On the eve of WW I, nothing predicted that Russian empire was nodding to its fall. Revolutionary disturbances had been done away with. Bolsheviks were not very popular in the society, Lenin was working in libraries abroad writing his revolutionary and philosophical works, drinking beer in Swiss and Paris bars and having an affair with Inessa Armand. At that time Russian economy was booming. People of older generation remember that all achievements of Soviet economy were compared with pre-revolutionary1913, which was considered to be the most successful year. Russia, and to be more accurate Ukraine, was feeding half of Europe at that time…
However, then it was possible to smell a future large-scale was between great states on the continent. Pro-German Petro Durnovo, former Russian Internal Affairs Minister, unlike Grishka Rasputin, was not a psychic or a profit. He was a wise analyst of geopolitical situation in Europe and in the world. In February 1914, Durnovo sent Nicholas II a profound note, in which he warned against a war with Germany in alliance with England and France, advised Tsar with whom and against whom he should «make friends», persuaded him that war failures would inevitably lead to the fall of the empire and revolutionary disturbances. Grigoriy Rasputin, a person close to the Emperor’s wife Oleksandra Fedorivna, a German by origin, prophesied the same. To his ultimate ruin, Nicholas II rushed into that ridiculous war.
The war against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire began on the wave of patriotism. There were almost no draft dodgers. But later, rotten tsar regime, unprecedented embezzlement of funds and civil servants’ density were revealed. There came losses at the fronts, great losses, ruin, hunger, exhaustion of soldiers from the long war, which they did not understood, troops’ low morale caused by Bolshevik propaganda. Petrograd became the center of the 1917 February Revolution. Long queues to get bread became the match that caused the explosion (although there is evidence that there was enough bread in Petrograd, and the panic was caused by double agents). There were hunger riots, anti-war meetings, strikes at industries.
Under such circumstances, the power in the capital was taken by the Provisional Government headed by duke Georgiy Lvov, and State Duma was headed by Mykhailo Rodzyanko. These names have faded from the memory of many people. Oleksandr Kerenskiy, a great lawyer and public speaker, who was the last head of the Provisional Government, is remembered better. He was «promoted» by Soviet propaganda, having created a myth that Kerenskiy had escaped from the Winter Palace wearing woman’s clothes.
Together with the Provisional Government, Petrograd Council operated as well. There is a popular term «diarchy». The tragedy of tsar authority lay in the fact that the police were powerless, and almost all members of the capital garrison supported revolution. Fit for combat troops, which had been ordered to leave the theatre of war, were not able to reach Petrograd.
This is a short prehistory and plot of the February Revolution. But could things be different? What were the motives of Tsar, who abdicated the throne at the beginning of March, which completed the fall of the 300-year Romanov dynasty empire? Why didn’t he change military command and suppress revolutionary disturbances by force?
We address these and other questions to Ivan Khoma, Phd, and Vasyl Banah, PhD, of the Department of History of Ukraine and Ethnic Communication.
– Why he didn’t use force to suppress the revolution? – historians are thinking aloud. – His power was not the same. The situation got out of control. Even Semenovskiy regiment, the most loyal to Tsar since the time of Petro I, which, during the revolution of 1905 had been shooting workers, supported the Provisional Government and Petrograd Council. At first they fired at the marchers above their heads. The crowd was laughing at soldiers. Then they shot to kill. People ran, hid behind buildings and gathered again into a crowd. Neither military command, nor his nearest entourage supported Tsar. We have to add that Nicholas II himself was indecisive.
– Were there ethnic Ukrainians among the organizers of the February Revolution?
– There were. The most conspicuous figure is Mykhailo Tereshchenko, a well-known Ukrainian sugar works owner and philanthropist. In March-May 1917, he was Minister of Finances in the Provisional Government, and in May-October – Minister of Foreign Affairs. Tereshchenko was proud to be a Minister at 29. However, being an ethnic Ukrainian, he did not accept national liberation movement of the Ukrainian people.
– And now the main question: how did the February Revolution affect the destiny of Ukraine? Let us start with the creation of the Central Council and its First Universal.
– The revolutionary wave of 1917 motivated, first of all, Kyiv to more active political life. Immediately after Nicholas’ II abdication, Ukrainian Central Council, a peculiar political centre, was created in Kyiv. Mykhailo Hrushevskiy was elected its head in absentia. He arrived in Kyiv only a week after being elected. He and the founders of the Central Council started the process of political and legal recognition of the political activity, i.e. the right to consider the Central Council legitimate representative of Ukrainian people and speak on their behalf. At that time socialist and socialist democratic ideas, «fashionable» not only in Ukraine, prevailed. The Central Council supported national and territorial autonomy within Russian Federation. In the second half of May 1917, a delegation headed by Volodymyr Vynnychenko was sent to Petrograd. It had a list of items which revealed the content of the notion «national and territorial autonomy». However, the Provisional Government rejected all this and refused to recognize the Central Council. This government could only speak with the Central Council leaders from the position of force. There was a military district with several thousands soldiers loyal to the Provisional Government located in Kyiv.
– Why were there no political leaders, who would immediately have declared forming an independent state and Ukrainian army, at that time in Ukraine?
– There were such people but they were the minority. This is, for example, Mykola Mikhnovskiy, a representative of the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Independists. He generated radical ideas and urged to break any ties with Russia and create our own army. It is also Vyacheslav Lypynskiy, founder of the Ukrainian Democratic Grain Producers Party, theorist of Ukrainian conservatism, advocate of monarchy. He spoke about Ukrainian people, «who live, want to live and will live as people of an independent state».
We should not forget about the realia of that time. There were approximately two per cent of politically active and nationally aware people in Greater Ukraine at that time. The vast majority of Ukrainians in the former Russian empire were peasants. The most important issue for them was the question of land. And state, national and patriotic aspirations were secondary for grain producers.
Some historians like «throwing stones» at Hrushevskiy, Vynnychenko and other Central Council leaders. They claim that those figures did not think about Ukrainian army. They thought but within the scope of Ukrainization of Russian army. However, politics is the art of possible. Hrushevskiy himself made a lot of efforts to make the army, which fought as part of Russian army, more Ukrainian. There was a question of Ukrainians serving only on the territory of Ukraine, closer to their homes. But they were scattered at different battlefields, and Russian officers hindered this Ukrainization.
– I think that the February Revolution made the personal destiny of many Ukrainians, especially from Galicia, easier. I know that Andrey Sheptytskiy, who had been deported deep into Russia by the tsar regime in 1914, was able to move to Petersburg and then to Kyiv…
– At the beginning of the war, Mykhailo Hrushevskiy was arrested in Kyiv for espionage and supporting Austria. This reminds me today’s repressions of Putin regime against Ukrainians! 300 hostages, who were considered politically dangerous by the tsar regime, had been deported from Lviv by the beginning of 1915. Stepan Fedak, a famous political and public figure, philanthropist and also father-in-law of Konovalets and Melnyk, leaders of Ukrainian nationalists, was among them.
– What lessons can be learnt from the course and failure of the February Revolution, failure of our other national liberation movements, taking into account current political situation?
– We have to rely only on our own resources. We have to be the subject of politics, and not its object. The absence of unity and populism, when all kinds of conmen and adventurers take part in politics, lead to failures. And the main lesson is that any Russia – tsar, bourgeois democratic, Bolshevik, Putin – has never changed and never will change its imperial nature and it will never recognize the right of the oppressed people to have their own independent state.