Yanata, Oleksander

Yanata, Oleksander [Яната, Олександер; Janata], b 9 June 1888 in Mykolaiv, d 3 June 1938 in the Kolyma region. Botanist and agronomist of Czech origin; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1923 and corresponding member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. A graduate of the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute, he taught at Kyiv University (from 1928) and was secretary of the Ukrainian Scientific Society and a cofounder of Ukraïns’kyi botanichnyi zhurnal. Before its liquidation in 1928 he was scientific secretary of the Agricultural Scientific Committee of Ukraine, chairman of its botany section, and editor of Visnyk sil’s’kohospodars’koï nauky. In Kharkiv he organized and directed departments of Applied Botany and Plant Cultivation at the Kharkiv Agricultural Institute. He was arrested during the Stalinist terror in 1933, and died in a labor camp. Yanata’s scholarly work dealt with the botany of southern Ukraine and the Crimea, botanical regionalization (vegetation regions), and Ukrainian botanical terminology. Much of it has remained unpublished, and his authorship of the first volume of Flora URSR (published after his arrest) was uncredited.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]