Peasants, Power, and Place: Revolution in the Villages of Kharkiv Province, 1914–1921 (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies)

285 Pages·2016·46.858 MB·English

by  Mark R. Baker

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute was established in 1973 as an
integral part of Harvard University. It supports research associates and
visiting scholars who are engaged in projects concerned with all aspects
of Ukrainian studies. The Institute also works in close cooperation with
the Committee on Ukrainian Studies, which supervises and coordinates
the teaching of Ukrainian history, language, and literature at Harv-clfd
University.
Publication of this book has been made possible in part by the generous
bequest of Paul Sawka.
<0 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the U.S. on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baker, Mark R. (History professor), author. I Harvard Ukrainian
Research Institute. ,oo~~',J6'c ~
Title: Pensants, power, and place: revolution in the villages of Kharkiv
Province, 1914-1921 / Mark R. Baker.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Distnbuted by Harvard University
I
Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research lnstltute, 2016. Series:
Harvard series in Ukrainian studies I Includes bibliographical references
and index.
I
Identifiers: LCCN 2016014321 ISBN 9781932650150 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Kharkiv (Ukraine)--History--20th c,eotury. I lJkraine-
History--Revolution, 1917-1921--Social aspects.
I
Classification: LCC DK508.95.K53 B35 2016 DOC 940.3/4775--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014321
hn · Central
Cover photograph: No. 0-183046 from the H. S. Psh enyc_ Y1 of
State Archives of Films, Photographs, and Sound Recordings
Ukraine. Used with permission. d'
,a;~th
Revised portions of this book originally appeared in ~an~
American Slavic Studies and Journal of Ukrainian Studies. se
permission.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 The Social Effects of the Great War in Kharkiv Province 19
2 The Rural Revolutions of 1917, Intervillage Conflict, and
the Limits of Villagers' Identities 49
3 The German Occupation of 1918 in the Ukrainian
Countryside 91
4 The Shifting Allegiances of 1919: Civil War in the
Countryside 123
5 Compromise and Conviction, Peasants and Party:
Groping toward "Soviet Power" in the Village 153
Conclusion 201
Notes 213
Works Cited 259
Index 277
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN unusually long in coming, so there are too many
people to acknowledge. At the same time, I do not wish to bore
anyone with a very long list, so here I note only the most significant
contributors to the final product. First, I want to thank my advisors, two
leading historians of Eastern Europe and Ukraine: professors Roman
Szporluk and John-Paul Himka. I thank them for all their attempts to try
to make me into an East European historian. I want especially to thank
John-Paul for his patient attention, advice, and friendship throughout
my post-graduate life. He is the very model of a mentor.
I would like to acknowledge the many graduate student colleagues,
now mostly university professors, for all their help, chats over coffee, and
patience with my rants about Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe, and peas
ants. Chris Hilliard, Carolee Pollock, Patrice Dabrowski, Andrew Port,
Barbara Keys, Graham Tan, Eric Lohr, and Alex Dillon were my most
gracious listeners. I want to point out in particular the friendship and sage
advice of Andrew Port, who has helped me from earlier on, reading drafts
of some chapters, applying his very sharp mind to my messy thinking,
discussing various aspects of social history, and welcoming me into his
Ann Arbor home on my sojourns across the United States.
In Ukraine, I want to thank all the unnamed people who helped me
wade through the chaotic, confusing web of post-Soviet archives and
libraries. Iurii Ivanovich Shapoval and Hennadii Boriak were instru
mental in obtaining access to the central archives. In Kharkiv, Viktoria
Vikorivna Reznikova, the then director of the Kharkiv regional state
archive (DAKhO), was not only kind and ready to assist at all times,
but made her archive a wonderful place to work. In .DAKhO's reading
room, I wish to thank Liubov Anatolivna and Larysa Polikarpovna, who
everyday made my sometimes exciting, sometimes boring, archival work
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
considerably easier. I would gl~dly water their plants ~ny time. I wish
also to thank my Kharkiv histonan colleagues for all their help and lively
conversations, especially Serhiy Posokhov and Volodymyr Kravchenko. I
want to thank Professor Rex A. Wade (George Mason University), whose
good name in Kharkiv opened the doors to these many friendships and
who has been most encouraging of my research on this topic. Finally, I
want to express my gratitude to Ostap and Viktoria Sereda for all their
assistance (and friendship) while adjusting to life in Lviv, Ukraine, where
I taught my first year after graduation.
Among my Ukrainian nonacademic friends, I want to acknowl
edge particularly the consistent support and loving kindness of Raisa
Alekseevna Strutinskaia and Anton Antonovich Strutinskii. For quite
unknown reasons, this couple welcomed me into their home, made me
a part of their little family, and taught me so much about Ukraine's more
recent past, recounting their stories of war, loss, sorrow, youthful exu
berance, joy, and frivolity around the kitchen table. Sadly, Anton did not
live long enough to see the publication of this book; Anton was that rare
person who helped anyone who asked without question, as several other
graduate students who stayed with them can testify. I miss him terribly.
I also want to thank my colleagues at California State University,
Bakersfield. It is very difficult to imagine a more supportive department
in which to begin as a recent PhD graduate. Cliona Murphy brought
me into the department and set an example of scholarly excellence and
teaching enthusiasm. Miriam Raub Vivian was my confidante on many
an occasion, her door always open for me to come and complain about
this or that mishap in my California academic and personal life. Charles
Litzinger, though emeritus by the time of my arrival, continued to play a
crucial role in creating community among the department's colleagu~s;
he also provided Mary and me wonderful trips to his seaside home in
the early years of our time in California. Alicia Rodriquez and Doug
Dodd helped me a great deal in adjusting to life in Bakersfield, w~re
great department colleagues, and hosted wonderful department parti_es.
Jeanne Harrie and Oliver Rink were also incredibly encouraging senior
~lleagues, always supporting and defending the junior faculty, especially
in clashes with the administration. I want to thank Jean Stenehjem for
her ready assistance throughout my time at CSUB. Finally, I want to
th
ank Beth Rienzi, a voice of warmth and reason in CSUB's sometimes
bureaucratic administration. I also miss her very much.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
In the fall of 2008, I took up a new position at Ko~ University in
Istanbul, Turkey. Again, I was fortunate to find helpful department col
leagues in Dilek Barias, Yonca Koksal, and Ash Niyazioglu. Can Nacar
soon joined the department, and as a labor historian with similar research
interests, he became a close intellectual and personal friend. I want to
thank him in particular for all his helpful advice, chats over lunch, and
for putting up with my rants on all and sundry.
In all my travels and studies across Eurasia, I have often thought how
fortunate I am to have such a caring family, a home base to which I can
return when I need to. I am lucky enough to consider all my siblings
Beth, Phil, Sandy, Tim, and Dan-my friends. This home and these good
fortunes are largely due to the tireless and loving efforts of my parents,
Robert Leonard Cecil and Loretta May Baker, who have taught me mostly
by their examples how to be a good person. I want to thank them all for
their loving support and help along the way.
Finally, I want to thank my own young family. Over the course
of reworking this book, Mary and I had two children, Lily and Jasper.
More than anyone else, these two bright lights have been able to turn my
frowns upside down; there is nothing as inspiring as coming home from
a relatively difficult day to hear their stories of the many places and times
they have visited in their books, imaginative play, and other learning.
Finally, and most important of all, I want to thank my soul mate Mary
Elizabeth McCue, without whom I would not have finished graduate
school, let alone, created two amazing children, traveled and lived all
over the place, and completed this book.
Introduction
AT
ITS MOST BASIC LEVEL this book is an investigation of the interac-
1"'\.
tions between the rural inhabitants of Kharkiv province (now a part
of Ukraine) and the numerous governments that claimed authority in the
region and across the crumbling Russian Empire over the period from
1914 to 1921. Essentially, it is an attempt to tease out of a wide variety of
archival documents the most representative experiences of these people,
their encounters with the authorities, other outsiders, and with each other.
Focusing as much as the documents will allow on villagers' actions (as
opposed to what was said about them or in their name), this study yields
two main conclusions: first, peasants acted above all in pursuit of their
perceived economic interests, although perceptions were often tied to
villagers' own sense ofw hat was fair and just. Whether they strove to stop
the Stolypin land reform, protest tsarist officials' efforts to force set prices
on their produce, seize lands and forests, or resist the attempts ofv arious
governments and occupying armies to requisition their grain, they were
primarily motivated by what they took to be best for their economic
well-being. The second and, perhaps, more striking conclusion is that
despite the integrative effects of the Great War and several governments'
attempts to get them to sacrifice for larger conceptions of community,
peasants acted largely in a very local manner, reflecting their parochial
understanding of the world. If we are to judge by their actions, it would
seem that these mostly Ukrainian-speaking rural inhabitants thought
of themselves mainly as members of one or another village and not as
members of any oppressed "nation" or "class."
This book thus joins a few monographs whose findings have begun
to curb the post-1989 enthusiasm to find nationalism at almost every his
torical turn, stressing rather the localness of people's social and political
identities. In her monograph about the ordinary people of Kazan and
l
. d . ces, Sarah Badcock argues that iocalism ov-erwhA'-...i
izhegoro provin · h
. . ests in Kate Brown asserts m er study of the'- llbll '-\1
nahona1 inter 1917_"1 . d R . . . or.
een Poland, Ukraine, an uss1a m the mterwar period
d er1 a n d s betw d 1 ds lJkrain· . . •
that "to call the villagers in the bor er ~ ian or P_ohsh is beside
the point. They were, as they often descnbed thems_elves, SIIDply 'locaJ."'i
kiv rovince has been described as a border region, although I do not
Kh
ar p . aril! d . db th
think peasants' sense of place was prun etenrune _Y. eir villages'
locations along the border between Russian- and Ukram1an- peaking
regions. Rather, I consider localness to be a_v ery common, important,
and human characteristic across place and time. 1n the cour e of world
history it is those who did not think locally that were, in fact, the excep
tion. It is much easier to identify with people one know per onally,
works alongside, celebrates with, e regularly, or at lea t go ip about
than with such abstract notion a nation and cla . Local identitie , of
course, continue to be a major feature of mo t oc.1et1e although, unlike
the subjects of this monograph, we modern indu tnaltzed citizen tend
to think of ourselves primarily as member.. of a broader group, nation,
class, ethnicity, race, or people.
To be focused on a local, tangible world wa not imple, nor was it
easy for outsiders to under tand. Indeed, a ke) theme revealed in this
study is the inability oft ari t official , revolullonarie , nationalists,
Bolsheviks, and communi ts to under tand the e pea ants' preference
for the local. My findings ugge t that the e villager did not think of
themselves primarily a the tsar's ubjects, or Ukrainians or Russians or
workers or Orthodox or only poor or only "backward," or "kulaks." They
~vere people who had rarely traveled farther than the nearest market town,
infreq~ently felt the fear of outsiders, seldom had to engage non-lo~ls
(especially non-peasants), or to explain their context to others. Village life
~vas ~ro~oundly contextual, seemingly simple to an outsider, but incred
'.bly mtnc~t~ to villagers. And the historian's problem is that this context
is rarely v1s1ble in the extant docwnents
Exactly becau th . . · R · Empire
. . se e maJonty of peasants of the uss,an
were illiterate t h · J ostlY
d a t e time of its collapse I was forced to emp oy m
ocuments co d b ' ·a1 f those
go mpose Y these very outsiders - the offici s 0
vernments wh ul d . Impe
rial G O r e the region over this period: Toe Russian
overnment th p . . . . Centra 1
Rad h . • e roV1s1onal Government, the Ukrauuan
hcl a, t e OVlet of People's Commissars, the Hetmanate and its G_e~~
pmates, the Ukrainian Directory, the Communist-led Provision
INTRODUCTION
3
Worker-Peasant Government, General Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army
(often called the "Whites"), and finally the Worker-Peasant Government
of Ukraine (also Communist-led). Such a problem with sources is not
easy to overcome. My method has been to read these sources very closely
and critically, taking into account their creators' biases and paying spe
cial attention to accounts of peasants' actions and their direct speech
(although recorded by others), in ,order to get as close to peasants'
experiences of this period as possible. The result is an imperfect but still
informative and useful portrait of how these villagers experienced th is
very tumultuous period and interacted with the various governments that
claimed to rule over them. And the most consistent pattern to emerge
from this examination is villagers' rejection of the various wider concep
tions of community that these diverse governments proposed; in the face
of numerous life-changing events, they sought refuge in their individual
village communities, where at least they knew everyone's name.
*
The historiography on the revolutionary period in Ukraine bears the
marks of a politically driven, polarized debate. For much of the post-revo
lutionary period, interpretations oft he revolution were determined by the
political requirements of the Ukrainian national and Soviet perspectives.'
Histories of the Ukrainian national revolution-from Volodymyr
Vynnychenko's socialist-oriented and very personal account to Dmytro
Doroshenko's more scholarly, state-building-focused contribution-have
never agreed on all aspects of the revolution, but they have shared what
Himka calls "a common narrative framework." This shared sense of"the
events" results from the very basic rule underlying the national approach
to history: whatever promotes the national cause is by definition histor
ically relevant. Seeking to portray in particular those events and people
that carried the national cause forward, toward statehood, these historians
neglect most other phenomena. The result is a history of a nationally
conscious elite and its activities in making the Ukrainian revolution; great
attention is paid to declarations and political bodies claiming le~itimacy
over the Ukrainian people, an amorpJ1ous mass that is ofte~ mv?ked
but rarely investigated.4 Certainly, a considerable amount of mtelli~ent
and informative history has been written within the national paradig,m,
and the historical controversies over the national roles of the successive
4
. . governments have led to some lively debate,s But like th
Uk ra,man . h e
. t t·ve framework that gave nse to t em, these controversies h
mterpre a 1 • • • ave
onfined to a quite narrow set of events, mst1tutions and peopl
be en c . . . . e,
an institutional, top-down, po1 1t1ca1 interpretation that leaves almost
everything else out. Declarations such as the Four Universals and the
actions and debates of the Central Rada (Council) have been examined
in great detail. Yet, few historians of the Ukrainian national revolution
studied the peasantry, its reactions to the appeals ofv arious governments,
or its participation in the revolution. 6
However, Ulkrainian national historiography was far more open,
honest and useful than Soviet historiography on the revolution, which
Himka aptly describes as the "elaboration of a founder's myth; ideolog
ically driven and quite unreliable as far as the evidence is concerned.
Within this myth all those people deemed sufficiently relevant to write
about were divided into "revolutionary" pro-Bolshevik forces and "count
er-revolutionary, bourgeois-landlord" or "petty-bourgeois nationalist"
forces; nothing bad could be said about the former, nothing good about
the latter.7
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this monumental Soviet effort to
fashion a history of the birth of the first socialist state was the failure
to create a useful social history. Over the Soviet Union's seventy-year
existence, Soviet academics managed to erect a history purportedly about
the triumph of "the masses;' while largely leaving them out. Although
Soviet historians had greater (though limited) access to the sources, ~nd
though in Marxism (one could argue) they even possessed the ideological
preconditions to write such a history, they instead produced a historr, of
the Communist Party and its (often exaggerated) role in "the events, as
defined by the party itself. Some Soviet historians discussed the peasan1
in Ukraine during this period, but their work was confined to the type 0
interpretations prevalent in Soviet historiography in general. For ~ aropl1
I. V. Khmil' carried out research in nine different Soviet archives an
arne conclu-
peruse d numerous Bolshevik newspapers, but came toth e 5 d
s·• on pro,.:e ssed by Lenin in 1917: that the union of the poor Pe asan.t.r y afno r
00
the workers, led by the Bolshevik Party, was "the necessary cond1t1
the victory of the socialist revolution in our country:'3 le.
Both these historiographical traditions selected which events, p~~ed
and m· stt·t utt•o ns were worthy of inclusion accordi. ng to a pre.c onced• a55
und ers t an d.m g or phi.l osophy of history; for SoV.t et h"ts t 0 n·ans it was
INTRODUCTION 5
struggle; for national historians it was national struggle. One assumed
that people's primary form of identification was their class, as determined
by their relations to the means ofp roduction; the other that people mainly
thought (or, at least, should have thought) of themselves as members of
a nation. Bringing these very different philosophies of history to their
research and writings about the revolution, both Soviet and national
historians tended to ignore or mention only in passing those people who
did not take some active part (positive or negative) in "the struggle."
Considering their numbers and importance to the revolution's outcome,
peasants have been without a doubt the most neglected group.
In the immediate post-Soviet period, most historians in independent
Ukraine embraced the national paradigm. "Sacred texts" such as the Four
Universals and the Central Rada's other decrees and debates have been
examined in great detail and lavishly republished.9 These texts are an
important part of the history of Ukraine and should be made known
to the country's citizens. But in this period there clearly emerged the
unbalanced privileging of these texts, and especially those who composed
them, over everything else as part of a new "founder's myth:' Instead of
Lenin and Stalin, we were presented with Symon Petliura, Vynnychenko,
and above all Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi (to be sure, in a much more sophis
ticated and honest way).10 A 2004 historiographical review asserted that
the revolution's "most controversial question" is the "evaluation of the
state-creating potential of the ideological doctrines of the Ukrainian
leadership."11 While Ukraine's citizens are becoming familiar with some
formerly unknown and important aspects of their past-the national
leaders, their institutions, and numerous decrees-Ukrainian historians
are only beginning to write a viable and even-handed social history of
Ukraine's peasants' experiences of the revolutionary period.
More recently, some Ukrainian historians have turned to the peas
antry, recognizing, as Hrushevs'kyi did already in 1918, that Ukraine's
fate has always been intimately linked with the peasantry.u Although this
new attention is relatively limited, it has proven sufficiently significant
to warrant a scholarly journal, Ukrai'ns'kyi selianyn (Ukrainian peasant),
which began publication in 2000 and devotes significant attention to
peasants during the revolutionary period.u These pioneering studies have
focused on three aspects of the subject: some studies strove to find among
the peasantry the "formation ofa social base of the national revolution.''14
My perusal of those studies reveals that this support was insubstantial