Kononenko, Konstantyn

Kononenko, Konstantyn [Кононенко, Константин], b 3 June 1889 in Rylsk, Slobidska Ukraine, d 28 August 1964 in Boonton, New Jersey, USA. Economist; civic and political figure. A member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' party (Menshevik), he was a member of the Central Rada. In 1919–20 he headed the Kharkiv Association of Agriculture, and from 1921 to 1924 the finance department of the People's Commissariat of Land Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR. Until 1930 he served on the board of directors of the Ukrainian Agricultural Bank (1927–30) and as a research consultant to the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR. Kononenko was arrested in 1930 and sentenced to eight years of forced labor. He immigrated to Germany in 1944 and to the United States in 1951. As an émigré he was involved in the OUN (Bandera faction). Among his numerous articles and studies are Agrarna polityka bol'shevykiv (The Agrarian Policy of the Bolsheviks, published under the pseudonym N. Olezhko, 1948) and Ukraine and Russia: A History of the Economic Relations between Ukraine and Russia, 1654–1917 (1958); a second volume, covering economic relations between 1917 and 1960, was published in Ukrainian as Ukraïna i Rosiia (Ukraine and Russia, 1965). Kononenko also coauthored and edited a collection on the agriculture of forest-steppe zone and the Polisia region: Orhanizatsiia sil's'koho hospodarstva v Lisostepu i Polissi Ukraïny (The Organization of Agriculture in Ukraine’s Forest-Steppe and Polisia, 1924).

  [This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]