Sadovsky, Valentyn
Sadovsky, Valentyn [Садовський, Валентин; Sadovs'kyj], b 27 August 1886 in Plishchyn, Iziaslav county, Volhynia gubernia, d 24 November 1947 in Kyiv. Economist, political activist, and civic leader; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1935. After graduating in law from Kyiv University (1909) and in economics from Saint Petersburg Polytechnic (1911) he practiced law in Saint Petersburg. In 1915 he became an inspector of the Union of Cities of the Southwestern Front, a relief organization that worked in Russian-occupied Galicia. He joined the Revolutionary Ukrainian party in 1904 and then the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party (USDRP). Having returning to Kyiv, after the February Revolution of 1917 he became a member of the Central Rada and the Little Rada and the first secretary of justice in the General Secretariat of the Central Rada (from 28 June 1917). In 1918 he and Volodymyr Vynnychenko represented the USDRP in the Ukrainian National Union, which organized the overthrow of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky. After being forced to flee Ukraine in 1920, Sadovsky lived in Tarnów, Lviv, and Czechoslovakia, where he taught at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady. He was also an associate of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw. In 1945 he was arrested by the NKVD in Prague and held in Lukianivka Prison in Kyiv, where he died.
Sadovsky was a prolific writer who published several monographs on Ukrainian economics and demography. The most important of them were Narys ekonomichnoï heohrafiï Ukraïny (A Survey of the Economic Geography of Ukraine, 1920), Problemy industriializatsiï v narodnomu hospodarstvi (Problems of Industrialization in the National Economy, 1929), Raionizatsiia Ukraïny (The Regionalization of Ukraine, 1931), Pratsia v USSR (Work in the Ukrainian SSR, 1932), Robocha syla v sil's'komu hospodarstvi Ukraïny (Labor Resources in Ukraine’s Agriculture, 1935), and Natsional’na polityka Sovietiv na Ukraïni (Soviet Nationality Policies in Ukraine, 1937). He was also a regular contributor to many prerevolutionary and émigré Ukrainian newspapers and journals, such as Rada (Kyiv), Ukrainskaia zhizn’, Robocha hazeta, Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Dzvin (Kyiv), and Tryzub.
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]