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
1917.5–1917.12Secretary of Military Affairs, Central Rada; led organization of Ukrainian armed forces
1918.1–1918.3Commander of Haydamaky Kish; suppressed Bolshevik Arsenal uprising in Kyiv
1918.11–1919.2Chief of Military Forces, Directorate of Ukraine
1919.2–1920.12Head of the Directorate and Supreme Commander, Ukrainian People's Army
1920.4Signed 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
Ukrainian nationalist politician and leader of the OUN-B.
Bandera led Ukrainian nationalist underground activity in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland. A leader in the OUN, he was sentenced to death for organizing the 1934 assassination of Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After the OUN split in 1940, he led its radical OUN-B faction, which proclaimed a Ukrainian state in Lviv shortly after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and pledged cooperation with Nazi Germany. German authorities detained him and sent him to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; after the war he led the OUN-B émigré organization in West Germany.
Career timeline
1929Joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).
1931Became head of propaganda for the OUN.
1933Became head of the OUN's home executive in Poland.
1934Was sentenced to death for organizing the assassination of the Polish interior minister; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
1940Led the OUN-B faction after the OUN split.
1941–1944Arrested by German authorities and imprisoned at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
1945Became leader of the OUN's foreign organization.
1959Assassinated in Munich by KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky.
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
A historian of the Holodomor’s mechanisms and memory
In 2009 he urged keeping, not toppling, monuments to the communist figures behind the Holodomor, setting a 'black board' beside each reading that its subject created the Holodomor and that his policy was criminal.
Vasyl Marochko is a Ukrainian historian whose work examines the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor. He treats the famine not as an abstract disaster but as the outcome of state policies combining grain requisitioning with control over rural society. His calculation that blacklisting covered 252 of the Ukrainian SSR’s 405 districts shows the scale at which food deprivation and administrative isolation were imposed on peasants.
Career timeline
1981–1995Postgraduate student and researcher, Institute of History of Ukraine
1985Earned a candidate of historical sciences degree with a dissertation on the Soviet way of life in Ukraine’s collective-farm countryside
1996Defended a doctoral dissertation on Ukrainian peasant cooperatives
1996Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
2008–2015Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
2013–Professor of Ukrainian history
2022Leading researcher, Holodomor Research Institute, National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide
A historian of state and society in Soviet Ukraine
Using records from his native Markivka, where 329 of 401 resettled Russian families returned within a year, he rebutted as baseless myth the claim that the resettlement sowed today's Donbas separatism.
Hennadii Yefimenko is a Ukrainian historian of the political and social history of Soviet Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century. He analyzed post-Holodomor rural resettlement as two waves, linking the state’s economic need to restore grain production with the large-scale return of settlers. His work treats population movement not as a simple story of ethnic change, but as a question in which rural labour and state rule were intertwined.
Career timeline
1989–1994Studied history at the Luhansk state pedagogical institute
1993–1997History teacher at a secondary school in Markivka
1997–2000Postgraduate study at the Institute of History of Ukraine
2001Defended a candidate dissertation on the VKP(b)'s national-cultural policy toward Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1938
2000–현재Researcher in the 1920s–1930s Ukrainian history department at the Institute of History of Ukraine
2013Published a district-level study systematizing data on the 1933–1934 resettlements in the post-famine years
Ukrainian otaman who took Odesa for the Reds, then turned to revolt and pogrom
Proclaiming revolt in his May 1919 Universaл, he cried: "Ukrainian people! Take power into your own hands. Let there be no dictatorship of any one man or any one party."
The Ukrainian otaman who took Odesa for the Soviets in the spring of 1919, he rose against them in May and his troops massacred Jews at Yelysavethrad and elsewhere. He was shot by Makhno's men in July.
Career timeline
1901–1907Volunteered for the imperial army, fought in the Russo-Japanese War, and won three Crosses of St George.
1914–1916Served as an officer on the Southwestern Front in World War I, rising to staff-captain.
1918Led peasant partisans in Kherson province against the Austro-German occupiers and the Hetmanate.
1918–1919Served as chief of the Kherson Division of the Ukrainian People's Republic (Directory).
1919-02Went over to the Red Army, commanding the 1st Zadniprovska Brigade and then the 6th Ukrainian Soviet Division, and took Odesa in April.
1919-05Led the Hryhoriv uprising against the Red Army in May.
