A Socialist Army Officer Confronts War and Nationalist Politics:
Konstantin Oberuchev in Revolutionary Kyiv
The career of Konstantin Oberuchev (1864-1929) offers a case study of a selfconsciously revolutionary and socialist thinker and social activist who confronts the
dilemmas of wartime and revolutionary politics. This essay will focus on the period of
his life when he seemingly had the greatest opportunity to achieve his political ideals for
Russia, the short year between March and November 1917 when he held positions of
considerable political influence in Kiev, first as army commissar and then commander of
the Kiev Military District.1 During those months, Oberuchev’s fate reflected the dramatic
transformations in the Russian Empire itself; at the beginning of 1917 he was still in
America, where he spent the last year of his several years abroad as a political exile for
his revolutionary activities while serving in the Russian imperial army as a relatively
high-ranking (staff) officer. He was arrested the first time in 1889, shortly after
graduating from the Mikhailov Artillery Academy for his participation in an illegal
military-revolutionary organization;2 he was at first held for seven months in the Peter
and Paul fortress-prison in the capital and then deported to Turkestan to serve in
detention until his retirement from the military in 1906. After retirement he lived in
Kiev, writing for military and socialist newspapers and taking part in the cooperative
movement and Socialist-Revolutionary organizations, including those seeking to
penetrate the Imperial Army. He was certain that he narrowly escaped arrest in 1909,
when the police uncovered revolutionary plots throughout the army. In 1913 he was
about to take part in a congress of the Moscow Union of Consumer Associations when he
was arrested a second time for his ties to revolutionary comrades; though sentenced to
exile in Olonets province, that sentence was changed to exile abroad with no permission
to return until January 1917. He left Russia for Switzerland.
He returned home from exile to his native Kiev in February 1917 at the age of 51
fully ready to resume his political activities, and found employment in the Union of
Towns’ Committee for the Southwest Front. In short order, he was rearrested by the
military commander, even though the ban on his return had expired. While still under
arrest, he was nominated by the new provisional authority, the Executive Committee of
the Council of Public Organizations (hereafter ECCPO, IKSOO in Russian abbreviation),
to the post of army commissar for Kiev Military District, a large front-line district that
was crucial to the ongoing war on the Eastern Front. As military commissar Oberuchev
1
For surveys of this period in the English-language literature, see John S. Reshetar, Jr., The Ukrainian
Revolution, 1917-1920: A Study in Nationalism (1952); Taras Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 1917-1921: A
Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1977) chapters 1-2.
2
Oberuchev traces his oppositionist career to the military gymnasium in Kiev, where he was enrolled in
1881. In the spirit of the counter-reforms that started even before Alexander II’s assassination, the Ministry
of Enlightenment conducted a purge in the schools under its auspices to rid them of teachers with liberal
ideas. In Kiev this purge also took in those with Ukrainophile views. The director of the military
gymnasium, however, was in the school network of the Army Ministry, and took in many of those
dismissed elsewhere in Kiev. For the students, these teachers came with the aura of martyrs to the despotic
state and encouraged them in their critical politics. Vos. p. 14. On Kiev in the 1870s, see Alexei Miller,
The Ukrainian Question ( ), chapter.
1
functioned as a mediator between the newly proclaimed civilian authority, recognized by
the Provisional Government in Petrograd and very much a local, Kievan version of that
proto-state, and the military authorities in this all-important district. After he served
briefly in that post, the commander-in-chief of the Southwest Front, wartime hero
General Aleksei Brusilov, promoted him to the post of commander of the Kiev Military
District, thereby replacing the man who had only recently arrested him. His appointment
was delayed by the crisis of the Provisional Government in Petrograd, during which the
Minister of War from the nationalist Octobrist Party, Alexander Guchkov, resigned and
was replaced by Alexander Kerensky, an erstwhile Socialist-Revolutionary. (Guchkov
had only recently conducted a purge of the Army to rid it of officers who did not meet the
test of the new political situation after the tsar’s abdication.)
As commissar Oberuchev was responsible for explaining difficulties to the troops
and officers and trying to keep the peace between the two groups, but as district
commander he was more responsible for delivering results, like replacement troops to the
front and keeping those troops armed and otherwise supplied. Very soon, he felt his
authority undermined by the rise of Ukrainian nationalism and the success of Bolshevik
propaganda in the ranks. He requested permission to resign from his post after he
concluded that the conflicts over ukrainianization of the army had made his position
impossible. In September 1917 Oberuchev came to revolutionary Petrograd for a new
assignment, that of negotiator with the Central Powers over the exchange of prisoners-ofwar. He was on his way home from the Copenhagen talks when the Bolsheviks seized
power in the capital. Though he was invited by the Bolshevik delegates at the talks to
serve the new Lenin government and continue his work with prisoners-of-war, he
refused. Oberuchev had come to detest the Bolsheviks and could not fathom finding any
common principles with which he might work with them. He died in emigration in New
York in 1929.3
Oberuchev wrote the first version of his memoirs after he decided not to return to
now-Bolshevik Russia and found refuge in Sweden.4 His efforts to understand the defeat
of moderate socialism and the usurpation of the revolution by the Bolsheviks provide the
broad frame for his interpretations of the particular cases of how democratization in the
army went wrong and why the Ukrainian socialists split from their Russian erstwhile
comrades-in-arms, thereby exacerbating the fragmentation of the initially united
opposition forces in early 1917. The fighting condition and morale of the army quickly
3
Oberuchev learned that several of his SR comrades, including the deputy commander of the Petrograd m
military district, P. Rutenberg, were arrested in the first days after the Bolshevik coup, a fate Oberuchev
might have shared, given his record of conflict with them. Vos., p. 433.
4
The essay will rely primarily on Oberuchev’s own accounts of these turbulent months in V dni
revoliutsii: Vospomonaniia uchastnika Velikoi Russkoi revoliutsii 1917-go goda (hereafter, VDR; New
York: Izd. “Narodnopravstva,” 1919); the author dates completion of the memoirs to December 5, 1917 in
Stockholm, where he decided to remain after the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd. This period is treated from
a later perspective, but sometimes with more and new details in a much longer Vospominaniia (hereafter,
Vos; New York: Izd. Gruppy Pochitatelei Pamiati K. M. Oberucheva, 1930). This second publication was
prepared posthumously by a group of former comrades-in-arms, now mostly in emigration in New York. In
1934 and 1940 Oberuchev’s archives were given to the Russian Foreign Historical Archive in Prague,
where they were seized by Soviet forces and removed to the USSR. Today they can be found in the State
Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) f. R-5930, 2. op., 151 ed. khr. See T. F. Pavlova, ed., Fondy
russkogo zagranichnogo istoricheskogo arkhiva v Prage: mezharkhivnyi putevoditel’ (Moscow: Rosspen,
1999), pp. 340-41.
2
became crucial determinants of the survival of the new revolutionary authorities who
were committed to continuing the war in the name of freedom and to the survival of the
Russian Empire as a multinational state. Army politics became inextricably bound up
with the rise of national rivalries and conflicts, while newly assertive non-Russians
challenged the socialist credentials of their Russian counterparts who claimed authority to
decide military matters. Because Oberuchev was in the maelstrom of Kiev as it evolved
into the capital of an increasingly autonomous Ukraine and because his responsibilities
were tied up with the decisive Southwest Front, his account of these months stresses
these linkages better than many memoirists. (He attended nearly all important congresses
during 1917 in Kiev and several other meetings outside the city, mostly in garrison
towns.)5 He faced conflicts within the framework of his own revolutionary politics
between his identities as a socialist, a military officer, and as a patriotic Russian. His
decisions, choices, and evaluations are not those of all Russians or officers or socialists
during this period. But nor are they at all unique, for many other citizens of the new
Russia were coming to similar conclusions. However representative or not he was, his
perspective on the events of 1917 in Kiev helps us understand that year in ways different
from Petrograd-centered ones, but also from those of the Ukrainian movement in Kiev
itself.
His Understanding of the Revolution
Oberuchev was one of many defeated socialists and revolutionaries who tried to
understand how the Bolsheviks had shut them out of the political space of revolutionary
Russia.6 He attempted to understand how the initial revolutionary unity and hopes for a
better future in the first months after the abdication of Nicholas II descended into
conflicts and hatred and how the first generation of revolutionary leaders were supplanted
by a new, in his view, more plebeian, set of representatives of the “crowd” who had
trouble thinking for themselves in the confusing circumstances. Oberuchev had
considered himself a revolutionary and a democrat for most of his conscious life and
remained so committed to his death in emigration in 1929. He had not only been
sentenced to internal exile in the Russian Turkestan for his political convictions and
organizational activities, but been expelled from his native land for them. For him
revolution was a matter of deeply ingrained faith and ultimate justice. Oberuchev was
proud of his career as a revolutionary in military uniform and placed himself in the noble
tradition of the Decembrists of the 1820s and the later Populists of the 1870s. He
lionized the officers of the imperial army who formed the military-revolutionary circles,
for which many were expelled and arrested. In many ways, military service was for
Vos. p. 373. For example, he addressed the Executive Committee of the Kiev Soviet of Workers’ Depties
whtin a week and a half after its formation; later in the year he attended the opening of the all-Ukrainian
peasant congress, the Ukrainian soldiers’ congress, etc.
6
See Viktor Chernov, Pered burei: vospominaniia (New York: Izd. imeni Chekhova, 1953); for the
perspective of the leader of the Socialist-Revolutionaries; for the Mensheviks, see Pavel Aksel’rod,
Perezhitoe i peredumannoe (Berlin: Grzhebin, 1923); and Iulii Martov, Zapiski sotsial-demokrata (Berlin,
Petersburg, Moscow: Grzhebin, 1922). For a survey of much of the agonized polemics of the Russian
socialist emigration, see Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 19171922 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
5
3
Oberuchev another version of the “to the people” ethos of earlier generations of wellintentioned intellectuals.7
As a moderate (perhaps right) SR who stubbornly insisted on Russia’s obligation
to win the war against the Central Powers, albeit without annexations and indemnities, he
found himself in the camp of socialist “defensists” and opposed to the far left of the
revolutionary movement which opposed the war and either sought its immediate end
through negotiations or Russia’s defeat. Most of his experience was with soldiers,
officers, and frequently with the workers of wartime, revolutionary Kiev. In his analysis
of the causes of the Bolsheviks’ success (and the moderates’ failure), he identifies many
factors, including the tragic and senseless fragmentation of the new political institutions
and newly empowered political parties. The socialists were as prone, if not more so, to
the splintering over fundamental questions of war and power, as he acknowledged
himself. The once united opposition front against the autocracy was replaced by a
proliferation of committees and executive committees who claimed to speak with the
authority of the revolution and asserting the rights of particular constituencies.
Oberuchev viewed the committees largely in a positive light during the first months of
the revolution and saw them as crucial in helping the revolutionary citizenry assert its
voice and shed its prior timidity before authority. But as they fell sway to the Bolshevik
influences, he came to view the Russian population as misled, if not deceived by crass
appeals to their basest instincts.
Of course he assigned a large measure of blame to the nation’s exhaustion and to
the incompetent waging of the war by a reactionary and inflexible autocracy. He
experienced the pettiness and self-defeating behavior of the Russian wartime authorities
himself, even while exiled in Switzerland where he, together with other Russian émigrés
and the help of the Swiss state and society, helped organize relief for Russian prisonersof-war in Central Power camps. Not only did the tsarist officials refuse to allow money
that had been raised in Russia to be transferred to the émigré groups, but they eventually
stopped paying Oberuchev’s pension because of his political unreliability. (Admittedly,
the idea of the autocracy paying a pension to a sentenced revolutionary officer while he
was in foreign exile already seems generous, but Oberuchev believed firmly that the
pension was his entitlement for his service in the Russian Army.) He also acknowledges
that his years away from Russia, especially in Switzerland, were critical in his
repudiation of the culture of arbitrary arrests that manifested itself among the newly
assertive workers and soldiers almost immediately after the overthrow of the old regime.
This was one of the unfortunate legacies that that old regime bequeathed to its successor.
But it was precisely this enthusiasm for arrests to avenge past wrongs that led
Oberuchev to perhaps his most important explanation for why the Bolsheviks behaved
the way they did, namely, inciting the otherwise “soft” crowd to violent acts against the
7
Oberuchev claims that for his generation of military cadets, the Balkan Wars of 1876-77, which he sees as
a war of liberation for the oppressed peoples of the Ottoman Empire, provided the first models of how they
could serve the people in the army. During that conflict, populists enlisted in the army as orderlies to “help
the people” and lighten the sufferings of the wounded soldiers, who, after all, were the same peasants that
the populists had tried to reach in their largely unsuccessful “to the people” campaign. See his
Vospominaniia, pp. 11-12. Later, when he received his first posting after being commissioned as an
officer, he welcomed his assignment to teach illiterate soldiers in his brigade as “cultural-enlightenment
work.” Ibid, pp. 21-22. On the populists’ ethos, see also Richard Wortman, The Crisis of Russian
Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
4
existing authorities. The strong dose of populism that formed his identity as a socialistrevolutionary led him to insist on the fundamental goodness of the Russian people, even
the crowd, a goodness he illustrates with several personal encounters. He resisted a
revolutionary politics based on class and insisted that the “people” (narod) was a concept
he could better understand.8 Even the wartime hardships did not exhaust that reservoir of
goodness, witness the behavior of the revolutionary soldiers and workers during the first
weeks of the new order. Still, his faith in the people’s goodness was coupled with a
belief in their lack of culture, which made Russia unready for real socialism; instead, the
main struggle for the moment had to be for political liberties and a democratic republic to
replace the autocracy.9 This contradictory view of the people led him to a novel theory of
why 1917 went so wrong so quickly. The main “instigators,” a word he uses frequently
in describing the organizers of the rabble in revolutionary Ukraine, in many instances
were former policemen and political agents of the Old Regime who had been dismissed
en masse by the new Provisional Government and the revolutionary soviets and who
remained disgruntled at the new authorities. It was these unemployed policemen who
were among the most enthusiastic new volunteers to the Bolshevik party. And who but
former policemen would be so ready to call for summary arrests and worse of the new
revolutionary authorities?10
Oberuchev had formed his hostile views of the Bolsheviks already in emigration
in Switzerland, where he recalls hearing Lenin, Trotsky, and Lunacharsky speak to
socialist circles. With the qualified exception of Lunacharsky and Alexandra Kollontai,
he found the Bolshevik leaders to be narrow-minded, inflexible, intolerant, and fanatic.
Another Bolshevik he met in Switzerland and whose political career intersected with his
in 1917 was Iury Piatakov, who would become head of the Kiev Bolsheviks. He
“considered and continues to consider him an honest revolutionary.”11 During the war,
when Oberuchev took up the cause of helping Russia’s prisoners-of-war, he confronted
Bolshevik agitators who opposed his efforts because they wanted Russia’s defeat in the
war. Part of Oberuchev’s intense feelings against the Bolsheviks came from his own
sense of revolutionary patriotism; he viewed them as traitors and demagogues well before
1917. He resented the Bolsheviks for exploiting the social and political tensions in the
country and destroying the national unity that followed in the initial euphoria of the
revolution. While the majority view of counterrevolution in 1917 linked it to the officers
or other imperial elites, Oberuchev, like a Cassandra, warned constantly and in vain of
the creeping danger of counterrevolution from the left.12
Oberuchev and the Revolutionary Russian Army
8
Vospominaniia, p. 27.
Ibid, p. 31.
10
VDR, pp. 104-06; a possible source and evidence for this theory is the unmasking as a police
provocateur of the first chairman of the Kiev Soviet of workers’ deputies, one Ermakov, only a month after
his election. See Vos., p. 373.
11
Vos., pp. 409-14. Oberuchev tried to appeal to the “honest revolutionary” side of Piatakov when he
challenged him on the Bolsheviks’ readiness to collaborate with the worst kinds of Ukrainian chauvinists.
He had a much more critical attitude to Piatakov’s brother, Leonid, who agitated among the soldiers and
eventually became head of a bolshevized Kiev Soviet of workers deputies. He saw Leonid as a good
illustration of the most alarming features of Ukrainian bolshevism. (413)
12
Vos., p. 395.
9
5
Konstantin Mikhailovich was born in Turkestan to a colonel in the Imperial
Army. He first attended the Kiev Military Gymnasium, then enrolled in the Mikhailov
Artillery School (in St. Petersburg), and graduated from the Mikhailov Artillery
Academy in 1889 (just before his first arrest). He became a leading specialist on
problems of artillery and published widely in military journals, even from exile and after
retirement. He was also committed to the Revolution, and saw himself in a noble
tradition of officer-revolutionaries dating from the Decembrists’ uprising in 1825.13
As a socialist, he advocated the eventual establishment of a militia-type military
service in place of the standing army, which had been associated with despotism and
autocracy by European liberals and leftists for much of the second half of the nineteenth
century. (The leading European advocate of the militia was the French socialist Jean
Jaures.14) In the months before the outbreak of World War I, Oberuchev took advantage
of his exile in Switzerland to become acquainted with the experience of the country that
had successfully replaced the standing army with a citizen militia; he wrote several
articles about his observations and was reaffirmed in his socialist faith that such an
important reform in civil-military relations was feasible, albeit in a country far more
democratic than Russia was likely to be for the foreseeable future.
In the meantime, Oberuchev seemed reconciled to the need for regular armies,
especially during the global conflict that became World War I. His own complicated
feelings of patriotism for Russia led him to apply to the War Ministry in Petrograd for
permission to return home and serve in the army’s ranks, despite his opposition to the
autocracy and even his revolutionary efforts to overthrow it. Not surprisingly, but very
disappointing to him, the Russian authorities refused to honor his request, demonstrating
to Oberuchev that even in times of national emergency, the bureaucracy remained
narrow-minded and fearful of its own citizens. His feelings of thwarted patriotism were
only made more painful by the death in battle of his brother on the Eastern Front in
February 1915. Since he was banned from direct participation in the wartime effort, he
directed his energies to joining other Russian émigrés and Swiss officials and citizens in
mobilizing support for the relief of Russian prisoners-of-war. In short, Oberuchev had a
very strong sense of duty and readiness to join the fray to support the Russian war effort
in spite of the autocracy’s mismanagement and incompetence.
These patriotic feelings, combined with his strong sense of the honor of the
Russian officers who risked their careers and lives for the revolution (including himself),
rendered him very intolerant of deserters in 1917. He considered them traitors to the
revolution and cowards. His hopes as commissar and commander in Kiev were to take
advantage of the euphoria and unity of the early weeks of the revolution and form a new
type of revolutionary, conscious military discipline among the troops to supplant the
One of his most lyrical invocations of the Decembrists comes during a visit in July 1917 to Tul’chin, the
seat of the Southern Society’s activities and where Pavel Pestel’ drafted perhaps the most famous document
of the Decembrists, the Russian Truth. Oberuchev lamented that in the current climate of hatred of all
officers, these great revolutionaries and their sacrifices for Russia’s freedom were forgotten. See Vos., pp.
284-85.
14
See Jaures, Armee Nouvelle; and von Hagen, “Engels and Marx on Revolution, War and the Army in
Society," with Sigmund Neumann in Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern
Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton University Press, 1986).
13
6
former harsh, unthinking obedience based on physical punishment of the Old Regime.
He fulminated against the Bolsheviks and the Ukrainian nationalists for appealing to the
basest instincts of the soldiers, self-preservation and a politics of entitlement, instead of
trying to inspire them to defend the new revolutionary regime. (Ironically, the
Bolsheviks tried to introduce a similar conscious, revolutionary discipline in the early
years of the Red Army.)
Oberuchev insists that he was against allowing politics into the army, although his
position is less straightforward than it appears. He believed that the politicization of the
army would inevitably lead to military conspiracies, coups, and a praetorian state. He
insisted that “an army should be an apparatus for defense of the country from foreign
enemies and nothing more.” Accordingly, he criticized both the Petrograd military
authorities themselves for introducing “political departments” in several districts and the
soldiers’ and officers’ soviets for claiming the right to issue unilateral orders to their
constituencies on military matters and for agitating among the soldiers on political
issues.15 Still, although he opposed allowing soldiers to vote in the local elections for the
Kiev city duma later in the year, he insisted on their right to take part in the elections to
the Constituent Assembly (elections that did not occur until after the Bolshevik seizure of
power in Petrograd) and on their right to express their political views “as citizens.”16
Even on this issue, his position is inconsistent, since he welcomed the municipal elections
as an important educational experience and trial in anticipation of the balloting for the
Constituent Assembly; his opposition to soldiers’ participation thereby would have
denied them this critical experience.17 So he too, like those he criticized, favored soldiers’
taking their newly gained empowerment seriously, but only as long as (another ironic
appearance of the formula of postol’ku-poskol’ku) their politics was limited to arenas he
thought appropriate. In another episode that betrayed his somewhat opportunistic
approach to contemporary politics, Oberuchev described a tour he made of several
garrison towns after the disastrous June offensive to learn firsthand the conditions of his
troops. He invited the deputy chairman of the Kiev Soldiers’ Soviet, a Menshevik soldier
Okhrim Task, to help him address the now overwhelming problems of morale and
desertion in the district.18
Oberuchev’s observations, judgments, and behavior also illustrate the
contradictions of attempting military reform aimed at a general democratization of the
army during wartime and revolution. While postponing the militia ideal to a less chaotic
future, Oberuchev initially welcomed the changes in the army that recognized soldiers’
and officers’ rights as citizens. In a characteristic greeting that reflected soldiers’ new
revolutionary status and image, Oberuchev addressed a crowd of disgruntled and
disobedient troops as “comrades, fighters (voiny), and citizens!”19 This new form of
15
Although the soviets had promised not to issue any orders or resolution to the troops without obtaining
Oberuchev’s authorization as commander, this promise was rarely kept, so he found himself continually
surprised by decisions over which he had less and less control. Vos. p. 275.
16
See Vos., pp. 172, 273. Oberuchev complains that the Soviets had a very open mission of waging
political campaigns in the army.
17
Vos., pp. 395-99, for his discussions of these elections in summer 1917.
18
Vos., p. 276. Task was someone who had his own history of jail terms and exile, so Oberuchev felt
himself with a genuine comrade.
19
VDR, p. 90. Commander Oberuchev was trying to persuade the members of the Poltava garrison in midSeptember to release several officers who had been seized by the soldiers’ soviet.
7
address signaled the expansion of citizenship to soldiers as well as presumed their
revolutionary sympathies and acceptance of the ethos of egalitarianism that
“comradeship” asserted. For Oberuchev and the other moderate socialists who served the
Provisional Government, such democratization went hand in hand with the expectation
that the soldiers would fight for the new regime, even if it was the same old war. After
Oberuchev was appointed commander, he found a new ally in his revolutionary
defensism in the commissar appointed to replace him in his former position, a Menshevik
Defensist Ivan Kirienko.20
In the spirit of the soldiers’ newly recognized rights, from the first days of the
revolution, military men began electing their deputies to a range of organizations to assert
the voice of those bearing arms for the nation.21 In many units, officers and soldiers
elected separate councils (sovety) and executive committees, but often held joint
meetings. The months of March to November 1917 saw a feverish proliferation of
committees to address all possible issues that was quickly dubbed komitetchina by
contemporaries. Soon the committees became the forum for articulating social
discontents; soldiers complained about “reactionary” and “counter-revolutionary”
officers, while workers suspected all military men of conspiring to overturn “their”
revolution. To Oberuchev all these demands and charges reflected the low level of
political development of the Russian population who demanded all sorts of rights in the
name of the new regime, but rarely felt any commensurate obligations to defend and
otherwise support that new regime.
For Oberuchev as army commissar this fissure translated into the conflicts and
mutual suspicion that pit officers against soldiers. Indeed, Oberuchev saw his role as
commissar primarily as a political buffer between the soldiers and their commanders.22
Accordingly, he devoted most of his career as commissar (and later as commander) to
resolving disputes over authority in his jurisdiction. The first army elections in Kiev
began with the officers’ electing their representatives and forming their own executive
committee to coordinate future political activities in the military. Next the soldiers
elected their representatives and formed their executive committee. At this stage, there
was still enough harmony to permit the officers and soldiers to agree to form a joint
Council of Military Delegates of the Kiev Military District.23 But soldiers’ deputies felt
as much if not more solidarity with the workers’ deputies that were being elected and
maintained contacts with their organizations. Often soldiers were able to find allies
among the workers for their challenges to officers’ authorities and alleged abuses.
Workers, likewise, could find sympathy in their conflicts with employers and factory
owners. Before long, soldiers and workers joined forces in a joint executive committee
of their representatives, notably excluding officers’ participation in their deliberations.
Of course, even this episode of worker-soldier solidarity proved to be fragile and
brief; Oberuchev was disturbed when he attended a joint meeting of the workers and
Oberuchev was reassured by Kirienko’s revolutionary biography, which included several years of exile
and hard labor. Before his arrest, Kirienko (1877-?) had also been a deputy to the second Duma.
21
The best studies of soldiers’ politics during 1917 are Allan Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial
Army, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, 1987); and Mikhail Frenkin, Russkaia
armiia i revoliutsiia 1917-1918 (Munich, 1978). Oddly, Wildman does not cite Oberuchev’s memoirs in his
two volumes.
22
Vos., p. 115.
23
On the executive committees and their relations, see VDR, pp. 52-58.
20
8
soldiers’ soviets of Kremenchug, another garrison town in the district he commanded.
The soldiers offended the workers by charging that the members of their soviet were
hardly genuine workers—meaning those with long ties to factories and other proletarian
workplaces and the consequent revolutionary consciousness—but instead were avoiding
military service under the guise of workers. The workers in turn accused the soldiers of
reactionary and even counterrevolutionary politics. Still, the executive committees of the
soldiers and workers were able to agree on resisting pressure from above, including from
Oberuchev, to release or try an officer, Lt. Colonel Smirnov, they had been holding for
more than three months without any charges beyond a vague accusation of
“counterrevolution.” Oberuchev observed this as another example of the culture of
arbitrary arrests that the Old Regime left as an important legacy to revolutionary
society.24 It was also a sign of his rapidly eroding authority in Kiev (and Petrograd, by
extension.) Even among the soldiers themselves, each month brought growing
polarization; for example, soldiers at the front, at least initially, resented the soldiers in
the rear, who began to fear for their lives when they were sent from Kiev on morale and
inspection tours to the front lines. The front-line soldiers believed that those in the rear
were partly to blame for their suffering in the trenches, while they lived it up.25
The most serious threat of the new politics to the integrity of the army was the
increasing insistence on electing officers and commissars and, by extension, of removing
unpopular officers by popular vote. This was a form of democratization that Oberuchev
fought with all his energy, but largely in vain. He recounts how he visited a unit whose
council of military deputies had just elected an army commissar; he defended the
authority of the Provisional Government and the army itself to make such appointments.
But an assertive soldier pointedly reminded him that his own appointment as commander
of the military district had been on the recommendation of the Kiev Soviet. He
acknowledged this “democratic” initiative, but insisted that he had been first nominated
by Brusilov and that the Soviet had only lobbied for his appointment with the Petrograd
authorities.26 Still, the soldier grasped the slippery slope of the transformation of civilmilitary relations throughout the country. And Oberuchev was willing to have it both
ways himself. When he faced arrest by a group of angry soldiers over his insistence that
they pay for transportation on the city trams or not ride, a Polish officer (serving in one of
the experimental Polish regiments) tried to shame them into obeying their commander on
the grounds that he had been “elected by the soldiers themselves.” Oberuchev did not
correct them at this moment, but was able to avoid arrest and have a heated conversation
with the soldiers. It proved impossible for not only Petrograd, but also Kiev authorities
to manage the fragmenting of authority through the proliferation of new committees and
councils.
In the end, the most serious threat that the soldiers’ posed to Oberuchev’s sense of
the limits of democratization was their protest against the war itself and their
unwillingness to fight it. He recorded the range of ways in which the soldiers expressed
their opposition to the unpopular war, most tragically in self-mutilation or simulating
sickness or injury. (Cutting off or otherwise injuring one’s fingers was the most
24
Vos., pp. 244-45.
Vos., p. 379.
26
Vos, pp. 201-02; elsewhere in his memoirs, Oberuchev asserts his authority as an official of the
revolutionary regime by virtue of his having been elected by the Soviet of soldiers’ deputies. See p. 192.
25
9
widespread method of self-mutilation, leading to the nickname palechniki for this group.
Another alarming population of self-mutilators, according to Oberuchev, were those
soldiers who “consciously” contracted venereal diseases so as to avoid service at the
front.)27 He detected what he interpreted as the war-weary soldiers’ own version of the
defensism that he shared with much of the new ruling elites; for the soldiers, defense
meant “not a step forward, but no movement backward either.” In reply to these
attitudes, Oberuchev penned several articles in Kievskaia mysl’ on the differences
between offensive and defensive warfare. But the mostly negative answers he received
touched a sore spot with him. “It’s fine for you to think about offense when you’re sitting
warm in the city. But for those of us who have been here three years, it’s not something
we care to think about.”28 Indeed, Col. Oberuchev appears to have never taken part in a
genuine war, since his career coincided with the largely peaceful years of Alexander III
and the opening of Nicholas II’s reign.
The Ukrainian Soldiers’ Movement as a Test of Socialist Federalism
As a Socialist Revolutionary and progressive Russian with deep roots in Kiev,
Konstantin Mikhailovich was in favor of a federalist future for a democratic Russia, in
which all nations would have a measure of autonomy and cultural rights.29 He insisted
that among his oldest friends and acquaintances were leaders of the Ukrainophile wing of
social democracy and that they largely remained true to their democratic and socialist
principles. He reminded his readers that he helped intervene to bring back to Kiev the
exiled historian and national leader Myhailo Hrushevsky after his Ukrainian comrades
asked for his help.30 He paid homage to the Ukrainian movement’s patron saint, Taras
Shevchenko, during a visit as commissar to the garrison in Kanev, the site of
Shevchenko’s grave; this last visit in 1917 brought to mind earlier visits to the shrine,
including one with his wife who left a cloth she embroidered to honor “bat’ko Taras.”31
As further proof of his own Ukrainophile sympathies, he also described an argument he
had had during his administrative exile to Turkestan in the 1870s with another Russian
officer—and a Cossack to boot—when he tried to defend his Ukrainophile beliefs, in
particular his assertion that the imperial government had made a serious mistake in
banning the use of the Ukrainian language.32
But it was the extension of those goals of autonomy and self-determination to the
Russian Army in the form of ukrainianization of military units that provoked Oberuchev
to resign his post as Commander and seek new opportunities in the revolution away from
Kiev, in Petrograd. He came to see his conflicts with the chaotic and, in his opinion,
27
See Vos. p. 201-22 for self-inflicted shooting wounds; on venereal disease, pp. 283-84.
Vos. p. 209.
29
Besides his attachment to Kiev, Oberuchev also had strong ties to Vinnitsa, where he had one of his
earliest postings as commander of a battery there. He was also later tried (in 1910) with a group of other
officers who had served with him in Vinnitsa and who were all charged with political offenses. Vos., pp.
279-80.
30
Vos., p. 310
31
Vos.pp. 237-38.
32
Vos. pp. 72-73. Oberuchev was quite surprised at the reaction of this Russian in Turkestan who had
“gone native” (otuzemilsia) to the point of his wife donning a parandzha, Muslim headdress. Instead of the
solidarity he had expected, the former officer (now an inspector of native schools) countered with his
theory of nations that were dying out, among which he included the Ukrainians, and whose dying out
should not be obstructed by “artificially” encouraging the use of their language.
28
10
opportunistic advocates of ukrainianization as “the most tragic experiences” of his eight
months working “for the Revolution.” Ukrainianization of the army “was dangerous to
the general cause of freedom,” he insisted.33 Just as he accepted the postponement of the
militia model for a more peaceful future period, so too he felt that too much
decentralization and autonomy were premature in wartime conditions; a federal Russia
would have to wait. In the meantime, he welcomed the removal of discriminatory ethnic
and confessional criteria and the extension of civil and political rights to all citizens of
Russia. As most liberals and moderate socialists, he assumed that much of the interethnic
animosity of the prewar and war years would disappear with the expanded access to
rights.34 He was particularly proud of his efforts as commissar to win permission for
Jews to enter military schools, from which they had been largely banned in tsarist times.35
From his earliest days as commissar in Kiev, he was confronted with the prospect
of “nationalization” of the army, a movement among many non-Russian nationalities to
form army units from predominantly one nation. Because Kiev and the Kiev military
district were on the front lines of the war, it was at the center of much, if not most, of
these experiments in reorganizing the army. Kiev was host to Polish units formed earlier
during the war and designated as the site for forming Czechoslovak units, the latter
formed from prisoners-of-war, an innovation that Oberuchev opposed on grounds of
international law and the law of war that forbade the use of foreign prisoners for combat
against their native state. Oberuchev also argued to a representative of the Army
Ministry from Petrograd, General Chervinka, that particularly the formation of
Czechoslovak units violated the promise of the Provisional Government to not annex any
territories without popular referenda. Clearly, the troops were being used for a military
“liberation” of the Czech and Slovak lands from the Austria-Hungary.36 Indeed,
Oberuchev actively ignored requests to find accommodation for the Czechoslovak units
that were authorized from the Petrograd Army official and was proud of his
determination in forbidding the formation of the Czechoslovak units in the Kiev Military
District during his tenure and of his success in removing those Polish regiments that had
been stationed in Kiev.37 His opinions about the Polish regiments were slightly more
ambiguous, partly because the Polish regiments had been formed from Russian subjects
of Polish nationality; the cause of Polish autonomy and independence had long been
accepted by progressive public opinion in Russia, including among socialists, so
33
VDR, p. 93. See von Hagen, “The Russian Imperial Army and the Ukrainian National Movement in
1917, The Ukrainian Quarterly, Special double issue, The Period of the Ukrainian Central Rada, Vol. LIV,
Number 3-4 (Fall, Winter 1998).
34
On the “blindness” of the new authorities to the national question, see the memoirs of the Georgian
Menshevik leader (and member of the Petrograd Soviet and Provisional Government), see I. G. Tsereteli,
Vospominaniia o fevra’lskoi revoliutsii, 2 vols. (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1963), p.
35
Vos, pp. 215-16.
36
Vos., p. 216. Oberuchev recounts the objections of the Germans and Austria-Hungary at the
Copenhagen negotiations on POWs in fall 1917 to Russian practice of recruiting POWs from their states to
fight in the Russian Army against the Central Powers. Oberuchev refers to a resolution of the Military
Council in Petrograd, dated March 26 1917, authorizing the formation of a division from Czechoslovak
prisoners-of-war. Vos., pp. 245-49. On the Czechoslovak units, see Joseph Bradley, The Czechoslovak
Legion in Russia, 1914-1920 (New York/Boulder: East European Monographs and Columbia University
Press, 1991); V. S. Dragomiretskii, Chekhoslovaki v Rossii 1914-1920 (Paris-Prague, 1928).
37
Vos. p. 246.
11
socialists like Oberuchev had a more positive attitude toward Polish nationalism than was
true for other nationalities of the Empire.38
But his objections and anxieties were not shared by many of his colleagues and
superiors; nationalist and pan-Slavic sentiments in the High Command, together with a
desperate hope that nationalism—even non-Russian nationalism—would be an effective
antidote to the even more threatening bolshevization of the troops, won out over cooler
heads who advised caution with these experiments. Oberuchev’s counterpart in the
Moscow Military District, General Alexander Verkhovskii, was typical of the proukrainianization officers. When Oberuchev visited Moscow on the way home from a trip
to Petrograd and army headquarters, Verkhovskii assured him that the “most reliable
units in his district were the Ukrainian ones.”39 In Petrograd Oberuchev had been unable
to get any serious response to his complaints about the chaos of ukrainianization.
Kerensky, who was now serving as prime minister (minister-president) and army
minister, was too busy for Oberuchev to deliver a report on his problems in the Kiev
district. National formations were only one response of the military authorities to the
crisis in morale and the rise in desertions; the High Command authorized the organization
of all sorts of “shock battalions,” including the famous women’s battalion. Oberuchev
objected to all of these on the grounds that they announced lack of confidence in regular
units and disorganized those units because the “volunteers” for the new shock troops
came from existing units and from little experienced Junkers and military cadets.40
Of course, in Kiev, the largest such experiment was with Ukrainian soldiers
among whose arguments for forming their own units were the examples of other national
regiments and divisions, especially those of the Poles who, after all, had a history of antiimperial uprisings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During his first days as
commissar, Oberuchev was approached by the leading advocate of a Ukrainian army,
Second Lieutenant Mykola (Nikolai) Mikhnovsky, to accept an invitation to serve as
honorary member of the organizational committee for the “formation of a Ukrainian
army.” Mikhnovsky was an army lawyer and Ukrainian revolutionary who would
eventually become a political nuisance for not only Oberuchev, but also the Rada’s
General Secretariat and even subsequent Ukrainian governments. Oberuchev declined
the invitation on the grounds that the revolution had done away with the meaningless
tradition of honorary titles, but replied that he would be honored to serve as a real
working member of the committee.41 He set down his conditions for agreeing to help the
committee work toward its goals: above all, the new Ukrainian units were to be formed
from volunteers who were not otherwise eligible to be called up. With this seeming
consensus, he pledged his support. Little did he realize how far these efforts would soon
develop and how fierce would be his opposition to them.
Oberuchev faced the first test of his conditions upon his return from a visit to the
front in early May. At home with his family, he received an urgent phone call from the
38
Oberuchev was impressed by a celebration of Polish unity in late March or early April which he
witnessed in a camp for prisoners-of-war outside Kiev in Darnitsa. Members of the Polish regiment
serving in the Russian Army joined with Polish prisoners from Austria-Hungary and Germany in a joint
mass served by a Roman Catholic priest. Vos. p. 249.
39
Vos., p. 322. Verkhovskii would soon become Army Minister.
40
Oberuchev devotes an entire chapter of his memoirs to these--in his opinion--unfortunate experiments.
See Vos., pp. 245-60.
41
VDR, pp. 92-93.
12
Executive Committee of the Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies to come immediately to the
Mariinsky Palace where they were meeting to resolve a serious question of political and
military authority. Earlier that day, a group of nearly 4000 “deserters” who had been
awaiting reassignment went out on the street, led by one staff captain D. M. PutnikGrebeniuk, and headed in the direction of the Palace to demand recognition as the First
Ukrainian Regiment named after Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The Executive Committee had
refused their demands, so the “regiment” appealed next to the Kiev Commander,
Khodorovich. In his characteristic dilatory fashion, he referred them back to the
Executive Committee, whereupon Oberuchev got his call. Oberuchev made his way to
the meeting hall, where he was alarmed by the hostile faces and by the fact that many of
them did not have “Ukrainian national features;” he noted that the bogdanovtsy had
donned blue and yellow ribbons in assertion of their Ukrainian loyalties. He came to
believe that many soldiers who simply wanted to desert “discovered” their Ukrainian
identity as a political cover for their cowardice. (As evidence for his theory of
opportunism, he recalled that the rabble rouser Putnik-Grebeniuk was eventually arrested
by the officers of the newly forming regiment; as he was leaving for the front, he
confessed to Oberuchev that he shared the latter’s opinion that the Ukrainian formations
were unnecessary!)42
The Central Rada was drawn into the conflict, but took a principled position
against forming a Ukrainian army as premature. Nevertheless, they were ready to
acknowledge the Khmelnytsky regiment as a fait accompli. Oberuchev continued to
oppose recognizing the “deserters” as a regiment, but appealed to higher authority. He
proposed a visit to General Brusilov to resolve the issue, but again insisted on his
conditions that such a regiment be commanded by serving officers, but that the troops be
recruited from volunteers. He invited representatives of Mikhnovsky’s Organizing
Committee, as well as of the disputed “regiment,” for discussions. The following day no
one showed up at the train station to accompany him, so he proceeded alone to Brusilov’s
headquarters. The Front Commander agreed with Oberuchev’s proposal and conditions
and even consented to the formation of a second, reserve regiment.43 Once again, despite
seeming consensus, the conditions were ignored; officers were found for the regiments,
but genuine volunteers were not to be found. Instead, the troops were recruited from
deserters from the front and rear units. Not surprisingly, when Oberuchev tried several
months later, now as commander of the military district himself, to fulfill his obligation
to send quality replacements to the front during the June offensive, he failed. He insisted
that one of the main reasons for his failure was the chaotic and demoralizing phenomena
of unauthorized and unregulated ukrainianization. All he had to do was send out an
order for a reserve unit to mobilize for the front when the soldiers would call a meeting,
elect several representatives and declare that they would go to the front only “under the
Ukrainian flag.”44
Oberuchev as an Enemy of the Ukrainian Cause
42
VDR, pp. 93-94.
VDR, pp. 94-95.
44
VDR, pp. 96-97.
43
13
The process of ukrainianization in the army took a new direction in early May
when the militant second lieutenant Mikhnovsky and the Rada decided to convene a
Ukrainian soldiers’ congress to resolve some important issues. The congress took place
May 5-8 in Kiev in the Pedagogical Museum which now normally housed the Rada;
Oberuchev attended the organizational sessions prior to the opening as army commissar
and as a representative of the ECCPO. He had some of his fears confirmed by his
experience, especially, his conviction that Ukrainian activists were using the cover of
“volunteer” Ukrainian military units as the door for promoting a full-fledged Ukrainian
army. The reformers, as a first step, wanted to transfer all Ukrainian soldiers and officers
who were serving across the empire, in accord with the imperial Army’s policy of
extraterritorial recruitment and stationing, back to Ukraine. Oberuchev recognized that
the Ukrainians were split among themselves into two rival camps, the militant (and, in
Oberuchev’s evaluation, nationally chauvinist) group around Mikhnovsky and what he
referred to as the democratic tendency represented by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and
Semen Petliura. Oberuchev saw it as his duty to remind the congress organizers that the
war was still on and that Russia and Ukraine shared common interests of defense from a
powerful enemy. Even he, however, could not resist playing to the Ukrainian patriotic
feelings in the congress and called for the delegates to stand in the defense of “motherUkraine.”
Oberuchev was disturbed by several aspects of the congress, including the fact
that several of its sessions were closed to outsiders. Although he acknowledged that
some technical military matters were discussed that might have threatened Army secrets,
he nonetheless felt that the secrecy contributed to a rise in distrust between the Rada and
its counterparts in Kiev and Petrograd. He also was struck by the sense of empowerment,
in his understanding inappropriate and dangerous, of many of the delegates, especially
those surrounding Mikhnovskii. These delegates openly proclaimed that they intended to
build a Ukrainian army in order to expel from Ukraine all the katsapy, a Ukrainian slang
term for Russians. When he spotted a delegate dressed in Cossack uniform of the old
Zaporizhian Sich era but sporting insignia of a lieutenant in the Russian army, Oberuchev
questioned the colorful officer about his unit. He replied that he was an officer of the
“Ukrainian army (voisko),” to which Oberuchev answered, “But there is no Ukrainian
army at this time.” Lt. Pavlenko shot back with a challenge, “You’ll see how it will rise
and cover all of Ukraine. It exists already, but you just don’t see it.”45
In the end, the organizing committee elected a presidium with both rival factions
represented, and the “democratic faction” emerged as the victor at this point. Still, the
Congress’ resolutions raised the stakes higher in the relations between Kiev and
Petrograd. The congress claimed to speak in the name of 900,000 “organized armed
Ukrainian people” and demanded an act from the Petograd government recognizing the
“principle of national and territorial autonomy of Ukraine as the best guarantee” of the
rights of Ukrainians and of the entire region. The most contentious resolutions bore on
“the Ukrainian army.” Insisting on the importance of “maintaining conscious discipline,
which only now is possible in a people’s army” and that the requisite high military
morale “can only be raised by some great common, uniting idea,” they proclaimed that
such an idea for Ukrainians is “the idea of national rebirth.” Following on that faith, the
Congress “believes in the immediate consolidation of all Ukrainians [now serving] in the
45
Vos., pp. 225-27.
14
armies into one national army.” The Congress condemned the multinational army of “the
old despotic regime” as “antidemocratic” and wasteful of national funds; moreover, such
a multinational army contributes to the “disintegration of the moral strength of
nationalities.” The resolutions used the language of revolutionary defensism to argue that
“nationalization of the army,” and in particular a Ukrainian national army, would restore
the soldiers’ spirit of resistance and raise morale. They predicted that with the restoration
of morale, desertion would begin to fade, but they acknowledged that more efforts were
needed to combat desertion as well, including enlisting the village itself in the effort and
urging soldiers from the front to write home. They urged regimental soviet and soldiers’
congresses to issue appropriate appeals to bring to trial any deserters and those who
conceal them. On the issue of the future Ukrainian army, the Congress adopted a longterm socialist goal of the people’s militia as the only form of military organization
appropriate for a free people.
To realize their goal of forming a national army, the Congress proposed
immediate measures, including the separating out of Ukrainian soldiers and officers now
serving in military units in the rear areas into separate units; they acknowledged that
these measures had to proceed without causing disorganization at the front. They also
proposed a similar Ukrainianization of the Black Sea Fleet, as the part of the navy
composed overwhelmingly of Ukrainians. They urged the military authorities to
implement the “Instruction on Ukrainian Unit” that had been approved by the
Commander in Chief (on April 4) and the Army Minister (on April 6); they “recognized”
the Khmelnytsky regiment that had formed a month earlier as the “First Ukrainian
Cossack Regiment named after Bohdan Khmelnystky. The Ukrainian language was to be
introduced into the newly formed units, as well into military education and publications.
Finally, the delegates authorized the museums of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities to
transfer their ancient Ukrainian banners to Kiev to a Ukrainian National Museum so that
newly forming units would be able to use these relics as they reformulated their national
identities.46 The final decision of the Congress was to elect a provisional Ukrainian
military general committee that would be attached to the Rada and coordinate “Ukrainian
military affairs” with the Russian General Staff.
In any event, the matter of who had the authority to decide on questions of
ukrainianization was left more confused by the meetings. In mid-May the new Army
Minister Kerensky arrived in Kiev for a visit to Brusilov’s headquarters. Oberuchev
joined a large and seemingly authoritative delegation that included representatives of the
Rada, Mikhnovsky’s committee, and Ukrainian Military General Committee, just elected
at the Ukrainian soldiers’ congress. By this time, Oberuchev’s condition of volunteers
only was jettisoned as unrealistic and irrelevant; the General Committee representatives
46
English text of excerpted resolutions in Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The
Russian Provisional Government 1917 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1961) vol. 1, pp.
373-74. For full Ukrainian text, see Vladyslav Verstiuk et al, eds., Ukrains’kyi natsional’no-vyzvol’nyi
rukh, berezen’-lystopad 1917 roku: Dokumenty i materialy (Kyiv: Olena Teliha Publishers, 2000), doc.
117, pp. 279-284. The resolutions were given authoritative sanction by their publication in the Rada’s
“official” journal, Visti z Ukrainsk’oi Tsentral’noi Rady. The Congress also addressed the land question,
insisting that a Ukrainian Sojm be summoned to take into consideration the specific conditions of
landholding in Ukraine; and education, above all the ukrainianization of primary, secondary and higher
education. The Ukrainian volume cited above also has numerous documents from the Ukrainian soldiers’
movement, mainly previously unavailable.
15
proposed a more active policy of formation, but limited to soldiers in the rear units.
Oberuchev agreed on the condition that Kiev and Minsk districts be exempted because of
their closeness to the front and the threat of disorganization that the reorganizations
would likely present. And once again, after achieving this painful consensus, things more
or less continued as they had been. Despite the insistence of the Provisional Government
in Petrograd that the Kiev-based Rada and its general secretariat were not to meddle in
military affairs, the Rada faced its own political mutiny from Mikhnovsky’s committee
and the stubborn resistance of Oberuchev and tried to seize control of the chaos.47 In
several garrisons, the demands of Ukrainian soldiers were provoking splits with their
“Russian” counterparts that replicated the hostilities faced not so long ago by the activists
of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU in Ukrainian abbreviation) in German
and Austrian POW camps.48 Oberuchev reported on his visit to Uman’, where a group of
Ukrainian soldiers had elected their own officers.
they were following the ideological lead of a second lieutenant that Oberuchev had
ordered removed for his harmful “agitation.” (Among the slogans that Ukrainian soldiers
were shouting, were; “We shall not leave Uman’! Let them go back to their Moscow
land! Get out!”) The situation was made more complicated by an order for the entire
regiment in Uman’ to be transferred to the front and another order, from the Ukrainian
Military General Committee, authorizing the regiment to ukrainianize.49
Oberuchev and his companion for the visit to Uman’, the soldier Task who was
the deputy chair of the Kiev soldiers’ soviet, were unable to resolve this crisis before they
were summoned back to Kiev for the next politico-military crisis, the mutiny of a
regiment named after another hetman, Pavlo Polubotok. Polubotok was a martyr for the
Ukrainian cause after Peter I had him imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress for
resisting the tsar’s politics and for trying to preserve the Hetmanate’s autonomy and the
privileges of the Cossack elite. The mutiny of the polubotkovtsy occurred virtually
simultaneously with the July uprising in Petrograd, a largely spontaneous militant
demonstration against the war and for the transfer of power to the soviets that was
blamed on the Bolsheviks. Oberuchev was convinced that the timing of the Petrograd
and Kiev rebellions could not have been a coincidence and saw them as attempted coups
d’etat directed by the Bolsheviks.50 He characterized this latest self-proclaimed regiment
as a ragtag mob of deserters who were trying to avoid being sent to the front by
demanding that they be reorganized into Ukrainian units. He claimed that the origins of
this unit lay in Chernigov where they had called themselves the Doroshenko regiment,
named after yet another Cossack hetman. Rather than intervening himself, Oberuchev
turned to his reluctant partner, the Ukrainian General Military Committee, which, after
some false starts, persuaded the “Ukrainian” troops to relocate to Kiev. Once they
arrived in Kiev, they attracted a couple thousand more troops who claimed they were
eager to serve under a Ukrainian flag. It was this expanded unit that refused to obey an
47
VDR, p. 96.
See von Hagen, "The Great War and the Mobilization of Ethnicity in the Russian Empire" in Barnett
Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds, Post-Soviet Political Order: Conflict and State Building (London and New
York: Routledge, 1998).
49
Oberuchev relates several episodes when he was faced with two “delegations” from units, one claiming
to speak for the Ukrainians and the second representing the non-Ukrainian troops. See his description of a
confrontation in Zhitomir in early July. Vos., pp. 277-78. On the Uman’ visit, see Ibid., 285-87.
50
VDR, p. 98.
48
16
order from the Ukrainian Committee to leave their barracks for transfer to the front.
Instead, the soldiers decided to take power into their own hands and seized several
military objects, including Oberuchev’s official residence. Oberuchev was visiting the
garrison in Uman’ and escaped arrest and possible worse.51
Oberuchev’s deputy commander, General Tregubov and his chief of staff General
Oboleshev were authorized by the Kiev Soviet to organize the “defense of Kiev” and the
removal of this “motley crowd,” operating under a Ukrainian flag. The Ukrainian
Military Committee also assigned Major-General Kondratovich to help in putting down
the mutiny. The fractured power relations in Kiev meant that Oberuchev faced an effort
by the Rada’s General Military Secretariat to intervene through negotiations with the
mutineers. Another Ukrainian unit, the first one to form on the initiative of its own
officers, the Bohdan Khmelnytsky regiment, or bogdanovtsy, succeeded in encircling and
disarming the unauthorized “regiment” after the Rada’s negotiators finally calmed them
down. Oberuchev, however, had to acknowledge that his authority in such situations was
virtually nonexistent.52
The failed coup of the polubotkovtsy was for Oberuchev a prelude to the
disastrous July retreat or rout of the Russian Army after a three-week offensive ordered
by Kerensky. That panicked flight in the face of the advancing German army provoked
panic in Kiev, which expected a mob of rampaging soldiers. Early reports of desperate
and brutal soldiers turning on their officers, commissars, and anyone else who stood in
their way reached the Ukrainian capital which began to prepare for self-defense from its
own soldiers. Oberuchev understood this July disaster as the beginning of the second
period of the revolution in Kiev, a set of months that would bring more and more
uncontrolled violence and social polarization and would end with the Bolshevik coup in
Petrograd in October. General Lavr Kornilov, commander of the Southwest Front,
insisted on reintroducing the death penalty at the front, a policy Oberuchev opposed, but
claimed he understood at this desperate point. It was all the more disturbing to him that a
government of socialist ministers approved this desperate act. Another consequence of
the July rout was the crowding of Kiev with not only fleeing soldiers, but refugees. Kiev
was already bursting at the seams. Oberuchev ordered the seizure of schools empty for
the summer holidays to accommodate some of the new population. He was accused of a
“counterrevolutionary” hostility to public education by the liberals and progressives, and
of hostility to the Ukrainian cause because the schools were in the midst of introducing
Ukrainian language at the time. In retrospect Oberuchev saw July as the beginning of the
civil war.53
The Kornilov putsch in August only added to the volatile relations between
officers and soldiers; it unleashed a new wave of soldiers’ revenge with lynchings and
other atrocities across the army. (Kornilov had been promoted for his “success” during
the June offensive to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army.) The
distrust of authority extended to the Petrograd government and its local agents; among
51
In support of his assertion that the Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists had become allies, he reported
that Iury Piatakov, the leader of the Kiev Bolsheviks, was among those who were entering and exiting his
(Oberuchev’) house during the mutiny. Vos., p. 292. Elsewhere, he noted that one of the two workers,
both named Smirnov, who were send from the Soviet to tour the front with him, was “somewhat seized by
Bolshevik tendencies” and had a “long, Ukrainian mustache.” Vos., p. 378.
52
Vos., pp. 288-93.
53
Vos., pp. 293-298.
17
those, Oberuchev now faced an impossible situation. The Kiev soviet demanded the
resignation of Oberuchev’s chief of staff, General Obeleshev, whom they branded a
“counter-revolutionary.” The Kiev Committee for the Salvation of the Revolution,
formed from all major political and civic associations, demanded Obeleshev’s arrest as a
co-conspirator of Kornilov’s. Oberuchev admitted that this “Great Russian-Muscovite to
his bones” was even more opposed to ukrainianization than he himself was and that he
acted tactlessly with soldiers’ deputies.54 A soviet of Ukrainian soldiers in Kiev passed a
resolution of non-confidence in Oberuchev, as an enemy of the Ukrainian cause, and
urged all soldiers not to obey his commands. Sure enough, when he ordered a
Ukrainianized battalion to transfer from Chernigov to Kiev, the battalion committee
expressed its solidarity with the Kiev soviet’s resolution and refused to obey Oberuchev’s
orders unless they were countersigned by the Rada’s General Military Secretariat.
Within days, similar resolutions were passed in nearly all regiments that had been
ukrainianized; several demanded Oberuchev’s resignation. . In fact, Oberuchev had
good reason to believe that the Rada’s Military Secretariat had insisted that the
Provisional Government dismiss him as commander. The Kiev Soviet, which he claimed
was thoroughly ukrainianized, also demanded his dismissal. Other telegrams warned him
that if he didn’t leave Kiev by August 14, he would be “killed like a dog.”55
This proved the final straw for the socialist commander; he informed his
superiors, Front Commander General Volodchenko, Army Minister General Verkhovsky,
and Commander-in-Chief Kerensky, of his urgent desire to resign his post in Kiev. They
tried to dissuade him, but his arguments won them over. He could no longer preside over
a policy he was convinced was wrong and, furthermore, being implemented without his
authority in any case. Among the considerations he included in his decision to leave
Kiev was his unwillingness to be branded an enemy of Ukraine’s right to selfdetermination, but such he had already become.56 Oberuchev sensed that his commissar,
Kirienko, attracted even greater hostility from the Ukrainian movement because he was
ethnically Ukrainian himself and had even been a member of the Social-Democratic
Ukrainian “Spilka” party earlier. Yet Kirienko too opposed ukrainianization in the army
and earned a reputation as an enemy of the Ukrainian cause (vrag ukrainstva).57 One of
Oberuchev’s last official duties was to address the Congress of Peoples of Russia, which
the Rada convened in September to bring together all the autonomist and national
movements on a platform of federalism. He noted two moments of the congress, one a
plea by the representative of the Don Cossacks not to be considered “counterrevolutionary oppressors” but as freedom fighters and the audience’s hostile reception of
the proud but exasperated socialist commander; he was hissed upon taking the podium.
Nevertheless, he ended his greetings with a rousing “Long live free, young Russia! Long
live free Ukraine!”58
Concluding Reflections
54
Vos., pp. 325-31.
Vos., p. 324.
56
VDR, pp. 117-19.
57
Vos., pp. 335-37.
58
Vos., p. 371-72.
55
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Oberuchev’s sense of military duty, especially now that he was serving Russia’s
first revolutionary regime, became more and more a trap from which he could not
extricate himself. Despite growing evidence (indeed, from the start) of opposition and
resistance to the war, despite his own experience of the new government’s
mismanagement that he had to contend with in Kiev, including in the War Ministry of his
party comrade Kerensky, and despite the disastrous June offensive, he adhered firmly to
his defensist politics and insisted on seeing Bolshevik (and Ukrainian) agitation behind
nearly every failure. He strangely, too, insisted that the army must remain outside of
politics, in spite of his own activities as commissar in bringing the army into the political
life of the country; but most importantly, he failed to realize that the war itself had
become political issue number one!
Another issue that he did not interrogate his politics about was his views toward
nationalism, particularly Russian nationalism. He recounts one episode that gives some
insight into his dilemmas, when a monarchist demonstration in Kiev bearing the tricolor
flag was denounced as counterrevolutionary by leftists generally, but Ukrainian activists
in particular. He reminded his readers that demonstrations with all sorts of national flags
had become common in revolutionary Kiev, so why should anyone be offended by the
appearance of a flag, “whether correctly or not, identified as Great-Russian national?”59
On the one hand, he stood for freedom to express one’s opinion and diversity of opinions;
he also argued that having monarchists demonstrate openly was preferable to having
them plotting all sorts of conspiracies in secret. But he also acknowledged that the fear
of “counter-revolution,” which was expected in many quarters to come from the army or
the former elites of the Old Regime, was an integral part of the political culture of 1917,
and of the emerging civil war in society. Still, he appeared much more sympathetic to
these demonstrations than to those of Ukrainian soldiers and to the Rada’s demands for
autonomy. His model of Ukrainian-Bolshevik collusion fed his hostility toward the
Ukrainian cause and made it difficult for him to support many of the changes in the army
that went under the name of democratization.
His political evolution bears comparing with that of another emerging leader in
Kiev at the time, Pavel Skoropadsky, who also found himself in the middle of the fierce
struggles over ukrainianization. (Curiously, in his 450-plus pages of memoirs,
Oberuchev fails to mention Skoropadsky even once.60) Skoropadsky, too, identified
above all with the officer corps that he had been part of during his entire career.
Although he was not a socialist by any stripe, but rather a monarchist on his way to
something else, he too detested the Bolsheviks with an almost visceral energy and held
them responsible for the tragic and murderous decline of the army’s morale starting in
mid-1917. He even shared with Oberuchev a quasi-populist faith in the goodness of the
Russian and Ukrainian peasant. But where he differed was in his ability and apparent
willingness to cast aside some of his military principles and to reluctantly accept the
desperate adoption of “the national principle” to combat the Bolshevik virus.
Skoropadsky was able to see his own role in the first official ukrainianization measures in
the Kiev District as some continuation of his ancestors’ roles in organizing Cossack units.
59
Vos., pp. 392-94.
Skoropadsky, in contrast, does refer to Oberuchev in his memoirs, but has a conflicted characterization of
him and fails to assign him a very large or important role in his own activities. See Spohady, pp. 61-63.
60
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He tried to put a positive spin on his efforts, though his own account suggests a host of
insurmountable obstacles to restoring the morale of the fragmenting Russian Army.61
Oberuchev, for his part, remained enough of a socialist, nonetheless, that he was
troubled by certain aspects of the militarization of the revolution and the ever growing
assumption by “democratic” institutions of the trappings of the Old Regime. He recalled
his unease when he visited the former house of the nobility that had become the address
for the executive committees of the soldiers’ and officers’ organizations and found there
a full unit of sentries performing guard duty. Out of his sense of socialist propriety, he
complained about the guards, who were themselves elected representatives of the soldiers
and who were now performing duties of questionable value that removed them from
actual combat at a critical time in the war. The guards were removed, but he recalls a
similar sense of socialist outrage when he visited the Smolny in revolutionary Petrograd
and had to make his way through several layers of bureaucratic obstacles before getting
to the place where he could conduct his official business.62 On another occasion, he
protested against the ECCPO’s takeover of the residence of the former Empress, Mariia
Fedorovna, instead insisting that it be used as a military hospital. His arguments lost out
to those who felt that the new organs of authority needed dignified and beautiful sites
where they could exercise their new functions. Yet even on this matter, Oberuchev’s
ambivalence is evident; after all, he won too in having a set of offices assigned to him as
commissar in the Palace!63
See von Hagen, “I Love Russia, but Want Ukraine: How a Russian Imperial General Became Hetman
Pavlo Skoropadsky of the Ukrainian State,” in Synopsis: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Zenon E.
Kohut, ed. Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhii (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies
Press, 2005).
62
Vos. p. 268-70. Oberuchev laments, “To what degree we are all inculcated with a faith in the power of
salvation in a soldier’s bayonet!”
63
Vos. p. 271.
61
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