February 11, 1919

Two more Ukrainian delegations appeared yesterday and frankly deposited their problems on our doorstep. They are a pleasant-looking group garnished with gay Parisian clothes, striped trousers and all that, but Cossack boots are not wholly concealed. Their leader, M. Sydorenko, speaks excellent French and has his indignation under diplomatic control. “How can we sit at a Peace Conference with the Bolsheviki, murderers and bandits who have invaded our country and are still burning our villages and committing crimes at which even the Germans would blush?”

Sydorenko gave me a very dramatic account of the vicissitudes to which his people had been exposed during the eighteen months of their recent existence as an independent republic. The clash with the Bolsheviki came in December, 1917. Apparently, the young Republicans held their ground and the local Soviet Socialistic state was but a flash in the pan. Their more serious trouble came in April, 1918, when the Germans put in an appearance, ostensibly to protect the young republic but in reality, to loot the only remaining full “bread basket” in Europe and to secure the wheat and above all the oil at the time so desperately needed in Germany.

“In this emergency our National Union selected General Petliura to command our forces, and we faced the struggle for independence on three fronts,” said Sydorenko. “On one were the so-called ‘White Russians,’ mostly former Tsarist officers who were seeking to carve out for themselves estates in the lands which our peasants had long tilled and of which they were now in rightful possession. On another front were the Soviet forces whose purpose was as unsocial and as imperialistic as ever had been the emissaries of the Tsar. We were holding our own when the Germans threw off the mask of friendship and entered the field with large armies. We met at first with defeats, but in the end we conquered, and on December 15 we recaptured our Holy City of Kiev and about twenty thousand Germans who garrisoned it. Unfortunately, their leader, Skorapadski, escaped to Berlin where he is still plotting against us.”

“Our future is by no means promising,” continued Sydorenko, “but now that we are united and all the Ukrainian peoples are as one in our struggle for liberty, we have no fear of the ultimate outcome. The Ukrainian brothers, from what was the Bukovina, the Hungarian Carpathians, and Austrian Galicia, have asked and received permission to join our patriotic union. The federal state which we are forming is larger than Germany and much richer in resources. We have come to the Peace Conference to demand that our undoubted right to self-determination be recognized. It is unthinkable that we should be returned to Russia now that from our devastating experiences it is quite clear that the Bolsheviki are as tyrannical as ever was the autocrat. You are restoring to the peoples today the rights that were taken away from them by the Russian Empire and by the monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and so we have come with our plea for the recognition of our just rights. Unless this is done a stable peace cannot be established.”

I asked Sydorenko to put his plea in writing and promised to see that it would reach the President, M. Clemenceau, and the members of the American delegation. The memorandum came this morning and I have fulfilled my promise. But I have my fears; under various disguises, Europe is still in a predatory mood, and this land of the long-submerged Ukrainians presents to the underfed and overcrowded peoples of war-ruined states a very tempting picture of Naboth’s vineyard.