This week in history

May 12. 1795. The Bratslav, Volyn, and Podillia gubernias were created in the Right-Bank Ukraine by a tsar’s ukase.

1929. The first council of propletarian writers of Western Ukraine took place in Lviv.

1954. The Ukrainian SSR became member of UNESCO and the Global Labor Organization.

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

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

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.