Sham Expression of Popular Will

In December 1917 the Bolsheviks held a sham "all-Ukrainian" congress in Kharkiv to give the seizure of power in Ukraine the appearance of an expression of the people's will. The elected assemblies of workers and soldiers, through which the Bolsheviks were trying to seize power, gathered at the real All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv on 4–6 (17–19) December 1917. At the real congress Ukrainians hardly noticed the Bolsheviks: of more than 2,500 delegates "the Bolsheviks were represented by only 150", and the congress supported the Central Rada^[1]. The communists decided not to give up. Zatonsky (one of them, later a member of the puppet government in Kharkiv) recalled: "having gathered illegally in the premises of the trade unions, the delegates of the congress, all Bolsheviks except for two or three Left SRs, resolved to declare themselves the plenipotentiary Congress of Soviets of the Country, to elect a Central Executive Committee and a government of Soviet Ukraine and, having moved to Kharkiv, to take up open struggle against the Central Rada"^[2]. The new "congress" met in a city already seized by Russian troops. The historian Stanislav Kulchytsky writes: "the day before the opening of the congress of soviets the Central Rada's garrison in Kharkiv was disarmed by the troops of V. Antonov-Ovseyenko, whom the Council of People's Commissars had instructed to take Ukraine by force of arms"^[3]. On 9 (22) December the regional congress of soviets of the Donbas and Kryvyi Rih area opened in Kharkiv. When the delegates' credentials were checked, 77 people with the right to vote and another 6 without it were counted. In the Donbas and the Kryvyi Rih area there were 140 elected assemblies of workers and soldiers, and only 46 of them had sent delegates. By the rule of the previous regional congress, a session was allowed only with delegates from half of these assemblies. Those gathered in Kharkiv abolished this rule by a vote of 46 to 18 with 5 abstentions and declared themselves entitled to sit. Then the delegates who had left Kyiv addressed the gathering. By a majority of 43 to 11 the assembly resolved "to merge with the representatives of the Regional Congress and to name the congress 'the Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies of Ukraine with the participation of part of the peasant deputies'"^[4]. Thus an assembly of one region began to speak in the name of all Ukraine. It granted itself the right to sit by abolishing its own rule that a session was allowed only with delegates from at least half of the region's assemblies. Its new name came from a vote of 43 to 11 in a Kharkiv hall, not from elections: outside the hall nobody had voted for this congress. The historian Vladyslav Verstiuk calls it "a hastily staged alternative congress of soviets": "at it 89 soviets and military revolutionary committees were represented by 200 delegates", whereas "soviets alone at that moment numbered more than 300 in Ukraine"^[5]. The historian Larysa Yakubova notes: there were "almost no" peasant delegates, and Soviet historiography later scrubbed the qualifier "with the participation of peasant deputies" from the congress's name^[6]. In the resolution of 9 (22) December that qualifier stands^[4]. The majority of Ukraine's population remained outside the doors of the hall. The assembly declared itself the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets and proclaimed the creation of a Soviet - "supposedly truly people's" - Ukrainian People's Republic^[6].