Puppet Government

On 28 November 1918 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the CC RCP(b)) created in the Russian city of Kursk a puppet government for Ukraine, which named itself the "Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine" - political cover for the invasion by the troops of Soviet Russia into Ukraine. By a manifesto of 29 November it proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine, and on 29 January 1919 it was reorganized into the Council of People's Commissars of the UkrSSR on the Russian model^[1]. By a decree of 3 December 1918 - a month before the capture of Kharkiv - this government set up its own secret police: the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission^[2].

In the summer of 1919 Moscow took even the punitive apparatus away from the front it had created. On 11 June 1919 Shishkov, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, telegraphed the CC RCP(b) that it had no organizational ties whatsoever with the Russian one and that all local commissions in Ukraine were subordinate only to the Ukrainian, not the Moscow one^[3]. On 22 July 1919 Dzerzhinsky, head of the Russian secret police, wrote to Latsis, head of the Ukrainian one, that the Ukrainian commission's business was to carry out in Ukraine the policy of the party's Moscow centre: "in relation to us You have become a samostiynik, become one objectively," and its task was "to be the conductor of the policy of the CC RCP [the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party] in Ukraine"^[4]. On 13 August 1919 the politburo of the CC RCP(b) resolved to dissolve the Ukrainian secret police, merging it with the Russian one, and charged Peters with the execution; on 14 August the politburo of the party's Ukrainian branch (the CC CP(b)U) submitted, and on 16 August Peters was appointed representative of the Russian commission attached to the colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR)^[5].