The question of the revolution of 1917–1921 and the beginning of the «Civil War» in modern ukrainian of historiography

Abstract

Understanding the educational jubilee of the February Revolution of 1917 and the czar’s demise, therefore, according to the statement of the prominent Ukrainian lawyer, statesman and diplomat S. Shelukhin, the Ukrainian people were released from the oath of the Russian tsar, made up on the Pereyaslav Council, the rise of the national liberation movement of the Ukrainian people, as a result of which was proclaimed the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic, gives an opportunity to rethink the events of 1917-1921 ina new way. An unbiased view of the historical realities that came about after the collapse of the Russian Empire shows that the struggle of Ukrainians to restore own statehood lost some centuries ago, acquired special forms of national democratic revolution and liberation struggles, the so-called Russian democracy, which replaced the tsarist regime, did not see in the long term the solution of the Ukrainian problem through the proclamation of independence and only under pressure of circumstances, first of all the military factor, since about 4 million Ukrainians were the ranks of the Russian Army on the fronts of World War II, was forced to agree on certain autonomous acts that materialized in proclaimed by the Ukrainian Central Council universals. At the same time, the Interim Government launched criminal cases for anti-state activities and separatism on the leaders of the Ukrainian national liberation movement. The Bolshevik coup in Petrograd abruptly changed the course of history. Bolshevik government - Sovnarkom - acknowledging the UPR, at the same time, declared war against the youth Ukrainian state under the pretense of contrived helping for the Ukrainian workers and peasants in the struggle against the bourgeoisie.

The most recent Russian-Ukrainian war started in 2014, which according to Russian propaganda is presented as an internal conflict of Ukraine, gives additional grounds for considering events in the winter of 1917-1918 not as the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine, but as the invasion of Soviet Russia into Ukraine, military aggression against to overthrow the UPR. The participants of events, including Antonov-Ovsienko, Lieutenant-Colonel Muravyov, and others, testify to the true purpose of military invasion-not to allow the Ukrainian people to revive their own state and continue to economically exploit the country's natural resources and its human resources. The Ukrainian national liberation movement, according to our conviction, was not an integral part of the All-Russian revolutionary process, which had a pronounced social-class color, but aimed primarily at resolving national-democratic problems, which most affected the centuries of the disenfranchised people. The political confrontation that was observed in Ukrainian society about possible ways of further development could be resolved peacefully, but the invasion of the regular units of the Russian army, the participation of the “Red Guard”, gave an impetus to the Communist leadership of Soviet Russia to talk about the civil war in Ukraine, which, according to our conviction, was not. As a result of the aggression of the RSFSR and the military defeat of the Ukrainian People's Republic, a communist regime was established in Ukraine, which some historians and lawyers treated as an occupation, and the Soviet government as colloquial, whose influence legally ended with the proclamation of independence by Ukraine in 1991.