Molchanovsky, Nykandr

Molchanovsky, Nykandr [Молчановський, Никандр; Molčanovs'kyj], b 1858 in Lozuvata, Balta district, Podilia gubernia, d 17 December 1906 in Kyiv. Historian and community activist. In 1879 he was expelled from Kyiv University for his political activities and exiled for two and a half years to Viatka gubernia. In 1884, after his return to Kyiv, he completed his studies under Volodymyr Antonovych, and in 1885 he wrote a study of the Podilia land to the year 1434. Because he was a member of the Hromada of Kyiv, he was deemed politically unreliable and barred from becoming a professor. The Kyiv Archeographic Commission sent him to do research at archives in Stockholm (1898–9) and Budapest. The materials he collected in the Stockholm State Archive about Ukraine in the second half of the 17th century were published posthumously with his long introduction in Arkhiv Iugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, in 1908 (vol 6, no. 3), and in Ukraïns’kyi arkheohrafichnyi zbirnyk, in 1930 (vol 3, ed Veniiamyn Kordt). From 1889 Molchanovsky contributed over 20 articles and archival documents and some 80 reviews (signed mostly ‘N.M.’) to Kievskaia starina. They include articles on the Kyiv municipal administration in 1786 (1889, nos 5–7), women at the hetman’s court in Chyhyryn (1894, nos 1–2), 15th- to 17th-century Left-Bank Ukraine (1896, nos 4–6), Kyiv’s budgets in the mid-18th century (1898, no. 1), reports of the Venetian envoy Alberto Vimina about Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks (1900, no. 1), the origin of the term katsap (1901, no. 12), and Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s death and his successors (1903, no. 1). From 1902 he directed the chancellery of the governor-general of Kyiv gubernia, Podilia gubernia, and Volhynia gubernia.

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