Mykola Skrypnyk | |
|---|---|
Микола Скрипник | |
 | |
| Chairman of thePeople's Secretariat of Ukraine | |
| In office 4 March 1918 – 18 April 1918 | |
| President |
|
| Preceded by | Yevgenia Bosch(acting) |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished reorganized asThe Uprising Nine |
| People's Secretary of Labor Affairs | |
| In office 4 March 1918 – 18 April 1918 | |
| Prime Minister | Himself |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Position abolished |
| People's Commissar of Internal Affairs | |
| In office July 1921 – April 1922 | |
| Prime Minister | Christian Rakovsky |
| People's Commissar of Justice | |
| In office April 1922 – 1927 | |
| Prime Minister | Christian Rakovsky |
| Preceded by | Mikhail Vyetoshkin |
| Succeeded by | Vasyl Poraiko |
| Prosecutor General of Ukraine | |
| In office 1922–1927 | |
| President | Grigory Petrovsky |
| Preceded by | Position established |
| Succeeded by | Vasyl Poraiko |
| People's Commissar of Education | |
| In office March 1927 – February 1933 | |
| Prime Minister | Vlas Chubar |
| Head ofDerzhplan UkrSSR | |
| In office February 1933 – 7 July 1933 | |
| Prime Minister | Vlas Chubar |
| Preceded by | Yakym Dudnyk |
| Succeeded by | Yuriy Kotsiubynsky |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1872-01-25)25 January 1872 |
| Died | 7 July 1933(1933-07-07) (aged 61) |
| Political party | RSDLP (1901–1903) RSDLP (Bolsheviks)(1903–1918) VKP(b) (1918–1933) |
| Alma mater | Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology |
Mykola Oleksiiovych Skrypnyk (Ukrainian:Микола Олексійович Скрипник; 25 January [O.S. 13 January] 1872 – 7 July 1933), was a UkrainianBolshevik revolutionary and Communist leader who was a proponent of the Ukrainian Republic's independence, and later led the culturalUkrainization effort inSoviet Ukraine. When the policy was reversed and he was removed from his position, he committed suicide rather than be forced to recant his policies in a show trial. He also was the Head of the Ukrainian People's Commissariat, equivalent to the modern-day position ofPrime Minister of Ukraine.
Skrypnyk was born in the villageYasynuvata ofBakhmut uyezd,Yekaterinoslav Governorate,Russian Empire in the family of a railway telegraph operator, assistant to the chief of the railway station; his mother worked as a midwife in theZemstvo hospital.
At first he studied at theBarvinkove elementary school, thenrealschules of the citiesIzium, from which he was expelled for revolutionary activities, andKursk, which he graduated from in 1890. During his studies, he became acquainted with Ukrainian history and literature, in particular with the works ofTaras Shevchenko andPanteleimon Kulish.
Originally a member of the Saint PetersburgHromada society, Skrypnyk became a member of "Workers' Banner", part of the Marxist social democratic movement, in 1897. Skrypnyk joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party ("RSDLP") in 1898.
While studying atSaint Petersburg State Institute of Technology in 1901, he was arrested on political charges, prompting him to become a full-time revolutionary. Skrypnyk was eventually expelled from the institute.[1]
He was arrested between fifteen and seventeen times, exiled seven times, and at one point was sentenced to death. He escaped from his first exile inthe Yakut region, then worked as a social-democratic organizer and propagandist inTsaritsyn (1902),Saratov (1902–1903),Samara andYekaterinburg (1903),Odesa (1903–1904) andKaterynoslav (1904), from which he was exiled for five years to theKem district of theArkhangelsk Governorate. Skrypnyk escaped on the way to his exile and moved to Odesa.
In 1905, he was a party organizer of theNevsky District ofSt. Petersburg, then the secretary of the Petersburg Committee of the RSDLP. He was elected as a delegate to the3rd London Congress of the RSDLP in that year.
In October 1905, he became a member of theRiga Committee of the RSDLP. At the end of December 1905, he moved toYaroslavl, where he was arrested and exiled for five years to theTurukhansky region. During this exile, he fled to the city ofKrasnoyarsk, where he conducted the election campaign of the RSDLP to the Second State Duma of the Russian Empire. He was arrested and sent toTurukhansk, from which he soon escaped, having covered 1,200versts, or an equivalent number of kilometers, by boat and on foot.
In the summer of 1908, he went toGeneva inSwitzerland for a month and a half. After his return, he worked as a party organizer and a member of the Central Bureau of Trade Unions inMoscow. He was arrested and spent three months in a Moscow prison. After his release, he worked as a district organizer, secretary of the Moscow Committee of the RSDLP(b), and was dispatched on a campaign trip to the Urals.
At the end of 1908, he was arrested in St. Petersburg and exiled for five years to theVilyuysky District of the Yakut region. He returned from exile at the end of 1913.
In 1913, Skrypnyk was an editor of the Bolsheviks' legal magazineIssues of Insurance and in 1914 was a member of the editorial board of thePravda newspaper, while also working forIskra. He used the party pseudonyms Glasson, Peterburzhets, Valerian, H. Yermolaev, Shchur, and Schensky.
In July 1914, he was arrested again, sentenced to administrative exile in the city ofMorshansk,Tambov Governorate, where he worked as an accountant in a Morshanska bank.
After theFebruary Revolution, Skrypnyk was amnestied by theProvisional Government and moved to St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd), where he was elected as a secretary of the Central Council of Factories Committees. During theOctober Revolution, Skrypnyk was a member of theMilitary Revolutionary Committee of thePetrograd Soviet.
In December 1917, Skrypnyk was elected in absentia to the firstBolshevik government of Ukraine, the so-called People's Secretariat, inKharkiv (Respublika Rad Ukrainy) as the People's Secretary of Labor. From February to March 1918, he was the People's Secretary of Trade and Industry of theUkrainian People's Republic of Soviets. On March 3, 1918, he was elected president of the Secretariat, replacingYevhenia Bosch, daughter of a German immigrant, who had resigned in protest against theTreaty of Brest-Litovsk. From March 8 to April 18, 1918, he also served as the People's Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
The Soviet Ukrainian government, under the onslaught of German troops, ended up in Katerynoslav, and later inTaganrog, where it ceased to exist. On March 17–19, 1918, the II All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets was held in Katerynoslav, which proclaimed the independence of Soviet Ukraine. On April 18, 1918, Skrypnyk was elected a member of the All-Ukrainian Bureau to lead the insurgent struggle against the German occupiers. At the so-called Taganrog meeting (April 19–20, 1918), Skrypnyk was elected secretary of the Organizational Bureau for the 1st Congress of the Central Committee of the CP(b)U at its first congress held in Moscow (July 5–12, 1918), where he was the main speaker. But after the congress, he was removed from the leadership of the CP(b)U and left in Moscow.
Skrypnyk was a leader in the so-calledKyiv faction of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks, the independentists, sensitive to the issue of nationality, and promoting a separate Ukrainian Bolshevik party, while members of the predominantly RussianKaterynoslav faction preferred joining the All-Russian Communist Party in Moscow, according toLenin's internationalist doctrine. The Kyiv faction won a compromise at a conference inTaganrog,Soviet Russia in April 1918, when the Bolshevik government was dissolved and the delegates voted to form an independentCommunist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, CP(b)U. But in July aMoscow congress of Ukrainian Bolsheviks rescinded the resolution and the Ukrainian party was declared a part of the Russian Communist Party.
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Skrypnyk worked for theCheka secret police during the winter of 1918–19, then was the head of the special department of the Cheka of the South-Eastern and Caucasian Fronts. He returned to Ukraine, where he was a special commissioner of the Defense Council for combating the insurgent movement and led the suppression of the rebellion ofDanylo Terpylo. He later served as People's Commissar of Worker-Peasant Inspection (1920–21) and Internal Affairs (1921–22).
During debates leading up to the formation of theSoviet Union in late 1922, Skrypnyk was a proponent of independent national republics and denounced the proposal of the new General Secretary,Joseph Stalin, to absorb them into a singleRussian SFSR state as thinly-disguised Russian chauvinism. Lenin temporarily swayed the decision in favour of the republics, but after his death, the Soviet Union's constitution was finalized in January 1924 with very little political autonomy for the republics. Having lost this battle, Skrypnyk and other autonomists would turn their attention towards culture.
Skrypnyk was Commissar of Justice between 1922 and 1927 and the Commissar of Education of the USSR from March 7, 1927, to February 28, 1933. He was a member of the executive committee of the Communist International from September 1, 1928, to July 7, 1933.
Skrypnyk was appointed head of the Ukrainian Commissariat of Education in 1927. He convinced the Central Committee of the CP(b)U to introduce the policy ofUkrainization, encouraging Ukrainian culture and literature. He worked for this cause with almost obsessive zeal and, despite a lack of teachers and textbooks and in the face of bureaucratic resistance, achieved tremendous results during 1927–29. TheUkrainian language was institutionalized in the schools and society and literacy rates reached a very high level. As Sovietindustrialization and collectivization drove the population from the countryside to urban centres, Ukrainian started to change from a peasants' tongue and the romantic obsession of a smallintelligentsia into a primary language of a modernizing society.
Skrypnyk convened an international Orthographic Conference inKharkiv in 1927, hosting delegates from Soviet and western Ukraine (former territories ofAustria-Hungary, then part of theSecond Polish Republic). The conference settled on a compromise between Soviet and Galician orthographies, and published the first standardizedUkrainian alphabet accepted in all of Ukraine. TheUkrainian orthography of 1928, also known as Kharkiv orthography orSkrypnykivka, was officially adopted in 1928.
Although he was a supporter of an autonomous Ukrainian republic and the driving force behind Ukrainization, Skrypnyk's motivation was what he saw as the best way to achieve communism in Ukraine, and he remained politically opposed to Ukrainian nationalism. He gave public testimony against "nationalist deviations" such as writerMykola Khvylovy's literary independence movement, political anticentralism represented by formerBorotbistOleksandr Shumsky, andMykhailo Volobuiev's criticism of Soviet economic policies which made Ukraine dependent on Russia.
From February to July 1933, Skrypnyk headed the Ukrainian State Planning Commission, became a member of thePolitburo of the CP(b)U and served on the executive committee organizing theCommunist International, as well as leading the CP(b)U's delegation to the Comintern.
In January 1933, Stalin sentPavel Postyshev to Ukraine, with free rein to centralize the power of Moscow. Postyshev, with the help of thousands of officials brought from Russia, oversaw the violent reversal of Ukrainization, enforcedcollectivization of agriculture, and conducted apurge of the CP(b)U, anticipating the wider SovietGreat Purge which was to follow in 1937.
Skrypnyk was removed as head of Education. In June, he and his "nefarious" policies were publicly discredited and his followers condemned as "wrecking,counterrevolutionary nationalist elements". Rather than recant, on 7 July he shot himself at his desk at his apartment inDerzhprom atDzerzhynsky Square (Dzerzhynsky Municipal Raion of Kharkiv city).
During the remainder of the 1930s, Skrypnyk's "forced Ukrainization" was reversed.
He wasrehabilitated in 1962.
His first wife, Maria Skrypnyk (maiden name Mezhova; 1883–1968) was a Bolshevik from pre-revolutionary times, a member of the Krasnoyarsk organization of the RSDLP, where they met. At the end of 1917 – the beginning of 1918, she worked as the secretary of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR Vladimir Lenin, in 1919–1920; she later served as a member of the collegium of the People's Commissariat of Land Affairs and the People's Commissariat of Social Security of the USSR, then worked as a teacher and authored her memoirs about Lenin. They separated in the 1920s, at which point she moved to Moscow, while he stayed in Kharkiv.
His second wife was Raisa Leonidivna Khavina (born in 1904, Gomel, in some sources her last name is given as Petrova), much younger than her husband.[2] After Skrypnyk's death, she was arrested, but soon released. She moved to Moscow, where she worked as an engineer of the prescription commission of "Aniltrest". In 1938, she was arrested again and executed on August 20, 1938, and her son Mykola was sent to an orphanage; he died at the front during the war.[3]
Ministers of education and sciences of Ukraine | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Earlier |
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| Soviet Ukraine |
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| Ukraine | ||||||
| Ukraine (1917–1920) | Valentyn Sadovskyi(court affairs) •Serhiy Shelukhin(court affairs) •Mykhailo Chubynskyi •Oleksiy Romanov •Andriy Viazlov •Viktor Reinbot •Serhiy Shelukhin(acting) •Viktor Prykhodko •Hryhoriy Syrotenko •Dmytro Markovych •Andriy Livytskyi |  |
|---|---|---|
| West Ukraine (1918–1919) | ||
| Soviet Ukraine (1918–1991) | Aleksandr Khmelnitskiy •Mykhailo Lebedynets •Yevhen Terletskyi •Sergei Buzdalin •Mikhail Vetoshkin •Mykola Skrypnyk •Vasyl Poraiko •Vasiliy Polyakov •Mykhailo Mykhailyk •Arkadiy Kiselyov •Khoma Radchenko •Mykola Babchenko •Denys Panasyuk •Fedir Hlukh •Kateryna Zghurska •Volodymyr Zaichuk •Vitaliy Boiko | |
| Ukraine | Vitaliy Boiko •Volodymyr Kampo •Vasyl Onopenko •Serhiy Holovatyi •Syuzanna Stanik •Oleksandr Lavrynovych •Roman Zvarych •Serhiy Holovatyi •Roman Zvarych •Oleksandr Lavrynovych •Mykola Onishchuk •Oleksandr Lavrynovych •Olena Lukash •Pavlo Petrenko •Denys Maliuska •Olha Stefanishyna •German Galushchenko •Liudmyla Suhak(acting) | |
People's commissars and ministers of interior of theUkrSSR | |
|---|---|
| Ukrainian People's Republic of Soviets People's Secretaries | |
| Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic People's Commissars | |
| Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic Ministers | |
1 denotes acting | |
| Ukraine (1917–1918) |  | |
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| Soviet Ukraine (1922–1991) | ||
| Ukraine (since 1991) |
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| Political offices | ||
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| Preceded by introduced | Director ofAll-Ukrainian Institute of Marxism–Leninism 1922–1930 | Succeeded by |
