Where Did the Black Hundreds Disappear? Electoral Statistics as a Source for the Study of the National Identity of Ukrainian Peasantry at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

The article traces the fates of the members of the Black Hundred organizations of Right-Bank Ukraine after the revolution of 1917. In 1905–1917, this region was one of the centers of the monarchist movement, and the Pochaev department of the Union of the Russian People was the most numerous black hundred organization in the Russian Empire. There is a lot of indirect evidence that after the overthrow of the monarchy, many Black Hundreds of the Right Bank found themselves in the ranks of Ukrainians and Bolsheviks, actively participating in various rebel detachments and gangs, but it is impossible to draw far-reaching conclusions based on such sources, most often of a memoir nature. To understand what happened to the former black-hundredists and in which political camp they found themselves, the author turns to electoral statistics. Comparing the data about the size of organizations of the Union of the Russian People in different settlements of the Kiev province in the 1910s with the results of the elections to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly in 1917–1918 in the same localities, the author comes to the conclusion that the former black-hundredists did not vote for Russian nationalists and monarchists, but for the Ukrainian Social revolutionaries and occasionally for the Bolsheviks, that is, for the parties that promised a radical solution to the agrarian question. At the same time, the peasants who voted for the socialists because of the desire to divide the landowners’ land, did not support the party programs of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks on other issues, retaining elements of the black-hundred worldview. This is why during the Civil War “black-hundred sentiments” could be found both in the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and in the Red Army.