Back to the Ukraine?

The success of the great gamble which Hitler took last week will hinge first on victory in war and then, just as vitally, on victory in occupation. For just 24 years ago Germany won another war with Russia only to lose the occupation. Before his troops marched last week Hitler may--and very likely did--pause to review this pertinent chapter of history:

After the Russian revolution in 1917, the Ukraine split with the Bolsheviks and signed a separate treaty with Germany on Feb. 9, 1918. But the Soviet armies drove into the Ukraine, to its capital, Kiev (see map, p. 24). Thereupon the Germans not only drove out the Reds, but forced them to accept the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 3), which, besides depriving Russia of a Caucasian slice which went to Turkey, Russian Poland, Finland, Georgia, Lithuania, Kurland, Livonia, Estonia and the Islands of the Moon Sound, provided for an independent Republic of the Ukraine.

This Republic was intended by the Germans to be not much more than a commissary for herself and Austria. The Ukrainians undertook to supply 1,000,000 tons of grain, 46,000 tons of meat, 400,000,000 eggs, many horses, much coal, lard, manganese, fodder, sugar. The German Commander in the East, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, settled down to gather in the loot.

But everything went wrong. It developed that the enthusiastic negotiators had grossly overestimated the produce of the Ukraine. By the end of the occupation the Germans had got out only one-fifth of the scheduled exports. They got only 9,293 wagonloads of grain, 4,567 wagonloads of minerals and 23,195 wagonloads of fodder, sugar, cattle, eggs and other foodstuffs.

Troubles multiplied. The "elected" Rada became unruly, and it became necessary to set up a frank puppetry under a Hetman named Paul Skoropadsky. Marshal von Eichhorn was assassinated by a Ukrainian terrorist. The peasant workers of the Ukraine became infected with Soviet ideology; riots broke out. Disorderly crowds of the Austrian troops who were supposed to garrison the area started west for home in trains and on foot, selling their arms to the local populace. The German soldiers caught Bolshevism, and it spread like an epidemic.

All this was bitter return for the cost: 500,000 men immobilized on the Eastern Front. Half of these men might have turned the scale in the West. Military experts are of the opinion that only a few cavalry divisions would have been necessary to widen the gap in the Allied line in April 1918, so that general retreat would have been inevitable; there were then three cavalry divisions occupied in occupying the Ukraine.

Invading Russia beat Napoleon. Perhaps it beat Kaiser Wilhelm. But Adolf Hitler thinks he can do it differently. He is deep in plans for the Ukraine. Some time ago he discovered Puppet Skoropadsky living on memories, polishing the Order of the Black Eagle which the Kaiser had given him, in a little house on the Wannsee, near Berlin. Skoropadsky thought his violent days were over; he no longer played the Cossack blindman's buff in which the blindfolded man tries to shoot his companions.

But Adolf Hitler, architect of violence, had new plans for him. He set him up as organizer of the Ukrainian nationalists. Ukrainians were subsidized in intrigue, trained in espionage and sabotage. Today Paul Skoropadsky, a tall amiable, handsome old no-good of 67, claims he has a Ukrainian legion of 60,000 Cossacks, each one of whom personally would like to slit Joseph Stalin's throat. After a quarter of a century, General Skoropadsky may have his second day of power. The big question, if the German military campaign is a success, is whether this time a new and abler German economic campaign can turn Russia into a big productive asset.

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