Mykhailo Braichevsky was a historian, archaeologist, philosopher, artist, and poet from Kyiv, Ukraine. He was born in Kyiv in 1924 and died in his home city in 2001. He graduated from Kyiv State University in 1948 with a degree in history and archeology and then worked as a researcher at the Institute of Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. After obtaining his PhD degree from the Institute of Material Culture in Moscow he began to work at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He became well-known in Ukrainian shestidesiatniki underground circles for his writings and public lectures in which he openly expressed his independent and nonconformist views on the history of Ukraine and the origins of Ukrainian statehood.

Among his most important works was Priednannia chy voz’ednannia? (Annexation or Reunification?) written in 1966 in which he openly criticised the Theses on the 300^th Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine and Russia (1654-1954), a document imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1954 as the only permitted interpretation of the events of 1654 in Ukrainian history, namely, the Pereiaslav Council and the Treaty of Pereiaslav, after which Ukraine became a part of the Russian Empire. Braichevsky’s Annexation or Reunification? was widely circulated in Ukrainian samizdat and was later published in Canada. As a result, Braichevsky was fired from the Institute of History. In the next decade he was oppressed by the Soviet authorities and the Communist Party that demanded his public “repentance” and acknowledgment of his research “falsities”, and they did not allow him to officially continue his research career. All his works were labelled "nationalist" and were banned during the Soviet period. In 1968, Braichevsky was among the 139 Ukrainian activists who signed an open letter to the Soviet authorities protesting against political repression in Ukraine and in the entire Soviet Union.