Historian who wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, and chairman of the Central Rada
In March 1917 the Central Rada elected him chairman in absentia while he was still in exile in Moscow, and his return raised hope for uniting the democratic forces.
The historian whose History of Ukraine-Rus wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, he chaired the Central Rada in 1917 and 1918. He returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and died under surveillance in 1934.
Career timeline
1890Graduated Kyiv University, gold medal for graduation thesis
1894Professor of history at Lviv University
1897Chairman of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (1897–1913)
1917Chairman of the Central Rada (1917–1918), elected in absentia
1919Founded the Ukrainian Sociological Institute in Vienna
1924Returned to Soviet Ukraine, academician of VUAN
1929Full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
1931Arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity
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
Ukrainian independence leader who headed the People's Republic but whose role in pogroms remains fiercely contested
Do not separate the fate of Ukraine from the fate of Russia. If Russia suffers defeat, the consequences of this catastrophe will also affect Ukraine.
A social-democratic journalist from Poltava who rose from military secretary of the Central Rada in 1917 to commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian People's Army and head of the Directorate of the Ukrainian People's Republic. He fought to defend Ukrainian independence against Bolsheviks, White armies, and Poland, but was forced into exile, first in Poland and then Paris, after defeat in 1920. An estimated 50,000 Jews were massacred by forces under his command, and whether he was unable or unwilling to stop the killings remains fiercely disputed. In 1926 he was assassinated in Paris by the Jewish anarchist Sholem Schwarzbard, who called it vengeance for the pogroms.
Career timeline
1900–1917Activist in the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party and USDRP; journalist leading the Ukrainian national movement
1917.05–12Secretary of Military Affairs, Central Rada; led organization of Ukrainian armed forces
1918.01–03Commander of Haydamaky Kish; suppressed Bolshevik Arsenal uprising in Kyiv
1918.11–1919.02Chief of Military Forces, Directorate of Ukraine
1919.02–1920.12Head of the Directorate and Supreme Commander, Ukrainian People's Army
1920.04Signed Warsaw Treaty with Poland, forming anti-Bolshevik alliance
1924–1926Published weekly Tryzub from exile in Paris
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
Russian field marshal who took Warsaw in 1831 and in 1849 led the Russian army that forced the Hungarian surrender at Világos
Born at Poltava in 1782 to a father of a Zaporozhian Cossack family and a Belarusian noblewoman, he passed through the Page Corps and was commissioned into the Guards in 1800. He fought at Austerlitz, Borodino and Leipzig, conquered the Erivan khanate in the Russo-Persian War of 1826–1828, becoming Count of Erivan, and was made field marshal in 1829. Charged in 1831 with crushing the Polish November Uprising, he took Warsaw and was made Prince of Warsaw and viceroy of Poland; his rule, known in Poland as the "Paskevich Night", was infamous for political repression and Russification. In 1849 he led the Russian army sent to aid Austria into Hungary and finally compelled the Hungarian surrender at Világos. Commanding the Army of the Danube at the start of the Crimean War, he was wounded in 1854, and he died in Warsaw in 1856.
Career timeline
1800Commissioned into the Guards
1826–1828Commander in the Russo-Persian War; Count of Erivan
He killed the tsar's gendarme chief with a dagger, then introduced the Russian revolution to the West with his pen
On the eve of assassinating Mezentsov in 1878, Kravchinsky wrote: 'Long enough have we preached love — the time has come to call forth hatred. Merciless, bloody vengeance shall henceforth be the answer to your crimes.'
A writer and revolutionary who served as a bridge between the Russian Narodnik movement and the West. After activity in the Chaikovsky Circle he assassinated gendarme chief Mezentsov with a dagger in 1878 and fled into exile; in London he published Underground Russia (1883), introducing the Russian revolutionary movement to the West for the first time, and founded the Russian Free Press Fund and the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, becoming the hub of émigré anti-tsarist agitation.
Career timeline
1872–1873Joined the Chaikovsky Circle; conducted socialist propaganda among St. Petersburg workers
1873–1874Went to the People — agitated peasants in Tver and Tula, arrested and escaped
1875–1876Fought in Herzegovina uprising against Ottoman rule; wrote for Bakuninist journal Rabotnik in Geneva
1877Joined the Benevento insurrection with Malatesta and Cafiero; arrested and amnestied
1878Joined Land and Liberty, edited its journal; assassinated Mezentsov on 4 August; fled abroad in November
1883Published Underground Russia — the West's first comprehensive account of the Russian revolutionary movement
1889Published The Career of a Nihilist (Andrei Kozhukhov), a novel of revolutionary life
1890–1895Founded the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and Russian Free Press Fund; edited monthly Free Russia
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
From Legal Marxism to ethical socialism: the economist who pioneered business cycle theory
At the April 1900 Pskov meeting to organize Iskra, he sat alongside Lenin, Martov, and Struve — but he never actually joined the underground Social Democratic movement.
A leading exponent of Legal Marxism, Tugan-Baranovsky gained international recognition with his 1894 Industrial Crises in Contemporary England, which pioneered an endogenous theory of capitalist business cycles. Together with Pyotr Struve he advanced Marxist economic-historical analysis against the Narodniks and attended the 1900 organizational meeting of Iskra, but later broke with orthodox Marxism toward an 'ethical socialism' grounded in Kantian ethics, laying the theoretical foundations of the cooperative movement. After the February Revolution he served as finance minister in the Ukrainian Central Rada and was a founding member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; his cycle theory influenced Keynes, Robertson, and Kalecki.
Career timeline
1888Graduated Kharkov University, Candidate of Sciences in natural sciences
1894Published Industrial Crises in Contemporary England, MA in political economy from Moscow University
1895–1899Privatdozent in political economy, St. Petersburg University
1898Published The Russian Factory in Past and Present, doctorate from Moscow University
1900Participated in the Iskra organizational meeting (Pskov)
1901–1905Worked in Poltava zemstvo, wrote Outlines from the Recent History of Political Economy
1906–1913Privatdozent and professor at St. Petersburg University and Polytechnic Institute
1909–1917Editor-in-chief of Vestnik Kooperatsii (Cooperative Digest)
1917.08–11Finance Minister (Secretary) of the Ukrainian Central Rada
1918Founding member, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; head of socio-economic department
