Turning the pages back...

March 27, 1917

Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who eventually became Ukraine's first president, was among the co-founders of the National Democratic Party (established in 1899), but his involvement in his country's political life was galvanized following the Russian Revolution of 1905.

As restrictions on Ukrainian life were eased and mass Ukrainian organizations and political parties burgeoned, Hrushevsky moved to the imperial capital, St. Petersburg, where he co-founded the official newspaper of the Ukrainian club in the State Duma (1906).

Two years later, he was in Kyiv, right at the center of the ferment that led to the creation of the Society of Ukrainian Progressives (TUP) - formed to protect the national movement from the rising wave of Russian chauvinism following the dissolution of the Second State Duma. Thanks to his seemingly inexhaustible efforts as a publicist and organizer, he emerged as the universally acknowledged leader of the Ukrainian movement, from a field that included the magnate Yevhen Chykalenko, Symon Petliura and Volodymyr Vynnychenko.

After the first world war broke out, the Russian authorities clamped down on Ukrainian activities once again, and Hrushevsky was arrested in the fall of 1914. First imprisoned in Kyiv, he was then exiled to Simbirsk, then Kazan, and finally to Moscow, where he remained under police surveillance. And yet, the indefatigable scholar continued his work, even helping to edit the journal Ukrainskaya Zhizn and the Ukrainian-language weekly Promin.

The February Revolution of 1917 that toppled the Romanovs loosed his fetters. On March 17 TUP established the Central Rada in Kyiv as the body that united all of Ukraine's political, community, cultural and professional organizations, and elected Hrushevsky president in absentia. Ten days later, 80 years ago, Mykhailo Hrushevsky arrived in Kyiv to assume the presidency of the Central Rada, which, a month later, became the revolutionary parliament of Ukraine.

Sources: "Central Rada," "Hrushevsky, Mykhailo," "Society of Ukrainian Progressives," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 1, 2, 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, 1988, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 23, 1997, No. 12, Vol. LXV

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