Socio-political transformations and military confrontation in Central Ukraine, 1918–1919

Abstract

Central Ukraine in 1918–1919 turned into a laboratory of state collapse and grassroots armed self-organization. The article reconstructs how successive political regimes—the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, and the Directorate of the Ukrainian People’s Republic—attempted to impose administrative and military control over Kyiv region, Uman, Yelysavethrad, and the Cold Yar area, while local communities formed irregular detachments that quickly outgrew the framework of “local self-defence”. By correlating central government decisions with regional micro-cases and published archival-document collections, the study traces the rise of parallel jurisdictions, the erosion of the monopoly on violence, and the shift from initially legitimized insurgency to otamanshchyna as a persistent mode of governance and warfare. Methodologically, the paper combines comparative political history, microhistory, and a security-oriented reading of territorial control, mobilization, and legitimacy. The key result is a causal model that explains the repeated loss of operational control by the “centre”: institutional fragility and competing claims to authority fostered ad hoc alliances with insurgents; these alliances decentralized violence and fragmented command; external pressures—occupation forces, Bolshevik offensives, requisitions, and punitive raids—accelerated local militarization and produced autonomous power brokers. The Cold Yar network is used to show how historical memory, village solidarity, and everyday logistics (supply, messengers, shelter, discipline) could sustain armed resistance beyond the lifespan of a single government. The findings refine the notion of multiple sovereignty for the Ukrainian Revolution by grounding it in observable practices of competing security institutions and rival claims to justice, representation, and resources.