Ivan Fedorovych Kuras (October 3, 1939, in Nemyrivske — October 16, 2005, in Kyiv) was a Ukrainian scientist-political scientist, public and political figure, academician (from April 14, 1995)[1] and vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, founder of the Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.
In 1964, he enrolled in graduate school at Kyiv State University, where he prepared and defended a doctoral dissertation on the national liberation movement in Ukraine in the early 20th century.
From 1972 to 1983, he served as an instructor, consultant, and head of the department's sector of science and educational institutions at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and from 1983 to 1991, he was the deputy director of the Institute of Political Studies at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine.
A significant event was the publication in 1990 of the scientific-documentary edition "The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: Through the Eyes of Historians, in the Language of Documents".
Kuras raised the issue of the necessity to study national relations before the leadership of the Ukrainian SSR.
Under Kuras's leadership, the institute achieved significant achievements in the theoretical-methodological substantiation of the new direction of socio-humanitarian sciences—ethnopolitics, the development of the object-subject area of political science and ethnopolitics, and the refinement of the conceptual-categorical apparatus of these sciences, understanding the dialectic of interaction between ethnic and political, ethnic and regional factors.
On December 20, 2016, a ceremony was held to unveil a memorial plaque on the facade of the Institute of Political and Ethnonational Studies named after I. F. Kuras of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, General Almazov St., 8) to its first director, academician, vice-president of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Ivan Fedorovych Kuras.