Russia’s War against Ukraine in 1917–20 (Ideological and Political Context)

Abstract

Adopting as a starting point Russia’s current war against Ukraine, the paper discusses the historical precedent of today’s events, i.e. the war between Soviet Russia and the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which was proclaimed after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and the empire had disintegrated into separate state entities. The author probes into the policies implemented by the Bolshevik government along with the military occupation of Ukraine and analyses the successive stages of the Russian intervention. The paper is intended to show how the Bolsheviks strived to depict the war as an internal Ukrainian class-based conflict rather than a case of direct Russian military aggression. In this pursuit, the Bolsheviks created a pseudo-Ukrainian Soviet government as a banner for the operations of Russian troops. The paper discusses how the conflict developed, presents a brief description of the “war communism” policy led by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine in 1919–20 to justify the exploitation of its natural resources, especially food supplies, and presents an overview of the occupation of Ukraine and the establishment of the Bolshevik regime on its territory.