History

Ukrainian Green Wedge – a disputed land on the Pacific Ocean shore

Only the flag remained, similar to that of Czechoslovakia. Added to the Ukrainian yellow and blue was the green triangle at the hoist. It’s a curio nowadays, perhaps just for vexillologists, one who studies flags. Who knows what the reaction at the Kremlin would be if it were to be unfurled on the Red Square itself, for example.

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Weakening your enemy country by formenting unrest on territories controlled by the enemy is an-age old practice. Facilitating a revolt has an imperial and multicultural aspect. The English monarchs didn’t shy from using this tactic during the Hundred Years War. The Hapsburg dynasty later used this effectively to dominate Europe.

The British during the ‘Great Game’ with Imperial Russia throughout the 19th century attempted to weaken the latter by stoking up disaffection in Central Asia. You could have called them ‘Promethians before the fact’ were it not for the fact that the Russians did the same of course, in Persia and the Indian Raj.
The Poles have a particular knowledge of subjugated peoples and their efforts at independence. The so-called ‘Promethean’ movement was a particular lasting achievement of the Polish Second Republic (1918-1939), despite its varied successes. The Ukrainian contribution is especially noted and remembered better than the somewhat forgotten Bashir-Tatar, Idel-Ural ephemeral state of 1918.

It’s worth remembering that what was normal among the Windsors or Hapsburgs in whatever form it took (whether diplomatic or military) now generally meets with condemnation. So the Russian activities in Ossetia, Trans-Dniester, Crimea or Donbas was and is criticised unambiguously and apart from Third World leaders are unlikely to find imitators.

This may prove to be a double-edged sword for Russia and its pursuit of ‘historical territorial demands’ and sponsorship of many independence movements, among the dozens of ethnic groups that may one day seek true independence or autonomy.
Ukrainian demonstration in Vladivostok in 1917. Photo Wikimedia/ http://kobza.com.ua/doslidzhennja/4225-henotsyd-abo-chomu-znykaiut-ukraintsi-na-neosiazhnykh-prostorakh.html
No-one seeks to use the ‘Promethean option’. But historians and geographers are indeed alarmed at the new dimension of Moscow’s renewed imperialism. It’s a bit grim to remind the world of the next ethnic hotspots. Some may bring up the centuries old Ugric and Karelian feuds or those ancient Ukrainian lands on the banks of the river Amur, in the Russian Far East.

Four colours of Cossak settlements

It isn’t fanciful to imagine, but with no legal foundation nevertheless, that Kiev doesn’t have any demands on this point any more given the scale of historic Imperial Russian expansion stemming from Lesser Ruthenia or Little Russia as the area of Ukraine is also known.

These were settlements in the area, that varied in nature from their origins in Siberian exile, simply punitive, to professional or personal, right through to mass official colonisation projects.

Only the latter can be taken seriously. However it’s still difficult to speak of a fully formed Ukrainian national consciousness set against the background of Lesser Ruthenian settlement. There were many such colonisation initiatives, state sponsored or spontaneously taken up. Peasants from the banks of the Dnieper river started to intermix with other arrivals and became Russified to an extent.

History remembers these territories as areas of settlement dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Multi-coloured Old Ukraine

Looking from the west, there was the Crimson Ukraine, the Malynowy Klyn, the Crimson Wedge, raspberry coloured, around the Kuban area. The Kuban takes its name from the river in the northern Caucasus. Here, there were two separate streams of settlement; the Cossacks and the peasant farmers. The Cossacks dominated the other community and the culture of the Kuban Cossacks took hold in the settlements and the military units that they formed. They formed shock troops similar to the gauchos of Latin America.

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Further eastwards, there’s the Zhovty or Yellow Ukraine. This is chronologically the oldest of the Volga settlements, the name taken from the colour of the sands. The Czars started to settle Cossacks here at the start of the 17th century, right after the Pereyaslav Council treaty.

Traders, or chumaks, especially known for trading in Black Sea salt joined the Cossack communities. This chumak emblem of an ox carrying a load of salt, figures on the coat of arms of the town of Engels, known in pre-Marxist times as Prokorovskaya Sloboda. Peasants followed the traders. Ukrainian settlements can be found in the area of Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad), Saratov or Samara.

Further east is the Siryi or Grey Ukraine, a pale of Ukrainian settlement on the south-west borderland of Siberia and northern Kazakhstan, dating from the second half of the 19th century. The Russian state pushed this settlement through the most forcibly, especially during the period of Pyotr Stolypin. It’s written up by author Jerzy Rohoziński in his latest book the ‘Great Steppe’ dealing with the settlements from Stolypin to Stalin.

Lastly, the Zeleny or Green Ukraine, the largest area of a million square kilometres. The stretched northwards from the lower Amur between the Yakutsk lands and Manchuria itself.

Its name was recorded as being the first recorded Ukrainian term for their area and the peasantry called it Zakitajszczina, the ‘Land to China’.

This became the Green Ukraine, whose villages arose alongside the military settlements at the end of the 19th century.

Ukrainian Communities on the Amur

They grew swiftly especially resulting from the 1882 initiative of Paul Unterberg, the governor. He organised free maritime passage for settlers- from Odessa, no less, thence via the Dardanelles, Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, the Indian Ocean finally to Vladivostok.

Up to 1905, estimates by Ukrainian historians have recorded an influx of over 100,000 from Ukrainian provinces.
Flaga Zielonego Klinu. Fot. Wikimedia
Over the next decade… one a half times more.

Orchards bloomed and generations were born. On the eve of the Great War, around 65 percent of the Amur population was Ukrainian. Russian historians do not doubt this estimate. More zealous Ukrainian historians put this figure at three quarters of the population.

Up to 1905, it may have been difficult to clearly define the population by ethnicity. Vladislav Illich-Svitych, the noted Russian philologist and reporter, now all but forgotten, describes Ussuriysk, one of the region’s largest town as a Lesser Ruthenian/ Little Russian village, but still a village. The main street was named Nikolskaya, after Nicholas, the Ukrainian popular saint. Lining the street were whitewashed homesteads with thatched roofs. On the banks of the Rakivka river was a mill and singing would often break the evening stillness.

It's like finding yourself in a scene out of Gogol, Svitych noted. If a Pole found himself there, he would have felt as though he were in a Jan Stanisławski painting, probably.

All this changed after the 1905 revolution a result of which extended the right to use a national language in schools and in print.

It was also a political hammer blow to the authorities.

Theatre parties appeared on the Amur and Rakivka. The circulation of newspapers rose and Ukrainian schools and libraries opened. The Ukrainian Club also operated in Chinese Manchuria. Ukrainian students founded their association in Vladivostok.

The local educational associations flourished. Geographers in St. Petersburg debated on the subject of could one speak of a Far East Ukraine…playing with the concept that ‘Ukraine’ in Polish and Russian shared the same root meaning ‘borderland’, a ‘limit’ as in ancient Rome. It was though, a concept without higher political aspirations.

The apocalypse came sure enough with the revolution and the fall of the empire.

Several hundred independence movements appeared on the lands of the former empire and that of the Ukraine was one of the most powerful.

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They are well known to the Poles both as the Soviet’ and Petlura’s versions and that of the rival West Ukraine People’s Republic (WUPR) that competed with the nascent Poland. These were just two of the most important of several between 1917 and 1921.

These were formed as ad hoc alliances from conflicts between centralising Ukrainian communists and Belarusian formations, also with forces of other ethnic groups.

The Far East Independent Ukrainian Republic

On the wedges, it wasn’t any different. The Kuban Cossacks were the dominant force during the first months of the civil war, but not quite a permanent force. They vacillated between forming the short-lived Kuban Republic and taking the conditional support of the Soviets.

The forces in Yellow and Grey Ukraine started to arm themselves, giving support to the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the anti-Bolshevik movements in the Urals.

For the Ukrainians, the situation on the Amur was the most important.

It wasn’t just the military strength that counted. The strength of the local societies came into its own after decades of settlement – schools, cooperatives and village trade associations. Local elites, as after the February revolution came from this milieu. They started to get organised. First came a local political organisation such as the First General Congress of Far East Activists that was called into being in 1917.

A year later, in January 1918, the delegates gathered in Khabarovsk, called themselves simply The General Ukrainian Far East Congress, and started to appeal seriously to the Ukrainian People’s Republic to pressure the Bolsheviks into accepting their standpoint to accept the Green Ukraine as an integral part of Ukraine itself.

There was no chance for this proposal to be accepted. Three months later, as a result, the desperate delegates proceeded to create an independent Ukrainian Pacific-region state and to create their army under Ataman Boris Khreschatitsky. The government came under the leadership of Yuri Gluschko-Movka, and recruiting centres were set up.

The Ukrainians were not alone in this enterprise. The Whites also operated in this region, and they wished to resurrect the Russian empire. The fate of these areas were a true epic tragedy with heroes like Admiral Alexander Kolchak, betrayed and executed by the Bolsheviks. Or the soldiers of the Czechoslovak corps, or the comic opera figure of Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg a heroic figure straight out of an adventure novel.

Grigory Siemyonov, the Cossack leader held out the longest. He looked critically on Ukrainian ambitions, but thanks in part to Japanese support welded his forces into United front. But his forces continued to fight as most of the units, to fight an irregular war until 1922. The Bolsheviks and die-hard Whites under Mikail Diterikhs, increasingly marginalised these forces.
After the Bolsheviks finally took control, the participation of the Ukrainian population diminished. During the first Soviet census of 1926, Ukrainians constituted barely a quarter of the population. The politically dubious elements were replaced by the authorities and replaced by new populations as political repression ensued.

These were the first years of the new regime and the court verdicts given out were relatively lenient as far as the Soviets went. The Prime Minister Yuri Gluschko-Movka recived a three year sentence despite being accused of attempting to secede from the Soviet Union.

Gluschko didn’t stop fighting however. He fled to the Soviet Ukraine during the 1930s under a pseudonym and finished his studies in his fifties. He contacted independence sympathisers and in 1941 became a part of the short-lived Ukrainian National Council based in Kiev. This body lasted less than a month before being wound up by the Germans who feared its growing popularity.

Only the flag remained, similar to that of Czechoslovakia. Added to the Ukrainian yellow and blue was the green triangle at the hoist. It’s a curio nowadays, perhaps just for vexillologists, one who studies flags. Who knows what the reaction at the Kremlin would be if it were to be unfurled on the Red Square itself, for example.

–Wojciech Stanisławski
–Translated by Jan Darasz
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