Oleksandr Lototsky. 1910s (?). Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine site
Russian zoological nationalism did not begin yesterday, nor will it end tomorrow. Moreover, it is based on the serfdom of the imperialist idea and the imperialist feeling of the Russian nature, and such traditions do not disappear quickly or easily. The bourgeois Russian intelligentsia has not only failed to free itself from these zoological traditions, but, in being detached from the substance of Russian reality, it is even more entrenched in them
Oleksandr Lototsky
Oleksandr Lototsky was a Ukrainian public and political figure, writer, publicist, and scholar.
He was born on March 21, 1870, in the village of Bronytsia, in Podillia. He came from the Lototsky family of priests, which belonged to an ancient boyar family. In 1896 he graduated from the Kyiv Theological Academy and received a PhD in Theology. At the same time, he became interested in scientific research, which was no surprise, since his supervisors were Volodymyr Antonovych and Mykhailo Hrushevsky. He wanted to continue his career at the academy, but because of his reputation as an “unreliable Ukrainophile”, he was rejected. This led to him obtaining a job in finance, where he worked as an official in St. Petersburg and Kyiv.
He leaned toward the moderate wing of Ukrainian politics, which was united around the Society of Ukrainian Progressives. He did a great deal of work in lobbying for Ukrainian interests in St. Petersburg. One successful outcome was that he obtained permission for the full publication of Shevchenko’s Kobzar.
In the fall of 1917, he became the General Secretary of the Secretariat General, and not long after, the General Controller of the Ukrainian People’s Republic.
As he had been interested in church affairs since his studies at the Kyiv Theological Academy, Lototsky took the position of Minister of Confessions in the government of Fedir Lyzohub under Hetman Skoropadsky. He obtained this position under the Directory. His greatest achievement at this time was the proclamation of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on January 1, 1919. This was, without exaggeration, an epoch-making decision, because for the first time in hundreds of years the Ukrainian Church, with its Holy Synod and hierarchy, was free of any dependence on the Moscow Patriarch.
In 1919-1920, as the head of the UPR diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire, he tried to obtain approval for autocephaly from the Primate of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople.
In 1929-1939, he taught the history of the Slavic and Romanian Orthodox churches as faculty in the Department of Theology at the University of Warsaw. He was also the Director of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw (1930-1938).
Lototsky is a well-known author of various types and genres of literature. He wrote fiction and children’s books, such as the children’s fairy tales: The Adventures of the Fat Wolf, The Little Bunny, and The Little Fox Sister. His memoirs include Pages of the Past and In Tsargorod, as well as the fundamental two-volume Autocephaly (1935, 1938). He also wrote as a journalist. For example, he published a brochure in honor of the memory of Symon Petliura, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of his death.
He died on October 22, 1939, in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where he was buried in an Orthodox cemetery. His son Borys later reinterred his father’s remains at St. Andrew’s Cemetery in South Bound Brook, New Jersey in the United States.
