Central Rada, First Universal Declaration. June 10, 1917
The disintegration of central authority under the Provisional Government played directly into the movement for autonomy among Russia’s national minorities. By mid-1917 the larger and more self-conscious minority peoples of European Russia–particularly the Ukraine and Finland–were virtually asserting their independence.
People of the Ukraine, nation of peasants, workers, and toilers:
By your will you placed us, the Ukrainian Central Rada, as the guardians of the rights and freedoms of the Ukrainian land.
Your best sons, elected by people from the villages, from factories, from soldiers’ barracks, from all the large bodies and groups in the Ukraine, have elected us, the Ukrainian Central Rada, and entrusted us to defend these rights and freedoms.
Your elected men expressed their will thus:
Let there be a free Ukraine. Without separating from all of Russia, without breaking away from the Russian State, let the Ukrainian people on their own territory have the right to manage their own life. Let a National Ukrainian Assembly (Sejm), elected by universal, equal, direct, and secret suffrage, establish order and a regime in the Ukraine. Only your Ukrainian assembly is to have the right to issue all laws which are to establish this regime.
Those laws which will establish the regime throughout the entire Russian State must be issued by the Ail-Russian Parliament.
No one knows better than we what we need and which laws are best for us. No one can know better than our peasants how to manage our own land. Therefore we desire that, after all lands throughout Russia are confiscated as national property, pomeshchik, state, crown, monastic, and other lands, when a law is passed about this in the Constituent Assembly, the right to have control of our Ukrainian lands, the right to use them, belongs to us, to our Ukrainian Assembly (Sejm).
Thus spoke those elected from the entire Ukrainian land.
Having spoken thus, they elected from their midst the Ukrainian Central Rada and told us to stand at the head of our people, to guard their rights, and to create a new order of a free autonomous Ukraine.
And we, the Ukrainian Central Rada, fulfilled the wish of our people; we took upon ourselves the heavy burden of building a new life, and we have launched upon this work.
We had hoped that the central Russian Provisional Government would lend us a hand in this work in order that, jointly with it, we the Ukrainian Central Rada might organize our land.
But the Russian Provisional Government rejected all of our demands; it refused the outstretched hand of the Ukrainian people.
We sent our delegates to Petrograd to present to the Russian Provisional Government our demands.
And the chief demands were as follows:
That the Russian government publicly, by a special act, declare that it is not against the national freedom of the Ukraine, against the right of the people to autonomy.
That the central Russian government have in its cabinet our commissar on Ukrainian affairs for all matters related to the Ukraine.
That local authority in the Ukraine be united in one representative from the central Russian government, that is, by a commissar in the Ukraine elected by us.
That a certain portion of money collected by the central treasury from our people be returned to us, the representatives of this people, for their national and cultural needs.
All these demands of ours the central Russian government rejected.
It did not wish to say whether or not it recognizes the right of our people to autonomy, the right to rule their own life. It evaded the answer and referred us to the forthcoming Constituent Assembly.
The central Russian government did not wish to have in its cabinet our commissar; it did not wish to build jointly with us a new regime.
Likewise it did not want to recognize a commissar for all of the Ukraine in order that we might, together with it, lead our land to organization and order.
And it refused to return the money collected from our land for the needs of our schools, culture, and organization.
And now, people of the Ukraine, we are forced to create our own destiny. We cannot allow our land to be ruined and to collapse. If the Russian Provisional Government cannot introduce order in our land, if it does not want to initiate with us a great work, we must undertake it ourselves. It is our duty to our region and to the people who dwell upon our land.
And therefore we, the Ukrainian Central Rada, publish this Universal to all of our people and declare that from now on we shall build our own life.
Therefore let each member of our nation, each citizen of a village or city know henceforth that the hour of great work has struck.
From this time on, each village, each volost, each board, whether city or zemstvo, that defends the interests of the Ukrainian people must have the most intimate organizational relations with the Central Rada.
Wherever, for some reason, administrative authority remains in the hands of people hostile to Ukrainianization, we prescribe that our citizens launch upon a broad and mighty campaign of organization and information of the people and, after that, elect a new administration.
In towns and those places where the Ukrainian population lives together with other nationalities, we suggest that our citizens immediately establish relations and understandings with the democracy of those nationalities and jointly with them begin preparations for a new and correct life.
The Central Rada expresses the hope that the non-Ukrainian peoples who live in our land will also be concerned about peace and order in our territory and during this trying time of national disorganization will, in the spirit of friendship, together with us begin the organization of autonomy in the Ukraine.
And after we complete this preparatory organizational work, we shall call representatives from all peoples of the Ukrainian land and will work out laws for her. Those laws, that entire order which we shall prepare, the Ail-Russian Constituent Assembly must approve by its law.
People of the Ukraine, your electoral organ, the Ukrainian Central Rada, faces a great and high wall which it must demolish in order to lead its people out upon the road of freedom.
We need strength for this. We need strong and brave hands. We need the people’s hard work. And for the success of this work we need, first of all, great means (money). Up to this time the Ukrainian people have turned all of their means into the All-Russian central treasury. And the people themselves never had, and have not now, anything in return for it.
The Ukrainian Central Rada consequently orders all organized citizens of villages and towns, all Ukrainian public boards and institutions, beginning with the 1st of July, to tax the population with a special tax for their own affairs and accurately and immediately transmit this tax regularly to the treasury of the Ukrainian Rada.
Ukrainian people! Your future is in your own hands. In this hour of trial, of total disorder and collapse, prove by your unanimity and statesmanship that you, a nation of grain producers, can proudly and with dignity take your place as the equal of any organized powerful nation.
Source: Robert Paul Browder and Alexander F. Kerensky, eds., The Russian Provisional Government, 1917: Documents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), pp. 383-85.