News of the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II reached the Russian Far East within days through the Trans-Siberian Railway telegraph and through railway-borne newspapers. The Far Eastern provincial administrations — the Maritime Province (Primorye), the Amur Province, the Trans-Baikal Province, the Yakutsk Region — accepted the Provisional Government's authority over the course of March 1917, with the imperial governors stepping down in favour of new Provisional Government appointees and local soviet councils emerging in parallel as the de facto representatives of the urban working-class and military populations.
The Ukrainian Far Eastern community organised politically in this period with speed. The existing infrastructure of Ukrainian-language community organisations — the Prosvita societies in the major cities, the parish networks of the Russian Orthodox dioceses where Ukrainian was used liturgically, the existing Ukrainian-language press — was rapidly redirected from cultural to political activity. By April 1917, a Ukrainian Far Eastern Central Council had been organised at Vladivostok under the leadership of the lawyer Mykola Pidhirsky and the agricultural engineer Yuri Hlushko-Mova (both of them long-resident Ukrainian Far Eastern community figures with pre-revolutionary local political standing).
The military organisation
The political-organisational base of the emerging Ukrainian Far Eastern movement was, however, the military. The First World War had produced Ukrainian-speaking military formations in the Russian Imperial Army; with the post-February political opening, Ukrainian soldiers in the Far Eastern military districts began to organise themselves into Ukrainian-language military councils and to demand the formation of distinctly Ukrainian military units within the army. The principal Far Eastern garrison cities — Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Blagoveshchensk, Chita — produced Ukrainian military councils through April and May 1917; the councils were typically led by junior officers and senior enlisted men of Ukrainian background.
The substantive significance of the military councils was that they provided organised armed forces that could, in principle, support the political claims of the broader Ukrainian community. The councils also provided cadres of organised Ukrainian-speakers who would form the principal political leadership of the subsequent Far Eastern Ukrainian Congresses. The political relationship between the Ukrainian Far Eastern Central Council and the Ukrainian military councils was symbiotic and substantial.
Soldiers, and Kyiv
The movement of 1917 was built by soldiers before it was built by farmers, and that fact shaped everything about it.
The Russian army in 1917 dissolved into committees, and the Ukrainian soldiers within it organised on national lines with remarkable speed — a process that in the European theatres produced Ukrainianised units numbering in the hundreds of thousands. In the Far East the same thing happened in the garrisons of Vladivostok, Nikolsk-Ussuriysky, Khabarovsk and Blagoveshchensk, among troops who were both the most politically mobilised and the most literate part of the Ukrainian population east of Baikal.
Soldiers were also mobile, which mattered in a territory where a village might be a hundred kilometres from the next. It was garrison delegates who carried the idea of a congress out into the settlement districts, and the hromady that formed through the summer of 1917 were frequently founded by men in uniform who had been to a meeting in a town.
The relationship with Kyiv was aspirational throughout. The Central Rada proclaimed autonomy in its First Universal in June 1917, and the Far Eastern congresses took their vocabulary, their programme and a good deal of their confidence from it. But the practical connection was almost nil: a letter from Vladivostok to Kyiv crossed eight thousand kilometres of a disintegrating empire, and by the time the Fourth Congress resolved in October 1918 on an eventual link with Ukraine, the government it proposed to link with had already been replaced twice. The Far Eastern movement was, in operational terms, on its own from the first week.
The First Congress
The First All-Ukrainian Far Eastern Congress convened at Mykolsk-Ussuriysky (modern Ussuriysk, the principal Ukrainian-settlement market town in the Primorye region, about 100 km north of Vladivostok) on the 11th of June 1917. The Congress was attended by approximately 450 delegates from across the Far East — representatives of Prosvita societies, of the Ukrainian military councils, of the rural Ukrainian-speaking villages, of the urban professional and labour organisations.
The Congress's substantive resolutions were modest. The delegates declared the Ukrainian Far Eastern community a "national-territorial" community within the new Russian democratic state; demanded the introduction of Ukrainian-language instruction in all primary schools in Ukrainian-majority districts; demanded the establishment of Ukrainian-language regional government offices in the principal Ukrainian-settlement zones; and elected a permanent executive committee — the Provisional Ukrainian Far Eastern Council — to coordinate further political organisation and to maintain contact with the Ukrainian Central Rada at Kyiv (the principal political body of the Ukrainian national movement in the European territories, which had emerged in March 1917 and which was, by mid-1917, conducting substantive negotiations with the Russian Provisional Government for Ukrainian autonomy in the European Ukrainian provinces).
The Congress did not declare an autonomous Far Eastern Ukrainian state. The political programme of the Provisional Ukrainian Far Eastern Council was, in mid-1917, that the Far Eastern Ukrainian community would seek the same level of national-cultural autonomy within the new democratic Russian state that the Ukrainian Central Rada was seeking for the European Ukrainian provinces. The substantive political programme was cultural-administrative rather than territorial-political.
The summer and autumn
The substantive political situation deteriorated through the summer and autumn of 1917 in parallel with the deterioration of the broader Russian political crisis. The Provisional Government's negotiations with the Ukrainian Central Rada produced, in July 1917, a constitutional declaration recognising Ukrainian national-cultural autonomy in the European Ukrainian provinces; the declaration was implemented imperfectly, with Russian political resistance, and was overridden by the October Revolution. The Ukrainian Central Rada declared full Ukrainian state independence (as the Ukrainian People's Republic) on the 22nd of January 1918, after the Bolshevik takeover of the central Russian state had made continued participation in the Russian state institutionally impossible.
The Far Eastern Ukrainian Central Council followed the political developments at Kyiv with attention. The Council's principal communication channel — telegraph correspondence via the Trans-Siberian Railway — was operating intermittently as the Russian political crisis disrupted communications across the empire. The Council's substantive political position evolved from the moderate national-cultural autonomy demands of mid-1917 to more ambitious territorial-political claims by late 1917, in response to the developments at Kyiv and to the substantive collapse of central Russian authority in the Far East itself.
By November 1917, with the October Revolution producing the Bolshevik takeover at Petrograd and the collapse of Provisional Government authority across the Russian periphery, the political situation in the Far East had become more open. The Ukrainian community's emerging political programme — the establishment of an autonomous Ukrainian Far Eastern territorial entity, possibly in formal political union with the new Ukrainian People's Republic at Kyiv — would be the principal subject of the Second Ukrainian Far Eastern Congress, convened at Khabarovsk in January 1918. The next chapter takes up the sequence of Congresses through 1917-1918 and their evolving political claims.
End of Chapter III