The Directorate in Kiev

A British chronology of the war records the Directorate’s entry into Kiev under 20 December 1918. According to Ukrainian sources and the Kiev press of the time, the ceremony took place a day earlier, on 19 December. The republic’s troops had been in the city for five days already, since the fall of Skoropadskyi’s Hetmanate. The members of the Directorate, which for the past weeks had led the uprising from far away from the capital, arrived only now. Kiev’s Ukrainian organisations decided to turn their arrival into a great celebration. They set up a Committee for Welcoming the Directorate, which controlled all the preparations. An obstacle was the state of siege imposed during the night before 16 December by the chief of staff of the Siege Corps of the Sich Riflemen, Andriy Melnyk. It banned gatherings in the streets and ordered establishments to close at half past nine in the evening. Some of the bans were suspended for the day of the entry.

On 19 December the streets from the station to Sofia Square were decorated with flags, garlands and banners. Despite a snowstorm, delegations from offices, organisations and schools lined up along them from the morning. The train carrying the Directorate arrived at about two in the afternoon. On the platform the welcome was given to its chairman Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the Supreme Otaman Symon Petliura, Fedir Shvets and Opanas Andriievskyi (PL). Speeches were made by representatives of the Ukrainian National Union, the mayor of Kiev, the Jewish community and the diplomats who had still remained in the city, among them the Turkish, Bulgarian and Finnish envoys. The German command also came to the station. The members of the Directorate were offered bread and salt on silver trays. The leader of the Ukrainian National Union, Mykyta Shapoval, compared their arrival with Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s entry into Kiev in 1648.

From the station the celebration moved to Sofia Square, where units of every arm were drawn up: infantry, cavalry, artillery, machine guns and armoured cars. Clergy came out of St Sophia’s Cathedral and Bishop Agapit celebrated a service for the fallen and for the prosperity of the republic. Then came a rally. On behalf of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, founded by the hetman only a month earlier, its secretary Agatangel Krymsky spoke. He announced that in the Ukrainian People’s Republic science would be free and independent. Afterwards, at the Ukrainian National Club, Vynnychenko said that from that day social and political reforms must begin.

Behind the celebration lay tensions. The city was full of the hetman’s disarmed Russian officers. General Fyodor Keller, who had taken refuge in St Michael’s Monastery, according to Russian accounts had to surrender his sabre, which the commander of the Sich Riflemen, Yevhen Konovalets, later presented to Petliura. During the night before 21 December Keller and his two adjutants were shot by their escort at the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument, allegedly while trying to escape. Within the Directorate itself, the left-wing Vynnychenko quarrelled with Petliura, who relied on the army and its otamans.

On 26 December the Directorate issued a declaration of its programme. In it it revoked the hetman’s laws and announced the transfer of landowners’ land to the peasants and the convening of a Labour Congress (PL), elected by peasants, workers and the working intelligentsia. On the same day it appointed the government of Volodymyr Chekhivsky. On 22 January 1919, on the same Sofia Square, unification with the West Ukrainian People’s Republic was proclaimed. But as early as the beginning of February, under the pressure of the Bolshevik offensive, the Directorate had to leave Kiev and move to Vinnytsia.