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Caption: War Publications - WWI Compilation 1923 - Article 21
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ceeded in throwing ofT the yoke of petty officialdom, the heavy burden poverty fy who aspired towards nothing less than a complete emancipation of their native land from what they termed foreign domination. When Czardom fell, a number of the latter constituted themselves into a Rada or Council and presented demands to the Provisional government for the recognition of Ukraine as a separate administrative unit. In vain did Kerensky's government point out to them the needlessness and the dangers of their action at a time when strong enemy armies were fighting their way into Russia and when the Revolutionary government was doing its best to solve the many perplexing problems left by the old regime. The Rada insisted that the principle of self-determination of peoples proclaimed by the Revolution applied to the Ukrainians not less than to the Poles, to the Finns, or to the Letts. "Ukrainia for the Ukrainians" became the watch-word of a number of politicians many of whom had just arrived from Vienna or from Lemberg; with this watch-word they stirred up the slumbering nationalistic feelings in a part of the Ukrainian peasantry bringing it to the support of the separatist movement. Taking advantage of the weakness of the Provisional government the Rada issued on June 26, 1917, a Manifesto announcing that the Ukrainian people would henceforth manage their own affairs. The IProvisional government had to give way; it recognized the General Secretariat of Ukraine as the highest administrative power of Southern Russia; the future constitution of the country was left to the decision of the Constituent Assembly which was expected soon to convene. With the overthrow of the Provisional government by the Bolsheviki, the conflict between the North and the South of Russia became most bitter and intense; its character, however, changed materially. The Bolsheviki cared little for the integrity of Russia as a unified state; what they wanted was the spreading of the doctrine of social revolution *nto Ukraine; they were opposed to the Rada not because of its insistence upon Ukrainian autonomy but because it was, according to them, bourgeois and counter-revolutionary in character. Threatened by the Bolsheviki on the one side and by the Russian nationalists on the other, the Ukrainian Council decided that it had nothing to gain and perhaps everything to lose by delaying radical action;.and accordingly, on November 20, 1917, it proclaimed the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In a manifesto 7 •
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