Vasyl Pylyshenko: Essay of the biography of a member of the Central Council

The article examines the biography of a sailor, an active participant in the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921, Vasyl Pylyshenko. Based on the heuristic work, the author concluded that for a long time the figure of V. Pylyshenko remained known only out off the USSR/Ukraine, which significantly affected the state of scientific assessment of his role in the events of the Ukrainian Revolutionof 1917-1921. Тo form a matrix of the sailor's political biography was made by authors from North America, who in the 1960s and 1980s published small investigations into the life of a senior lieutenant in the UPR fleet, mostly in the Ukrainian-language, sometimes English-language, USA press. It is proved that the active process of rethinking the events of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, which covered most of the academic community at theturn of the 19th-21st centuries, did not lead to the immediate inclusion of V. Pylyshenko in the lists of those who became objects of research practices. Only in 2010 authors from Odesa and Zaporizhzhya attempted to reconstruct the biography of the UPR government official, gradually introducing new sources into scientific circulation. Significant assistance in this process was played by the materials of the personal archives of V. Pylyshenko and his son Volodymyr, which filled some gaps in the depiction of the political portrait of the studied figure. According to the results of the research, it was established that V. Pylyshenkowas one of those people who took an active part in uniting the Ukrainian community of Odesa within the state-building processes from the first days of the revolution. He joined the process of Ukrainization of the Black Sea Fleet, was amember of the Central Council, a delegate to party and professional congresses, was a member of various committees created during the revolutionary era, held administrative positions in the governments of the UPR during 1918-1921. Afterretiring, he continued to carry out ascetic activities in the field of socio-politicaland cultural self-organization of the Ukrainian population of Volyn, where helived in the interwar period.