Life and Career
Ohloblyn traced his ancestry to the Novhorod-Siversky region of Left-bank Ukraine, which had formed an important part of the autonomous Ukrainian "Hetmanate" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and throughout his professional career as a historian retained a lively interest in this area and wrote frequently about it. Educated at the universities in Kiev, Odessa, and Moscow, from 1921 to 1933 he taught history at the Kiev Institute of People's Education (as Kiev University was known after the revolution), but during Joseph Stalin's purges, was dismissed from his posts, forced to recant his allegedly "bourgeois nationalist" views, and suffered repression including several months of imprisonment. In the late 1930s he returned to teaching at Kiev and Odessa universities. When the Germans occupied Kiev in the fall of 1941, Ohloblyn was elected head of the Kiev Municipal Council, a post which he held from September 21 to October 25, and was a member of the Ukrainian National Council which tried to organize Ukrainian life under the difficult conditions of the occupation. he desperately tried to save from execution some of Jews he knew but the German commandant of Kiev informed him that "the Jewish issue belongs to exclusive jurisdiction of Germans and they will solve it at their own discretion" (, in Russian). Politics under the Nazis was not to his taste and he quickly retired from his public positions and returned to his scholarly work. In 1942 he worked as a director of Kiev Museum-Archive of Transitional Period, whose exhibition compared life under Bolsheviks and under Germans. In 1943 he moved to Lviv in western Ukraine and in 1944 to Prague. Upon the approach of the Red Army, he fled west to Bavaria. From 1946 to 1951, he taught at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. In 1951, he moved to the United States where he was active in various Ukrainian emigre scholarly institutions such as the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US and the Ukrainian Historical Association. From 1968 to 1970, he was a Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University.
Read more about this topic: Oleksander Ohloblyn
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