Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi

Viacheslav Briukhovetskyi died on 12 November 2026 at the age of 79. The National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy announced the death on Facebook, saying that the heart of its first and honorary president had stopped beating, and calling it an irreparable loss for the Mohyla community and for all of Ukraine. The university said his most important achievement was the generations of graduates who take responsibility for their country. Verkhovna Rada Chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk also paid tribute. No cause of death was made public, and funeral arrangements had not been announced at the time of the first reports.

Viacheslav Stepanovych Briukhovetskyi was born on 14 July 1947 in Dzaudzhikau, as Vladikavkaz was then called, in the Russian SFSR of the Soviet Union. His father, Stepan Oleksiiovych Briukhovetskyi, came from Oleksandrivka in the Chernihiv region, and his mother, Valentyna Pylypivna, born Horiachkivska, came from Kaniv. An older brother died in 1945, before Viacheslav was born.

He first trained in engineering, graduating from the Smila technical college of the food industry in 1966 as a mechanical technician. He worked as a boilermaker at the Smila engineering plant, as a fitter in Odesa and Cherkasy, and served in the army in 1967 and 1968 as a radar operator. He then entered the journalism faculty of Kyiv State University, graduating with honours in 1974. He completed postgraduate study at the Kyiv State Institute of Culture, received a candidate's degree in pedagogical sciences in 1980, and defended his doctoral dissertation in philology at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature in 1986.

From 1973 to 1976 Briukhovetskyi was a journalist and head of the criticism department at the Kyiv newspaper Literaturna Ukraina. From 1980 to 1991 he worked at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, rising to head its department of literary criticism. He joined the Writers' Union of Ukraine in 1982. He was the author of more than 400 publications, among them studies of Ivan Senchenko (1981), Lina Kostenko (1990) and Mykola Zerov (1991), books on the theory of literary criticism, and a three volume edition of the studies of Viktor Petrov (2013). In 1989 and 1990 he taught Ukrainian literature as a visiting professor at Rutgers University and the University of Manitoba.

In 1989 he was one of the initiators of the People's Movement of Ukraine, Rukh. In 1991 he became the driving force behind the revival of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy as a modern university, serving as its rector from 1991 to 1994 and as president from 1994 to 2007. He modelled the institution on North American universities, introducing master's and doctoral programmes, student self-government and an emphasis on academic freedom and critical thinking, and defended the principle of university autonomy. From 2007 he was honorary president.

He also served on the committee for the Shevchenko National Prize from 2005 to 2010, on the National Commission of Ukraine for UNESCO, and as president of the civic network Experts of Ukraine from 2005 to 2007. In 2006 he was elected to the Kyiv City Council on the Our Ukraine list but soon gave up the seat. In 2011 he was a co-founder of the First of December initiative group, in which he took part until 2019.

Briukhovetskyi was married to Larysa Briukhovetska, a film scholar and editor. They had two daughters: Oksana, an artist and ceramicist who worked in book design and on the magazine Kino-Teatr, and Olha, a philosopher who graduated from Kyiv University. He also had a granddaughter, Melaniia.

Briukhovetskyi is remembered above all as the man who brought the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy back to life. The university he rebuilt became one of the best known in Ukraine and a symbol of the country's independence, academic freedom and civic engagement, with its students and staff taking a visible part in the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity. He was made a Hero of Ukraine in 2007 and received the Order of Merit, the Antonovych Prize and the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland. A collection published for his 60th birthday was titled The One Who Revived Mohylianka.