The article explains how the Bolsheviks succeeded in gaining rapid control over a vast swath of Ukraine’s territory at the beginning of 1919, inasmuch as what was established under the name of “Soviet power” cannot be described as mere military occupation. It highlights the state-building processes at the lowest possible level, the volost (community) in the interaction between the guidelines prepared by the central bodies and their local interpretation and implementation. The article aims to show the legal and normative tools that were designed for local supporters of the Bolsheviks and how the latter used them. The establishment of a civilian Soviet administration in a village in Kharkiv gubernia in early 1919 will be studied through the “policy materials” that were sent from the Soviet capital to the remote village of Oleksandrivka. These documents reveal the kinds of administrative and legal information that the central power deemed useful locally. The author examines the form of the documents that were aimed at rural areas, focusing on the issue of the language that the Bolsheviks used to address the locals; discusses how the study of new Soviet laws reveals the Bolsheviks’ priority policies in early 1919; pinpoints the different forms of the newly established communist institutions; and describes the people who embodied the new power locally. Thanks to the Bolsheviks’ radical, class-oriented lawmaking, small cohorts of plebeians who had drifted more to the left since 1917 were formed. Thus, the establishment of a new state apparatus from scratch allowed for the involvement of people, especially working-class individuals, in Bolshevism. This was enough to gain power locally in early 1919 but proved to be insufficient to retain it a few months later.
Éric Aunoble (2020) studied this question.