Fall of the Hetmanate

On 14 December 1918 the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi came to an end. During the night and in the morning troops of the Directorate broke into Kiev, and Ukrainian fighting groups rose against the hetman in the city. In the afternoon Skoropadskyi signed a short act renouncing power and disappeared. After a month of the uprising that the Directorate had proclaimed in mid-November, the Ukrainian People’s Republic returned to power in the capital.

The siege of Kiev

By the end of November the hetman ruled only in Kiev and a few towns. In the provinces power was being taken over by the Directorate’s men and insurgent otamans. On the left bank of the Dnieper the Zaporozhian Division of Colonel Petro Bolbochan went over to the republic and took Kharkov and Poltava. The capital was defended mainly by Russian volunteer officers organised into druzhinas. Their commander, General Fyodor Keller, known for his hostility to Ukrainian statehood, was dismissed by Skoropadskyi on 26 November and replaced by General Prince Alexander Dolgorukov. Meanwhile some of the hetman’s Ukrainian units, including the Serdiuks of his guard, were going over to the insurgents.

Outside Kiev stood the Siege Corps of the Sich Riflemen under Colonel Yevhen Konovalets, with Andriy Melnyk as chief of staff. From the single regiment with which the uprising in Bila Tserkva had begun, it had grown to more than ten thousand men, and according to the Encyclopedia of Ukraine to about 25,000 by early December. It could not storm the capital, however, because German troops were still stationed in the city. According to Ukrainian historians, as late as early December the Germans repulsed an attack by the Directorate near Kiev. They did not want to settle the dispute over power, but neither did they intend to allow a showdown with the hetman’s men in the streets. Their units, already run by soldiers’ councils, thought only of returning to Germany. In the end the German command, seeing that the hetman had no support among the population, agreed with the Directorate that its troops would enter the capital in exchange for a peaceful evacuation of the German units.

14 December

During the night of 13–14 December the inhabitants of Kiev heard artillery and machine-gun fire. The Directorate’s forces were attacking from the direction of Zhuliany and Sviatoshyn, while in the city workers’ and soldiers’ fighting squads, directed by the staff of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Military Committee, took, according to Ukrainian accounts, Pechersk, Shuliavka, Lukianivka and the area of the railway station. In the morning the General Staff and the War Ministry fell into their hands. In the centre shops were closing and offices stopped work. Some of the hetman’s units sent envoys to the insurgents with assurances that they were coming over to their side.

Skoropadskyi wrote in his memoirs that only the day before Dolgorukov had assured him the city would hold for two days. In the morning he was woken by gunfire and reports that the defenders were withdrawing. He took his papers and drove to the Turkish envoy at the Hotel Palace. “The Arsenal taken, the War Ministry taken,” he recalled. He hesitated over whether to renounce power, but what tipped the balance was that machine guns could still be heard in the suburbs. He thought that somewhere honest men were fighting for him and would go on fighting until they learnt that they had been released from their oath. So he wrote an act that read:

To all, to all institutions of Ukraine. To all military units and institutions. I, Hetman of all Ukraine, for seven and a half months have devoted all my strength to leading the country out of the grave situation in which it found itself. God did not give me the strength to accomplish this task. Today, in view of the circumstances that have arisen, guided solely by the good of Ukraine, I renounce power.

The hetman’s Council of Ministers, headed since mid-November by Serhiy Gerbel (PL), handed power to the Directorate. According to Ukrainian accounts, in the evening the Ukrainian revolutionary committee set up a Council of Commissars as the provisional authority in Kiev until the members of the Directorate arrived. The commissars took charge of the ministries and released several hundred political prisoners from Kiev’s prisons. That same evening the Kiev city council met again. The main force of the Sich Riflemen, according to the press of the day more than 15,000 men, entered the city with Konovalets’s staff on the morning of 15 December.

The officers and the hetman

The Russian officers fared worst in the fall of the Hetmanate. Some of them were still fighting. According to Russian accounts, General Keller with a detachment of about thirty men tried to break through along the Khreshchatyk, but in the face of the enemy’s superiority took refuge in St Michael’s Monastery after dismissing his subordinates. Most of the officers laid down their arms. According to Ukrainian sources nearly two thousand of them were gathered in the building of the Pedagogical Museum on Volodymyrska Street, where, disarmed, they awaited their fate for several weeks. Those days were later described by Mikhail Bulgakov, who was living in Kiev at the time, in his novel The White Guard. He portrayed in it, with bitterness, the officers abandoned by the hetman and the Germans.

Skoropadskyi himself, according to accounts disguised in a German uniform, hid in Kiev for some time and then, under the protection of the withdrawing Germans, left Ukraine on a hospital train. He settled in Germany, eventually in Wannsee near Berlin. In exile he stressed that he had renounced power but not the title of hetman, and he became the leader of the Ukrainian monarchist movement.

A hetman without a state

The Hetmanate fell because from the outset it had rested on German bayonets. After Germany’s defeat Skoropadskyi tried to save himself with the federation charter (hramota) of 14 November, which was meant to win him the Entente and the Russian Whites. It pushed the Ukrainian countryside and the Ukrainian parties away from him, however, and his only defenders became men to whom an independent Ukraine was alien. The peasants did not receive the promised land reform, and to them the hetman’s administration meant the return of the landlords and German requisitions. Ukrainian historians point out, however, that the Hetmanate left behind lasting institutions, including the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, universities and a national library. For the Polish landowners of Right-bank Ukraine, whose estates the hetman had restored in April, his fall meant the end of that protection.

The Directorate’s victory was fragile. The reborn republic had neither a proper army nor the support of the Allies, whose ships were already in the Black Sea. Since the end of November the Bolshevik Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government of Ukraine had stood on the northern border, with the Red Army behind it. In the west the Galician Ukrainians were fighting the Poles for Lviv. A few days later the Directorate was to make a ceremonial entry into Kiev, but by early February 1919 it had to abandon the city to the Bolsheviks.