Ukrainian Independentist
Skrypnyk was born in the village Yasynuvata of Bakhmut uyezd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire in family of a railway serviceman. At first he studied at the Barvinkove elementary school, then realschules of the cities Izium and Kursk. While studying at Saint Petersburg State Institute of Technology, he was arrested on political charges in 1901, prompting him to become a full-time revolutionary. Skrypnyk was eventually excluded from the Institute. He was arrested fifteen times and exiled seven times. He was convicted for the total term of 34 years and one time to the death sentence, while six times had chance to run away. In 1913 Skrypnyk was an editor of the Bolshevik's legal magazine Issues of Insurance and in 1914 was a member of the editorial collegiate of the Pravda newspaper.
After the February Revolution Skrypnyk arrived from one of his exiles to Morshansk (Tambov Governorate) to Petrograd where he was elected as a secretary of the Central Council of Factories Committees. During the October Revolution Skrypnyk was a member of the MilRevKom of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
In December 1917, Skrypnyk was elected in absentia to the first Bolshevik government of Ukraine in Kharkiv (Respublika Rad Ukrayiny), and in March 1918 Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin appointed him its head. He replaced at that assignment Yevgenia Bogdan (Gotlieb) Bosch, daughter of a German immigrant. Skrypnyk was a leader in the so-called Kiev 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 Russian Katerynoslav faction preferred joining the All-Russian Communist Party in Moscow, according to Lenin's internationalist doctrine. The Kiev faction won a compromise at a conference in Taganrog, Soviet Russia in April 1918, when the Bolshevik government was dissolved and the delegates voted to form an independent Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, CP(b)U. But in July, a Moscow congress of Ukrainian Bolsheviks rescinded the resolution, and the Ukrainian party was declared a part of the Russian Communist Party.
Skrypnyk worked for the Cheka secret police during the winter of 1918–19, then returned to Ukraine as People's Commissar of Worker-Peasant Inspection (1920–21), and Internal Affairs (1921–22).
During debates leading up to the formation of the Soviet 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 single Russian 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.
Read more about this topic: Mykola Skrypnyk