Jarosław Pełenski

Jaroslaw Pelenski (Warsaw, 12 April 1929 – New York City, 20 February 2022 ) was a Polish-born Ukrainian historian, political scientist and professor emeritus. He obtained his higher education in West Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s, and his doctorate in the United States in the 1960s, where he made an academic career. Returning to Ukraine in the 1990s, he was a full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, and a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, where he served as the Director of the Institute of European Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Biography Education in West Germany Pelenski was born to Ukrainian parents in Warsaw in 1929. In the summer of 1991, he became a member of the editorial board of the Przegląd Wschodni ("Eastern Review") in Warsaw, and in 1993 a member of the editorial board of the Kyiv-published Ucraina mediaevalis ("Medieval Ukraine").

As early as May 1990, as visiting professor, Pelenski lectured for a month at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Lviv. After the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine (24 August 1991), his cooperation with the Ukrainian academic community in the country began. In November 1992, he was elected as a foreign full member (academician) of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU). In August 1993, he became a member of the Polish–Ukrainian Historical Commission established by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since March 1994, he was a member of the NASU's Office of the History, Philosophy and Law Faculty.

His research interests covered various issues and historical periods: Kievan Rus', Ruthenia and Muscovy, the Russian Tsardom and Empire, Soviet Russia and the Soviet Union since 1917, 20th-century history of Ukraine, and more broadly the modern history of (Eastern) Europe since 1500. He gave lectures, seminars and colloquia on themes such as Leninism, Stalinism, the dissident movement, the Soviet political system, political theory, historiography, problems of nationality, imperialism, communism, nobility, and conservatism.