Ukrainian delegation at Brest

On 3 January 1918 (21 December 1917 Old Style) the German wireless reported that a delegation of the Ukrainian Central Rada had arrived at Brest-Litovsk to take part in the peace negotiations. The Secretary of State, Richard von Kühlmann, gave an assurance in a telegram that he was ready to talk with representatives of Ukraine at Brest. Some Ukrainian studies state that the delegates had already arrived on 1 January. They came at a moment when the conference stood empty: the Bolshevik delegation was sitting in Petrograd demanding that the talks be moved to Stockholm, and the ministers of the Central Powers were only just returning from their capitals.

Who came

According to a telegram from Brest, passed on via Amsterdam, those present were Mykola Levytsky, Mykola Liubynsky, Mykhailo Polozov and Oleksandr Sevriuk, all members of the Rada authorised by the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic to conduct negotiations. They were young men, mostly activists of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary party; Sevriuk was not yet 25. They declared that their government was preparing to conduct an independent foreign policy, that they wanted a speedy democratic peace and hoped to act together with the Bolsheviks at Brest. The delegation was headed by the General Secretary for Trade and Industry, Vsevolod Holubovych, who arrived a few days later.

The road to Brest had been short. On 24 December the Rada’s government, the General Secretariat headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko, sent the belligerent and neutral states a note announcing that Ukraine was entering upon independent international relations. A peace concluded by the People’s Commissars would bind it only if the Ukrainian government signed it. As early as 26 December the Central Powers replied by telegram that they would gladly welcome plenipotentiaries of the Ukrainian People’s Republic at Brest. In Kiev this was read as de facto recognition of the republic by foreign states. The Rada was by then in open conflict with Petrograd: in December the Council of People’s Commissars had sent it an ultimatum, and the Bolsheviks had proclaimed a rival Ukrainian People’s Republic of Soviets in Kharkov.

Grain and a wedge

For the Central Powers the Ukrainians were a godsend. The Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Count Ottokar Czernin, noted in his diary on 3 January that if the Russians did not return, it would be possible to negotiate with the Ukrainians, “who should already be in Brest”. The next day he agreed with Kühlmann that the only salvation was to deal with the Ukrainian delegation “quickly and energetically”. Austria-Hungary was starving, and Ukraine was the granary of the former empire. The Germans, and especially General Max Hoffmann, also saw the Ukrainians as a wedge that could be driven between Kiev and Petrograd and used against the Bolsheviks at the conference table.

On 6 January the first talks were held, attended by all the delegates except the chairman. Czernin noted that the Ukrainians were far less revolutionary than the Russians and thought only of their own country, though they themselves did not yet know whether they wanted full independence or a place in a Russian federation. They wanted the Central Powers first to recognise their independence and then, with that fact in hand, to force the Bolsheviks to talk to them as equals. Czernin replied that recognition was possible on three conditions: the negotiations were to be held at Brest and not in Stockholm, the frontier between Austria-Hungary and Ukraine was to remain as before the war, and neither state was to interfere in the internal affairs of the other. For the time being he received no answer.

The Chełm question

The second of these conditions touched the Polish question from the start. The Ukrainians were thinking of a great Ukraine. According to the British historian John Wheeler-Bennett, they hoped for the Ukrainian parts of Galicia and Bukovina and for the Chełm Land, that is the former Chełm Governorate, already named in the Third Universal. The latter was then under occupation by the Central Powers, mostly Austro-Hungarian, and the Poles regarded it as part of the future Polish state. Czernin knew that any concession on this point would earn him the hostility of the Poles, including those of Galicia, who had a strong position in the Vienna parliament. But hunger in Vienna weighed more and more.

The Ukrainians were admitted to the conference as a separate delegation on 10 January, when Trotsky was already at Brest. Five weeks later, on 9 February 1918, the Central Powers signed with the Ukrainian People’s Republic the first peace treaty of the war, called the “Bread Peace”. It promised Ukraine the Chełm Land, which provoked a storm of protest in the Kingdom of Poland and in Galicia.