Borotbism: A Chapter in the History of the Ukrainian Revolution

Analysis of the population of the strategically vital urban centers illustrates the predicament of the Ukrainian movement. In 1917 the intelligentsia and white-collar staff formed 26 per cent of the total urban population, and the petty-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie another 29 per cent. These middle-class strata represented some 55 per cent of the urban population, with the proletariat, at 23 per cent, and the semi-proletariat, at 21 per cent. Ukrainians were poorly represented in the first two groups, and formed a majority of the latter.50 In Kyiv two thirds of Ukrainians were classed as workers, servants or unemployed.51 The resulting alienation was captured by the Ukrainian Marxist Vasyl Shakhray considered this demography:

reflected the centuries-old government of the Tsarist bureaucracy and the Russian bourgeoisie, landowners and capitalists. As in a “drop of water the sun is reflected in all the colors of the rainbow, so these figures reflect the result of the national, social, political and cultural oppression that Ukraine had experienced for centuries.52

In considering the awakening Ukrainian masses, Shakhray asked how it can be a surprise that the Ukrainian peasant was so suspicious of their foreign overlords, of ‘the Jewish-merchant, the Great Russian-official, an assistant to the Polish-landowner, the clerk.’ Writing through the eyes of a peasant Shakhray wrote:

The city rules the village and the city is ‘alien’. The city draws to itself all the wealth and gives the village nothing in return. The city extracts taxes, which never return to the village, to Ukraine. During the 14 years from 1900–1914, 8 of the Ukrainian provinces gave 7507 million, and of that only 4099 million (54 per cent) was spent on Ukraine, and 3409 million (45.6 per cent were lost to Ukraine. In the city one must pay bribes to the official, be freed from bullying and red tape. In the city the merchant is lying, selling and buying. In the city the landlord eats good things collected in the village. In the city the lights are burning, there are schools, theatres, and music plays. The city is expensively dressed as for a holiday, it eats and drinks well, many people promenade.

In the village there is, except for hard work, impenetrable darkness and misery, almost nothing. The city is aristocratic it is alien. It is not ours, not Ukrainian. It is Great-Russian, Jewish, Polish, but not ours, not Ukrainian.53

Regarded the breadbasket of Europe, Ukrainian was synonymous with peasant. In 1917 Ukraine remained an agrarian country; 80 per cent of the population lived in the countryside and 68 per cent relied on agriculture for their livelihood.54 It was here that the social and national questions became enmeshed in an explosive cocktail, setting the scene for the agrarian revolution of 1917 and the base of movements such as the Borotbisty.

In the four years prior to the ‘Emancipation’ reform of 1861, Ukraine saw an estimated 276 peasant uprisings, but the end of serfdom did not solve the agrarian problem. The reform created new obstacles, the peasantry faced the curtailment of the area of land available for their use, an excessive redemption, preventing buying back the land which was originally theirs, they were burdened by excessive payments, iniquitous income tax, land tax, an array of dues and a series of labor duties leftover from serfdom.

A process of social differentiation of the peasantry occurred in the context of capitalist development though not as presented by certain historians and Soviet literature.55 The latter placed particular emphasis on the rich peasants the ‘kulaks’ (kurkul in Ukrainian)—a term of abuse used frequently for any expression of Ukrainian nationalism. The standard categories of Soviet literature of which much historical data has been drawn, divided the peasantry into poor, middle and rich famers, the kulak. These categories are based on landholdings, and on this basis almost half of the peasant population of Ukraine in 1917 was poor, one-third middle strata.56 A high proportion of poor peasants’ worked elsewhere, agricultural laborers, or in trades, over a million left their homes each year to work in seasonal worker.57

The national composition of the class of landowners further entwined the national and agrarian question. Of some 25 million rural inhabitants the class of landowners comprised 1.1 per cent yet controlled 30 per cent of the land.58 Alongside the Russian state, church and monasteries, a third of arable land was held by a class of which three out of four were Russians or Poles.59 There was further estrangement from the petty traders who bought the grain at the cheapest price and in return sold manufactured goods at the highest price; only one out of seven was Ukrainian.60 In Right-Bank Ukraine, in Kyiv, Podillia and Volhynia provinces where large latifundia remained since the era of Polish rule; poverty was the most acute in the Empire.61

Already in 1902 mass peasant strikes in Poltava and Kharkiv began to fuse social demands with that of an autonomous Ukraine.

Socio-economic inequality of the colonial agrarian system was a major factor in the developing revolutionary ferment in the Ukrainian provinces, but as Holubnychy points out there were several factors to take into account. It is also necessary to appreciate that the agrarian revolution that unfolded in 1917 was not in isolation but was part of a wider revolutionary situation. The experience of the 1902 strikes and the 1905 revolution was alive, education was spreading literacy in the countryside and assisted the extensive socialist and cooperative agitation, youth had gained experience in the Army, and the overall acute situation was exacerbated by the war.62 Karl Kautsky the foremost figure of international socialism before 1917 had observed of Ukraine:

Capitalism develops in only one dimension for the Ukrainian people—it proletarianizes them, while the other dimension—the flowering of the productive forces, the accumulation of surplus and wealth—is mainly for the benefit of other countries. Because of this, capitalism reveals to Ukrainians only its negative, revolutionizing dimension...it does not lead to an increase in their wealth.63

The development of capitalism in Ukraine was not an isolated process, it occurred in the context of an expanding capitalist system which integrated the Russian Empire into the world economy through social, economic, military and political connections. Divided between rival empires that were part of two opposed camps, the Ukrainian question was situated in a vital strategic vector of European capitalism. It was in the strategic interests’ of European capital to prevent a Ukrainian republic emerge, especially one constituted by the labor and socialist movement.

In Ukraine a nation of workers and peasants with no nationally conscious capitalist class it logically followed that the driving forces of the revolution should correspond to the nation’s character. This had already been illustrated in the influential work of the leading theorist of the Ukrainian Social Democrats, Mykola Porsh that the:

Thus only the proletariat can assume the leadership in the struggle for autonomy.... the Ukrainian national movement will not be a bourgeois movement of triumphant capitalism as in the case of the Czechs. It will be more like the Irish case, a proletarian and semi-proletarianized peasant movement.64

These contours of the Ukrainian movement were already apparent in 1905, having produced its own organic intellectuals and organized in political parties, unions, co-operatives, cultural and Prosvita educational associations. The movement which emerged at the start of the 20th century contained an energetic current which was strongly influenced by socialist thought and the struggles of the worker-peasant masses. It was the starting point of a new period for the Ukrainian movement. The scale and power of the revolution in Ukraine would come as a surprise even to those who had expected it and worked for it.

3. Problems of the Ukrainian Revolution

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.