People of the Revolution and the USSR

Ukrainian State (Hetmanate) state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1873–1945 ○ Died

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.

Ukrainian People's Republic state institutions Counter-revolutionary forces 1891–1938 ✕ Assassinated

Ukrainian nationalist leader who commanded the Sich Riflemen and built the UVO and OUN

Rotterdam, 23 May 1938: a Ukrainian-style box of chocolates handed over by his trusted contact Pavel Sudoplatov concealed a time bomb made in Moscow.

A Ukrainian military and political leader from Zashkiv in Austrian Galicia. After captivity in Russia during the First World War, he organized the Sich Riflemen in Kyiv in 1917 and became a leading commander of the Army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. Following defeat in the independence war, he led the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in exile and united several nationalist groups into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Vienna in 1929, becoming its first leader. He connected émigré organizations across Europe and North America and sought international support for Ukrainian independence, but was assassinated in Rotterdam in 1938 by a bomb delivered by NKVD operative Pavel Sudoplatov, who had infiltrated the OUN. In 1929 he obtained Lithuanian citizenship and a passport, giving his émigré activity a legal basis, while his national and political identity and the aim of his movement remained consistently Ukrainian independence.