Apostol, Petro

Apostol, Petro, ?-1758. Son of Hetman Danylo Apostol, colonel of the Lubny regiment (1728–57); educated in Saint Petersburg. From 1726 to 1730 he was held hostage in Moscow by the Russian government as a means of exerting control over the politics of his father, the hetman of Ukraine. One of the most cultured figures of the Hetman period, Petro Apostol knew French, German, and Italian. His diary of 1725–7 was written in French. In 1895 Oleksander Lazarevsky published the Russian translation of it in Kievskaia starina (no. 7–8). The diary contains notes on Ukraine's past, interesting data about the events of 1725–7, and information on the socioeconomic history of Left-Bank Ukraine.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]