Background
Zatonsky was born in the village of Lysets in of Ushitsy (Ushytsia) Uyezd, Podolia Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Dunaivtsi Raion, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine) in a family of a volost pysar.
Zatonsky was born in the village of Lysets in of Ushitsy (Ushytsia) Uyezd, Podolia Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Dunaivtsi Raion, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine) in a family of a volost pysar.
Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.
He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) party, faction of Mensheviks, in 1905. He was one of few who initiated the organization of the Congress of the Workers-Peasants and Soldiers deputies as well as the military coup in Kiev. Zatonsky participated in the fight against the Central Rada.
When the Red Army took over Kiev in 1918 after the January Uprising, Zatonsky recalled that he only narrowly escaped execution as a counterrevolutionary when only the Lenin"s mandate saved his life.
In 1918 while being the Narkom of the People"s Education, he personally by Lenin was offered a position of a representative of the Soviet Ukrainian People"s Republic in Russian SFSR. In 1918 he was Chairman of All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee as well as the Head of the Ukrainian delegation from the Soviet Ukrainian People"s Republic for the Brest-Litovsky Peace Conference. Together with Mykola Skrypnyk protested Joseph Stalin"s proclamation that it is enough for Ukraine to play the government and the independent republic.
In 1920 he was chairman of Galrevkom. As the Narkom of the People"s Education he made everything in his power to shut down the Kamyanets-Podilsky State University as the concentration of the counter-revolutionary forces of Symon Petliura.
Afterwards he held various governmental and Party positions in Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In September 1933 Zatonsky was appointed the chief editor of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia.
On November 3, 1937 he was arrested in a movie theater while he was with his family. Later the authorities conducted an unsanctioned search of his apartment searching for a proof of him being a spy for the bourgeois Poland. On July 29, 1938 he was convicted after a 20-minute long trial and sentenced to 10 years in prison without the right of letter exchange.
Nonetheless the same day he was executed by a fire-squad.
In 1956 Zatonsky, along with many others, was finally rehabilitated posthumously.
In July 1918 was a commissar of a strike force against the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rebellion in Moscow. In 1922 he was one of the persons who signed the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republic as the representative of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic.
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine]
In March 1917 he joined Bolsheviks as the member of the Kiev Committee, later joining the Kiev revkom as well. He was charged with being a member of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist center.