War Without Fronts: Atamans and Commissars in Ukraine, 1917-1919 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters 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 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 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. iii 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 vi 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 Kiev on the evening train.” There, in the city of multitudinous crowds, they became witnesses of the first “procession of freedom” as massive demonstrations in support of changes became to be known. As an uninterrupted wave flowed the human stream along the Kreshchatik street, hurrying to reach the City Hall, where the revolutionary powers now sat. Fiery speeches were being declaimed there. Red, revolutionary banners passed before the eyes of thousands spectators, who crowded up the space on the pavement. The wind unfurled them, displaying at once the words of defiance, cast at the faded spirit of the tsarist order “Long live Russia freed from the tyrants!”… “We demand the summoning of the Constituent Assemby!” “Land and Freedom to the toilers!” “Long live Federal Russian Republic!” “Seven-hour working day! Freedom to trade-unions!” “Long live revolutionary, free Russia!” Observing the exaltation of the masses with the hindsight of subsequent events, Kozicka- Dunin felt obliged to add: “The Revolution – as usually in its first moments before it turns into a sanguinary fury, which never gets its fill of offerings and destructive follies – showed up in the radiant guise of the goddess of freedom.”2 Like the Kievan crowds, most of the Tsar’s former subjects readily succumbed to the intoxicating excitement of the early days. Most – but not all. General Anton Denikin, who had a chance to see the surreptitious intrigue unfold behind the festive performance of the revolution from the very outset belonged to the small coterie of skeptics. The vision of “enthused faces,” the music of “excited speeches,” “the joy of being emancipated from the hovering incubus” affected him much less than did the first army decrees aiming to loosen the screws of its overworked and rickety structure.3 His initial alarm found indirect confirmation in Petrograd, whither he was summoned to discuss the possibility of becoming 2 ibid., 12 3 Anton Denikin, Ocherki russkoi smuty (Minsk: Kharvest, 2004), v.