The Ukrainian Revolution

On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food. On the other, soldiers, members of the GPU, carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible. They had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages. They had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert.

Malcolm Muggeridge British Foreign Correspondent War on the Peasants Fortnightly Review 1st of May 1933 Welcome to Agent to recent My name is Joseph Parkinson and today we are starting a new podcast series on the Holodomor, the man made famines inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In the first episode of our series, we're going to set the stage. We're going to look at the revolutions of 1917 that brought the Tsarist empire to its knees, how those revolutions affected Ukraine, Ukraine's attempts to set up an independent Republic, and the efforts of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to keep Ukraine as part of the newly constituted Soviet empire. Episodes of Ancient Theresa are out every Friday. They're available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, and are brought to you by worldofwhiskey.co.uk, the premier place for whiskey cask investment. On the Sunday morning of April the 1st, 1917, the people of Kiev marched.

This March was not a religious procession or a display of forced loyalty to the Romanov family, the royal dynasty that had ruled Ukraine since its conquest by the Russian army in the 18th century. This March was. Different this March was a display of Ukrainian national identity and yearning for freedom, independence and recognition that the Ukrainians. Were a people. In their own right, this was a remarkable moment to see a display of Ukrainian national pride, something almost unthinkable only a few weeks before.

Flags. Displayed the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian national flag as well as the red of socialism, The crowd was drawn from every strata of society, soldiers and peasants, children, intellectuals, priests, men and women, the young and the old. One speaker after another climbed onto the podium and called for the crowd to support the Central Rada, the new assembly that had gathered together to create an independent Ukrainian state.

This was a time of hope, of optimism, of dreams. Everything that was set in stone yesterday had been washed away. Everything that had been eternal was now a thing of the past. Exiles of czarist repression began streaming back into Ukraine. Eager to build a free and independent state, the Rather set about establishing the institutions of government. The Russian Empire had banned Ukrainian schools, books, and symbols of Ukrainian identity, but the Rather was eager to undo these restrictions and allow Ukrainian culture to flourish once more.

The Ukrainian government set about creating everything from banknotes to stamps to publishing houses, all of the accoutrement, all of the symbols of a new and independent state to assert Ukrainian identity as separate. From that. Of the decaying Russian Empire at the centre of the movement for Ukrainian independence were intellectuals, figures like Mikhailo Hukrevski, a historian who'd published works on Ukrainian from his exile in Habsburg Galicia. Poets, artists and writers had played a key role in keeping alive Ukrainian identity during the long years of czarist oppression.

When even writing a pamphlet in Ukrainian could have got you a one way ticket to Siberia. The Central rather convened an all Ukrainian National Congress on the 19th of April 1917 with over 1500. People all elected by. Councils and factories from around Ukraine attending to begin the work of establishing a new independent, viable state. But the Rada had many challenges. There were millions of demilitarized Ukrainian soldiers. 3,000,000 Ukrainians had served in the.

Ranks of the Czarist. Army and a further 200,000 had. Fought as part of the Habsburg. Army of Austria, Hungary, Many of these soldiers, now returning home to the hopes and dreams and optimism of an independent Ukrainian state, had been shooting at each other. Only weeks before. But the problems of the RADA went even further. Than that land. Reform was a pressing. Issue much of the. Land was owned by absentee Russian aristocrats and the Ukrainian peasants were desperate to have their own share, to be able to control their own land and dictate their own future.

For the first time in hundreds of years, the rather set about a radical policy of confiscating land from the nobility and monasteries and distributing it amongst land hungry peasants. Ukrainian culture was also a top priority. After more than a century of Russian oppression, the Ukrainian language, the language of the vast majority of the people, was now encouraged. This was itself almost unthinkable from only months. Before under Saris rule.

Courts, education and all official functions had been carried out only in Russian, a language that many Ukrainians, especially Ukrainian peasants, didn't speak, thus denying them legal recourse, especially against abusive land owners and overly officious. Bureaucrats. On January the 26th, 1918, Ukraine declared independence, winning recognition from France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary and even the Soviet Union itself. Ukraine agreed peace with the Central. Powers at Breslatovsk.

And the USA set up an embassy in Kiev. It seemed like a good start for the new Ukrainian Republic. And a heavyweight have been lifted from the hearts of every Ukrainian patriot. Free at last, a nation once again. But the Ukrainian state was still. Fragile the reforms brought about. Justice. But they also brought about. Chaos. The Central rather wasn't able to exert much control beyond a few isolated areas, and so much of the countryside was governed by partisans, bandits or local warlords.

The Central rather couldn't call them a standing army, and Ukraine was. Also surrounded by hostile. And aggressive neighbors, many of them believing themselves to be rightly due part of this new state's territory. And there was another problem. There was now a large number of Russian speaking, ethnically Russian citizens who found themselves separated off from the state that they identified with and living within the borders of a state that they didn't recognize as being legitimate.

And a people whose identity they didn't recognize as being separate from their own. A people that they had actually been taught to look down on and to think of Ukrainians and Ukrainian language and Ukrainian identity as being something that was backward gauche. Or. Uneducated of all the nations. That neighboured the new Ukrainian state. There was one that had the most to lose from its success, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was led. By the fire breathing revolutionary. Vladimir Ilitch Bulianov or his?

History would remember him. Lenin. Lenin began the assault on the new Ukrainian state, sending. Troops to crush the new. Republic in January 1919, the Bolsheviks drove the radar out of Kiev and. Established their own pro Bolshevik and Ukrainian government, but troops from the Central Powers, Germany and Austria. In turn drove the Bolsheviks out the Central Powers, however, instead of restoring the radar. Supported an eccentric general. Called Pablo Skoropadsky. Was born in Germany.

He was an extravagant figure who dressed as a Cossack with a clipped mustache and carried a sword in public. He had little sympathy for the radicalism of the socialist Rada members. As soon as he was secure, he set about repealing many of the more radical laws of the Rada, such as land reform, reintroducing czarist laws, reappointing many czarist officials. He even advocated potentially rejoining a reconstituted Russian Empire.

But Skoropadsky was recognized by many to be. Simply a German and Austrian. Puppet and he was deeply unpopular opposition to Skoropadsky's government began to organize around a man called Seymour Padulia. Skoropadsky's power was guaranteed by German and Austrian bayonets, so as soon. As they began to withdraw. And by 1919? World War 1 is now officially. Over even if the fighting and killing in Eastern Europe would go on long after Skoropadsky lost his guarantor of power.

Padulia was able to cobble. Together, an army known as the Directory and he led it on a March against Kiev, laying seas to the city. Without the support of the German and Austrian troops, Skoropadsky's forces melted away and his government collapsed. Padulia's government was much like the RADA in that it was radically to the left. Simone Padulia was a committed socialist of a Cossack background and he wanted to radically transform society.

However, the Directorate seemed to suffer from the same problem that the radar had. It controlled the ground that it stood on and very little else. This wasn't helped by the fact that Directorate wasn't able to establish rule of law and full control within Kiev itself. The director, unlike the rather lacked popular support and legitimacy and its power rested on the peasant army that Padulia had brought together that he then found very hard to control as it ran amok within Kiev.

Kiev was an affluent Russian speaking city and it was quite the culture shock. For peasant troops drawn from. Galicia, the extreme West of Ukraine that previously was part of the Habsburg Empire. The reality was that the power of the directorate extended no further than the city limits. Beyond its bounds in the vastness of Ukraine was anarchy and chaos. By the end of 1919, Ukraine seemed to be in a state of disarray.

There was deep division between those who wanted to return to the days. Of Czarist rule. And those who wanted a complete break with the past. There were people who wanted full independence for Russia, and some who wanted autonomy within a broad federation. There were those who wanted to go back to the good old safe, secure, steady days before the war. And there were those who wanted to forge a bright new future. There was also deep division between the left and the right.

Some had seen the anarchy in the countryside and wanted these changes undone. They wanted a restoration of law and order. Others saw this anarchy. As simply. A releasing of tensions pent up, of injustice building up over generation and generation and the most important thing was to release the. Steam. Others wanted to push ahead further and faster and more aggressively to create a better society, one free of the stain of Russian imperialism.

In 1917 there had been 2 revolutions in the Zarist Empire. One in. February that had swept away the monarchy of Nicholas the 2nd and brought to power a provisional government under the socialist Alexander Kerensky. But a second revolution. On the 7th of November had. Brought a new, more radical government to power in Petrograd, led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Party the Bolsheviks. Had been a faction within the Russian Social Democratic.

Labour Party. The Bolsheviks were fired by a fanatical commitment. To the one. True faith of Marxism. They sought. Absolute power to transform the state, society and human nature itself along the principles. That they believed. Were outlined in the teachings of Marx, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no time for democratic bourgeois niceties of the rule of law, elections and individual rights. All opposition to their holy crusade, all opposition to their vision of a perfect utopian society, was to be crushed.

A. Dictatorship. Of the proletariat was to be created. And all. Power was to be centralized in its hands, and the world was to be made anew in their vision. Lenin was very clear from the start about the lengths that he was willing to go to. How can you make a revolution without firing squads? He asked, And this sentiment was shared by other Bolshevik leaders. We shall not enter the Kingdom of socialism in white gloves on a polished floor, said Leon Trotsky, one of the senior members of the Politburo, the central organization that ran the new Soviet state. The Bolsheviks had publicly distanced themselves from imperialism.

They had also stated that they believed in the rights of all people in the Russian Empire. To autonomy. Up to and including secession. But there were a number of problems. Part ideological, part practical and part good old fashioned bigotry, the Bolsheviks saw the Russian Empire as being a platform. To launch a global revolution. And so any part of the empire that broke away would be a repudiation of and a set back to the revolution. Aren't the workers meant to?

Value their class consciousness over their national identity. Doesn't being a member of the international proletariat matter more to them than being Aziri or Armenian or Georgian? Isn't that what Marx said? Isn't that what you're supposed to believe as a devout, committed, believing Marxist? Furthermore, Ukraine was an overwhelmingly Agricultural Society, and many of its people were peasants. Marxist ideology was contemptuous of peasants, seeing them as lacking class consciousness.

It was the industrial working class, the proletariat, that was the class of the future. And the Bolsheviks, they were the self appointed representatives of the workers. The very fact that the Ukrainian peasants didn't actually go for Marxist dogma, well, that just further proved to the Bolsheviks that the Ukrainians themselves lacked class consciousness. So this is a perfect circle then? If Ukraine wants to be part of the Soviet.

Union that proves that the Ukrainians have achieved class consciousness. If Ukraine doesn't want to be part of the Soviet Union, that proves then that the Ukrainians have not achieved class consciousness and therefore not ready for self governance and therefore the Bolsheviks must do the responsible benevolent thing and govern Ukraine. For the Ukrainians. The Bolsheviks were also men raised in the culture of the Russian Empire, and they had imbibed the chauvinism it's so permeated Russian society.

To the Bolsheviks, Ukrainian wasn't a language, it was a dialect. Ukraine wasn't a nation, They were just confused Russians. Ukraine wasn't a country, it was just little Russia, as Ukraine was patronisingly called by Russian nationalists. The Bolsheviks were a very small party in Ukraine. Their support was mainly centred in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The Bolsheviks only had a few 1000 followers in Ukraine, who are mainly in the eastern parts of Ukraine in cities like Kharkiv and even Ukrainian.

Bolshevik leaders were Marxists and Bolsheviks 1st and Ukrainians second. Pyorgi Piatakov, the leader of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, did not in any way consider himself a Ukrainian. He told a meeting of Ukrainian Bolsheviks in Kiev that Ukraine, in typical Marxist fashion, did not comprise a quote distinct economic region. There were also further practical reasons for the Bolsheviks to be so hostile to a new, independent Ukrainian state. Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917, in a year of turmoil and anarchy.

It was one thing to come to power, but it was another thing to stay in power. The Bolsheviks had been able to take advantage of the inability of the Provisional Government led by Kerensky to feed the cities. Food was the ultimate means of power. Those who had access to it would rule, and those who did not would be swept away. If the Bolsheviks could not keep the cities fed, they knew that they would soon go the way of the Tsar and Kerensky. And Ukraine was some of the most fertile agricultural land in the world.

It was the bread basket of the Tsarist empire. Letting Ukraine go would cut Petrograd and Moscow off from its main source of food and doom the revolution. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had given their lives to the revolution. They had spent years in exile, in prison, away from their families, away from their loved ones. They had very often given up lives of tremendous privilege. Lenin was one of the tiny number of people in Russia who got to go to university.

He graduated with a law degree. He was a minor member of the aristocracy who had his own landed estate. And he gave all of that up in the name of his commitment to the revolution. And he believed that he was in the process of creating a new and perfect world. He wasn't going to let a bunch of Ukrainian peasants who hadn't even. Read Das Capital. Get in the way of him achieving the workers paradise. The Bolsheviks, apart from ideology, had another reason for their antipathy towards Ukraine. The war in the former Czarist empire was a war of repression, of massacre and counter massacre. It was a struggle to the death and there were few places that resisted the Bolsheviks quite as ferociously as Ukraine did. This experience traumatised the Bolsheviks, traumatised them because it confounded everything that they believed. It challenged their very core beliefs. Why aren't the peasants?

Rising up to supporters, this is what our ideology says that they should do. The poor should be on our side and instead these peasants are fighting tooth and claw to defend their identity and their culture. But that doesn't make any sense to us as Marxist. That challenge is the very core of what we believe. This brutal violence coupled with this existential challenge to their Marxist worldview would convince the Bolsheviks that Ukrainians were themselves an inherently untrustworthy counter revolutionary force that had to, above all else, be stomped on.

Their identity had to be broken. They had to be brought into line. The challenge to Soviet ideology could not be tolerated. Before we dive back into the story of the Holodomor and the revolution in Ukraine, a quick word from our sponsor, World of Whiskey. Some things only get better with age, and a fine single malt is one of them. That's why whiskey cask investing has such serious allure. With World of Whiskey, you can own a share of Scotland's most iconic exports. You'll get full certification of ownership, delivery orders and access to rare expressions few ever taste. And in the UK, there's no capital gains tax when you sell. Now, this is not financial advice. Investing carries risks and you must be over 18. Remember to drink responsibly and invest responsibly. And a great place to start is with worldofwhiskey.co.uk. Of all the Bolsheviks, there was one that was particularly shaped by their experience in Ukraine.

Joseph Virianovic de Sugarsh Philly or as history will remember him, Stalin. Stalin was born in Gorgi in Georgia in 1878 to a seamstress mother and a drunken cobbler father. Stalin had trained for the priesthood, one of the few opportunities open to educated and ambitious non Russians within the czars domain, but he left the seminary after he discovered a new religion, Marxism. Stalin was a thug, a tough a heavy knocking off banks and carrying out hits for the Bolshevik Party. He was often on the run or in Siberia, where he was repeatedly sent in exile.

But he was also a journalist who churned out party papers and articles commenting on contemporary politics through the lens of his austere Marxist worldview. Stalin was a member of the First Bolshevik government as People's Commissar for Nationalities, responsible for forcing the minorities and nations of the Zarist Empire to submit to Soviet rule. It was his job to undermine the national movement in Kiev and to secure Ukraine and Ukrainian grain for the Soviet government. The principal organ for Soviet state propaganda was the newspaper Pravda, which in Russian means the truth. Pravda denounced Ukrainian independence as a conspiracy supported by the land owners and the aristocrats against the working class.

Stalin also supported what was called active measures, encouraging local Ukrainian Bolsheviks to establish their own breakaway states. The Bolsheviks also backed an attempted coup in Kiev that failed miserably. But it did have the effect of sowing disquiet, of challenging the rule of law, and anything that the Bolsheviks could do to undermine the new Ukrainian state served their purpose. Early in the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks had been on the back foot, pressed on all sides by White armies led by former Tsarist generals. The former Tsarist empire was also invaded by British, French, American and Japanese troops who landed in Murmansk and Vade Vostok.

So things were very challenging for the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Civil War. However, the tide began to turn. The anti Bolshevik armies never were able to achieve a unity of purpose, a supreme commander. The Bolsheviks were united and the Bolsheviks were also able to present their enemies as being foreign backed or as those who sought to restore the rule of the Tsar, which in fairness many of them really were.

And many peasants didn't want to go back to the days of the land being owned by the aristocrats and them being effective serfs. So the Bolsheviks were able to harness these different forces, Russian nationalism, class resentment and the division of their enemies to go on the offensive. This allowed the Bolsheviks to set up an alternative communist government in Kharkiv. And then for the Red Army to advance S push into Ukraine and capture Kiev.

For the first time, the Bolsheviks implemented a reign of terror, shooting anyone speaking Ukrainian in the street, removing Ukrainian street signs, and suppressing Ukrainian culture. For the first time, Lenin deployed grain requisition squads into the countryside to begin stripping the Ukraine of the food grown by Ukrainian peasants and shipping it back to Moscow and Petrograd, leaving Ukrainians to starve. But the Russian civil war was volatile, and just as momentum swung one way, it would often swing back. The Bolsheviks were driven out of Kiev and Kharkiv as well. They were expelled from Ukraine and the quote UN quote Ukrainian Bolshevik government had to be established in exile in Rostov across the border in Russia.

Lenin's troops regrouped and re entered Ukraine. But this time they styled themselves not as Russian conquerors but instead as the Soviet Ukrainian liberation movement. Their objective here was to turn the conflict from being a national war between Russians and Ukrainians into being a class war where they could try and appeal towards the resentment of working class Ukrainians. Taking advantage of the disunity of the Ukrainian forces, the Bolsheviks were able to drive forward and reoccupy Kiev. Lenin knew that control of grain supplies was essential for the Bolsheviks.

The Bolsheviks were utterly ruthless in that determination to hold onto power, and so Lenin implemented an extreme set of policies called war, Communism, the militarization of the economy. Food supplies were to be taken control of by force. Priority was to be given to the soldiers and the factory workers. The state was to decide who ate, and Lenin was the state. In May 1918, the Council of People's Commissars created an army specifically for the confiscation of grain.

The practicality of this policy was to leave those not considered important by the Bolsheviks to starve. Many desperate people turned to the black market in an effort just to get enough food to feed themselves. This policy, enforced by the Bolsheviks, led to a collapse in food supply, and trapped in their Marxist orthodoxy, the Bolsheviks couldn't understand why there was widespread hunger. By setting prices and confiscating food, the Bolsheviks deincentivized the peasants from growing more crops, so they responded with ever increasing levels of harshness. Unable to think beyond the bounds of their ideology, they blame shortages not on their failed or short sighted economic policies, but instead on speculators, capitalists and mythical rich peasants that they called culacks. They began closing down small markets and stalls that operated, allowing people to find some food to feed their families.

They began clamping down on bartering in the countryside. These policies, all driven by their fanatical commitment to their Marxist beliefs, only served to increase the hunger, to increase the misery. To enforce this new iron rule, Lenin created a new institution, the All Russian Extraordinary Commission, or as history would remember it, the Checker. The Checker would go by many names, the GPU, the NKVD, the KGB, and is today called the FSB.

The Checker was headed by Felix Rosinski, a man descended from the Polish aristocracy who earned the nickname Iron Felix. The Checker would be the principal weapon Lenin would wield in unleashing his Red Terror against the enemies of the Bolshevik state. The Checker set about enforcing the system of force, grain confiscation at the point of a gun, closing their eyes to the tears of children, the screams of mothers and the rumble of empty stomachs.

Stalin, as people's commissar for the nationality, took a lead in procuring bread. He was dispatched to Zarini, a city on the Volga, north of the Caucasus. On the 7th of July, Stalin sent a telegram back to Lenin. We won't show mercy to anyone, not to ourselves, not to others, but we will bring you bread. Within days of arriving, Stalin began to cleanse the city of counter revolutionaries. The Chequer confiscated grain on mass and arranged mass executions of those believed to be class enemies.

This moment seems to have been particularly memorable for Stalin, as in years to come the city of Sarini would be renamed in his honour. Stalingrad. When the Bolsheviks reoccupied Kiev, the checker was let loose, banning Ukrainian books, arresting and shooting Ukrainian intellectuals and nationalists, crushing any expression of Ukrainian identity. The appointed boss of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, Rakovsky, refused to speak Ukrainian, and again Red Army troops murdered people just for speaking Ukrainian. In the streets of Kiev, the Soviet officials tried to establish some early collective farms where peasants would take their small holdings, band them all together. And the idea was you would create one large farm out of this small plots of land of individual peasants, and this would be more efficient because it'd be easier to invest at scale.

This was meant to be a voluntary scheme, but it was incredibly unpopular with Ukrainian peasants. And so many of these farms were simply abandoned after only a short period of time. The Ukrainian peasants haven't finally got the land off the aristocrats just to give it away to the communists. Lenin demanded ever greater levels of action. More grain quicker, more requisition squads, more shooting. No mercy to the peasants. He never showed any concern that his policies were actually leading to starvation or the innocent people were dying. As a direct result.

The Soviets had another tactic division. Soviet officials created new categories dividing the population up into invented imaginary groups that only adhered to their Marxist ideology, and they then used propaganda to try and turn the different peasants against each other. The imaginary bogeyman of this new class system with the mythical culacks, the so-called rich peasants who were said to be hoarding grain and thus responsible for all hunger and in fact responsible for all policy failure. The only problem with this is that the Soviet state never actually defined who actually was a kulak. There's stories of Stalin in the 1930s receiving reports about efforts to suppress kulak activity in Ukraine and him underlining the word kulak and writing in the borders of the reports.

What's a kulak? Define a kulak? Who is kulak? And this is a policy that he himself was driving forward at the time the Bolsheviks began recruiting local collaborators. They would use propaganda privileges and the promises of land confiscated from the mythical kulak class to attract collaborators. The Bolsheviks not only seem to understand that these policies of force, requisitions and division would create misery, they seemed to relish it. Trotsky publicly stated if the requisition of grain meant civil war between the culacks and the poor elements of the village, then Long live the civil war.

Again, it has to be pointed out that the Culacks or a purely fictional group, there's no way of distinguishing a poor peasant from a kulak. It's a completely arbitrary categorization. It was just invented by the Bolsheviks so that they could tar anyone who opposed them as being a quote UN quote kulak and therefore could simply be killed. The Czechers reign of terror was not limited to the peasants. Anyone deemed a class enemy was targeted bankers, priests, land owners, intellectuals, poets, writers, anarchists, monarchists, aristocrats, non Bolshevik socialists, independent trade unionists, artists, former imperial civil servants and army officers.

Anyone who could be deemed an enemy of the Soviet state was arrested, deported or simply shot. The Chequer also singled out certain ethnic minorities. The Don and Kuban Cossacks were groups that had long enjoyed a degree of autonomy within the Tsarist empire, and they had overwhelmingly sided with the white anti Bolshevik forces during the Civil War. When the Red Army entered the Don Province, the Chequer carried out a policy of what was euphemistically called D Cossack Ification by the lead checklist in charge yourself Rheingold. This was in effect a programme of ethnic cleansing. 12,000 people were simply arrested, put against a wall and shot. Not content, the Bolsheviks deported Don and Kuban Cossacks from the Don region and resettled the province with ethnic Russians imported from other parts of the USSR to dilute the indigenous population and therefore pacify the region. But the policy sparked A backlash. Mass terror by the Czecher led to a Cossack uprising to oppose Bolshevik rule.

So desperate did the local Bolsheviks become that they started frantically bombarding the Politburo in Petrograd with messages pleading with them to relent on the policy of terror because it was simply unifying all the anti Bolshevik forces against them. But Lenin and the government in Petrograd did not listen. Terror was the only policy that they knew. Those who opposed them were to be crushed. There was no compromise with the class enemies. In August 1919, the Bolsheviks were ejected from Kiev. Again.

The Bolshevik policies of mass terror and forced grain requisition had led to a mass peasant uprising that now threatened to bring down Bolshevik rule. There were many factions in 1919, Ukraine, anarchists, monarchists, nationalists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and non Bolsheviks, socialists, not to mention any number of independent partisans, revolutionaries and bandits, many switching sides or commanding no more than the land that they stood on in May. Niki for Harihar Eve, a charismatic, flamboyant man with an inflated sense of his own importance and a pronounced anti-Semitic streak, who had fought in the ranks of the Red Army, who spoke the garbled, jargon heavy language of the Bolsheviks, who swapped sides as often as he changed his clothes. He called for his followers to revolt against Bolshevik rule. Rihorive was one of many figures who had become disillusioned with the Bolsheviks.

The countryside was aflame with rebellion. There were 328 peasant revolts in June, with attacks on Soviet officials common in July. There were more than 200 anti Bolshevik uprisings in just 20 days. By the summer of 1919 there was a state of total anarchy in the Ukrainian countryside as faction Fort faction. The White Army advanced into Ukraine, capturing Kharkiv. In June, the troops of the Directory retook Kiev. Kiev would change hands over a dozen times in 1919 alone.

Each time a region changed hands, the new masters would accompany the change of power with a massacre of their perceived opposition. When the White Army arrived in khaki, they assumed the bodies of the recently slaughtered White troops, only to find the some of them had burning coals pressed into their stomachs and others had had their epaulettes nailed into their flesh. Some of them had been scalloped. As the cycle of violence grew ever more intense, the Bolsheviks, in their frustration, strove for ever harsher and more cruel means of repression, partly out of a desire for control, but partly out of a deep frustration.

Weren't the poor supposed to support the Bolsheviks? Isn't that what Marxist ideology had told them? Why isn't this working? Why aren't our theories playing out? Our beliefs are not beliefs, they are a science. And yet nothing seems to be happening the way it should happen. The more frustrated they became, the greater the rebellions, the more they reached for the gun and the knife. Again and again. At every turn, the the Bolsheviks increased their terror, burning villages, shooting hundreds of prisoners, killing entire male populations of villages in retaliation for a single Bolshevik death.

But the most brutal violence in the entire war as it raged through the Ukrainian countryside, we saved for one group. And this group happened to be one that had done everything it could. To stay away from the politics and the turmoil that had been unleashed in 1917. Czarist Russia was a seething hotbed of racism and prejudice. Even by the standards of the early 20th century, laws discriminated against non Russian minorities, Non Russians were banned from attending universities, laws discriminated against non Russians in employment, in education. Languages other than Russian were discouraged and non Russian books were banned.

But there was one group of people that were singled out for particular hatred, discrimination and violence. The Jews. Hatred of the Jews was common at every level of Tsarist society, including amongst non Russians and amongst every class of people all the way up to the Tsar himself. Nicholas the Second was a particularly pronounced anti Semite, but even he paled in comparison to his father, Alexander the Second, who blamed the Jews for social changes he could neither control nor understand. During the reign of Nicholas the Second, the Akrana, the Zara secret police have produced a document titled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

This document purported to show a Jewish plot to control the world. The Akrana promoted this document and it became an international bestseller, serializing newspapers in the West and read repeatedly by figures such as Henry Ford. It also influenced the thinking of a certain Austrian painter that history would remember as Adolf Hitler. This was all done in a desperate, conspiratorial attempt to explain away the rapid economic and social changes that were sweeping through Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Nicholas the Second didn't have the intellectual capacity to understand that he might actually be part of the problem, and the system of autocracy that he sought so desperately to maintain no longer was capable of running Russia. And so instead of trying to genuinely understand what was actually happening, he reached for conspiracies and racism. He blamed the other. And of all the people he blamed, first on the list was the Jews. Anti Jewish violence had swept through the Russian Empire in the late 19th century with many massacres, the worst of which was in 1905 in a place called Kishniev in modern Moldova, where dozens of Jewish people were beaten and murdered for no crime other than being Jewish.

Conspiracies about Jewish supposed wickedness were common with regular pogroms, especially around holy days like Easter. Golda Meyer, a future Israeli Prime Minister born in Ukraine, said that her earliest memory was the sight of her father nailing planks of wood across their door, boarding their family up inside of their own house. Because it was Easter. And every Easter the local Christians would go to church, be fired up by their priests about how the Jews murdered Jesus, then get drunk and break into the Jewish ghetto to beat and rape and murder their Jewish neighbors. Hatred of the Jews was common on all sides. Anti Bolshevik forces would denounce Jewish Bolshevism and the Bolsheviks themselves would hurl back at their white opponents that they were tools of Jewish capitalism. During the civil war in Ukraine, more than 50,000 Jews were murdered in over 1300 pogroms.

Though contemporary research seems to suggest that this figure may be a conservative estimate and that the actual figure is higher. Closer to 200,000 Jews may have been killed by pro and anti Bolshevi forces in Ukraine, and this does not include the countless number of Jewish people who were beaten and injured and Jewish women who were raped. The Ukrainian uprising would leave a deep impression on the Bolsheviks forever, solidifying in their mind the idea that Ukrainians are an inherently counter revolutionary and untrustworthy people and that Ukrainian nationalism poses an existential challenge to the integrity of the Soviet state. Anarchy in Ukraine presented an opportunity to the newly formed Polish state led by Joseph Pildunsky. Pildunsky led the Polish army across the border into Ukraine in an effort to carve out an independent Ukrainian state that he believed would act as a buffer between Poland and Russia.

As the Poles advance into Ukraine, Pildonski called on the Ukrainian people to support him, using not the jargon heavy language of the Bolsheviks, but the language of romantic nationalism and Ukrainian patriotism, saying that the Poles were there just to remove the Bolsheviks and that they would stay until the Bolsheviks had gone and no longer. This led to many Ukrainians to swell to join Pildonski's army. In the spring of 1920, Paldunsky's army advanced facing little resistance. On May the 7th his army entered Kiev, but on the 13th the Red Army forced the Poles back and marched deep into the heart of Poland itself before being defeated at the gates of Warsaw in a battle forever remembered as the Miracle on the Vistula. The Poles had wanted to create an independent Ukrainian buffer state, but instead settled for an Armistice and a recognition of borders.

In 1921, with the Poles having withdrawn, the Red Army was able to pick off 1 by 1 the White Armies and gradually begin the process of decisively turning the tide in the Russian Civil War in their favour. This left Ukraine still itself deeply divided on its own. Against the might of Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. Anarchist forces and the Directorate, alongside partisans and guerrillas continue to fight on, but without external support.

The checker gradually ground them down. The shootings, the hangings, the burned villages, the countryside stripped of food. Eventually, after years of warfare, the people were simply exhausted. There seemed to be no hope. The Bolsheviks moved the Ukrainian capital to Khrahif, in the Far East. Culturally and linguistically more Russian and closer to the Russian border, the Red Army stationed in Ukraine was 90% ethnically Russian, and though it officially talked the language of class, it was in every sense a foreign army of occupation. By 1922, almost all organized opposition to the Bolsheviks had been crushed.

The Bolsheviks had won, but their leaders were well aware that it had been force and force alone that had allowed them to prevail. They knew the people of Ukraine was still overwhelmingly hostile to their rule. They knew that Ukraine, though pacified, was held within the Soviet Union against its will. And should that iron grip ever loosen, Ukraine would very quickly escape the grasp of the Soviet state. The Bolsheviks emerged from the civil war victorious, triumphant, bloodied, and deeply paranoid. There were deep questions that must have gnawed away at them. Why had the Ukrainian peasants and working class resisted them and resisted them so fanatically? Why hadn't the Ukrainian working class seen the Communists as their liberators?

Why had these people held so tight to their national and cultural identities rather than embracing class consciousness? These must have been the 1st and in some ways the most painful doubts that people who had given their lives, in some cases 20 or 30 years, to the cause of Marx's revolution must have ever encountered. One thing was certain, the Bolsheviks viewed Ukraine and Ukrainian identity as a permanent threat to Soviet power and a threat that could not be tolerated. And for the Bolsheviks, there was only ever one way of dealing with any challenge.

And Lenin spelled out exactly how he felt that the Ukrainians should be dealt with. We must teach these people a lesson right now so that they will not ever dare to think of resisting us in the coming decades. That was how the Bolsheviks plan to deal with the Ukrainians. My name is Joseph Parkinson. This has been Ancient to recent. Episodes of the Ancient to Recent podcast are out every Friday and are available on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify. Next week we will continue the story of the events that lead up to the Holodomor.

We will look at the period after the civil war where the Soviets have managed to solidify their control over Ukraine and they begin to implement the policies that will lead inexorably to the horror of the Holodomor.