Skaba, Andrii

Skaba, Andrii [Скаба, Андрій], b 12 December 1905 in Khorishky, Kobeliaky county, Poltava gubernia, d 26 June 1986 in Kyiv. Communist Party and Soviet state activist and historian; member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR from 1967. After graduating from Kharkiv University (1934) he worked at the Kharkiv Pedagogical Institute and Kharkiv University (1936–40) and headed the departments of contemporary history at Lviv University (1940–1) and Kharkiv University (1946–9). He served as director of the Central State Archive of the October Revolution of the Ukrainian SSR in Kharkiv (1946–9) and as editor of the Kharkiv oblast newspaper Sotsialistychna Kharkivshchyna. He was secretary of the Kharkiv oblast committee of the CPU (1951–9), minister of higher and secondary special education of the Ukrainian SSR (1959), and secretary of the CC CPU (1959–68). From 1968 to 1973 he was director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Skaba published works on the history of Soviet society and of the Communist Party, including a monograph on the Paris Peace Conference and foreign intervention in Soviet territory in 1919 (1971). He was editor in chief of Radians'ka entsyklopediia istoriï Ukraïny (The Soviet Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, 4 vols, 1969–72). Skaba was a hard-line ideologue of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, particularly regarding nationality policy, and a proponent of Russification. He persecuted the shestydesiatnyky and supported the repression of opposition groups.

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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