Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

A “Committee of Elders” met 10 times to elaborate the final declaration of the conference (“The Act of Formation of an All-Russian Supreme Power”). This act, which decreed the creation of the Ufa Directory, was a compromise between those (chiefly the socialists) who wished for a new state authority to be responsible to the Constituent Assembly of 1917 and those (chiefly the Kadets and the Provisional Siberian Government) who were in favor of a provisional military dictatorship. Neither the Left nor the Right was happy with this outcome, and in retrospect, it could be said that the Ufa State Conference was no more successful in uniting Russia’s political forces than had been the Moscow State Conference of 1917, summoned by A. F. Kerensky in the weeks before the Kornilov affair.

UKRAINE, PROVISIONAL WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT OF. This regime—the second attempt to Sovietize Ukraine, after the thwarting of such efforts in early 1918—was established at Kursk on 20 November 1918, at the outset of the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and in the aftermath of the withdrawal from the country of the forces of the Austro-German intervention. Its chairman was Iu. G. Piatakov, and its commissar for military affairs was F. A. Artem.

On 29 November 1918, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine issued a manifesto announcing the overthrow of the Ukrainian State and the rule of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, canceling all the laws, treaties, and decrees of the Skoropadskii regime and announcing the nationalization of industry and the redistribution (without compensation) of all landowners’ estates among the peasantry. In January 1919, as the Red Army enjoyed success in the latest stage of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, the regime moved to Khar′kov and announced the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A new government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), was then formed, on the Russian model, with Cristian Rakovski at its head. On 25 January 1919, it announced a union with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, on the basis of “socialist federalism.” The regime lost control of much of Ukraine over the summer of 1919, and on 30–31 August 1919, was forced to abandon Kiev to the separately advancing Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia.

UKRAINIAN ARMY. Unlike the regular Ukrainian Galician Army of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Army—or the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR)—consisted of various semi-independent volunteer and partisan formations, with only a loosely defined structure and chain of command. Its home front was so unstable from 1917 to 1921 that it had to struggle constantly to marshal the material and human resources to maintain itself, and consequently it was unable to move from the status of an army in the process of formation into a stable national force.