Skrypnyk, Mykola

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Skrypnyk, Mykola, b 25 January 1872 in

Yasynuvata, Bakhmut county, Katerynoslav
gubernia, d 7 July 1933 in Kharkiv. (Photo:
Mykola Skrypnyk.) Bolshevik leader and
Soviet Ukrainian statesman; full member of
the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences from
1929. After his first arrest in 1901, Skrypnyk
abandoned his studies at the Saint Petersburg

Technological Institute and became a full-time

Marxist revolutionary in Saint Petersburg,
Odesa, Katerynoslav, Riga, and Moscow. By
1917 he had been arrested 15 times and exiled
7 times to places such as Yakutiia (1909–13)
and Tambov gubernia (1914–17). During the
Bolshevik coup in Petrograd in November
1917, he was a member of the supreme
command of the military-revolutionary
committee. In December 1917 he was elected
in absentia to the People's Secretariat, the first Soviet government in Ukraine, and in March
1918 he was appointed its chairman by Vladimir Lenin. At the Tahanrih Bolshevik
Conference Skrypnyk was chosen chief of the bureau that was to set up the CP(B)U.
Although he delivered the keynote address at the Party's first congress (July 1918), he was
not elected to the CP(B)U leadership. Until January 1919 he was a member of the All-Russian
Cheka collegium in charge of the section for combating counterrevolution. He returned as a
Bolshevik commissar to Ukraine, where he served as people's commissar of worker-peasant
inspection (1920–1), internal affairs (1921–2), justice (1922–7), and education (1927–33); general
procurator (1922–7); and, briefly (February–July 1933), head of the State Planning Committee
of the Ukrainian SSR and deputy premier of the Council of People's Commissars of the
Ukrainian SSR. At the same time he rose in the CP(B)U to the positions of Central Committee
member (April 1920) and Politburo candidate (1923–5) and member (1925–33), and in the All-
Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) (see Communist Party of the Soviet Union), CC

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Skrypnyk, Mykola

candidate (1923–5) and member (1927–33). He also took part in organizing the Communist
International, was a member of its Executive Committee, and headed its CP(B)U delegation.
As a leading Party scholar he directed the All-Ukrainian Commission for the History of the
October Revolution and the CP(B)U, the Ukrainian Institute of Marxism-Leninism (1928–30),
and its chair of the national question (1926–31), and presided over the Ukrainian Society of
Marxist Historians (from 1928).

Among the non-Ukrainian members and leaders of the CP(B)U (eg, Emmanuil Kviring and
Dmytro Lebid) he encountered Russian chauvinism and a rejection of all things Ukrainian as
counterrevolutionary. To overcome this attitude Skrypnyk persuaded the CC CP(B)U to
introduce Ukrainization policies and actively advocated the development of a Ukrainian
‘proletarian’ culture and literature and Ukraine's political and economic autonomy. As
people's commissar of education he Ukrainized the press and publishing, primary education
and secondary education, and, to a significant extent, higher education. In 1927 he convened
an all-Ukrainian conference (attended also by Western Ukrainian specialists) to standardize
Ukrainian orthography. Its so-called Skrypnykivka spelling system was officially adopted in
1928.

A dogmatic Leninist, he remained a determined enemy of the opponents of Soviet rule,

including the Ukrainian ‘nationalists.’ He participated in the military and ideological struggle
that led to the physical destruction of the postrevolutionary Ukrainian intelligentsia and the
Party supporters of national communism. At the same time he saw Russian great-power
chauvinism and centralism as the chief threats to Ukrainian culture and fought against them.
Convinced of the need to unite all Ukrainian ethnic territories within one Soviet Ukrainian
state, he opposed Russian Bolshevik plans to establish a separate Donets–Kryvyi Rih Soviet
Republic in 1918. Later he demanded that the Ukrainian parts of adjacent Russian gubernias
and the regions of compact Ukrainian settlement in Central Asia and the Far East be
incorporated in the Ukrainian SSR. Throughout the 1920s he devoted much attention to the
cultural needs of Ukrainians in these regions as well as in Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and
Romanian territories.

Skrypnyk's activities contradicted the imperialistic plans of the central leadership in Moscow.
In January 1933 Joseph Stalin sent Pavel Postyshev to Ukraine to take control of the CP(B)U.
Skrypnyk's policies and theories were condemned, and he was removed as education
commissar. Foreseeing the reversal of Ukrainization and his inevitable liquidation as an old
opponent of Stalin, he committed suicide.

Skrypnyk's undeniable contributions to and defense of Ukrainian culture made him a symbol
of Ukraine's struggle for sovereignty. He was rehabilitated in the mid-1950s. His policies,
views, speeches, brochures (partly collected in 4 vols in 1929–30), and over 800 articles have
been republished in Ukraine in a selected edition (1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Babko, Iurii; Bilokobyl’s’kyi, I. Mykola Oleksiiovych Skrypnyk (Kyiv 1967)
Koshelivets’, Ivan. Mykola Skrypnyk (Munich 1972)
Skrypnyk, Mykola. Statti i promovy z natsional’noho pytannia, ed Ivan Koshelivets’ (Munich

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Skrypnyk, Mykola

1974)
Mace, James. Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet
Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge, Mass 1983)

Ivan Koshelivets

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]

List of related links from Encyclopedia of Ukraine pointing to Skrypnyk, Mykola entry:

1 All-Ukrainian Association of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Research Institutes

2 Badan, Oleksander

3 Chubar, Vlas
4 Collectivization
5 Communism
6 Communist International

7 Donets–Kryvyi Rih Soviet Republic

8 Education
9 Famine-Genocide of 1932–3
10 Federalism

11 History of Ukraine
12 Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

13 Khvylia, Andrii
14 Koshelivets, Ivan
15 Literary Discussion
16 Literaturna krytyka

17 National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

18 National communism
19 New Economic Policy

20 People's Secretariat

+ 20 Records >>

A referral to this page is found in 33 entries.

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