Turning the pages back... January 28, 1874 (01/24/99)

Turning the pages back...

January 28, 1874

For most of his life, Kost Losky was a "diaspora" Ukrainian, but he left his mark both in Ukraine and as a member of Prague's émigré community. Born in St. Petersburg on January 28, 1874, he studied law in the Russian imperial capital's university, then at Warsaw University.

Losky served in various capacities of the imperial administration in Siberia and Poland. Then he secured an appointed to a post in the Kholm-centered gubernial administration, and soon became a leading figure in the Ukrainian movement. In 1905 he founded a publishing house for popular Ukrainian books in Kholm and a branch of Prosvita in Hrubeshiv, a town about 60 miles north of Lviv. He also co-published the newspapers Buh (named for the river that marked boundary between the Austrian and Russian empires) and Nova Rada, and ran against the controversial Russian Orthodox Archbishop Yevlogii in an election to the Russian Duma.

Unfortunately, little is known about his other activities in the intervening 12 years, but in May 1917 he emerged as an assistant to the gubernial commission for Galicia (based in Ternopil) of the nascent Kyiv-based Ukrainian administration.

Sometime that summer, Losky moved to Kyiv. In August 1917, he was made director of the Internal Affairs Secretariat's Refugee Department in the Kholm region, was elected chairman of the Kholm Gubernia Council, served briefly as chairman of the Kyiv City Council, and established as a member of the Central Rada as a delegate of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Federalists).

In October 1917, he represented the Kyiv city military council at the Central Rada and that December began serving as acting secretary of the UNR government's Secretariat of Foreign Affairs. In 1918, the Hetman government sent him as an envoy to Finland. When the Ukrainian National Republic's Directory took over, he was sent to Sweden, then Norway.

After brief sojourns in Berlin and Vienna, Losky settled in Prague in 1920, where he turned to scholarly work, establishing himself as a professor at the Ukrainian Free University (UFU). He served as the UFU's dean of law and social sciences (1927-1928) and prorector (1929-1930). He lectured and wrote monographs on Roman law, on classical history and contemporary politics. He also translated works of Anton Chekhov and Heinrich Heine into Ukrainian.

Kost Losky died in Prague on October 14, 1933.

Sources: "Losky, Kost," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Ukrainska Tsentralna Rada, Vladyslav Verstiuk ed., Vols. 1, 2 (Kyiv: Naukova Dumka, 1996); "Kost Losky," Dilo , October 22, 1933.

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