It’s said that in the 2001 census, only 589 people lived in Dubova. In 2024, the Ukrainian Wikipedia site was reporting 485.
Just before the Russian revolution, the village contained a shtetl in the Kyiv governorate, with over 1100 Jews, about a quarter of the village’s population. By 1920 there were no Jews left, only a few families having escaped the pogroms there. Two accounts of the pogroms that led to the extinction of the Jewish populace in Dubova are reported by History of Jewish Communities in Ukraine (in Russian). One was written by David Moshevich Rabinovich, a medical student at Kyiv University, the second by Beni Sukernik, an innkeeper. The second account is dated June 17, 1920.
The same site reports that in 1897 Dubova had had two synagogues (see below). The Jews there “were engaged in trade and crafts, with about 170 Jewish families involved in the milling and selling of flour.” Part of a 1913 list (in Russian) gives people’s names, organized by occupation. (The second and third columns need to be transposed.)
Ukrainian Wikipedia reports that the village was founded in 1515 but that documents mentioning it date only from two centuries later. Ownership of it changed a few times over the centuries. Presumably late in the 19th century,
the town played the role of a certain economic and cultural centre for the surrounding villages. There was an Orthodox church, along with a parochial school, two synagogues, a hospital with one doctor, two medical assistants, and one ‘midwife’; two pharmacies, three inns, two state wine shops No. 511 and 512, two water mills, a windmill, six forges, a creamery, and about twenty grocery stores. The needs of the population were served by a postal and telegraph station, two barber shops, four tailor and dressmaking workshops, and one photo studio. On the Yatran river there was a high-production flour mill belonging to the landowner Hrabovytskyi, employing 18 workers.
In 1890 Dubova got railway service, which increased demand for its agricultural products, and in 1904 a philanthropist built a hospital there. Soon after, Dubova joined in dissent against the Imperial Russian autocracy and economic deprivation, with resulting arrests and deportations.
Late in World War I, German forces occupied the village. In 1920, after the pogroms of the civil war period, the Soviet Union’s authority was established in Dubova, and collective farming in 1929. In the notorious famine of 1932–33, about 500 people in Dubova died of starvation.
In World War II, many villagers were deported or killed by the Germans. Afterwards, it took some time to re-establish the village's economy, including the collective farms, which many years later reverted to being independently owned.