Mirza-Avakiants, Natalia

Mirza-Avakiants, Natalia [Мірза-Авак’янс, Наталія; Mirza-Avak’janc, Natalja; née Дворянська; Dvorianska], b 23 October 1889 in Boryspil, Pereiaslav county, Poltava gubernia, d 1942? in a GULAG concentration camp. Historian. She studied at Kharkiv University under Dmytro Bahalii. In the 1920s and 1930s she was a professor of Ukrainian history at the Kharkiv Institute of People's Education and the Poltava Institute of People's Education and at Kyiv University (1935–7). One of the founders of the Ukrainian Scientific Society for the Research and Protection of Monuments of Antiquity and Art in the Poltava Region (1918–20) and a full member of the Scientific Research Institute of the History of Ukrainian Culture in Kharkiv, she wrote articles on the Cossack starshyna in the late 17th century (1919), peasant movements in Poltava gubernia in 1902 (1924), and the legal system in Left-Bank Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century (1926); a book on peasant unrest in Ukraine in 1905–7 (1925); a pioneering monograph on the history of Ukraine in relation to the history of Western Europe (1928); and a reader in Ukrainian history. She was arrested in 1937 and sent to a Soviet labor camp. Her further fate is unknown, but she was most likely executed.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]