Hrushevsky, Mikhail Sergeevich (1866–1934)

Ukrainian historian and politician. After the February Revolution of 1917, he joined the party of Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries and was president of the short-lived Ukrainian Central Council. He emigrated in 1918, but returned to Kiev, Ukraine, in 1924, and became a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and in 1929 of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1930 he was arrested and deported from Kiev.

Hrushevsky was educated at Kiev University. From 1894, he was professor at Lvov University (modern Lviv), and from 1897, was president of the Shevchenko Scientific Society at the same institution. This was, at the time, the main centre of Ukrainian intellectual life. In his works – the ten-volume History of the Ukraine-Russia (1898–1936), Outline History of the Ukrainian People (1904), and the five-volume History of Ukrainian Literature (1923–26) – Hrushevsky laid the foundations of the nationalist school of Ukrainian historiography based on the idea that Kievan Russia was a specifically Ukrainian state, and not a state belonging to all the Russian peoples (i.e. Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians).