Rusov, Oleksander

Rusov, Oleksander, b 7 February 1847 in Kyiv, d 8 October 1915 in Saratov, Russia. (Photo: Oleksander Rusov.) Statistician, folklorist, and civic figure of Russian origin; husband of Sofiia Rusova and father of Mykhailo Rusov and Yurii Rusov. A graduate of Kyiv University (1868), he taught at gymnasiums in Kyiv (1868–74) and belonged to the Hromada of Kyiv. He was a founding member of the Southwestern Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographic Society. In 1874 he helped organize the Kyiv census, and in 1875–6 he prepared with Fedir Vovk the two-volume Prague edition of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar. Along with Petro Chervinsky, Vasilii Varzar, and Oleksander Shlykevych he was one of the founders of the zemstvo statistical service in Chernihiv gubernia. He worked in the Nizhyn county zemstvo (1878–80), supervised statistics-gathering in Kherson gubernia and Kharkiv gubernia (1882–92), developed an economic survey of Chernihiv gubernia (1893–8), and directed the Statistical Bureau of Poltava gubernia (1899–1902). After being banished from Poltava he worked for a few years in Saint Petersburg and then taught statistics at the Kyiv Commercial Institute (1909–15). Rusov wrote over 40 scholarly works and many articles in statistics, history, and ethnography. His more important contributions to statistics are Russkie trakty v kontse 17 i nachale 18 vekov (Russian Trade Routes at the End of the 17th and the Beginning of the 18th Centuries, 1876), a statistical-economic description of Nizhyn county (1879), a statistical description of Kharkiv based on the 1892 census (1893), and a description of Chernihiv gubernia (2 vols, 1898–9). He also wrote studies of Ostap Veresai (1874), torban players (1892), carols (1907), and Mykola Lysenko (1903).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]