Controlled Opposition

Deliberate transfer of loyal delegates and political agitators to the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv in order to hijack the agenda from within^[1].

An attempt to convert an electoral minority into a procedural majority at the congress. Actual support was negligible: in the Constituent Assembly elections "across the country as a whole the Bolsheviks gathered less than 24% of the votes, and in the Ukrainian gubernias only 10%"^[1]. Hence the wager on capturing representative bodies: the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) declared outright that "the transfer of government from the hands of one soviet party into the hands of another party is secured without any revolution, by a simple decision of the Soviets, by a simple re-election of deputies to the Soviets," while the All-Russian Central Executive Committee's decree of 4 December 1917 "On the right of recall of delegates" provided the mechanism for such a replacement^[1][2].

The staging of a sham "all-Ukrainian" congress to give the seizure of power the appearance of popular will. The real All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kyiv on 17-19 December 1917 did not go the Bolsheviks' way: by the time resolutions were adopted it numbered more than 2,500 delegates, "the Bolsheviks were represented by a mere 150 delegates", and the congress backed the Central Rada^[3]. The losers did not accept the outcome. Volodymyr Zatonsky - one of them, later a member of the Kharkiv government - recalled: "having gathered illegally in the trade-union building, the delegates of the congress, all of them Bolsheviks except 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 enter into open struggle against the Central Rada"^[4]. The new "congress" convened in a city already occupied by Russian troops: "the day before the congress of soviets opened, the Central Rada's garrison in Kharkiv had been disarmed by the troops of V. Antonov-Ovseenko, whom the Council of People's Commissars had instructed to take Ukraine by force of arms", writes historian Stanislav Kulchytsky^[5]. He describes the merger thus: with the regional congress of soviets of the Donets and Kryvyi Rih basins, the newcomers "proclaimed their congress the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets"^[5]; historian Vladyslav Verstiuk writes that "an alternative congress of Soviets was hastily staged", at which "200 delegates represented 89 soviets and military-revolutionary committees", while "soviets alone in Ukraine at that moment numbered over 300"^[6]. The majority of Ukraine's population stayed outside the hall - delegates from the peasants, notes historian Larysa Yakubova, "were almost absent", and the qualifier "with the participation of peasant deputies" was later scrubbed from the congress's name by Soviet historiography^[7]. The assembly declared itself the All-Ukrainian Congress and proclaimed the creation of a Soviet - "supposedly truly popular" - UNR^[7].

An attempt to legalize the marginalization of the state language in the regions: the law "On the Principles of State Language Policy" (the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law) allowed record-keeping to be transferred to "regional languages," effectively entrenching the dominance of Russian in the Russified regions^[8].