Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Approximately 10,000 Poles and 15,000 Ukrainians, the overwhelming majority of them soldiers, died during the war. Many of the Poles who died during the opening stages of the conflict were buried in an extension to Lviv’s Lychakiv cemetery, beyond an arch proclaiming it to be the site of interment of the “defenders” of L′viv. After the incorporation of the region into the USSR in 1939, and especially since Ukrainian independence in 1991, that sign has been many times defaced by Ukrainians, who object to the notion that Poles defended the city against its own Ukrainian inhabitants and their cousins. An oversized (and remarkably “Soviet”-style) bronze statue of Taras Shevchenko, the Ukrainian national poet, now also stands on L′viv’s Freedom (formally Lenin) Prospekt (in Polish times, the Street of the Legions), near where a statue of Lenin once stood (and before him, from 1898, a monument to Jan III, King of Poland).

UKRAINIAN SICH RIFLEMEN. Formed on local initiative at Lemberg in 1914, this 2,500-strong force constituted the sole, purely Ukrainian unit in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. Its name, Sich, was derived from the Ukrainian term used in earlier centuries to denote a Cossack unit—especially a unit of the Zaporozhian Cossacks—which itself was related to words denoting chopping (e.g., of trees to clear an encampment, or of logs to construct a fortification)

Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), the Sich Riflemen formed part of the Central Powers’ army of occupation in Ukraine and was used as a propaganda tool by Vienna (presenting the Austro-German intervention in Ukraine as some form of liberation). In October 1918, it was transferred from the Kherson region to Bukovina, but when the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed, on 1 November 1918, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated, it marched to Lemberg (now L′viv) and became the nucleus of the Ukrainian Galician Army.

A second, 600-strong corps of Sich Riflemen was also formed by POWs from Galicia and Bukovina at Kiev, over the winter of 1917–1918, and became an important element in the Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. It was this latter unit which (with the aid of the Central Powers) drove Bolshevik forces from Kiev in March 1918 and which, in November–December that year (by which time it had swelled to some 20,000 men), also played a key part in the overthrow of the regime (the Ukrainian State) of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii. In addition, in 1919 the Sich Riflemen fought on the Ukrainian Army’s fronts against both the Red Army and the White forces of the Armed Forces of South Russia.

UKRAINIAN SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC LABOR PARTY. Founded in Kiev in 1905, as the successor to the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party, the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Labor Party (USDLP) adopted a platform for an evolutionary, parliamentary road to socialism that was based on the Erfurt Program of the German Social-Democratic Party. It supported Ukrainian autonomy and sought (unsuccessfully) recognition from the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as the representative of the Ukrainian proletariat, but faced the problem that that constituency, among the workers of Ukraine’s major cities and towns, was almost entirely Russian or Russified. It also suffered from persecution at the hands of the tsarist authorities following the 1905 Revolution and was dormant from 1907 onward, as many of its leading members fled to Galicia and Central Europe, where they collaborated with members of the Bund and the Mensheviks. The party formally united with the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Spilka in late 1911. During the First World War, some members of the party were active in the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, the Vienna-based émigré organization that sought the assistance of the Central Powers to establish an independent Ukraine at the end of the war.