Turning the pages back... May 24, 1821 (05/23/99)

Turning the pages back...

May 24, 1821

Ivan Vernadsky was the first of the three famous scholars who bear that surname; he was the father of Volodymyr the geochemist and grandfather of George the historian.

He was born on May 24, 1821, in Kyiv into an imperial officer's family (his mother was from the Korolenko line of Ukrainian Kozak nobility). At Kyiv University he studied philosophy and Slavic philology. After graduating with honors, he was offered a stipend to pursue political economy, which he accepted and traveled to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and England. He defended his master's thesis at St. Petersburg University in 1847. After a two-year stint teaching in Kyiv, he entered Moscow University and in 1849 completed a doctoral dissertation on Italian economic theory. Two years later he secured a full professorship and taught political economy.

In 1857 he was called to St. Petersburg to serve as an advisor to the Imperial Ministry of Internal Affairs. That year he also established and edited the newspaper Ekonomicheskii Ukazatel (EU), and in 1859, the journal Ekonomist. His contributions were marked by a commitment to a laissez-faire approach to economics and liberalism in social issues. For a time, the EU was published at the printing house owned by Panteleimon Kulish. Through Kulish, he met Taras Shevchenko and Kvitka Osnovianenko, as well as the historian Mykhailo Maksymovych.

Vernadsky's publications served as the epicenter of the establishment's ruminations over the abolition of serfdom (which came in 1861). He believed that the newly emancipated serfs should be afforded total economic and social freedom and a loosening of the fetters of "obshchini" (collective communities).

Vernadsky also argued for the economic emancipation of women: he supported allowing them into the labor force and championed their rights to equal pay. He argued for legalization of prostitution whose practitioners, he contended, exercised an important social function and merited humane treatment, medical attention and even effective unions. Vernadsky's periodicals took strong stands against anti-Semitism and the havoc caused in the environment by the rapid pace of industrialization and urbanization.

In 1868 he was forced to leave St. Petersburg because of a heart condition and chose to travel to Kharkiv, where he became director of the State Bank's local branch. Upon his retirement in 1876 he returned to St. Petersburg, where he died on March 27, 1884.

Sources: "Vernadsky, Ivan," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Ivan Koropeckyj, "Ukrainskyi Ekonomist Ivan Vernadskyi," Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter 1984).

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