The Blood of Hetmans

In the spring of 1918, as the Russian Empire collapsed and the Ukrainian revolution consumed itself in factional violence, a former imperial general descended from the last Hetman of the Zaporozhian Host seized power in a single dramatic day - proclaimed before six thousand delegates at the Kyiv Circus, anointed in the thousand-year-old Cathedral of Saint Sophia, and installed in the Mariinsky Palace as Hetman of all Ukraine. Pavlo Skoropadsky ruled for seven and a half months. What he built in that time outlasted him by a century.

The Blood of Hetmans is the full narrative biography of one of the most complex and most misunderstood figures in Ukrainian history - a man formed by Cossack lineage and imperial military service, shaped by the Manchurian steppe and the court of Nicholas II, tested by four years of the Eastern Front, and then thrust into the center of the Ukrainian revolution at its most dangerous moment. Drawing on the full sweep of the historical record, Patrick Tulira traces Skoropadsky from the ancestral estate at Trostianets through the crisis of 1918 to the long decades of exile in Weimar and Nazi Germany - examining the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences he chartered, the political philosophy he helped create, and the alternative vision of Ukrainian statehood his career represents. For anyone seeking to understand what Ukraine is and how it came to be, Skoropadsky is impossible to ignore.