Shevchenko, Fedir
Shevchenko, Fedir [Шевченко, Федір; Ševčenko], b 24 August 1914 in Dunaivtsi, Nova Ushytsia county, Podilia gubernia, d 1 November 1995 in Kyiv. Historian; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1969. He graduated from the Moscow Historical Archives Institute (1937), and from 1940 he worked in state archives in Chernivtsi, Krasnodar, and Uzbekistan. From 1945 to 1949 he was deputy head of the commission on the history of the Great Patriotic War at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and from 1949 to 1968 he worked at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (assistant director in 1964–7; PH D, 1963). He was editor in chief of Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal (1957–72), editor of the collections Selians'kyi rukh na Bukovyni v 40-ykh rokakh XIX st. (The Peasant Movement in Bukovyna in the 1840s) and Narysy z istoriï Pivnichnoï Bukovyny (Essays in the History of Northern Bukovyna, 1980), editor in chief of the annual Istoriohrafichni doslidzhennia v Ukraïns’kii RSR (Historiographic Research in the Ukrainian SSR) in 1968, and a member of the editorial board of Istoriografiia istorii Ukrainskoi SSR (The Historiography of the History of the Ukrainian SSR, 1987), in which he wrote on the 1648–54 period.
From 1968 to 1972 Shevchenko was director of the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, whence he returned to the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR; from 1982 he headed the Section of Historical Geography and Cartography, which compiled an atlas of the history of the Ukrainian SSR. His research was centered on the Middle Ages, the Second World War, historiography, and problems of Slavic studies. He published works on the political and economic ties of Ukraine with Muscovy in the mid-17th century (1959), the international significance of the 1768 uprising (the Koliivshchyna rebellion) in Right-Bank Ukraine (Ukraïns’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal [UIZh], 1968, no. 9), and the use of film documentaries in history education (UIZh, 1976, no. 6). He presented Mykhailo Hrushevsky in a positive light in ‘Na chasi—vsebichnyi analiz’ (It Is Time for an All-Round Analysis, Kyïv, 1988, no. 9).
Arkadii Zhukovsky
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]