The Soviet-Ukrainian War: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom, 1917-1921

It was one of the first new states born from the collapse of a bygone world. As World War I entered its final year, a single ethnic group stretched across two disintegrating empires made its bid for freedom. In Russian-claimed Kyiv and Austrian-claimed Lviv, Ukrainian nationalists seized power and declared independence. Their goal was to unite their two statelets into a single Ukrainian homeland, a new nation that would take its place alongside emerging countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.

In that dreamlike era, success seemed almost a given, a natural outcome on a continent that was rapidly shedding empires. Yet it would be in the capital of one of those collapsing empires that Ukraine’s fate was decided. Up in Moscow, Vladimir Lenin had no intention of letting his neighbors slip away without a fight.

That fight became the Soviet-Ukrainian War, also known as the Ukrainian War of Independence, and it ranks among the messiest and most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century. As Europe’s borders shifted, armies of every stripe poured into Ukraine: imperialist Whites, Bolshevik Reds, Polish nationalists, and black-flag-waving anarchists. In the melee that followed there would be many winners, but only one major loser: the civilians of Ukraine.

This is the story of how a nation that existed mostly as an idea briefly became real, fought for its life against a dozen rivals, and ultimately lost the war while perhaps winning something more enduring.

A Divided Land

As the twentieth century dawned, it dawned on a Europe cracked with fissures. Across the continent ran invisible ethnic and political fault lines that could split open at any moment, unleashing the geopolitical equivalent of a megaquake. One of the biggest of these fault lines ran right through what is today called Ukraine.

In that era, of course, Ukraine did not exist, except as an idea. The same was true of the Czech lands, Croatia, Poland, and a dozen other modern nations. Ukrainians were instead largely split between two imperial behemoths. In the west, centered on the picturesque city of Lviv, lay the lands controlled by Austria-Hungary. To the east stretched the vast agricultural plains claimed by Imperial Russia.

The ethnic majority on both sides of this invisible boundary were Ukrainians, also known in that period as “Ruthenians.” Yet their lived experiences of empire were wildly different, and those differences would shape everything that followed.

Life Under Two Empires

For Ukrainians in the east, life was marked by near-invisibility. For a long time their cities had been dominated by a Russified elite and a growing class of skilled Russian workers. From St Petersburg’s point of view, these cities were mere flecks of paint on a vast, rural Ukrainian canvas, so the Tsars decided to repaint the whole picture.

That meant a deliberate policy of Russification: discouraging the use of the Ukrainian language and the cultivation of a distinct Ukrainian identity. By the nineteenth century it meant a blanket ban on anything even fractionally less Russian than the imperial ideal. This was also the era of romantic nationalism, when minorities across Europe began creating their own written languages and literatures. Eastern Ukraine was no exception; the mid-nineteenth century was the golden age of Taras Shevchenko’s poetry and of academics in Kharkiv and Kyiv working to forge a Ukrainian consciousness.

It was equally the era of an almighty Russian backlash. In 1863, the Russian empire’s Polish minority launched an unsuccessful revolt. Overnight, minority languages went from a quaint peasant curiosity to dangerous, rabble-rousing threats that had to be stopped. In Ukraine, the backlash saw figures like Shevchenko arrested and exiled, and the use of Ukrainian outlawed. Any hint of nationalism was pushed deep underground.

The Idea That Would Not Die

The trouble with nationalism, once unleashed, is that it cannot be put back. Out of sight of the authorities, clandestine groups began to piece together a vision for Ukraine. In Kyiv, a movement emerged for an autonomous country within a federalized Russian empire. Yet it was in Kharkiv that the most radical idea of all took hold.

In 1900, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party became the first to advocate the unthinkable: a Ukraine that was no longer part of Russia but its own free nation. More precisely, they were the first to advocate it in the Ukrainian lands under Tsarist rule.

In the Austrian-dominated west, nationalism was not merely miles ahead but lightyears. The Austrians had picked up their Ukrainian holdings in 1772, during the first partition of Poland. Before that, the region of Galicia had been under Polish domination, so when Vienna annexed what is now western Ukraine, it acquired not just a population of Ukrainian peasants but also a class of wealthy, deeply resentful Poles with the power to make endless trouble.

Rather than follow the Tsarist route of forced assimilation, the Austrians tried a hands-off approach, allowing the Polish elites to keep much of their power. But they could not let them grow too powerful, so they turned to a ready-made counterbalance: the Ukrainians. Under Habsburg rule, Ukrainians in the empire were allowed to publish in their own language, to teach, to organize, and to dream of one day creating their own nation state.

The Habsburg Counterbalance

Even after the failed revolutions of 1848, which saw Ukrainians in Galicia establish their own council and national guard and attempt to merge with their eastern counterparts, Vienna kept allowing Ukrainians to pursue their own development. There was even a Ruthenian delegation in the imperial parliament.

This was not because the Austrians were more enlightened than the Russians. They had simply realized, cynically, that the key to retaining power in Galicia was to play both ethnicities off against each other. But the practical effect was profound: Western Ukrainians entered the twentieth century with far more political experience, and higher aspirations, than their eastern compatriots.

That divergence mattered enormously. When everything went to hell a few years later, the two parts of Ukraine would fight wildly different wars, so different that one side’s allies would become the other’s bitterest enemies. The same people, the same language, and the same dream of nationhood, but two utterly distinct political worlds set on a collision course.

Birth of a Dream

For all the historical differences between Austria and Russia’s approaches to their Ukrainian subjects, their methods became extremely unified in the fall of 1914. That is because the First World War erupted with Vienna and St Petersburg, soon renamed Petrograd, on opposing sides. The result was an eastern front in Ukraine that saw some of the bloodiest fighting of a supremely bloody war.

As the Austrians were forced into retreat, they turned on their own Ukrainian subjects. Thousands upon thousands were executed across Galicia for suspected treachery, often on the flimsiest of evidence. If that were not bad enough, the Russians then rolled in, annexed Galicia, and began their own campaign of repression. In the months the Tsarist regime held the region, the Ukrainian language was banned, schools and bookshops were closed, and the local religious system was dismantled.

By the time the Central Powers chased the Russians back east in the summer of 1915, the region had become so avowedly anti-Russian that the returning Austrians were practically embraced. Western Ukrainians may by then have regarded Petrograd as utterly untrustworthy, yet it would be events in that very imperial capital that turned their nationalist dreams into reality.

Revolution and the Rada

In early 1917, Russian civil society surveyed its war-shattered economy, its abysmal military performance, and its discredited ruler, and decided it was time for a change. On March 8, or February 24 in the old-style Russian calendar, a revolution swept the nation and toppled Nicholas II. In his place rose the Provisional Government, which made one of its first acts the ending of prohibitions on the rights of minorities.

Barely was the ink on that declaration dry before Ukraine was racing for the exit. All the nationalism that had been forced underground in Kyiv came bubbling back to the surface on a wave of ecstatic victory. A Ukrainian-language press appeared. New political parties and cultural organizations opened. Most important of all was the rise of the Central Rada.

Formed that March in Kyiv, the Rada began as a council on Ukrainian affairs before very quickly assuming the role of a government. By April, the historian Mykhaylo Hrushevsky had become its head, a position he vowed to use to push for a wholly autonomous Ukraine within a federal Russian empire. For their part, the Provisional Government left the Rada to its own devices. Liberally inclined and stretched far too thin, Petrograd’s new rulers were simply too busy, and too weak, to consider disbanding it.

The October Revolution Changes Everything

Then the October Revolution came along, and a government far less kindly disposed to nationalist aspirations swept to power. Taking place on November 7, and thus forever confusing anyone not familiar with the Julian calendar, this was the revolution that took Vladimir Lenin from excitable bald nobody to excitable bald somebody. It was very bad news for eastern Ukraine’s nationalists.

On paper, Lenin was supportive of minority rights within the now-former Russian empire. In practice, he supported those rights only so long as the minorities in question immediately formed Bolshevik-supporting Soviets. And for all the Rada’s socialist leanings, it was about as pro-Bolshevik as anyone might be pro-smallpox.

Thirteen days after the Bolshevik coup, the Rada threw down the gauntlet and declared the Ukrainian National Republic. While Hrushevsky maintained the new entity was still in federation with Russia, the Rada began passing a slew of laws designed to win the public over in case of a permanent split. Peace was promised. Land was promised. A law was drafted to grant national autonomy to Ukraine’s Jews and Poles.

But while this went down well in the countryside and the military, in the cities it crashed straight into a brick wall of skepticism. Outside Kyiv, urban support for the Rada barely crested 13 percent. In Kharkiv, a combination of industrial workers and Russified intellectuals seized on this dissatisfaction to set up a rival government. That December, in 1917, the Kharkiv government declared Ukraine a Soviet Republic.

One of its first acts was to invite the Bolshevik army into the country to defeat the nationalists.

Independence Declared

In no time at all, Russian troops were pouring into the region and marching for Kyiv. Trapped and desperate, the Rada pressed the nuclear button, the one that would blow Ukraine’s political fault lines wide open. On January 22, 1918, they declared full independence. For the first time, a distinct nation state called Ukraine had come into being. Now all they had to do was make sure it survived.

At the moment independent Ukraine was declared, few would have bet on it surviving days, let alone months. Right after the announcement, the Rada abandoned Kyiv to the Bolshevik onslaught, retreating to a region known as the Right Bank, which confusingly is the name for the left-hand side of Ukraine as it appears on a map. The Reds took the capital effectively unopposed.

That looked like the beginning of the end. It was not quite. The Rada was about to enter a marriage of convenience with a hulking partner: Imperial Germany.

The German Bargain and the Hetmanate

As the new Ukrainian state crumbled, the Rada negotiated a hurried peace deal with the Central Powers. Signed at 2 a.m. on February 9, it amounted to a contract to save the Rada from the Bolsheviks in return for Ukraine becoming Germany’s personal breadbasket. Left with no other choice, the Rada closed its eyes and agreed.

The first peace deal of the war concluded, Austrian and German troops flooded into eastern Ukraine, scattering the Bolsheviks. At the same time, a separate German offensive in the north was rolling toward Russia proper. With Lenin’s government, now headquartered in Moscow, already unstable, the Bolsheviks were forced to cut a deal. Signed on March 15, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave the Central Powers essentially everything they wanted.

In Ukraine’s case, that meant the withdrawal of Red Army troops and a guarantee of independence.

But the Rada had little time to celebrate. One of its key promises to the people had been land. Taking it from landlords and handing it to peasants, however, would disrupt the 100 million tons of grain Ukraine had also promised Germany. So the Germans simply turned their guns around and made it clear that a new government was needed. On April 29, Pavlo Skoropadsky was installed as Kyiv’s dictator.

Drawing support from the monied, Russified elite, Skoropadsky reorganized Ukraine into something called the Hetmanate. Effectively a German colony, the Hetmanate existed only to feed Germany’s starving soldiers. While Rada supporters formed the Ukrainian National Union to organize a rebellion, there was little they could do. So long as the Central Powers backed him, Skoropadsky was secure.

Collapse and a Second State

That, of course, was where dramatic irony entered the story. That fall, the Central Powers collapsed. Bulgaria tapped out. The Ottoman Empire signed an armistice with its dying breaths. Austria-Hungary disintegrated into multiple new states. On October 29, a revolution broke out in Germany that would usher in a new government and a peace concluded by November 11. By then, though, a brand-new Ukrainian state had already been born in the west.

What had been happening in Galicia all this time? Very little. After Austria retook the region in 1915, it stayed part of Vienna’s empire, save for a brief Russian incursion in its eastern districts. Western Ukrainians had missed out on the drama of the Rada, the Bolshevik invasion, and independence. Even when the Hetmanate was created, they remained firmly within Austria’s chilly embrace, denied even the autonomy of being a puppet state.

As Austria-Hungary entered freefall in the war’s closing weeks, that changed. With central authority gone, Galicia was suddenly up for grabs. In late October, Ukrainian nationalists under Yevhen Petrushevych rose up. On November 1, they marched into Lviv and declared it the capital of the Western Ukrainian National Republic.

Then they watched with glee as their eastern cousins chased Skoropadsky from power. By mid-December the Hetmanate had fallen, and the nationalists were back in charge as the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic.

Yet there was no time to celebrate, and no chance to join all Ukrainians into a single nation state. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires had also produced another new state, one with its own historic claims on Galicia: the newly resurrected Republic of Poland.

Age of Chaos

It would be reasonable to assume this was a story about a single war, the titular conflict between the Soviets and independent Ukraine. It was not. The two Ukraines of this period were less fighting one war than they were caught in a gigantic free-for-all, with a crowd of heavily armed contenders using their nation as the arena.

On November 21, 1918, before the Hetmanate had even fallen, the first of these contenders joined the fray. Polish troops attacked Lviv, sparking the Polish-Ukrainian War. Forced to fall back, Petrushevych’s western government regrouped at Stanyslaviv, today the small, pretty city of Ivano-Frankivsk. There they managed to make contact with the eastern Ukrainian Directory. That January, the two statelets agreed to merge, creating a single, indivisible Ukraine. Sadly, this new country would only ever exist on paper.

Over the first months of spring 1919, the Poles relentlessly hammered the Western Ukrainians, driving them out of Galicia. By summer, Petrushevych had been forced to evacuate, forming a government-in-exile in Vienna. It is important to note that the Poles only wanted Galicia. They did not follow their successes by rolling ever eastward to threaten Kyiv, Kharkiv, and the Donbas.

They merely reoccupied the Ukrainian lands they had held prior to the 1772 Partition. Still, this offered the Directory cold comfort at best.

A Nation Surrounded

Now under the control of the military leader Symon Petlyura, the eastern Ukrainians could only watch in horror as more and more wars engulfed different parts of their nation. In the southeast, an anarchist rebellion had broken out under the charismatic Nestor Makhno. By early 1919 his movement controlled a Free Territory centered on Huliaipole that claimed 7 million inhabitants.

To the east, the regrouped Red Army had reinvaded in December, resuming the Soviet-Ukrainian War. In February it would force the Directory to abandon Kyiv all over again. Nor were the Bolsheviks the only occupying force. The same month the Red Army reinvaded, France took control of the vital port of Odessa, part of an Allied attempt to shore up the pro-imperial Russian White armies.

And the Whites themselves were about to open another front in the fast-developing quagmire. In May 1919, the Volunteer Army under former Tsarist officer Anton Denikin crossed into Ukrainian territory, part of a grand push up through Kharkiv and Kyiv toward Moscow to overthrow the Bolsheviks. But while the enemy of one’s enemy may be a friend, Denikin was simply everybody’s enemy.

He and the Whites did not just want to smash Lenin; they wanted to restore the empire, turning Ukraine back into a vassal state in which everyone played the part of obedient subjects. If that meant slaughtering and terrorizing Ukrainian peasants on their drive north and west, so be it.

This was the multi-pronged nightmare Ukraine faced at the start of 1919: a series of colliding civil wars in which all sides were out to dismember the state. And that is only the basic overview. It does not even account for the smalltime Otamany warlords running around, killing and looting at will, perhaps because the bigger armies would soon kill and loot on a far grander scale. No one would come out of this battle for Ukraine’s future looking good.

Bloodlands

With so many armies criss-crossing its territory, Ukraine did what any unstable new state would do: it collapsed. In most regions, central authority simply evaporated. And that meant a surge in violence, most prominently a wave of pogroms targeting Ukraine’s Jews.

The reasons for the anti-Semitic attacks that took place over 1919 are complex and legion, but the brutal truth is that nearly every side made a point of killing as many Jewish people as possible. The Whites and the Ukrainian Directory allowed their forces to massacre Jews on the pretense that they were all Bolsheviks. The Red Army, by contrast, targeted them as capitalists and class enemies. The Otamany were straight-up anti-Semites.

Over in Galicia, Polish forces celebrated taking Lviv by launching a three-day orgy of destruction in Jewish neighborhoods. Even the anarchists committed anti-Semitic violence, despite Nestor Makhno publicly punishing soldiers who attacked Jews.

In short, the birth and collapse of Ukraine were accompanied by anti-Semitic bloodletting on a scale rarely seen this side of the Holocaust. So intense was the violence that it is today thought over 100,000 people were killed. Almost everyone involved, whether Russian, Polish, or Ukrainian; nationalist, imperialist, or Communist, bears a share of this horror. Not that any of their commanders likely cared much about the atrocities being carried out. They were all too busy fighting to gain the upper hand.

The Race for Kyiv

Summer 1919 saw Odessa vacated by the French and replaced by a Bolshevik-aligned force. With the most important port in Ukraine’s claimed territory now taken, a race developed between the Whites and the Directory to overrun Kyiv. On August 31, both sides entered the city mere hours apart, forcing the Communists to flee. But this was hardly a joint effort. With the Bolsheviks gone, a bitter fight erupted for control of the capital.

As the Whites gained ground, the Directory’s forces were pushed into retreat, falling further and further back into the northern region of Volhynia. Finally, in December, Symon Petlyura found his army trapped between a rock and a hard place, because yet another war had meanwhile broken out: the Polish-Soviet War.

Back in February, as Polish forces swept across Galicia, the remnants of the defeated German army had been retreating from the eastern front. As they went, the Red Army followed, occupying territory that the newly reconstituted Poland wanted for itself. On February 9, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski decided it was time to push back and launched a counterattack.

With the Bolsheviks distracted by their war against the White Armies in Russia itself, Piłsudski’s army was soon rolling eastwards, devouring territory at speed. It was this hungry, advancing army that Petlyura and the Directory’s forces found themselves directly in the path of that December.

Petlyura’s Gamble

Trapped between two colossal armies, Petlyura’s forces disbanded as a conventional army, ceasing regular operations and turning instead to guerilla tactics against the Communists, but not against the Poles. Realizing he needed powerful new friends if he wanted to see the state called Ukraine survive, Petlyura abandoned the front. He headed to Poland and, that winter, opened negotiations with Piłsudski’s men.

In April 1920, both sides signed the Treaty of Warsaw. In it, Petlyura threw the Western Ukrainians under the bus, agreeing to give up all claims to Galicia. In turn, all Poland had to do was help the Directory defeat the Red Army.

By now, the utter chaos in Ukraine was dying down, or at least simplifying. The Red Army had cut its own deal with Makhno’s anarchists to take out the Whites, with the result that Denikin’s army was driven from Ukraine by February 1920. While the Whites would stagger on in Russia and Crimea for a while longer, they were no longer active players in the Ukrainian conflict. The board had been cleared and the rules of the final showdown were set: a direct confrontation between the Poles, backed by the eastern Ukrainians, and the Red Army.

What happened next would decide the fate of millions.

Death of a Dream

Even with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to pinpoint the moment independent Ukraine went from a real possibility to a wistful dream. Maybe it was when Germany overthrew the Rada and installed the Hetmanate. Maybe it was when Poland swiped Galicia. Maybe it was as late as Denikin’s invasion. Whatever the exact point, it seems clear that by the spring of 1920 the likelihood of Ukraine surviving the war was receding.

Petlyura had not only abandoned Galicia; he had also lost most of his popular support at home. With a guerilla force numbering only in the tens of thousands, the Directory had little claim left to speak for all Ukrainians. But that is the trouble with dreams: they are hard to give up on, even when all the evidence says it is time to cut your losses.

Which is why the Directory, the Red Army, and Poland’s forces spent the next half year chasing their own impossible dreams in a wild back-and-forth, constantly thinking they could keep climbing only to be startled by their sudden return to earth. The first to experience this whiplash was the newly combined Polish-Ukrainian force. In early May they stormed into Kyiv, dislodging the Communists yet again, the high point of the entire campaign.

The Seesaw of 1920

Then the Red Army counterattacked, and the Poles and Ukrainians crashed back down. With the White Armies now finished, Lenin was able to call in extra units that had been tied up fighting in Russia itself. The counterattack did not just dislodge the Poles from Kyiv; it chased them all the way back to the outskirts of Warsaw. But this turned out to be only Moscow’s turn at the top, because the Poles then devastated the Red Army on home turf before pushing it back east all over again.

And so it went, on and on for six months. Six months of carnage in which perhaps another 100,000 people died. Six months that left the Reds, the Poles, and the remaining Ukrainian forces utterly exhausted. Six months that finally convinced Józef Piłsudski someone would have to give up on their dreams. It just would not be him.

In October 1920, the Poles and the Red Army called a ceasefire and hammered out a joint agreement to end the war. Signed in March 1921 and known as the Peace of Riga, it allowed both sides to limp home with some gains and their dignity intact, but at a steep price for Piłsudski’s erstwhile allies. To secure Poland’s borders, Warsaw had sacrificed all hopes of an independent Ukraine. The treaty handed Galicia to Poland and the eastern territory claimed by the Directory to the Soviets.

By now, two smaller western Ukrainian territories, Bukovina and Transcarpathia, had already been joined with Romania and Czechoslovakia. With this last treaty, the dismemberment of Ukraine was complete.

The Seed That Survived

For a short while, the Directory tried to fight on. In November 1921, the Second Winter Campaign saw a small force cross into eastern Ukraine in an attempt to spark a general uprising. But it failed when some of the fighters were caught and executed by the Bolsheviks. It was the last military action the Directory would ever take.

That did not mean the dream of a separate Ukraine was completely dead. When the USSR was declared in 1922, it was not as a renewed empire in which the former Ukrainian National Republic was subsumed into Russia itself. Instead, it was a federal state, one in which the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic existed as its own distinct entity. According to the historian Serhii Plokhy, it was precisely to counter Ukrainian separatism that the USSR was built this way.

Of course, much of that autonomy existed only on paper. Under Stalin, ethnically motivated crimes were committed against Ukrainians on a scale the Tsar could only have dreamed of. Yet for all he might try, not even Stalin could destroy the seed that had been planted, one that would, decades later, bloom at last into a truly independent Ukraine.

What Became of the Major Players

The leading figures of this period suffered a variety of fates. Symon Petlyura was assassinated by a Jewish man in Paris in 1926 for his role in the pogroms. Nestor Makhno died in the same city in poverty just eight years later. The Rada’s first head, Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, eventually embraced socialism and returned to Communist Ukraine, only to be purged; he died in suspicious circumstances in 1934.

That was just one year before Józef Piłsudski, by then the strongman ruler of Poland, passed away from liver cancer in Warsaw. Had Piłsudski lived another decade, he would have seen Galicia annexed into Soviet Ukraine. The White general Anton Denikin was the last to go. After settling in France, he finally moved to the United States at the end of the Second World War, passing away in Michigan in 1947 at the age of 74.

Today, the many wars that consumed Ukraine in this period remain relatively unknown, simply too messy and confusing to be remembered by all but the most dedicated students of history. Yet this period still represents an epochal moment, an era when Ukrainians fought ferociously for their freedom against a larger oppressor. And while they may not have won the war, they perhaps won themselves something even more precious: a future.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Austrian and Russian rule over Ukrainians differ, and why did that matter?

Imperial Russia pursued aggressive Russification, banning the Ukrainian language, exiling figures like Taras Shevchenko, and suppressing nationalism underground after the Polish revolt of 1863. Austria-Hungary, by contrast, allowed Ukrainians to publish, teach, and organize, mainly to use them as a counterweight against Galicia’s powerful Polish elites. As a result, Western Ukrainians entered the twentieth century with far more political experience and higher aspirations—a divergence that meant the two halves of Ukraine would fight wildly different wars, with each side’s allies becoming the other’s enemies.

What was the Central Rada and how did it evolve into an independence declaration?

The Central Rada was formed in Kyiv in March 1917, immediately after the revolution toppled Nicholas II, as a council on Ukrainian affairs. Led by the historian Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, it initially sought autonomy within a federal Russian empire. After the Bolshevik coup in November 1917, the Rada declared the Ukrainian National Republic. When the Red Army invaded, it declared full independence on January 22, 1918—the first time a distinct Ukrainian nation state had formally come into being.

Who were the main forces fighting over Ukraine between 1918 and 1921?

The conflict drew in the Bolshevik Red Army, imperialist White forces under former Tsarist officer Anton Denikin, Polish troops under Józef Piłsudski, Nestor Makhno’s anarchists with their Free Territory around Huliaipole claiming 7 million inhabitants, French forces who occupied Odessa, smalltime Otamany warlords, and the two Ukrainian governments themselves—the eastern Directory and the Western Ukrainian National Republic based briefly in Lviv then Stanyslaviv.

How did the pogroms of 1919 fit into the war?

As central authority collapsed across Ukraine, nearly every faction targeted the Jewish population. The Whites and the Directory framed Jews as Bolsheviks, the Red Army targeted them as capitalist class enemies, the Otamany were openly anti-Semitic, and Polish forces launched a three-day rampage in Lviv’s Jewish neighborhoods after taking the city. Even Nestor Makhno’s anarchists committed anti-Semitic violence despite his publicly punishing soldiers who attacked Jews. It is thought over 100,000 people were killed in what ranks among the worst anti-Semitic violence this side of the Holocaust.

How did the war end, and what legacy did the failed Ukrainian state leave?

The Polish-Soviet War concluded with the Peace of Riga, signed in March 1921. Poland sacrificed its support for an independent Ukraine to secure its own borders, handing eastern Ukraine to the Soviets while Galicia went to Poland and Bukovina and Transcarpathia to Romania and Czechoslovakia. Ukraine’s dismemberment was complete. Yet when the USSR was declared in 1922, it was built as a federal state that recognized a distinct Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic—preserving the idea of Ukraine as a separate entity that would, decades later, bloom into a truly independent nation.

Sources

1. Encyclopedia of Ukraine: http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CU%5CK%5CUkrainian6SovietWar1917hD721.htm
2. Britannica, Soviet-Ukrainian War: https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine/World-War-I-and-the-struggle-for-independence
3. 1917, Ukraine in Flames: https://huri.harvard.edu/news/ukraine-flames-1917-kyiv-serhii-plokhii
4. Character of the revolution: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/1917-the-empires-diverging-revolutions
5. Britannica, Russo-Polish War: https://www.britannica.com/event/Russo-Polish-War-1919-1920
6. History, Ukraine’s peace treaty: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ukraine-signs-peace-treaty-with-central-powers
7. French Occupation of Odessa: https://euromaidanpress.com/2021/12/28/the-time-when-odesa-was-a-french-province-for-100-days-historic-photos/
8. 1919, anti-Jewish pogroms: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/the-1919-pogroms-ukraine-and-poland-one-hundred-years-later
9. Lviv pogrom: https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-1918-anti-jewish-pogroms-end-in-poland-1.5202015