Towards the Course of Ukraine (to the 100th Anniversary of the Act of Unification of the UPR with ZUNR)

Abstract

In the history of the state and law of Ukraine there are immemorial events, legal monuments, the significance of which is fully realized only with time, especially in modern times. Such an event and attraction is the Act of reunification of the Ukrainian People’s Republic and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic on January 22, 1919. This article attempts to make a short historical and legal analysis of the processes of statebuilding on the way to the unification of the Ukrainian people and their lands with the beginning of the Ukrainian revolution. It began after the February bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1917 in Petrograd to create in Kiev in early March, public organizations and political parties, emerged from the underground, the Ukrainian Central Rada (hereinafter – UCR). The latter was created as a “parliamentary organization”. In order to provide her with the “nature of the present representation of the entire organized Ukrainian people,” in April 1917 a crowded National Congress was convened. He determined the form of the state structure of Ukraine – national-territorial autonomy as part of federal democratic Russia, with the main principles of autonomy. The Congress replenished the composition of the UCR, elected its Chairman – Grushevsky. Subsequently, at its V and VI sessions, as a result of the new reorganization and replenishment of membership in territorial and party representation, as well as at the expense of elected members from military, public, trade union organizations, national minorities, the UCR already had 643 deputies. The activity of the Central Rada was determined by political parties of the socialist direction: from 19 parties (Ukrainian, Russian and Polish), 17 called themselves socialist. This led to the direction and content of the state implemented by the Ukrainian Central Rada and its government – the General Secretariat.