Historians, much like lawyers, observe the eternally valid fundamental principle, which every truly objective researcher must place at the core of his studies of our unfathomed, contradictory, and unpredictable past: before passing judgment, hear out all the facts. This is necessary both for ethical considerations (for those for whom justice is not an empty word) and the pressing need for a panoramic, colorful, dramatic, and “unretouched” picture of Ukrainian history.
Pavlo Skoropadsky, Hetman of Ukraine from April to December 1918, is one of those Ukrainian political leaders of the 20 th century who have yet to be given an opportunity to plead their case in this make-believe “court hearing” of this nation’s former leaders. Soviet historiography painted Skoropadsky mostly in dark colors as “a German marionette that held on to power only thanks to the Kaiser’s troops,” “a designated representative of large Ukrainian landowners and German latifundists, who wanted to overrun Ukraine,” “an operetta dictator,” and, of course, “a bourgeois nationalist.”
Can we say today that all these accusations, no matter how remote they are from the historical truth, are absolutely groundless? Or perhaps Pavlo Skoropadsky was no national hero, marionette, or traitor? Perhaps he was more complex and completely different? It is impossible to answer these questions unless we give the floor to the “Hetman of all Ukraine” himself. He speaks through his book Spohady [Memoirs], which has long been known in the West, but unfortunately not duly evaluated in Ukraine.
Without a doubt, Spohady, much like any other memoir, can be used as a historical source only with certain significant reservations. First, Skoropadsky wrote his memoirs in the immediate wake of the tragic historical events. He began this work in Berlin on Jan. 5, 1919, and completed it the following May: in four months. Second, it is obvious that Skoropadsky’s assessments and his selection of facts mentioned in his memoirs, as well as his interpretations of these facts, could not have been unaffected by his political views, which were a natural product of a specific historical era.
Naturally, historians will analyze his memoirs critically. If this is done, Spohady can expand our knowledge of the tragic period of the Central Rada, the Hetmanate, and the Directory, which in many ways played a decisive role in Ukrainian statehood. As Skoropadsky wrote, “Perhaps future historians researching the revolution will find my notes helpful. I ask them to believe that everything recorded by me is true, i.e., I will present things according to how I saw the situation at the time. Meanwhile, the future will tell whether I thought correctly.”
Who was Pavlo Petrovych Skoropadsky? What were his ambitions, and his vision of Ukraine’s present and future? Skoropadsky was a descendant of an ancient Cossack family. His ancestor Ivan Skoropadsky was Ukraine’s hetman from 1708 to 1722. The Skoropadsky family tree includes many famous Ukrainian military and civic leaders. It is worth mentioning that in his poem “P.S.” Taras Shevchenko addresses a representative of the Skoropadsky family and calls him “a descendant of a foolish hetman” and “an overzealous patriot.”
For our purposes it is more important to note that at the time when the course of history (or was it the course of changeable circumstances?) made Pavlo Skoropadsky Ukraine’s hetman, he was a man of two cultures: Russian and Ukrainian. Most tellingly, he wrote his memoirs in the Russian language.
Skoropadsky’s views and political practice could not have been unaffected by his apparently sincere and unfeigned loyalty of many years to the tsar. The future hetman was a general in the Russian army and commanded His Imperial Highness’s 34 th Corps. During his military service he got to know Marshal Mannerheim, another, more successful, “independentist,” who eventually became the president of Finland.
At the same time, Skoropadsky’s father and grandfather were staunch Ukrainian patriots. Contemporaries recall that their family revered Hetman Ivan Mazepa and even had a portrait of him in their house. This is interesting if you recall that in 1708, on orders from Peter I and under threat execution, Ivan Skoropadsky was forced to rectify the consequences of Mazepa’s “betrayal.”
In brief, we are dealing with the phenomenon of “dual patriotism,” which proved literally fatal for the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian history. Ukraine’s past is filled with patriots, who loved Ukraine in their own special way: from Bezborodko and Troshchynsky to Shelest and Shcherbytsky. The trouble is that these politicians did not serve Ukraine, but another country, while their patriotism bore no features of national statehood, but was merely a territorial patriotism. Thus, we can fully understand Skoropadsky by considering his activities within this historical context.
Hetman Skoropadsky is still accused of “groveling” before Kaiser’s Germany. It would be wrong to say that these accusations are absolutely groundless. The fact is that the government of Wilhelm II, who long before Skoropadsky considered Ukraine a zone of his “vital interests,” received broad and unprecedented possibilities to “exploit the economic resources” of Ukraine or, to put it plainly, loot it, and the German government did so with the hetman’s tacit approval and often absolutely conscious support. In 1918 the Germans in Ukraine instituted an occupational and repressive regime with all the resulting consequences, and the hetman was unquestionably responsible for this.
However, for the sake of objectivity we must not forget about other significant circumstances that Skoropadsky points out issult of which Skoropadsky became hetman.) Second, despite Germany’s military presence, Skoropadsky managed to Ukrainize many important spheres of social and cultural life: education, scholarship (with his order of Nov. 27, 1918, the hetman created the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences), book publishing, and theater. Interestingly enough, for some time during the fall of 1918, the German military administration even insisted on the Ukrainization of Skoropadsky’s government and policies.
Finally, we must bear in mind the complex balance of forces of the two warring military and political blocs — the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France, and the US). In his memoirs Skoropadsky openly admits that before 1918 he was not a political supporter of Germany and knew little about this country, while his attitude toward Wilhelm II was determined by one decisive factor: the Russian emperor’s army, in which Skoropadsky used to serve, was at war with Germany.
The hetman notes in his memoirs that after his rise to power he was betting, not openly of course, on the victory of the English-French-American coalition. However, as early as Jan. 22, 1918, the high-ranking French military representative, General Georges Tabouis, stated quite openly in a conversation with him: “The Entente will never recognize Ukraine’s independence.” In dotting all the i’s, we must clearly state that this position of the Western powers was fatal to the future of Ukraine’s independence, impartial historians are thus not inclined to idealize their policies.
In concluding this brief analysis of Pavlo Skoropadsky’s memoirs, I must note that this work reflects the hetman’s constant political vacillations between Ukrainian patriotism (“territorial”) and the infamous decree that was issued on Nov. 14, 1918, proclaiming Ukraine’s federation with Russia. Yet all these vacillations can hardly be explained by the mistakes of Skoropadsky alone. This problem runs much deeper.
To this day a large part of the ruling political class in Ukraine, much like Skoropadsky, consciously or unconsciously upholds the same positions of “territorial” or “dual” Ukrainian-Russian patriotism. Therefore, Skoropadsky’s memoirs are both edifying and absolutely relevant today.
