Panchenko, Mykhailo

Panchenko, Mykhailo [Панченко, Михайло; Pančenko, Myxajlo], b 1888 in Poltava, d 19 October 1938 in a GULAG camp, Kazakh SSR. Revolutionary figure and writer. After the February Revolution of 1917 he was a member of the central committe of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries, a member of the Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Council of Military Deputies, and a delegate to the Central Rada. In December 1917 he sat in the Presidium of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies in Kyiv. In 1919 he served briefly as people's commissar of education in the Bolshevik government in Kharkiv. As Borotbist from 1918, he opposed the party’s merger with the CP(B)U and did not join the latter. In the 1920s he worked as an editor, wrote the script for Petr Chardynin’s films about Taras Shevchenko: Taras Shevchenko and Malyi Taras (Little Taras, 1926, with Dmytro Buzko) as well as the play about the Koliivshchyna rebellion—Koliïvshchyna (1927). He also headed the Ukrainian Collective of Directors, Writers, and Scenarists. He was arrested with other former Borotbists during the Stalinist terror of the 1930s, and perished in a concentration camp.

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