The chairmen of the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian State were Mykola Illich Sakhno-Ustymovych (29–30 April 1918); Mykola Prokopovych Vasylenko (30 April–10 May 1918); Fedir Andriiovych Lyzohub (10 May–14 November 1918); and S. N. Gerbel′ (14 November–14 December 1918).
Ulagai, Sergei Georgievich (31 October 1875–20 March 1947). Colonel (1917), major general (12 November 1918), lieutenant general (1919). A controversial figure among the White military leadership, and probably best remembered for commanding the ill-fated effort to reestablish a White bridgehead in the Kuban during the summer of 1920, S. G. Ulagai was a graduate of the Voronezh Cadet Corps (1895) and the Nicholas Cavalry School (1897). He was a participant in the Russo–Japanese War and in the First World War rose, by 1917, to the command of the 2nd Zaporozhian Regiment of the Kuban Cossack Host (of which he had become a member through marriage, being born into a Cherkess family). He was arrested in September 1917, for complicity in the Kornilov affair, but escaped and made his way to the Kuban.
In the White movement, Ulagai served initially as an officer with a partisan detachment of the Kuban Cossacks (November 1917–January 1918) and was then a participant in the First Kuban (Ice) March, rising to command of the Kuban Cossack Infantry (Plastunskii) Battalion (May–July 1918) after the forces of the Kuban government had united with the Volunteer Army. After recovering from wounds, he then served as commander of the 2nd Kuban Cossack Division of the 2nd Army Corps of General V. P. Liakhov (22 July 1918–27 February 1919), contributing to the clearance of Red forces from the North Caucasus, and as commander of the 2nd Kuban Cossack Cavalry Corps that suffered defeats to Red forces around Rostov-on-Don (March–June 1919). From June to August 1919, he commanded a Cossack cavalry group of the Caucasian Army of General P. N. Wrangel at Tsaritsyn, before being hospitalized for illness. He returned to command the Composite Cavalry Group of Don and Kuban Cossacks in the Volunteer Army that suffered defeats in the Donbass and at Rostov (November–December 1919). In January 1920, he again fell ill with typhus, but again returned to service as commander of the remnants of the Kuban Army in the North Caucasus (29 February–13 April 1920). Together with his men, he was then evacuated to Crimea, where he was placed in the reserve of Wrangel’s Russian Army. Over the summer of 1920, he helped to plan and command the unsuccessful landing of Cossack forces along the coast of Kuban (sometimes termed “the Ulagai Landing”).
Evacuated back to Crimea as a general uprising in the Kuban failed to materialize and the operation collapsed, Ulagai was dismissed from the army by Wrangel and went into emigration in October 1920. He lived in Albania from 1920 to 1940, reportedly serving with the émigré Cossack group that helped bring King Zog to power and (from 1924) entering the ranks of the Albanian army. During the Second World War, he joined the collaborationist efforts of General P. N. Krasnov, seeking to raise Cossack forces in Yugoslavia and elsewhere to fight against the USSR in alliance with Nazi Germany, but (apparently because he had possession of full Albanian citizenship) he escaped extradition to Russia along with Krasnov and other Cossack émigré “victims of Yalta.” He moved to France, where he died at Marseille in 1947. On 22 January 1949, his remains were transferred to the cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, Paris.
Ulmanis, Kārlis (4 September 1877–20 September 1942). Kārlis Ulmanis, the first prime minister of independent Latvia, was born at Bērze, in Courland guberniia, and studied agronomy at universities in Switzerland and Germany before embarking on a career as a teacher and manager in a variety of agricultural institutions in his native province. He was arrested and imprisoned during the 1905 Revolution, and thereafter fled to the United States to escape persecution at the hands of the tsarist authorities. Having furthered his studies (and later taught) at the University of Nebraska, then opened a dairy business in Houston, he returned home following the amnesty declared by Nicholas II during the Romanovs’ tercentenary celebrations in 1913.
As the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917–1918, Ulmanis helped found the Latvian Farmers’ Union (one of the most powerful political forces in Latvia at the time); joined the Latvian People’s Council (Tautas Padome), which declared Latvian independence on 18 November 1918; and became prime minister of the Latvian republic (19 November 1918–18 June 1921) during the Latvian War of Independence. He was returned to that office on several occasions, as governments came and went in interwar Latvia, before in 1934 intervening with military assistance to partially suspend the constitution and establish an authoritarian dictatorship (the “Nationalist Dictatorship”) under his command. (Ostensibly, he moved to forestall a coup that had been planned by an extreme-Right organization, the “Legion.”) In 1936, he merged the offices of prime minister and president and began styling himself “Tautas Vadonis” (“Leader of the Nation”).
When the USSR invaded Latvia in June 1940, Ulmanis advised nonresistance, which added to the controversies surrounding his part in Latvian history. The following month (on 21 July 1940), he was arrested by the occupying Soviet authorities and was deported to Stavropol′, in Russia, where he was initially assigned to agricultural work before being imprisoned in July 1941. The following year, as invading German forces approached the North Caucasus, he was among prisoners evacuated across the Caspian Sea to Krasnovodsk, in Turkmenistan. He contracted dysentery and died soon after his arrival in Central Asia. Despite the controversy that surrounds a figure who imposed a dictatorship and ordered the passive surrender of his country to an invader, since 1989 Ulmanis has enjoyed some rehabilitation in independent Latvia. One of the major streets in Riga is named after him (K. Ulmaņa gatve), and in 2003 a monument of him was unveiled in a park at Bastejkalns, in the city center.
UNGERN VON STERNBERG, ROMAN FEDOROVICH (22 January 1886–15 September 1921). Sublieutenant (1908), esaul (1915), major general (1918), lieutenant general (1919). The “Bloody Baron” R. F. Ungern von Sternberg, one of the most notoriously cruel and violent characters of the civil wars and the personification of the Siberian atamanshchina, was born at Graz, Austria, as Robert Nicholas Maximillian von Ungern-Sternberg, but later changed his name. He was raised on the Estonian estates of his ancient Baltic German family, and even as a youth, he terrified and terrorized both his teachers and his classmates. He was expelled from the Revel (Tallinn) Gymnasium and later (February 1905) was withdrawn from the Naval Cadet Corps by his family, under threat of being cashiered, then served in the Far East as an ordinary soldier. After returning to European Russia and graduating from the Pavlovsk Military School (1908), he again served in Siberia, in the Argunsk Regiment of the Transbaikal Cossack Host. A wild, undisciplined character and a heavy drinker (remembered by P. N. Wrangel as “the type that is invaluable in wartime and impossible in times of peace”), he was expelled from the army in 1911, but not before, during a fight with a colleague, receiving a heavy saber blow to the head that may have left him mentally unbalanced. He then drifted around eastern Asia for some years, becoming attracted to the culture of the Mongols and studying Buddhism. (According to some sources, he joined the Mongolian forces that overthrew imperial Chinese rule in 1911.)