NEW YORK — A conference in New York on the weekend of Sept. 22-23 explored how Ukraine’s first attempt, a century ago, to achieve independence through revolution during World War I and following upheavals in the Russian Empire, affected the country’s declaration of independence in 1991 and continues to influence events during Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Entitled “Commemorating the Ukrainian National Republic and Its Legacy,” the conference featured 16 academics from American, Canadian and Ukrainian universities as well as contributions from Ukrainian politicians and diplomats and two Americans intimately linked to events in Ukraine, U.S special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker and retired U.S General John Abizaid, who has been a key adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.
The event was held at the Princeton Club and organized by the Center for U.S.-Ukrainian Relations, a New York-based think tank supported by the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, the largest diaspora organization in the U.S, and the American Foreign policy Council.
The speakers concentrated on the events in Russia following the February 1917 “democratic” Russian Revolution and the October Bolshevik coup. Ukrainians in the former czarist empire strove to first gain autonomy and later independence. The Western Ukrainian People’s Republic emerged at the close of World War One upon Ukrainian ethnic lands that had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Volodymyr Birchak of the Ukrainian Catholic University said the Ukrainian Revolution “began in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals which shook the Russian Empire in March 1917 and was the key motivation for the Ukrainian people and its political elite to evolve from the idea of political autonomy and federation [with Russia] to the concept of full national independence.”
But he said Ukraine’s political elite evolved too slowly before accepting the necessity of independence for their own country.
Familiar Ukrainian behavior
Many Ukrainian pacifist politicians debated even the need for their own army so that tens of thousands of war-hardened soldiers prepared to fight for their country were disbanded. Other traits, that would be familiar to modern Ukrainians, manifested themselves among the quarreling elite who formed short-lasting governments first led by the person considered the founding father of modern Ukrainian independence, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, then by a military “Hetmanate” leader, General Pavel Skoropadsky, and another by socialist and military commander, Symon Petliura.
Birchak said that, in the spring of 1917, Hrushevsky supporters in Kyiv called for a Ukraine federated with Russia. But, he said “By the spring of 1918 they started shouting ‘shame on Hrushevsky’. In April Skoropadsky came to power and they shouted ‘shame on Skoropadsky’ until December when Petliura came to power and then they shouted ‘shame on Petliura’ until the Bolsheviks came to power and they shot anyone who dared to say ‘shame’ on them.”
The Ukrainians from both the pre-war empires eventually formed a unified Ukrainian People’s Republic in December 1918. However, beset in the east by hostile Bolshevik and “White” anti-communist forces, and in the West by a Poland backed by western powers and competing for its own state on territory claimed by Ukrainians, the young Ukrainian State was smashed by 1922.
Anna Procyk, a professor of history at New York’s City University, traced modern Ukrainian nationalism to the 1830s and Giussepe Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary who inspired his country’s independence struggle and influenced awakening Ukrainian independence movements. She said that meant Ukrainian nationalism in 1918 was “based on democratic republican principals and the humanistic values at the core of western civilizations.” Procyk said that type of “benign, democratic nationalism” led the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic to make generous provision for non-Ukrainian minorities in government bodies like parliament. One result was that a 1000-strong Jewish battalion fought alongside Ukrainians.
Vladislav Verstyuk of Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences said that the processes triggered by Ukraine’s first independence attempt “became unstoppable and above all changed the mass consciousness” of Ukrainians. He and other speakers said that despite its failure the revolution forced Soviet rulers to acknowledge the notion of a Ukrainian nation, albeit constrained within the limited framework of the USSR, setting the stage for the future.
Try not to declare independence during a war
Professor Alexander Motyl of Rutgers University in New Jersey said that before the 1918 independence declaration Ukraine didn’t have a unified elite with a national Ukrainian agenda. But despite brutal attempts to suppress genuine Ukrainian independence, the USSR did develop an elite. “To be sure it was a Soviet, communist elite,” said Motyl, “it didn’t necessarily have an agenda for independence but nevertheless there was something resembling a quasi-state with boundaries, a constitution, flags, a supreme soviet.” Although these institutions “weren’t exactly pining for independence” Motyl said they did provide a framework for statehood that was absent in 1918.
He said another important difference was that in 1991, unlike in 1918, Ukraine wasn’t surrounded by conflict, was already on the map and most countries, including the most powerful Western nations, recognized her independence.
Motyl said: “So a major lesson is to try not to declare independence in the presence of a world war around your territory. You can extend that to Ukrainian state-building efforts during World War II that weren’t likely to succeed for the same reasons. Ukraine is in a war now and it has territory occupied but I think as long as the war is confined to 6 percent of Ukrainian territory then, despite soldiers and civilians dying, Ukraine can go on with the business of nation-state building regardless.”
Releasing the genie of independence
Author of books about Ukrainian history and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, Serhii Plokhy, said: “The most important take away from our conference is to understand that events of a century ago are where it all started – the state, the independence, the territory, east and west together, the universities, the academy of sciences, the army, the diplomatic service, our understanding of who we are today – it all started there.”
Plokhy believes 1918 started a process that led to the emergence of the modern Ukrainian national identity which “brings together east and west and crosses not only the [old] imperial borders and boundaries but the religious ones between the Orthodox and Greek Catholics. Not less importantly the Ukrainian identity emerging in 1917-18 destroys the big building of the Russian imperial nation……Little Russians [as Ukrainians were called in the Russian Empire] were considered to be part of a three-part big Russian nation and once Ukraine took itself out of that building they left the Russians and Belarusians trying to figure out who they were. So Ukrainians in 1917-18 created not only themselves but also [modern] Belarus and Russia…by withdrawing not only out of the empire but out of the construct of the all-Russian language and all-Russian culture.”
The Ukrainian Revolution, Plokhy said, “released the genie of independence from empire and after that independence would never disappear from the agenda of Ukrainian organizations, east or west.”
