• 2 On U.S. policies after 1945 see especially Jeffrey Burds, The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine (...)

1From President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points address in January 1918 through President Franklin Roosevelt’s promulgation of the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, the United States committed itself to the principle of self-determination of nations. In the same era, Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans repeatedly sought U.S. recognition of the independence of Ukraine and support for Ukrainians suffering under Soviet domination. Yet U.S. leaders did not heed the appeals – thereby surprising, frustrating, and deeply disappointing Ukrainian American leaders. Moreover, Roosevelt moved in the opposite direction by establishing diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. in 1933 – despite numerous reports about a terrible famine in Ukraine and other grain producing regions of the Soviet Union. The policies of the U.S. government in this era are especially striking in contrast to its clandestine aid to Ukrainian insurgents after World War II, U.S. politicians’ rhetorical backing for the liberation of Ukraine during the Cold War, and the costly U.S. commitments to Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity in the twenty-first century.2

• 3 See, for example, two excellent studies: Thomas R. Maddux, Years of Estrangement: American Relation (...)
• 4 Leonid Sonevytsky, “The Ukrainian Question in R.H. Lord’s Writings on the Paris Peace Conference of (...)
• 5 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans: Roots and Aspirations, 1884-1954, Toronto, University of Toronto (...)

2Historians of U.S.-Soviet relations have devoted little attention to questions about the United States and Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century.3 While several Ukrainian American scholars produced detailed studies of U.S. policies toward Ukraine in the Wilson era, their work was published in specialized journals or collections and did not receive wide attention.4 The only major study of Ukrainian American activism before 1950 strongly reflected a Ukrainian nationalist perspective and did not utilize State Department documents about Ukraine and Ukrainian Americans.5

• 6 Recent participants in the debate include Alexander Statiev, “The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationa (...)

3This article – based on thorough examination of U.S. government records, the personal papers of Ukrainian American leaders, newspaper reports, and journalistic commentary – presents a more complete examination of Ukrainian and Ukrainian American efforts to secure U.S. recognition, sympathy, and support from 1917 to 1941. It concentrates on two key phases when the issues concerning Ukraine were most actively considered and debated. The first part focuses on the years of the Russian Civil War, from 1917 to 1920. In contrast to earlier scholars’ assertions that the U.S. failure to support Ukrainian ambitions for independence stemmed mainly from ignorance and misinformation, I emphasize the U.S. backing of anti-Bolshevik Russians and the U.S. commitment to the territorial integrity of “Russia.” The second part examines the period from the U.S. diplomatic recognition of the U.S.S.R. in 1933 to the beginning of U.S. aid to the Soviet Union in its war against Nazi Germany. In contrast to claims that U.S. policies and public attitudes toward Ukraine were warped by Communist propaganda and penetration of the government in Washington, I highlight how Washington prioritized the strategic objectives of countering Japanese and German aggression. I also show how American public opinion was affected by basically valid, though at times exaggerated, concerns about Ukrainian nationalist sympathies for fascism and ties to Nazi Germany. This will, I hope, contribute to the contemporary scholarly debate over the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and fascism by turning attention from Europe to the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States.6

• 7 Stephen A. Garrett, “Eastern European Ethnic Groups and American Foreign Policy,” Political Science (...)

4The limited impact of Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans on U.S. foreign policy between 1917 and 1941 was not abnormal. Scholars have found that Eastern European and other ethnic groups typically have had little direct influence on U.S. foreign policies and only rarely has their influence been decisive. As Larry Wolff has shown, Woodrow Wilson’s personal relationships with the Czechoslovakian and Polish leaders Tomas Masaryk and Ignace Paderewski enabled them to exert unusual influence.7 Yet the much lesser influence of Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans embittered them and left a deep imprint on writing about relations between the United States and Ukraine.

• 8 Address by Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the Day of Unity of Ukraine, 22 January 2020, president.gov.ua.
• 9 Address by Vladimir Putin, September 30, 2022, kremlin.ru

5The period I address has particular significance in the twenty-first century for three reasons. First, the formation of a reunified, though short-lived, Ukrainian state in January 1919 is remembered in Kyiv as one of the most significant events in the history of Ukraine.8 Second, controversy over Ukrainian nationalist connections to fascism and Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s has been inflamed by war between Russia and Ukraine since 2014. Third, U.S. support for the territorial integrity of most of the former Russian empire in the decades after it collapsed in 1917 contradicts Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claims that the West has always sought to break up Russia.9

• 10 Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, The Great Challenge: Nationalities and the Bolshevik State, 1917-1930 (...)

7On November 19, 1917, twelve days after Bolsheviks led a seizure of power in Petrograd and issued a decree on peace, the nationalist and socialist intellectuals of the Rada (Council) in Kyiv proclaimed the establishment of a Ukrainian People’s Republic. Amid rising tensions with the Bolsheviks and a rival Soviet Republic of Ukraine based in Kharkiv, on January 3, 1918 a Rada delegation joined negotiations at Brest-Litovsk between representatives of the Central Powers and Soviet Russia.10

• 11 The Fourteen Points Speech, in Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (eds.), The Public Papers of (...)

9and to securing for Russia “an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development.” While Wilson declared in his thirteenth point that “an independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations,” he did not mention any other parts of the former Russian empire such as Ukraine, the Baltic provinces, or Finland. Yet he closed his Fourteen Points address with a universalist proclamation of “the principle of justice to all peoples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.”11

• 12 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial (...)
• 13 David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil (...)

10A Southerner with strong racial and ethnic prejudices, Wilson actually did not intend to apply the principle to all nations, many of whom he believed were not fit or at least not ready for self-government.12 As his repeated references to Russia in the speech suggested, he was also inclined to “stand by Russia,” which he hoped would emerge from revolutionary turmoil with (supposed) democracy restored and territorial integrity largely preserved.13

• 14 John M. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace, Princeton, Princeton University Pre (...)

11Wilson’s British and French allies diverged from his approach. Earlier in the war they had agreed with Imperial Russia on a postwar carving up of their enemies’ empires. Just two weeks before Wilson’s address they also had agreed on spheres of influence in the disintegrating Russian empire, with France to have sway in Ukraine and Britain to have primacy in the Caucasus and Trans-Caspian region. British and French leaders contemplated the detachment of parts of the Russian empire. France, in particular, considered the creation of separate states in Ukraine and Crimea from 1918 to early 1919.14

• 15 “Ukrainians, Little Known, Though Millions in Number Victims of European Strife,” Bridgeport Times (...)

12Across the Atlantic, Ukrainian Americans succeeded in exerting some political influence both before and after the U.S. entered the war against Germany in April 1917. Weeks after meeting with Ukrainian-Americans, Wilson proclaimed a Ukrainian Relief Day (April 21) so that funds could be solicited for relief of hunger and suffering in lands scarred by warring armies. Ukrainian-Americans seized the opportunity to educate the American public about Ukrainian desires for freedom and self-government after centuries of suppression by autocratic Russia.15

• 16 Congressional Record, Vol. 57, 65^th Congress, third session, 726. Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and (...)

13By the end of the war in late 1918, the cause of Ukrainian independence won support from some prominent politicians. Following the Armistice of November 1918, a Republic of Western Ukraine was formed in Lviv (Lvov), and it united with a Kiev-based Ukrainian National Republic in January 1919. On December 13, 1918, Representative James A. Hamill, a Democrat from New Jersey who hosted a Ukrainian information bureau in his congressional office, introduced a resolution calling for the U.S. delegation in Paris to recognize the independence of Ukrainian territories in both Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.16 Although the resolution was defeated, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, soon took up the cause. Lodge’s loathing of the Bolsheviks and his skepticism of the capabilities of the “ignorant people of Russia” led him to depict Ukraine as a source of hope. In a long speech in the Senate on December 21, Lodge declared: “The one ray of light seems to come from the people of Ukraine, and we may be able to rebuild Russia by aiding the only people who have shown any capacity for maintaining a government and preventing the dissolution of the social fabric.” 16

• 17 Speech on “Affairs in Russia,” January 9, 1919, Congressional Record, Vol. 57, 65^th Congress, third (...)
• 18 King remarks on January 9, 1919, Congressional Record, Vol. 57, 65^th Congress, third session, p. 11 (...)

14Yet Lodge, a sharp critic of the Democratic president, had no impact on the administration’s policy and his positive view of Ukraine did not prevail in the Senate. Two weeks after Lodge’s speech, for example, Senator Knute Nelson (R-Minnesota) alluded to how Germany made Ukraine a protectorate in 1918 and called it a sinister scheme that “would prove the most destructive to the future welfare of Russia” by depriving her of a vital and rich domain.17 Agreeing with Nelson about nefarious German influence, Senator William H. King (D-Utah) predicted in January 1919 that “the people of Ukraine will soon see the folly of separating from the rest of Russia.” In contrast to Lodge, King expressed “great faith in the recuperative vitality of the Russian people,” whom he hoped would soon be freed from Bolshevism.18

• 19 Inventory of the Myroslav Sichynsky Papers, Immigration History Research Center Archives, Universit (...)
• 20 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, p. 141.
• 21 Undated press release, c. December 1919, Box 3, Folder 9, Volodymyr Levytskyi Papers, Columbia Univ (...)

15Throughout 1919, the most prominent Ukrainian American activist was Miroslav Sichinsky (as he transliterated his name in English). Born in Galicia in 1887, he assassinated the Austro-Hungarian governor in 1908, escaped from prison, and came to America in 1914.19 A socialist, Sichinsky became an influential editor, orator, and organizer. Early in 1919 he expressed confidence that America would “represent the principle of national self-determination for all peoples at the peace conference.”20 Despite subsequent disappointment, near the end of the year, in a press release on behalf of the Ukrainian Federation of the United States, Sichinsky urged the Wilson administration to recognize an independent Ukraine. The Ukrainian republic, he argued, met all the ethnographic, economic, historical, and linguistic tests of self-determination. Since that government was “neither Bolshevist nor Tsarist,” he argued, recognition would serve U.S. objectives of “the balking of Bolshevism and the reconstruction of Russia.”21

• 22 “Comes with Plea for Ukrainians,” St. Albans Daily Messenger (Vermont), August 11, 1919; “Protests (...)

16Additional arguments for diplomatic recognition of Ukraine were presented by Iuliian Bachynskyi, a socialist representative of the Ukrainian government who came to Washington in August 1919. “We have no doubt that the liberty loving American people will sympathize with our struggle for independence,” Bachynskyi declared, citing the brave Ukrainian army’s fight against Bolshevik, Polish, and Rumanian invaders. He also dangled the lure of profitable commercial relations by highlighting Ukrainian desires for American involvement in opening new coal mines, developing railroads, and utilizing water power. However, neither Wilson nor Secretary of State Robert Lansing agreed to meet with Bachynskyi.22

• 23 Parker to Grew, November 12, 1919, with Wilson to Parker, 24 March 1919, Papers Relating to the For (...)

17Ukrainian representatives in Paris were a little more successful. Although not officially recognized by the U.S. Commission to Negotiate Peace, they were able to arrange in the spring of 1919 for the purchase of more than $11 million worth of surplus U.S. military supplies.23

• 24 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, p. 152, 160.

18Yet Ukrainian representatives and Ukrainian-Americans failed to secure U.S. recognition of the Ukrainian republic. In August 1920 the Ukrainian-American periodical Svoboda (“freedom”) bitterly complained about Wilson’s abandonment of his ideals. Despite “years of feverish effort,” one author later concluded, “Ukrainians in the United States were left with nothing.”24

• 25 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, p. 129; Arnold D. Margolin, From a Political Diary: Russia, the U (...)
• 26 See, for example, Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peac (...)
• 27 Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919, New Haven, Yale Unive (...)
• 28 For a related recent paper, see Roman Tymchenko, “Diplomats of UNR and ZUNR at the Paris Peace Conf (...)
• 29 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, p. 150; Mark von Hagen, “Ukraine,” in Critical Companion to the R (...)

20Ukrainian and Ukrainian American writers emphasized that the U.S. delegation in Paris was “woefully unfamiliar with the nationality question in the Russian Empire,” failed to realize “the strength of the Ukrainian national movement,” and consequently backed the reunification of Russia.25 It is true that Wilson and his advisors lacked clear and complete information about Ukraine in 1919. The reports they received about the rapidly changing situation in Ukrainian lands from Ukrainian representatives, Polish officials, U.S. military officers, and others were contradictory and confusing.26 Yet sheer ignorance was not the main reason for that policy. Intellectual advisers in a group called The Inquiry had studied the nationalities issues and recommended in January 1919 that if the Bolshevik regime remained in power the independence of the non-Russian nations should be accepted. More specifically, the Inquiry report recommended support for an independent Ukrainian state, with eastern Galicia and Crimea, “provided Ukrainian nationalism is strong enough.”27 That would prove a key question. The Ukrainian national movement was weakened by divisions. Ukrainian leaders disagreed over whether Poland, Soviet Russia, or anti-Bolshevik Russian armies were their main enemy. Disputes over which adversary to conciliate led to ruptures, for example between the Ukrainian National Republic and representatives of the Republic of Western Ukraine.28 In addition to the conflicts between regions, there were divisions between intellectuals and less educated masses, as well as between workers and peasants. Plagued by such discord, the Ukrainian National Republic came to control only a small part of western Ukraine around Vinnytsia in the spring and summer of 1919. Thus, the strength of the Ukrainian national movement was far from self-evident.29

• 30 Robert Gerwarth, “The Sky beyond Versailles: The Paris Peace Treaties in Recent Historiography,” Jo (...)
• 31 Liliana Riga and James Kennedy, “MittelEuropa as Middle America? ‘The Inquiry’ and the Mapping of E (...)
• 32 Robert Howard Lord to Wilson, May 29, 1919, with report by Lt. R.C. Foster, and Wilson remark to th (...)

21Other writers have called attention to the influence of “irrational sympathies and antipathies for certain states and nations” among Wilson and his advisers.30 In that vein, members of The Inquiry expressed doubts about the “ethnic capacity” of Ukrainians, whom they described as “ignorant and inarticulate masses of peasants” with a “small class of intellectuals” who habitually looked to Berlin and Vienna for guidance.31 While it is not clear that Wilson was influenced by those specific views, he did endorse the conclusion of a U.S. officer who visited eastern Galicia in May 1919, found the “most unsatisfactory” Ukrainian government was failing to preserve order, and reported that “the Ukrainian people are not capable of self-government.”32

• 33 Notes of a Meeting of Council of Four, May 8, 1919, PWW 58: 543.

22Yet only three weeks earlier Wilson had disagreed with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s citation of the view that no one seriously thought of Ukraine “other than as a part of Russia.” In contrast, Wilson held that “a true desire for autonomy exists in Ukraine.”33

• 34 Memorandum by Francis Joseph Kernan, 11 April, 1919, PWW 57: 275-280; Report by Arthur James Balfou (...)
• 35 Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, New York, Random House, 2002, Ch (...)

23Lacking strong convictions about Ukraine, Wilson was swayed by the most recent information he received. In April, he had read a report from a U.S. general who visited the region, found that the Ukrainian government and people were “by no means Bolshevik,” and asserted that they wanted a truce with Poland in order to be able to fight “the Russian Soviets.” Although some U.S. representatives in other parts of the former Russian empire lumped non-Bolshevik socialists with Bolsheviks, the general vigorously criticized Polish efforts to camouflage their aggressive designs with claims that Ukrainian governments were Bolshevik. Accepting the general’s report of Polish evasion of a truce, Wilson commented that “while the Ukrainians were playing the game” with regard to an armistice, the Poles were not.34 On the whole, then, Wilson’s desire to counter the menace of Bolshevism was much stronger than any jaundiced view of Ukrainian national character. While some studies of the Paris Peace Conference have treated Ukrainian issues solely as a part of questions concerning Poland,35 for Wilson and Lansing Ukraine was part of the broader problem of how to support anti-Bolshevik “White” armies that sought a reunited great Russia without gravely antagonizing anti-Bolshevik nationalities of the former Russian empire that wanted independence.

• 36 Oleg Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920, Philadelphia, University (...)
• 37 Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the (...)
• 38 Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, p. 100, 180.
• 39 “35,000 Jews Killed in Savage Pogroms,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 13, 1919; “Pogroms in Pola (...)
• 40 Louis Marshall to Wilson, May 26, 1919, PWW 59: 514-516; Veidlinger, In the Midst of Civilized Euro (...)
• 41 Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority (...)
• 42 In 1926, for example, Sholem Schwarzbard, a Jewish veteran of fighting in Ukraine during the revolu (...)

24Some studies have suggested that Jewish Americans were deeply disturbed by press reports of pogroms in Ukraine, that they blamed the government headed by Symon Petliura for the pogroms, and that they had enormous influence on the Wilson administration.36 As Jeffrey Veidlinger has shown in gruesome detail, Ukrainian forces did commit numerous horrific pogroms against Jews. During the first three months of 1919, in particular, soldiers under the authority of the Ukrainian People’s Republic launched 167 pogroms in western Ukraine that involved the killing, raping, and robbing of thousands of Jews.37 Yet American newspapers, including Yiddish papers, only belatedly reported on the atrocities in western Ukraine and until May 1919 much of the Jewish press lauded the Ukrainian republic’s proclaimed principles, especially respect for the rights of minorities.38 Later reports conflicted. Some blamed Petliura, but more faulted Poland, which was the target of a massive demonstration in New York City on May 21.39 Louis Marshall, a prominent lawyer who led the American Jewish Committee, informed President Wilson in May 1919 that the Bolsheviks and their foes were “equally guilty” of atrocious pogroms, thereby obscuring the difference between Bolshevik forces, which instigated fewer pogroms and severely punished perpetrators, and their adversaries.40 In addition, Marshall had little influence on Wilson, who gave more attention to the hope that Admiral Alexander Kolchak’s anti-Bolshevik forces advancing from Siberia would capture Moscow, hold free elections, and respect the “civil and religious liberty of all Russian citizens.”41 Thus, the pogroms did not significantly influence the U.S. non-recognition of the Ukrainian republic, though memories of them would cause enduring tensions between Jewish and Ukrainian Americans.42

• 43 “The New Nations,” January 1, 1919; “Cutting the Sanitary Cordon,” December 18, 1919; “Russia Is No (...)
• 44 For example: “Poland and Galicia,” New York Times, November 24, 1919; “Give the Poles a Chance,” Ne (...)

25If there had been strong support for Ukrainian independence in the American press, perhaps it could have influenced the Wilson administration’s position. One of the most important newspapers, the New York Times, did argue at the start of 1919 that Ukrainians should be given a “fair opportunity at realization of their aspirations to independence” and later criticized Lansing for not giving sufficient consideration of separatist sentiment in the states bordering Russia.43 Yet much of the press, including the New York Times, doubted the strength of Ukrainian nationalism, prioritized support for Poland as a bulwark of civilization against Bolshevism, and urged support for anti-Bolshevik (“White”) military leaders when they seemed to be on the way to defeating the Red Army (despite the White leaders’ belief in a great, unified Russia).44 As a result, the press did not exert consistent pressure for recognition of Ukrainian national ambitions in 1919.

• 45 Gelfand, The Inquiry, p. 201; report by Lt. Reginald C. Foster, May 25, 1919, PWW 59: 596-599; “Uni (...)
• 46 Lansing to Commission to Negotiate Peace, October 29, 1919, FRUS, 1919, Russia, p. 783.
• 47 Wilson remark to the Council of Four, May 8, 1919, PWW 58: 543.

26In part because the earlier Rada had concluded a separate peace with the Central Powers in February 1918 and the Ukrainian army subsequently received help from Germany, several important American observers associated Ukrainian nationalism and independence with German power.45 Secretary of State Lansing endorsed the view of “the Ukrainian separatist movement as largely the result of Austrian and German propaganda seeking the disruption of Russia” in late October of 1919, after Wilson had been disabled by a stroke.46 Yet at a critical moment in May 1919 Wilson had disagreed with Lloyd George after he asserted that Ukraine was “a veritable creation of Germany.”47 Hence, while a postwar hangover of anti-German sentiment colored many influential Americans’ views of Ukraine, it was not decisive in the U.S. government’s policy.

• 48 Thompson, Russia, Bolshevism, and the Versailles Peace, p. 44, 45.
• 49 Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism.
• 50 The Diary of Edward M. House, September 19, 1918 and October 28, 1918, Yale University Library.
• 51 Notes of a Meeting of the Council of Four, May 21, 1919, PWW 59: 356.
• 52 Gregory Fairchild Close to Robert Lansing and Alexander Comstock Kirk reply to Close, 19 March 1919 (...)

27The more important reasons for the Wilson administration’s course were fear of the spread of Bolshevism, faith in the eventual emergence of a strong, democratic, unified Russia, and support for anti-Bolshevik Russian forces as the way to fulfill that vision. Many scholars have portrayed Wilson as a steadfast opponent of intervention in the Russian Civil War and some of them have claimed that Lansing “had little influence with the president on Russia.”48 Yet Wilson and Lansing largely agreed on policies toward Russia, including: the continued recognition of Boris Bakhmeteff as the Ambassador of Russia in Washington after the overthrow of the Russian provisional government in November 1917; the use of the Russian embassy to send supplies to White armies; and the dispatch of military expeditions to northern Russia and the Russian Far East.49 In contrast to Lansing, Wilson’s confidant Edward House feared the influence of a big, strong Russia and favored dividing European Russia into three parts, but he had little influence on U.S. policy toward Russia in 1919, especially after a rupture in his relations with Wilson in March.50 Like Lansing, Wilson and other U.S. representatives at Paris were persistently haunted by the specter of Bolshevism. In May, for example, Wilson expressed the fear that if strong Allied action against Polish forces in Ukraine caused the downfall of the Warsaw government, “Poland would turn Bolshevist.”51 Wilson and Lansing also agreed that it was not desirable for the president to meet with the head of a Ukrainian delegation in Paris.52

• 53 Report from a consul in contact with the Volunteer Army at Ekaterinodar, cited in a June 26, 1919 t (...)
• 54 Polk to Lansing, summarizing a report from General Jadwin, October 26, 1919, FRUS, 1919, Russia, p. (...)
• 55 Lansing to Commission to Negotiate Peace, October 29, 1919, FRUS, 1919, Russia, p. 783-784.

28After Wilson returned from Paris to the United States in June 1919, he left day-to-day handling of policies toward the former Russian empire to Lansing and the State Department. U.S. diplomats were keenly aware that White leaders adamantly opposed independence for any parts of the former Russian empire except Poland and perhaps Finland.53 News in October 1919 that efforts to induce Petliura to cooperate with White General Anton Denikin against the Bolsheviks had failed and that Petliura had even declared war against Denikin exacerbated U.S. officials’ hostility to the Ukrainian leader.54 In that context, at a time of optimism about advances by White forces both from southern Russia and from Estonia, Lansing wrote the most explicit articulation of the administration’s views concerning Ukraine. He declared “that the policy of the United States, while leaving to future events the determination of the exact character of the relations to exist between Great and Little Russia [i.e. Ukraine], should tend in the meantime, rather to sustain the principle of essential Russian unity than to encourage separatism.” The most that he thought appropriate for Ukraine was “such greater measure of local autonomy as will naturally result from the establishment in Russia of a modern democratic government, whether federative or not.”55

• 56 Markku Ruotsila, John Spargo and American Socialism, New York, Palgrave, 2006, p. 111-116; Colby to (...)
• 57 Eero Medijainen, “The United States and Estonia, 1918-1921: Approval de facto before Recognition,” (...)

29As the Russian Civil War neared an end, with the Red Army having defeated most of its White foes, Lansing’s successor as Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, issued a statement in August 1920 that publicized U.S. policy. It had been drafted by John Spargo, a socialist who shared Ambassador Bakhmeteff’s belief that a pledge of respect for Russia’s historic borders would help encourage Russians to rise against the Bolsheviks. The Colby note explained that the United States would not recognize the dishonorable Soviet regime and expressed confidence that eventually “a free and unified Russia” would emerge. Like Lansing, Colby endorsed the territorial integrity of Russia in its prewar boundaries, with the exceptions of Finland, Poland, and Armenia.56 Although Washington recognized the governments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania two years later (a move promoted as a way to keep them “free from the ravages of the present Moscow regime”), the basic policy Colby proclaimed would be maintained all the way to 1933.57

• 58 Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, p. 252-253.
• 59 M. Wayne Morris, Stalin’s Famine and Roosevelt’s Recognition of Russia, Lanham, MD, University Pres (...)
• 60 Morris, Stalin’s Famine and Roosevelt’s Recognition of Russia.
• 61 Congressional Record, Vol. 77, especially April 12, 1933, p. 1538-1546, and April 21, 1933, p. 2099 (...)
• 62 United Ukrainian Organizations of the United Sates to the President, n.d., 1933, Box 42, Folder 4, (...)
• 63 Morris, Stalin’s Famine, p. 141.

30From late 1932 through much of 1933, a terrible famine caused primarily by ruthless Soviet policies to seize grain supplies led to the deaths of millions of people along the Volga River, in the North Caucasus, and particularly in Ukraine. Joseph Stalin blamed Ukrainian nationalists for resistance to grain requisitions and sent top Soviet officials to Ukraine to insist on harsh fulfillment of extreme quotas.58 While some foreign journalists in the Soviet Union infamously claimed that there were only “food shortages,” others courageously declared that there was widespread famine.59 Some U.S. diplomats also reported the famine in Ukraine but top State Department officials did not cite it as a reason to withhold diplomatic recognition of the U.S.S.R.60 The opposition to establishing relations with the Soviet Union voiced in Congress dwelled on the menace of communist revolutionary propaganda, not on the famine.61 Ukrainian-American leaders who wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt to oppose recognition of the Soviet Union argued that the famine was “a result of the political and cultural conflict between Ukrainian nationalistic aspirations and Moscow’s imperialistic and centralizing designs; and also because of the Ukrainian peasants’ opposition to Moscow’s economic exploitation of Ukraine and to its forcibly imposed collectivization” of agriculture.62 Yet Roosevelt did not see that letter or similar appeals; they were not part of the correspondence his aides selected for him.63

• 64 David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America’s Soviet Policy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1995, (...)
• 65 Maddux, Years of Estrangement; John Richman, The United States and the Soviet Union: The Decision t (...)

31Some scholars have argued that the Roosevelt administration should have proposed urgent relief measures to the Soviet government and if it resisted they should have withheld recognition instead of becoming a near “accomplice to Stalin in the Ukraine.”64 However, Roosevelt believed that the non-recognition policy had been futile and that recognition would serve U.S. strategic interests by creating a foundation for future cooperation against aggressors, particularly Japan, which had established a puppet state in Manchuria in the preceding years. During negotiations with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov in November 1933, Roosevelt offered moral and diplomatic support against Japan, discussed terms for repayment of loans the U.S. had extended to the Russian provisional government in 1917, and emphasized the importance of Soviet assurances about religious freedom for Americans in the U.S.S.R. (a move to placate Catholic anticommunists), but he did not raise a question about Ukraine.65

• 66 “Protest Parade Harried By Reds, The Sun, November 18, 1933; “Attack Parade Held in Protest Against (...)

32On November 18, 1933, one day after Roosevelt announced the agreements, thousands of Ukrainian-Americans who marched in New York and Chicago to protest Soviet atrocities in their homeland were attacked by Communists seeking to break up the demonstrations. A banner carried by marchers in New York read: “We Condemn the Murderous Starvation of Ukraine by Soviet Government.” One month later, Communists and protesters clashed again.66 Yet the demonstrations did not slow the U.S. move to open an embassy in Moscow.

• 67 Kuropas, The Ukrainian Americans, Chapters 5, 6, and 7.
• 68 Memorandum of Conversation between Loy Henderson of the State Department and Yaroslav Chyz of Scran (...)
• 69 Alexander Granovsky to Joseph Kurtz, October 28, 1939, Box 133, Folder 3, Granovsky Papers; Alexand (...)

33As Myron Kuropas showed in great detail, Ukrainian Americans were sharply divided by their diverse political orientations, including Communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, and monarchists.67 It was those toward the center of the political spectrum who worked most energetically to win U.S. support for an independent Ukraine. One of the groups that lobbied the State Department was the left-leaning Ukrainian National Council of America, based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and led by Miroslav Sichinsky (among others).68 However, by far the most vigorous campaign was waged by the anticommunist Organization for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODWU), which was inspired by and collaborated with the militant Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Europe. Ukrainian-Americans formed ODWU in the early 1930s and in 1937 established a press bureau in Washington, DC. Alexander Granovsky, a professor of entomology at the University of Minnesota who was elected President of ODWU in 1936, was especially active in trying to sway the press, public opinion, and government officials. Like other Ukrainian-American nationalists, Granovsky dreamed of a greater Ukraine that would extend all the way from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caspian Sea.69 Implicit in that vision was an assumption of the hegemony of leaders from northwestern Ukraine over a vast space with many millions of non-Ukrainian people – a presumption that foreshadowed bitter conflicts in the future.

• 70 Granovsky biographical statement, December 19, 1942, in an FBI report sent to Adolf Berle by J. Edg (...)
• 71 Granovsky to Loy W. Henderson, May 12, 1939, Box 133, Folder 4, Granovsky Papers.
• 72 Granovsky to Roosevelt and to Hull, January 26, 1940, Box 133, Folder 9, Granovsky Papers. Pierrepo (...)

34Born in Volhynia in 1887, and raised by parents of peasant origin who spoke Ukrainian at home, Granovsky was trained in Russian schools. By 1903, after reading literary works by Ukrainian writers, Granovsky concluded “that Ukrainian people were badly mistreated by the Russian Government” and he then came to consider himself “a separatist.”70 Granovsky came to the United States in 1913 but did not become politically active until the 1930s. As head of ODWU, Granovsky tirelessly gave speeches, delivered talks on radio, wrote articles, sent letters to editors, met with government officials in Washington, and corresponded with the State Department. Granovsky repeatedly emphasized the menace of Russia, depicted a future independent Ukraine as a force for peace, and asked for U.S. aid to the Ukrainian struggle for independence. For example, in one of many letters to Loy Henderson, who handled relations with Ukrainian Americans as Assistant Chief of the State Department’s Division of European Affairs, Granovsky explained in May 1939 that an “independent united Ukraine” was the only solution for lasting peace in Eastern Europe. “Such a state,” he wrote, “certainly would be of service in maintenance of future peace by political balance between Communist Empire on one side and totalitarian Germany on the other.”71 In January 1940, as the Red Army fought to push back the Soviet border with Finland, Granovsky appealed to Roosevelt and Secretary of State Hull for the U.S. to “become the leading champion for the creation of the democratic United Ukrainian Independent State.” Real peace in Europe would only be possible, he asserted, “when ruthless persecution of oppressed peoples and of stateless nationalities shall cease.” He therefore urged that the U.S. give “moral and material aid to the Ukrainian people in their struggle against the greatest enemy of mankind – Soviet Russia.”72

• 73 See, for example, syndicated columns by Dorothy Thompson, “Harbingers of Spring,” Washington Post, (...)
• 74 Henry Paynter, “Ukrainians Help Nazi Plots Here,” PM, September 1, 1940, p. 9.
• 75 Louis Adamic, Two-Way Passage, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1941, p. 125; rebuttal in “Mr. Adamic a (...)
• 76 Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, Sabotage! The Secret War Against America, New York, Harper, 1942 (...)

35A major obstacle to the success of Ukrainian American activism was persistent, widespread press criticism, particularly from 1938 to 1941, of Ukrainian nationalists in Europe and their Ukrainian American supporters as fascists, Nazi sympathizers, and collaborators with German aggression.73 In September 1940, for example, an article in the left-leaning PM claimed that organizations like the ODWU “maintain links with a central Berlin headquarters, finance and drill uniformed storm troopers who practice the Hitler salute and march in [German] Bund parades.”74 Popular author Louis Adamic asserted in a book published in 1941 that the movement for Ukrainian independence “became largely a Nazi-controlled affair in this country as well as abroad.”75 The left-leaning paper The Hour went even further, claiming that a Ukrainian-American “fifth column” was involved in kidnapping, espionage and sabotage – allegations that were often exaggerated, unsubstantiated, or outright false, yet were reproduced in later books, including one serious scholarly study.76

• 77 Notes on a visit to the State Department, July 3, 1941, Box 142, Folder 3, Granovsky Papers.
• 78 For example: Walter Cherewatuk and V.A. Riznyk of ODWU to Albert Parry and Albert E. Kahn, editors (...)
• 79 “Poland and the Ukraine,” letter from Sichinsky, Washington Post, September 22, 1939. See also Sich (...)
• 80 Granovsky to Joseph Kurtz, October 28, 1939, Box 133, Folder 43, Granovsky Papers.
• 81 Granovsky, “Notes and Impressions Upon Reading the Transcript of Mr. Revyuk’s Testimony before Dies (...)
• 82 Kuropas, “Fighting Moscow from Afar,” p. 52-4.

36Keenly aware of the negative media depictions of Ukrainian nationalism in both Europe and America, State Department officials repeatedly advised Granovsky to present the Ukrainian case forcibly in the press.77 He and other Ukrainian American leaders tried to do that, denying accusations, demanding retractions, and even threatening lawsuits.78 Miroslav Sichinsky, whom Granovsky loathed as a leftist rival among Ukrainian-Americans, publicly insisted in September 1939 that “only a few misled leaders among Ukrainian immigrants in America actually sympathized with the Nazis’ drive eastward.”79 Granovsky informed an editor in October 1939 that “the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement” was “in no way Fascist or Nazi.”80 He blamed negative views of Ukrainian nationalists and their supporters in the United States on Ukrainian-Americans with “Red” sympathies and “Communistic propaganda [sic] against the Ukrainian cause.”81 The denials by Ukrainian-Americans were echoed by one leading scholar, who treated the accusations as a “defamation campaign.”82

• 83 Sayers and Kahn, Sabotage!, p. 88; Granovsky to Stephan Kuropas, May 6, 1940, Box 133, Folder 42, a (...)

37Some of the charges were clearly false. There is no evidence in Granovsky’s voluminous papers that he and the ODWU were directed or controlled by Nazi Germany. If German military intelligence lavishly financed the ODWU in the early 1930s, as some writers alleged, that funding ended by the start of the war in Europe, when the ODWU was desperately short of funds.83

• 84 Alexander Granovsky and Walter Dushnyk to Francisco Francio, December 24, 1936,
• 85 Transcript of the Committee hearing on September 28, 1939, Box 137, Folder 1, Granovsky Papers, pag (...)
• 86 Granovsky, “Notes and Impressions Upon Reading the Transcript of Mr. Revyuk’s Testimony before Dies (...)
• 87 Barry Foley, “Nazi Rule Asserted Choice of Ukraine,” Rochester Times-Union, September 14, 1939; sim (...)

38Yet Granovsky and other prominent Ukrainian Americans did express approval of European fascists. Five months after General Francisco Franco attacked the Spanish Republic in 1936, Granovsky and another leader of the ODWU wrote to Franco to express “admiration, together with sincere wishes for continued success in your noble struggle against the dark forces of Europe. Your valiant fight is stirring our hearts ... .”84 Emil Revyuk, who had been President of the United Ukrainian Organization of the United States, testified before the House of Representatives Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (chaired by Representative Martin Dies) in September 1939 that the ODWU had expressed affinity for German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the early 1930s, that it embraced authoritarianism at its convention in 1938, and that it saluted Colonel Andriy Melnyk, leader of one faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as the “Hitler of the Ukraine.”85 In private notes on the transcript of the testimony, drafted to prepare for rebuttal, Granovsky conceded that Melnyk had been compared to Hitler and observed that “Hitler has done a great deal for Germany.”86 After returning from a tour of Eastern Europe, where he met with Ukrainian leaders, in the summer of 1939, Granovsky publicly declared that Ukrainians in southeastern Poland “would prefer Nazi rule to cruel Polish dictatorship.”87

• 88 General Sherman Miles to A. A. Berle, October 24, 1941, decimal file 800.20211/976; J. Edgar Hoover (...)

39U.S. intelligence agencies received conflicting reports about Granovsky and the ODWU. While the Military Intelligence Division in the War Department had information that “the ODWU is under Nazi control,” different FBI informants alternately suspected Granovsky “of being a pro-Axis sympathizer or agent” or classed him “as anti-Nazi and a good American.”88

• 89 Granovsky, June 12, 1939 note on a visit to the State Department, Box 137, Folder 10, Granovsky Pap (...)
• 90 Granovsky to Harold Hoskins at the State Department, August 13, 1941, Box 133, Folder 7, Granovsky (...)

40Such contrasting reports did not deter U.S. government officials from meeting and counseling Granovsky, who found them very friendly. After meeting twelve officials in the State, Justice, and War departments in January 1941, he praised their “profound understanding of the Ukrainian problem.”89 Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Granovsky continued to be pleased by what he called government officials’ “sympathetic attitude toward the struggle for freedom of the Ukrainian people and for the establishment of a Ukrainian National State in the post-war reconstruction period.”90

• 91 Robert F. Kelley, Chief, Division of Eastern European Affairs, to Peter Janes, July 27, 1936; Memor (...)
• 92 Memorandum of Conversation between Granovsky and Henderson, July 3, 1941, M1286, Roll 4.

41While Granovsky had cordial relations with several State Department officials, they actually informed him firmly and repeatedly that the United States could not support the independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union. From 1936 to 1941, top diplomats explained to Granovsky, Sichinsky, and other Ukrainian Americans that developments in Ukraine did not directly affect U.S. interests, that U.S. policy was not to intervene in European disputes, and that the U.S. could not support a movement that sought to sever territory from states with which the U.S. had friendly relations (Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, as well as the U.S.S.R.).91 In July 1941, Henderson flatly told Granovsky that “there was no possibility at the present” that the U.S. “would take a stand with regard to the independence of the Ukraine.”92

• 93 Kuropas, “Fighting Moscow from Afar,” p. 55.
• 94 Christopher O’Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937- (...)

42Such positions at the State Department matched views at the White House. Some scholars have claimed, without citing specific evidence, that infiltration of Soviet agents into the Roosevelt administration helps to explain why FDR was not sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause.93 Yet the strategic imperative of preventing a full German conquest of the Soviet Union offers a better explanation. Roosevelt and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles (who led postwar planning until he was forced to resign in August 1943) prioritized urgent aid to the Red Army and accepted Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, especially once it became clear that the U.S.S.R. would withstand the Nazi invasion.94

• 95 Granovsky to Hoskins, August 13, 1941, Box 133, Folder 7, Granovsky Papers; Granovsky to President (...)
• 96 Harold B. Hoskins of State Department to Granovsky, November 12, 1941, Box 133, Folder 7, Granovsky (...)
• 97 Burds, The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944-1948.

43As the Soviet-German war raged, Granovsky altered his line in a way that seems to have helped him expand his connections in Washington. He shifted from predicting a Soviet collapse and highlighting how Ukrainians in the Red Army would help wreck Russia to emphasizing the valiant contributions of Ukrainians to the Allied cause.95 Responding to requests from U.S. officials for literature on the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Granovsky sent memoranda to several government agencies, including the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).96 Such wartime contacts foreshadowed the much more ambitious ways U.S. intelligence officials would utilize Ukrainian nationalists after the war.97

• 98 Philip E. Mosely, “Postwar Ukraine,” July 8, 1941, and Granovsky to Mosely, August 7, 1941, Box 134 (...)
• 99 Charles Kersten Remarks, “Liberation Force of Ukrainian Resistance More Powerful Than the Atomic Bo (...)

44During the war, despite the alliance with the Soviet Union, the idea of an independent or at least autonomous Ukraine gained more sympathy from prominent American experts on Eastern Europe, some of whom would serve in the U.S. government.98 And in the later Cold War the cause of liberating Ukraine won the backing of influential members of Congress such as Charles Kersten (R-WI) and Brien McMahon (D-CT).99

• 100 Dobriansky, The Vulnerable Russians, 3-4, p. 379-380; Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of R (...)

45Yet from the revolutions of 1917 to World War II, Ukrainian nationalists failed to secure significant support for an independent Ukraine from U.S. presidents, Congress, or the press. The main reasons for that, as I have shown, were not sheer ignorance or communist misinformation. U.S. policies from 1917 to 1921 were driven above all by the political objective of opposing Bolshevism, which led Wilson and Lansing to support the White ambition for the reunification of most of the former Russian empire, though they did not favor a restoration of tsarism. Later, in the decade before U.S. involvement in World War II, U.S. policy was shaped primarily by the strategic objective of countering Japanese and German expansion. Newspapers divided over depictions of Ukrainian nationalists and pogroms during the civil war of 1918-1920, then later emphasized (and sometimes exaggerated) Ukrainian sympathies for fascism and cooperation with Nazi Germany. As a result, in neither period was there strong public support or pressure for recognition of Ukrainian nationalist aspirations. The history of U.S. policies and attitudes toward Ukraine in this era thus counters some widely believed myths, including the idea that presidents Wilson and Roosevelt fatally undermined viable Ukrainian national aspirations because of simple lack of knowledge and the claim that the West has always sought to split apart Russia.100