Tag: soviet union

‘…Kiev had a peculiar mentality. Only some twenty years before it had been occupied in quick succession by the Germans and Austrian armies, who had put up a puppet ruler, Hetman Skoropadsky, at the head of the Ukrainian “state”, by Ukrainian nationalists under Petlura, by Reds, Whites and Reds again and, for a short time, in 1920, even by Pilsudski’s Poles. Older people may have remembered that the German-Austrian occupation of 1918 had not been as terrible as all that.’