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.
Activities and affiliations
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–현재Researcher 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–현재Joined the public history project Likbez
Related historical events
- 1917–1921Ukraine’s revolution and warsHistorian of Ukraine’s revolutionIn a 2012 collective volume, he covered Soviet Ukraine’s formation and the Bolsheviks’ attempt to take over Ukraine.
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation Faminescholar of the HolodomorHe analyzed the scale of rural resettlement in 1933-1934 Ukraine and the state's economic aims.
Research on the Ukrainian SSR's status and its relations with Soviet Russia, 1918-1920
Yefimenko's research does not stop at 1930s cultural and nationality policy. He treated the relationship between the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (USRR) and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) in 1917-1920, and the evolution of the former's state status, as a separate subject. After a candidate dissertation on the VKP(b)'s national-cultural policy toward Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1938, he widened his focus to the revolution and civil-war years.\n\nThe first result along the economic axis was his 2008 book, Relations between the Kremlin and Soviet Ukraine: The Economic Aspect (1917-1919). In 2012, under Stanislav Kulchytsky's editorship, he published The Status of the USRR and Its Relations with the RSFSR: The Long Year of 1920. Drawing on documentary sources, the author analyzed how the Ukrainian republic's state status evolved over the course of 1920 and how relations between the two republics developed.\n\nHe also contributed the same questions to collective volumes. In the 2012 Essays on the History of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 he covered the formation of Soviet Ukraine in 1917-1918 and the Bolsheviks' attempt to take over Ukraine, that is, the second attempt from late 1918 to August 1919. In a 2013 collective monograph he summarized the evolution of Ukrainian Soviet statehood in the period of the Soviet order's formation, 1917-1938.\n\nThese works connect to his 1930s research in that they treat Soviet Ukraine not merely as a recipient of Moscow's policy but as a field of negotiation and conflict over a constituent republic's powers and status. He framed this as a long process of the formation and subsequent narrowing of statehood.