Rubach, Mykhailo

Rubach, Mykhailo [Рубач, Михайло; Rubač, Myxajlo], b 2 December 1899 in Chernecha Sloboda, Romny county, Poltava gubernia, d 17 January 1980 in Kyiv. Historian and archivist. From 1917 he taught and worked in Bolshevik organizations in Katerynoslav. In 1923 he was appointed deputy director of the Commission for the Study of the History of the October Revolution and the CP(B)U (Istpart), editor in chief of Letopis’ Revoliutsii, and director of the Central Archival Administration of the Ukrainian SSR. After graduating from the Institute of Red Professorship in Moscow (1927) he served as director of the Institute of Party History of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (1929–32) and worked at the Institute of History of the Communist Academy in Moscow (1933–5). Later he headed the department of USSR history at Kharkiv University, and in 1942 he began working at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, as director of the archeography department and as senior associate of the department of history of the October Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War. In 1957–69 he was a professor in the department of the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at Kyiv University.

Rubach was the author of Ocherki po istorii revoliutsionnogo preobrazovaniia agrarnykh otnoshenii na Ukraine v period provedeniia Oktiabr'skoi revoliutsii (Essays on the History of the Revolutionary Transformation of Agrarian Relations in Ukraine in the Period of the Duration of the October Revolution, 1956) and the coauthor of collective works on the Ukrainian SSR during the Second World War and on the history of the Ukrainian SSR. In the 1930s he led a publicistic campaign against Mykhailo Hrushevsky (in Chervonyi shliakh, 1932, nos 5–12), and he was instrumental in efforts to discredit Ukrainian historiography in the 1970s.

Ivan Myhul

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