Communist delegates meeting in Kharkiv declared the establishment of a Soviet government for Ukraine on December 25, 1917, directly challenging the nationalist Ukrainian People's Republic proclaimed weeks earlier in Kyiv. The rival declarations set off years of civil war across Ukraine that entangled Bolshevik, nationalist, White Russian, anarchist, and foreign armies.
Ukraine's revolutionary period produced a chaotic tangle of competing claims to legitimacy. The Central Rada in Kyiv had declared an independent Ukrainian People's Republic in November 1917, hoping to steer a course separate from Bolshevik Russia. Ukrainian and Russian communists responded by convening their own congress in the eastern industrial city of Kharkiv, declaring a Soviet Ukrainian government loyal to Lenin's new Russian state.
Within weeks, Bolshevik forces marched on Kyiv, and by early February the Rada's government had fled the capital. The struggle over Ukraine's political identity — between Kyiv-centered nationalism and Moscow-aligned socialism — would recur throughout the twentieth century and echo, with tragic force, into the twenty-first, as the fault lines drawn in this obscure 1917 congress proved remarkably durable.
Key people: Vladimir Lenin