Three Occupations of Odesa: on the Issue of Establishment of Bilshovyk Colonial Regime in 1918-1920

Abstract

The purpose of the research paper is to analyze the political capital and effectiveness of the Soviet model of governance during the dictatorship using the example of Odesa (then spelled Odessa) from 1918 to 1920, to provide a comparative description of the processes of establishment of the Bilshovyk dictatorship, the coming to power of which Odesa experienced three times during the liberation struggle (January 1918, April 1919, and February 1920), and to consider the peculiarities of the occupation’s influence on the councils (Radas), the destruction of the seedlings of self-government.

The scientific novelty is in the fact that the processes of ‘Soviet’ conflicts during the years of the ‘red’ dictatorship (in the form of revolutionary committees, military administrations, gubernia committees of the CP(b)U) are considered precisely in Odesa, the largest city in the South of Ukraine, in the first quarter of the 20^th century.

Conclusions. The ‘red’ Moscow power in Odesa in 1918 was establishing, disregarding the decisions of the Presidium of the local councils, with the help of the terror of the self-elected revolutionary committee and military dictatorship of ‘Moscow appointees’ (V. Yudovskyi, M. Muraviov), in the spring of 1919 – by the military and party ‘Moscow appointees’ (M. Khudiakov, V. Yudovskyi, B. Kraievskyi), who suppressed any manifestation of ‘Soviet democracy’, in early 1920 the need for councils disappeared altogether, the Party’s revolutionary committee and its ‘Center appointees’ (V. Lohinov, P. Kin, O. Borchaninov, and others) exercised a dictatorship without the participation of ‘Soviet’ institutions. In Odesa of the 1920 model, even workers who did not register with ‘state’ trade unions, civil servants, and unemployed workers were deprived of their seats in the council. A similar transformation occurred in 1920 with trade unions and the Fund-Procurement Commissions (FZK) (affiliated with state trade unions), which became an instrument of Bilshovyk pressure and control.

In large cities of Ukraine between 1918 and 1920, the councils were elected by the votes of only 10 percent of the population. At that time, calls were still being heard in Odesa to reform the councils into ‘free councils without communists,’ but the passivity of the masses, after years of war hardships, was growing stronger with each passing month. It was that passivity and disappointment in the aftermath of the revolution that the dictatorial state machine took advantage of to turn the ‘council’ and trade union institutions into its puppets.

By the beginning of 1921, the workers of Odesa, as well as the entire ‘council’ space, had no representatives and defenders left, and no structures of resistance to the dictatorship of colonial terror remained. Thus, the destruction of the Councils of Workers’ Deputies became a necessary stage for the Bilshovyk Party to occupy Ukrainian lands.