Hrushevsky, Oleksander

Hrushevsky, Oleksander [Грушевський, Олександер; Hruševs’kyj], b 12 August 1877 in Stavropol, Russia, d spring 1943, probably in or near Irtishsk, Pavlodarsk oblast, Kazakhstan. Historian; brother of Mykhailo Hrushevsky and Hanna Shamrai. He studied at Kyiv University with Volodymyr Antonovych and was a privatdocent at Odesa University, Saint Petersburg University, and Kyiv University; he was the first to lecture in Ukrainian at Odesa University (1906). In 1918 he was appointed professor at Kyiv University. He was a full member of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In the 1920s he served as director of the Historical-Geographical Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) and a member of the VUAN Archeographic Commission. He was arrested in August 1938 and sentenced to five years of exile in Pavlodarsk oblast, Kazakhstan.

Hrushevsky wrote a number of historical studies, including Pinskoe Poles’e (Pynsk Polisia, 1901), Ocherki istorii Turovskogo kniazhestva (Essays on the History of Turiv Principality, 1902), and Goroda Velikogo Kniazhestva Litovskogo v XIV–XVI vv. (Cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th–16th Centuries, 1918). His numerous articles on the political, socioeconomic, and regional history of 16th–19th-century Ukraine and on Ukrainian historiography appeared in various VUAN journals, especially in Ukraïna (1914–30). He was also the author of studies of Ukrainian writers, which were published together in Z suchasnoï ukraïns’koï literatury (On Contemporary Ukrainian Literature, 1909, 1918).

[This article was updated in 2005.]