Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

UKRAINIAN CENTRAL RADA. This rada (“council”), founded in Kiev in March 1917 to coordinate the Ukrainian national movement in the wake of the collapse of tsarism in the February Revolution, became the supreme legislative body of the Ukrainian National Republic, following the proclamation of that state in November 1917 and the declaration of its independence in January 1918. It was determined, in August 1917, that 75 percent of the seats on the Rada (of which, at that time, there were 798) should go to Ukrainians (some representing Ukrainian communities outside Ukraine), with the remainder filled by ethnic minorities: Russians (14 percent), Jews (6 percent), Poles (2.5 percent), Moldavians (four seats), Germans (three seats), Tatars (three seats), Belarussians, Czechs, and Greeks (one seat each). Representatives tended to be drawn from the urban intelligentsia and the professions, but the majority of the electorate were peasants. At one time or another, 19 political parties were represented in the Rada (with 17 of them defining themselves as socialist), the largest parties being the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (UPSR), the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDLP), and the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Federalists. Because of its influence among the peasantry, the UPSR held the most seats in the Rada, but the most influential cabinet posts tended to be held by members of the USDLP, who counted V. V. Vynnychenko and S. V. Petliura among their numbers. (This mirrored the situation in Petrograd, where the more popular Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries allowed Mensheviks to dominate the Central Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet.)

On 15 June 1917, an executive body, the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), was established and was charged with “managing internal, financial, food-supply, land, agrarian, inter-ethnic and other issues in Ukraine and executing all resolutions of the Rada pertaining to these issues.” On 9 January 1918 (following the declaration of Ukrainian independence in the fourth of the Universals of the Ukrainian Central Rada), these functions were transferred to a new body, the Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic. (The Rada had already been responsible for the declaration of the UNR as an autonomous entity within a federated Russia in its Third Universal of 7 November 1917.) This body was formally responsible for the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, on 27 January 1918. Following the coup that overthrew the UNR on 29 April 1918, Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii issued a “Charter to the Ukrainian People” that dissolved the Rada and annulled its laws.