Shulgin, Vasilii

Shulgin, Vasilii [Шульгин, Василий; Šul'gin, Vasilij], b 1 January 1878 in Kyiv, d 15 February 1976 in Vladimir, RSFSR. Russian conservative political leader and publicist; son of Vitalii Shulgin. A graduate of the law faculty at Kyiv University (1900), he was a deputy from Volhynia to the Second and Fourth Russian State Dumas (see State Duma). Before the First World War he was a leading member of the Ukrainophobic Kyiv Club of Russian Nationalists and editor (1913–19) of the reactionary newspaper Kievlianin. An opponent of the Ukrainian National Republic, during the Russian Civil War he was an ideologue of the White forces and one of the founders of the Russian Volunteer Army in the Don region and the Kuban. In 1920 he fled abroad, and in the 1920s, while living in Yugoslavia, France, and Poland, he was a leading figure among the White émigrés. He published several books in the West, including the anti-Ukrainian diatribes Ukrainstvuiushchie i my! (The Ukrainianizers and We!, 1929) and Le plus grand mensonge du XX^e siècle: L’Ukraine (1939), as well as several anti-Semitic tracts.

His strong sense of Russian nationalism led him to accept the USSR as the continuation of the Russian Empire, and he appreciated the Soviet leadership’s ability to control the various nationalities, especially the Ukrainians. In 1961 he published an open letter urging Russian émigrés to stop criticizing the Soviet Union. His memoirs of the Revolution of 1917 (1925), of the year 1920 (1927), and of his time in the State Duma (1979) were published in Moscow; the last appeared in English translation as The Years: Memoirs of a Member of the Russian Duma, 1906–1917 (1984).

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