Letter to the Naval Revolutionary Committee, January 15, 1918

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January 15, 1918

Please take urgent measures to provide Comrade Ter-Arutyunyants immediately with 2,000 sailors for operations against the bourgeois Rada.[1]

Lenin

  1. Central Rada—a bourgeois nationalist organisation set up at a congress of Ukrainian bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties and groups in Kiev in April 1917. Its chairman was M. Grushevsky, and his deputy, V. Vinnichenko. Among its members were Petlyura, Yefremov and other nationalists. After the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Rada proclaimed itself the supreme organ of the “Ukrainian People’s Republic” and took the path of open struggle against the Soviet power. Some states tried to set up a centre in the Ukraine pivoted on the Rada for fighting against the proletarian revolution. France gave the Rada a loan of 200 million francs. The Rada helped the Don and Kuban whiteguard generals in their fight against the Soviet power, and tried to disarm Soviet regiments and the Red Guard in the Ukraine. A manifesto to the Ukrainian people from the Council of People’s Commissars, written by V. I. Lenin on December 3 (16), 1917, exposed the Rada’s counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet activity (see present edition, Vol. 26, pp. 361–63). In December 1917 and January 1918 armed uprisings against the counter-revolutionary Rada swept the Ukraine, restoring Soviet organs of power. In January 1918, Soviet troops in the Ukraine started an offensive and on January 26 (February 8) took Kiev and overthrew the rule of the bourgeois Rada.