusians, Tatars and others).	108

By the end of July 1917 the Central Rada consisted of 822 deputies including the representatives of the national minorities. It elected an executive body the Mala (Little) Rada, and after proclaiming autonomy a General Secretariat, the embryonic autonomous government of Ukraine.

The very existence of the Central Rada, the revolutionary parliament of Ukraine was an historic achievement; this movement transformed the situation from one where officially Ukraine did not even exist, to one in which by July 1917 the duplicitous and hostile Russian Provisional Government was forced to recognize it as a ‘higher organ for conducting Ukrainian national affairs’.66 In historical terms the Central Rada represented for Ukraine what the Easter Rising and First Dáil did for the Irish Republic.

The leaders and parties at the forefront of the Ukrainian movement were exclusively socialists, ranging from the moderate Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Federalists to the Marxist Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers Party (USDRP), to the mass Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR). The chairman of the Central Rada was the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky a socialist aligned with the UPSR, and the President of the General Secretariat, was the Volodymyr Vynnychenko of the USDRP.

The revolution in Ukraine did not mirror the situation in Russia of ‘dual power’ between the state and the councils of workers and soldiers deputies—soviets. This period of the struggle for national emancipation was characterized by profound social and political contradictions. Following the February revolution, the administrative organs of Imperial Russia such as the Military District Commissars, town and city dumas, remained intact. Like the Provisional Government they viewed the Central Rada with antagonism. Separate workers, peasants and soldiers’ soviets arose throughout Ukraine, in industrial Kryvyi Rih-Donets region alone there were 140 soviets.

In the first phase of the revolution the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (Mensheviks) and the Russian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries leaders in a number of soviets refrained from addressing the Ukrainian question.67 Nezbolin the Russian SR chairman of the Kyiv Soviet denounced the demand for autonomy “as a stab in the back for the Russian revolution”.68

In the Kyiv a regional meeting of Mensheviks in April opposed the Ukrainian movement, and favored limited cultural-national autonomy for the Ukrainian people proclaiming “political autonomy, especially a federation, is harmful”.69 The tendency to block with the Russian middle class and Provisional Government against the Ukrainian movement was recorded by Leon Trotsky:

The difference in nationality between the cities and the villages was painfully felt also in the soviets, they being predominantly city organizations. Under the leadership of the compromise parties the soviets would frequently ignore the national interests of the basic population. This was one cause of the weakness of the soviets in the Ukraine...... Under a false banner of internationalism the soviets would frequently wage a struggle against the defensive nationalism of the Ukrainians or Mussulmans, supplying a screen for the oppressive Russifying movement of the cities.70

This was not uniform, the Poltava Councils of Workers and Soldiers welcomed the “revolutionary act of the Central Rada, which declared the autonomy of Ukraine”. And urged “all revolutionary organizations and all citizens living in Ukraine to support the revolutionary aspirations of the Ukrainian people…”.71 In May, the First Congress of Peasant Deputies of Kharkiv province demanded that the Provisional Government “immediately and openly recognize the Ukrainian people’s right to national-territorial autonomy’.72

The Ukrainian word ‘rada’ and Russian ‘sovet’, meaning council, are direct transliterations, the Bolshevik leader Yuri Lapchynsky, recalled that there always seemed to be a Ukrainian who would claim he supported soviet power and also the Rada because it was a soviet.73 Vynnychenko considered at that time the revolution appeared to be following a course concurrent with Ukraine’s class composition:

Thus, it seems that it would have been logical to continue establishing only the workers’ and peasants’ statehood, which would have corresponded to the entire nation’s character. And it seemed to have been so planned during the first period, especially during the struggle against the Provisional Government. And our power seemed to have been established in such a way. The Central Rada really consisted of councils of peasants’, soldiers’ and workers’ deputies, who were elected at the respective congresses and sent to the Central Rada. And the General Secretariat seemed to have been consisting only of socialists. And the leading parties, Social Democrats and Socialist-Revolutionaries, seemed to have been standing firmly on the basis of social revolution.74

The wide socialist composition of the Central Rada was reflected in the debates that arose in response to the challenges it faced. In some aspects they were a continuation of controversies that gripped the social democratic workers movement in preceding years over perspectives and character of the revolution.

The Central Rada faced burning questions of ending the war, the agrarian revolution and the drive to workers’ control, encapsulated in the slogan ‘land for the peasants and factories for the workers’. By late 1917 leaders of the Central Rada at key moments began to lag behind the pace and aspirations of the popular movement from below.75 Relations strained between those moderate and centrist elements and the radicalizing rank and file of the movement.

The difficulties of the Central Rada were exacerbated by an often overlooked fact that as it expanded its base it drew in parties such as the RSDRP Mensheviks and the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, who sat in the Provisional Government. The Menshevik/SR ‘Revolutionary Defensist’ centrist currents who were for continuing the war and supportive of the Provisional Government was particularly dominant in Kyiv committees of their party. Which was where the Rada was located. They opposed ‘independent implementation’ to secure of Ukraine’s autonomy, on land and ending the war before the convening of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly.76

Meanwhile the popular movement pushed for robust action to establish autonomy from Russia, the soldiers demanded their own self-organized regiments and unilateral action for peace. On the pivotal land question the right of centre USDRP leader Bory Martos, and Kost Matsiievch of the UPSF undertook development of policy for the Central Rada—but implementation was delayed pending the Constituent Assembly. Regardless, the agrarian revolution advanced from below, millions of peasants many enrolled in the Ukrainian Peasants Union (Spilka) organized by the UPSR, and in Councils of Peasants’ Deputies, proceeded to seize land themselves.