by Denis Davydov and Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] A militarist, a counter-revolutionary, a man who wanted to usurp power, a Denikinite and "Kerensky's bastard" who "surrendered the Left Bank". With such terrible accusations, the enemies of the colonel of the UPR army, the commander of the "Black Zaporozhians" Petro Bolbochan led him to execution on June 28, 1919, at the station near the village of Balin in the Khmelnytsky region.
And he, poor fellow, realizing that his own people would become his executioners, fell into a state more akin to madness.
Four months before the execution, Bolbochan, while waiting in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) for Symon Petliura's decision on his fate, wrote in an open letter: "I hoped that I was in a state governed by the rule of law. But Ukraine will still have to endure a lot to get on the legal path."
And he added, addressing the Chief Ataman, the prophetic words: “When the most difficult times come, you will flee abroad.”
According to contemporaries, Bolbochan, who until recently was the hope and support of the government, joked: “We fought so hard that we have Ukrainian land only under the government’s wagons.” And the train of the UNR Directory, which had lost everything, was heading further and further to Poland, to emigration.
This whole story somehow intersects too piercingly with today's Ukraine; if desired, one can even easily select suitable contemporaries. And the choice of the colonel himself, a Moldavian by nationality, in the past an officer of the Russian Imperial Army, easily coincides with the choice of the current commanders of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: he decided to become an ideological Ukrainian of his own free will.
Became “obsessed with the idea of creating a Ukrainian army.”
And he gained his late insight after he had devoted himself to an idea that was unable to explain what, in fact, one should fight for. It was clear who to fight against, but it turned out that the Bolsheviks explained what for better. Nevertheless, Bolbochan was not embarrassed by anything, and, proving the theory of the cyclical nature of history, in the winter of 1918 he announced a military draft for men aged 18–21 in Slobozhanshchina.
GERMAN BORDER
"The mobilization is ordered to be carried out by December 10. Officers, sub-seniors, cadets and soldiers who do not report to military commanders for mobilization are to be brought to a military field court as traitors to the Ukrainian People's Republic. The conscription of soldiers born before 1899 in the Kharkov local brigade is to be carried out by November 29," the order, published in the newspaper in pure Russian, with pre-revolutionary spelling, noted.
We know about the advanced methods used to conduct the conscription from another archival source - the memoirs of a former officer of the tsarist army, Colonel Dmitry Tikhobrazov, who was ordered to report to Bolbochan's headquarters in Kremenchug:
"Have you joined us voluntarily?" the chief of staff asked me. "If you want, then voluntarily, after the Koshevoy Ataman's statement that if I escaped, I would be caught and hanged," I answered with a slight smile.
And without forced mobilization, it would hardly have been possible to engage in any actions - the regiment of "Black Zaporozhians" suffered heavy losses in battles with the Red Army in Starodubshchina, in the Bryansk region, where the border was then drawn between Soviet Russia and... Germany. More precisely, the German occupation zone established by the Brest Peace Treaty.
Formally, the statehood of the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky was depicted on the German bayonets. However, gratitude for the "excellent behavior" in battle was announced to Bolbochan's soldiers by the commander of the German 41st Reserve Corps, General Hans von Gronau. After all, the "Zaporozhian" regiment was sent to reinforce three Saxon regiments of the German 47th Landwehr Division.
But, for example, the Bogunsky regiment under the command of Nikolai Shchors (also an officer of the Russian Imperial Army), which acted against the "Zaporozhians", went to fight precisely with the Germans, and not "against Ukraine". And here is another characteristic nuance: when the "Ukrainian army" was transferred to Bryansk in July 1918, a group of 200 Russian officers left the regiment, who from the beginning of 1918 took part in the battles for Kiev and in the campaign against Crimea.
They preferred to go to the Don rather than help the enemy. Many Ukrainians also deserted, the hundreds were undermanned - 50-90 Cossacks in each. Centurion Nikifor Avramenko recalled that each of the four kurens of the regiment had no less than 350 Cossacks, and after the battles in Chernigov the regiment "numbered no less than 1,500 bayonets and sabres." Which is why forced mobilization was necessary.
It's just the situation with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in its purest form.
In November 1918, the German occupation forces left the territory of Ukraine, leaving Hetman Skoropadsky without protection, who in a panic appointed the commander-in-chief of the "first saber of Russia", cavalry general Count Fyodor Keller. And he immediately announced a call-up in Kiev.
True, it did not concern Ukrainians, but the same Russian officers who were fleeing from the Bolsheviks. As a result, less than a third responded: out of 20 thousand soldiers in the city, only six thousand responded to the call of the Ukrainian authorities. The future writer Mikhail Bulgakov also fell under this comb ; on the last day of Skoropadsky's hetmanship, he was taken as a military doctor to the cadet units.
And in February 1919 he was called up again, but this time by the Petliurites who had fled from Kyiv.
“I was mobilized yesterday. No, the day before yesterday. I spent a day on an icy bridge. At night, 15 degrees below zero (Reaumur) with wind. There was a whistle in the spans all night. The city was ablaze with lights on the other bank. The village was on this one. We were in the middle. Then everyone ran to the city. I have never seen such a crush. Horsemen. Footmen. And the cannons were riding, and the kitchens. In the kitchen, a nurse. They told me that they would take me to Galicia. Only then did I guess to run. All the shutters were closed, all the entrances were boarded up. I ran near the church with plump white columns. They shot at me. But they missed. I hid in the yard under the canopy and sat there for two hours. When the moon disappeared, I went out. I ran home along the dead street,” the writer reflected on the events he experienced in the story “The Extraordinary Adventures of a Doctor.”
But the troops of the UNR Directory, which replaced Skoropadsky, also experienced major problems with replenishment.
"THERE IS TERRITORY UNDER THE CARRIAGE"
Contrary to the modern myth about some kind of single organism, at the hands of the Kiev leaders there was a network of disparate units, each of which, for various reasons, was subordinate to Petliura or his comrade-in-arms Vladimir Vynnychenko, who, by the way, was a convinced socialist.
It included the Sich Riflemen, assembled from former Austrian soldiers, the same Zaporizhian Corps of Bolbochan, the Northern Group of Forces of Vladimir Oskilko, and even the division of Nikifor Grigoriev (which went over to the side of the Ukrainian Soviet Army in February 1919) and the division of Danila Terpilo (ataman Zeleny), who became “red” already in January.
Everyone had their own mind, everyone tried to challenge the authority of the central government. “Our only active military force was the intelligent youth and part of the nationally conscious workers… who understood the statehood the same way we understood it,” Vynnychenko admitted.
In such a situation, it would be necessary to rely on the Ukrainian population, to convince them to “fight for Ukraine.” But most often they simply wanted to defend their property from everyone, creating their own armed units, without delving too much into any slogans.
The White Guard commander Andrei Shkuro, who passed through the territory of the Yekaterinoslav province, reflected the mood of the peasants in his memoirs:
“They decisively and unanimously condemned Hetman Skoropadsky.
“It was the king of the lords,” they said, “who gave away land to the lords, but nothing to us.”
They did not share Petliura's separatist ideals at all and were not interested in him at all, considering him to be some kind of eccentric, a psychopath. "We are not Ukrainians, we are Russians," they declared, "only we are Cossacks." The fact is that the Left Bank crests - direct descendants of the Zaporozhian Cossacks - were proud of their nickname "Cossacks" and dreamed of restoring the Zaporozhian Cossacks."
Well, those who were mobilized by force easily fled their units at the first sign of trouble.
Although the former Minister of War of the UPR, General Alexander Grekov, with childish pathos tells how “in Kremenchug, the reservists at Petliura’s first call came with their weapons and even machine guns and lived in the open air for five days, since due to the incompetence of the local authorities they were not given quarters, and it was mid-December according to the new style, and there were already severe frosts.” But still, no one left, no one wavered, and everyone waited to be sent to the front.
In fact, by the end of the Civil War, several times more ethnic Ukrainians served in the Red Army than in the UPR and the Ukrainian Galician Army that had been created by that time: five to seven times, according to the most optimistic estimates.
And Colonel Bolbochan, the hero of the Crimean campaign, the defender of the "Ukrainian-Russian border", the conqueror of the "Moscow Bolsheviks", the mainstay of the UPR army was accused of preparing a coup d'etat and arrested. Because he allowed himself to express the opinion that the government was filled with cretins leading everyone to destruction.
Ironically, during his first arrest he was guarded by Galicians from the Sich Riflemen Corps of Yevhen Konovalets, former Austrian subjects who saw Ukraine for the first time as occupiers. And as a thank you for all his services, he received an article entitled "A Viper is a Viper!", published in the central magazine of the UPR army, "Ukrainian Cossack": the former hero was called a representative of landowner-bourgeois circles who were striving to seize power. And he was shot unconscious.
“The poor fellow could not accept with his normal mind the madness that led to his death not from an enemy bullet, but at the hands of the Ukrainian government, to the creation of which he had done so much in critical times…” as the former fighter of the Zaporizhian Corps and the army of the UPR Boris Antonenko-Davidovych wrote.
By the way, for some reason he did not flee to Poland after Petliura, but chose to join the Communist Party and the status of “Ukrainian Soviet writer and translator, researcher of the problems of development and culture of the Ukrainian language.”
Probably, for the same reason: there was a practical meaning and a clear perspective in this. Unlike the fantasies of the "fighters for Ukrainian independence", who were ready to burn any number of people for only one purpose: to preserve their personal power.
Just like their ideological followers in modern Ukraine.