Internationally prominent sociologist Valery Khmelko died on Oct. 30, 2021, at the age of 82. Professor Khmelko was chairman of the Sociology Department at National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, and president and co-founder of Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS).
Khmelko’s scholarship focused on the relationship between personality and social structure, and his KIIS population survey institute introduced and encouraged the use of exit polls in Ukrainian elections since independence in 1991.
Holding graduate degrees in physics and philosophy, Khmelko pursued sociology in his doctoral studies at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, focusing on methodological problems in sociological research.
Khmelko’s research interest in personality and social structure was regarded as sensitive during the Soviet era, but after the USSR’s Central Committee legitimized sociology as an academic discipline in 1988, Khmelko was encouraged to pursue his research by international sociologists at a series of joint US-Soviet symposia where he met and later collaborated with American sociologist Melvin Kohn of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Khmelko and Volodymyr Paniotto’s collaboration with Kohn led to a revolution in the practice of Ukrainian sociology. In the following years under Kohn’s guidance, Khmelko and Paniotto incorporated long-established Western procedures and standards into Ukrainian social surveys and founded KIIS at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1992. After introducing interviewer-based surveys and census-based probability sampling to Ukrainian polling as well as introducing focus groups, exit polling and domestic software for statistical data analysis, KIIS became internationally recognized as Ukraine’s premier social survey organization.
American sociologist Weldon T. Johnson, who also collaborated with Khmelko and Paniotto for several years, said, “It’s not difficult to measure the impact of Khmelko on Ukrainian sociology because he and Paniotto literally dragged sociological methods and procedures out of the soviet era when public opinion was ignored. In the Soviet era, when the Central Committee was curious about public opinion, some party officials would call the oblast governors and ask how do your citizens feel about this or that? They called this the Expert Method at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in the early 1990s. Khmelko changed all of that.”
Vyacheslav Bryukhovetsky, honorary president of National University Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and founder of its revival, expressed his condolences.
“This is a great loss for Ukrainian academic research and studies. Valery Khmelko was a renowned academic and researcher at our university and a leading intellectual in Ukraine. He was the first person in 1991 to come to me with a proposal to create a new department of structured sociological studies. This was the first such department in the post-soviet world. With Volodymyr Paniotto, they were ready to rebuild the Academy. They already had international recognition in the study of sociology. As a consequence, they brought international academic recognition to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.”
by kyivpost.com.