Shtepa, Kostiantyn

Shtepa, Kostiantyn or Shteppa, Konstantin [Штепа, Костянтин; Štepa, Kostjantyn], b 15 December 1896 in Lokhvytsia, Poltava gubernia, d 19 November 1958 in New York, New York State, USA. Ancient and medieval historian. He studied at the Poltava Theological Seminary (1910–14), Petrograd University (1914–16), and the Nizhyn Historical-Philological Institute and received a doctorate in 1927. He was a professor at the Nizhyn Institute of People's Education (1922–30; now Nizhyn State University) and Kyiv University (1930–8). In the 1930s he was also the chairman of the Byzantological Commission of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He was imprisoned by the NKVD in 1938–9. During the German occupation he was briefly rector of Kyiv University and then editor of Kyiv’s Nove ukraïns’ke slovo (1941–3). A postwar displaced person, he taught Russian at the US Army school in Oberammergau (1950–2) and served on the Council of the Institute for the Study of the USSR in Munich. In 1952 he emigrated to the United States of America, where he worked as an analyst for the American Committee for Liberation. Shtepa wrote books in Ukrainian, on ancient and Christian demonology (2 vols, 1926–7) and peasant revolts in the Roman Empire (1934); in Russian, on slave revolutions in the ancient world (1941) and the Soviet system of governing the masses and its psychological consequences (pseudonym V. Lagodin, 1951); and in English, titled Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession (pseudonym W. Godin, with F. Beck, 1951) and Russian Historians and the Soviet State (1962). He also wrote articles in Ukrainian on ancient religious syncretism in relation to early Ukrainian folk motifs (1927), the persecution of witches in Ukraine (1928), and Ukrainian legends about the creation of the first people (1928).

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