{"id":21366,"date":"2022-04-18T20:13:55","date_gmt":"2022-04-18T20:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=21366"},"modified":"2022-04-18T20:13:55","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T20:13:55","slug":"when-the-bolsheviks-created-a-soviet-republic-in-the-donbas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2022\/04\/18\/when-the-bolsheviks-created-a-soviet-republic-in-the-donbas\/","title":{"rendered":"When the Bolsheviks created a Soviet Republic in the Donbas"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article written by Hanna Perekhoda (translated by David Broder) first appeared in The Jacobin<\/a>. It examines the history of the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the 1916-21\/3 International Revolutionary Wave\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

WHEN THE BOLSHEVIKS CREATED A SOVIET REPUBLIC IN THE DONBAS<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Donbas is at the heart of Vladimir Putin\u2019s claim that Lenin divided Russia to create Ukraine. Yet the region\u2019s real history shows how much the Bolsheviks struggled with demands for national autonomy amid the collapse of the tsarist empire<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Donbas coal miners in the 1940s in the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. (Mark Redkin \/ FotoSoyuz \/ Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Announcing the Russian invasion of Ukraine late last month, Vladimir Putin offered a\u00a0detailed presentation<\/a>\u00a0of his vision of the world \u2014 and of history. The Russian president explained that Ukrainians do not exist, that their identity is a mere invention, and that the Ukrainian state is a mistake. More than that, he cast it as an illegitimate creation, an act of theft against Russia.<\/p>\n

Putin had special venom for Vladimir Lenin and his conception of the Soviet Union as a federal state \u2014 painting this as a time bomb that contributed to the collapse of the USSR, \u201cthe greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century.\u201d He was also frank about his sympathies for Joseph Stalin, since, in renouncing Lenin\u2019s ideas, he had been able to build \u201ca strictly centralized and totally unitary state\u201d within the borders of the old tsarist empire. Putin criticized Stalin only for not having revised Leninist principles more thoroughly \u2014 that is, for not having gotten rid of the Soviet republics\u2019 formal autonomy.<\/p>\n

Even among those who do not question Ukraine\u2019s historical right to be an independent state, it is commonly assumed that its internationally recognized borders are, in essence, artificial. Many do not question Putin\u2019s claims that the southeastern regions of Ukraine were \u201cstolen\u201d from Russia for Ukraine\u2019s benefit. Since 2014, Putin has claimed that these \u201chistorically Russian\u201d regions were attached to Ukraine in the 1920s. But does this really have anything to do with the historical facts?<\/p>\n

Indeed, it was the Bolsheviks who emerged victorious in the struggle for power at the end of World War I, who had to solve the problem of the border between Russia and Ukraine. Drawing the boundaries of a new country within a previously centralized empire was no small problem, especially since the provinces that were to become Ukraine had not had any special status or autonomy in the tsarist empire. In the nineteenth century, the territory of today\u2019s Ukraine was divided into three general governments encompassing various provinces: the General Government of Kiev (northwest), the General Government of Little Russia (northeast), and the General Government of New Russia and Bessarabia (east and south). After the gradual liquidation of the general governments, this de facto subdivision into three regions persisted. These structures inherited from the empire did not simply disappear without a trace after the February and October revolutions. In 1917\u201318, their persistence not only influenced the main forces\u2019 strategies regarding their organizational structures \u2014 also guiding their political choices \u2014 but decisively shaped what historians Sophie Coeur\u00e9 and Sabine Dullin call their \u201cmental geographies<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forgetting the National Question<\/strong><\/p>\n

The February Revolution put an end to tsarism; in Ukraine, as in the rest of the empire, the soviets (workers\u2019 councils) and the provisional government started to fight for power. But in Kiev, a third actor made its claim to power: the Central Rada, an assembly of different Ukrainian parties that sought Ukrainian autonomy. The only census that had been held, in 1897,\u00a0did not include data<\/a>\u00a0on the ethnicity of the empire\u2019s inhabitants. The advocates of autonomy claimed as Ukrainians all those who had indicated \u201cLittle Russian\u201d as their mother tongue; Ukraine would, then, include all the territories where this population was in the majority. Such a way of defining the political space was quite logical: for a country whose lands had long been subject to imperial authorities who denied the historical and cultural subjectivity of its inhabitants \u2014 instead structuring economic circuits according to the needs of the metropole \u2014 criteria of historical legitimacy or economic rationality could hardly serve as arguments for autonomy.<\/p>\n

Based on this language-based data, the Central Rada drew up a list of provinces that were to be considered Ukrainian, which included Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava, and Chernigov, but also the eastern and southern provinces of Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kherson, and Taurida (without Crimea). Although the large cities were the centers of colonial domination and spoke Russian, the indigenous rural population spoke Ukrainian and were everywhere\u00a0the majority<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Local Bolsheviks insisted that \u2018to create Ukraine, even a Soviet one, would be a reactionary decision,\u2019 because giving the state a national form meant only \u2018a return to the distant past.\u2019<\/p>\n

For Bolshevik militants, Ukraine\u2019s autonomy and its future territory were hardly a priority. One member recalled that they were \u201cextremely unprepared to grasp the idea of the unity of Ukraine\u201d and did not contemplate its possible borders. In fact, the geographical spaces in which the Bolsheviks operated depended above all on the soviets and the relations they established among themselves. On the territory of the future Ukraine, there were three such groupings of local soviets in 1917 \u2014 one centered around Kiev, another around Odessa, and a third bringing together the soviets of the industrial region of Donets-Krivoi Rog. This division largely overlaps with the administrative map of the tsarist era, where these three regions are also found. Regional branches of the Bolshevik Party were formed according to the same territorial principle, and militants organized within the bounds of these three areas.<\/p>\n

Shortly afterward, the local Bolsheviks were overwhelmed by events for which they were ill-prepared. In October 1917, it was not the Bolsheviks who overcame the provisional government in Kiev but the Central Rada that consolidated its power. Yevgenia Bosch, a member of the Bolsheviks\u2019 Kiev branch, wrote that \u201cwhen the question of Ukrainian self-determination was raised in practice,\u201d the organization remained without \u201cany real program.\u201d<\/p>\n

Across the Dnieper<\/strong><\/p>\n

With the failure of the initial plan to seize power in Kiev by force, the Bolsheviks\u2019 plan B consisted of organizing a congress of soviets together with the Central Rada. The second part of this plan involved bringing in masses of Bolshevik delegates from the eastern provinces and using this numerical strength to tip the balance in favor of supporters of the new authority in Petrograd. But the congress was a debacle for the Bolsheviks, as sympathizers of the Rada won the majority.<\/p>\n

The Bolsheviks needed to improvise a plan C, and decided to \u201clook for a place where the proletariat is more numerous, more concentrated, more conscious.\u201d So, the delegation headed east to Kharkov, a large industrial city. The newcomers tried to convince their comrades that they were all bound by a common goal \u2014 to sovietize Ukraine as a whole. However, the eastern Bolsheviks wanted first to establish themselves permanently in the industrial and working-class Donets-Krivoi Rog oblast, while letting the Ukrainian peasants in the western provinces choose a government \u201cin their own image.\u201d The Kiev Bolsheviks called their comrades\u2019 approach \u201chead-in-the-sand politics\u201d and blamed them for wanting to \u201cbarricade themselves in their Donbas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the disagreements, on December 12, 1917, the Kharkov congress proclaimed soviet power, declared the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (attached to the Russian Soviet Republic by federal ties), and announced the overthrow of the Rada. The name of the new state was identical to that chosen by the Rada \u2014 the Ukrainian People\u2019s Republic, or UNR. The clear aim was to substitute the Soviet UNR for the Rada\u2019s UNR. But it was also clear that the idea of the Ukrainian state, as defined by the national movement, was more influential than it had seemed \u2014 and the Bolsheviks had no choice but to adopt it, albeit in their own way.<\/p>\n

The Donets-Krivoi Rog Soviet Republic<\/strong><\/p>\n

In reality, there was far from any real consensus on these issues within the party. At the time of the proclamation of Soviet Ukraine, the Kharkov Bolshevik leaders were already building up a republic locally with their own organs of power. So why did they oppose the project for a Soviet Ukraine? Some members pointed to the Kharkov Bolsheviks\u2019 choice to isolate themselves in the Russified urban environment, given their only very limited contacts with the Ukrainian peasantry. Moreover, Bolshevik militants were not immune to Great Russian imperial ideology. However, this was not only a clash between bearers of different regional or national loyalties but also a disagreement about tactics and overall strategic vision.<\/p>\n

The idea of a Donets-Krivoi Rog republic, uniting eastern Ukraine and the industrialized part of the Don oblast, seemingly emerged among the Kharkov Bolsheviks under the influence of some militants coming from Rostov-on-Don after the conquest of this neighboring Russian region by anti-Bolshevik general Alexei Kaledin. The Don was a rallying point for many anti-Bolshevik forces in these lands, and was thus perceived as an immediate threat. The Donbas, conversely, was a region loyal to soviet power, capable of imposing its proletarian will on the peasant and \u201creactionary\u201d regions. Securing its support was thus a top priority both for those who had fled from Kiev and for the fugitives from Rostov. Their respective plans were essentially identical: to integrate the Donbas into their state project and to use its forces to drive the enemy out of their own home region.<\/p>\n

In January 1918, the Soviet armed forces took control of the Ukrainian capital. The government of the Central Rada fled. According to the Bolsheviks in Kharkov, there was no longer any need to maintain Soviet Ukraine, as its tactical mission \u2014 to gain control over Ukraine \u2014 had been accomplished. So they decided that the provinces of Yekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Tauride (without Crimea), and a part of the Don Oblast were now a separate republic \u2014 the Donets-Krivoi Rog Soviet Republic (DKRSR).<\/p>\n

But why establish a republic within these territorial limits? Its proclamation was justified primarily by the fact that \u201cthe Donets and Krivoi Rog basins represent an economically self-sufficient unit.\u201d According to the supporters of the DKRSR, with the socialist revolution, \u201cthe class principle, that is to say, the economy, has prevailed over the national principle.\u201d They insisted that \u201cto create Ukraine, even a Soviet one, would be a reactionary decision,\u201d because giving the state a national form meant only \u201ca return to the distant past.\u201d On the contrary, founding a state based solely on the criterion of economic relevance would be rational and therefore progressive. The DKRSR was meant to be an embodiment of such a breakthrough into the future. By creating the economic and not the national republic, the Bolsheviks in Kharkov were convinced that they were defending a truly Marxist vision of the world and of history. It was not until 1922 that Lenin\u2019s idea that the nation is a necessary step on the historical path to a socialist society won out and became a guiding principle of the USSR. In 1917\u201318, a good part of the membership of the Bolshevik Party, if not the majority, was still convinced that the socialist revolution and the equality it brought rendered the \u201cnational question\u201d obsolete.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the founders of the Donets-Krivoi Rog Soviet Republic justified their decision by the need to put all of Donbas\u2019s resources at the service of the \u201cindustrial centers of the North,\u201d such as Petrograd and Moscow. \u201cWe want to join the whole country,\u201d insisted DKRSR leader Fyodor Sergeyev, implying that the whole country meant the former tsarist empire and its Great Russian metropole. The proclamation of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was instead perceived as a harmful decision, \u201ca whim that could not last,\u201d that broke the unity of the imperial economic space inherited from the tsarist era.<\/p>\n

Sergeyev informed Petrograd of his decision. The answer came back immediately: \u201cWe consider this separation harmful.\u201d However, the central authorities refrained from any definitive answer deciding in favor of either side. Yet the circumstances were changing day by day.<\/p>\n

Today Lenin\u2019s project for national autonomy is trampled upon by Putin.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seeking to extricate itself from World War I, the Russian Soviet Republic signed the peace treaty with the Central Powers in March 1918. One of its conditions was the withdrawal of Red Army troops from Ukrainian territory and the abandonment of Russia\u2019s territorial claims to Ukraine. The Bolsheviks in Ukraine obviously did not want to give in so easily. What if Soviet Ukraine proclaimed itself independent, too? It could oppose the occupation without Soviet Russia being held responsible for its actions. For this to be possible, it was necessary to convene a new congress that would vote for Ukrainian independence and armed resistance to the German and Austrian invaders. The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party supported this project and finally gave a clear directive: the DKRSR must be part of Ukraine and send its representatives to the congress.<\/p>\n

However, once the Germans began to invade the industrial regions, Moscow instead brought out the card of Donets-Krivoi Rog belonging to Russia, stating that the German offensive \u201cexceeded the borders of purely Ukrainian territory.\u201d The Soviet authorities, involved in a diplomatic game, sought to keep all possibilities open in Ukraine. But as soon as Austro-German forces had occupied the whole of Ukraine, this diplomatic game ended.<\/p>\n

Why \u201cInvent\u201d Ukraine?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Far from being a coherent and premeditated plan of action, the decisions taken by the Bolsheviks in 1917\u20131920 were the product of constraints \u2014 but also of the opportunities of the moment. In 1917, notably thanks to the perseverance of the men of the Rada, Ukraine imposed itself as a new political space. This new reality, at first poorly analyzed by the Bolsheviks, finally forced them to take a position on questions hitherto alien to them. More important, it confronted them with the contradiction between the immensity of their political ambitions on a global scale and the very concrete, local difficulties of a revolution playing out in a decaying colonial empire. This contradiction sparked a long process in which the Russian Marxists\u2019 mental geographies were challenged and reconfigured.<\/p>\n

The main question remains why, long after the defeat of the Ukrainian nationalists, the top Soviet authorities continued to support the conception of a \u201cgreater Ukraine\u201d while ruling out any possibility of a Russian or independent Donbas. Wasn\u2019t the main mission of this project \u2014 namely to combat the Ukrainian nationalists \u2014 now complete?<\/p>\n

Until about 1922, the overall goal of the Bolsheviks remained a world revolution. It was thus necessary to win the support of peoples outside the Russian core of Soviet-ruled territory in order to expand the reach of the popular revolt. Their sights were directed toward the West, the uprisings in the European countries providing the only hope of survival for the revolution, of which the Russian October was only a first spark. In this sense, Ukraine had an important role to play in their global revolutionary enterprise \u2014 to open the first door to Europe, and in particular to Germany. In this sense, the openly anti-national rhetoric of the DSKSR leaders could have provided a disservice to Soviet power and alienated Ukrainian allies from the Bolsheviks.<\/p>\n

During the civil war, the Communists brought out the flag of Soviet Ukraine on several occasions, especially during military offensives, in order to ensure the support of the local population. However, it was not until 1919\u20131920 that the Bolshevik leaders began to realize that the formally independent Soviet Ukraine, including the southern and eastern provinces, was not only a good tactical response to neutralize the nationalists but that its maintenance also had long-term advantages. The eastern cities, as industrial melting pots and centers of colonial domination, could become a kind of transmission belt between the Russian metropolis and the \u201cpeasant\u201d Ukrainian periphery. This is why Moscow no longer planned to separate this region from Ukraine \u2014 quite the contrary.<\/p>\n

As Terry Martin rightly points out, the Bolsheviks\u2019 strategy was \u201cto assume leadership over what now appeared to be the inevitable process of decolonization.\u201d This is why, first in theory and then in practice, Lenin opted for a national principle in building the USSR. Each Soviet nation was thus to have its own territorially and administratively delimited \u201cnational home\u201d \u2014 a difficult plan to implement in a continental empire like Russia\u2019s. Indeed, the tsarist empire had a multiplicity of geographical areas, halfway between metropolitan and colonial status. Eastern Ukraine represented such a zone of hybridization: its urban centers, economically and culturally oriented toward Russia, existed as islands in an ocean of socially, ethnically, and culturally distinct countryside.<\/p>\n

The arduous and ambitious task of building a national home for each Soviet nation had both political and economic advantages, favoring the establishment of a type of state structure that guaranteed centralized decision-making \u2014 a sine qua non of a transition to communism for the Bolsheviks \u2014 while appealing to local populations and their particularities. By making a concession to the nation-state concept of matching nation and territory, the Bolsheviks hoped to preserve the territorial integrity of the former Russian Empire and transform it into a multiethnic socialist state. The federation of Soviet republics was supposed to be only the first step in the long process of merging and consequently eliminating nations first in the USSR and then worldwide. It was this policy, which\u00a0Francine Hirsch<\/a>\u00a0calls \u201cstate-sponsored evolutionism,\u201d pursued within the framework of a centralized state with a quasi-colonial economic and administrative structure, that would give the USSR its distinctive form.<\/p>\n

The ideal of a \u201cbrotherhood of peoples\u201d soon became a smokescreen to conceal Stalinist imperialism. Thus, the knot of contradictions between the imperial heritage of tsarism and the utopian project of Bolshevism on which the USSR was built was never untied. It remains and represents today a challenge for many countries of the post-Soviet space that have been deprived of a real national, political, and economic sovereignty during the whole twentieth century. In the continuity of its long imperial history, Putin\u2019s Russia continues to exercise its brutal domination over its former colonies.<\/p>\n

Today Lenin\u2019s project for national autonomy is trampled upon by Putin, who advances irredentist and revisionist historical arguments to justify his barbaric war against Ukrainians. It is time to say no to this denial of the subjectivity of not only the state but also the Ukrainian people. Our solidarity must go to the Ukrainian people who have taken up arms to fight the imperialist force, as well as to all those in Russia who, at the risk of their freedom, protest against the military adventure decided by the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

22\/3\/22<\/strong><\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

also see:<\/p>\n

Marko Bojcun- Ukrainian Socialist, author of\u00a0The Workers Movement and the National Question in Ukraine, 1897-1918<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

National liberation and Bolshevism \u2013 the view from the borderlands \u2013 Eric Blanc<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Internationalism from Below, Volume 3, pp. 167-188 \u2013 Allan Armstrong<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Internationalism from Below, Volume 4, pp. 55-93 \u2013 Allan Armstrong<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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This article written by Hanna Perekhoda (translated by David Broder) first appeared in The Jacobin. It examines the history of the creation of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the 1916-21\/3 International Revolutionary Wave\u00a0   WHEN THE BOLSHEVIKS CREATED A SOVIET REPUBLIC IN THE DONBAS The Donbas is at the heart of Vladimir Putin\u2019s claim…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1852,1855,1858,1861,1867,1868,1864],"tags":[9089],"class_list":["post-21366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-communists-organise","category-exploitation-and-emancipation","category-oppression-liberation","category-alienation-self-determination","category-emancipation-liberation-and-self-determination","category-against-imperialism","category-our-history","tag-author-hanna-perekhoda"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":4917,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21374,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21366\/revisions\/21374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}