War without fronts: Atamans and Commissars in Ukraine 1917-1919

The double Revolution of 1917 buried the old Romanov Empire without installing anything definite in its stead. It did, however, attenuate authority to the extreme, producing a climate propitious to the emergence of socio-political projects each with a claim upon the present and the future. One of such projects was the revolutionary warlordism known under the name of atamanshchina. Reaching greatest scope and complexity on the territory of modern-day Ukraine, this predominantly peasant phenomenon represented, on one hand, an effort of the countryside to fill in a power vacuum by institutionalizing the rural insurgency. On the other hand, as an efficient form of military self-organization, it embodied a factor of paramount importance in the ongoing Civil war – to be courted and reckoned with. The Bolsheviks appeared to have been the most successful in that task, establishing a type of joint dominion with the warlords over Ukraine in the months following German departure (Nov. 1918). Experiment for all those involved, this alliance attempted to reconcile the atamans’ suspicion of disciplinary regimes with the Bolshevik war-making imperatives. Ultimately, this experiment proving disastrous, the notion of party-state centralism collided against the practice of revolutionary particularism and compelled the partners to split under the dramatic circumstances of the Grigoriev’s uprising. Drawing heavily from archival sources, this work looks, therefore, at the manner whereby major players came to recognize their own political identities and ends – not in the least the Bolsheviks themselves, who evolved from the unsure parvenus to the seasoned Staatsmachthaber (“state power holders”) in the course of their interaction with the forces of rural revolt.