Umanets, Fedir

Umanets, Fedir [Уманець, Федір; Umanec'], b 5 March 1841 in Yasnivka, Hlukhiv county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 1908 (according to other accounts, 1917) in Hlukhiv. Liberal historian and civic figure. A law graduate of Moscow University, Umanets served as a member of the agency for peasant affairs in Hlukhiv (1875–80) and the head of Hlukhiv county’s zemstvo (1887–95) and Chernihiv gubernia’s zemstvo administration (from 1896). He supported the Ukrainian national movement and secured zemstvo jobs for its members (Borys Hrinchenko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Mykola Vorony, Volodymyr Samiilenko, and others). An active member of the Chernihiv Gubernia Scholarly Archival Commission (see Archival commissions), from the 1860s on he published historical and political articles on Ukrainian-Polish relations and other subjects in Russian journals, and books on public education in Russia (1871), the decline of Poland (1872), the colonization of unsettled lands in the Russian Empire (1884), and Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1897). Using archival and published sources, he was the first writer in Russian and Ukrainian historiography to evaluate positively Mazepa as a man and a statesman. He also wrote a study on Prince Kostiantyn Vasyl Ostrozky (Russkii arkhiv, 1904).

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