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Updated: June 19, 2025
At the same time the negotiations with the Ukrainian delegation were continued. By means of lengthy and wearisome conferences we succeeded in bringing their demands to a footing which might just possibly be acceptable, and gaining their agreement to a clause whereby Ukraine undertook to deliver at least 1,000,000 tons of grain by August, 1918.
The principal grounds for this demand are that our frontier includes that territory and that the Rumanians are a law-abiding, pacific people whose interests never clash with ours and whose main enemy Bolshevism is also ours. The Allies shall purge the Ukrainian army of the Bolshevists, German and other dangerous elements that now pervade it and render peace impossible.
The leader of the Austrian Ruthenians, Nikolay Wassilko, arrived yesterday, and albeit evidently excited by the part his Russian-Ukrainian comrades are playing at Brest, speaks nationally, far more chauvinistically than when I thought I knew him in Vienna, and we have at last agreed on the minimum of the Ukrainian demands.
"'We, the representatives of the Workers' and Peasants' Government of the Ukrainian Republic, People's Commissary for Military Affairs, W.M. Schachrai, and the President of the Pan-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee of the Council of the Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputation, J.G. Medwjedew, delegated to proceed to Brest-Litovsk for the purpose of conducting peace negotiations with the representatives of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, in full agreement with the representatives of the Workers' and Peasants' Government of the Russian Federative Republic, thereby understood the Council of People's Commissaries, hereby declare as follows: The General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Central Rada can in no case be acknowledged as representing the entire Ukrainian people.
On the 2nd of July came a crisis in the ministry, the immediate cause of which was the Ukrainian question. This was in every respect a period of most intense political suspense. From various points at the front came delegates and private individuals, telling of the chaos which reigned in the army as a result of the advance. The so-called government press demanded severe repressions.
"'And we now bring to the knowledge of the President the following resolution, passed by the Central Executive Committee of the Pan-Ukrainian Council of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies, on the 30th December, 1917/12th January, 1918: "'The Central Committee has decided: To delegate Comrade Medwjedew, President of the Central Executive Committee, and People's Secretary Satonski and Commissary Schachrai, to take part in the peace negotiations, instructing them at the same time to declare categorically that all attempts of the Ukrainian Central Rada to act in the name of the Ukrainian people are to be regarded as arbitrary steps on the part of the bourgeois group of the Ukrainian population, against the will and interests of the working classes of the Ukraine, and that no resolutions formed by the Central Rada will be acknowledged either by the Ukrainian Soviet Government or by the Ukrainian people; that the Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Government regards the Council of People's Commissaries as representatives of the Pan-Russian Soviet Government, and as accordingly entitled to act on behalf of the entire Russian Federation; and that the delegation of the Ukrainian Workers' and Peasants' Government, sent out for the purpose of exposing the arbitrary steps of the Ukrainian Central Rada, will act together with and in full agreement with the Pan-Russian Delegation.
"O-hoy!" came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman's call which unites the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner came Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, wrinkled old man with hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a long bent whip in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of everything that is only seen in huntsmen.
When at Brest-Litovsk, under the pressure of the hunger riots that were beginning, I refused to agree to the Ukrainian demands, but consented to submit the question of the division of Galicia to the Austrian Crown Council. I was impelled thereto by the conviction that we were adhering strictly to the programme as it had been planned for the Monarchy.
It was twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land; and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees about a village of the Ukrainian plain.
Rather than have Germany attack her, England preferred to see Hitler turn his eyes to the fertile Ukrainian wheat fields of the Soviet Union. It meant war, but that war seemed inevitable. If Russia won, England and her economic royalists would be faced with "the menace of communism."
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