Mykola Hurovych Kulish was a Ukrainian prose writer, playwright, pedagogue, veteran of World War I, and Red Army veteran. He is considered to be one of the lead figures of the Executed Renaissance; he was murdered by the NKVD during Stalin’s Great Terror.

The Executed Renaissance is a term used to describe the generation of Ukrainian language poets, writers, and artists of the 1920s and early 1930s who lived in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.