Kovalevsky, Mykola M.

Kovalevsky, Mykola M. [Ковалевський, Микола; Kovalevs’kyj], b 3 September 1892 in Krupe, Lublin gubernia, d 18 August 1957 in Innsbruck. (Photo: Mykola M. Kovalevsky.) Political leader, co-operative organizer, and publicist. As a student he headed the Ukrainian student hromada in Moscow (1912) and then in Kyiv (1915). In 1917 he played a leading role in the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and the Peasant Association, and edited the latter's daily Narodna volia. A member of the Central Rada, he served in Volodymyr Vynnychenko's cabinet as minister of food supplies and in Vsevolod Holubovych's cabinet as minister of agrarian affairs. In 1919 under the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic he was minister of agrarian affairs in Borys Martos's and Isaak Mazepa's cabinets. Emigrating in 1920, he moved from Warsaw to Bucharest, and then to Innsbruck. A prolific writer, particularly on Soviet policy, he contributed to many journals, including Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk, Biuletyn Polsko-Ukraiński, and Sprawy Narodowościowe. In 1940–2 he was a coeditor of Nashe zhyttia (Bucharest), and from 1950 an editor of the Express-Pressedienst in Innsbruck. Besides newspaper and journal articles and entries for Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukraine), he wrote a number of monographs: Ukraïna pid chervonym iarmom (Ukraine under the Red Yoke, 1936), Opozytsiini rukhy v Ukraïni i natsional’na polityka SSSR (1920–1954) (Opposition Movements in Ukraine and the Nationality Policy of the USSR [1920–1954], 1955), and a book of memoirs, Pry dzherelakh borot’by (At the Sources of Struggle, 1960).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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