In February 1917 strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd escalated into open mutiny. The Tsar abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government, composed of liberal and moderate socialist politicians and eventually led by Alexander Kerensky, attempted to steer Russia toward a constitutional order while simultaneously continuing the war against the Central Powers.
The government introduced civil liberties and promised land reform and elections to a Constituent Assembly, but it refused to withdraw from the conflict or to sanction the spontaneous seizure of noble estates by the peasantry. Parallel to the Provisional Government stood the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, creating the unstable system of “dual power.” Kerensky’s attempts to rally the army for a summer offensive in 1917 failed, and by autumn the Provisional Government commanded little loyalty outside a narrowing circle of officers and urban liberals.
On the night of 25–26 October 1917 the Bolshevik Party, directed by Vladimir Lenin and executed through Leon Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee, carried out an armed coup in Petrograd. Red Guards and sympathetic garrison units seized bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange; the Winter Palace, where the remaining ministers had taken refuge, was stormed with relatively little bloodshed.
The Provisional Kerensky Government was there upon arrested and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the transfer of power. Lenin’s new Council of People’s Commissars immediately issued decrees calling for an end to the war and for the distribution of land to the peasants. In March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany formally removed Russia from the World War, ceding vast territories to Germany and its allies.
The October coup did not bring peace. Instead it ignited a brutal civil war that lasted until 1921. The Bolshevik “Reds” confronted a heterogeneous array of “White” forces – former Tsarist generals such as Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel, together with liberal and socialist opponents of the incipient Bolshevik dictatorship.
National movements, peasant insurgencies, and foreign intervention by British, French, American, Japanese, and other contingents further fragmented the struggle. Fighting raged across European Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.
The Reds ultimately triumphed because they controlled the industrial core and the railway network, maintained stricter internal discipline through the Cheka (secret police), and offered the peasantry at least the promise of land. By contrast, the Whites remained divided, often restored landlord claims, and failed to articulate a compelling political program. By the end of 1920 the principal White armies had been defeated – even as sporadic resistance continued into 1921 but no longer threatened Bolshevik power.
In the Ukrainian lands the imperial collapse opened a brief window for independence. After the February Revolution, Ukrainian activists in Kiev organized the Central Rada, which progressively asserted autonomy and, in January 1918, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The republic adopted national symbols, issued currency, and sought international recognition.
The latter was short-lived, however, because German and Austrian troops now occupied much of Ukraine under the terms of Brest-Litovsk. Accordingly, they installed the conservative Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in place of the socialist-leaning Rada. After the Central Powers’ defeat in November 1918, the Directory under Symon Petliura restored a republican regime and attempted to defend Ukrainian independence against both Bolshevik and White Russian forces.
None of these successive Ukrainian governments possessed the military or administrative capacity to hold the territory. By 1920–1921 the Red Army had overrun the greater part of the Ukrainian provinces east of the emerging Polish frontier. The Ukrainian People’s Republic survived thereafter only as a rump émigré government based in Warsaw, Paris and scattered elsewhere in Europe.
Moreover, at the Paris Peace Conference the Allied powers revived an independent Polish state. The Treaty of Versailles and subsequent arrangements awarded Poland eastern Galicia, including the city of Lviv and the surrounding districts that had belonged to the Austrian Empire. These western Ukrainian territories therefore remained outside Soviet control and inside the Polish Republic until 1939.
In a similar manner,Crimea, historically administered as part of the Taurida Governorate, stayed within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and was not transferred to Ukrainian jurisdiction until 1954.
Lenin’s incorporation of the remaining Ukrainian lands into a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an act of administrative state-building based and geographic contiguity. It was focused on control of factories, railroads, coal mines and other resources – not the vindication of an underlying national sovereignty.
Once the Civil War was won, the Bolshevik leadership had confronted the practical problem of governing an immense, ethnically diverse territory. So rather than reconstitute a unitary Russian state, they created a federal structure of nominally sovereign Soviet republics.
The Ukrainian SSR was proclaimed in 1919 and consolidated after the final expulsion of anti-Bolshevik forces. Its borders encompassed the bulk of the former Russian imperial provinces with Ukrainian majorities – Right-Bank and Left-Bank Ukraine – along with Russian-speaking Novorossiya.
At the same time, the Ukrainian SSR deliberately excluded both Polish-held Galicia in the west and Crimea in the south. Parallel republics were established for Belarus and for the principal nationalities of the Caucasus and Central Asia, as also shown in the map below.
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself was formally constituted in December 1922 by four founding members: the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, the Belorussian SSR, and the Transcaucasian SFSR. In subsequent years the number of these faux soviet republics fluctuated with administrative reorganizations and territorial changes, eventually reaching fifteen.
The essential principle remained constant: Lenin and his successors divided the lands under Bolshevik control into Soviet Socialist Republics in order to facilitate rule, to manage national aspirations within a centralized party dictatorship, and to falsely present to the outside world the new regime as a voluntary union of peoples.
The Ukrainian SSR was just one such faux republic and little more. Its institutions, borders, and personnel were determined in Moscow to serve the requirements of Soviet power.
As indicated, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic that emerged from the ruins of the Russian Civil War was an administrative creation of the Bolshevik regime rather than the organic product of a long national history. After the Red Army extinguished the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic, Moscow incorporated the bulk of the former Russian imperial provinces east of the Polish border into a nominally sovereign Soviet republic.
Its institutions, personnel, and borders were defined in the Kremlin to serve the requirements of centralized party control. From 1920 until 1954 three successive Soviet dictators – Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev – reshaped this territory through collectivization, famine, wartime annexation, reconquest, and a final territorial gift, producing by the mid-1950s a delimited “republic” whose territorial extent and population/linguistic/cultural mixes had no precedent in the preceding millennium of East Slavic history.
The first decade of Soviet rule was marked by the catastrophic transformation of agriculture. In the late 1920s Stalin abandoned the limited market concessions of the New Economic Policy and imposed forced collectivization across the Ukrainian countryside. Peasants were compelled to surrender land, livestock, and grain to collective farms; those who resisted were labeled kulaks and deported or shot.
The procurement quotas imposed on Ukraine were exceptionally severe. When the harvests of 1931–1932 fell short, the state continued to extract grain at gunpoint, sealing villages, confiscating seed, and blocking migration. The result was the famine of 1932–1933, known in Ukrainian historiography as the Holodomor.
Millions of rural inhabitants—predominantly Ukrainian peasants – died of starvation while grain was exported or stored in state reserves. The precise death toll remains debated, but demographic studies indicate losses in the range of three to four million in Ukraine alone. The famine broke peasant resistance, completed the collectivization of agriculture, and demonstrated that the Ukrainian SSR existed to supply the industrializing Soviet state, not to protect its rural population. Parallel political purges eliminated the remaining Ukrainian national-communist intelligentsia, ensuring that cultural and administrative life remained subordinate to Moscow.
The territorial shape of the Ukrainian SSR then changed dramatically in 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August partitioned Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In September the Red Army occupied eastern Poland, including Galicia and the city of Lviv.
These lands, which had lain outside Soviet control since the revival of Poland at Versailles, were formally annexed and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. A similar fate befell northern Bukovina and parts of Bessarabia seized from Romania in 1940.
Thus, for the first time the Ukrainian republic included the historic western territories that had developed under Austrian and Polish rule. The annexation was presented as the reunification of the Ukrainian people; in practice it extended the same apparatus of collectivization, deportation, and political terror into regions that had never previously experienced Soviet administration.
As it happened, however, the enlarged republic collapsed within two years. In June 1941 the German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and advanced rapidly across Ukraine. Many inhabitants of the recently annexed western districts, and some in the east, initially greeted the Germans as liberators from Stalinist rule.
Certain nationalist and proto-nazi formations, most notably the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, collaborated with the occupation authorities in the hope of securing an independent state. The German regime, however, had no intention of permitting Ukrainian sovereignty. It imposed a brutal colonial administration aimed at resource extraction and the eventual settlement of the steppe by Germans.
Thereupon there occurred mass shootings of Jews, poles and Roma, the starvation of prisoners of war, and the deportation of civilians for forced labor, thereby quickly dispelling any illusions. As the front moved eastward toward Stalingrad, German forces conducted a scorched-earth invasion, destroying infrastructure and industry and killing civilians in the tens of thousands.
Upon the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943, the process reversed. The Red Army’s return from east to west in 1943–1944 was accompanied by widespread retribution. Soviet partisan units and regular troops, reinforced by local recruits—many of them Russian-speakers from the industrial east – exacted revenge for the occupation’s atrocities and for earlier nationalist collaboration.
Entire villages suspected of aiding the Germans or the collaborating Ukrainian Insurgent Army were burned; populations were deported; and the returning NKVD reimposed the full apparatus of Soviet control. By 1945 the Ukrainian SSR had been restored within roughly its 1941 borders, now enlarged by the permanent retention of Galicia.
Needless to say, the human human cost of the marauding armies and occupations had been immense: Ukraine suffered among the highest proportional losses of any Soviet republic in both military and civilian dead – losses so extreme that they are remembered to this day in the family lore of millions of Ukrainians whose ancestors had been on both sides of the war.
Needless to say, Stalin’s death in March 1953 opened a succession struggle within the Soviet leadership. Nikita Khrushchev, who had served as party boss in Ukraine in the 1930s and 1940s and who retained strong personal and political ties to the republic’s apparatus, emerged as the dominant figure.
In February 1954, as part of the consolidation of his authority, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet transferred the Crimean Oblast from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR. The official justification cited geographic proximity, economic integration, and the forthcoming 300th anniversary of the Treaty of Pereiaslav.
In political reality, however, the transfer rewarded the Ukrainian party elite for its support during the post-Stalin maneuvering and bound the peninsula more closely to the administrative structures Khrushchev knew best. Crimea, which was 80% Russian-speaking and which had remained inside the Russian SFSR since the early 1920s, now became part of the Ukrainian SSR – an arrangement that would endure until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In short, in the space of just thirty-four years, three Soviet dictators assembled, through famine, annexation, wartime destruction, reconquest, and political gift, a territorial unit called the Ukrainian SSR. Its borders, population, and institutions were the product of Kremlin decisions taken for reasons of administrative convenience, ideological presentation, and intra-party power.
No comparable Ukrainian state had existed in the preceding thousand years of recorded history. The Soviet republic, therefore, was not the culmination of a continuous national development; it was an interim administrative contrivance whose final shape – Galicia included, Crimea attached – was fixed only in 1954.
Alas, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the glue which held together the faux state of Ukraine evaporated. As we will show in Part 4 that was apparent from the first elections on post-Soviet Ukraine. It was only a matter of time that the handiwork of the Soviet Commissars – with a big push from Washington—degenerated into civil war.
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