Volodymyr Vynnychenko

Volodymyr Kyrylovych Vynnychenko (; – March 6, 1951) was a Ukrainian statesman, political activist, writer, playwright and artist who served as the first prime minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic. As a writer, Vynnychenko is recognized in Ukrainian literature as a leading modernist writer in pre-revolutionary Ukraine, who wrote short stories, novels, and plays, but in Soviet Ukraine his works were forbidden, like that of many other Ukrainian writers, from the 1930s until the mid-1980s. Prior to his entry onto the stage of Ukrainian politics, he was a long-time political activist, who lived abroad in Western Europe from 1906 to 1914. His works reflect his immersion in the Ukrainian revolutionary milieu, among impoverished and working-class people, and among émigrés from the Russian Empire living in Western Europe. Early life Vynnychenko was born in a village, Vesely Kut (today – Hryhorivka, Novoukrainka Raion), in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, in a family of peasants. His father Kyrylo Vasyliovych Vynnychenko earlier in his life was a peasant-serf who moved from a village to the city of Yelisavetgrad, where he married a widow, Yevdokia Pavlenko (nee: Linnyk). From her previous marriage Yevdokia had three children: Andriy, Maria, and Vasyl, while from the marriage with Kyrylo only one son, Volodymyr. Upon graduating from a local public school the Vynnychenko family managed to enroll Volodymyr at the Yelyzavetgrad Male Gymnasium (today the building of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine). In later grades of the gymnasium he took part in a revolutionary organization and wrote a revolutionary poem for which he was incarcerated for a week and excluded from school. That did not stop him from continuing his studies as he was getting prepared for his test to obtain the high school diploma (Matura). He successfully took the test in the Zlatopil gymnasium from which obtained his attestation of maturity. In 1900 Vynnychenko joined the Revolutionary Ukrainian Party (RUP) and enrolled in the law department at Kiev University, but in 1902 or 1903 he was expelled for participation in revolutionary activities. As a member of the RUP he provided political agitation and propaganda among the Kievan workers and peasants from Poltava and was jailed for several months in Lukyanivska Prison. He managed to escape from his incarceration.