This week in history

May 13: 1865. The Novorossiya University, the third in Ukraine, was opened in Odesa on the basis of the Richelier Lyceum.

1933: Writer Mykola Khvyliovyi committed suicide, symbolically marking the end of the Ukrainian literary renaissance of the previous decade.

1940. By order of the USSR People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, so-called departments to fight banditry were organized in Ukraine and Belarus’s western oblasts.

May 14: 1783. Russian Empress Catherine II issued an order relegating millions of Ukrainian peasants to serfdom.

1993. Heads of the CIS member states (with the exception of Turkmenistan) signed the (stillborn) declaration On Creating an Economic Union in Moscow.

May 15: 1848. The law On Canceling Serfdom in Eastern Galicia was adopted in Vienna.

1942. Soviet troops abandoned Kerch.

May 16: 1648. Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossacks defeated Stanislaw Potocki’s Polish army at Zhovti Vody.

1917. An anti-Ukrainian Democratic Union of Russian Culture Workers was set up in Kyiv.

May 17: 1990. The founding meeting of the Majoronis Society of Lithuanian Culture took place in Kyiv.

1991. The founding meeting of the Ukrainian Association of the Democratic Press was held.

May 18: 1944. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Crimea began.

1961. The Taras Shevchenko Republic Prize for Outstanding Achievements in Literature, the Fine Arts, Theater, Music, and Cinematography, now the State Shevchenko Prize, was established.

May 19: 1861. The first Ukrainian Sunday school was opened in Sumy.

1945. The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR, Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, and Central Committee of the KP(b)U adopted an Address to the Members of Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalists Bands calling upon them to surrender.