Appointed professor of history at Lviv University in 1894, Mykhailo Hrushevsky became a leading figure in the scholarly and cultural community of Western Ukraine. In 1918 in Kyiv, he became head of the government of the independent Ukrainian state. From 1924 to 1931, he organized historical studies at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. An extraordinarily prolific writer, he produced some 2,000 scholarly works.