Natalia Mykhailivna Vitrenko – People’s Deputy of the II and III convocations of the Verkhovna Rada, leader of the banned “Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine”, Doctor of Economics.
Place of Birth, Education
She was born on December 28, 1951 in Kyiv.
From 1959 to 1965, she lived with her mother in Donbas, but returned to the capital.
In 1973 she graduated from the accounting faculty of the Kyiv Institute of National Economy. After that, she studied at the university’s graduate school for another three years.
In March 1977, she successfully defended her PhD thesis.
In 1994, she received the degree of Doctor of Economics, defending her work on the topic “Regional problems of social infrastructure development”.
Political Activities
Back in 1974, she joined the “Communist Party of the Soviet Union”. During her studies at the institute, she was a member of the Komsomol committee of the educational institution and a deputy of one of the districts of Kyiv.
In the period from 1977 to 1994, Vitrenko:
- held the position of a researcher at the Research Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (UkrSSR);
- worked as an associate professor of the Department of Statistics of the Kyiv Institute of National Economy;
- was a senior researcher at the Council for the Study of Productive Forces of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
In 1991, she joined the work on the economic section of the updated program of the “Communist Party of Ukraine”.
After the Communist Party of Ukraine was banned, Vitrenko joined the formation of the Socialist Party of Ukraine (SPU). According to her, it was she who was the main author of the party’s program documents and headed the theoretical center of the party.
In the second half of 1994, she served as an adviser on socio-economic policy to the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada and the head of the “SPU” Oleksandr Moroz.
In December of the same year, she was elected a people’s deputy.
In 1996, after disagreements with Moroz, she, together with Volodymyr Marchenko, initiated the creation of a new political party – the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine (PSPU).
In 1998, Vitrenko was elected to the Verkhovna Rada for the second time.
In 1999, she nominated her candidacy for the post of president. During the election campaign, in October of the same year in Kryvyi Rih, after a meeting with voters, two RGD-5 grenades were thrown at Vitrenko and the people’s deputies who accompanied her, as a result of which she and several other people received shrapnel wounds.
All subsequent attempts by Vitrenko to get into parliament were unsuccessful. The latter took place during the parliamentary elections of 2006, when she headed Natalia Vitrenko’s People’s Opposition Bloc.
In early February 2007, Vitrenko announced her transition to full opposition to both the then President Viktor Yushchenko and Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.
On March 18, 2017, the XXXI extraordinary congress of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine was held in Kyiv, during which Vitrenko was re-elected chairman of the party.
On June 23, 2022, the court decided to ban the activities of the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine.
Scandals
In February 2014, immediately after Yanukovych fled Kyiv, the politician participated in the organization of the so-called “referendum” among the residents of Sloviansk, during which residents were asked questions about their trust in the new government in Kyiv.
In 2017, a pre-trial investigation was launched against the public organization “Gift of Life”, which was headed by Vitrenko. She was suspected of separatist activities.
On November 6, 2019, in Moscow, Vitrenko said that, in her opinion, Nazism had “raised its head” in Ukraine. In particular, she called for a “cleansing” and proposed to impose sanctions on the Lviv region.
In 2022, Vitrenko blamed the United States of America (USA) and the United Kingdom for the start of a full-scale war.
Marital Status
Vitrenko was married twice, currently divorced.
He has three children: daughter Olga, who was born in 1972, son Yuriy, born in 1977, and daughter Maryna, born in 1983.
