“Shemet Is One of the Main Organizers of The Hetman Movement Abroad…”

Serhiy Shemet, an attorney-in-fact and long-term personal secretary of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, has been repeatedly mentioned in the Intelligence’s archival documents on various cases. At the same time, only the case-form instituted against him in November 1943 by the 4th (Intelligence) Directorate of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR allows us to draw a holistic picture of his special role in the activities of the Hetman's Office in exile and to find the answer to the question why Hetman valued and was bringing him close to himself.

S. Shemet’s case contains documents dating back to the early 1930s. At that time he lived in P. Skoropadskyi’s villa near Berlin, was actively involved in organizing the work of the Hetman's Office and performed the Hetman’s various tasks. This was the main reason for the Soviet secret services to begin his covert cultivation.

One of the first documents attached to the case and dated 1933 is S. Shemet’s letter to a representative of some emigrant center in Czechoslovakia. It reads about the need to exchange information and consolidate efforts in the struggle against the USSR. “I am sure”, he writes, “that the consolidation of the capitalist West against the communist East will become a fact any day now, and our Hetman's group will play an important role in creating this situation” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 9789. - P. 3).

Besides, S. Shemet in the letter gives a detailed description of the Hetman movement from its beginning to activities in exile, highlighting the following sections: organization of work; press and publishing houses of the Hetman movement; hostile propaganda against the Hetman movement. Next to the mention in the text of the letter of the Hetman secret organizations in Soviet Ukraine, the Chief of the Foreign Department of the GPU of the USSR made a note in the margin that special attention should be paid to this.

This and other original materials collected by agents abroad, allowed the Chekists to formulate the following brief description: “Serhiy Shemet, chief of Skoropadskyi's Office and press, a member of the Ukrainian Union of Farmers- Statesmen. Former landowner in Lubny district, Poltava province, former owner of a cloth factory in Lubny. A chemical engineer by education. Lives a healthy lifestyle. Very devoted to Skoropadskyi and the idea of Hetmanate. He has a great authority in the Office and conducts the main work in it”. (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 9789. – P. 14).

There is no detailed biographical information about S. Shemet in the case. Already in modern times, domestic researchers have found a few of his photographs, and added some new information to the biography. According to it, Shemet Serhiy Mykhailovych was born on June 6, 1875 in the village of Oleksandrivka, Lubny district, Poltava region. He came from an ancient noble family Shemet-Kezhgailo, who always valued their Ukrainian national identity. He graduated from the Institute of Technology in St. Petersburg, where he led the Ukrainian student community. From 1902 he was a leading figure of the Ukrainian People's Party. In 1917 he became a co-founder of the Ukrainian Party of Farmers-Democrats. In April 1918 he was among the initiators of convening the Agricultural Congress, at which Pavlo Skoropadskyi was proclaimed Hetman of Ukraine. He persistently advocated the Ukrainization of the Hetman’s government. During his emigration, together with Vyacheslav Lypynskyi, he formed the ideology and organizational basis of the Hetman movement. He was co-editor of the magazine “Khliborobska Ukraina” and other Hetman publications. He lived in Tarnów, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris.

At the same time, this information was of no special significance for the GPU-NKVD-MGB officers. It was more important to know what tasks S. Shemet was receiving from P. Skoropadskyi, whom he was meeting, where he traveled. Therefore, such materials were mostly accumulated in the case. According to archival documents, in 1936 alone, S. Shemet made a number of trips to different European countries. For example, one of the reports states that he visited Warsaw, Lviv, Prague, where he met with Andriy Livytskyi, Yevhen Konovalets, Vasyl Mudryi and other prominent figures of the Ukrainian emigration.

Another special report of the Foreign Department of the NKVD of the USSR states: “On June 10, 1936, Hetman Skoropadskyi’s attorney-in-fact, engineer Shemet, arrived in Kovno from Berlin. Shemet was instructed by Skoropadskyi to visit Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria to get acquainted with the state of Ukrainian organizations in those countries, exchange information and instruct Hetman’s like-minded people in those countries. At the same time engineer Shemet had to clarify the possibility of uniting different Ukrainian organizations on a single platform for the struggle against the USSR” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 9789. – P. 29).

The document states that other people also went to Romania, France, England, Canada, the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia with similar tasks. By August 1, they were to return to Berlin and report on their trips. At the same time, it is reported that P. Skoropadskyi had a meeting with the head of the State Center of the UPR in exile A. Livytskyi, devoted to “finding a common platform for reaching an agreement on joint work between Hetman Skoropadskyi, his group and the UPR, as well as finding ways of reconciliation and joint activities with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)”.

Further, the case file states that the NKVD recorded the active correspondence between representatives of foreign Ukrainian organizations, in particular, S. Shemet's letter to the leader of the Ukrainian community in Kovno Mykola Forostenko was intercepted. It states that the purpose of all recent trips and meetings is to prepare for convening of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Ukrainian Emigrants and creating a “joint anti-Bolshevik front”.

Declassified documents from the archives of the Intelligence are another evidence that in the interwar years there were repeated attempts to unite the disparate circles of Ukrainian emigration, and that Hetman Skoropadskyi and his trusted man S. Shemet played an important role in the process.

Apart from this, S. Shemet was introduced by Hetman to other issues, including personal ones. Among the documents in the Branch State Archive of the SZR of Ukraine, there are letters written by him on behalf of P. Skoropadskyi to different Ukrainian figures, mainly - to Hetman’s son Danylo. They often begin with the following words: “Mr. Hetman instructed me to inform you that he had received your letters. He also instructed me to immediately answer some points…”

So S. Shemet was not just a leading figure of the Hetman movement in exile and a person close to the Hetman, he was like a member of the family. That is why he felt so deeply the death of P. Skoropadskyi, who was mortally wounded in April 1945 as a result of the bombing by Anglo-American aircraft and died shortly afterwards.

After the Second World War, Serhiy Shemet fell out of sight of the MGB for a while. It was soon established that he was in western zones of German occupation. In 1951, it was reported that he and his nephew Bohdan, a “Ukrainian nationalist and agronomist” lived in Paris. In the absence of operational opportunities for the covert cultivation, in 1953 the case was handed over to the archives.

Then S. Shemet moved to Australia without the invisible care of the Soviet secret services. There he was one of the founders of the Union of Ukrainian Organizations of Australia which was headed by his nephew Bogdan. S. Shemet died on May 5, 1957 and was buried in Melbourne.

Nowadays in Ukraine, he is given due respect as a person who in all periods of history actively worked for the Ukrainian cause, fought for unity in the ranks of Ukrainian emigrants and contributed to the revival of statehood.

In the photo: brothers Serhiy (left) and Mykola Shemets in Oleksandrivka, Lubny district (1910). The photo from the archive of V. Shemet (Yulikh, Germany)