Ukrainian State (Hetmanate)
우크라이나국 (헤트만국)
The state Pavlo Skoropadsky ruled as "Hetman of all Ukraine" after overthrowing the Central Rada on 29 April 1918 with the backing of the German occupiers. Because it borrowed the title of the 17th-century Cossack state it is also called the Hetmanate. Relying on large landowners and industrialists, it rebuilt a working bureaucracy, but German and Austrian grain requisitioning and the failure of land reform turned the peasants against it, and after the Central Powers lost the war it fell to the Directorate's uprising on 14 December.
In depth
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk brought German and Austrian troops into Ukraine, but the Rada government could not deliver the grain and raw materials it had promised. On 29 April a congress of landowners in Kyiv proclaimed the former imperial general Skoropadsky hetman, and the Ukrainian People's Republic was replaced by the "Ukrainian State". The Hetman's government built a functioning bureaucracy and opened new universities in Kyiv, Kamianets-Podilskyi and Katerynoslav, but it abolished the Rada's land reform and land committees and restored landed property, which met with peasant uprisings. Its perceived support for the often violent German and Austrian grain extraction and an ethnic policy seen as too Russophile fed popular discontent, while the socialist parties went underground or into opposition. When the Central Powers were defeated in November 1918 Skoropadsky issued a charter on 14 November promising federation with a future non-Bolshevik Russia, and that night the Directorate, Petliura among its leaders, launched the Anti-Hetman Uprising. On 14 December Skoropadsky signed his abdication and left Kyiv with the Germans.