Oleksandr Ohloblyn. 1930s. Kyiv. Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive
Oleksandr Ohloblyn. 1950s. Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive
Oleksandr Ohloblyn is a great Ukrainian historian, perhaps our most prominent historian of the second half of the twentieth century.
Ihor Hyrych, historian
Oleksandr Ohloblyn was a Ukrainian historian, archivist, public figure, founder of scientific genealogy in Ukraine, president of The Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States; a representative of the third (political) wave of emigration. He lived and worked in the Czech Republic, Germany, and the United States.
The scholar was born on December 06, 1899 in Kyiv. He graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology at the Kyiv University of St. Volodymyr. In 1926, he was the first Ukrainian scholar to receive a doctorate in the history of Ukrainian culture. He taught at gymnasiums, the Kyiv Institute of Public Education, and others. He took an active part in the development of Ukrainian historical science. In the 1930s, he headed the Kyiv Central Archive of Old Documents. He worked at the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Academy of Sciences of Ukrainian SSR and the Institute of History of Ukraine of the Ukrainian SSR. The Soviet authorities persecuted him.
During the Second World War, he was forced to emigrate. In 1944, he arrived in Prague (Czech Republic). He taught at the Ukrainian Free University. From 1945 to 1951, he lived in Germany and continued to teach at the Ukrainian Free University and the Theological and Pedagogical Academy of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.
Since 1951, he has been in the United States. He lived in constant financial difficulties in the town of Ludlow, Massachusetts. He collaborated with the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) and the Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms for Ukraine (ODFFU), which financed the publication of his articles and monographs. In the 1960s, he founded and headed the Ukrainian Genealogical Society and the Ukrainian Historical Society. He was a visiting professor at the Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University. For forty years, he headed the Historical Section of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States (1952-1992), and during 1970-1987 he became the head of the Academy itself. O. Ohloblyn was proud of his students, including Liubomyr Vynar, Vasyl Omelchenko, and Orest Subtelny.
Ohloblyn was the author of about a thousand works on the history of Ukraine, genealogy, and historiography. Of fundamental importance is his study of the era of Hetman Mazepa (“Hetman Mazepa and His Era,” 1960) and the work “History of the Ruses”. O. Ohloblyn is considered the founder of Ukrainian scientific genealogy, as the scientist linked genealogical research with the political history of Ukraine.
He died on February 16, 1992 in Ludlow. He was buried in Springfield.
