Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REPUBLIC, DIRECTORY OF THE. This was the name by which was known the revolutionary national government for Ukraine created at Kiev on 14 November 1918, by the Ukrainian National Council and representatives of Ukrainian political parties and trade unions, as well as by the command of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. The directory replaced the crumbling Ukrainian State of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii’s. Its aim was to restore the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), which had been overthrown by Skoropadskii and his German allies in late April 1918. Its members (initially including V. K. Vynnychenko, as chairman, and S. V. Petliura, as head of military affairs) called for the establishment of a provisional government (the Executive Council for State Affairs) and a Military Revolutionary Committee, before retiring to Bila Tserva (the headquarters of the Sich Riflemen) on 15 November 1918. On 19 December 1918, after Skoropadskii and the Germans had left the city, the directory entered Kiev.

On 26 December 1918, the restoration of the UNR was proclaimed, and on 22 January 1919 an act of union (the Act of Zluka) with the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic was signed. It had been intended that a Labor Congress, summoned at Kiev on 23 January 1919, would take over the functions of government, but the approach of units of the Red Army from the north made that impracticable, and the congress provisionally transferred power to the directory, whose leader henceforth acted as head of state. When Red forces entered Kiev on 5 February 1919, the directory relocated to Kamenets-Podol′sk, in Podolia. From there, efforts were made to gain the support of the Allies, but commanders of the French force that had landed at Odessa in December 1918 were suspicious of the radicalism of the directory’s leaders and recalled too that it had been the UNR that had signed the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers in January 1918. On 11 February 1919, therefore, in an attempt to appease the Allies, Vynnychenko resigned, and Petliura, who had renounced his membership in the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDLP), assumed the leadership of a government from which both the USDLP and the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries agreed to exclude themselves. Even this, however, could not win Allied support, and in any case the French were forced to abandon Odessa in April 1919.

Other problems faced by the regime were the advance of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) toward and then into Ukrainian territory; the indiscipline of the numerous peasant bands that made up its “army” (particularly their taste for pogroms); and an uneasy relationship with the leader of the Western Ukraine, Yevhen Petrushevych, who had assumed dictatorial powers in an attempt to win the Ukrainian–Polish War. When the Ukrainian Galician Army was driven out of its home territory by the Poles, Petrushevych demanded the formation of a new government as the price for merging his forces with those of the directory. This was agreed to, and a new government was established, under Isaak Mazepa, on 27 August 1919. With an army of some 80,000 men now at its disposal, the directory (which was still based at Kamenets-Podol′skii) sought to recapture both Odessa and Kiev. Its forces entered the latter on 30 August 1919, but were promptly thrown out by the arrival of the advance guard of the AFSR. This prompted a new crisis between eastern and western Ukrainian leaders, as the former wanted to prioritize the struggle against A. I. Denikin (and even considered forming an alliance against him with the Soviet government), while the latter hoped to come to some accommodation with the Whites, whom they viewed as representatives of the Allies, and to ally with them in a joint struggle against the Soviet government. Thus, on 6 November 1919, the leaders of the Ukrainian Galician Army negotiated a cease-fire with Denikin.