Mykola Krasovskyi

Mykola Krasovskyi was born on March 31, 1871, in Kyiv in the family of  an Orthodox clergyman. He began his career in 1903 as an assistant of a police officer in Nizhyn, Chernihiv province. From 1908 he worked in the Kyiv City Police, for some time he was the Acting Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), he solved  dozens of high-profile crimes and proved to be one of the best detectives.

He took part in the investigation of one of the most high-profile cases in pre-revolutionary tsarist russia, which erupted in the world – the so-called “Beilis Case” concerning the murder in 1911 of 13-year-old student of Kyiv-Sofia Theological Seminary Andriy Yushchynskyi. They tried to accuse of committing the crime Menachem Mendel Beilis, a freight forwarder at the Kyiv Brick Factory, who allegedly committed a ritual murder. Thanks to the persistence of M. Krasovskyi, the real murderers were found and Jewish pogroms in Kyiv were prevented.

The Ukrainian Central Rada hired M. Krasovskyi as an officer who accepted the idea of ​​national statehood. In March 1917 he was appointed Commissioner of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Kyiv police. He headed the Kyiv CID until June 1918. Later, he was a member of an underground organization that fought against the special services of the Austro-German troops stationed in Ukraine under the Brest Treaty, and was a member of the illegal Committee for the Salvation of Ukraine. In July 1918, he was arrested by German counterintelligence and subsequently sentenced to two years in prison by a German military court martial.

After Hetman P. Skoropadskyi’s resignation, M. Krasovskyi was released from prison. He worked in the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian People’s Republic. From 1920 to 1921 he headed the “Information Bureau” of the Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the UPR Army. At the head of this structure, he was notable for his integrity and perseverance, paying much attention to the organization of agent work, personally developing a number of normative documents, laying the foundations for this specific activity of national intelligence and counterintelligence. Under Krasovskyi’s leadership, an assassination attempt on Symon Petliura was prevented and the organizer of the action was detained.

M. Krasovskyi was implacable to the enemies of the UPR. It is not without reason that the bolsheviks appointed a bounty of 300 thousand rubles for the head of each employee of the Information Bureau, and  called the Bureau  itself  the “Petliura Cheka”.

After the Ukrainian Government’s  emigration to Poland, he was engaged in intelligence and counterintelligence work in the new environment. In 1934, while trying to sneak into the territory of Ukraine on an intelligence mission from the special service of the State Center of the UPR in exile, he was detained by gpu of the ussr. His fate is unknown (he was probably shot dead).

The fate of his family members is currently unknown.

In recent times, a number of articles and essays have been written in the media and books about Colonel of the UPR Army M. Krasovskyi as one of the most prominent representatives of the national special services of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 and creators of Ukrainian Intelligence, a documentary film was made and an artistic portrait was created. In 2022, a memorial plaque was installed on the house where M. Krasovskyi lived in Kyiv at 21/20a, Yaroslaviv Val Street.