A “Committee of Elders” met 10 times to elaborate the final declaration of the conference (“The Act of Formation of an All-Russian Supreme Power”). This act, which decreed the creation of the Ufa Directory, was a compromise between those (chiefly the socialists) who wished for a new state authority to be responsible to the Constituent Assembly of 1917 and those (chiefly the Kadets and the Provisional Siberian Government) who were in favor of a provisional military dictatorship. Neither the Left nor the Right was happy with this outcome, and in retrospect, it could be said that the Ufa State Conference was no more successful in uniting Russia’s political forces than had been the Moscow State Conference of 1917, summoned by A. F. Kerensky in the weeks before the Kornilov affair.
UKRAINE, PROVISIONAL WORKERS’ AND PEASANTS’ GOVERNMENT OF. This regime—the second attempt to Sovietize Ukraine, after the thwarting of such efforts in early 1918—was established at Kursk on 20 November 1918, at the outset of the Soviet invasion of Ukraine and in the aftermath of the withdrawal from the country of the forces of the Austro-German intervention. Its chairman was Iu. G. Piatakov, and its commissar for military affairs was F. A. Artem.
On 29 November 1918, the Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine issued a manifesto announcing the overthrow of the Ukrainian State and the rule of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, canceling all the laws, treaties, and decrees of the Skoropadskii regime and announcing the nationalization of industry and the redistribution (without compensation) of all landowners’ estates among the peasantry. In January 1919, as the Red Army enjoyed success in the latest stage of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, the regime moved to Khar′kov and announced the establishment of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A new government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), was then formed, on the Russian model, with Cristian Rakovski at its head. On 25 January 1919, it announced a union with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, on the basis of “socialist federalism.” The regime lost control of much of Ukraine over the summer of 1919, and on 30–31 August 1919, was forced to abandon Kiev to the separately advancing Ukrainian Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and General A. I. Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia.
UKRAINIAN ARMY. Unlike the regular Ukrainian Galician Army of the Western Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Army—or the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR)—consisted of various semi-independent volunteer and partisan formations, with only a loosely defined structure and chain of command. Its home front was so unstable from 1917 to 1921 that it had to struggle constantly to marshal the material and human resources to maintain itself, and consequently it was unable to move from the status of an army in the process of formation into a stable national force.
The Ukrainian Army had its roots in the period of the Ukrainian Central Rada (March 1917–January 1918), partly through the detachment of Ukrainian units from the Russian Army (the Haidamak Cavalry regiment on the Western front, the three Shevchenko Regiments at Moscow, etc.), partly through the Ukrainization of Russian Army units, and partly (after November 1918) through the formation of new units from former units of the Austro-Hungarian Army (e.g., the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen). In part, these developments were spontaneous, but also influential were the All-Ukrainian Military Congresses (of Ukrainian soldiers’ committees), which convened at Kiev (on 18–21 May, 18–23 June and 2–12 November 1917) and called for the establishment of a separate Ukrainian army. The Central Rada, however, was dominated by socialists and was initially opposed to a standing army; it developed, instead, the idea of the Free Cossacks, whose position as a national militia was defined by the Rada on 13 November 1917. The invasion of Ukraine by Soviet forces under V. A. Antonov-Ovseenko in December 1917, marking the beginning of the Soviet–Ukrainian War, changed the Rada’s mind, but it was overthrown before much could be done. By April 1918, the Ukrainian Army consisted of the Zaporozhian Corps (four infantry regiments, one cavalry regiment, and two light artillery), the Sich Riflemen, the Bluecoats (formed from Ukrainian POWs in German camps), and the Greycoats (formed from Ukrainian POWs in Austrian camps), which were in the process of formation, and an indeterminate number of Free Cossacks, totaling approximately 15,000 men (of whom 2,000 were cavalry).
After the First All-Ukrainian Military Congress, the command of the Ukrainian Army was placed in the hands of the Ukrainian General Military Committee, headed by Symon Petliura, who became head of the General Secretariat of Military Affairs following the proclamation of the UNR on 20 November 1917 (and who remained the most important Ukrainian military leader throughout the civil-war period). The assistance of German and Austrian forces secured by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918) allowed this command to expel Soviet forces from most of Ukraine in March–April 1918, but the price extracted by the occupying forces was a heavy one: the German command demanded that Ukrainian forces abandon Crimea (which it did not recognize as belonging to the UNR), and on the eve of the coup of Hetman P. P. Skoropadskii, moved to reduce the army of the UNR to the Zaporozhian Corps alone, as the Bluecoats and the Sich Riflemen were disarmed by forces of the Austro-German intervention.
During the period of the Hetmanate (or Ukrainian State), a law on universal military service was promulgated (24 July 1918), with the aim of raising an army of 310,000 men. A decree of 16 October 1918 further determined that the army would be organized along Cossack lines, with territorial units (of seven regiments each) led by commanders (otamans) subordinate to one hetman. However, the resistance of both Russian officers in the army and the German high command limited the army’s development, and by the time of the collapse of the Skoropadskii regime in November–December 1918, the force numbered only some 60,000 men. (Characteristic was the abrogation of all Ukrainian army regulations on 11 November 1918 by the Russian General F. A. Keller, whom Skoropadskii had placed in command of the army.)
In the period of the Ukrainian National Republic Directory, the forces that had come into being under the Rada (and which by and large had joined the uprising against the Hetman) remained at the heart of the army, although numerous new units were formed: the Volhynia Division (composed of the Hetman’s Nalyvaiko Regiment, the Galician Regiment, the Czech-Ukrainian Regiment, and others) and the Podilia Division, which was composed of various revolutionary groups that were active in Podilia—the Karmeliuk, Zalizniak, the Blackhoods (Chornoslychnyki), and other regiments. In December 1918, the Ministry of War of the UNR reorganized the army into four groups: Left-Bank (commanded by Otaman Petro Bolbochan, in charge of the front against the Red Army); North Right-Bank (under Otaman Volodymyr Oskilko, in charge of the Bolshevik–Polish front); Southern (under General Oleksandr Hrekiv, in charge of the front against the Entente, French, and Greek forces that had recently disembarked at Odessa); and Dnestr (on the Romanian front). In February 1919, as the directory moved to find common cause with the Allies, the Southern and Dnestr groups were disbanded and their units transferred to the remaining two fronts facing Soviet Russia and Poland. After a renewed advance by Soviet forces (which captured Kiev on 4–6 February 1919) obliged the Ukrainian Army to retreat southwest into right-bank Ukraine in the spring of 1919, the forces of the UNR were again reorganized, into 11 divisions (each consisting of three infantry, one artillery, and one cavalry regiment), distributed among five formations. Then, in mid-July 1919, Polish forces pushed the Ukrainian Galician Army back across the Zbruch River. The Galician army continued to exist as a separate unit under its own command, but from this point onward coordinated its actions with the Ukrainian Army, under a common operational command (the Staff of the Supreme Otaman). At this point, the armed forces of the Ukrainian state consisted of three Galician corps (50,000 men) and the five formations of the UNR Army (30,000 men). When various partisan forces are added to this, the total fighting strength of the various armies at the command of the UNR was probably in the region of 100,000 personnel (including 35,000 combat troops), 335 cannons, 1,100 machine guns, 2 air regiments, and various armored trains and motor vehicles.