…Let history judge us; we will gladly accept the verdict, even a cruel verdict, as long as the free Ukrainian people in the Independent Ukrainian State deliver it.
Andriy Livytskyi
Andriy Livytskyi was a statesman and active political figure in Ukrainian state-building of the first half of the twentieth century, member of the Ukrainian Central Rada (Council), Prime Minister of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) government, Head of the UPR Directorate, and the first President of the UPR in exile.
The statesman was born on April 12, 1879, in Krasnyi Kut in Cherkasy region into a large family. The Livytskyi family was of Cossack origin. He got his secondary education at the Pryluky Gymnasium and the Pavlo Halahan Collegium and his higher education at the Law Faculty of St. Volodymyr Kyiv University. He had a law practise and at the same time, in 1901, Livytskyi co-created one of the first political parties in Ukraine, the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP), and from 1905, he was one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labour Party (USDLP).
Livytskyi actively participated in the state-building processes during the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921. He became a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada and was a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Brest-Litovsk negotiations (1918). After Pavlo Skoropadsky came to power, Livytskyi opposed Hetman’s government. When the UPR Directory came to power, he held several positions in the government: interim head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Minister of Justice, Deputy of the Rada of National Ministers of the UPR, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Head of the UPR diplomatic mission to Poland.
Since 1920, he had been in exile, which he considered a forced temporary step. He lived and worked in Warsaw. During 1922-1926, he headed the Ukrainian People’s Republic government. After Symon Petliura died in 1926, he led the Directorate of Ukraine and became the Chief Otaman of the UPR Army. Livytskyi tried to consolidate the scattered Ukrainian emigration and sought the support of Western countries. The statesman was the first president of the UPR in exile (1926-1954).
At the end of World War II, he moved to Germany, which in the early postwar years became a center of Ukrainian political emigration. In 1948, on the initiative of A. Livytskyi, the Ukrainian National Rada was created, which included representatives of Ukrainian political parties in exile.
А. Livytskyi died on January 17, 1954 in Karlsruhe (Germany). He was buried in the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich. He was re-buried in the Ukrainian cemetery of St. Andrew in Bound Brook (USA, 1965).
