UKRAINA MODERNA (DEC.

2023)
https://uamoderna.com/history/the-versailles-treaty-and-the-ukrainian-national-republic-the-american-refusal-
to-recognize-ukrainian-independence-in-1919/
The Versailles Treaty and the Ukrainian National Republic.
The American Refusal to recognize Ukrainian Independence in 1919.

Valentyn Kavunnyk (Academy of Sciences, Kyiv)

Stephen Velychenko (Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto).

Our democratic friends are far away, and the predatory people who
want our grain and oil are very near. The Allies, thanks to America,
have won the war; but will they win the peace?
Ukrainian delegation in Paris, 4 May 1919.
Cited in Bonsal, Suitors and Supplicants, 142.

We have many enemies, but our greatest enemy is the ignorance of

the whole world.
Symon Petliura
Interview in The Times (4 May 1919)

In early 1919, in Paris the Entente and the US in Paris had decided not to recognize the Ukrainian National
Republic as a sovereign state. A key reason was that during the Paris talks, the Ukrainian National Republic was
progressively losing control of the territory to which it laid claim to Polish and Russian Bolshevik invasions.
Apart from that,, the heads of state represented at the conference had no intention of overseeing the dissolution
of their own or allied empires. Those involved knew little about eastern Europe or Ukraine. Many shared
Russocentric and Polonocentric preconceptions about that part of the world. Many were politically Polonophile
or Russophile. Political leaders thought that a restored Polish state alongside a non-Bolshevik Russian state
within its 1914 borders would mitigate the possibility of a post-war restoration of German power in Europe.

In 1991, the US, Britain, and France recognized Ukrainian independence along with the rest of the
countries of the world. In March 2022, EU countries reaffirmed that recognition in the Versailles
Declaration, voiced support for independent Ukraine, and condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine
that had begun in February of that year. This was in marked contrast to what happened in June 1919,
when Entente leaders feared that the Russian Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine would continue west, into
central Europe. Apart from that, Britain, France, and Japan had no intention of dismantling their
empires, or that of their ally, Russia. Nor did the US intend to renounce the Monroe Doctrine and its
hegemony in the western hemisphere. One result of this was that the victorious powers did not include
Ukraine among the newly independent countries to emerge from the Great War, as recognized in the
Versailles Treaty.

This paper reviews and summarizes the reasons why American leaders decided not to recognize the
Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) one century ago. Today, the US and the west European powers
no longer control empires directly, with soldiers and bureaucrats, and they recognize Ukrainian
independence. However, at the time of writing, the political circumstances resemble those of 1919 in
as much as Russia has again invaded Ukraine and former Soviet-bloc countries fear that invasion
might continue west, toward their borders.

It is thus a propitious moment to review how Ukraine figured in the interaction between empires and
nation-states a century ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Great War. Europe was then the centre
of the world, and Ukraine, which claimed recognition in Paris but, like Ireland, India, Vietnam, and
Korea, did not receive it, was at the heart of European geopolitics. As Dominic Lieven has written,
World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine and the peace of 1918 was lost in eastern Europe – where
wars continued until 1923. American intervention in 1917 had ensured Germany’s defeat, but its
post-war withdrawal from Europe removed the intermediary power that could have balanced Germany
and Russia and guarantee the Versailles settlement. The US thus contributed to the demise of
Ukrainian independence and helped produce, in the post-war period, a politically frustrated faction of
Ukrainians that turned to radical extremism in an attempt to win the independence promised by “the
right to self-determination.”[1] “In the collective memory of the peoples of Europe, this period
featured prominently either as one of revolutionary turmoil, national triumph, or perceived national
humiliation to be redeemed through yet another war.” [2] Disappointment turned to violent activism
not only in Europe, but the world over. Veterans and romantic youth turned to either the antisemitic,
anti-Bolshevik right, or the anti-capitalist, theoretically anti-imperialist Russian Bolshevik-controlled
left.[3]

This subject is well covered in Ukrainian-language literature and a small number of English-language
articles and finds occasional mention in the vast literature on US-Russian/Soviet relations and the
Paris Peace Talks. But there is no English-language monograph devoted specifically to US--Ukrainian
relations during the revolutionary years.[4] The last English-language article on the subject was
published over fifty years ago.[5]

John T. McCutcheon "Seeds of Future Wars", Chicago Tribune 1920

THE EVENTS

Ukrainian leaders formed the Central Rada in Kyiv in March 1917. In November 1917, after the left
wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, the Bolsheviks, took power in Petrograd, the
Rada proclaimed the UNR and claimed authority over the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire.
They envisaged Ukraine as an autonomous part of a future non-Bolshevik federal Russia within its
former imperial borders. The Bolshevik party claimed authority over the entire former tsarist empire,
declared war on the UNR, and invaded Ukraine in December. In January 1918, during the Bolshevik
invasion, the UNR government fled Kyiv –then returning that March, allied with Germany.

After the Bolsheviks declared a unilateral cease-fire in 1917, Entente representatives on the eastern
front flocked to Kyiv, where they promised the Rada men and material in order to keep the nascent
power in the war. In practice, the only thing they gave the Ukrainians was money. Some went to
create armed units of Polish and Czech POWs on Ukrainian territory, and some for bribes to keep
specific Ukrainian leaders loyal to the Entente. The Americans secretly funded the Whites in southern
Russia from December, but they were not among the representatives in Kyiv trying to keep the Rada
on the Entente side in late 1917. The then-US consul in Kyiv, Douglas Jenkins, was under orders only
to observe.[6]

The Rada made its first attempts to contact the Entente in late December 1917 via French
representatives.[7] Because the Entente regarded Ukrainian issues as the internal matters of an allied
country, they were prepared to support Ukrainian politicians who were political autonomists at the
time. In his reports filed before the Rada’s declaration of independence in January 1918, Jenkins
correctly described Rada political objectives as autonomist.[8]

Great Britain and France recognized governments de facto, and offered such recognition to the Central
Rada in January 1918, hoping thereby to prevent it from signing a treaty with Germany. The UNR,
nonetheless, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the Central Powers that month, after which Entente
contacts ended. That April, the Germans supported a coup against the UNR led by General Pavlo
Skoropadsky and recognized his government in the Ukrainian State – the official name of Ukraine
under his rule. His government collapsed in the wake of Germany’s defeat in December 1918. His
opponents, led by Simon Petliura, re-established the UNR in January 1919, now including the West
Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) – formed in November 1918 in former Austrian ruled
eastern-Galicia. The UNR’s borders fluctuated with the fortunes of wars fought in the east and south
against the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and Nestor Makhno’s anarchists. The ZUNR, for its part, fought a
Polish invasion in the west until it was defeated and incorporated into Poland in June 1919. In the
UNR, the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and the Ukrainian Social Democratic
Labor Party (SDs) were the ruling parties. Their left wings were ideologically pro-Bolshevik and in
early 1919 formed separate parties that rallied Ukrainian support for the Russian Bolsheviks. By the
end of that year, the UNR had collapsed. But until 1923, people alienated by Bolshevik terror and
brutality supported anti-Bolshevik warlords (otamany) fighting Red Army troops.

While national leaders were establishing the UNR, the Russian Bolshevik party’s Ukrainian section
seized power in Kharkiv in December 1917. They did not represent a majority of Ukraine’s soviets,
but set up a government with the help of Red Guards arrived from Moscow. These Bolsheviks formed
a People’s Secretariat that arrived in Kyiv in January 1918, from which the Germans would evict them
in March. That month, the Russian Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which required
them to recognize the UNR and all the provinces it claimed as constituting an independent state.
When Germany collapsed in November 1918, the Bolsheviks withdrew their recognition of the UNR
and created a second Bolshevik government for Ukraine in the Russian town of Kursk. They
proclaimed a Ukrainian SSR in January 1919 and invaded a second time. Formally, by 1920, the
Bolsheviks ruled former tsarist Ukraine. In reality, Bolshevik control was tenuous outside the big
cities, where Makhno and warlords fought a guerrilla campaign that raged through to 1923.
The main concern of the Allies in the spring of 1919 was to stop a Bolshevik advance that looked as if
it would sweep into central Europe. As far as leaders in Paris in May 1919 knew, the Whites were
advancing on Moscow, the UNR was retreating westward, and the ZUNR was retreating east. All of
these developments lent credibility to those who supported a Polish state that would include western
Ukraine and a non-Bolshevik Russian state that would include what had been the tsarist Ukrainian
provinces before 1917. The top American officials in the spring of 1919, like all the Allies, were
much concerned that the Bolsheviks would attack central Europe and were accordingly more inclined
to listen to those who argued they should back governments seemingly able to stop the Bolshevik
advance than to those who advocated betting on an unknown Ukraine. During the years under review
in this article, the US recognized neither the Bolshevik government in Russia nor the Ukrainian SSR.

THE DECISION TO REFUSE

Indian nationalist cartoon depicting Wilson and Lloyd George excluding India from the promises of
Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Besides Ukraine, Ireland and Korea could have been depicted behind India.
Self- Determination for India (London, 1918).
Library of Congress.

On 29 December 1918, the UNR had appointed a delegation to Paris. It did not get official status.
Members could only meet with leaders privately and submit briefs, which they began doing in
February 1919.[9] On 18 January 1919, a few days before Ukrainian leaders declared independence,
the Paris Peace Conference began. On 19 May, the Entente informed the Ukrainian delegation that it
would support them in the struggle against the Bolsheviks, and nothing more. The only time the
delegation was allowed to formally address Conference delegates was on 21 May, and that session
was devoted only to western Ukraine/eastern Galicia. When the Ukrainians met with French Premier
Clemenceau the next day, they learned that as far as he was concerned, “Fate has condemned the UNR
to death.”[10] On 23 May the Council of Four confirmed Ukraine’s fate when it expressed its
willingness to recognize the anti-Bolshevik Whites led by Admiral Kolchak as Russia’s legitimate
government. Specifically, it would “assist the Government of Admiral Koltchak [sic] and his
Associates with munitions, supplies, food, and the help of such as may volunteer for their service, to
establish themselves as the government.”[11] The Council obliged the Whites to recognize an
independent Finland and Poland, but only local self-government within a Russian state for former
tsarist Ukraine – a condition that could be interpreted as applying to individual Ukrainian provinces as
much as to UNR-claimed territory as a unit. After getting a reply from Kolchak, noting that only a
future Constitutional Assembly could decide the status of former non-Russian territories, the Council
confirmed its intention on 12 June.[12]

During those four months, successful Polish offensives in the west against ZUNR and Bolshevik
offensives from the east reduced the UNR-controlled territory from an area bounded approximately by
Kyiv in the east, Lviv in west, and the Black Sea coast in the south, to a strip of territory between
Lutsk and Ternopil in the west and Proskuriv and Kamianets-Podilskyi in the east. Within a week of
the Bolshevik takeover of Kyiv and their continued offensive west, a British intelligence report
forwarded to Washington on 31 January 1919 concluded that Petliura’s cause was lost and that the
only way to stop the Bolsheviks was to support the Whites.[13]

The US/Entente refusal to recognize the UNR as an independent state was duly reflected in the
Versailles Treaty of June 1919. That same month, the Entente recognized the Polish conquest of the
ZUNR.[14] On 30 June the US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, told the Ukrainian delegation:
“The United States will not even temporarily recognize Ukrainian independence until the Ukrainian
delegation reaches an appropriate agreement with [the White government of] Admiral Kolchak.” He
said that as far as he was concerned, for Ukrainians the right of self determination meant the right to
chose between Polish or Russian occupation.[15]

Lansing accorded the unity of Imperial Russia, and Polish claims on western Ukraine, greater
importance than a Ukrainian independent state including western Ukraine. On 3 June 1919, Arnold
Margolin, the Ukrainian Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and UNR representative in Paris, met
privately with Lansing, who “demanded the submission of the Ukraine and the complete recognition
of [the White] Kolchak and Denikin.” [16] When Margolin, who thought that Wilson advocated the
principle of self-determination, asked Lansing why that principle applied to the dissolved Habsburg,
but not Romanov, empire, Lansing replied, “Austria and Hungary were our enemies in this war,
whereas Russia was our ally.”[17] Lansing sought an end to German power and saw restored Russian
control over its former imperial territories as the best way to do that. For Lansing, the “Right to
Self-Determination” was a “cursed phrase.”[18] In a December 1918 memorandum he wrote:

The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination’, the more
convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be
the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands. What effect
will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not
breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion? …. The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise
hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives…. What a calamity that the
phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause![19]

US leaders concluded that Ukraine should be part of a post-war non-Bolshevik federal Russia, and, in
the final analysis, officials found reports by The Inquiry [see below] that reinforced that view.
Ukrainian issues after May 1919 figured simply as part of US Russian policy.[20]
Nonetheless, there were Americans who supported Ukrainian independence. These included the
co-author of the Fourteen Points, Edward House, and head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Henry Cabot Lodge. American officials sympathetic to Ukraine had support among society. Some
American publications published pro-Ukrainian materials – after May 1919. In the autumn of that
year Literary Digest published a three-page article on Ukraine for its “Nations in Rebirth” edition. It
summarized Ukrainian history and emphasized the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language.[21] In
August 1919, National Geographic described “newly” discovered peoples in the collapsed tsarist
empire. The article elaborated the linguistic differences between Russians and Ukrainians and
described the physical differences between the great Russians and Ukrainians: “The people are
handsomer than the Great Russians. Better nourishment probably has something to do with this, or the
natural distinction between a northern and southern people, but the admixture with other races has
also left its trace. They are, in general, taller and more robust.”[22] In 1921, a vituperative
interpretation of Entente anti-Ukraine policy appeared in the widely-read American conservative
Century Magazine, where Herbert Adams Gibbons lamented: “Why were the Ukrainians treated as
they were and not permitted to enjoy the fruits of liberty and independence? Because independent
Ukraine stood in the way of every combination to create a new balance of power favorable to France...
and Great Britain.”[23]

THE GERMAN FACTOR

Faced with Russian Bolshevik invasion in December 1917, the Rada decided to send representatives
to negotiate with the Central Powers on the 22nd of that month. The Bolsheviks occupied Kyiv in
January on the same day that the Ukrainians signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.[24] That signing gave
credence to those opposed to the break-up of the Russian Empire and to the pre-war tsarist
government’s characterization of the Ukrainian national movement as, from its origins, a “German
and Austrian conception.”[25] This interpretation ignored that Ukrainian leaders in 1918 signed the
Treaty because they faced a Russian Bolshevik invasion. They knew that their people had no more
stomach for war that their troops were unreliable, and saw no Entente troops or aid forthcoming
despite its agents’ promises. Whether or not the experts in Berlin, Washington, London, and Paris
knew how desperate the Ukrainian situation was remains unknown. What is known is that Ukraine’s
signing the treaty with the Central Powers was something that British and French leaders found
impossible to forgive. This predisposed them to accept at face value the White Russian condemnation
of the entire Ukrainian movement and Ukrainian independence and see Ukrainians as no better than
the Red Russian Bolsheviks. The French regarded the Treaty as nothing less than an act of war against
France for which they could not forgive the national leaders involved.[26]

The Treaty allowed Germany to transfer hundreds of thousands of troops westward, mount an
offensive that killed additional thousands of Entente soldiers, and threaten them with defeat had not
American troops arrived. German socialist parties supported Ukrainian socialist parties, and
Skoropads'kyi overthrew the Rada in April 1918 with the help of Germans to establish a German
satellite-state.[27] All of this added credence to those who labeled the UNR, like the Ukrainian State,
agents of German power in eastern Europe. Without contact with Kyiv throughout 1918, Entente and
US officials who knew little about Ukrainian issues as it was, had even less information than
previously about what was happening there.[28]

In emigration, Skoropads'kyi explained he had turned to Germany for support against the Bolsheviks
because promised help had not been forthcoming from France or Britain: “But the Allied troops never
came, not on the arranged day, nor since... When it became evident that no help was to be expected
from the Entente, there was no alternative left to me but to apply for help from Germany, although I
highly disliked doing so.”[29] Who among the Entente would have known that is moot. What is ironic
about the Ukrainian State, is that the landowners, industrialists, and generals who controlled it were
imperial loyalists. They had nothing to do with Germany or Austria before they took power, or with
the small group of pro-Austrian Ukrainian SDs and SRs. They sympathized with the Whites and
maintained clandestine contacts with White generals. Immediately after Germany surrendered, French
representatives informed Skoropads'kyi they would recognize and send aid to his government if he
agreed to organize a Ukrainian army to fight the Bolsheviks and federate Ukraine with a
non-Bolshevik Russia --– which is what he declared as his last major act on 14 November. Again, no
French or British aid ever came. Skoropads'kyi abdicated and fled to Germany.

Opponents of Ukrainian independence exploited the Brest-Litovsk Treaty to compromise Ukraine

even after Germany had been defeated and the Treaty died. The Russian representative in Bucharest
told the US Charge d’Affaires there that he had proof of Petliura’s connection with Germany. He
claimed “German officers who come to Petlioura [sic] bring him false Russian Romanoff rubles, made
in Berlin, which proves that Petlioura, deprived of territory and pecuniary resources, is living on
Russian credit and spending false Russian rubles made in Germany, because the ‘karbovantzi’ [the
Ukrainian currency] of the Ukraine are accepted nowhere, neither in the Ukraine nor abroad.”[30]
Felix Cole of the Department of State’s Division of Russian Affairs subsequently used this document
in his report to Lansing discouraging recognition: “Petliura... has been and still is in close contact with
Germany.”[31] When a member of the UNR delegation in Washington visited him in early 1920, Cole
wrote: “He [Sichins'kyi, the diplomat in question] complained that America seemed to regard
Ukrainians as inimical and allied with Germany and Austria. I made no positive statement as to our
beliefs on this subject, which are to that effect….” [32] That August, in a summary of the US position
towards the former tsarist empire given to the Italian ambassador, Ukraine was not even mentioned in
a list of former tsarist-ruled non-Russian territories whose independence the US had not recognized.
[33]

These illustrations show with what consistency the Government of the United States has been guided
in its foreign policy by a loyal friendship for Russia [meaning the Tsarist Empire]. We are unwilling
that while it is helpless in the grip of a non-representative government, whose only sanction is brutal
force, Russia [in its pre- 1917 borders] shall be weakened still further by a policy of dismemberment,
conceived in other than Russian interests…. The territorial integrity and true boundaries of Russia
shall be respected. These boundaries should properly include the whole of the former Russian Empire,
with the exception of Finland proper, ethnic Poland, and such territory as may by agreement form a
part of the Armenian State.

Such reports obviously reinforced the anti-Ukrainian arguments of American pro-Russian and
isolationist groups.

Who in America and western Europe knew how slender the true extent of Ukrainian-German contacts
was is unknown. As of 1914, some emigre Ukrainian SRs and SDs did cooperate with Austrian
intelligence. They were condemned by their associates who lived in tsarist Ukraine, but their activities
were a gift to the tsarist secret police, who used those émigrés as proof that the entire Ukrainian
movement was a German anti-Russian plot. The tsarist government was opposed to all national
movements on its territory. The tactic of associating the Ukrainian movement with the Germans was
developed after the signing of the Franco-Russian Treaty (1887). It abrogated Russia’s earlier alliance
with Austria and Germany (1873) and allowed the secret police to regard those two previous allies
and label all associated with them as potential enemies.[34] This notion became a staple of the
anti-Ukrainian propaganda disseminated by the secret police-sponsored extremist Russian parties that
emerged after 1905. It was well exploited by Whites and their supporters.

While the importance of Ukraine as a food source for the Central Powers was well-documented in the
American press, and the New York and London Times did report that the Socialist and Liberal
opposition in Germany’s parliament opposed the overthrow of the Rada in April 1918, Americans
took no notice of these facts, nor of the popular insurrections against German troops in the summer of
1918.[35] Few seemed to realize that the mass movement led by Petliura against Skoropads'kyi’s
government in November 1918 was anti-German. Already in 1914, Petliura had doubted that the
Central Powers would win the war and was very critical of Ukrainians who worked with them in the
first years of the war. In 1922, he repeated this belief and condemned his political rivals for the
German alliance: “We still now are repenting for this mistake, because to this day the allies cannot
forgive us our ‘treason’.” [36] In early January 1917, he had opposed alliance with Germany.
Although he marched with German troops into Ukraine in March 1918, the Hetman had him arrested
on 27 July for criticizing German policies. Under pressure from the German side, originating from
German socialists in Berlin, Petliura was released that November. Interestingly, the Spanish anarchist
paper, El Socialista, reported that Ukrainians were clearly anti-German, [37] while the liberal Spanish
newspaper El Sol reported on the “Germanophobia” of Ukraine’s anti-Hetman movement in Ukraine.
[38]

If leaders in Paris were aware of these events and reports, it did not influence them. In the wake of
their offer to recognize Skoropads'kyi, they regarded the Petliura-led uprising as pro-German and
Bolshevik. The French and British in Paris did not advertise their support for the Rada in 1917 until it
signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, nor that they had funded Petliura and other Ukrainian politicians that
autumn. The French did negotiate with the UNR in early January 1919, but because they imposed
conditions that effectively nullified Ukrainian independence, the Ukrainians refused them. [39]

The lack of reliable information about ongoing events made it difficult for officials in Paris to follow
the kaleidoscope of alliances and rivalries in Ukraine and consider changing policy aimed at keeping
Ukraine within a centralized, non-Bolshevik Russia. Thus, in November 1918, after Germany
surrendered and the Hetman had agreed to federate with a re-established White Russian state, the
Entente recognized the previously German satellite Ukrainian State. It condemned any “subversive
movement in Ukraine” and instructed German troops in Ukraine to remain and keep order. [40] They
consequently cast the Petliura-led uprising against the earlier pro-German Hetman, that had nothing to
do with Germany, as a subversive threat to the pro-Entente Whites.

Reports about White opposition to the UNR were ignored. The New York Times reported from London
that Petliura had abandoned the quest for independence and that “progress” had been made in talks
with Denikin, whom the Entente supported. The Ukrainian Delegation in Stockholm protested these
reports to the American consulate in Stockholm. [41] The Times, meanwhile, described Denikin as
“hostile” toward Ukrainians. [42] Henry Alsberg, an American Jewish correspondent for The Nation
and Zionist activist, was close to Lansing, yet was sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. Petliura told
him in an interview: “Why does not the Entente direct Denikin against Moscow instead of against
Ukraine? We would join him and, at any rate, secure his rear. But [instead], while we fight him, the
Bolsheviks will regain the initiative and all will be lost.” [43]

Alongside accusations of political Germanophilism, there were also those who accused the UNR
under Petliura of being a Bolshevik regime. The U.S. High Commissioner in Constantinople in his
reports underscored Petliura’s “intrigues with the bolshieviks [sic].” [44] The Times reported that
Petliura had supposedly freed arrested Bolsheviks after he overthrew Skoropads’kyi and issued a
publication saying that he was not an enemy of the Bolsheviks, but a “brother in socialism.” [45]

A GENERAL IGNORANCE

In addition to the anti-Ukrainian animus stemming from the German alliance and fear of Bolshevism,
another reason underlying US and Entente decisions on Ukraine in 1919 was doubt born of pre-war
ignorance. Only towards the end of the war did the UK, the US, and France create secret
organizations of specialists, called “The Inquiry” in the US, that included eastern Europe experts
who produced confidential memoranda and published periodicals describing the region’s “small
nations,” which included Ukraine. These committees never coordinated their work and were not
always aware of each other’s work. [46] Inasmuch as tsarist Russia was an ally, those who advocated
for the independence of for non-Russian nationalities under tsarist rule had little impact on the
government officials who made decisions. In Paris, opinions of these few experts and their spies were
but one variable in the decision-making – and likely to be ignored if they ran counter to policy
directives. [47] While leaders did envisage dividing the enemy Habsburg empire along national lines,
they avoided nationality issues in the allied Romanov empire by collectively labeling them an internal
affair. [48]

The politicians whom the experts were supposed to inform and influence knew as much about Europe
east of Berlin as they did about Timbuktu. British Prime Minister Lloyd George thought that
“Kharkov” was a White general. Some historians, furthermore, note that leaders gave little attention to
intelligence reports that did not conform to their preconceptions. [49] There was no pre-war English-,
French-, or German-language map indicating a place called Ukraine. With the possible exception of
Foreign Office intelligence personnel, British writers on the region had little interest in or knowledge
of Ukraine or Ukrainians until 1914, when interest began to rise and separate publications about
Ukraine appeared. [50] The 1910 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica included five lines on “Ukraine”
and twenty-seven pages on “Poland.” As of 1917, there had only been one English-language book
about Ukraine published in the US, Ukraine’s Claim to Freedom, sponsored by America’s Ukrainian
National Association. The authoritative six-volume British History of the Peace Conference of Paris
written between 1919 and 1922, mentions only that the Germans recognized Ukrainian independence.
It does not mention the UNR or anything about it. One author used the term “Ukrainians” in reference
to former tsarist subjects. The book treats Ukrainian issues at length only in the chapter on Poland, in
which the author calls the Ukrainian subjects of eastern Galicia Ruthenians and Little Russians. [51]

Pro-Entente Ukrainian leaders, for their part, like most of their other eastern European counterparts,
misunderstood President Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points of January 1918. Although they thought
that the statement recognized national self-determination and legitimized their claim to political
independence, the Points, in fact, nowhere mentioned the term nor made any such assertion. The
actual text was well known because in early January 1918, a US delegation showed the Points to
Lenin, who then allowed the Americans to distribute over five million copies in German, Russian,
Polish, and Ukrainian throughout the former empire. Nonetheless, like many others, prominent
Ukrainian leaders mistakenly thought that the Points included the cited terms. [52] In reality, the text
only stipulated “impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” and the “opportunity of autonomous
development” for the peoples of the Habsburg empire. [53] Section VI, which referred to the Russian
Empire, was heavily influenced by the Provisional Government’s ambassador to the US Boris
Bakhmetev and did not mention non-Russian subject nationalities. [54] Wilson sought to promote,
moreover, not self-determination understood as the political independence of a given cultural unit, but
the American idea of the civil right of self-government, which meant participation by all constituents
of a polity in public affairs. He himself admitted that he had spoken “Without the knowledge that
nationalities existed, which are coming to us day after day.” In addition, he understood nation in a
civic American sense, and not in the ethnic European sense. His intention was to resolve future
grievances within the boundaries of existing states – with the exception of Poland. [55] As Robert
Lansing explained, Wilson only used the term in a speech to Congress in February 1918, one month
after issuing the Fourteen Points. But he never openly disavowed it, nor did he refute
misinterpretations. It was subsequently popularized by the press and “members of certain groups and
unofficial delegations” in Paris. During the Paris talks, it figured only as a moral precept, not a
guiding principle in the formation of policy that Lansing later wrote. [56]

There was also confusion on the allied side. Not only did the noted phrases contradict Article X of the
League of Nations Covenant that guaranteed the territorial integrity of the signatories, including
empires, but they also contradicted a fundamental principle of American policy -- namely, the Monroe
Doctrine, which stipulated that the US not interfere in any European colonies or domestic affairs. In a
bit of brilliant oratory, in September 1919 Wilson fudged the issue by presenting the Doctrine as a
worldwide extension of a uniquely American claim to Allied leaders who then, in Article 21 of the
League of Nations Covenant, duly excluded the Doctrine’s provisions from the Covenant.[57] Nor
was there consensus among specialists and politicians then about what made nations (i.e., shared
ethnicity or shared citizenship); whether nations could exist in multi-national states, or if identity was
defined by religion or language. Were Lithuanians really Poles, or Ukrainians really Russians? What
if locals did not know to which nation they belonged? Statistics were unreliable. Communications,
even by telegraph, could take days to arrive, and written reports from secret agents – weeks.[58]
RUSSOCENTRISM AND POLONOCENTRISM

Western Europeans and Americans may not have known much about Russia or Poland, but they did
know more about them than Ukraine, and like all people, they understood events in light of what they
knew. What they knew about the territory between the Oder and the Don rivers was in turn determined
from the perspective of Petrograd or Warsaw, not the perspective of Kyiv.

Experts friendly towards the White Russian émigré representatives, with faith in their anti-Bolshevik
White generals and their intention to maintain Imperial Russian unity, shared their understanding of
“Russian history” as being synonymous with the history of the tsarist empire. They had no qualms
about advising Allied leaders not to apply any such “Right of Nations to Self-determination” to the
peoples of the former Russian Empire.[59] The émigré White Russians, for their part, aware that they
could not explicitly defend the pre-1914 imperial borders at Versailles in light of the popularity of the
idea of the right to self-determination mistakenly associated with the Fourteen Points, publicly
reiterated the policy of the Provisional Government towards Ukraine. In August 1917, it had
recognized the Rada as a regional administrative authority in five of the empire’s nine Ukrainian
provinces. But, while the Parisian émigré Russians told allied leaders that they would establish a
federal government within the 1914 borders with national rights for non-Russian territories, General
Denikin in Russia, who had recognized the Kolchak government, vehemently rejected that
position.[60] Entente leaders did not formally recognize either the Ukrainian or the émigré White
delegations. However, they did meet and listen to White representatives who had formed the Russian
Political Conference. White demands for restored imperial borders were clearly at odds with demands
by leaders from former non-Russian territories that the Entente recognize their declared independence.
The British, American, and French governments moreover disagreed on which of the new states on
formerly imperial Russian territories to recognize and which to ignore, as did groups within those
governments.[61]

A second important source of anti-Ukrainian opinion that swayed American politicians were claims
laid by representatives of the newly created Polish state to western Ukrainian territories. Polish
representatives saw Ukrainian ethnic territories between the Dnipro and San rivers as their rightful
territory because they had been part of the pre-nineteenth-century Polish-dominated Rzeczpospolita.
At the time, most Polish activists, additionally, distinguished between the good, happy, hard-working
“Rusini,” a Polish tribe, and the evil, fanatical, bloodthirsty Ukrainians, who were invented by the
Germans. Roman Dmowski in Paris and Ignacy Paderewski in Washington, like the White Russians,
explained to American leaders that the UNR and the entire Ukrainian movement were German
creations and politically Bolshevik. Just as the Russians began associating the Ukrainian national
movement with German anti-Russian intrigues at a specific point in time, so, too, did Polish leaders
begin associating the Ukrainian movement with Austrian anti-Polish intrigues from 1848, when
western Ukrainian activists had asked Vienna to separate the province of Galicia into eastern
Ukrainian and western Polish parts.[62] Wartime Polish pamphlets expressed the relationship as
follows: “Eastern Galicia is not a Rus' country because it is over 40% Polish-inhabited.” The authors
of one such publication wrote: “send such an army there [eastern Galicia/ZUNR] as to liberate the
Polish and Rus' people from German-Austrian-Ukrainian slavery.” Another pamphlet claimed that the
territory was historically ethnically Polish and that the “Rusini” were invader-occupiers. Because
Polish nationalists considered Poles of higher civilizational rank than the so-called Rusini on all
socioeconomic and cultural indicators, the former represented progress, and the Polish state was
justified in extending its borders as far east as Polish settlement reached.[63]
 In service of that goal, Dmowski sent a memorandum to Entente leaders on 12 February 1919 in
which he falsely claimed that the UNR had signed a secret deal with Germany renewing the
Brest-Litovsk Treaty.[64] The Americans even believed that it was not Poland that attacked the ZUNR
in November 1918, but that the ZUNR had been taking over Polish territory that were designated as
Ukrainian by the Germans in the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.[65] Robert Lord, who headed the
American committee of experts on eastern Europe, did not think that ethnographic principles should
be applied to the determination of Poland’s borders. He had been prepared to include eastern Galicia
into Ukraine. This was in keeping with opinion in 1917 that Ukraine would be part of a federated
Russian republic within the empire’s 1914 borders – thus including eastern Galicia. This view was
shared by Wilson and Lansing, who supported the formation of a future Russia that would include
eastern and western Ukraine, and constitute a great power capable of countering Germany. Lord,
however, was prepared to recognize Polish claims if no Ukrainian state was able to emerge.[66] The
Entente, as noted above, finally recognized Polish rule in western Ukraine despite the opposition of
British PM Lloyd-George and the attitudes of the liberal American and British press, which ridiculed
Polish claims. The New Republic, for instance, lambasted French aid to Poland because of Roman
Dmowski’s vision of a reestablishment of pre-1772 Polish borders: “Can there be any doubt that a
huge Polish empire would drive all Ukraine, including Ruthenia [sic], into the fold of Soviet Russia?”
[67] In desperate hopes of obtaining Entente support, Petliura, on 20 May 1919, the day after he heard
that the Entente had not extended recognition, began secret negotiations with Poland. He signed an
armistice with that state at the cost of renouncing Ukrainian claims on eastern Galicia on 1 September
1919. [68]

INTERNAL UKRAINIAN ISSUES

The UNR’s failure to stop the Russian Bolshevik and Polish offensives between March and May 1919
was perhaps the single most important factor explaining why the allies did not recognize it. Internal
developments contributed to that failure. Serious differences in policy orientation that began in
November 1917 between pro-Bolshevik and pro-Entente Ukrainians weakened their foreign policy
initiatives in western Europe. Petliura’s party, the Ukrainian Social Democrats (SDs), for example,
were similar to the Russian Mensheviks. Like them, Ukrainian SDs repudiated the idea of the
“dictatorship of the proletariat” and stood for independent socialist parties in independent states. [69]
Yet, its left-wing, though not Bolshevik, did advocate for alliance with the Bolsheviks. [70] Leftists in
the second governing party, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, meanwhile, secretly plotted
with the newly formed Bolshevik government to overthrow the Rada and establish a pro-Russian
Bolshevik Ukrainian government. Simultaneously, Petliura and his army officers were plotting with
France to overthrow the Rada and establish a pro-Entente Ukrainian Government. Neither group
succeeded. [71] The Ukrainian left SD’s and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, one of the UNR’s top leaders,
outlined the tragedy of the situation in his diary. He explained that the choice for Ukrainian leaders at
the time lay between the Entente that represented “reaction” and return to Russian rule, and the
Bolsheviks, who represented anarchy and return to Russian rule.

The Ukrainian leaders hindered their own cause by sending different signals to US and Entente
officials trying to understand ongoing events. In the summer of 1918, even before overthrowing the
Hetman, Petliura’s associates had contacted the Allied powers, but sent mixed messages. They
explained that they sought independence, but made no mention of what the Entente was most
interested in -- fighting the Bolsheviks. Then, on 14 December 1918, shortly after taking Kyiv, the
Directory proclaimed neutrality. On the 19th it sent a note stating “we don’t need assistance from the
Entente powers.” On the 26th, it asked the Entente when it would withdraw its forces from Ukraine, in
reference to French troops in Odesa. The Directory repeated that, unlike the Hetman, it required no
foreign support. The next day, it sent a note to Paris explaining that the UNR was neither pro-German
nor pro-Bolshevik, requesting recognition and official status at the Peace Conference. Then, on 10
January, it sent representatives to the US and the UK seeking aid and recognition, not knowing that on
16 December 1918, the State Department had told the head of America’s Ukrainian National
Committee that it would not recognize anyone claiming to represent the Ukrainian nation. [72]

The Ukrainian leaders, understandably pressured by war and the fact that they had to build their
foreign diplomatic efforts from nothing, began circulating their own printed propaganda in English
and French among Entente powers only from late 1918, on the eve of the collapse of the Ukrainian
State, and then, through neutral Switzerland. The UNR, for its part, formed its external affairs
ministry in December 1918 and established press bureaus in most European countries, but had no
printed materials at the time to offer to its representatives. UNR foreign affairs officials, moreover,
could not present a single Ukrainian policy or front to foreign countries in 1919 because of differences
with the ZUNR and the absence of a coherent strategy -- which was ultimately only formulated in
1920, when it was too late. [73] Officials had to write their materials on the spot in western European
languages, noting down what they thought important, albeit without coordination. Thus, their foreign
interlocutors heard different things about Ukraine from different representatives. Their efforts began
to bear fruit only after May 1919 -- after Entente leaders had decided not to recognize their
government. A contemporary French observer noted that Ukrainian propaganda in Paris was badly
organized, without plan, method, or any cooperation with foreign pro-Ukrainian politicians. [74]

Other Ukrainian problems were noted by its supporters in Paris. French parliamentarian Charles
Dubreuil wrote in September 1919 that many from the Ukrainian delegation were incompetent and
worked at cross-purposes with one another, thereby compromising each other in the eyes of the Allies.
Their failure to illustrate the positive achievements of the UNR government and work in association
with Ukraine’s foreign supporters, reinforced Polish and Russian claims that Ukraine was a centre of
anarchy -- worse even than Bolshevik Russia – and as such could never seriously oppose the
Bolsheviks. He accused the head of the delegation, Hryhoryi Sydorenko, of totally alienating all of
Ukraine’s friends and urged he be dismissed. [75] The Austrian ambassador to the Ukrainian State and
then the UNR, Prince Furstenberg, observed already in December 1918:

They [Ukrainians] cannot be compared with the All-Russian monarchists [the Whites], who posses a
good orientation which works which works with high pressure in Washington Paris and London. That
organization is composed of politically seasoned agents who enjoy social position, while the
exponents of this regime [UNR[ do not have enough international acquaintances; neither do they
master the necessary forms of social intercourse, nor do they have the knowledge of the languages.

Furstenberg’s observations about Russian émigrés applied as well to Poland’s foreign-based

“exponents.” His and Dubreuil’s observations help us understand Lloyd-George’s comments about the
Ukrainian delegates: “I have only seen a Ukrainian once. He was the last Ukrainian whom I saw and I
am not sure that I want to see any more.” [76]

FROM PROVISIONAL “YES” TO “NO”

Within this convoluted political context, Allied leaders made their policies, and Ukrainians their
pleas. Officials weighed alternative options before making their final decision in May 1919. A
negative US report released in January 1918 described Ukrainians and Russians as “the same people.”
It characterized nationalist leaders as a miniscule grouping of “fools” and recommended
reestablishing Russia within its 1914 borders. [77] A US consular report from Vienna in early January
1918, on the other hand, described in positive terms the economic opportunities in Ukraine. It
depicted the cooperatives there favorably and praised Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura: “Petljura [sic]
and his followers have demonstrated a perseverance that indicates the possibility of ultimate success.”
In December 1918, the US Ambassador in Russia, David Francis, had expressed support for an
independent Ukraine. In late January 1919, “The Inquiry” submitted a report to President Wilson and
US representatives in Paris recommending “the establishment of a Ukrainian State,” contingent on the
Bolsheviks winning the Russian civil war, that would include both western Ukraine/eastern Galicia
and Crimea. It did not recommend recognition if the Whites won.[78] In his reports from late 1917,
which arrived in Washington in March 1918, Jenkins opposed recognition.[79] The positive
recommendations conformed to Wilson advisor Col. Edward House’s understanding of the Fourteen
Points as allowing the possibility of Ukrainian independence. In October 1918, he had explained that
because Letts and Lithuanians and Ukrainians had emerged since the Points were issued, they would
have to be granted “the same opportunity of free development” as the Poles, whose government, the
Points explicitly specified, was to be recognized as independent.[80] In House’s view. a postwar
Russia including its former non-Russian territories would be “too big… for the safety of the
world.”[81] Nonetheless, by May 1919, American leaders decided not to recognize the UNR and,
accordingly, provided no assistance of any kind to Ukraine.

It is unknown how many Ukrainian publications actually reached US officials and what impact they
had. Stephen Bond was an American sympathetic to the UNR and in charge of his country’s
delegation archives in Paris. On 3 May, he wrote to the American delegation that there was no more
room in his safe for the ten-pound dossier of accumulated Ukrainian briefs, memoranda, and
statements to the American delegation. That day he was instructed by his superior to burn all of them.
“I will not assert that what they have had to say has gone entirely unheeded by the commissioners, but
it has not been as carefully weighed as in my opinion it should have been…. But what was I to do
with this mass of neglected, and I must also admit, often quite contradictory, information?” [82]

Although not-recognized, Ukraine did request aid.[83] At the Peace Conference on 30 June, Margolin
requested technical aid from the US; it was not the first time that the UNR had requested such aid.[84]
US replies reveal additional reasoning about Ukraine. Lansing replied that if the UNR was indeed
anti-Bolshevik, it should cooperate with the White armies, which the Allies supported. Margolin said
that he had spoken to Denikin, but that White demands with respect to Ukrainian independence were
“intractable.” Lansing reiterated that the US was in favor of a unified Russia.[85]

One consequence of the US and Entente refusal to recognize the UNR was a blockade that allowed no
relief missions into Ukraine.[86] A last train with Red Cross supplies that reached Ukraine in early
November 1919 had been organized in June by the Austrian Red Cross at the request of the Western
Ukrainian government. The train took five months to reach UNR territory because it was refused
passage by the Polish government and had to travel via Romania.[87] In another incident, the UNR
delegation in July 1919 purchased American war surplus on credit. It was never sent. The Ukrainians
complained, and Robert Lord, the man in charge of agency, dismissed the claim as coming from a
state that “never existed and probably would never exist.”[88] What further alienated those involved
in this deal against Ukraine was a report by Franz Fitts. He had dealt with the Ukrainians and claimed
that they had not paid the agreed sum, in gold, for the supplies.[89] Upon hearing of the UNR’s final
collapse in November 1919, Cole finally canceled the sale of $12,000,000 of salvaged surplus army
supplies in France on grounds of the “Ukrainian Republic’s” inability to pay in the future.[90]
Lansing, when informed of the transaction, for his part wrote the French ambassador saying that he
disapproved of the deal.[91]

Departmental telegrams related to this deal reveal American thinking about Ukraine. Lansing wrote:
“On the basis of past investigations the Department is disposed to regard the Ukrainian separatist
movement as largely the result of Austrian and German propaganda seeking the disruption of Russia.
It is unable to perceive an adequate ethnical [sic] basis erecting a separate state….” [92] He accepted
as a given that the Ukrainian movement was a German creation despite reports to the contrary. The
Entente demanded that Petliura resign in order to even consider recognizing Ukraine. [93] Lansing
informed the UNR’s representative in Washington on 15 August that although “the government and
people of the United States have a lively and sympathetic interest in the welfare of the people in all
parts of Russia, including the Ukraine,” “the United States has not recognized either the independence
of the Ukraine or any Government at present in control and, consequently, is not prepared to receive
any representatives of that Government.”[94]

Ukrainian emigres in the US, most of whom came from western Ukraine, took to mobilizing war
relief aid for their relatives in Ukraine not long before the fall of the tsar. Their representatives
addressed Congress on the topic of Ukraine in the spring of 1916 and persuaded Congressmen James
Hamill to sponsor legislation for funds to be directed toward the “Ruthenians devastated by the
war.”[95] The Ukrainian Federation Congress held a meeting in Washington on 14 December 1918 to
protest Polish claims to and attacks on the newly proclaimed Western Ukrainian Republic. There is
little to suggest that it had much influence on policy. In May 1919, the Federation published an open
letter, stating that it opposed US aid to anti-Bolshevik governments because none of them provided
any indications that they would not use that aid against Ukraine as well as the Bolsheviks.

During the struggle of our people, we, the Ukrainian immigrants, did not seek either military or moral
support from Allied nations. We did not seek it for the reason that the present policies of the Allies, we
regret to say, give no guarantee that their intervention would aid the free self-determination of the
Ukrainian people against the Russian armies and the violence of the Russian Government. On the
contrary, the policy of the Allied governments up to this time can only justify the suspicion that their
intervention would restrict the free will of the Ukrainian people and popular rule in the Ukraine in
favor of the old Russian order and imperialistic interests of Poland. And, not having sought Allied
support for the Ukrainian people, we must protest against sending aid [that would be used] against
them. [96]

Whether anti-Jewish pogroms on UNR territory that its opponents used to discredit it influenced US
attitudes before May 1919 is unstudied. While the pogroms that broke out before and during the Paris
Conference were reported in newspapers before May, Jewish organizations abroad began public
protests against and calling the attention of Entente leaders to them from September 1919, when the
first strong, organized anti-pogrom initiatives were mounted by émigré Jewish organizations.[97]
Collections of published pogrom witness testimonies that decisively influenced American opinion
about the UNR began appearing after 1919. In Paris, Jewish delegations’ primary interests before then
had been, first, a Jewish state in Palestine, and second, the fate of minority rights in former imperial
peripheries that left Jews as minorities in national states whose leaders envisioned them to be
mono-national as opposed to big, multi-national states.[98] In the US, the government established a
commission in December 1918 to investigate Polish pogroms, news of which did nothing to stop
Washington from recognizing Poland in January 1919. In Berlin in early 1919, meanwhile, UNR
representatives had contacted the Zionists, who agreed to ship English- and French language literature
about Ukraine to the US. They also won the support of wealthy émigré Russian-speaking Ukrainian
Jewish bankers and industrialists for the UNR.[99] The first Jewish mass protest against pogroms in
Ukraine happened in New York in November 1919. According to The New York Times (25 November
1919), protestors did not actually accuse the Ukrainian government or “the Ukrainians” [100] of
perpetrating these pogroms. The UNR mission condemned the pogroms and denied governmental
culpability shortly afterwards in the press and a separate publication, The Jewish Pogroms in Ukraine.

CONCLUSION

The UNR existed as an independent state recognized in international law and by the wartime Central
Powers and their allies as of January 1918. The Brest-Litovsk Treaty that Germany signed with the
Russian Bolsheviks that March obliged them to recognize the UNR and then the Ukrainian State,
which they did, until the Kaider’s Germany and the Ukrainian State both collapsed. Poland recognized
the UNR in April 1920, although neither side ratified the Treaty of Warsaw that established that
recognition. When Poland signed the Treaty of Riga of April 1921 with Red Russia, it nullified the
Warsaw Treaty, as it recognized the Bolshevik-controlled Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic as the
lawful representative of Ukraine. Thereafter, the UNR no longer existed as a subject in international
law. Neither the US nor the Entente recognized the UNR or the Ukrainian State.

Influential groups, American, Russian, and Polish, associated Ukrainian independence with
Bolshevism and German power in Europe. The Ukrainian governments’ failures to repel Polish and
Russian offensives, meanwhile, weakened the arguments of its supporters in Paris and Washington.
The general ignorance prevailing among western Europeans and Americans about eastern Europe and
Russia, compounded by bad communications and internal differences among Ukrainians concerning
domestic and foreign policy, also seriously weakened their case for recognition. These factors
predisposed leaders who had never heard of a Ukraine -- but did know about a Russian Empire, had
vague knowledge of a Poland that had once existed, and feared continued German hegemony in
eastern Europe -- to look at the region in Russo-centric and Polono-centric terms. This left no space
for an independent Ukraine in their plans for postwar Europe.

The United States, like its allies, had by June 1919 decided that, in the final analysis, Ukraine was an
“internal domestic issue” to be left to the authority of a restored White Russian ally -- a view that
conformed to their refusal to oversee the dissolution of their own respective empires. Representatives
of the provisional Russian government that had no status in Paris in 1919 and existed only in the form
of the Russian Political Conference and the White generals on former imperial tsarist territory,
meanwhile, were divided on the issue of Ukraine. Some were totally against any recognition
whatsoever, while others thought in terms of a limited autonomy subject to ratification by the
Constituent Assembly elected in 1917 but abolished by the Bolsheviks in January 1918. In April
1920, General Vrangel, boxed into the Crimean peninsula with his army and the “South Russian
Government,” did recognize the independence of the UNR. This might ultimately have led to Entente
recognition, had the Polish-Ukrainian offensive that May succeeded. But it did not. As of August
1920, the UNR existed only as a government-in-exile.

In March 1921, the Foreign Minister of the UNR government-in-exile summed up the American
position on Ukraine and his ministry’s accomplishments in Washington as follows: “[The American]
attitude towards the Ukrainian state, as noted, is totally negative, Americans know almost nothing
about our affairs, and there are no ties with official circles… It must also be admitted that a cause of
our situation in the United States is the unfortunate choice of our representatives, who not only did
nothing for our case, but also managed to compromise themselves with the publicized court case of
[the head of the mission] Iu. Bachins'kyi vs. Imkhanyts'kyi.” In a separate letter to the minister,
Bachyns'kyi defended his personal record. [101]
The authors gratefully acknowledge and thank Marco Poisler (B.Sc. Georgetown, School of Foreign
Service) for his research of the contemporary newspapers and journals, and in the U.S. National
Archive

References

1 Lieven wrote before Russia’s 2014 invasion. As of then, his closing sentences referring to Ukraine
as no longer being at the heart of European geopolitics, has become invalid. Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine also casts doubt on his claim that Europe is no longer at the centre of world politics. Lieven,
The End of Tsarist Russia, 1, 367.
2 Rinke, Wildt eds., Revolutions and Counter- Revolutions, 159.
3 Gerwarth, The Vanquished, 175, 266.
4 Most recent: Saul, War and Revolution: The United States and Russia 1914-1921,; idem, The A to Z
of United States–Russian/Soviet Relations. Recent work on the Paris Peace Talks and Versailles:
Macmillan, Paris 1919; Gerwarth, “The Sky beyond Versailles.” On the unrecognized countries:
Gerwarth, The Vanquished; Manela, The Wilsonian Moment.
5 Shumeyko, “American Interest in Ukraine;” Gorodnia, Polityka derzhav Antanty i SShA; Pavliuk,
Borotba Ukrainy za nezalezhnist; Vedneiev, “Mizhnarodno-informatsiina diialnist Ukrainskoi
derzhavy;” “Stanovlennia kulturnoi dyplomatii.” The most recent examination of US Ukrainian policy
in English is Dornik, “Polityka Spoluchenykh Shtativ Ameryky,” in Dornik et al, Ukraina, 399-414.
Also: Manning, “The Ukrainians and the United States;” Klachko, “American Delegation to the Paris
Peace Conference in 1919;” Warwariv, “America and the Ukrainian National Cause 1917-1920,” in
Hunczak ed., The Ukraine, 352-81.
6 Pavliuk, Borotba Ukrainy, 24-6. Foglesong, America’s Secret War. 90-105.
7 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, Bk. 2, 92. Its refusal to recognize the Ukrainian portion of the
tsarist debt did little to ingratiate itself with France.
8 Lytvyn et al, Narysy z istorii dyplomatii, 320. Klynina, “Diialnist predstavnyka SShA. Daglasa
Dzhenkinsa,” 11.
9 Ukrainian materials presented in Versailles from February to April 1919 reproduced in G.
Sydorentko, ed., Notes Presentees par la Delegation de la Republique Ukrainienne a la Conference de
la Paix a Paris (fevrier – avril, 1919). Paris, 1919. The most recent summary in English of Ukraine at
the Paris Talks: Gorodnia, “The Post-Great War Settlement of 1919 and Ukraine.”
10 Adadurov, “Polityka Frantsii,” 21. Also: Laidinger, “Polityka Frantsii shchodo Ukrainy,” in
Dornik, et al, Ukraina, 359-74.
11 Mezit, Kattsina, “The Cooperation of Admiral Kolchak’s Government and the Entente.” Mantoux,
The Deliberations of the Council of Four, II: 194. The Whites fought the Bolsheviks until October
1920.
12 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 6: 74-75.
13 National Archives, doc. no. 860E.01/7. To Secretary of State / From: John W. Davis (31 January,
1919).
14 In July 1921 the Entente specifically decreed that the ZUNR did not constitute either a de facto or
de jure government and had no right to represent any former Habsburg territory. Talmon, Recognition
of Government in International Law, 289, 320.
15 Margolin, Ukraina i polityka antanty, 161; Pavliuk, Borot'ba Ukrainy, 53-56.
16 Margolin. From a Political Diary, 48.
17 Ibid., 48.
18 Kennan, Russia Leaves the War, 248-49.
19 Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 87.
20 Under Secretary of State Frank Polk told Margolin he saw “the Russian Ukrainian quarrel” as a
repeat of the American Civil War, with the Ukraine as the South and Russia as the North. Margolin,
From a Political Diary, 41.
21 Literary Digest, (5 October, 1919) “Ukraine,” 37–40.
22 “The Ukraine, Past and Present,” National Geographic, August 1919, 118.
23 Gibbons, “The Ukraine and the Balance of Power,” 12.
24 Most recently reviewed in Chernev,Twilight of Empire.
25 The Times, 14 January, 1919, 7. On pre-war Russian characterization of the Ukrainian national
movement: Velychenko, “Putin Preludes.”
26 Hai-Nyzhnyk, “Vzaiemyny Ukrainy z Frantsiieiu.”
27 Fedyshyn, Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 141. Chernev, Twilight of Empire.
Ukraine was not reduced to the status of Germany’s Ober-Ost
28 Occleshaw, Dances, passim.
29 National Archives. doc. no. 860E.00/16. To: Secretary of State/ From: H. M. Gunther at the Hague/
Re: Interview with Skoropadsky / (20 August, 1919).
30 National Archives (10/8/19) doc. no. 860E.00/20.
31 National Archives (2/20/20) doc. no. 860E.01/27.
32 National Archives, doc. no. 860 E./016. Memorandum of Division of Russian Affairs, 17 February,
1920.
33 Papers Relating to the Foreign relations of the United States, 3: 463–468.
34 The secret police characterization of the Ukrainian movement as a German plot was elaborated by
one of its operatives S. Shchegolev, Ukrainskoe dvizhenie (Kyiv, 1913). Also: Khrystiuk, Zamitky, bk
1 82-83; Pater, Soiuz vyzvolennia Ukrainy; Dornik and Lieb, “Polityka tsentralnykh derzhav shchodo
Ukrainy,” in Dornik, et al, Ukraina, 93-128. Velychenko, “Putin Preludes.”
35 “Manna From Ukraine,” New York Times, 10 March, 1918, Section 7, 1–16. “Berlin Press Admits
Failure in Ukraine,” New York Times, 5 August 1918, 2; “German Socialists Assail Ukraine Policy,”
2. “Through German Eyes,” The Times (London), 31 May 1918, 6.
36 Drazhevska et al., Symon Petliura, 188-90; Hunczak et al., Symon Petliura, II: 324.
37 El Socialista, 24 August, 1918, 2. This paper constantly faced the risk of bankruptcy and
apparently did not have the resources for extensive coverage of events outside Spain.
38 El Sol. 5 May, 2, and 5 August 1918. 2. Margolin, Ukraine and the Policy of the Entente, 187.
While not many in Paris read Spanish-language publications, let alone left-wing ones, Margolin states
that the Ukrainians at Geneva conversed often with the Spanish-speaking nations, that comprised
one-third of the League. After Armenia, Azerbaidjian, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Ukraine had their requests for membership denied, Argentina demonstrated its sympathy to the
eastern European nationalities in its proposal to amend
Article I of the Covenant. This amendment would remove the condition to League membership to the
degree that non-membership would be a voluntary decision of the state itself. Davis, The Soviets at
Geneva, 267.
39 Conditions included the resignation of Petliura and Vynnychenko. Brinkley, “Allied Policy and
French Intervention in the Ukraine, 1917-1920,” in Hunczak ed., Ukraine, 323-51. The Whites
condemned the French for having any negotiations whatsoever with the UNR.
40 Documents reproduced in: Nahayewsky, History of the Modern Ukrainian State, 276-79.
41 National Archives (860E.01/10), p. 2. Secretary of State / From: Green, Stockholm / September 9,
1919/.
42 “Denikin and Petlura,” The Times, 20 September, 1919, 6.
43 Alsberg, “The Situation in the Ukraine,” 1.
44 National Archives, doc. no. 860E01/26. To: Secretary of State / From: U. S. High Commissioner
(January
15, 1920) Constantinople. National Archives doc. no. 860E01/26.
45 “Kiev’s Revolution: A New Leader,” The Times. 30 December, 1918. 1.
46 Prott, “Tying up the Loose Ends of National Self-Determination,” 727-41. The British Foreign
Office prepared a series of informed usually balanced accounts of eastern European countries
including Ukraine in 1917-1919 that were published in 1920—but never supported independence.
Whether they forwarded these to their American colleagues is unknown. Eg: G. W. Prothero ed.,
Ukraine (London, 1920).
47 Prott, “Tying up Loose Ends,” 748. Since secret agents on the spot do not always adhere strictly to
policy or orders, it should be noted that while political relations between Ukraine and the Entente
powers are well researched, covert operations in Ukraine are not. Through 1918, US agents, with their
French and British counterparts based in Moscow, financed and carried out sabotage in Ukraine using
anti-Bolshevik Russians. There is no record of contacts with Ukrainians opposed to the Hetman. No
records are known to exist of the
British “Military Intelligence Operations” under Richard Steel that coordinated all British
anti-Bolshevik operations. Occleshaw, Dances in Deep Shadows, xiv, 39-40. The records of its
American counterparts, reports from American military attaches and the “U.S. Information Service”
are preserved. Foglesong, America’s Secret War, 106-42.
The Germans captured French Military archives in 1940 and took them to Berlin, from where the
Russians in 1945 took them to Moscow. Whether or not anything was missing when they were
returned to France in 1998 is unknown. The most recent work on French agents: Iu. M. Galkina, “K
voprosu o frantsuzkom slede v ‘dele lokkarta’: Kto takoi Anri Vertamon?” Klio (St.Petersburg) no. 3
(2018) 176-86. No one has yet examined all these collections for their information on Ukraine. Agents
activities are summarized in Service, Spies and Commissars, 146-69, 210-28.
48 Holovchenko, Soldatenko, Ukrainske pytannia, 88-97.
49 Service, Spies and Commissars, 218.
50 Saunders, “Britain and the Ukrainian Question,” 41-44, 52-59. Ukrainian activists were
pro-Austrian because Austrian policies in western Ukraine contrasted favourably with Russian
policies in its Ukrainian provinces. Consequently, as of 1914, British officials placed Ukrainians in the
enemy camp and in 1916 the government banned publication of any pro Ukrainian materials.
51 The relevant chapter in vol. 6 was probably written by American Robert Lord. He referred to the
possibility of an independent Ukraine “in Russia”, as the establishment of “a storm –centre in the
heart of Europe” and asked: “Who would venture to set-up such … a source of sedition and disruption
for the Russian empire?” Temperley ed., A History, VI: 270. Benedict Sumner was the author who
used “Ukrainians”. Ibid: I: 222-28.
52 Sisson, One Hundred Red Days, 210–11. Doroshenko, Istoriia Ukrainy, I: 355; Potichnyj ed., On
the Current Situation in Ukraine, 3, 176; Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsii, III: 82, 392. Dmytro
Doroshenko, Skoropadsky’s Foreign Minister ,was one of those who realized the Fourteen Points
provided only for a Russia in 1914 borders. Ibid II: 393,
53 Lloyd-George used the term in January 1918 in his “Statement of British War Aims” – made
BEFORE Wilson presented his Fourteen Points. Temperley ed., A History, VI: 189-93.
54 Seymour, The Intimate Papers, 330-31.
55 Throntveit, “The Fable of the Fourteen Points,” 447, 450-54, 475-78.
56 Lansing, The Peace Negotiations, 85-87. Lenin used the phrase “national self-determination” in his
“Decree on Nationalities” of November 1917, but, like the Fourteen Points, this declaration did not
mean what people thought it did. A few weeks after the Points were issued in January 1918, Stalin
specified that only “the proletariat” had the “Right to national self-determination.” The unstated
underlying assumption, furthermore, was that because “the proletariat” was ideologically immature,
only its party, the Bolsheviks, could represent and act in its true interests. This qualification would
have been known at the time only to those who read Russian and had access to the Bolshevik press.
Tretyi vserossiskyi siezd sovetov rabochikh soldatskikh i krestianskikh deputatov (Petrograd, 1919)
72-78. The fact that Bolshevik party centralization ignored “Soviet Republic” borders also effectively
nullified any “Right to Self Determination” those ruled by Bolsheviks thought they might have had.
Central leaders recognized the “republics” as nothing more than regional party
committees. Vosmoi siezd RKP (b) mart 1919 goda. Protokoly (Moscow, 1959) 425.
57 “Nothing in this Covenant shall be deemed to affect the validity of international engagements such
as treaties of arbitration or regional understandings like the Monroe Doctrine, securing the
maintenance of peace.” The French agreed to this slight of hand after Wilson agreed to allow them to
station troops to occupy the Rhineland. Cited in Brown, “The Monroe Doctrine,” 208. Hall, The
Monroe Doctrine, 138-56. Thompson, “The Peace Conference,” 296.
58 MacMillan, Paris 1919, 10-12, 64. Reynolds, The Long Shadow, 9- 38.
59 Warvariv, "America and Ukrainian National Cause, 1917-1920," in Hunczak, ed., The
Ukraine. 1917-1921, 352-381
60 Shmelev, In the Wake of Empire. Tongour, Diplomacy in Exile, 188. In the early twenties Russian
émigrés came up with the notion of Eurasianism. This involved presenting the pre 1917 Russian
empire not as an empire, but a nation-state in the making. They could then claim the Right to Self
Determination was applicable to this “Russia.” Bassin, “’Classical Eurasianism’.”
61 Alston, “The Suggested Basis.”
62 Rosdolsky, Engels and the Nonhistoric Peoples, 57-63.
63 Dlaczego Galicya wschodnia az do granic Romana Dmowskiego musi należyć do Polski (np.
1919) Derzhavnyi arkhiv Lvivskoi oblasti (DALO) f. 257 op 1 sprava 432. E. Romer, S. Zakrzewski,
S. Pawlowki, W Obronie Galicji wschodniej (Lviv, 1919) 23, 105.
64 Papers Relating to the Foreign Policy of the United States, 1919. The Paris Peace Conference, Vol.
3, 981-82. A possible source Dmowski may have twisted to create his Brest-Litovsk fable, were
reports about a planned Black-Sea Baltic defensive union including Ukraine and directed against
Poland. Kavynnuk, ed., Arkhiv…Posolstvo v Nimechchyni, 41. The UNR’s Russian rivals might also
have forwarded to him this kind of disinformation. On 24 February 1919, the UNR ambassador in
Berlin reported that German socialists and
liberals were heavily influenced by White Russian émigrés. They regarded Ukrainian issues as
“reactionary” although “the reactionary circles” that had previously supported pro-Ukrainian policies
were “completely isolated from power.” In early 1921, the foreign minister of the UNR government in
exile reported that German ties with it were “reserved.” German Generals secretly supported Petliura’s
rival, the exiled Skoropads’ky,
whose people, the report continued, disseminated “detrimental propaganda” and supported a German
decision in April 1919 to close the UNR delegation’s bank account. In May 1919, the UNR’s Berlin
ambassador considered the Ukrainian State’s personnel there pursued only White Russian interests.
Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv, 129, 718; ibid, Arkhiv… Posolstvo v Nimechchyni, 44, 48-49, 86; Motyl, The
Turn to the Right, 23-24.
65 Pavliuk, Borotba Ukrainy, 44. On Dmowski Paderewski and pro-Polish groups: MacMillan, Paris
1919, 207-29; Nahayewsky, History, 285.
66 All the committee’s reports on Ukraine by then were pro-Russian and dismissive of Ukrainian
aspirations. Biskupski, “ Recreating Central Europe,” 269-70, 275. Cf. note 35 above
67 Don Levine, “The New Balance of Power,” 16.
68 Brinkley, “Allied and French Intervention in the Ukraine,” in Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine, 323–352.
69 Borys “Political Parties in the Ukraine,” in Hunczak, ed., The Ukraine. 1917–1921.
70 Palij, The Anarchism of Nestor Makhno,. 248.
71 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, vol. 2: 92, 125,
72 Lytvyn et al, Narys istorii dyplomatii Ukrainy, 342-46. Central State Archive of Civic
Organizations of Ukraine (TsDAHO), f. 57 op 2 sprava 253 no. 3-4. Pavliuk, Borotba Ukrainy, 36.
73 Matiash, “Osnovnoiu orientatsieiu,”
74 Bohuslavsky, Informatsiino-presova diialnis, 79-80, 158-61; Hnatyshyn, et al, Dyplomatiia UNR,
I: 266.
75 Cited in: Mazepa, Ukraina, 284-85. Although in theory the Ukrainian delegation represented the
UNR and ZUNR, the ZUNR representative Vasyl Paneiko pursued a policy for ZUNR independent of
the UNR. Just after the Allies decided not to recognize the UNR, he created a separate ZUNR
diplomatic mission in Paris.
76 Cited in MacMillan, Paris 1919, 226. Furstenberg reproduced in: Nahayewsky, History, 288-90. A
few members of the delegation did know English or French and these were sometimes helped by
American or Canadian-born Ukrainians as well as French well-wishers. The reference was most likely
in reference to Sydorenko.
77 Unlike its British counterpart. The Inquiry did not publish its reports for general distribution.
Warvariv, “American and the Ukrainian National Cause,” 369-71. Biskupski, “Recreating Central
Europe,” 269-70. After September 1918 Bolshevik raids against Entente spies, they had to move their
base of operations from the capital cities to towns controlled by the Whites. Nothing their White hosts
told them would have been sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.
78 Klachko, “American delegation.” The article reproduces the entire document but gives no source
nor does it specify The Inquiry compiled the report. Gelfand, The Inquiry, 213-15. Pavliuk, Borotba
Ukrainy, 27.
79 US National Archives. To: Secretary of State / From: American Consulate / Vienna / 6 January,
1920 / RE: Possibilities for American Investment in the Ukraine, (860E.00/55). Lytvyn et al, Narysy z
istorii dyplomatii, 320. Klynina, “Diialnist predstavnyka SShA. Daglasa Dzhenkinsa,” 10. Dornik,
“Polityka Spoluchenykh Shtativ Ameryky,” in Dornik et al, Ukraina, 407.
80 Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States 1918, Supplement 1. The World
War,405-413.
81 Cited in Lasch, The American Liberals, 177.
82 Bonsal, Suitors and Supplicants, 140-43. Copies were likely held by other countries, and
Americans could probably have consulted them – with obvious delay and formalities.
83 Franck and Glennon. Foreign Relations and National Security Law, 58.
84 New York Times, “Ukraine Seeks Aid from Allies,” 1 December, 1918, 3.
85 Foreign Relations: Paris Peace Conference, IX: 251–255.
86 Alsberg, “The Allied Dog in the Ukrainian Manger,” The Nation, 392. Warvariv, “American and
the Ukrainian National Cause,” 373-78.
87 Trembitsky, “Sanitarna blokada Ukrainy 1919 roku.” The American Red Cross mission functioned
in Poland and Polish-occupied western Ukraine. Also: Foreign Relations of the U. S., 1919, Russia,
784.
88 Cited in Pavliuk Borotba Ukrainy, 68.
89 National Archives: doc. no. 860E.48/20. Memorandum for Mr. Felix Cole (From Advisory
Commission of the Council of National Defense) 27 May, 1920.
90 National Archives: 8602.01/27. To: Secretary of State / From: Felix Cole / (2 February, 1920).
91 Foreign Relations, 1919. Russia, p. 789.
92 To: Commission to Negotiation the Peace / From: Secretary of State Robert Lansing / 29 October,
1919 / Foreign Relations. Russia. 1919, p. 783.
93 “Petlura’s Fight With Bolshevists: An Interview,” The Times, 4 May, 1919 6. Bilinsky, “The
Communist Takeover of the Ukraine,” in Hunczak, ed, The Ukraine, 1917-1921, 121.
94 Department of State, Washington to Mr. Julian Batschinski [sic], 15 August, copy, 1919. Central
State Archive of the Higher Bodies of the Government of Ukraine [TsDAVO], f. 3696 op. 2 sprava
287 no. 44.
95 Both Houses on 24 January 1917 passed the resolution, with the support of President Wilson.
Whether it applied to Ukrainian territories under enemy Habsburg control is unclear – but unlikely.
(Congressional Record: Second Session of 64 th Congress, 3909). Also, Klynina, “Diialnist
predstavnyka SShA,” 9; Holovchenko, Soldatenko, Ukrainske pytannia, 92-93.
96 “The Mid-European Union and the Ukraine.”
97 Allied leaders were cool concerning Jewish issues as most considered them Germanophile and/or
Bolsheviks –despite considerable Jewish enlistments in their armies. Fink, Defending the Rights of
Others, 89-90, 283-87. Veidlinger, In the Mist of Civilized Europe, 6-7, 241.
98 Levene, “The Jewish Question.” Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, III: 46-48,
99 Kavynnuk, ed., Arkhiv…Posolstvo v Nimechchyni, 49-51. Reports about Pogroms began
appearing in the German press in July 1919. Ibid., 61.
100 Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 115-20. Behei, ibid, 255, claims organizers demanded the
government not recognize the UNR.
101 Cited in Kavynnuk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky, 129. Imkhanytsky was
involved in sex scandals and speculation. When Bachynsky refused to recognize his claim to
plenipotentiary powers at the embassy, he took Bachynksy to court. The court refused to rule as the
matter involved foreign citizens and Imkhanytsky fled. Behei, “Iuliian Bachynsky, ” 256-59.

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