Otamanovsky, Valentyn

Otamanovsky, Valentyn [Отамановський, Валентин; Otamanovs'kyj], b 26 February 1893 in Zlatopil, Chyhyryn county, Kyiv gubernia, d 10 March 1964 in Kharkiv. Historian, bibliographer, and community figure. In After the February Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the Central Rada representing the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Independentists. He was a cofounder of the Vernyhora publishing house and wrote a popular novel for youth, Syn Ukraïny (Son of Ukraine, 1919), under the pseudonym Zlotopolets. In the 1920s he was an associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, a member of its Commission for the Study of the History of Western-Ruthenian and Ukrainian Law at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and director of the Vinnytsia branch of the National Library of Ukraine and its Research Cabinet for the Study of Podilia. He was arrested and sentenced during the sow trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine of 1930. In the 1940s and 1950s, after his release from a labor camp, he worked in Leningrad. He edited a collection of articles about Vinnytsia okruha (1926) and wrote a brochure about the tasks and needs of regional studies in Podilia (1926), an article about Stepan Rudansky’s roots (1929), and books in Russian about the towns of Right-Bank Ukraine under Polish noble rule from the mid-17th to the late 18th century (1954) and Vinnytsia as a Ukrainian city type in 14th- to 17th-century southern Right-Bank Ukraine (1964).

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