In the Ukraine the nationalist movement had already collapsed by the time the Bolsheviks launched their third and final invasion during the autumn of 1919. The military vicissitudes of 1917–20, when the Ukraine had ten different regimes, were hardly conducive to national unity. Two brief spells of nationalist rule in Kiev — the Rada of March 1917 to February 1918, and the Directory of the following December to February 1919 — were not enough to inculcate a national consciousness into the Ukrainian peasantry, who were largely cut off from and hostile to the towns. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of an independent Ukrainian state had existed mainly in Shevchenko’s poetry and Cossack myth. With the exception of the western Ukraine, where the landowners were mainly Poles, the mass of the peasants remained untouched by the intelligentsia’s nationalism. The strength of the peasantry’s attachment to the idea of the independent village made them hostile to a national state. During 1917, however, the socialist parties in the Rada had built up a mass base of rural electoral support by linking the idea of national independence with the autonomy of the village and a land reform in the interests of the peasants. They succeeded in translating the abstract concept of the nation into social terms which were real to the peasantry. But the promised land reforms were never carried out. The Rada and the Directory were politically paralysed by the growing internal division between nationalists like Petliura, who subordinated social reforms to the national struggle, and those like Vinnichenko, who subordinated nationalism to social change. Without land reform, the peasants had little incentive to fight for an independent Ukraine. Neither the Rada nor the Directory was able to mobilize a truly national force against the invading armies of the Reds or the Whites. Even Petliura was forced to raise his so-called National Army on Polish soil.
The urban head of the Ukrainian national movement was thus cut off from its rural body. What remained was a local peasant nationalism, focused on the idea of the autonomous village, which continued to dominate the Ukraine, making it virtually impossible to rule from the cities, until the early 1920s. This smallholders’ nationalism was seen in the atamanshchina, the local peasant bands of Makhno, Grigoriev and countless other warlords, who claimed to defend the free Ukrainian village from both Whites and Reds; in the rural economic war against the towns, which the peasants saw as ‘foreign’ and as the centres of a hostile state; and in the pogroms against Jews as the outward symbols of that alien nature. It was also seen in the mass appeal of the Borotbist Party, formed from the Ukrainian Left SRs, which stressed cultural nationalism as a form of village autonomy, a means of uniting and empowering the peasants in the revolutionary struggle against the Russified urban bourgeoisie.
It was this peasant nationalism which made life so hard for the Bolsheviks in their first two attempts to conquer the Ukraine (during the first three months of 1918 and the first six of 1919). With only the workers and the army on their side, they were reduced to ruling it by terror. The second of these two Red regimes was especially violent. Bulgakov captured its terrible power in his image of the huge Red armoured train in the forest outside Kiev at the end of The White Guard. It is a good example of the way that sometimes only a novelist can describe the essence of civil war:
The locomotive rose up like a black, multi-faceted mass of metal, red-hot cinders dropping out of its belly on to the rails, so that from the side it looked as if the womb of the locomotive was stuffed with glowing coals. As it hissed gently and malevolently, something was oozing through a chink in its side armour, while its blunt snout glowered silently toward the forest that lay between it and the Dnieper. On the last flat-car the bluish-black muzzle of a heavy calibre gun, gagged with a muzzle-cover, pointed straight towards the City eight miles away.
This second invasion of the Ukraine was almost certainly carried out on Stalin’s personal authorization but without the knowledge or approval of Lenin. It was led by a group of Bolsheviks who were determined to bring the Ukraine back under Moscow’s rule. Many of them were Russians from the Ukraine who had taken up Bolshevism partly as a form of identification with Russia itself. Georgii Piatakov, who instigated the invasion and became the head of the Bolshevik regime in the Ukraine, was typical of this conquering Soviet élite. His father had been a Russian industrialist in the Ukraine, so it could be said that a certain urban-Russian arrogance towards the native peasants was inbred in him. Like many leading Bolsheviks on the Southern Front — Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Ordzhonikidze also come to mind — Piatakov had close ties with Stalin. The extreme centralism which he imposed on the Ukraine was a thin disguise for his own Great Russian chauvinism. The Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsia were imprisoned in their hundreds during the Red Terror of 1919. ‘Bourgeois property’ was sent off by the trainload to Moscow. Nearly all the Bolshevik posts in the Ukraine were filled by Russians, who ruled the country like colonial masters. The Ukrainian peasants were subjected to the worst excesses of the Bolshevik requisitioning campaigns. The kombedy and the collective farms, both of which had clearly failed in Russia itself, were forcibly imposed on the Ukrainian peasants — and this despite the fact that the traditions of private and inheritable property were much more deeply rooted among the Ukrainian peasants than among the Russian ones.86
The result was a wave of peasant revolts against the Bolshevik regime throughout the Ukraine, of which Makhno’s was merely the largest. Lenin was furious: the insensitivity of Piatakov’s regime had undermined the Reds’ control of the Ukraine and opened the door to its conquest by the Whites. During the autumn of 1919, as the Reds once again swept south across the Ukraine, Lenin insisted that this time his comrades should be more sensitive to national sentiment. The ‘Federalists’ among the Ukrainian Bolsheviks had been calling for this for some time, and their views were now being echoed by senior Bolsheviks such as Ordzhonikidze. ‘We must find a common language with the Ukrainian peasant,’ he wrote to Lenin on 19 November. These themes were taken up by Lenin in December. At the Eighth Party Conference he spoke out for the first time against the ‘primitive Russian chauvinism’ displayed by certain Bolsheviks. The resolution on the Ukrainian question recognized the strength of national sentiment, albeit among the ‘backward’ masses. It called for the use of the Ukrainian language in all Soviet institutions and for a rapprochement with the Ukrainian villages.87
In March 1920, as the first step towards this, the Borotbists were finally admitted to the Ukrainian Bolshevik Party. Like the earlier alliance with the Russian Left SRs, this was a great political victory for the Bolsheviks: it split the main rival party in the Ukraine and gave them access to the villages. The Borotbists were the only Ukrainian party with a mass peasant following. During the campaigns against the Hetmanate, Petliura and Denikin, the Reds had relied upon them to organize the peasant partisans. The Borotbists espoused a synthesis of cultural nationalism and peasant socialism within a decentralized Soviet federal structure. They were the true heirs of the peasant nationalism which had driven the revolution in the Ukraine during 1917 and 1918. When the Ukrainian Directory abandoned its commitment to a socialist programme, most of the Borotbists (about 4,000 out of 5,000) joined the Bolsheviks. They hoped to moderate the Bolsheviks’ Communism and to make them more aware of the national culture of the Ukrainian peasants.88 Once again, it was nationalism that turned these opponents of the Bolsheviks Red.