Puppet Government

In December 1917 the Bolsheviks gathered their own congress of soviets in Kharkiv and created a government subordinate to Petrograd, the "People's Secretariat". The goal was to pass off Russia's war against Ukraine as an internal struggle among Ukrainians. The Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine describes it this way: it was created "as an alternative to the Ukrainian Central Rada and the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada" and "acted in close contact with and under the direct leadership of the highest state and party institutions of Soviet Russia"^[1]. The congress declared Ukraine a part of Russia. On 12 (25) December 1917 it adopted a resolution on the self-determination of Ukraine. In it the congress recognized "the Ukrainian Republic as a federative part of the Russian Republic" and declared "a resolute struggle against the policy of the Central Rada, ruinous for the worker and peasant masses, exposing its bourgeois, counter-revolutionary character"^[2]. The congress explained its right to power by the coup in Petrograd and wrote in the resolution: "the principle of the right of nations to self-determination, proclaimed by the February Revolution, could be put into practice only thanks to the October Revolution, which led to the creation of the Worker-Peasant Government — the Council of People's Commissars"^[2]. The puppet government in Kharkiv had no laws of its own: it introduced Petrograd's ready-made decrees in Ukraine. The congress itself decided so: "to immediately extend to the territory of the Ukrainian Republic all decrees and orders of the worker-peasant government of the Federation" and "to declare invalid all orders of the Rada that it has issued and will issue"^[3]. The entire new "all-Ukrainian" Soviet authority consisted of 40 people chosen by the congress. There were no peasants among them: the congress left 20 seats for a peasant congress that had not yet convened^[4]. Among its first decisions the puppet government appealed to the Council of People's Commissars (the government of Soviet Russia) and annulled the reply of the General Secretariat (the government of the Ukrainian People's Republic under the Central Rada) to Petrograd's ultimatum^[4]. It explained the purpose of the appeal this way: "to avoid the possibility of a fratricidal war between the working peoples inhabiting Russia"^[4]. The Council of People's Commissars had telegraphed this ultimatum to Kyiv earlier, on 4 (17) December^[5]. It put four demands to the Rada. Not to break up the common front by recalling Ukrainian units. Not to let Cossack units pass to the Don, to Kaledin (a general, ataman of the Don Cossack Host, who did not recognize the authority of the Council of People's Commissars), without Petrograd's consent. To help the troops of Soviet Russia against Kaledin. To stop disarming Soviet regiments and the Red Guard. The Council of People's Commissars wrote in the ultimatum: "in the event that a satisfactory answer to these questions is not received within 48 hours, the Council of People's Commissars will consider the Rada to be in a state of open war against Soviet power in Russia and in Ukraine"^[6]. The General Secretariat replied with a refusal the next day^[5]. The puppet government withdrew that refusal. Thus Petrograd obtained a Ukrainian government that accepted the terms of the ultimatum. Petrograd also kept its own man inside the government. The people's secretary for inter-ethnic affairs, Bakinsky, was at the same time the representative of the Council of People's Commissars of Russia^[1]. The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky describes direct supervision: "since no Ukrainian party centre existed, Lenin placed a temporary extraordinary commissar over the Kharkiv government"^[7]. That commissar was Ordzhonikidze, an official of the central party apparatus^[7]. The journal "Letopis revolyutsii" (a publication of Istpart, the party commission on history) wrote in 1924: "The all-Ukrainian government was a centre without a periphery, a headquarters without an army, when it had neither territory, nor a population subordinate to it, nor an armed force"^[8].