Military Intervention

On December 12, 1919, the command of the Soviet Southern Front issued secret directive No. 188. The document was signed by front commander Yegorov, the future head of the USSR Stalin, and chief of staff Petin. The directive gave the invaders' army its task: «to capture the city of Kyiv in the shortest possible time»^[1]. On December 16, 1919, the army of Soviet Russia (RSFSR) took Kyiv for the third time since the start of the communist revolution^[1][2].
The Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) is the Ukrainian state proclaimed in 1917. By December 1919 its army - eight to ten thousand soldiers, many of them sick with typhus - was pinned near Starokostiantyniv in Volhynia: the Volunteer Army of Denikin to the south and east, the Polish army to the west, the troops of Soviet Russia to the north. Contemporaries called this position the «triangle of death»^[3]. At a meeting in Nova Chortoryia on December 4-6, 1919, the head of the UNR Directory Symon Petliura and the army command decided to dissolve the regular front. The UNR Army under the command of Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko set out on a raid through the rear of the Soviet and White forces: in 180 days, from December 6, 1919 to May 6, 1920, some ten thousand soldiers marched two and a half thousand kilometres across Ukraine. This raid is known as the First Winter Campaign^[3].
That same winter Soviet troops occupied most of Ukraine. The dates of the cities' capture, according to the front reports: December 11, 1919 - Poltava and Kharkiv, December 16 - Kupiansk, December 24 - Luhansk, January 5, 1920 - Mariupol, February 7 - Odesa^[1]. On the Right Bank the Russian occupier reached the Polish front line: Kamianets-Podilskyi, Proskuriv and Starokostiantyniv were held by the Poles^[3].
The UNR leadership signed an alliance with Poland and secured the support of its army in the fight against the Russian occupiers. In the spring of 1920 the armies of Poland and the UNR moved to liberate Kyiv. On May 6, 1920, Yegorov, commander of the Southwestern Front of the Soviet army, telegraphed in secret order No. 304: «Kyiv must fall to the enemy only at the cost of the heaviest losses on his part»^[4]. The armies of the UNR and Poland retook Kyiv: on May 7 Polish reconnaissance units rode to the centre of the city by tram, and on May 8 ten regiments of the 3rd Polish Army entered the capital^[5].
The occupier gathered its forces and on June 6 broke through the Polish front south of Kyiv, at Samhorodok. On June 10 the Polish troops, having blown up the Chain and Rusanivskyi bridges, withdrew from Kyiv^[5]. On June 12, 1920, Yegorov reported: «Units of the 58th Division have taken Pechersk and are entering Kyiv». The orders to cut the Kyiv - Korosten railway, issued the day before, were signed by Yegorov and Stalin^[4].
On October 18, 1920, an armistice took effect on the Polish-Soviet front, and the UNR Army was left to face the invader alone^[5]. By November 10 it held the front with 8,968 bayonets and 3,250 sabres, with 95 guns and 687 machine guns. Against it the Soviet command moved the 12th and 14th armies, the Bashkir cavalry brigade and Kotovsky's cavalry brigade: 24,000 bayonets, 4,000 sabres, 120 guns and five armoured trains^[6]. The occupation troops attacked first and thwarted the offensive being prepared in Podillia, in today's Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi oblasts. In eleven days of fighting the UNR Army lost about 13 thousand soldiers, almost all of its artillery and four armoured trains^[5].
On November 21, 1920, about 12 thousand UNR soldiers, together with the staff of Symon Petliura and the ministries, crossed the Zbruch River, along which ran the border with the lands ceded to Poland under the Treaty of Warsaw^[5]. Mykhailo Andrusiak, a participant in the retreat, recalled: «Sadly, with bowed heads, the Cossacks laid down their arms after crossing the bridge and marched on to the West»^[7].
In the autumn of 1921 the soldiers of the UNR army made a last attempt to raise a general uprising against the Soviet occupiers. This raid is known as the Second Winter Campaign, and its course is known from the report of the chief of the Field Insurgent Staff, Colonel Yurii Otmarshtein, submitted to Symon Petliura. At 2 a.m. on November 4, 1921, the detachment crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border near the village of Borove: 155 officers and officials, 645 Cossacks, 32 horses, with about 56 percent of the men armed with rifles^[8]. On November 7 the detachment under the overall command of Yurii Tiutiunnyk liberated the Korosten railway junction in battle and freed 600 political prisoners from the jail, but withdrew that same morning: an armoured train of the Soviet occupiers was approaching the town with guns the detachment had nothing to counter, and ammunition had to be spared. Seven officers and twelve Cossacks died in the battle^[8].
The detachment could go no further. Half of the infantry marched without boots and with frostbitten feet, the wagon train carried up to 80 wounded, and ammunition was replenished only with what was taken from killed and captured Russians. The staff decided to turn back, towards Poland^[8]. The troops of the Russian invader blockaded the area of the UNR raid and on November 17 encircled the detachment near the village of Mali Mynky in the north of Zhytomyr Oblast. Over 400 soldiers died in the battle, 537 were taken prisoner, and more than a hundred broke out of the encirclement and crossed the Polish border on November 20^[9][10]. The prisoners were taken to the village of Bazar, where 359 of them were shot^[11]. The armed struggle of the regular UNR Army ended there^[12].