Looking at the various rifts in the political parties most
strongly committed to Ukrainian statehood reminds one of the Ukrainian
national movement early in this century. In 1900 the Revolutionary Ukrainian
Party, the first more or less mass Ukrainian political party in imperial
Russia, was formed. Having evolved toward orthodox Marxism, in late 1904,
the Ukrainian Social Democratic Spilka (Union) split off and joined the
Russian Social Democrats, who allowed the organization to simply wither
away. The rest renamed themselves the Ukrainian Social-Democratic Workers
Party and became one of the leading forces in the Ukrainian Revolution.
The other leading force in that revolution was the agrarian socialist Ukrainian
Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries.
In the spring of 1918 both split, with the more radical Social-Democrats
dedicated to a Ukrainian-led Soviet Ukraine and peace at any price with
Bolshevik Russia taking the name Nezalezhnyks, from which an even more
leftist splinter, the Left Nezalezhnyks then appeared. Their SR counterparts
took the name Borotbists, later merging with the Left Nezalezhnyks and
swapping their agrarian socialism for Marxism. In 1920 they merged with
the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, the local branch of Lenin's
party. The main group of Nezalezhnyks renamed themselves the Ukrainian
Communist Party, and soon the ancestor of what would become the KGB organized
a Left Fraction to undermine the party from within. Both groups were ordered
dissolved by the Communist International, and most of their members were
admitted to the CP(b)U in 1925. With one exception (the late Iwan Majstrenko
managed somehow to survive until the war and then flee the country), all
surviving alumni of both groups remaining in the USSR ended up being arrested
in the 1930s and killed. The former Borotbist leader Oleksander Shumsky
spent well over a decade in the Gulag, was released and then killed on
personal orders from Stalin and Kaganovich on a train in 1946.
Mainstream Ukrainian socialists, weakened by their own disunity, lost
to Lenin's Bolsheviks and fled the country. In the 1920s, some returned,
lured by the cultural opportunities offered by a policy called Ukrainization,
the one pro-Ukrainian interlude in the history of Soviet Ukraine. They,
for the most part, were arrested as early as the first half of the 1930s.
Some only served ten years in the Gulag and managed to survive, but most
were shot.
There were, of course, more groups and splinters in the period, but
the scheme simplifies as it ends. The disunited fighters for the Ukrainian
cause ended up either in emigration, shot, or at best in the Gulag. Today's
disunited fighters for the Ukrainian cause would do well to ponder this.






