Valery Tereshchenko (academic)

Valery Ivanovich Tereshchenko (also V. J. Tereshtenko) (Валерий Иванович Терещенко; Валерій Іванович Терещенко; 13 June 1901 – 28 September 1994) was a Russian, Soviet and Ukrainian academic specialising in the field of management.

Valery Tereshchenko was born in the city of Ekaterinodar (now Krasnodar), in the family of a deputy district judge.

He completed high school and conservatory studies in his home town, and after the outbreak of the Russian Civil War was mobilised into the ranks of the Whites.

Following their defeat at the hand of the Bolsheviks Tereshchenko emigrated to Prague, where he graduated from the Department of Economics of the Czech Technical University and from the Russian Institute for Agricultural Cooperation, teaching at the latter in the late 1920s.

In 1930 moved to the United States, and graduated from Columbia University in New York.

Later he became a professor at Columbia, where he taught management courses.

He worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at a Wall Street firm, and was a counsellor of the American businessman Roswell Garst.

In 1937, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, Tereshchenko organized and led a large (160 employees) research project to study the world's literature on cooperatives, which was published 12 languages.

The work was conducted in close collaboration with the Co-operative League of America, the International Cooperative Alliance in London, the International Labour Office in Geneva, and the Rockefeller Committee for Relations with South America.

The Library of Congress assessed the materials collected by project as ‘the most complete in the world’ at that time.

The Fundamental Project Edition 'Summaries of laws on cooperatives in the U.S.’ was used to revise the cooperative laws in some states.

In this regard, in April 1940 Valeriy Tereshchenko was invited to Committee of the Senate on cooperatives legislation.

In the 1940s he was invited to organize a section on cooperative in the Latin American Institute in Boston, he was initiator of the first ever visit delegation of cooperators South America to the United States.

He along with other employees of the project took part in the establishment of initial economic ties between the U.S. and the Republic of China (1942−1949).

Before the end of World War II, the scientist was elected to the Executive Committee of the International Cooperative postwar reconstruction (NY).

He participated in the preparation the United Nations Conferences on Food and Agriculture in Atlantic City and Hot Springs.

After the Second World War Tereshchenko came to the USSR for business trips, to help to establish trade and economic ties with the U.S. In 1946 he was chief economist of the UNRRA in Soviet Ukraine.

He eventually returned permanently to the Soviet Union, living in Kyiv from 1963 onwards.

Here he worked in a number of research institutes of the Ministry of Agricultural Economics and of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, and taught at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

He was given an honorary award by UNESCO, and awarded an honorary diploma by the Missouri Writers' Guild in the U.S.

In 1970 a Moscow company published a reduced version of the multi-volume American "Executive Leadership Course" (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963) edited by Valeriy Tereshchenko.

He was a lecturer, with thousands of public lectures given in the U.S., Europe, and the Soviet Union.

His later works included ‘The choice problem: policy of research priorities in the West’, ‘The science of management’, and ‘All about cooperation’, which was written when he was almost 90 years of age and published in Kyiv.

Valeriy Ivanovich Tereshchenko died September 28, 1994.

His remains are buried in Kyiv, at the Baikove Cemetery.

He is author of over 170 books, papers and articles in periodical on the management problems, which were printed in the United States, Argentina, Bulgaria, India, Canada, Germany, Peru, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland.