for example, the city of Lviv (which the Poles called Lwow, the Russians Lvov,
and the Germans Lemberg) had more Polish inhabitants than Ukrainians, and
Poland claimed the city on this basis. But this same city was located in an area
where Ukrainians outnumbered Poles rather substantially.

In most of Ukraine, which had been ruled by Russia, the bulk of the urban
dwellers considered themselves Russians, and most Russians considered
Ukrainians to be “Little Russians” who were merely a branch of a larger
Russian nation composed of both peoples along with the Byelorussians (or
White Ruthenians). Most Ukrainians disagreed, and few Ukrainians wanted to
be ruled by either Russians or Poles, the rival claimants for their territories.
Elections were held in 1917-18 to the All-Russian and All-Ukrainian constitu-
ent assemblies. These were the only free elections ever held in this part of the
world, and the majority of votes each time were cast for political parties
committed to the pursuit of Ukrainian home rule. immediately after the fall of
the imperial government in March, 1917, these parties had established the
Ukrainian Central Rada (council) in Kiev; and in the summer of that year, the
Rada was recognized by the Russian Provisional Government as the official
organ of Ukrainian territorial autonomy. After the Bolsheviks seized power in
November, the Rada proclaimed the Ukrainian National (or People’s) Republic
(UNR), and on January 22, 1918, declared the UNR to be sovereign and
independent.

The UNR was a democratic and somewhat socialist republic which guar-
anteed full national cultural autonomy to the one-fifth of its citizens who were
members of various minority nationalities, principally the Russians, Jews, and
Poles. On January 22,1919, union was proclaimed with the Western Ukrain-
ian Peoples Republic, which had been established in the part of Ukraine that
had been ruled by Austria-Hungary.

Ukraine under the Soviets

the Ukrainians had to fight on several fronts against Russian Bolsheviks,
Russian anti-Bolsheviks, and Poles. Law and order broke down completely. By
the spring of 1919, hundreds of marauding bands led by warlords or otamans
roamed the countryside, fighting one another and switching sides among the
major rivals with impunity. Ukraine’s large Jewish community suffered terrible
pogroms that the UNR authorities were helpless to prevent. By the beginning
of 1921, the bulk of the country was in the hands of the Bolsheviks, led by
Vladimir Lenin, while smaller parts of Ukraine were ruled by Poland, Czecho-
slovakia, and Rumania. The Bolshevik Party officially changed its name to the
Russian Communist Party and at the end of 1922 forced the Ukrainian
Socialist Soviet Republic, which it had set up, to join with the Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic and other parts of the old Russian Empire that
it had reconquered to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

The Ukrainians, as well as the other former subject nations of Russia whom
the Communists ruled, had been militarily defeated but remained restive.
Lenin was forced to grant concessions. in 1921 the Tenth Congress of the
Russian Communist Party proclaimed the New Economic Policy (NEP), guar-
anteeing the peasantry the right to their own individual farms and the right to
sell what they produced on them. In 1923 the Twelfth Party Congress
proclaimed a new policy of indigenization, which called for official sponsorship

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