United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). A United Nations agency established on 4 November 1946 to facilitate international co-operation in nonpolitical endeavors. It had 158 member countries and approximately 250 nongovernmental organizations with consultant status by 1987. UNESCO’s main offices, located in Paris, include a publishing house (Office des Presses de l’Unesco), which produces 26 periodicals in various languages. The Ukrainian SSR, as a full member of the United Nations (UN), joined UNESCO on 12 May 1954. It was represented by Yu. Kochubei (later deputy minister for external affairs of the Ukrainian SSR and deputy director general of UNESCO), M. Reshetniak, A. Zlenko, V. Skofenko, and O. Slipchenko. In 1980–5 the representative of the Ukrainian SSR, Hlib Tsvietkov, was a member of the Executive Board. In 1974–9 the UNESCO museum division was headed by Yurii Turchenko. In 1956 the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR created the UNESCO Commission of the Ukrainian SSR, which included over 50 representatives of state educational and civic institutions. The commission drafted plans for UNESCO work and co-ordinated the work of UNESCO committees on scientific programs (geological co-operation, hydrological program, the oceanographic commission, the study of Slavic cultures, and so forth) in the Ukrainian SSR.
An international UNESCO conference of Slavists (with approximately 200 participants) took place in Kyiv in 1979. The Biuleten' Komisiï URSR u spravakh IuNESKO was published in many foreign languages from 1970. As well, the pamphlet Ukraïna—chlen IuNESKO (Ukraine: A Member of UNESCO, 1966), by M. Petrachkov and T. Kovalenko-Kosaryk, and A. Zlenko’s UNESCO and Problems of the Present (1984) appeared in print. As part of its work, UNESCO produced the following: G. Chevchuk (Hryhorii Shevchuk), La politique culturelle dans la République socialiste soviétique d’Ukraine (1981; also in English), the album Sculpture et architecture de bois (1981), Leonid Novychenko’s Taras Chevtchenko (1982), and Antolohiia ukraïns'koï radians'koï poeziï (Poetry of Soviet Ukraine’s New World: An Anthology, 1986). UNESCO has celebrated the 150th and 175th anniversaries of the birth of Taras Shevchenko, the 250th anniversary of the birth of Hryhorii Skovoroda, and the centenary of the birth of Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Yevhen Paton, and has staged a festival of films by Oleksander Dovzhenko (1984). In 1983 UNESCO took part in the celebration of the 1,500th anniversary of the founding of Kyiv, and in 1988 the commemoration of the millennium of Christianization of Ukraine.
Before 1991 Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence the UNESCO representatives of the Ukrainian SSR, like those in other international organizations, followed closely a common Soviet policy.
Arkadii Zhukovsky
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]