Petliura, Symon

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Petliura, Symon

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Petliura, Symon [Петлюра, Симон; Petljura]

(pseuds: В. Марченко, В. Салевський, І.
Рокитни, С. Просвітянин, О. Ряст; V.
Marchenko, V. Salevsky, I. Rokytny, S.
Prosvitianyn, O. Riast), b 10 May 1879 in
Poltava, d 25 May 1926 in Paris. Statesman
and publicist; supreme commander of the

Army of the Ukrainian National Republic

and president of the Directory of the
Ukrainian National Republic. He entered the
Poltava Theological Seminary in 1895 but was

expelled in 1901 for belonging to a

clandestine Ukrainian hromada (see
Hromadas), which he had joined in 1898.
From 1900 he was also active in a political cell in Poltava that became the
nucleus of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party (RUP). To avoid arrest he

moved in the autumn of 1902 to Katerynodar, in the Kuban, where he worked

as a teacher and then, under the supervision of Fedir Shcherbyna, cataloged
the archives of the Kuban Cossack Army. For his involvement in Katerynodar
in the local RUP branch (the Black Sea Free Hromada) and in RUP periodicals
(notably Dobra novyna) published in Austrian-ruled Lviv, he was arrested in

December 1903. After being released on bail in March 1904, he went to Kyiv
and from there, in the autumn, to Lviv to do RUP work and to edit its
monthly Selianyn. In 1905, after the general amnesty, he returned to Kyiv. In
January 1906 he left for Saint Petersburg to edit, with Prokip Poniatenko and
Mykola Porsh, the social democratic monthly Vil’na Ukraïna (Saint

Petersburg). After returning to Kyiv in July 1906, he worked as secretary of

the newspaper Rada (Kyiv), coedited (in 1907–8) Slovo (Kyiv), the organ of
the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party, and contributed to the

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Petliura, Symon

monthly Ukraïna (1907). In 1909 he moved to Moscow and worked there as a

bookkeeper until 1912, when he became coeditor, with Oleksander

Salikovsky, of the Russian-language monthly Ukrainskaia zhizn’ (1912–17). In
1916 and until the beginning of 1917 he was deputy plenipotentiary of the All-
Russian Union of Zemstvos aid committee on the Russian western front.

After the February Revolution of 1917 Petliura was elected head of the
Ukrainian Military Committee of the Western Front. He was sent as a
delegate to the First All-Ukrainian Military Congress (18–21 May 1917; see All-
Ukrainian military congresses) in Kyiv, where he was elected chairman of the

Ukrainian General Military Committee. In June 1917 he was appointed general

secretary of military affairs in the first General Secretariat of the Central
Rada, and directed all his energies to organizing and building up the
Ukrainian armed forces, while facing opposition from certain members of the
Central Rada as well as open and active hostility from Russian circles. In late
1917, disagreeing with the policies of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the chairman
of the General Secretariat, Petliura resigned and went to Left-Bank Ukraine.
There he organized and commanded the Haidamaka Battalion of Slobidska

Ukraine, a military formation that played a decisive role in the January–

February 1918 battles for Kyiv and suppression of the Arsenal uprising there.

After Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky's coup in April 1918, Petliura headed the
Kyiv Gubernial Zemstvo and All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos. He was

arrested by the Hetman government in July 1918 but was released after four
months, and went to Bila Tserkva. There he took part in the popular uprising
against Skoropadsky's regime and was then elected a member of the
Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic and supreme otaman of the
Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. On 11 February 1919, after the army's retreat
from Kyiv and Volodymyr Vynnychenko's flight abroad, Petliura succeeded him as
president of the Directory and resigned from the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers'
party. In the difficult conditions of the next 10 months he commanded the UNR Army and
later joint UNR Army and Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA) against the Red Army and
Volunteer Army (see Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21). On 5 December 1919, surrounded by
the enemy and faced with certain defeat after the UHA established a separate alliance with
the Volunteer Army, Petliura and some members of his government fled Ukraine and made
for Warsaw in the hope of finding support and allies there. In the meantime Petliura ordered
the UNR Army to begin the First Winter Campaign.

After the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw in April 1920, the UNR Army under Petliura's
command and its Polish military ally mounted an offensive against the Bolshevik occupation
in Ukraine. The joint forces took Kyiv on 7 May 1920 but were forced to retreat in June.
Petliura’s army fought alongside the Polish forces in the Polish-Soviet war that resulted in

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Petliura, Symon

turning back the Red Army at Warsaw in August 1920. Poland and Soviet Russia concluded
an armistice in October 1920, and in November the major UNR Army formations were forced
to retreat across the Zbruch River into Polish-held territory and to submit to internment (see
Internment camps). Petliura and his government resided temporarily in Tarnów. Later
Petliura moved to Warsaw under an assumed name. In late 1923, faced with increased Soviet
demands that Poland hand him over, he was forced to leave for Budapest. From there he
went to Vienna and Geneva, and in late 1924 he settled in Paris. There he founded the
weekly Tryzub and oversaw the activities of the Government-in-exile of the Ukrainian
National Republic until his assassination by a Bessarabian Jew (Shalom Schwartzbard)
claiming vengeance for Petliura's purported responsibility for the pogroms in Ukraine (see
Schwartzbard Trial). He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

Petliura debuted as a publicist in 1902 in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk. There and in the

periodicals he edited he published many articles on political, civic, and cultural affairs,
particularly on the question of Ukraine's national liberation. His articles had a discernible
impact on the formation of Ukrainian national consciousness before the Revolution of 1917.
As an émigré in Poland Petliura wrote a brochure on contemporary Ukrainian émigrés and
their responsibility (1923). In Tryzub he wrote mainly about the 1917–21 attempts at Ukrainian
nation building, the responsibility of émigrés, and Ukraine under Bolshevik rule.

The entire 1917–21 period of struggle for Ukrainian statehood is indissolubly linked with
Petliura. As a publicist, politician, and military leader he was uncompromising on the issue of
Ukrainian independence. Petliura's broad outlook was particularly evident in his definition of
the tasks of Ukrainian émigrés and their role in the struggle for Ukrainian statehood. Despite
the initially negative, if not openly hostile, attitudes of certain émigré (particularly Western
Ukrainian) circles to Petliura because of his central role in the Treaty of Warsaw and the
Ukrainian-Polish alliance, since the mid-1920s he has personified, perhaps more than any
other person, the Struggle for Independence (1917–20). The personification seemingly also
extends to the issue of the pogroms that took place in Ukraine during the revolutionary
period of 1918–20, and Petliura has frequently been invested with the responsibility for those
acts. Petliura's own personal convictions render such responsibility highly unlikely, and all
the documentary evidence indicates that he consistently made efforts to stem pogrom activity
by UNR troops. The Russian and Soviet authorities also made Petliura a symbol of Ukrainian
efforts at independence, although in their rendition he was a traitor to the Ukrainian people,
and his followers (Petliurites) were unprincipled opportunists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Documents sur les pogromes en Ukraine et l'assassinat de Simon Petlura à Paris (Paris 1927)
Zbirnyk pam'iaty Symona Petliury (1879–1926) (Prague 1930)
Lotots’kyi, O. Symon Petliura (Warsaw 1936)
Zhuk, A. (ed). Symon Petliura v molodosti: Zbirka spomyniv (Lviv 1936)
Ivanys, V. Symon Petliura—prezydent Ukraïny, 1879–1926 (Toronto 1952)
Symon Petliura: Statti, lysty, dokumenty, 3 vols (New York 1956, 1979; Kyiv 1999)
Pidhainy, O. Symon Petlura: A Bibliography (Toronto and New York 1977)
Hunczak, T. Symon Petliura and the Jews: A Reappraisal (Toronto and Munich 1985)

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Petliura, Symon

Mark, R. ‘Symon Petljura und die UNR: Vom Sturz des Hetmans Skoropadśkyj bis zum Exil
in Polen,’ Forschungen zur Osteuropäischen Geschichte, 40 (Berlin 1988)
Klymchuk, O. (ed). Symon Petliura: Statti (Kyiv 1993)
Holota, L. (ed). Symon Petliura: Vybrani tvory ta dokumenty (Kyiv 1994)
Palij, M. The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919–1921: An Aspect of the Ukrainian
Revolution (Edmonton–Toronto 1995)
Mykhal’chuk, V.; Stepovyk, D. (eds). U 70-richchia paryz’koï trahediï, 1926–1996 (Kyiv 1997)
Abramson, Henry. A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times,
1917–1920 (Cambridge, Mass. 1999)
Lytvyn, S. Symon Petliura u 1917–1926 rokakh: Istoriohrafiia ta dzherela (Kyiv 2000)
———. Sud istoriï: Symon Petliura i Petliuriana (Kyiv 2001)
Serhiichuk, V. et al (eds). Symon Petliura: Nevidomi lysty z Paryzha iak politychnyi zapovit
bortsiam za samostiinu Ukraïnu (Kyiv 2001)
Kuchabsky, V. Western Ukraine in Conflict with Poland and Bolshevism, 1918–1923
(Edmonton–Toronto 2009)

Taras Hunczak

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]

List of related links from Encyclopedia of Ukraine pointing to Petliura, Symon entry:

1 All-Ukrainian Council of Military Deputies

2 All-Ukrainian military congresses

3 All-Ukrainian Union of Zemstvos

4 Army of the Ukrainian National Republic
5 Arsenal

6 Bila Tserkva
7 Burghers
8 Council of National Ministers of the Ukrainian National Republic

9 Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic

10 Donets, Mykhailo
11 First World War

12 Freemasonry
13 General Secretariat of the Central Rada

14 Government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic

15 Haidamaka Battalion of Slobidska Ukraine

16 History of the Ukrainian church

17 History of Ukraine
18 Hurtuimosia
19 Józewski, Henryk

20 Konovalets, Yevhen

+ 20 Records >>

A referral to this page is found in 62 entries.

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Petliura, Symon

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