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
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
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