Karl Marx described Ukraine as a "republic of the courageous Cossacks" and seemed to support the Ukrainian nation\'s intense desire for freedom. Marx\'s ardent follower, Vladimir Lenin, also recognized the right of any nation to choose its own path. However, when Ukraine announced its intention to establish an independent state after the 1917 October Revolution, Lenin threatened to "teach Ukrainians a good lesson."
He later invented a propagandistic excuse for his fierce reluctance to let Russia\'s neighbors go, calling their craving for independence nationalistic and bourgeois, and persuading thousands of party members to think the same with his passionate and choleric articles and manifestos.
Searching for a strong personality
The Ukrainian People\'s Republic appeared soon after the February revolution in Russia. Further events showed that Ukrainians had forgotten how to build a state over the centuries of oppression and dependence. During the cruel civil war in Russia, Ukraine's inert Social Democrats were trying to combine democratic pluralism with the necessity to obey one ruler.
Three governments changed while the country was looking for the right leader. The Central Rada, Ukraine's parliament, was led by Professor Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who was soon, in April 1918, succeeded by hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky (April-November 1918). Having forced Skoropadsky to emigrate, ataman Simon Petlyura, who headed Ukraine between November 1918 and October 1920, also survived a bitter fiasco. Of all the three leaders of the Ukrainian People\'s Republic, only Pavlo Skoropadsky was a professional military officer and descendant of the Ukrainian hetmans.
The Kremlin organized three military attacks on Ukraine to irreversibly enforce its rule. It faced both the White Army and Ukrainian peasants, whose powerful rebellion, according to Lenin\'s closest allies, Leo Trotsky, was the major cause of the Bolshevik army's initial failures.
Historian Orest Subtelny says Lenin sent special regiments to Ukraine from Moscow and St. Petersburg to take away food, mostly grain. They confiscated more grain within two months than the German troops of the Kaiser took during the seven months of their presence.
"Ban, abolish, close…"
 Having seized power in Russia in November 1917, the Bolsheviks began to create a dictatorship of the proletariat, often resorting to unmotivated terror and violence. Post offices tirelessly sent orders and decrees with the words, "ban, abolish and close."
The Russian Emergency Commission, led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, could arrest anyone without trial. Ukrainian historian Myroslav Popovych wrote in one of his articles that the basements of the Russian Emergency Commission were covered in blood and bones. Its officers, infamous for their homicidal cravings, killed new victims there daily and hourly.
Those days were tense for Lenin. He worked with almost no sleep. He often spoke with Dzerzhinsky by phone and no longer gave kind-hearted and witty recommendations like, "Send this guy to Finland so that he should cool down."
Having monopolized power, Lenin sparked off a bacchanalia of mutual hatred. He knew no mercy, ordering all his opponents exterminated, among them aristocrats, priests and artists.
Banners instead of regiments
 During this period, the Ukrainian People\'s Republic founded an academy of sciences, two universities, a state library and a central archive, and restored the Jewish cultural autonomy.
The leader of the Central Rada, prominent scholar and author of the multi-volume book The History of Ukraine, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, was obviously losing his grip. He was a democratic idealist. In his office, there were debates involving different political forces. Hrushevsky was often accused of inviting religious leaders to political rallies. His opponents believed he should have developed the country's army instead.
Hrushevsky naively thought Russia was democratic and therefore could not be Ukraine's enemy. His Central Rada issued a few historic documents, first declaring the country\'s autonomy and later independence.
However, when 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers and military officers said they were ready to defend Ukraine, Hrushevsky was among those who insisted it was not necessary to have a big army. The disappointed soldiers joined other forces or retired.
His successors, Pavlo Skoropadsky and Simon Petlyura, started creating armed forces after long delay. However, their regiments of Sich riflemen looked more like a public movement and could not effectively resist the professional Red Army.
In order to balance the forces, Ukraine\'s leaders formed somewhat risky alliances, Skoropadsky with Germany and Petlyura with Poland. The Germans helped Ukrainian landlords and openly robbed Ukraine. The Poles demanded that they be given the right to renew their rule in the western regions. Their actions provoked the nation's resentment, which the Bolsheviks used to their advantage.
The order of sword-bearers
 Meanwhile, the Kremlin was building a communist empire in Russia. This formidable process was led by the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks [RCP (B)] and its creator, Vladimir Lenin, whose authority was indisputable. Later such parties emerged in many countries of Europe and Asia. The Bolshevik party mirrored Lenin\'s character, whose major traits were intolerance of other people\'s opinions and self-assurance. This party would soon determine the country\'s political, economic, ideological, spiritual and cultural course.
Thanks to Lenin, who was an unmatched master of tactics, his party, this so-called f"order of sword-bearers", grew from 20,000 to 300,000 members within six months in 1917. These personal guards of Lenin were ready to implement any order issued by their leader and enforce his ideas all over the country. On the path to the new empire, just like 350 years ago during the rule of Bohdan Khmelnitsky, Ukraine was the only hurdle.
Lenin often said no communist state was possible without Ukraine as a part. He, however, complained there were no trustworthy leaders in Ukraine. His mistrust was so profound that he recommended the country be led by Kristian Rakovsky, a Russian-speaking Bulgarian of Romanian descent, and closely followed the process of forming his party in the unreliable neighboring state.
Ukraine's communists held their first convention in July 1918 in Moscow's opera theatre. Its delegates represented mainly large industrial cities of the southeast. Lenin was standing behind the curtains, anxiously watching their debate. One group wanted the party to protect interests of the Ukrainian people whereas the other group insisted that their party be a part of the united Russian Communist Party. The second group won. Lenin then summarized the discussion by saying, "Today's victory is worth a few good battles."
The Bolsheviks could demoralize the army with a few memorable and provocative slogans in the years of WWI.
When fighting against the Ukrainian government, Lenin's propagandists behaved as bravely as they did during that war. They incited riots in the rear of the Ukrainian army, skillfully persuading the soldiers and peasants to join the Communist party. They shouted in squares: "Ukrainians, you will see no land and no freedom if you drift away from Russia!\" This slogan is still popular among Ukraine's communists, almost a century later.
"Invincible and legendary"
Lenin created a truly invincible army. Its commanders made many fewer mistakes during the Civil War than Stalin did later, when he repressed most of the country's officers and was the only commander during the Great Patriotic War.
Although Lenin had studied the works by the military theorist Karl Klausevitz, he knew his military skills were quite mediocre.
However, it was Lenin who insisted on involving former officers of the tsarist army. This was a very efficient move.
During the civil war deserters posed the greatest threat and challenge to the Ukrainian army. The reason was simple: the Russian empire's peasants were tired of war.
The red Bonaparte, commander in chief Leo Trotsky, was going from front to front in a bulletproof train to inspect the troops and commanders and enforce Lenin's idea to kill deserters. He achieved results.
The Red Army owed its triumphs to those 50,000 tsarist officers, their brilliant leadership and decisions. Moreover, the party concentrated all resources - industrial, financial, administrative and human - in its hands.
They defeated General Yudenich in the north, General Denikin in the south, Admiral Kolchak in Siberia and General Wrangel in Crimea.
The war exhausted Soviet Russia but there was still enough money to suppress national movements in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania, Estonia and some other states in Central Asia. These countries followed Ukraine's example by declaring they wanted to be independent. These movements represented middle business and wealthy peasants. Lenin once again branded them as nationalistic and bourgeois. Pro-Bolshevik governments were secretly formed to overthrow new cabinets in those republics according to the Ukrainian scenario.
The Red Army was mentally pro-communist. Moreover, Lenin called all those barely literate soldiers internationalists and made them forever remember they represented the leading nation of the multiethnic state. Poor and always hungry, they devastated farms and killed captives and civilians, often without any reason.
Although Soviet propaganda created the myth of the "invincible and legendary" Red Army, many people still remember its viciousness, cruelty and unjustified brutality. Kyiv will never forget the tsarist Colonel Mikhail Muravyov, whose drunken soldiers gunned down passersby in Kyiv for speaking Ukrainian and massacred three hundred pupils and students near the village of Kruty in the winter of 1918.
Today Russia ignores these facts and painfully reacts to the "unexplainable anti-Russian protests" staged in some former Soviet republics. The Russian people are the hostages of Lenin's legend. Seeing his death as one of the greatest tragedies, they will probably never understand that his birth was the greatest tragedy for all the countries of the Soviet Union, especially Ukraine.
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