In response to this situation the Rada signed a separate peace with the Central Powers. German and Austrian units aided nationalist units led by Petlyura, Skoropadskya and others to drive back the Reds. The battles were fought primarily for control of railway lines and stations (armoured trains and cavalry units being of main strategic importance in this kind of warfare). By August 1918 there were some thirty-five Central Powers divisions in the Ukraine and they were acting as an occupying army, dictating policy to the Rada which did its best to resist Austro-Hungarian and German demands (principally for grain to feed its fighting armies). In April, the German commander, Field Marshal Eichborn, began to issue decrees without reference to the Rada. The Rada was all but powerless and lost its popular support to the more right-wing Socialist-Federalist party. On April 25, Eichborn issued an order making Ukrainians subject to German military tribunals for offences against German interests. He went on to order the disarmament of Ukrainian units and, when the Rada complained, sent a German detachment into the Rada building in Kiev to arrest two ministers. A day later Hrushevsky was elected President of the Republic but was ousted immediately in a coup d’état, supported by Germans and right-wing elements, led by Skoropadskya who proclaimed himself ‘Hetman of the Ukraine’ - another romantic Cossack title, designed to appeal to those who nostalgically identified Ukrainian freedom with the old Cossack uprisings. Skoropadskya was a German puppet who willingly aided their efforts to put down dissident elements, allowing the ruthless German military police units full rein. Resistance to his regime and the German occupying forces was carried on most successfully by Petlyura on the one hand and, most dramatically, by Nestor Makhno, the Anarchist-Socialist, whose exploits were so daring and so cleverly-organised that he was popularly considered to be the ‘Robin Hood’ of Southern Ukraine. Skoropadskya’s ‘Hetmanate’ seemed an ideal refuge for thousands of Russians fleeing, for one reason or another, the Bolsheviks. Kiev and Odessa became, in particular, centres of bourgeois and aristocratic opposition to any form of radicalism or nationalism. These cities, along with most of the Ukraine’s other industrial cities, had large ‘non-Ukrainian’ populations (primarily Russians and Jews). The pogroms became worse. Skoropadskya introduced grandiose elements into his regime, clothing his soldiers in elaborate nineteenth-century uniforms and making increasingly pompous and empty decrees. His support came entirely from extreme right-wing Russian interests and from the occupying forces, though many of the old Rada ministers continued to hold office so long as they did not act against German interests. The Union of Representatives of Industry, Commerce, Finance and Agriculture (
