The purpose of this article is to highlight the life path of Oleksandr Popov, to determine his role in the development of Ukrainian nationalism and his commitment to the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The methodology of the work is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, and systematics It is based on philosophical and special scientific methods of the socio-humanitarian sphere of scientific knowledge, namely: historical, structural-functional, systemic, etc. Sociological methods are also used – behavioral, social network, etc. The scientific novelty is determined mainly by the establishment and development of the subject as a complete scientific problem, clarifying certain facts from the biography of the professor of pedagogy.

Oleksandr Ivanovich Popov was born in 1891 into the family of a priest and a teacher in the town of Kup’evasi in the Kharkov region. His life can be split into five stages. The first stage – childhood and early childhood – starts with childbirth and ends with education. The second stage is the youth that occurred during the years of the national democratic revolution. At that time he had become a Ukrainian nationalist. The third stage is maturity, which fell in Soviet times. Here he experienced a rise in the official ladder, certain achievements in the development of Soviet pedagogy, and a fall when he was arrested for his pro-Ukrainian views. During the fourth stage, determined by the Nazi occupation of Kharkov, O. Popov appears as a person. He stopped hiding his belief in God, and actively engaged in the reorganization of education in the Kharkov region. At that time, he was a lecturer at various educational courses, spoke at conferences, wrote articles for the magazine “Nova Ukraina”, was the author of official speeches at events before the German command, and headed the department of Ukrainian language and literature at the agricultural school, etc. The fifth stage of life is connected with emigration. During this period, O. Popov continued to work on modernizing the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

As a result, Oleksandr Popov was able to make some contributions to the development of the Ukrainian nation during his life.

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