Surovtsova, Nadiia [Суровцова, Надія; Surovcova, Nadija], b 18 March 1896 in Uman, Kyiv gubernia, d 13 April 1985 in Uman, Cherkasy oblast. Historian, translator, and dissident civic activist. With the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917 she returned from Saint Petersburg University to Ukraine to take part in the Ukrainian national struggle for independence (1917–20): she worked in the zemstvo and Peasant Association branch in the Uman region, contributed to Trybuna and other newspapers, and headed a department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian National Republic. In 1919 she emigrated from Ukraine and settled in Vienna, where she completed a PH D in history and worked in Ukrainian publishing houses, women’s organizations, and the pacifist movement. In 1925 she returned to Ukraine, where she worked at the Radio and Telegraph Agency of Ukraine, the All-Ukrainian Photo-Cinema Administration, and the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. For refusing to collaborate with the Soviet secret police, she was arrested in 1927, charged with spying for Austria, and sent to the GULAG labor camp, from which she emerged only in 1954. She then returned to Uman, where she devoted her energies to volunteer work at the Uman Regional Studies Museum and to writing her memoirs. In the 1970s the authorities placed her under close surveillance and confiscated her memoirs. They were published posthumously in Nauka i kul’tura: Ukraïna, vols 24–5 (1990–1).

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