Evdokia Reshetnik

Career

Pre-war and war years (1935–1946)

In 1935, when the capital of Ukraine was transferred from Kharkiv to Kyiv, Reshetnik's husband was transferred with his employer and she followed him. She found employment as a researcher at the Kyiv Zoo. In 1936, she was designated as a senior researcher at the I. I. Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, for which she served as secretary. In 1939, she published her paper describing Spalacidae (mole-rats) in Ukraine and the following year earned a Candidate degree in 1940, although her diploma would not be awarded until 1946. While on a research trip the following year in Chișinău, Bessarabia, the war caused Reshetnik to return to Kyiv. Boarding the academic evacuation train for Ufa, she disembarked at Poltava, where her son was staying with her sister. She was also reunited with her husband at the train station. The curfew made it impossible for her to pick up her son and continue on the evacuation train, so they remained in Poltava until October 1941, when the Germans invaded the city. They then went back to Kyiv on horseback, a difficult and lengthy journey.

After arriving in Kyiv, Reshetnik discovered her home had been ransacked and looted, so she and her son stayed with friends. Without work, she volunteered with the Red Cross, distributing clothes and food to captured Red Army prisoners, held at the Darnytsky concentration camp. The prisoners were fed peas, which were shared with Reshetnik who was able to take them home and feed her family. On 10 February 1942, Red Cross workers, including Reshetnik, were arrested by the Gestapo. She was also charged with collaborating with the newspaper Ukrainian Word, although she had no affiliation with the publication. After eighteen days of imprisonment, her bail was paid by colleagues, Mykola Charlemagne and Sergey Paramonov and Reshetnik was released.

In May 1942, the Institute of Plant Protection and Pest Control was established by the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine in the National Academy of Sciences. Reshetnik was hired to work under the direction of Charlemagne and she secured a position there for her son as a bookbinding student to prevent him being removed to Germany. She conducted work on ground squirrels, gophers, and groundhogs at this institute until September 1943. Of particular interest to the Germans was research into drugs and other means of eliminating pests, particularly rodents, which might endanger agricultural plants. Near the end of the war, the Germans began moving the Zoological museum collections to Poznań, and other locations in Germany and Poland. Reshetnik was actively involved in successfully hiding some of the specimens to prevent their removal.

Post-war (1946–1986)

At the end of the war, Reshetnik was awarded a research specialist designation in zoology in 1946 and was hired to work at the Institute of Zoology of the Academy of Sciences, where she remained until 1950. During this time, she published two papers on her earlier study of ground squirrels. One of them, which was published in 1946, identified new subspecies of the speckled ground squirrel (Citellus suslica ognevi and Citellus suslica volhynensis). In her works, Reshetnik pointed out that rodents could be valuable for their skins as well as their fat, which was widely used during the war as a food source. She published extensive analyses about the ecology, species distribution, populations, and variability of the types of rodents throughout Ukraine. In these works, she argued that the economic or usefulness of rodents should be weighed against the potential damage they might do.

When the Soviets were restored to power, a period of repression began in Ukraine. In 1948, Reshetnik's son was arrested for membership in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and deported to Mordovia. Soon after, her husband was also arrested and imprisoned. Both of them were required to serve eight-year sentences. She faced several fabricated charges — that she was to have been shot by the Gestapo and since she was not must have been a collaborator; that she had friendships with questionable people, such as Charlemagne and Paramonov; and that she had plagiarized other people's work — among other accusations and denunciations from colleagues. In 1951, Reshetnik was remanded to the Chernihiv Penal Colony, where she remained until 1955. Upon her release, Reshetnik began working as a district entomologist for the Kyiv-Sviatoshyn District Sanitary and Epidemiology Station. Between 1956 and 1957, she was rehabilitated by the authorities, and in 1961 allowed to return to the Institute of Zoology, where she remained until her retirement in 1986.

Much of her work at the Institute of Zoology was spent curating the museum's collections. As a skilled authority and taxidermist, she expanded the zoological specimens with hundreds of samples of species. As an archivist, and one with intimate knowledge of how history treats scientists, she was a meticulous record keeper and made sure that the personnel files of her colleagues retained their most important works, even if they had been repressed by the government. Among the biographies of Ukrainian scientists Reshetnik preserved were Charlemagne, Ivan Demyanovich Ivanenko (Ukrainian: Іван Дем’янович Іваненко), Sergey Medvedev, and Paramonov, among others. In 1993, she dictated her memories of Olena Teliha to her son, because her eyesight was failing. The remembrance was published in the newspaper Ukrainian Word under the title "Моя Оленіана" ("My Oleniana") and told of their relationship when they were held by the Gestapo.

Death and legacy

Reshetnik died on 22 October 1996, in Kyiv and was buried Sovsky Cemetery. Despite her name being remembered in Ukraine because of the papers she had published, Reshetnik's biography was not retold until the twenty-first century.