MYKOLA HOVOROV – DEAN OF THREE UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the research of life and achievements of Mykola Oleksandrovych Hovorov (1899-1950), adventurer of revolutionary times and younger brother of USSR Marshal Leonid Hovorov. Being a whiteguard officer, he was trying to escape political police prosecutions (OGPU), in the end of 1920 he became a teacher of mechanical studies of the provincial Oleksandrivsk seven-class mechanical and handcraft school. M. Hovorov’s pedagogical and scientific career was quite successful, his educational institution was later reorganized into Zaporozhzhia Industrial College, and then to Zaporizhzhia Institute of Agricultural Engineering. M. Hovorov himself was able to avoid repressions during the «Great Terror» to defend his PhD thesis and to become an associate professor (1936). Subsequently, he took the position of Head of the Department «Machinery details» (1939) and became the first Dean of the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology in the history of the university (1938). During the Second World War, M. Hovorov continued to keep contact with his older brother and was actively involved in the fight against German Nazism. In August 1941, together with the Institute, he was evacuated to the Altai region in Barnaul, where he took a noticeable participation in the organisation of the Altai Machine-Building Institute. Managing a large pedagogical staff, made up of refugee professors, M. Hovorov in 1943 headed the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology. After the reevacuation of the institute to Zaporizhzhia in the summer of 1944, M. Hovorov held the position of Dean of the Faculty of Mechanics and Technology of the newly created Zaporizhzhia Auto-mechanical Institute (1944) and took an active part in the reconstruction of the institute and restoration of its full work. M. Hovorov devoted almost his entire life, right up to his death in 1950, to the development of Ukrainian technical education and training of domestic engineering personnel, earning a reputation of a talented teacher and scientist, one of the best specialists in the country in the production and implementation of industrial bearings.