War without fronts: Atamans and Commissars in Ukraine 1917-1919

436 Pages·2013·1.36 MB·English

by  Mikhail Akulov

War Without Fronts: Atamans and
Commissars in Ukraine, 1917-1919
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Citation Akulov, Mikhail. 2013. War Without Fronts: Atamans and
Commissars in Ukraine, 1917-1919. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard
University.
Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11181181
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War Without Fronts:
Atamans and Commissars in Ukraine, 1917-1919

A dissertation presented

by

Mikhail Akulov

to

The Department of History

in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the subject of

History

Harvard University

Cambridge, Massachusetts

August 2013
© 2013 Mikhail Akulov

All rights reserved
Dissertation Advisor: Terry Martin Mikhail Akulov

War Without Front:
Atamans and Commissars in Ukraine, 1917-1919

Abstract

The double Revolution of 1917 buried the old Romanov Empire without installing anything
definite in its stead. It did, however, attenuate authority to the extreme, producing a climate
propitious to the emergence of socio-political projects each with a claim upon the present and
the future. One of such projects was the revolutionary warlordism known under the name of
atamanshchina. Reaching greatest scope and complexity on the territory of modern-day
Ukraine, this predominantly peasant phenomenon represented, on one hand, an effort of the
countryside to fill in a power vacuum by institutionalizing the rural insurgency. On the other
hand, as an efficient form of military self-organization, it embodied a factor of paramount
importance in the ongoing Civil war – to be courted and reckoned with. The Bolsheviks
appeared to have been the most successful in that task, establishing a type of joint dominion
with the warlords over Ukraine in the months following German departure (Nov. 1918).
Experiment for all those involved, this alliance attempted to reconcile the atamans’ suspicion
of disciplinary regimes with the Bolshevik war-making imperatives. Ultimately, this
experiment proving disastrous, the notion of party-state centralism collided against the
practice of revolutionary particularism and compelled the partners to split under the dramatic
circumstances of the Grigoriev’s uprising. Drawing heavily from archival sources, this work
looks, therefore, at the manner whereby major players came to recognize their own political
identities and ends – not in the least the Bolsheviks themselves, who evolved from the unsure
parvenus to the seasoned Staatsmachthaber (“state power holders”) in the course of their
interaction with the forces of rural revolt.
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Table of Contents

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………1

Chapter I:
From the Railroads to Country Roads: Birth of Peasant Insurgency…………………..42

Chapter II:
“Petliura ide na Hetmana”: Anti-Hetman Uprising and the Ukrainian Revolution…..178

Chapter III:
Between Bolsheviks and Atamans ……………………………………………………….232

Chapter IV:
Front against Government: the End of the Bolshevik-Ataman Alliance……………...296

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………406

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….417

iv
To Stephanie Weismann and my grandparents, Ded and Ilia, who rooted for me till the end

v
Acknowledgements

Approaching deadline does not allow me to express the gratitutude to all those who stood by
me and helped me in words they truly merit.
First of all, I would like to thank my Harvard advisor, Professor Terry Martin, who remained
a steadfast – and insightful – champion of the subject despite the many quirks of my prose
and character.
I am extremely grateful for having found in Professor Serhii Plokhii an individual whose
calm and balanced judgement often kept me from steering into unsolicited corners.
I am deeply indebted to Professor Steven Zipperstein from Stanford University, who became
my mentor in the fullest sense of the word – a kind guide in moments of confusion and the
most genuine witness of my small triumphs.
I would like to thank Professor Elizabeth Perry for teaching me how to think about peasants,
Professor Alison Frank-Johnson for her enthusiastic engagement with the project, especially
in its early stages, Dr. Lis Tarlow and Dr. Gulnora Aminova for their invaluable friendship
and healing sympathy.
Professor Thierry Leterre from Middlebury College, Professor Karen Gocsik from
Dartmouth and Professor Klaus Müller-Richter from the University of Tübingen had shown
me how to fuse stellar scholarship with passion for teaching into an irresistable whole. It was
great pleasure to be taking classes with them. Thank you for your inspiring examples – and
that credit of faith which you had so gratiously offered me.
To say that I was lucky with the colleagues I had in the Ph.D. Program is a poor
understatement. Tariq Ali, Hasan Malik, Stefan Link, Johan Matthew, Johanna Conterio,
Kuba Kabala, Sofiia Gracheva, Michael Tworek, Tom Hooker – and many others – you
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brought mirth to my life, and not exclusively of the intellectual kind. Without you I might
have finished the dissertation earlier – but then the process would have not been worthy of
undertaking at all.
Illimitable is my gratutide to Matthew Corcoran, Sarah Faillah, Michael Nafi, Julie Kohler
and Beth Kerley. They are the greatest friends and impeccable editors, who spent many hours
of their life to give the wild growth of my paragraphs appearance of an orderly garden.
We have all gone to different places, yet I hope that we will all stay together no matter what.
I would like to thank Kamilla Kurmanbekova for her patience and understanding.
To Stephanie “Fania” Weismann goes the dedication of this work – although that falls
terribly short of what she truly deserves.
Finally – what words could express the extent to which I am indebted to my family? To my
mom, my sister, my cousin and his parents – and, above all, to my grandparents? No doubt,
this project has a meaning for them as it does for nobody else.

vii
Introduction

1
Part I: Institutionalized Insurgency: Project Overview

Whether driven by an onerous administrative chore or, on the contrary, by the desire to take
in a dose of a big city air after the unrelenting rural winter, the couple of Dunin-Kozickis
picked the least appropriate season for traveling to Kiev (Kyiv). It was in the middle of
March and this meant that a notorious bezdorizhzhia, a creeping mélange of dirt and snow, a
cantankerous child of vernal elements, took hold of the countryside roads, metamorphosing
them into nearly impassable mud swamps. The journey, accomplished during clement
weather in 5-6 hours, became a veritable ordeal, testing the limits of endurance of all those
involved: the inanimate droshkies, which creaked and coughed in their exactions of pity,
horses, their feet stuck in the mud, dragging on with flagging resolve of sentient creatures,
and, finally humans, who, although sheltered from physical hardships, found the strain of
monotony no less deleterious than the abrasion of labor. When the night finally came,
effacing all hopes of reaching Kiev in one day, the party decided to stop at a guest house in
Belaia Tserkov (Bila Tserkva) and rest there before hitting the road again in the morning.1

It was there, in that inn named in a risible rebuttal of its provincial whereabouts “European,”
that the spouses learned the shocking news from the innkeeper: the Tsar was toppled and
herewith the Dynasty and the Empire came to an end. At first, fatigue prevented them from
registering the ramifications of such cataclysmic turnabout, but then, some minutes or maybe
hours later, in their room cozily snuggled in feather comforters, with the Dziennik Kijowski
(“Kiev Daily”) in their hands, they began to discern the contours of the event’s grandeur.
“The charm of the printed word enthralled us,” remembered Maria Dunin-Kozicka. “Inspired
by hope of standing perhaps on the threshold of the Slavic spring of nations, we set out to

1 Maria Dunin-Kozicka, Burza od wschodu (Łomianki: LTW, 2007), 11
2