Skoropadskyi proclaimed hetman

On 29 April 1918 a congress of landowners and well-to-do peasants, convened by landowners’ and conservative organisations, met in the Kiev circus. More than six thousand delegates from eight governorates attended. Speaker after speaker attacked the socialist policies of the Central Rada, and when General Pavlo Skoropadskyi appeared in the hall, it was proposed that he be proclaimed Hetman of Ukraine. The delegates rose and gave him an ovation. During the night the Hetman’s supporters seized the ministries and the state bank. The Ukrainian People’s Republic ceased to exist, and in its place arose the Ukrainian State, ruled by one man under the protection of German bayonets.

The Rada and its allies

German and Austro-Hungarian troops had come to Ukraine as allies of the Ukrainian Central Rada, which the Bolsheviks had driven out of Kiev in February. After its return to the capital, the Rada, chaired by the historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and the government of Vsevolod Holubovych quickly disappointed their protectors. The Germans and Austrians had come above all for the grain that Ukraine had promised to deliver in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the socialist government was unable to organise the deliveries. The Rada’s land law abolished private ownership of land and announced its distribution among the peasants, which in the eyes of the German commanders threatened chaos in the countryside and unsown fields.

On 6 April the commander of the German army group in Kiev, Field Marshal Hermann von Eichhorn, issued an order on the sowing of the fields. In it he accused the peasants of not sowing the land and instructed the German troops to see to the sowing, by force if necessary. The Rada regarded this as interference in the internal affairs of the state and protested on 13 April. On 18 April the German ambassador, Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein, reported to Berlin that cooperation with the present government was impossible. The Germans began looking for someone who would guarantee order and deliveries.

In the end the break was hastened by a criminal affair. On the night of 24–25 April the banker Abram Dobry, who sat on the financial commission handling settlements with the Central Powers, was kidnapped in Kiev. The investigation pointed to officials of the Ukrainian interior ministry. Eichhorn responded with an order placing crimes under the jurisdiction of German military courts. On 26 April the Germans disarmed the Ukrainian division of the Bluecoats (PL), formed from prisoners in German and Austrian camps, and on 28 April an armed German detachment burst into a session of the Rada and arrested several members of the government. According to most accounts two ministers were detained, and the interior minister, Mykhailo Tkachenko, escaped arrest only because he was not in the hall.

A general from a line of hetmans

Skoropadskyi was a figure who suited the Germans. Born in 1873 in Wiesbaden, he came from the family of the eighteenth-century Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky. He was a wealthy landowner from the Poltava region and a general of the Russian army. During the war he commanded a Guards cavalry division and the 34th Army Corps, which in 1917 he turned into the 1st Ukrainian Corps. According to contemporaries he was a man of old Russia who spoke Ukrainian poorly, although he took the Ukrainian cause seriously.

In mid-April he made contact with the German embassy, and at the end of the month he talked with Eichhorn’s chief of staff, General Wilhelm Groener. According to historians, the Germans set him conditions: recognition of the Brest peace, dissolution of the Rada and cancellation of the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, free export of grain and raw materials, German consent to the composition of the government and German determination of the size of the Ukrainian army. In return the Germans promised not to interfere in Ukraine’s internal affairs but not to allow disturbances in the streets.

The coup

After Skoropadskyi had been proclaimed Hetman, the delegates moved to the square in front of St Sophia Cathedral, where Bishop Nikodim held a service and anointed the new ruler. That same day the Rada met for the last time and adopted the constitution of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which never came into force. On the night of 29–30 April the Hetman’s supporters took over the buildings of the ministries of military affairs and the interior and the bank. On 30 April the Germans disarmed the Sich Riflemen, the Rada’s most loyal formation.

Skoropadskyi issued a “Charter to the Whole Ukrainian People” and a law on the provisional constitution of the state. It dissolved the Rada and its organs, repealed its laws, restored the right of property, including landed property, and concentrated all legislative and executive power in his hands until a parliament was elected. The state took the name Ukrainian State. Austria-Hungary and Germany welcomed the change with relief, and in the first days of May the Hetman appointed a government dominated by conservatives and men of the old Russian state apparatus.

Landowners, peasants and Poles

The coup was a victory for the landowners. In Right-Bank Ukraine, in the governorates of Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia, a large part of the estates belonged to Poles, who during the revolutionary year had lost them to peasant committees or been driven from them. The restoration of property opened the way for them to return to their manor houses, often escorted by the occupation troops. In the following months the Polish landowners became an influential group in the Hetman’s Kiev. According to Ukrainian historians it was largely their influence, alongside the German command, that blocked plans to parcel out the great estates until the autumn. Skoropadskyi himself wrote in his memoirs that on the land question he wanted to side neither with the left-wing demagogues nor with “our Russian and Polish lords”, who would accept no concessions.

The Ukrainian socialists regarded the coup as a counter-revolution. Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote that it had been carried out by impoverished landowners, thinned-out manufacturers, a bureaucracy pining for bribes and an insolent officer class. In the countryside revolts soon broke out against requisitions and the return of the squires, and on 30 July 1918 a Left Socialist Revolutionary killed Field Marshal Eichhorn in Kiev. The Hetmanate lasted exactly as long as the German presence in Ukraine. After the defeat of the Central Powers Skoropadskyi was overthrown, and on 14 December 1918 he renounced power.