President and Hetman

On November 27, Borys Paton, an outstanding Ukrainian scientist, the unchallenged president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (formerly: Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR) for 55 years (!), turned 99. Quite symbolically, the National Academy, this country’s topmost scientific institution, is marking the same anniversary on the same day – the 99th anniversary of its foundation by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in 1918.

One can write very much about similar managerial approaches of the two prominent Ukrainians – Skoropadsky and Paton (an unexpected but interesting angle). Indeed, both the former and the latter are businesslike people who are by no means inclined to make high-sounding declarations, hype themselves up, and create a semblance of good instead of facing the not so good reality. But the point now under discussion is somewhat different.

Hetman Skoropadsky decreed the foundation of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences on November 27, 1918. Skoropadsky was aware of the paramount importance of the real science for the people who are striving to assert themselves as a full-fledged nation and build a state of their own. In a short period of his hetmanship (April 29 – December 14, 1918), he managed to do more than all the other leaders combined in the later period.

And on one day of that stormy era, November 27, 1918, a person was born who has led this Academy for over half a century and has made an exceptional contribution to the development of our science, and to the salvation of this science in the current super-difficult conditions. It is Mr. Borys Paton. Of course, he has also been often coming under not always well-grounded criticism. But elementary intellectual honesty and human decency demand that we admit: if somebody else has been steering Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences in the past few decades, no one knows if we would have managed to preserve Ukrainian science, the decisive factor of society’s strategic development, at all.

Speaking with journalists on his birthday, the Academy’s president expressed a firm confidence (and wish): “Ukraine will win! It will win in everything!” He said ironically about the fact that his and the Academy’s birthdays are not a “good round figure”: “We will be marking the Academy’s centenary next year, and I am celebrating my birthday rather ‘quietly’ today. But a year later…” Let us wish Mr. Paton and the Academy he leads ample strength to move on, willpower, and new achievements. And good health to the president!