Yet the result of this ostrich-like reaction was merely to strengthen the nationalist cause and to drive it towards the more radical demand for independence from Russia. Urged by the Second Ukrainian Military Congress to make a unilateral declaration of autonomy, the Rada published its First Universal on 10 June. The Universal was a declaration of the Ukraine’s freedom modelled on the charters of the seventeenth-century Cossack Hetmans, whom the nationalists claimed to be the founders of the ‘Ukrainian nation’, and in the context of 1917 it took on a symbolic role equal to the yellow and light blue flag of the Ukraine. The Universal called for the convocation of a Sejm, or sovereign national assembly, and declared the establishment of a General Secretariat, headed by V. K. Vinnichenko, which effectively assumed executive power, replacing the authority of the Provisional Government in the Ukraine. It was only now that the Ukrainian crisis, coinciding as it did with the Finnish declaration of independence, came to the top of the political agenda. Just as the army was about to launch a fresh offensive in the West, Russia was threatened with the loss of two vital regions behind the Front. Lvov immediately accused the Rada of threatening to ‘inflict a fatal blow on the state’, while Volia naroda expressed the general Soviet view that the Universal was ‘a stab in the back of the Revolution’.35
Yet it was clear that some compromise was needed, and on 28 June the government despatched a three-man delegation (Tereshchenko, Kerensky and Tsereteli) to negotiate with the Rada. On 2 July the two sides reached a makeshift compromise: the Provisional Government broadly recognized the national autonomy of the Ukraine, the popular legitimacy of the Rada and the executive authority of the General Secretariat. This was enough to cool down Ukrainian tempers for the rest of the summer. But it outraged the Russian nationalists in Kiev, Shulgin’s chauvinist supporters in particular, who took to fighting the Ukrainians in the streets. The rightwing Kadets in Lvov’s cabinet took up the cause of the Russian minority in the Ukraine. They refused to endorse the settlement on the grounds that only the Constituent Assembly had the legal authority to resolve such matters, which was really no more than a pretext for the defence of Russia’s imperial interests in the Ukraine. In a conversation with his secretary, Lvov condemned the Kadets for ‘behaving like the worst Black Hundred bastards’ on the issue.36 On 4 July three Kadets resigned from the cabinet. This was the trigger for the start of a protracted political crisis which would end in the collapse of the Provisional Government.
*
Brusilov to his wife on 1 March:
You must know what is happening. I am of course pleased. But I pray to God that this awful crisis, in this awful war, may soon end, so that our external enemy may not reap the benefit of our collapse. The one fortunate circumstance is that it comes at a time of the year when it is very difficult, almost impossible, for the enemy to launch an attack, for this would be a catastrophe. It is all the more important now that we win this war, otherwise it will be the ruin of Russia.
Brusilov’s untiring faith in Russia’s victorious destiny was now, more than ever, a matter of hope against hope. It was, as he later acknowledged, entirely unrealistic to sustain a lengthy military campaign in the midst of a social revolution. And yet he still believed in the will of the people to continue fighting until the end, and, unlike most of the Tsar’s generals, threw in his lot with the revolution in the hope that the defence of Russia’s liberty might at last inspire their patriotism. Monarchists accused him of opportunism; and historians have repeated the charge. But Brusilov had long been persuaded, despite his own sympathies for the monarchy, that without a complete change of government Russia could not win the war. ‘If I have to choose between Russia and the Tsar,’ Brusilov had said in 1916, ‘then I choose Russia.’37
