Yakovliv, Andrii

Yakovliv, Andrii [Яковлів, Андрій; Jakovliv, Andrij], b 11 December 1872 in Chyhyryn, Kyiv gubernia, d 14 May 1955 in New York. Legal scholar and civic and political leader; full member of the Ukrainian Scientific Society in Kyiv and the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh, from 1926) and director of the law section of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States. After graduating from the law faculties of Yurev University (1903) and Kyiv University (1904), he worked in Kyiv as a civil servant and in the treasury department. From 1908 he maintained a legal practice and conducted research in the Kyiv archives. During the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917–20) he was a member of the Central Rada (1917–18, delegate of the cultural organization of Kyiv) and the Little Rada (director of its bureau) and consul extraordinary to Austria-Hungary (1918); under the Hetman government he was director of international relations in the external affairs ministry; and under the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic he was head of the extraordinary diplomatic mission of the Ukrainian National Republic in Holland and Belgium (January 1919).

Yakovliv lived as an émigré in Prague from 1923. He served as a professor at the Ukrainian Free University (rector in 1930–1 and 1944–5), a professor of law at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, head of the society of the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence, and head of the Ukrainian Academic Committee in Prague. In 1939 he became director of the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Warsaw. After the Second World War he lived in Belgium, and in 1952 he moved to the United States.

Yakovliv ranks as one of the leading researchers in the field of the history of Ukrainian law. Among his works (written in Ukrainian, Russian, French, German, and English) are Dohovir het’mana B. Khmel’nyts’koho z Moskvoiu r. 1654 (Hetman B. Khmelnytsky's 1654 Treaty with Moscow, 1927), Pro kopni sudy na Ukraïni (About Community Courts in Ukraine, 1931), Ukraïns’ko-moskovs’ki dohovory 17–18 vv. (Ukrainian-Muscovite Treaties of the 17th–18th Centuries, 1934), Osnovy Konstytutsiï UNR (The Foundations of the UNR Constitution, 1935), Das deutsche Recht in der Ukraine (1942), and Dohovir Het’mana B. Khmel’nyts’koho z moskovs’kym tsarem Oleksiiem Mykhailovychem 1654: Istorychno-pravnycha studiia (The 1654 Treaty of Hetman B. Khmelnytsky with the Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich: A Historical-Juridical Study, 1954), as well as articles in Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva im. Shevchenka on Muscovite treaties with Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky (1933), on the authorship of the historical-political tract Istoriia Rusov (1937), and on the history of the Ukrainian Code of Laws of 1743 (1949). In his series of studies on 17th-century Ukrainian-Muscovite relations, Yakovliv defended the theory that the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 created the conditions for a vassalage relationship akin to that of a protectorate between Ukraine and Russia. Yakovliv was also a philatelist; under the pseudonym Andrii Chyhyrynets he published Poshtovi marky Ukraïny 1918–1943 (Postage Stamps of Ukraine in 1918–43, 1948).

Arkadii Zhukovsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]