Mazurenko, Yurii

Mazurenko, Yurii [Мазуренко, Юрій], b 1 July 1885 in Kryvorizhia, Oblast of the Don Cossack Host, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia region, RSFSR. Political and civic leader and jurist; brother of Semen Mazurenko and Vasyl Mazurenko. During the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917–20) he was one of the leaders of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party (Independentists), and in 1919 he commanded its insurgent forces against the Bolshevik government in Kyiv. In the summer of 1920 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist party. After its dissolution he joined the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. In the 1920s he chaired the codification department of the People's Commissariat of Justice and taught at the Kharkiv Institute of the National Economy. He presided over the Juridical Society in Kharkiv. In the early 1930s he was president of the Kharkiv Scientific Society of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. After being arrested in 1934, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for belonging to a ‘Ukrainian terrorist organization,’ and murdered during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. His publications dealt largely with family law.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]