Parkhomenko, Volodymyr

Parkhomenko, Volodymyr [Пархоменко, Володимир; Parxomenko], b 21 September 1880 in Smile, Romny county, Poltava gubernia, d 1942 in Leningrad. Historian. After graduating from the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy in 1905, he taught church history at the theological seminary in Poltava and was the first chairman of the Poltava Church-Archeological Committee. Later he was a privatdocent and, from 1918, docent at Kyiv University and the Kyiv Institute of People's Education. In the 1920s he was a professor at the Dnipropetrovsk Institute of People's Education (later Dnipropetrovsk University), director of a department at the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Historical and Archeological Museum (now Dnipropetrovsk National Historical Museum), a research associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) (from 1926), president of the Dnipropetrovsk Scientific Society of the VUAN, and a member of the VUAN Commission of Ukraine’s Ancient History. He was swept up in 1929 during the arrests of members of the fictitious Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU) and exiled from Ukraine. From the late 1930s he was a professor at Leningrad University, where he died during the Leningrad blockade during the Second World War.

Parkhomenko initially studied the history of the Ukrainian church. He contributed some 20 articles on 18th-century Ukrainian church and secular history to Kievskaia starina and wrote a book on the history of the Pereiaslav-Boryspil eparchy in 1733–85 (1910) (see Pereiaslav eparchy), a booklet on the question of when Princess Olha of Rus’ was baptized (1911), and books on the beginnings of Christianity in Rus’ in the 9th and 10th centuries (1913) (see Christianization of Ukraine) and the origin of the Kyivan Rus’ state (1916). A supporter of the theory of the southeastern (ie, Ukrainian) origins of Rus’, in the Soviet period he wrote a book on the 8th- to 11th-century Rus’ state (1924) and some dozen articles, including ones on Rus’ and the Khazars (1927) and Pechenegs (1929), Prince Oleh and Prince Ihor (1923), the politics of Hetman Ivan Samoilovych (1928), Rus’, the steppe, and the Varangians (1929), and the character and significance of the reign of Prince Volodymyr the Great (1941).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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