Ukrainian Communist Party

The Ukrainian Communist Party (Ukrainian: Українська Комуністична Партія, Ukrayins’ka Komunistychna Partiya) was an oppositional political party in Soviet Ukraine, from 1920 until 1925. Its followers were known as Ukapists (укапісти, ukapisty), from the initials UKP.

Socialist Sovereigns

The UKP was an offshoot party of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party (SD's) created in January 1920 by former members of the Social-Democrats who prior to that were organized as the group of the independent Social-Democrats (Socialists-Sovereignists in the Ukrainian: Соціалісти-Самостійники). The left-wing split from the party because, unlike it, they adovocated a socialist soviet Ukraine allied with other soviet republics in a European Socialist International. It opposed Russian domination within this envisaged Socialist order as well as Russian domination of Republics formed within the territory of the former Russian empire. It condemned the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (CP(b)U) criticizing it in its newspaper, Chervonyy Prapor for being subject to the Russian Bolshevik party in Moscow.

Communists

The initial membership of several hundred was made up of Ukrainian Social-Democrat Sovereignists, former left-Ukrainian SRs Borotbists, and "federalists" from the CP(b)U, like Yuriy Lapchynsky. The Ukapists stood for a Soviet Ukraine with its own communist party separate from the Bolsheviks (renamed in March 1918 Russian Communist Party). In 1923 a faction within the UKP sponsored by the secret police (CHEKA) requested unification with the CPU. On August 27, 1920, then again in 1924, the UKP sent the Comintern a letter requesting recognition of the independence of the Ukrainian SSR and the right of Ukrainians to have their own party in the Comintern. The Comintern, de facto run by the Russian Bolsheviks, answered that the Ukrainian republic as a sovereign state within the USSR was already represented and that therefore UKP should dissolve and unite with CP(b)U. Recent research has shown that on the eve of their dissolution their influence was rising in Kyiv and Katerynoslav provinces.

At its IV congress the UKP formally abolished itself. Some members joined the Bolshevik CP(b)U, including its leader Andryi Richytsky in order to have some influence on Ukrainian politics. Former Ukapists were purged in 1931–34,and then executed or exiled to Siberia.