Ukrainians occupy Odessa

On 11 December 1918 the first troops of the Directorate, which since mid-November had been leading an uprising against Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, entered Odessa. The Hetman’s corps stationed in the city offered no resistance, and the Russian volunteers who tried to defend Odessa withdrew to the port. In the great port on the Black Sea power was taken by the revived Ukrainian People’s Republic. It did not, however, take the whole city. Entente warships were already lying in the roads, and the waterfront by the port remained in Allied hands.

Since March Odessa had been in the Austro-Hungarian zone of occupation. At the beginning of December the last Austrian troops left for home, and only two mutually hostile forces remained in the city. The Hetman’s 3rd Kherson Corps split into two groups. Its commander, General Berezovsky, and most of the experienced officers sympathised with General Anton Denikin’s Russian Volunteer Army and called on the Entente for help. The younger officers, supporters of the Directorate, gathered around the army doctor Ivan Lutsenko and formed several Ukrainian regiments from volunteers. According to Ukrainian accounts, on 7 December Lutsenko gave Berezovsky an ultimatum to hand the city over to the Directorate’s troops. For several days the two sides remained side by side in tense neutrality.

Meanwhile the Allies were sailing towards Odessa. According to Russian and Ukrainian accounts, the first British destroyer appeared in the roads on 26 November, and on 2 December the French battleship Mirabeau arrived. At the end of November the Odessa press published a declaration in the name of the Entente powers announcing their “unshakeable will” to maintain order in southern Russia, soon to be backed by armed force. In the same days Allied warships anchored at Sevastopol. France, to which by agreement with the British Ukraine had fallen as its sphere of operations, planned to make Odessa the base of an expedition against the Bolsheviks. In this it was counting on the Hetman, who, however, was losing control of the country. The Directorate’s troops and insurgent detachments had already taken nearby towns without a fight, among them Balta, and on 10 December they stood outside Odessa.

When the Directorate’s troops entered the city on 11 December, the Hetman’s garrison capitulated and the corps submitted to the Directorate. The Russian volunteer detachments, made up mainly of officers, withdrew to the port; some of them embarked on the steamer Saratov and waited in the roads. According to Ukrainian and Russian works, on 12 and 13 December the Directorate’s troops occupied all the important points of the city without a fight. They left the Allies only a narrow “Allied zone”, that is, the port, a few seaside blocks and the Nikolaevsky Boulevard. Some accounts, including Polish ones, give 13 December as the date of the occupation of Odessa, when the republic’s troops controlled the whole city except that zone. Lutsenko took charge of the city authorities.

Ukrainian rule in Odessa proved short-lived. The Ukrainians were a minority in a multinational city in which Russians and Jews predominated, and the port was crowded with Russian officers, Polish soldiers and all those who were counting on Entente help. Less than a week later French troops began to land. The Directorate, which took power in Kiev on 14 December, did not want war with the Entente and soon had to withdraw its troops from Odessa.