Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

SOVIET–UKRAINIAN WAR. This multifaceted military conflict, from December 1917 to November 1921, between the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR)—and in 1918, the Ukrainian State—on the one side, and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and pro-Soviet Ukrainian forces on the other, was one of the longest, most intense, and bloodiest of all the “Russian” Civil Wars. At issue was not only many Ukrainians’ desire for independence and their hostility to “Russian” Bolshevism and Soviet internationalism, but also the Soviet government’s recognition that their own new state would be unlikely to survive without the industrial and agricultural wealth of Ukraine, which had supplied the majority of the iron, coal, wheat, sugar, and other essential products in the former Russian Empire. The situation was complicated by the fact that Ukrainian cities were largely populated by Russians—even in Kiev, during the revolutionary period, less than 20 percent of the population was Ukrainian (and many of them were Russified)—the notable exception being L′viv (L′vov/Lemberg), but that city had never been part of the Russian Empire, and during the civil wars, it was contested by Ukrainians, Poles, and Russians.

The war first erupted in November–December 1917, when a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was established at Khar′kov, in opposition to the Ukrainian Central Rada at Kiev, which the Bolsheviks accused of bourgeois nationalism and of providing covert aid to the Volunteer Army that was forming on the Don, effectively using Ukraine as a shield between itself and Moscow. In this period, some 30,000 Red forces, led by V. A. Ovseenko and M. A. Murav′ev and composed of radicalized elements of the old army, sailors of the Baltic Fleet, and the Black Sea Fleet and Red Guards, advanced on Kiev from the north and east, capturing Khar′kov (25 December 1917), Ekaterinoslav (9 January 1918), and Poltava (20 January 1918). They were opposed by some 15,000 irregular Ukrainian forces, Free Cossacks, and the Sich Riflemen. After Murav′ev’s group had crushed resistance from Ukrainian student detachments (notably the Kruty Heroes), Kiev fell to the Reds on 26–27 January 1918, but following the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918), forces of the UNR commanded by Symon Petliura, with the aid of forces of the Austro-German intervention, retook the city on 2 March 1918. Under the terms of the second Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the Soviet government agreed to a peace treaty with Ukraine, which was eventually signed on 12 June 1918.