“How the Bolsheviks were disgraced. In 1920, a Soviet republic appeared in Galicia, but it ceased to exist in a few months September 22, 09:25 Share: Polish soldiers in Tarnopol after the capture of the city in a common room filled with Soviet propaganda of the RSSR, September 1920 (Photo: Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe Wojskowego Biura Historycznego) Author: Rostislav Kameristy-Breitenbücher The shameful history of the puppet Bolshevik republic with its capital in Ternopil, which appeared over a hundred years ago”, — write on: ua.news
Polish soldiers in Tarnopol after the capture of the city in a common room filled with Soviet propaganda of the RSSR, September 1920 (Photo: Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe Wojskowego Biura Historycznego)
The shameful history of the puppet Bolshevik republic with its capital in Ternopil, which appeared more than a hundred years ago and lasted two months and eight days.
In 1920, a kind of analogue of the Soviet republic was created in the west of Ukraine — Galician Socialist Soviet Republic with the capital in Tarnopoli. This experiment of Bolshevik Russia existed under the noses of Poland and Hungary for only 68 days, and on September 21 it fell under the onslaught of Polish-Ukrainian troops.
Yes, it didn’t last long at all, and perhaps that’s why this episode is somewhat lost in the history of Ukraine: even modern university textbooks do not describe this fact. Instead, he was supplanted by a stereotype that, they say, until 1939 “there was no Soviet spirit in Galicia.”
In fact, it is not. As early as November 1918, a new state emerged — Western Ukrainian People’s Republicand in a few months the Act of Unification with Ukrainian People’s Republic. Later, this contract was denounced. And while Ukraine was in the heat of the war, determining its future, the head of the Council of People’s Commissars of Soviet Russia, Vladimir Lenin, tried to seize the western lands – according to a typical Bolshevik scenario. On July 15, 1920, he almost succeeded, but the triumph did not last long.
Soviet historians avoided mentioning the RSSR for more than 50 years — it was forbidden to write about Lenin’s failure in Galicia. Studies and monographs with an extremely small circulation were limited to the vulture “for special use” and were full of ideological cliches and clichés — they were written for party functionaries and propagandists. Only in 1986, Vasyl Veriga’s diasporic monograph Galician Socialist Soviet Republic (1920) shed some light on these events for a wider range of readers.
