Turning the pages back... July 7, 1852 (07/05/98)

Turning the pages back...

July 7, 1852

The scholar and civic leader Volodymyr Naumenko was born in Novhorod Siverskyi on July 7, 1852. He graduated from Kyiv University in 1873 and taught in the Ukrainian capital's secondary schools until 1903. In 1905, he founded a gymnasium and served as its director in 1914.

A member of the relatively conservative and cautious Old Hromada in Kyiv, he was elected its treasurer in 1875. In the 1880s, following the issuance of the repressive Ems Ukase directed by the Russian imperial government at all Ukrainian publishing and organized life, the Old Hromada, intending to minimize damage to itself, cut ties to one of its founders, Mykola Drahomanov; Naumenko was among those who persisted in staying in contact with the exile in Geneva.

Naumenko contributed regularly to the journal Kievskaia Starina, in which he published over 90 articles on Ukrainian history, literature, education and ethnography. He served as the Starina's last editor, from 1893 to 1906. He wrote a survey of the phonetic traits of "Little Russian," and discovered a collection of Ukrainian folk songs gathered by the Polish ethnographer Zorian Dolega-Chodakowski that was thought to have been lost.

In 1907, Naumenko acted on the easing of anti-Ukrainian tsarist restrictions by prompting the establishment of the Ukrainian Scientific Society (UNT), the first Ukrainian-language and openly Ukrainophillic learned society in Russian-ruled Ukraine. It was modeled on the Lviv-based Shevchenko Scientific Society, and its first president was historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, who was exiled to Russia in 1914. Naumenko himself was elected UNT president in 1914 and served until 1917.

Following the February 1917 Revolution that toppled the Romanovs, the Society of Ukrainian Progressives established the Central Rada in Kyiv as the body that united all of Ukraine's political, community, cultural and professional organizations, and chose Naumenko to serve as its interim leader until the president elected in absentia, Hrushevsky, arrived in March 1917.

In December 1917, Naumenko became a founding member of the conservative Ukrainian Federative Democratic Party and later served as the last minister of education (November-December 1918) under the Hetman government.

After that administration's removal by the UNR Directory headed by Symon Petliura, Naumenko worked at the newly established Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, where he collected materials on the history of 19th century Ukrainian literature.

In the course of their seizures of Kyiv in 1919, the Bolsheviks routinely executed those whom they considered "bourgeois intellectuals" and other enemies of their revolution. On July 8, 1919, it was Naumenko's turn. He went unmentioned in Soviet publications dealing with the work of scholars.

Sources: "Naumenko, Volodymyr," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (University of Toronto Press, 1993).