The parliamentarian the Tsar called 'fat-bellied': last chairman of the Imperial Duma
In February 1917, Rodzianko telegraphed the Stavka: "The capital is in a state of anarchy. The government is paralysed. Any delay is fatal. The last hour has struck." Nicholas II read it and told his court minister: "That fat-bellied Rodzianko has sent me some more nonsense."
Of Ukrainian noble stock, Rodzianko co-founded the Octobrist Party in 1905, pursuing constitutional reform of the Tsarist system through parliamentarism. As chairman of the Third and Fourth Dumas (1911–1917), he openly denounced Rasputin and confronted the wartime government's paralysis. During the February Revolution he led the Provisional Committee of the Duma and drove the negotiations for Nicholas II's abdication, but his constitutional-monarchy project collapsed when Grand Duke Michael refused the throne. He emigrated to Yugoslavia in 1920, dying in poverty after completing his memoir The Reign of Rasputin. Reviled by monarchist émigrés as a traitor and dismissed by the left, Rodzianko embodied the brief, thwarted experiment of Russian parliamentary politics.
Career timeline
1905Co-founds the Octobrist Party on a constitutional-monarchist platform
1907–1911Deputy, Third State Duma; vice-chairman from 1909
1911–1912Chairman, Third Duma (succeeding Guchkov)
1912–1917Chairman, Fourth Duma; participates in the Progressive Bloc
1917.02–03Heads Provisional Committee of the Duma; leads abdication talks with Nicholas II
summer 1917Founds Liberal Republican Party with Guchkov
1917.10–1920Anti-Bolshevik activity in Don and Crimea under Denikin and Wrangel
1920–1924Exile in Yugoslavia; writes The Reign of Rasputin: an Empire's Collapse
The last hetman of Ukraine, installed under German occupation in 1918
On 29 April 1918 in Kyiv, the All-Ukrainian Congress of Landowners rose and unanimously acclaimed Pavlo Skoropadskyi as Hetman of Ukraine with shouts of 'Long live the Hetman!'
A Ukrainian aristocrat and tsarist lieutenant general who commanded a corps in the First World War. In April 1918, backed by the German army that occupied Ukraine after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he overthrew the socialist Central Rada in a coup and was proclaimed Hetman of the Ukrainian State. During his eight-month rule he founded the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, established universities, and built diplomatic ties, but his pro-landlord agrarian policy and the German occupiers' forced grain requisitions provoked widespread peasant resistance. When Germany collapsed in November 1918, Symon Petliura's Anti-Hetman Uprising drove him from power; he abdicated in December and spent the rest of his life in German exile, refusing to collaborate with the Nazis.
Career timeline
1893Commissioned as an officer in the Chevalier Guard regiment
1904–1905Commanded Cossack units in the Russo-Japanese War, decorated for bravery
1912Promoted to major general, aide-de-camp to Nicholas II
1914–1916Commanded cavalry divisions in WWI, promoted to lieutenant general
1917Commander of 34th Army Corps, Ukrainised it into the 1st Ukrainian Corps
1917.10Elected Otaman of the Free Cossacks
1918.04–12Hetman of the Ukrainian State
1919–1945Exile in Germany, led the Hetmanite movement
Greek Catholic priest who became president of Carpatho-Ukraine when it declared independence in March 1939
The son of a Greek Catholic priest in Carpathian Ruthenia, then part of Austria-Hungary, he studied at the Ungvár school of theology and at Budapest University and was ordained. In 1918 he became head of the Subcarpathian National Council, which in 1919 asked for the region to join Czechoslovakia. In 1925 he was elected to the parliament in Prague as leader of the Ruthenian National Christian Party, and in October 1938 he was appointed head of the government of the Subcarpathian Autonomous Region. On 15 March 1939 he became president of Carpatho-Ukraine, but the next day Hungary occupied and annexed the region; he fled to Prague and spent the war as a professor at the Ukrainian Free University. Arrested by the NKVD when the Soviet army took Prague in May 1945, he was taken to Moscow and died in Butyrka prison in July.
Career timeline
1900–1917Professor of mathematics, teachers’ institute
1918–1919Head, Subcarpathian National Council
1925Deputy in Prague (Ruthenian National Christian Party)
1938–1939Head of the Subcarpathian autonomous government
Ukrainian Social Democratic writer who led the Rada's General Secretariat and the Directory
Just as you created the dictatorship of workers and peasants in Russia, we must create a dictatorship of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine.
A Ukrainian Social Democratic writer, he led the Central Rada's General Secretariat in 1917 and retook Kyiv as first chairman of the Directory in 1918. Arguing for talks with the Soviets he broke with Petliura and resigned in 1919, dying in France in 1951.
Career timeline
1905Co-founder of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party
1917Vice-president of the Central Rada and first head of its General Secretariat
1918.01Premier of the Ukrainian People's Republic, soon resigned
1918.12Retook Kyiv as chairman of the Directory
1919–1920Wrote the memoir Rebirth of a Nation
1920Deputy head of the Ukrainian SSR Sovnarkom; soon re-emigrated
The economic administrator who led Ukraine's government for 11 years, caught between Stalin's demands and the famine
In June 1932 Chubar reported to Stalin and Molotov that "tens of thousands of malnourished, starving and swollen people" were dying of famine "in every village", and asked for grain relief. Stalin replied that "Chubar is mistaken ... Ukraine has been given more than it should get".
An economic administrator born to a poor Ukrainian peasant family in Fedorivka, he joined the RSDLP in 1907. From 1923 he chaired the Ukrainian SSR's Council of People's Commissars for eleven years, driving industrialisation and collectivisation, and in June 1932 he reported the famine to Stalin and Molotov and requested emergency grain. He also bore responsibility for enforcing collectivisation and the 1932–33 famine, and in 2010 the Kyiv Court of Appeal ruled him one of the organisers of the Holodomor. A full Politburo member from 1935, he was arrested in 1938 and shot the next year, then rehabilitated in 1955.
Career timeline
1891Born in Fedorivka, Yekaterinoslav gubernia, into a poor peasant family
1907Organised Social Democratic circles in factory districts and joined the RSDLP at 16
1911–1917Factory worker in Kramatorsk, Mariupol, Moscow, Petrograd; underground activism
1917Member of Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees; commissar to Main Artillery Directorate during October Revolution
1918–1923Chairman of GOMZa, member of VSNKh Presidium; chairman of Organisational Bureau for Restoration of Ukrainian Industry
1921–1923Chairman of Ukrainian VSNKh and Central Coal Industry Administration (one source dates his VSNKh chairmanship to 1920–21; the dating differs between sources)
1923–1934Chairman of Sovnarkom Ukrainian SSR (11 years); led industrialisation and collectivisation
1923–1925Deputy Chairman of USSR Sovnarkom
1934–1938Deputy Chairman of USSR Sovnarkom
1926–1935Candidate member of Politburo CC VKP(b)
1935–1938Full member of Politburo CC VKP(b)
1937–1938People's Commissar for Finance USSR
1938.07.04Arrested on charges of being a 'German intelligence agent' and a member of an anti-Soviet sabotage organisation; removed from the Politburo
1939.02.26Sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court and shot the same day; rehabilitated in 1955
Khrushchev's loyal executor: a peasant-born apparatchik who twice led Soviet Ukraine's government
'Silence was his trump card. He'd wait for Khrushchev to propose something, then say: "Yes, yes, of course, that's exactly right."' — William Taubman
Soviet party and state leader who twice headed the Ukrainian SSR government (1938–1939, 1947–1954) and served 15 years as Chairman of its Supreme Soviet Presidium (1954–1969). Born to a poor peasant family, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and organized Red partisans. In the 1930s he formed a lasting patron-client bond with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow's Bauman district, riding that connection to the chairmanship of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars during the Great Purge. He organized partisan resistance under German occupation and led postwar reconstruction. Remembered as a classic yes-man whose silence was his trump card.
Career timeline
1918–1920Red partisan organizer & Red Army political worker
1921–1928Secretary, Shostka, Chernigov & Pervomaisk party committees
1931–1937Bauman District Soviet chair → 2nd Sec. Moscow Oblast → 1st Sec. Western Oblast
1938Acting 1st Secretary, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Committee
1938–1939Chairman, Council of People's Commissars, Ukrainian SSR
1939–1947Secretary, CC CP(b)U (wartime partisan organizer)
1947–1954Chairman, Council of Ministers, Ukrainian SSR (second term)
1954–1969Chairman, Presidium of Supreme Soviet, Ukrainian SSR
The Donetsk-born Soviet economic manager who led Ukraine's government for 15 years through the Brezhnev era
"The explosion was reported to central authorities within hours, but the full implications were not realized until two days later." — At a Kyiv press conference on 8 May 1986, explaining the information lag in the early Chernobyl response.
Rising from an engineer in the Donetsk industrial belt through the party apparatus, Lyashko chaired the Council of Ministers of Soviet Ukraine from 1972 to 1987, the longest tenure in that post's history, spanning the entire Brezhnev era of stability and the onset of perestroika. In 1986 he headed the republican government commission dealing with the Chernobyl disaster, telling a press conference that central authorities had been informed within hours although the full scale emerged only two days later. Alongside First Secretary Shcherbitsky, he embodied the institutional stability of a party-government division of labour that faithfully executed central policy. After retirement he published a four-volume memoir, The Burden of Memory.
Career timeline
1941–1945Graduate of 2nd Kharkiv Tank School, tank platoon commander on the North Caucasus Front, then instructor at Samarkand tank school
1945–1952Engineer, deputy shop chief, deputy director, party organiser at Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant
1952–1954First Secretary, Kramatorsk City Party Committee
1954–1960Secretary, then Second Secretary, Stalino (Donetsk) Oblast Party Committee
1960–1963First Secretary, Donetsk Oblast Party Committee
1963–1966Secretary, CC CPU; Chairman, CC Bureau for Industry and Construction
1966–1969Second Secretary, CC of the Communist Party of Ukraine
1969–1972Chairman, Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR; Deputy Chairman, Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet
1972–1987Chairman, Council of Ministers, Ukrainian SSR
1986Chairman, Republican Government Commission for Chernobyl accident consequences
From Soviet economic planner to independent Ukraine’s first prime minister
In 2016, the man who had signed away the USSR revealed his own grief: 'As a man, I'm ashamed to admit it, but when Crimea was annexed, I cried like a child.'
Vitold Fokin was a Ukrainian Soviet economic official who began as a mining engineer and experienced both the operation of a planned economy and the pressures of state transformation. He led Ukraine’s government around independence while confronting economic crisis and the collapse of the Union. In December 1991, he signed the Belovezha Accords for Ukraine alongside Leonid Kravchuk, helping establish the post-Soviet order. Late in life, his controversial positions in the Donbas negotiations ended his public role.
Career timeline
1954–1963Mining engineer and manager in the Luhansk region
1963–1971Manager in the Donbas anthracite industry
1971–1987Department head and deputy chair of Ukraine’s State Planning Committee
1987–1990Deputy chair of Ukraine’s Council of Ministers and head of the State Planning Committee
1990–1991Chair of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR
1991–1992First prime minister of Ukraine
1991Ukrainian signatory of the Belovezha Accords
2020First deputy head of Ukraine’s delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group
