From Oleksandrivsk to the soviet repressions: a book on the history of the Zaporizhzhia advocacy is presented

The book «The Zaporizhzhia advocacy: historical essays, facts and figures» — the fourth volume in the series «Regional history of the advocacy» has been published. The authors trace the formation and development of the bar in the Zaporizhzhia region from the late 19th through the 20th centuries.

The book, published with the support of the Ukrainian National Bar Association and the Zaporizhzhia Regional Bar Council, was presented during a meeting of the Bar Council of Ukraine, which is taking place on September 25–26 in the Lviv region.

The book illustrates how the judicial reform of 1864, industrial development, and the urbanization of Oleksandrivsk (modern-day Zaporizhzhia) influenced the formation of a professional association of jurors and private attorneys. Separate chapters are devoted to the structure and activities of the advocacy associations in Oleksandrivsk and Melitopol, the participation of lawyers in civil, commercial, and high-profile criminal cases, as well as the restructuring of the legal system amid changing political regimes and the establishment of Soviet power.

The research is based on archival documents and materials from the local press. In particular, the authors analyzed over 170 cases involving advocates from the 1920s drawn from the collections of the Zaporizhzhia Regional State Archive. They also utilized a digital database of personal files of the region’s advocates from 1943 to the early 21st century, created through the digitization of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Bar Association’s archive.

The book concludes with a biographical dictionary containing information on over one hundred advocates. It systematically organizes source-verified data on the years of life, places of practice, professional status, and periods of service of advocates who worked in what is now the Zaporizhzhia region.

«This new book is a thorough scholarly work that rescues the names of outstanding lawyers from oblivion and sheds light on the complex chapters of our profession’s development during times of ideological upheaval and the tragic chapters of repression», - noted the President of the UNBA, BCU Lidiya Izovitova.

Work on the book began in 2021 with the digitization of archival materials. According to the head of the UNBA’s Center for Research on the Advocacy Profession and Law Iryna Vasylyk after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion and the occupation of part of the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukrainian researchers lost access to a number of sources on the history of the advocacy profession in Melitopol and other settlements in the region. Therefore, the publication preserves information from documents, some of which are currently inaccessible to Ukrainian researchers.

Another distinctive feature of the fourth volume is its authorship. As I. Vasylyk noted, among the Center’s 19 publications to date, this is the first book whose authors include not only a historian but also practicing advocates — a member of the Zaporizhzhia Regional Bar Association Dmytro Maistro and the UNBA representative in the Czech Republic Vadym Lavrivsky. Joining them in working on the book was a historian, archivist, and researcher of the history of the Zaporizhzhia region Valerii Stoichev.

«We worked with the archives of the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions, as well as with the local press. In particular, in the early 20th-century «Melitopol news», correspondents provided detailed descriptions of high-profile court cases, off-site hearings, and advocates’ arguments. These materials allowed us to reconstruct the judicial practices of that time», - said D. Maistro.

«Before beginning this research, I, like many others, had the impression that Ukrainian advocacy was established on December 19, 1992. But the analyzed body of archival documents showed that its history in Zaporizhzhia began much earlier», - noted V. Lavrivsky.

The book is intended for advocates, lawyers, historians, local historians and anyone interested in the history of advocacy in Ukraine.