Mie Nakachi
HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University (February - May 2025)
Supported by HURI with the Stefan and Iwanna Rozankowskyj Ukrainian Fund.
Research Project
The World’s First Demographic Institute?: The Ukrainian Institute of Demography and Its Director Mykhaǐlo V. Ptukha (1884-1961)
In 1919, the Institute of Demography emerged in Kyiv as the world’s first independent demographic institute and soon became the first demographic institute in the future Soviet Union. The existence of the institute attracted leading demographers, especially those with roots in Ukraine, to work in Kyiv.
My research investigates the Kyiv Demographic Institute and Ukrainian demographers between its foundation in 1919 and its forced closure in 1938. The central figure in this history is Mykhaǐlo V. Ptukha, one of the most talented demographers of the era. Today, Kyiv’s Ptukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences is named after him. As a young demographer trained in St. Petersburg, London and Berlin, Ptukha was invited to become the director of the institute by M. I. Tuhan-Baranovs’kyǐ a renowned economist and one of the first four academicians appointed to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1919. With the exception of the brief period of the existence of the Leningrad Institute of Demography between 1930 and 1934, the Kyiv institute was the only academic institute of demography in the Soviet Union.
The institute operated in the period of demographic catastrophes due to revolutionary movements, war and civil war, multiple famines, Stalin’s forced industrialization and dekulakization, Holodomor, and purges. Ptukha and his team at the institute diligently compiled and analyzed data, and produced foundational work for the study of Ukrainian demography. My study analyzes how Ptukha defined the institute's role and goals, and what he and his institute had achieved, despite the increasing political interventions and repressions under Stalin, which eventually forced the institute’s closure and caused the purge of many Ukrainian demographers in 1938. Ptukha himself was arrested and jailed, but almost miraculously survived. The institute would, however, not be re-opened until Ukrainian independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Biography
Mie Nakachi is Professor of Global Studies at Hokusei Gakuen University and Research Associate at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. She holds a doctoral degree in history from the University of Chicago. Her research has explored reproductive politics, the interactions among policymakers who attempt to intervene in the reproductive lives of citizens, experts of medicine, law, and demography who inform and/or provide services for policymakers and citizens, and the citizens themselves, particularly women, who make decisions about childbearing. She has also used comparative analysis to place Slavic-Eurasia in regional and global perspectives, as co-editor of Reproductive States: Global Perspectives on the Invention and Implementation of Population Policy (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Nakachi’s book, Replacing the Dead: The Politics of Reproduction in the Postwar Soviet Union (OUP, 2021) analyzed the centrality of Ukraine in the making of the postwar Soviet reproductive policy and the impact of this policy on postwar women. This book won the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in 2022 and also received an honorable mention from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies for the Heldt Prize for Best Book in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies in 2022. It was during research for this book that Nakachi became aware of the distinguished history of Ukrainian demographers and demographic science. She is grateful for the opportunity to conduct research on them at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.