Borderland (17 page)

The Rada survived less than a year. Manned by young left-wing idealists who refused to adopt the existing administrative apparatus or the army units voluntarily formed in their support, it was more a talking-shop than a government, never extending its authority much beyond the cities. From the outset, wrote a (sympathetic) observer, it was ‘a real Tower of Babel . . . a parliament of national elements rather than of political parties’.
¹¹
Six weeks after Lenin’s coup in Petrograd, pro-Bolshevik troops marched on Kiev, ineffectually opposed by a scratch collection of peasants, schoolboys and ex-prisoners of war under Semyon Petlyura, a leading Ukrainian socialist and the Rada’s minister for war. While the Bolsheviks bombarded the city with heavy artillery from across the Dnieper, the desperate Rada rushed through its Fourth and last Universal, declaring Ukraine unconditionally independent: ‘People of Ukraine! By your efforts, by your will, by your word, a Free Ukrainian People’s Republic has been created on Ukrainian soil. The ancient dream of your ancestors – fighters for the freedom and rights of workers – has been fulfilled . . . From this day forth, the Ukrainian People’s Republic becomes independent, subject to no one, a Free Sovereign State . . .’
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Thirteen days later the Rada fled Kiev for Volhynia, debating as it went. ‘In various obscure towns along the railway line,’ writes Hrushevsky’s biographer, ‘laws were passed about the socialisation of land, about the introduction of the New Style calendar, a new monetary system, a coat-of-arms for the Republic, Ukrainian citizenship . . .’
¹³
After eight precarious months, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was no more.

While fighting continued around Kiev, German, Russian and Ukrainian delegations were negotiating an armistice in the Belarussian town of Brest-Litovsk. Two separate agreements – one with the Bolsheviks, one with the Rada – handed Ukraine, along with the Baltics, Russian-ruled Poland and most of Belarus, to Germany. For the Bolsheviks, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the only way to stop the war. For Germany, it secured a rich source of food supply and freed up troops for the Western Front. For the Rada, promised autonomy under German protection, it was a route back into government. In the event, only Bolshevik expectations were fulfilled. The Germans occupied Kiev in March 1918, bringing Hrushevsky and the Rada with them. But a few weeks of the Ukrainians’ interminable bickering convinced them that the Rada was incapable of running even a puppet government. On 28 April, soldiers marched into a debate on the new Ukrainian constitution and disbanded the assembly. The next day Pavlo Skoropadsky, a Russified landowner who had earlier offered military support to the Rada and been turned down, was declared ‘Hetman of All Ukraine’. Sympathetic soldiers smuggled Hrushevsky out of the city on foot, his long beard hidden inside his overcoat.

Given an illusory stability by the Germans’ presence, Kiev filled with Russian refugees: ‘grey-haired bankers and their wives . . . Respectable ladies from aristocratic families and their delicate daughters, pale depraved women from Petersburg with carmine-painted lips; secretaries of civil service departmental chiefs; inert young homosexuals. Princes and junk-dealers, poets and pawnbrokers, gendarmes and actresses from the Imperial theatres.’
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Nightclubs – the ‘Lilac Negro’ and the ‘Dust and Ashes’ – opened to cater for those determined to fiddle while Rome burned. All that summer, wrote Bulgakov, ‘the cab-drivers did a roaring trade and the shop windows were crammed with flowers, great slabs of rich filleted sturgeon hung like golden planks and the two-headed eagle glowed on the labels of sealed bottles of Abrau, that delicious Russian champagne’.
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Meanwhile, in the trenches of Flanders, the Germans were losing the war. In December they evacuated Kiev, taking Skoropadsky with them, and Petlyura’s Ukrainians entered the city once again, only to flee in the face of a second Red Army advance a few weeks later. At the same time, the Allies made their sole contribution to the anti-Bolshevik cause in Ukraine, landing 60,000 French troops along the Black Sea coast in support of the Whites. They were withdrawn again four months later, after a single unsuccessful skirmish with ‘otaman’ Hryhoryev.

Over the next year and a half, Kiev changed hands with dizzying frequency. ‘The inhabitants of Kiev reckon that there were eighteen changes of power,’ wrote Bulgakov. ‘Some stay-at-home memoirists counted up to twelve of them; I can tell you that there were precisely fourteen.’
¹⁶
The Ukrainians’ last throw came in 1920, when Petlyura did a deal with the Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski, recognising Polish sovereignty over Eastern Galicia in exchange for a joint Polish–Ukrainian advance on Kiev. Pilsudski duly took Kiev in May, only to abandon it again just over a month later. Petlyura fought on with the typhoid-ridden remnants of his army until November, before accepting internment in Poland. In 1926 he was assassinated in Paris by a middle-aged watchmaker, Sholem Schwartzbard, in revenge for his troops’ massacres of Ukrainian Jews. Despite having been arrested standing over Petlyura’s body with a smoking revolver, after a sensational three-week trial Schwartzbard was acquitted. ‘There are times,’ he wrote in his confession, ‘when private sorrows disappear in public woe, like a drop of water in the sea.’
¹⁷

In Lviv, Ukrainian independence was even shorter-lived. In October 1918, when it became clear that Austro-Hungary was falling apart, officers from the Sich Riflemen, an all-Ukrainian unit of the Austrian army, ran up blue-and-yellow flags over the public buildings, and posted placards announcing a West Ukrainian National Republic. House-to-house fighting immediately broke out between the Riflemen and Pilsudski’s Polish Military Organisation. Three weeks later the Ukrainians fled east to Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk), where they managed to form a rough-and-ready government and gather an army. The following summer the Poles pushed them over the river Zbruch into central Ukraine, where they joined Petlyura in defeat at the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Why did the Ukrainians fail to get independence at the end of the First World War, when the Poles, Czechs, Balts, Romanians and Albanians all succeeded? That they should fail was not a foregone conclusion. In 1918 some strands of Western opinion saw the establishment of an independent or semi-independent Ukrainian state in eastern Galicia as a real possibility, in accordance with Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination. Pilsudski was also initially in favour, on the grounds that an autonomous Ukrainian state, federated with Poland together with Lithuania and Belarus, would act as a buffer between Poland and Russia.

But even before the Ukrainians were beaten on the battlefield, rendering an independent Ukraine a practical impossibility, they had lost the argument at the conference table. At the Paris peace talks of 1919 the Ukrainians had to make their voice heard among a host of vociferous newly freed East European nations, all of whom based their claims more on historical precedent than Wilson’s Fourteen Points. ‘When Dmowski related the claims of Poland,’ recalled a despairing American official, ‘he began at eleven o’clock in the morning and in the fourteenth century, and could only reach 1919 and the pressing problems of the moment as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. Benes followed immediately afterward with the counter-claims of Czechoslovakia, and, if I remember correctly, he began a century earlier and finished an hour later.’
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The Poles’ argument, laid out in arch-nationalist Roman Dmowski’s impressively fluent French and English, was that Poland needed sovereignty over East Galicia, the better to act as counterweight to a resurgent Germany. Ukrainian national feeling was a German invention and the Ukrainians were dangerously inclined towards Bolshevism, as witnessed by their bloody raids on Polish-owned estates. The Ukrainians could and should not, therefore, be given any sort of independence. The White representatives at the conference agreed – though of course as far as they were concerned Ukraine was part of ‘one and indivisible’ Russia.

Hopelessly out of their depth in the gilt and green-baize world of international diplomacy, the Ukrainians fought their corner as best they could. The head of the Ukrainian delegation, Arnold Margolin, dashed to and fro between the European capitals, vainly trying to stir up enthusiasm for the Galician cause. ‘In interviews with Philip Kerr . . . chief of Lloyd George’s cabinet,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I could elicit no definite opinion in regard to events in Warsaw and the Ukraine. “
Qui vivra, vena
” was his enigmatic reply to my questions.’ Herbert Asquith expressed polite interest in Ukrainian peasant customs, and asked ‘which Ukrainian party corresponded to the British Liberal Party’.
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In Berlin, Rathenau assured him that Bolshevik Russia was bound to turn democratic; an American diplomat asked him why Ukraine and Russia didn’t form ‘a federation similar to our American commonwealth’. Americans in general, Margolin discovered, were ‘as uninformed about Ukrainians as the average European is about the numerous African tribes’.
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In the end, the Allies split on the Galicia issue. Britain, with oil interests in the region, was inclined to favour the Ukrainians; France, paranoid about a resurgent Germany, strongly supported the Poles. The casting vote therefore went to the Americans. After much dithering, they too came down in favour of Poland. On 25 June the Allied Council of Ambassadors accepted Poland’s right to occupy Galicia ‘in order to protect the civilian population from the dangerous threat of Bolshevik bands’. In exchange Poland gave a vague promise, never fulfilled, of a plebiscite permanently to decide the region’s future.

Ironically enough, one of the few Western voices raised against the decision was that of the historian Lewis Namier, a Polonised Galician Jew who had taken British nationality and spent the war working for British intelligence. Despite knowing that Ukrainian marauders had burned down the family manor-house and kidnapped his mother and sister, he wrote:

The Treaty of Versailles, signed three days after the decision on Galicia, split Ukraine in four. Galicia and western Volhynia went to Poland; the Bukovyna to Romania, and the district around Uzhorod and Mukachevo, known as Ukrainian Transcarpathia, to Czechoslovakia. Central and eastern Ukraine stayed with Russia, pending the outcome of the Polish–Soviet war. The treaty, Namier told his boss, was ‘worse than incomprehensible’, it was ‘a scandalous letting down of the Ukrainians.’
²²
Poland’s border with the Soviet Union, left open at Versailles, was formalised at the Treaty of Riga in February 1921, with no Ukrainian participation whatsoever.

Namier’s forebodings were all too prescient. The Treaty of Versailles created plenty of grievances among the East European nationalities. But none matched the Ukrainians’, who, though numbering tens of millions, had been left with no state of their own at all. Their hostility to the Galicia settlement became one of the major factors destabilising Poland between the wars.

In 1923 the League of Nations recognised Poland’s permanent sovereignty over Galicia and western Volhynia on condition that it grant the region an autonomous administration, allow the use of the Ukrainian language in government, and establish an independent Ukrainian university. But despite numerous complaints to the League, these promises were never fulfilled. Though almost a third of interwar Poland’s inhabitants were non-Polish (Ukrainians made up 14 per cent of the population, Jews 9 per cent, Belarussians 3 per cent, Germans 2 per cent), Polish governments became increasingly authoritarian and nationalistic, especially after Pilsudski’s coup of 1926. Ukrainian schools were closed or turned Polish-speaking, Ukrainian professorships at Lviv University abolished, Ukrainian newspapers strictly censored, Ukrainians barred from even the lowliest government jobs, and Ukrainian candidates and voters arbitrarily struck from electoral rolls. Over 300 Orthodox churches were demolished or converted to Catholicism, and up to 200,000 Polish settlers were moved into Ukrainian towns and villages. Poland’s aim, according to the aptly named nationalist politician Stanislaw Grabski, should be ‘the transformation . . . of the Commonwealth into Polish ethnic territory.’
²³

Predictably, far from assimilating the Ukrainians, Polonisa-tion turned them radical. Though the largest Ukrainian parliamentary party, the Ukrainian National Democratic Union (UNDO), sought compromise and denounced the use of violence, the national movement passed increasingly into the hands of an underground terrorist group, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Led by an ex-Sich Rifleman, OUN was neo-fascist in rhetoric and pro-German in sympathy, drawing financial support from Germany and Lithuania. In 1930, in response to hundreds of OUN-led arson attacks on Polish-owned estates, the government mounted a violent and indiscriminate ‘pacification’ campaign in the Galician countryside. Despite clumsy cover-up attempts (the
Chicago Daily New’s
man in Lviv was trailed by ‘a woman in gumboots, who spent most of her time looking bored in the vestibule of the George Hotel’) the campaign provoked an outcry in the Western press: