Turning the pages back... July 22, 1898 (07/19/98)

Turning the pages back...

July 22, 1898

Osyp Krilyk Vasylkiv was a fascinating figure of the western Ukrainian Communist world. He was born on July 22, 1898, in Krakovets, Yavoriv county, about 40 miles west of Lviv.

While a law student at Lviv University, he founded and led one of the "drahomanivky" (named after Mykola Drahomanov) or International Revolutionary Social Democracy groups that were springing up in Galicia, and joined the Ukrainian Galician Army. Interned in Czecho-Slovakia in 1920, he began to organize Communist circles in the camps and established the Committee to Aid the Revolutionary Movement in Eastern Galicia (based in Prague) and the Foreign Committee of the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia (based in Vienna).

Late in 1920 he returned to Lviv to head the party's Central Committee and to organize partisan opposition to the Polish occupation of Galicia. In 1921 he was tarred within the Communist movement as a "secessionist" for advocating the independence of the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia from Poland's Communist Workers' Party (KPRP).

In the fall of 1921 he was arrested together with 39 others by the Pilsudski government and brought up on charges of treason. The trial, which became known as the St. George Trial, lasted for 14 months, and Vasylkiv was one of the few to admit any ties to the Communist Party. Given a sentence of three years in jail, he did not serve any time and was released on bail.

In 1923, the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia was renamed the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and Vasylkiv became secretary of its Central Committee and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party of Poland, despite strong opposition from Moscow's man in the area, Volodymyr Zatonsky.

Vasylkiv's faction, known as the Vasylkivtsi, advocated a national Communist platform and somewhat anarchistically questioned the need for common goals with other revolutionary groups throughout Poland. Support from the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and leaders such as Mykola Skrypnyk and Oleksander Shumsky, as well as strong popular support in Volhynia, managed to keep the Vasylkivtsi, the majority faction, in a position of leadership until 1928.

At the Comintern congress that year, the Stalinists led by Zatonsky managed to get the Vasylkivtsi expelled from the Communist International (democracy was never the movement's strong suit), mirroring the repressions that had begun to descend on Shumsky and others in Ukraine.

Left exposed by his own party, Vasylkiv was arrested by Polish authorities in 1929 and was incarcerated until 1932. Thereupon he emigrated to Soviet Ukraine and worked in Kharkiv at the Chief Administration of Literary Affairs and Publishing. In May 1933 he was arrested, and was last seen in a concentration camp in Karelia, in northwestern Russia, in 1938. His further fate is unknown.

Sources: "Communist Party of Western Ukraine," "Vasylkiv, Osyp," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 1, 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).