Personal scientific archive of Myroslav Petrovych Zhukovskyi

Deputy Director of the Museum for Research, he studies issues from ancient times to the present. The 4 main areas of research are archaeology, Zaporizhzhia Cossacks, World War II and modern history. He has written more than a dozen papers on the topic of World War II.

Head of the Nikopol Memorial project, which deals with the search for the names of those who died during World War II on the territory of Nikopol. These are soldiers of the Red Army, the Third Reich, and its allies (there were Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and Croats in the territory of Nikopol). Prisoners of war, victims of the Holocaust. He was personally involved in documenting the righteous among the nations: three in Nikopol and four in the district. He collected these records together with the head of the Jewish community, Oleksandr Feldman, who died in the winter of 2024. Quote: “I have the data, I found some testimonies from witnesses who have already died, but the records remain. The only bad thing is that the situation in Nikopol is a frontline zone, there is shelling every day, and you walk every day, as they say, under God - today you have it, and tomorrow you don't, so far.”

He wrote the monograph “The Holocaust - Nikopol Region. The Holocaust - the Righteous Among the Nations” and published the second edition. In 2018, thanks to this work, he received an award - he went to a seminar of Ukrainian museum workers in Berlin at the Museum of the Wannsee Conference, where he had an internship for a week. “I really liked it, I would like to go again. I visited Holocaust-themed museums there, and it gave me the opportunity to expand my research”.

Quote: “My personal archive is small, it used to be forbidden to do this in Soviet times, it was under the control of the Communist Party, and when it was allowed, other issues arose - I just had to survive.”

A few years ago, he managed to record several testimonies about the place of execution of the Jewish population and other victims of Nazi terror from among hostages, Communist Party activists, and prisoners of war.

The Holocaust victims of Nikopol are part of the Nikopol Memorial project.

A separate area of research is the victims of communist repression by the NKVD.

Quote: “Our group has registered about 1,500 names of 5,000 people, but funds and the war have stopped this work. We recorded them from the publications of the SBU Office in Dnipropetrovsk region, they have their own vision, they needed it for one day, then forgot about it, and this should be done constantly. I don't have time for archives right now, and I'm sorry, but we have to tell it like it is”.

Officially, he began to study the period of World War II in 1978 as a junior researcher at the Nikopol Museum of Local Lore named after Lomonosov. This name of the museum is connected with the fact that in the 1930s the Ukrainian intelligentsia was exterminated and the Nikopol Museum of Fine Arts was transformed into a local history museum, headed by a Russian of Jewish origin, or a Jew of Russian origin, who, in order to be aware of the Communist Party's education, raised the issue of naming the museum after Lomonosov in 1930-31.

Zhukovskyi started working at the Nikopol Museum of Local Lore in 1975, and two years later he was accepted to study at the correspondence department of the History Faculty of Kharkiv State University. In March 1978, after successfully passing the first session, the museum director decided to support the young staff to stay at the museum and transferred him from the position of a hall keeper to the position of a junior researcher. Since he had been giving tours and lectures for two years before that, there were no objections from the museum's management.

From March 1978, he worked as a junior researcher and a researcher until August 1985. Because he collected data that did not fit into the official doctrine of communist propaganda, he was forced to leave the museum. He then worked as a teacher at a medical school, and only in 1992 returned to the museum, starting on May 1, 1993, as the museum's deputy director for research.

He graduated with a master's degree from the Faculty of History at the Drahomanov National Pedagogical University in Kyiv, then was a researcher at the Center for Monument Studies of the National Academy of Sciences, defended his PhD thesis, and received a diploma.

Head of the Nikopol Archaeological Expedition, 14 field seasons of his own searching for the sites of the Zaporozhian Sich in 2000-12. Then he collaborated with the Institute of History of Ukraine on the study of Cossack monuments, and now he is the director of the Nikopol regional branch of the Research Institute of the Ukrainian Cossacks of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences. Member of the National Union of Journalists, member of the National Union of Local History of Ukraine.

The area of search and research is Nikopol and Nikopol district, where 250 thousand people live. 3 cities - Nikopol, Marhanets, Pokrov, 2 villages - Tomakivka, Chervonohryhorivka, and more than 50 settlements that are in the field of Zhukovsky's research.

Mass graves and monuments are the basis of the researcher's scientific and search vector. Most of the monuments are registered, 90% of all mass graves are in the state register. The mass graves of the Third Reich soldiers, the data on them were registered and transferred to the Volksbund (a society for the care of war graves in Germany). He was a representative of the Volksbund in Nikopol and Nikopol district for 2 years, and Kyiv issued a mandate for this representation. Military graves of German soldiers are not included in the state register.

His personal research archive contains materials for the years 1939-1945, as well as information about the participants of the war and their life in the postwar period.

Public initiative. Most of the copies of documents needed for the search reflect, as far as possible, the creation of a particular monument or mass grave. Copies of decisions on the creation of monuments at the republican, regional, and local (city or district) levels.

The collection is located in the researcher's apartment. His family allowed Zhukovskyi to have one room for the library and archive in a 1950s building with 10 shelves and racks, a mezzanine to the ceiling. The wooden floor is bent and needs to be repaired (the room is 12-13 m2, the height of the walls is 280 cm), and it was not designed to hold 2 tons of books and documents, 36 cubic meters, it slides sideways between the shelves.

“I took the archives of newspapers and magazines to the “vremianka” (hut, shanty), which also has one room for this storage, but there is no heating, so I don't keep the archive or library there”.

He transferred 500 books from his own library to the museum library, as a result of the full-scale Russian library, he stopped accepting literature.

When he was on sick leave, he began to make a list of his personal library, as far as possible, and started to form archival files. The stationery store received archival folders for sale, he received money for sick leave, which was not very much, and bought 2-3 folders. “I decided to make lists of archival files on my sick leave, to review them, to remove unnecessary things, to keep everything valuable. I need computer equipment, which I don't have. There are problems with electricity because of the constant shelling, they advised me to have a voltage stabilizer. In our neighborhood, near the school where I live, more than a hundred houses were damaged and abandoned. It is a very intense area of attacks”.

He has a personal blog in Nikopol City, where he publishes materials about the Holocaust, WWII: (https://nikopol.city/articles/124387/do-mizhnarodnogo-dnya-pamyati-zhertv-golokostu-istoriya-etnocidu https://nikopol.city/blogs/259167/scho-mi-znaemo-pro-nacistskij-teror-u-nikopoli-chitaemo-schodennik-polonenogo- https://nikopol.city/articles/219455/slidkujte-za-nashimi-publikaciyami-na-temu-derusifikacii- https://nikopol.city/blogs/339637/partizani-dniprovskih-plavniv-pershi-dni ) 150 scholarly publications - essays, brochure information sheets, publications in historical journals. “Nikopol in the Flames of War” is an essay, a separate essay ‘Nikopol during World War II’, journalistic and publicistic ‘The Secret of the Soviet General Staff’ - one of the first publications written 22 years ago. He spoke at conferences on the war about partisans and the formation of certain military units. In the 1930s, a military town of the Red Army was created in Nikopol, where tactical units were formed - regiments and divisional-level formations.

He conducted a survey of war veterans in the early 1980s. I collected more than 1,200 questionnaires from war veterans out of 10,000 distributed. It was in the direction of the Communist Party, but veterans had doubts, and not all of them answered the questionnaires - “the KGB is checking again.”