The Russian Empire entered the First World War in 1914 as one of Europe’s great powers, yet four years of catastrophic military defeats, economic dislocation, and social upheaval destroyed the foundations of the Romanov autocracy. By early 1917 the army was demoralized, the cities were hungry, and the authority of Nicholas II had evaporated.
In February 1917 strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd escalated into open mutiny. The Tsar abdicated, ending three centuries of Romanov rule. A Provisional Government, composed of liberal and moderate socialist politicians and eventually led by Alexander Kerensky, attempted to steer Russia toward a constitutional order while simultaneously continuing the war against the Central Powers.
The government introduced civil liberties and promised land reform and elections to a Constituent Assembly, but it refused to withdraw from the conflict or to sanction the spontaneous seizure of noble estates by the peasantry. Parallel to the Provisional Government stood the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, creating the unstable system of “dual power.” Kerensky’s attempts to rally the army for a summer offensive in 1917 failed, and by autumn the Provisional Government commanded little loyalty outside a narrowing circle of officers and urban liberals.
On the night of 25–26 October 1917 the Bolshevik Party, directed by Vladimir Lenin and executed through Leon Trotsky’s Military Revolutionary Committee, carried out an armed coup in Petrograd. Red Guards and sympathetic garrison units seized bridges, railway stations, and the telephone exchange; the Winter Palace, where the remaining ministers had taken refuge, was stormed with relatively little bloodshed.
The Provisional Kerensky Government was there upon arrested and the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified the transfer of power. Lenin’s new Council of People’s Commissars immediately issued decrees calling for an end to the war and for the distribution of land to the peasants. In March 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany formally removed Russia from the World War, ceding vast territories to Germany and its allies.
The October coup did not bring peace. Instead it ignited a brutal civil war that lasted until 1921. The Bolshevik “Reds” confronted a heterogeneous array of “White” forces – former Tsarist generals such as Denikin, Kolchak, and Wrangel, together with liberal and socialist opponents of the incipient Bolshevik dictatorship.
National movements, peasant insurgencies, and foreign intervention by British, French, American, Japanese, and other contingents further fragmented the struggle. Fighting raged across European Russia, Ukraine, Siberia, and the Caucasus.
The Reds ultimately triumphed because they controlled the industrial core and the railway network, maintained stricter internal discipline through the Cheka (secret police), and offered the peasantry at least the promise of land. By contrast, the Whites remained divided, often restored landlord claims, and failed to articulate a compelling political program. By the end of 1920 the principal White armies had been defeated – even as sporadic resistance continued into 1921 but no longer threatened Bolshevik power.
In the Ukrainian lands the imperial collapse opened a brief window for independence. After the February Revolution, Ukrainian activists in Kiev organized the Central Rada, which progressively asserted autonomy and, in January 1918, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic. The republic adopted national symbols, issued currency, and sought international recognition.
The latter was short-lived, however, because German and Austrian troops now occupied much of Ukraine under the terms of Brest-Litovsk. Accordingly, they installed the conservative Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in place of the socialist-leaning Rada. After the Central Powers’ defeat in November 1918, the Directory under Symon Petliura restored a republican regime and attempted to defend Ukrainian independence against both Bolshevik and White Russian forces.
None of these successive Ukrainian governments possessed the military or administrative capacity to hold the territory. By 1920–1921 the Red Army had overrun the greater part of the Ukrainian provinces east of the emerging Polish frontier. The Ukrainian People’s Republic survived thereafter only as a rump émigré government based in Warsaw, Paris and scattered elsewhere in Europe.
Moreover, at the Paris Peace Conference the Allied powers revived an independent Polish state. The Treaty of Versailles and subsequent arrangements awarded Poland eastern Galicia, including the city of Lviv and the surrounding districts that had belonged to the Austrian Empire. These western Ukrainian territories therefore remained outside Soviet control and inside the Polish Republic until 1939.
In a similar manner,Crimea, historically administered as part of the Taurida Governorate, stayed within the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and was not transferred to Ukrainian jurisdiction until 1954.
Lenin’s incorporation of the remaining Ukrainian lands into a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was an act of administrative state-building based and geographic contiguity. It was focused on control of factories, railroads, coal mines and other resources – not the vindication of an underlying national sovereignty.
Once the Civil War was won, the Bolshevik leadership had confronted the practical problem of governing an immense, ethnically diverse territory. So rather than reconstitute a unitary Russian state, they created a federal structure of nominally sovereign Soviet republics.
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