Oleksandr Yakovych Shumskyi (Ukrainian: Олександр Якович Шумський), also known as Alexander Yakovlevich Shumsky (Russian: Александр Яковлевич Шумский; 2 December 1890 – 18 September 1946) was a Ukrainian communist and activist. He was one of the leaders of the national communism movement in Ukraine and actively supported Ukrainization. He was one of the victims of the Stalinist regime, being arrested and killed by the NKVD in 1946. He was rehabilitated in 1958, during the period of De-Stalinization.

Shumsky was born in the village of Turchynka, Volhynian Governorate (today Zhytomyr Oblast) in a family of foresters. The State Archives of Zhytomyr Oblast identify his parents as Yakiv Danylovych and Yeva.

Shumsky himself wrote that he was born in a family of "batrak" (poor farmer-serfs). Yuriy Shapoval indicates that Shumsky was not fully truthful about his origins, possibly due to the practice of characterising oneself in early Soviet history as coming from the lower class. In reality Shumsky's father Yakiv Danylovych, who worked as a forester for the landowner Mikhail Muravyov, had noble origins. Shumsky's grandfather Danylo Yakovych was a second generation priest, who had been assigned to the village of Turchynka in 1862.

He finished school in 1906, either at a village school or a two-year church parish school. After school, he worked at a sawmill and from 1908 as a land surveyor's assistant in the land reclamation commission.

In 1908 he joined the workers' movement and the Ukrainian Social Democratic League ("Spilka"). In 1909, he participated in a strike at a local sawmill.

In 1911 Shumsky began night school at the Shanyavsky Moscow City People's University, but never finished. During that period he participated in the Ukrainian socialist club in Moscow and later became a member of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries (UPSR). In 1915 he received the certificate of matura through expedited testing and enrolled in the Moscow veterinary school, but his studies were interrupted by World War I after he was arrested for spreading "revolutionary literature" and sent to serve military duty at the South Western Front.

At the frontlines Shumsky continued his revolutionary activity. After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia, he was elected as a delegate to the soldiers' congress at various levels: corps, army, and front. In April 1917 Shumsky already was in Kyiv, where he became a member of the Kyiv Governorate Land Committee in anticipation of upcoming land reform. At the Third Congress of the UPSR in November 1917 he was coopted to the Central Committee of UPSR as one of leaders of the party's left wing. He entered the Ukrainian Central Council, the Ukrainian parliament, on the party list of the UPSR. In the parliament he advocated left radical views on social and agrarian matters similar to those of the Bolsheviks.

In 1918 Shumsky was elected to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly from the Volhynian Governorate. He also became one of authors of the law relating to land adopted by the Ukrainian Central Council on 18 January 1918.