Petrovsky, Mykola

Petrovsky, Mykola [Петровський, Микола; Petrovs'kyj], b 26 November 1894 in Kudrivka, Sosnytsia county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 20 July 1951 in Kyiv. Historian; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1945. He studied at the Nizhyn Lyceum (1915–19). In 1924–33 he was a history professor at the Nizhyn Institute of People's Education (see Nizhyn State University) and edited its Zapysky Nizhyns'koho instytutu narodnoï osvity (12 vols). From 1934 he chaired the department of the history of Ukraine at Kyiv University. He was also an associate of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1937, received a doctorate in 1939, and served as the institute’s director in 1942–7. He was a member of the Ukrainian SSR delegations at the United Nations assemblies in San Francisco (1945) and London (1946) and at the signing of Paris Peace Treaties of 1947.

Petrovsky is the author of many works on 17th-century Ukrainian history. He wrote books about the Samovydets Chronicle (1930) and the Cossack-Polish War of 1648–57 (1939) and articles about Yu. Dunin-Borkovsky (1927), Samiilo Zorka’s pseudodiary (1928), the Ruin (1929), the Hetman state’s regimental system (1929), Tymish Tsiutsiura (1929), the last years of Hetman Petro Doroshenko (1930), Ivan Bohun (1930), Roman Rakushka (1931), and the state structure of 17th-century Ukraine (1931). He is also a coauthor of two Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR histories of Ukraine (1942, 1943) and a collection of articles on the Cossack-Polish War (1940), and he compiled a collection of documents and materials pertaining to the history of Kyivan Rus’ (1939, 1946) and Ukraine in 1569–1654 (1941, with V. Putilov). His articles of the 1940s have propagandistic rather than scholarly value.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]