Протоколи засідань Єлисавет(град)ської міської думи 1917–1918 рр. у системі джерел з історії української революції в місті

Abstract

Minutes of meetings of Elizavetgrad City Council (Duma) during the period of 1917–1918 were analyzed as the sources of information on the history of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921. While studying, as it turned out, due to the pro-Russian and liberal-democratic views of the majority of the members, the City Council prolonged to ignore the acts of the Ukrainian government for a long period, and oriented to the All-Russian democracy, considered the Bolsheviks as its main enemy. The City Duma sequentially ignored the fact of the existence of the Ukrainian Centralna Rada (the Ukrainian Central Council), its Universals and the Ukrainian legislation as a whole. At least the City Duma recognized the Ukrainian government only at the end of 1917 when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia and tried to seize the power in the city by means of the formation of the local Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’Deputies. At the same time, the City Duma considered the government of the Ukrainian People’s Republic only as a provisional alternative to the Petrograd Soviet of People’s Commissaries. So, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviks was considered as a more important political event than the Bolshevik invasion in Ukraine. Thus, naturally, the City Duma accused the Bolsheviks in the German offensive to Ukraine, in spite of the fact that the German troops were invited by the Central Rada, according to the Brest-Litovsk treaty of 9 February 1918. However, during the rule of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, the City Duma concentrated mainly on city economy issues and did not concern the Ukrainian State politics. Taking into consideration that the journals of meetings of the Elizavetgrad City Duma have not been fully preserved, for instance, the historian can see the originals until November 1918, but, according to local press, it is known that the meetings of the City Duma continued until February 1919, when the city was captured by the Bolsheviks. Moreover, inside the preserved journals of sessions, some of the minutes of meetings were actually lost, for instance, the pages, concerning skirmishes of city dwellers with the detachment of Marusya Nikiforov in January 1918. Thus, according to the above-mentioned facts, these documents cannot be considered as a total complex of the primary written sources, because of some gaps in important events of the history of the city of the revolutionary period.