Germans take Yekaterinoslav

At the beginning of April 1918 the Bolsheviks lost Yekaterinoslav, today’s Dnipro, a provincial capital and one of the largest industrial centres of the south of the former Russian Empire. The British chronology of the war and Soviet studies state that the city was taken after fighting on 3 April. According to other sources, Soviet units had already abandoned it on 2 April, and German troops, accompanied according to some accounts by Ukrainian units, entered the city on 4 or 5 April. Ukrainian lists of the changes of power in the city adopt the date of 4 April.

A city in Red hands

Yekaterinoslav, lying on the Dnieper at the mouth of the Samara, was in 1918 a large metallurgical city and railway junction through which ran the lines from the Donbas and Krivoy Rog to the Black Sea ports. In autumn 1917 the local authorities recognised the authority of the Central Rada, but at the end of December, after several days of fighting, the Bolsheviks seized the city. In February 1918 they incorporated it into the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic, which covered the Kharkov and Yekaterinoslav governorates and the coalfield on the Donets.

After the fall of Kiev Yekaterinoslav briefly became one of the centres of Soviet power in Ukraine. In mid-March the Second All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets met there, proclaimed the unification of the Soviet republics on Ukrainian territory and called for a common defence against the invader. The Soviet government of Ukraine soon moved further east, however, to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov.

The fall of the city

From the west and from the direction of Poltava, which German and Ukrainian troops had taken on 29 March, ever stronger forces were approaching. The Bolsheviks gathered several small formations, grandly called revolutionary armies, to defend Yekaterinoslav, but they could not stop regular troops advancing along the railway lines. After brief fighting the Reds abandoned the city and fell back east, towards Pavlograd and Sinelnikovo, which the Germans took a few days later.

The arrival of the new masters began with repression. According to historians of the city, about five hundred captured Red Guards were publicly shot immediately after the city was taken. The authority of the Ukrainian People’s Republic returned to the city, and in Ukrainian documents it began to be called Sicheslav. The Yekaterinoslav governorate fell within the zone that Germany and Austria-Hungary at the end of March allotted to the Austro-Hungarian forces, but in the following months units of both powers were stationed in the city itself.

The road to the Donbas

The loss of Yekaterinoslav sealed the fate of Left-Bank Ukraine. A few days later the Central Powers entered Kharkov, and in the second half of April German divisions and Ukrainian units moved on the Donets coalfield, from which the Germans wanted to export coal, and grain from the surrounding governorates. By the end of April the whole Yekaterinoslav governorate was in their hands. At the same time a dispute was growing over who really ruled Ukraine. The Ukrainian administration returned to the cities in the wake of the foreign troops, and the German command took less and less account of the government in Kiev.