Tiutiunnyk, Yurii

Tiutiunnyk, Yurii [Тютюнник, Юрій; Tjutjunnyk, Jurij], b 20 April 1891 in Budyshcha, Hlukhiv county, Chernihiv gubernia, d (executed) 20 October 1930 in Moscow. Senior officer in the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. In 1917 he organized Ukrainian military units in Simferopol and Zvenyhorodka. He was a member of the Central Rada and chairman of the Kyiv Revolutionary Committee, which prepared the uprising against the Hetman government. From February 1919 he was chief of staff of Nykyfor Hryhoriv’s partisan force in southern Ukraine (see Partisan movement in Ukraine, 1918–22). Having broken through the Bolshevik front, he rejoined the UNR Army and was appointed commander of the Kyiv Army Group in the Kyiv offensive in August 1919. During the First Winter Campaign (1919–20) he was commander of the Kyiv Division and deputy commander of the UNR Army. He was promoted to brigadier general. In 1921 he organized and led the Second Winter Campaign. Tricked by the Cheka undercover operation, in 1923 he returned to Soviet Ukraine where he was forced to cooperate with the secret police and write a pro- Soviet book Z poliakamy proty Vkraïny (With the Poles against Ukraine, 1924). He taught at the Kharkiv Red Officer School and wrote film scripts for the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration (including the script for Oleksander Dovzhenko's Zvenyhora which he co-authored with Maik Yohansen) until he was arrested in 1929 by the GPU and later executed. His memoirs appeared in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk and Zahrava, and his political and military essays were published in the collections Zymovyi pokhid 1919–1920 (The Winter Campaign, 1919–20, 1923) and Revoliutsiina stykhiia (The Revolutionary Force, 1937).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]