Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

Following the February Revolution and the formation of the Ukrainian Central Rada, Skoropadskii was named by the Russian Provisional Government as commander of the new 1st Ukrainian Corps (2 July 1917), in which capacity he resisted Bolshevik intrigues among local forces and worked to Ukrainize the military formations stationed in Ukraine. On 6 October 1917, at Chigrin, at the First Congress of Free Cossacks, he was elected their honorary commander (otaman), but resigned on 29 December 1917, when the Rada placed a man he did not trust (Iurii Kapkan) in charge of its forces. When forces of the Austro-German intervention occupied Ukraine in the aftermath of the first Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (27 January 1918) and encountered problems in persuading the Rada to deliver foodstuffs in the quantities agreed to in the treaty, Skoropadskii was approached by the German military with the request that he take control of the government. A coup was duly launched, on 29 April 1918, and Skoropadskii was pronounced “Hetman of Ukraine” by a Congress of Ukrainian Landowners. That same day, he issued a “Charter to the Ukrainian People,” announcing the dissolution of the Rada and its land committees and annulling all laws and decrees of both the Ukrainian Rada and the Russian Provisional Government of 1917 relating to the land question. He followed this with the “Laws on the Provisional State Order of Ukraine,” under which the Ukrainian National Republic was replaced by the Ukrainian State and all executive power was passed to the Hetman, pending the summoning of a Ukrainian Soim (Diet).

Subsequently, Skoropadskii’s government, headed by the wealthy landowner Fedir Lyzohub, sought to restore the prerevolutionary economic order and to defend private property, while at the same time meeting the demands of the Central Powers for the delivery of food supplies. This latter policy proved to be immensely unpopular across Ukraine. Moreover, despite his deliberate attempts to bedeck his government with the trappings of Ukrainian and Cossack history (he was a descendant of the 18th-century Hetman I. I. Skoropadskii), Skoropadskii’s cabinet was dominated by Russians. The regime was consequently resisted by organizations of workers and peasants and by the former nationalist and socialist adherents of the Central Rada, and widespread fighting was the outcome. On 4–17 September 1918, Skoropadskii visited Berlin and met with the kaiser, but as his German and Austrian allies collapsed in October–November 1918, he was forced into negotiations with representatives of the UNR, and he could not forestall the uprising against his rule that was being prepared by the Ukrainian National Republic Directory.

On 14 December 1918, Skoropadskii slipped out of Kiev (disguised as a wounded German officer), on a German train bound for Berlin. In emigration, he settled at Wannsee and was in receipt of financial support from the German government. He never relinquished his claim to governance over Ukraine, and during the interwar years, from his home he headed the Hetmanite Movement, made up of monarchist émigré organizations such as the Ukrainian Union of Agrarians-Statists in Europe, the United Hetman Organization in Canada and the United States, and the Ukrainian Hetman Organization of America. He was also honorary president of the Ukrainian hromada in Berlin and the chief founder of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin. During the Second World War, he lobbied the Nazi government for the release of Ukrainian nationalists who had been imprisoned in German concentration camps. Skoropadskii was mortally wounded during an Allied air raid on the railway station at Plattling, near Munich, on 26 April 1945, and died that same day. He is buried at Obersdorf.

SKRYPNYK, MYKOLA (NIKOLAI ALEKSEEVICH) (25 January 1872–7 July 1933). A founder and leader of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, Mykola Skrypnyk was born into the family of a railwayman at Iasnuvata, in Ekaterinoslav guberniia. He was expelled from his secondary school at Izum for revolutionary activities and in 1901 suffered the same fate at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute, having joined the social-democratic movement in 1897. Thereafter, he was engaged full time in revolutionary work (chiefly in journalism), as a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and was arrested 15 times and exiled 7 times by the tsarist authorities.