Agricultural Scientific Committee of Ukraine

Agricultural Scientific Committee of Ukraine (Сільсько-господарський науковий комітет України; Silsko-hospodarskyi naukovyi komitet Ukrainy). The center of scientific agricultural studies in Ukraine in the 1920s. It was formed in 1918 in Kyiv out of the agricultural section of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Ukrainian National Republic and assumed prominence in 1922 when it became a key institution in the framework of the People's Commissariat of Agricultural Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. The committee initiated and co-ordinated research in various branches of the agricultural sciences and supervised practical and educational work in agronomy. When the central office of the committee was moved to Kharkiv, some of its work (particularly publishing) continued to be done in Kyiv. The committee was responsible to the presidium, whose first chairman was Serhii Veselovsky and whose scientific secretary was Oleksander Yanata, and to the scientific council. Its work was divided among special committees and among sections such as those on farming, soil study, botany, animal husbandry, amelioration, meteorology, agricultural economics, and environmental protection. The committee headed a network of branches in Kyiv, Vinnytsia, Poltava, etc. It set up a chain of agronomic research stations, observation stations for migratory birds, etc. New scientific institutions such as the Ukrainian Institute of Applied Botany, the Ukrainian Institute for the Protection of Plants, and the Ukrainian Institute of Animal Husbandry were established with the committee’s support. Some scientific research institutes of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and some individual scientists were supported by the committee in their theoretical research in agriculture. Outstanding contributions were made by the section on soil study, directed by Hryhorii Makhiv, which published the first comprehensive map of the soils of Ukraine and ten volumes of Materiialy doslidzhennia gruntiv Ukraïny (Research Materials on the Soils of Ukraine), and by the botanical section, directed by Yanata, which issued Botanichno-heohrafichne raionuvannia Ukraïny (Botanical-Geographic Regionalization of Ukraine) in 1925 and began to publish Flora URSR. The committee published a series of journals: Biuleten' Sil's'ko-hospodars'koho naukovoho komitetu Ukraïny (Kyiv 1921), Visnyk sil's'ko-hospodars'koï nauky (monthly, 1922–4 and 1927–9), Trudy sil's'ko-hospodars'koï botaniky (2 vols and 6 issues, 1926–9), Agronom (journal of the Kyiv branch, 1923–6), Visnyk pasichnytstva (monthly, Kyiv 1926–7), Biuleten' borot'by z shkidnykamy sil's'ko-hospodars'kykh roslyn (Kyiv 1923–4), and others. The committee co-ordinated the research of almost all scientists in agriculture and related fields in Ukraine. Among them were, in addition to those already mentioned, agronomists Oleksander Fylypovsky and Oleksii Fylypovsky; soil-scientists Volodymyr Krokos and Oleksii Sokolovsky; geologists Volodymyr Riznychenko, Pavlo Tutkovsky, and Fedir Polonsky; botanist Yevhen Votchal; entomologist Irynarkh Shchoholiv; zoologist Mykola Sharleman; meteorologists and climatologists M. Danylevsky, Anatolii Ohiievsky, and Borys Sreznevsky; and hydrologist Yevhen Oppokiv (director of the amelioration section).

In 1928 the committee was abolished as an allegedly ‘nationalistic’ institution. Some of its sientific research institutes and researchers, many of whom were eventually politically persecuted, were transferred to the All-Ukrainian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, founded in 1926. THereafter, the Agricultural Scientific Committee of Ukraine was never mentioned in Soviet publications.

Volodymyr Kubijovyč

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]