In the Ukrainian historical calendar, January 29, 1918, marks the tragedy of Kruty
People my age never heard (and could they have heard) about it when studying at school. They never read young Pavlo Tychyna’s poem Pamyati Trydtsiaty (In Memory of Thirty [Martyrs]) with these lines:
They were buried at the Grave of Askold,
Thirty Ukrainian martyrs,
Young and courageous men.
The best sons of Ukraine
Were buried at the Grave of Askold.
We will have to step into this world,
Following a blood-covered path.
Contemporary school students learn that 86 years ago some 600 young defenders of the Ukrainian National Republic engaged 4,000 Bolshevik troops at the railroad station of Kruty, in a brave but futile attempt to stop their advance on Kyiv (reads an entry in the Entsyklopediya Ukrainoznavstva [Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies]), Half of them from the company made up of the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Youth School, Studentsky Striletsky Kurin [Student Sharpshooters Company], and Haidamaky Detachment were killed.
Among those that sacrificed their lives in the Battle of Kruty was Volodymyr Shulhyn, 23 year-old student at Kyiv University’s physics and mathematics department.
Among the Bolshevik troops bringing from the north the red star of socialism to Ukraine at the tips of their bayonets was 21-year-old Yury Kotsiubynsky, son of the great Ukrainian writer.
Of almost the same age, they had never met and found themselves at Kruty on the different sides of the barricade. This confrontation symbolized the tragedy of a split and ravaged Ukraine when its inner sharp political differences (as often happens in history) were used by a third party.
Shulhyn came from a noted family. His father Yakiv Shulhyn was a member of the Old Hromada, author of several precious historical papers. The tsarist government would eventually exile him to Siberia. Volodymyr’s elder brother Oleksandr would become foreign minister in Vynnychenko’s cabinet.
Volodymyr was destined to end his life at Kruty.
He could have become a scientist. While at the gymnasium [high school], he had developed a fancy for archaeology and with his friend Levko Chykalenko would spend every summer at diggings. Zoloty Homin [The Golden Voice] of 1917 in Kyiv, the tidal wave of national awakening swept him under and carried him on its crest. The more so that the Ukrainian National Republic was born under democratic slogans and against the background of social rejuvenation. And so when Bolshevik forces began to advance on Kyiv Volodymyr Shulhyn could be seen drilling in the ranks of the Support Student Company. UNR was getting prepared to defend itself.
However, it was unable to do so. It did not even form a strong army (either because there was no time or because it lacked the desire). In the end, several hundred poorly trained and equipped students were massacred in the Battle of Kruty. The Bolsheviks opened artillery fire on Kyiv January 31, 1918. Shells were flying from Darnytsia and exploding in Pechersk and near St. Sophia Square. M.M. Mohyliansky, one of the participants, counted some 7,000 artillery shells fired in 17 hours, since 07:00 a.m. till 01:00 a.m., meaning 5-6 shots a minute. This lasted nine days.
On the next day of storming Kyiv, Yury Kotsiubynsky, people’s secretary of the Soviet Ukrainian government, was appointed commander-in- chief of the republic’s army, on Lenin’s recommendation. What kind of troops did that yesterday’s ensign of the tsarist army have under his command? How did he get to Kruty?
In the summer of 1916 (precisely when the student Volodymyr Shulhyn was digging Paleolithic strata in the province of Chernihiv), Yury Kotsiubynsky, fresh from the high school of Chernihiv, was drafted into the tsarist army. He spent several months training in the Odesa school for ensigns. In February 1917, he refused to swear allegiance to the Provisional Government, but was promoted ensign nevertheless, whereupon he was sent to serve in Petrograd. Yury found himself in Ukraine after the October Bolshevik coup (in which he had also taken part as a member of the Russian Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party [RSDRP] since 1913; on the night of storming the Winter Palace, he and a detachment of Baltic seamen stood guard of the bridge where the cruiser Aurora was to cast anchor). He was generally instructed to organize Red Army units. His latest post in Petrograd was that of deputy chief commissar of military training institutions of the Russian Soviet Republic.
On the last days of 1917, Yury was summoned by Yakov Sverdlov, Chairman of the Central Executive Committee, Secretary of the RSDRP Central Committee who entrusted him with a special mission that called for an immediate trip to Ukraine. Shortly before their meeting a Soviet government of Ukraine had suddenly materialized in Kharkiv, signifying the beginning of a regime enforcement scenario that would be repeatedly played out by the Soviet Union in Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan...
As it was, Lenin, Sverdlov, et al., had decided it was time to establish Bolshevik rule in Ukraine. To do so, the first act of the scenario provided for stimulating inner instability in that territory, setting up and backing an opposition, actually implementing the age-old divide-and-rule principle. Local Bolsheviks were Soviet Russia’s key ally in Ukraine, in late 1917. There were also changing moods of the mob to take into account, the more so that Bolshevik propagandists knew how deal with the masses, relying on Lenin’s powerfully arresting motto Rob The robbes! All told, efforts were to be made to incite chaos and anarchy. RSDRP did not have a sufficiently strong footing in Ukraine at the end of 1917. Yevheniya Bosh, one of the Bolshevik leaders in Kyiv, recalled later that after the February revolution their city party organization numbered only 200 members, mostly relying on “revolutionary tailors” (sic). At the time, political power in Ukraine was in the hands of the Central Rada, and the latter was actually a coalition body of state administration. The Bolsheviks regarded it as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary (and this considering that its leadership included Hrushevsky and Vynnychenko who signed decrees on democratic elections, socialization of the land, and equal rights for all ethnic groups). Their logic was simple; if one was not a Bolshevik, one was the enemy. So they demanded convocation of the first all-Ukraine congress of Soviets. However, when it was called to order, the RSDRP discovered it did not have the votes. Chagrinned, the Bolsheviks left and held their own convention in Kharkiv, electing that Soviet government of Ukraine. All this was done with Petrograd’s knowledge and consent, of course. Thus the second act of the scenario was enacted, setting up a puppet government. There were few people with Ukrainian names in it, so Yury Kotsiubynsky was a godsend to Yakov Sverdlov.
There are several very interesting aspects. Yevheniya Bosh says that when the Kyiv Bolsheviks arrived in Kharkiv their local comrades in arms refused to recognize them, busy with the idea of setting up the Republic of Donetsk and Kryvy Rih that would be independent of both Russia and Ukraine, so they were anything but happy to see the guests from Kyiv about to proclaim a Soviet administration. The visitors were treated in a very humiliating manner. Yevheniya Bosh and her comrades were offered accommodations in vacant cells at the city jail. In her own words, it was “a dormitory of the members of the first Soviet government.” Nor were the Kyiv guests provided premises for the sittings, so they had to use audiences when they were vacated at night.
The new government met with an even more unpleasant surprise when the Council of People’s Commissars (CPC) sent an ultimatum to the Central Rada without consulting the Kyiv RSDRP (B). The document was actually a declaration of war on the UNR. The Kyiv Bolsheviks were prepared for this and they did not have a considerable influence on the masses. Worse so, the ultimatum made even those showing a cool attitude to the Rada its accomplices.
Revolutionary troops under Antonov-Ovseyenko’s command were advancing on Kyiv, so the local Soviet government could only bring up the rear with the appropriate degree of enthusiasm.
The CPC’s attitude toward the Central Rada and UNR as such was expressly hypocritical and treacherous. On the one hand, Soviet Russia could not act against its own motto reading that all nations had the right to self-determination (the Bolsheviks had needed it to hasten the end of the Russian empire), but on the other, they wanted to make a world revolution as soon as possible, primarily on the ruins of tsarist Russia. Therefore, CPC and its Chairman Vladimir Lenin decided to recognize the UNR but make sure that the power was in the hands of the workers and peasants, the way it allegedly was in Petrograd, meaning that Ukraine would have to do as told by Russia, and Petrograd would then take care of its self-determination. A case study in Bolshevik mentality that would work the same way in 1920, when Budionny’s cavalry troops were on their way to Poland with Feliks [Dzerzhinsky] on the wagon train as the new Polish ruler; in 1939, when Otto Kuusinen was planned by the Soviets as the new leader of conquered Finland; in 1956, when Hungary was forced to fall in love with Janos Kadar. Or consider what happened to Gustav Husak, Edward Gierek, Muhammed Nadzhibulla.
Lest I be accused of bias, below are testimonies by two of Yevheniya Bosh’s comrades.
Serhiy Mazlakh: “The Central Executive Committee of Ukraine sat in Kharkiv, but its influence was never felt.”
Volodymyr Zatonsky: “The Russian Republic had to assist the Sovietization of Ukraine (in 1918) with military force.”
Military force, armed intervention — these are components of the third act in the lasting scenario.
Yury Kotsiubynsky was to act as a Ukrainian Nadzhibulla. However, at 21, the young man (incidentally, Yevheniya Bush’s future son-in-law) must have felt happy. He believed in his being involved in a great worldwide revolution destined to finally establish social justice. He believed that the Central Rada he was to fight was indeed bourgeois and counterrevolutionary, meaning that it defended hateful capitalism. He believed that the Ukrainian Soviet Republic would emerge from the ruins of the old world order and would flourish, meaning that all sacrifices made for its sake were divinely justifiable; just as all sacrifices on the other side were the inevitable payment for the coming commune... He had stayed away from Ukraine for a long time and did not know how it actually lived and what it needed; he could not have imagined that Volodymyr Shulhyn, almost his age, also wanted a free and democratic Ukraine, but without a dictatorship, terror, and civil war. Shulhyn and others like him could not be blamed for the Central Rada and its General Secretariat being engrossed in endless discussions, inadvertently creating the prerequisites for the Bolshevization of the masses...
And then the Bolsheviks were in Kyiv. Shulhyn was shot and his body remained in the frozen earth at Kruty for almost two months.
Yury Kotsiubynsky was the Red commander in chief, although everyone knew that Kyiv had been taken by the troops of Remniov and Muraviov, formed using men from various units of the tsarist army siding with the Soviets, also detachments of seamen and Red Army men. The Soviet government [of Ukraine] did not have an army of its own; all it had managed was issue a decree on the formation of Red Cossacks (to be placed under the command of Yuri’s friend from Chernihiv Vitaly Prymakov). All contemporaries, political affiliation notwithstanding, testify that three weeks after the Bolshevik had entered Kyiv were a period of formidable “Red terror.” They compare what happened in Kyiv at the time to Batu Khan’s onslaught.
At a time when people would be shot for speaking Ukrainian (Petliura’s language) or for wearing embroidered (nationalistic) sorochka shirts, for having a portrait of Shevchenko in the sitting room, Yury Kotsiubynsky may have sensed for the first time that something was wrong. Those acting on his behalf demonstrated complete disregard of his nation, treating everything Ukrainian with great power superiority. What kind of Ukraine, even Soviet one, could one expect from them? The young man must have felt insulted deep inside, considering that he came from a Ukrainian intellectual family. One of his father’s friends, writer Serhiy Yefremov, addressed an open letter to Yury on the pages of the newspaper Nova Rada (and the young man must have read it): “For ten days this city with a million residents, among them innocent and defenseless children, women, and other civilians has been dying of mortal fear. I used to know your father and was very fond of him... Yet I say without hesitation that the man is very lucky to be dead; fortunately, he cannot see or hear his son [Yuri] Kotsiubynsky firing artillery shells at this gem of our beautiful land, killing our young Ukrainian freedom!”
Yury was too young, his soul too pure and not as yet calloused, to read these words without remorse. However, man can be blindfolded by what he believes is the supreme idea.
With people like him (Mykola Khvyliovy described them as “young fanatics of the commune”) such obsession turned into the naХve belief that the idea of socialism and shining future for the Red Ukraine was worth thousands of human lives. It was a horrible delusion, marking the beginning of the tragedy of that generation of Ukrainian intellectuals, ranging from Mykola Skrypnyk to Volodymyr Zatonsky to Yury Kotsiubynsky to Mykola Kulish to Mykola Khvyliovy.
I mean a generation of young Ukrainian revolutionaries, national communists that dreamed of achieving national liberation through a social revolution. Their worst mistake was that they realized too late that their Russian Bolshevik ally was afflicted with the mortal disease of great power chauvinism and centralism getting increasingly severe and monstrous. In addition, the machine of class struggle activated in 1917 required an increasing number of victims. After proving a civil war, the Bolsheviks were unable (maybe unwilling) to stop it. The civil war went on and the Moloch of terror was now devouring his creators.
Time had to come when each of them would be terrified to become aware of his involvement in and with that great evil. Skrypnyk and Khvyliovy each shot himself. Others back in the 1930s did not understand what was happening. Yury Kotsiubynsky was eventually relieved of all his important governmental posts. He went to Moscow to restore justice and was arrested February 12, 1935, when the Kotsiubynskys were celebrated their son Oleh’s birthday. Preparing for a long trip, Yury put on a Ukrainian embroidered sorochka. Had he forgotten that his comrades had shot people for doing so in February 1918?
What happened afterward is generally known. Siberia, then the Lukianivka Penitentiary in Kyiv... Back in 1918, the Shulhyns had lived at 9 Monastyrska St., a short walk from where Yury was now imprisoned.
There are eyewitness accounts about Yury Kotsiubynsky looking confused and forlorn in prison. Then came that night in spring when he was taken out of his cell for the last time in his life.
Did he recall that first combat on his native Ukrainian soil, at Kruty, on the road to his Calvary?
No one knows.
