People of the Revolution and the USSR

Mykhailo Hrushevsky

Михайло Грушевський
Ukraine Ukraine 1866–1934 ○ Died

Historian who wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, and chairman of the Central Rada

In March 1917 the Central Rada elected him chairman in absentia while he was still in exile in Moscow, and his return raised hope for uniting the democratic forces.

The historian whose History of Ukraine-Rus wrote Ukraine as a distinct historical subject, he chaired the Central Rada in 1917 and 1918. He returned to Soviet Ukraine in 1924 and died under surveillance in 1934.

Career timeline
  • 1890Graduated Kyiv University, gold medal for graduation thesis
  • 1894Professor of history at Lviv University
  • 1897Chairman of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (1897–1913)
  • 1917Chairman of the Central Rada (1917–1918), elected in absentia
  • 1919Founded the Ukrainian Sociological Institute in Vienna
  • 1924Returned to Soviet Ukraine, academician of VUAN
  • 1929Full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
  • 1931Arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity

Vasyl Marochko

Василь Марочко
Ukraine Ukrainian 1956–

A historian of the Holodomor’s mechanisms and memory

In 2009 he urged keeping, not toppling, monuments to the communist figures behind the Holodomor, setting a 'black board' beside each reading that its subject created the Holodomor and that his policy was criminal.

Vasyl Marochko is a Ukrainian historian whose work examines the countryside of the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor. He treats the famine not as an abstract disaster but as the outcome of state policies combining grain requisitioning with control over rural society. His calculation that blacklisting covered 252 of the Ukrainian SSR’s 405 districts shows the scale at which food deprivation and administrative isolation were imposed on peasants.

Career timeline
  • 1981–1995Postgraduate student and researcher, Institute of History of Ukraine
  • 1985Earned a candidate of historical sciences degree with a dissertation on the Soviet way of life in Ukraine’s collective-farm countryside
  • 1996Defended a doctoral dissertation on Ukrainian peasant cooperatives
  • 1996Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
  • 2008–2015Head of the Association of Holodomor Researchers in Ukraine
  • 2013–Professor of Ukrainian history
  • 2022Leading researcher, Holodomor Research Institute, National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide

Hennadii Hryhorovych Yefimenko

Геннадій Григорович Єфіменко
Ukraine Ukrainian 1971–

A historian of state and society in Soviet Ukraine

Using records from his native Markivka, where 329 of 401 resettled Russian families returned within a year, he rebutted as baseless myth the claim that the resettlement sowed today's Donbas separatism.

Hennadii Yefimenko is a Ukrainian historian of the political and social history of Soviet Ukraine in the first half of the twentieth century. He analyzed post-Holodomor rural resettlement as two waves, linking the state’s economic need to restore grain production with the large-scale return of settlers. His work treats population movement not as a simple story of ethnic change, but as a question in which rural labour and state rule were intertwined.

Career timeline
  • 1989–1994Studied history at the Luhansk state pedagogical institute
  • 1993–1997History teacher at a secondary school in Markivka
  • 1997–2000Postgraduate study at the Institute of History of Ukraine
  • 2001Defended a candidate dissertation on the VKP(b)'s national-cultural policy toward Soviet Ukraine, 1932–1938
  • 2000–presentResearcher in the 1920s–1930s Ukrainian history department at the Institute of History of Ukraine
  • 2013Published a district-level study systematizing data on the 1933–1934 resettlements in the post-famine years
  • 2014–presentJoined the public history project Likbez