the Turukhansky region. During this exile, he fled to the city of Krasnoyarsk, where he conducted the election campaign of the RSDLP to the Second State Duma of the Russian Empire. He was arrested and sent to Turukhansk, from which he soon escaped, having covered 1,200 versts, or an equivalent number of kilometers, by boat and on foot. In the summer of 1908, he went to Geneva in Switzerland for a month and a half. After his return, he worked as a party organizer and a member of the Central Bureau of Trade Unions in Moscow. He was arrested and spent three months in a Moscow prison. After his release, he worked as a district organizer, secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP(b), and was dispatched on a campaign trip to the Urals. At the end of 1908, he was arrested in St. Petersburg and exiled for five years to the Vilyuysky District of the Yakut region. He returned from exile at the end of 1913. In 1913 Skrypnyk was an editor of the Bolsheviks' legal magazine Issues of Insurance and in 1914 was a member of the editorial board of the Pravda newspaper, while also working for Iskra. He used the party pseudonyms Glasson, Peterburzhets, Valerian, H. Yermolaev, Shchur, and Schensky. In July 1914, he was arrested again, sentenced to administrative exile in the city of Morshansk, Tambov Governorate, where he worked as an accountant in a Morshanska bank. Russian Revolution After the February Revolution, Skrypnyk was amnestied by the Provisional Government and moved to Petrograd, as St. Petersburg was now known, where he was elected as a secretary of the Central Council of Factories Committees. During the October Revolution, Skrypnyk was a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. In December 1917, Skrypnyk was elected in absentia to the first Bolshevik government of Ukraine, the so-called People's Secretariat, in Kharkiv (Respublika Rad Ukrainy) as the People's Secretary of Labor. From February to March 1918, he was the People's Secretary of Trade and Industry of the Ukrainian People's Republic. On March 3, 1918 he was elected president of the Secretariat, replacing Yevhenia Bosch, daughter of a German immigrant, who had resigned in protest against the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. From March 8 to April 18, 1918, he also served as the People's Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The Soviet Ukrainian government, under the onslaught of German troops,