Did the Bolsheviks "Invent" Ukraine?

The myth: “Lenin created Ukraine”

The thesis that Ukraine as a nation or a state was “invented” by the Bolsheviks is a cornerstone of present-day Kremlin propaganda. The reality, according to Yefimenko’s research, is the direct opposite.

Having seized power, the Russian Bolsheviks had by 1919 already conquered almost all of Ukraine — and decided that this support was addressed to communism, not to the national movement. So they tried simply to ignore Ukrainian statehood: in the Kremlin they planned to attach Ukraine to Soviet Russia and did not conceal this. Among the “Soviet republics” of the time, they named a Bavarian one, a Hungarian one, a Russian one — but did not see a Ukrainian one among them^[1]. Ukrainian statehood was defended within Ukraine itself; in the Kremlin it was not recognized.

Ukrainization as a forced concession

It was precisely the failure of the attempt to ignore the national question that forced the Bolsheviks to change tactics. Ukrainization (more broadly, korenizatsiya) as a policy began in 1920 — not of good will, but as a forced concession after the Kremlin saw the strength of the Ukrainian movement^[2]. The logic was instrumental: to give communist reforms a national form so that they would “take root.” That is, the national wrapping was supplied from above — but to the nation, language, and movement that already existed.

The slogan of self-determination — a theoretical construct

To understand why this is about taming rather than “creation,” it is worth tracing the genesis of the Bolshevik slogan itself. The right of nations to self-determination “up to and including separation” was personally initiated by Lenin at the Poronin conference of 1913 and substantiated in his writings, with Joseph Stalin brought into the work (his pamphlet “Marxism and the National Question”). It was precisely this slogan that fundamentally distinguished the Bolsheviks from all the all-Russian parties, for whom the unity of Russia was an axiom^[8].

But this was a purely theoretical construct. The right was proclaimed — and at the same time any organizational structures that might have realized it were “cut off at the root.” A telling document: in a letter of 1913 to the Armenian Bolshevik Stepan Shaumian, Lenin wrote that proclaiming the right of separation did not at all mean that one should agitate for it — on the contrary, one should agitate against this right^[9]. That is, from the very beginning “self-determination” was not a goal but an instrument: with the slogan they intercepted a trend popular in the era of collapsing empires, having no intention of giving it effect.

The same logic operated after the seizure of power as well. Within a week the Bolsheviks proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which recognized for every people — including Ukrainians — the state right of separation. But the concessions on the national question ended there: the declaration was used to “tie” Ukraine to themselves (Yefimenko draws a direct comparison with 2022 — when the Russian guard was already preparing parade uniforms for Khreshchatyk), not to realize what had been proclaimed^[10].

Soviet Ukrainian statehood itself arose by the same instrumental logic. The separate Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine was, in words, seen in 1918 as equal in rights and independent of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) — yet in its charter and decisions it was recorded as merely a regional organization of the RCP(B). A separate Soviet government of Ukraine was proclaimed only at the end of 1918 — and not of good will, but when, under national slogans, an uprising against the Hetmanate began and the Directorate unexpectedly gained broad support. The geography is telling too: the first capital of this second Soviet Ukraine was Sudzha, then Belgorod — that is, the territory of today’s Belgorod region of Russia, not Ukraine^[11]. Soviet Ukraine was built not as a gift to the nation but as a way to mount the national movement, which was arising even without the Bolsheviks.

The first recognition — only December 1920

The legal side is telling as well. Soviet Russia formally recognized Soviet Ukraine for the first time only on December 28, 1920 — through a treaty on a worker-peasant union. Before that it did not recognize it at all: in June 1920 it even included 30 delegates from Ukraine in the Russian All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in effect treating Ukraine as part of Russia. The People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, put it bluntly: “make it look like a state, but change nothing in the substance of relations”^[3]. The Ukrainian side, on the contrary, was keen to change precisely the substance — and the treaty became its achievement.

Concessions under pressure: from autonomization to korenizatsiya

Historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya lays out the mechanics of these concessions in detail. The idea of an independent Ukrainian communist party was voiced as early as 1918 — at the Taganrog conference (April) and the First Congress of the CP(B)U (Moscow, July). But it was quickly rejected: despite talk of “the independence of our communist party,” the CP(B)U was from the outset constituted as a regional organization of the RCP(B) — it never became independent^[16].

Quasi-statehood was granted to Ukrainians not out of ideological conviction but under pressure. According to Dribnytsya, it only “dawned” on the Bolsheviks that they would have to yield after their army had been driven out of Ukraine three times: to avoid being driven out a fourth time, they had to grant quasi-statehood. It was not a gift but the result of three and a half years of Ukraine’s armed struggle for independence^[17].

Within the Bolshevik leadership two lines competed. Stalin advocated “autonomization” — to restore a single Russia and not grant the republics even autonomous rights (his 1922 plan). Lenin understood otherwise: to hold on to Ukraine, one had to win over the Ukrainian intelligentsia, convincing it that the Bolsheviks were “your defenders.” Lenin’s line prevailed: at the end of 1922 the USSR was framed as a (nominally) federation of equal republics rather than autonomies within Russia^[18].

An economic lever worked too. Many Ukrainians came around to Soviet power after the Bolsheviks abandoned war communism and in 1921 switched to the NEP, which undercut the base of peasant anti-Bolshevik uprisings. And korenizatsiya (in Ukraine, Ukrainization) was rolled out from 1923; Dribnytsya calls it outright a tactical move by Lenin to stay in power and avoid provoking new uprisings^[19]. This does not contradict Yefimenko’s dating: the first concessions to national form began around 1920, while korenizatsiya as an officially proclaimed party-wide policy was adopted by the XII Congress of the RCP(B) in April 1923.

The “1922 project” ignores the UPR

Putin’s argument itself often sounds even simpler — in its street version: “Ukraine is a Bolshevik project of 1922,” a failed one, so it “must be closed down”^[6]. Its weak point is immediately visible: this “1922 project” deliberately overlooks what came before it. For the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the whole Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 — with the achievement of statehood, the Universals, an army of the UPR — preceded any Soviet Ukraine. When this is pointed out, the typical reaction is to wave it away: supposedly those were “stillborn projects” lasting a few months that “can be disregarded,” whereas the Bolsheviks created something viable^[7]. But this is precisely the substitution: statehood that had to be conquered (see above) existed, by definition, before the conqueror. The “1922 project” is not the point of creation but the date when Moscow formalized control over what was arising without it.

Tellingly, the argument does not survive even the first clarifying question. Answering questions from the pro-Russian blogger Black Vata compiled from Putin’s articles, historian Vitaliy Dribnytsya breaks the very notion of a “Ukrainian state” into its components: for the Middle Ages and the early modern period, states were personalized, and territory mattered little; the state with the word “Ukraine” in its name is above all the UPR of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921; the modern state of Ukraine arose in 1991; and between them existed only a quasi-state — the Ukrainian SSR within the USSR. The question of the origins of Ukrainian statehood is thus multi-component — and the first thing to ask an opponent is: what exactly do you mean by the word “Ukraine”?^[12] No single Bolshevik act can be the sole “point of creation”: it accounts for only one — and a quasi-state — episode in this sequence.

Borders and the name — by imperial logic

The imperial approach is visible in smaller matters too. When the borders were cut up in 1919, ethnically Ukrainian territories — Belgorod region, Starodub region, four districts of Chernihiv region — were left to Russia on purely economic grounds: these are grain-growing regions, without which, as the border commission explained, Russia has “economically nowhere to live,” while Ukraine has grain^[4].

A simple comparison of maps hits the myth even harder. Dribnytsya points out that the territory of the UPR was in fact larger than that of the later Soviet Ukraine. The UPR encompassed all nine Ukrainian gubernias, including lands that today belong to Belarus and Poland — the Kholm region, the Nadsiannia, Podlachia^[13]. In other words, the formula “Lenin gave Ukraine its lands” turns reality upside down: from the outset the Bolshevik republic received less than the UPR had proclaimed and defended.

Part of the ethnically Ukrainian lands remained outside Soviet Ukraine altogether — within Soviet Russia or Soviet Belarus: the Starodub region (the former Starodub regiment of Khmelnytsky’s time), parts of the Voronezh and Kursk regions — that is, eastern Slobozhanshchyna — and the Taganrog region^[14]. And the border kept being cut — again not in Ukraine’s favor: in 1925 the administrative boundaries were drawn so that part of the eastern Donbas was handed over to Soviet Russia — above all Taganrog and its environs, where the majority of the population was Ukrainian^[15]. Today’s Kremlin claims to the Donbas conveniently “forget” that it was Moscow that severed its eastern part from Ukraine in the 1920s. A memorandum of the 1920s noted that Ukrainians and Belarusians had a national movement while Russians had none — therefore “Russians as a nation do not exist”: Russian identity was imperial, not national. And by a decision of the Politburo around the 1926 census, the “Great Russians” in effect secured for themselves the shared name “Rusians” (ruski)^[5] — the same appropriation of the heritage of Rus’ as in the renaming of Muscovy into “Russia”.

What this means

The myth that “the Bolsheviks created Ukraine” reverses cause and effect. The Bolsheviks did not create the Ukrainian nation — they encountered it as an accomplished fact, tried to deny it, failed, and were forced to make concessions. The Ukrainization of the 1920s was not a gift but a forced tactic, which a decade later was rolled back through repressions and the Holodomor. What the Kremlin calls “creation” was in fact an attempt at the subjugation of what existed before it.