In the fire and fury of revolution: Ukraine between Piłsudski's Poland and Bolshevik Russia

“The Polish, Finnish, Armenian, and other questions are all essentially periphera issues, and therefore of secondary importance. The Mazepinist question (mazepinskii vopros) hits Russia at the very foundation of her ability to be a great power.” These words, marked by a fear of the vigorously growing Ukrainian movement, were uttered on the eve of the First World War by Anatolii Savenko, a prominent political activist and writer, one of the leading ideologists of Russian nationalism. The diagnosis behind this observation was right: the Ukrainians, who rejected the idea of a “triune” Russian nation and subsequently started dreaming of a state of their own, could in future sound the death knell for Russia as an empire. For Russia the crucial task of controlling Ukraine if it wanted to keep its great power status was an outcome of geopolitical and strategic considerations, augmented at the close of the 19th century by yet another factor – the economic aspect. Suffice it to say that the Ukrainian territory, which prior to the outbreak of war accounted for barely one-fiftieth of the Romanov dominions, constituted their economic backbone. It was in Ukraine that Russia's chief industrial centres for metallurgy were located; it was Ukraine that produced nearly 70% of Russia's coal and 90% of its wheat exports. The volume of trade handled by the Black Sea ports was steadily rising year by year, and cities such as Odesa, Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Katerynoslav (at that time Odessa, Kiev, Khar'kov, Ekaterinoslav) were growing into flourishing metropolises. On the eve of the First World War the Ukrainian guberniias were generating more than a quarter of the revenue of the entire Russian Empire.

Ukraine's political future was a problem which would become current and more and more pressing in March 1917, in the period of revolution which not only swept out the autocratic regime of Nicholas II, but also shook the very foundations of Russian statehood. The tide of revolution which swiftly spread throughout the whole of the Empire in its borderlands aroused the centrifugal forces that had lain dormant but already ripe enough for eruption. In Kyiv they were manifested in the unilateral creation of a parliament of a kind, the Ukrainian Central Rada (Ukrains'ka Tsentral'na Rada).