The dissertation focuses on a comprehensive study of the multivolume (in 26 volumes) «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR» and its derivative ‒ Russian version of the «History of Сities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR» project, as the largest domestic project on local history of the second half of the 1950s ‒ early 1980s.
The social and political preconditions, caused a splash of public interest in local history since the mid-1950s have been clarified. In response to a public request, academic historians of Lviv and Kyiv offered to prepare the «Socialist Cities and Villages of Soviet Ukraine», a multi-volume historical and geographical dictionary. When the Ukr. SSR Communist Party leaders approved that initiative in 1962, the implementation of the «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR» multi-volume project began. The main stages of work on the publication and crisis moments have been analysed, its achievements and shortcomings have been clarified and the role of the leading executors of the project has been reconstructed.
The hypertrophied attention paid to the Soviet period of the history of cities and villages was a disadvantage of the project. According to the directives, it should have been presented in a pompous form exclusively. The presence of numerous «white spots» in the Soviet history of the Ukr. SSR made it difficult to write texts, forcing the authors to sugar-cover the real and recent past facts. Thus, the «Crimean» or the «Crimean Tatar» issue, the criminal action of the Stalinist regime in 1944 with the deportation of many of its indigenous inhabitants from the peninsula and the settlement of this territory by the newcomers, became the «stumbling block». The resistance of the Russian-speaking and Russian ethnic party nomenclature of the Crimean region not only resulted in the idea of bilingual publication of the regional volume at the last stage of the project (major part of the edition ‒ in Russian, minuscule share ‒ in Ukrainian). It was on the «New historical community ‒ the Soviet people» all-Union and republican political and ideological Russification trend at that time. The idea to publish a Russian-language version at least some volumes of the «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR» appeared.
The Russian-language series of the «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR», launched in 1974, was prepared in a much worse political and ideological atmosphere than its predecessor ‒ the «Ukrainian» version of the project. Changes were made for the worse at the top of the republican party nomenklatura. Petro Shelest, who tolerated the Ukrainian cultural projects, was replaced by Russifier Volodymyr Shcherbytsky. Consequently, Valentyn Malanchuk, who fought against the «Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism», provided ideological censorship between 1972 and 1979 years. He namely supervised the «ideologically correct» content of the Russian-language edition of the «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR». The all-Union atmosphere of the «stagnation» era with its cult of the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev influenced the illustrative series and content of the volumes of the Russian segment of the project.
The multivolume «History of Cities and Villages of the Ukrainian SSR» still is of encyclopedic significance, remaining a unique source of knowledge on a number of topics, primarily on the local history of Ukraine.
At the same time, the publication has significant disadvantages. The text, especially on the Soviet period history, is overly ideological. The system of historiographical prohibitions led to the tabooing of a number of important topics: the Ukrainian Revolution (1917–1921), the Holodomor (Famine-Genocide) (1932–1933), the Great Terror (1937–1938), Stalin deportations of peoples, etc. The material is presented unevenly: the era after 1917 clearly dominates. We can see a glut of «labor achievements», «heroic deeds» and «hostile crimes». The dates of establishment of certain settlements enshrined there need to be revised.
Considering disadvantages in the publication and a wealth of information put into circulation both, since the late 1980s Petro Tronko actively promoted the idea to republish the edition, taking into account new information and changing methodological approaches to the publication. In 2002, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine issued a resolution instructing the relevant ministries and departments to make proposals for the publication of a multi-volume «History of Cities and Villages of Ukraine». However, Tronko, a main driver of the project died in 2011 and the lack of funding did not let implementation of that plans
