Proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic

On 20 November 1917 (7 November Old Style) the Little Rada, the committee of the Ukrainian Central Rada that sat between its sessions, met in Kiev. The chairman of the Rada, the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, opened the ceremonial session, and the text of the Third Universal was then read out. Its most important sentence ran: “From now on Ukraine becomes the Ukrainian People’s Republic”. The new republic did not break away from Russia. The Universal announced that Ukraine, “without separating from the Russian republic and preserving its unity”, would help the whole state to transform itself into a federation of equal and free nations. Until the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly was convened, all power in the country was to belong to the Central Rada and its government, the General Secretariat.

According to Ukrainian studies, after a short break and at the request of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary group, a roll-call vote was held for the first time in the Rada’s history. Of the 50 members of the Little Rada, 47 were present. Forty-two voted for the Universal and nobody against. Five abstained: two Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, two Mensheviks and a representative of the Polish Democratic Centre. Soon afterwards the act was solemnly read out on Sophia Square before a crowd of Kievans and units of troops. A surviving photograph of the ceremony shows three leaders of the Ukrainian revolution side by side: Hrushevsky, the head of the General Secretariat and writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and the secretary for military affairs, Symon Petliura.

From autonomy to republic

The Central Rada had been formed in Kiev on 17 March 1917 (4 March Old Style), a few days after the fall of tsarism, as a body representing Ukrainian parties and social and cultural organisations. In time it was joined by delegates of peasant, workers’ and soldiers’ congresses and of the national minorities. For the first months its aim was autonomy for Ukraine within a democratic Russia. On 23 June (10 June Old Style) the Rada issued the First Universal, which proclaimed autonomy, and set up the General Secretariat under Vynnychenko. After difficult negotiations the Provisional Government recognised the Secretariat as its organ in Ukraine. The concessions to Kiev, incidentally, cost it the departure from the cabinet of the ministers of the Kadet party, which began the July government crisis. The settlement was announced on 16 July (3 July Old Style) by the Second Universal. In August, however, Petrograd limited the Secretariat’s authority to five governorates: Kiev, Volhynia, Podolia, Poltava and part of Chernigov. Ukrainian politicians regarded this as a breach of the agreement.

The news of the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd took Kiev by surprise. On 8 November (26 October Old Style) the Little Rada condemned the seizure of power by the workers’ and soldiers’ soviets. Power, the resolution declared, should belong to the whole revolutionary democracy and not only to part of it. A few days later fighting broke out in the city between the troops of the Kiev Military District staff, loyal to the overthrown government, and workers and soldiers led by the local Bolsheviks. The Rada kept a benevolent neutrality towards the Bolsheviks: the overthrown Provisional Government, which in recent weeks had shown more and more hostility to the Ukrainian movement, seemed the greater danger. According to Ukrainian studies, on 13 November (31 October Old Style) the district staff signed a truce and withdrew from the city, and Ukrainian units took over the offices. On 14 November the Rada declared itself the supreme authority in the country, and two days later the General Secretariat extended its authority to nine governorates with a Ukrainian majority. The Third Universal gave this state of affairs legal form.

What the Universal announced

The act began with a description of the moment: “In the north, in the capitals, a fratricidal and bloody struggle is going on. There is no central government, and anarchy, disorder and ruin are spreading in the state”. The Rada therefore did not recognise the Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars as the government of Russia. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was to comprise nine governorates: Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, Chernigov, Poltava, Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Kherson and Taurida without the Crimea. The incorporation of parts of the Kursk, Chełm and Voronezh governorates and neighbouring lands with a Ukrainian majority was to be settled by agreement, “in accordance with the organised will of the peoples”.

The social announcements went furthest. The Universal abolished the right of ownership of landowners’ estates and other holdings “not based on one’s own labour”, as well as of appanage, monastery, cabinet and church lands. It declared them the property of all the working people, to pass into their hands without compensation. Until the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly met, the land was to be administered by land committees elected by the population. From that day an eight-hour working day applied in Ukraine, and the General Secretariat was to introduce state control over production. The Rada abolished the death penalty, proclaimed an amnesty for political prisoners, announced a reform of the courts and local government, and guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, religion, assembly, association and strikes. To the Great Russian, Jewish, Polish and other peoples it granted national-personal autonomy, that is, the right to self-government in matters of their national life.

On the war, the Rada promised that “through the central government” it would compel allies and enemies to begin peace negotiations immediately, and would see to it that at the peace congress the rights of the Ukrainian people in Russia and beyond were not infringed. Until peace was concluded, however, every citizen of the republic was to “stand firm at his post”, at the front and in the rear. Elections to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly were set for 9 January 1918 (27 December Old Style) and its convening for 22 January (9 January Old Style). Elections to the All-Russian Constituent Assembly were to take place at the same time.

The Poles and the Chełm region

The Universal directly concerned the large Polish community of Right-bank Ukraine. The Polish population of Kiev, Volhynia and Podolia could count on national-personal autonomy, but the announcement that land would be taken without compensation struck at the Polish landed gentry, who owned a considerable share of the great estates there. According to the Polish legal historians Wiktor Hołubko and Adam Lityński, all Polish organisations protested sharply against this “act of injustice”, which destroyed the basis of existence of many Poles long settled in Ukraine. The abstention of the Polish member of the Little Rada had already symbolically expressed distrust of the Universal.

The second sensitive issue was the Chełm Governorate. The Russians had carved it out of the Lublin and Siedlce governorates in 1912, and the Poles regarded this as another partition. In 1917 these lands were under occupation by the Central Powers. The Universal merely stipulated that their fate would be decided by “the will of the peoples”, but by naming the Chełm region among the lands it laid claim to, it heralded a dispute with the Poles. Hrushevsky himself, as it happens, had been born in Chełm. The dispute broke out in full force a few months later, when in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Central Powers promised the Chełm region to Ukraine.

Between Petrograd and Kiev

The Russian Kadets regarded the Universal as a capitulation to the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks at first received it without open hostility. On 15 November (2 November Old Style) they had themselves issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which granted those peoples the right to self-determination up to and including secession. Kiev and Petrograd were nevertheless heading in opposite directions. The Central Rada, led by moderate socialists, wanted a federation of democratic republics and did not recognise the authority of the people’s commissars. The Bolsheviks wanted Soviet power in Ukraine too. Hołubko and Lityński also point out that the announced land reform, spread over a long procedure through the land committees, lost out to the Bolshevik slogan of seizing the land at once.

For the time being Kiev had its own government, its own army in the making and the ambition to negotiate peace on Ukraine’s behalf. Within two months the dispute with Petrograd turned into war. In December the Council of People’s Commissars presented the Central Rada with an ultimatum, and the Bolsheviks proclaimed a rival Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets in Kharkov. On 22 January 1918, the day set for the convening of the Constituent Assembly, the Fourth Universal proclaimed the independence of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The federation with Russia announced on 20 November never came into being.