Symon Petliura - Life Before The Revolution

Life Before The Revolution

Petliura was born on May 10, 1879, in a suburb of Poltava, Ukraine, the son of Vasyl Petliura and Olha (née Marchenko), of Cossack class. Cossack, as opposed to peasant heritage, allowed certain privileges regarding land ownership, taxes and access to education in the Russian Empire, of which most of Ukraine was then part. Petliura's initial education was obtained in parochial schools, and he planned to become an Orthodox priest.

During his years 1895 - 1901 in the Russian Orthodox Seminary in Poltava, Petliura joined the Ukrainian Revolutionary Party (RUP) in 1898. When his membership in RUP was discovered in 1901, he was expelled from the seminary. In 1902, under threat of arrest, he moved to Yekaterinodar in the Kuban where he worked for 2 years initially as a schoolteacher and later in the archives of the Kuban Cossack Host where he helped organize over 200 thousand documents. In December 1903, he was arrested for organizing a RUP branch in Yekaterinodar and for publishing inflammatory anti-tsarist articles in the Ukrainian press outside of Imperial Russia. He was released in March 1904, moving briefly to Kiev and then emigrating to the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In Lviv, Petliura lived under the name of Sviatoslav Tagon working alongside Ivan Franko, Volodymyr Hnatiuk publishing and working as an editor for the "Literaturno-Naukovy Zbirnyk" Journal (Literary-Scientific Collection), the Shevchenko Scientific Society and as a co-editor of "Volya" magazine. He contributed numerous articles to the Ukrainian language press in Galicia.

At the end of 1905, after amnesty was declared, Petliura returned briefly to Kiev but soon moved to the Russian capital of Petersburg in order to publish the socialist-democratic monthly magazine Vil’na Ukrayina (Free Ukraine). After Russian censors closed this magazine in July 1905, he moved back to Kiev where he worked for the magazine Rada (Council). In 1907–09 he became the editor of the literary magazine Slovo (Word) and co-editor of Ukrayina (Ukraine).

Because of the closure of these publications by the Russian Imperial authorities, Petliura was forced to once again move from Kiev to Moscow in 1909, where he worked briefly as an accountant. There, he married Olha Bilska (1885–1959), with whom he had a daughter, Lesia (1911–42). From 1912 he was a co-editor of the influential Russian-language journal Ukrainskaya zhizn’ (Ukrainian life) until May 1917.