Turning the pages back... September 17, 1872 (09/12/99)

Turning the pages back...

September 17, 1872

Two weeks ago, this column carried a biographical sketch of Osyp Nazaruk, whose origins and education were similar to, and who even crossed paths with, this week's subject, Ivan Makukh. Ultimately, however, their directions were dramatically different.

Makukh was born in Dorozhiv, near Sambir in Galicia, on September 17, 1872. Like Nazaruk, he studied law at Lviv University; unlike Nazaruk, he stuck with it and earned a doctorate in the field in 1901.

Like Nazaruk, he became active in the Ukrainian Radical Party and served as the editor of its organ, Hromadskyi Holos, for a year in 1905, 11 years prior to Nazaruk's arrival at the post.

In 1907, however, Makukh quit journalism and established a law practice in Tovmach (a county center also known as Tlumach, about 30 miles east of what was then Stanyslaviv) and, quite unlike Nazaruk, became a hands-on activist in the educational and political life of the county.

Makukh organized Prosvita reading rooms, Sich branches and the Selianska Kasa credit union throughout the region. He was first elected to the Galician Diet in 1908, and served for 10 years, all the while demanding an end to the Polish-administered Austro-Hungarian electoral system's biases against the Ukrainian population.

Meanwhile, when the first world war broke out, he avoided military service because of his frail health and traveled to Vienna where he joined the Ukrainian General Council. When Russia's armies were pushed out of Lviv, he returned to the Galician capital, served as secretary to various rural cooperatives, and litigated on behalf of farmers seeking restitution for losses caused by the war.

In October 1918 he was active in the formation of the Ukrainian National Rada and chosen deputy leader of the Lviv delegation. In the first secretariat established (also that month) by the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) in Stanyslaviv, Makukh held the post of minister of labor and reconstruction, and in the second, set up in Lviv in January 1919, he was assigned to head the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

When the Ukrainian Galician Army was forced to retreat across the Zbruch River, he followed the ZUNR government of Yevhen Petrushevych to Kamianets-Podilskyi, although he endorsed the elevation of Petrushevych to dictator reluctantly.

Unlike Nazaruk, he formed close ties with the UNR government-in-exile led by Symon Petliura and became a deputy to that shadow administration's top-ranking internal affairs official. Makukh returned to Tovmach in December 1920 and took up where he left off.

After the death of Lev Bachynsky in 1930, he inherited the mantle of leader of the Ukrainian Socialist Radical Party, which he retained until the outbreak of the second world war. Makukh was twice elected to the Polish Senate, in 1928 and 1930, from whose rostrums he denounced the regime's pacification policy.

Already sensitized to the murderous hostility that Communists bore for socialists 22 years earlier, Makukh went into hiding when the Soviets arrived in Galicia in 1939, surviving thanks to the resourcefulness of his daughter, Nadia, who lived in Horoshiv. His wife, Pavlyna, however, was not so lucky. She was arrested in 1940, and deported to Kazakstan. (She survived, but they never saw each other again - she died in Kharkiv in 1946).

In May 1942, he returned to Tovmach, and tried briefly to resume his representations in defense of agricultural workers, but a series of Gestapo investigations into his activities prompted him, already of retirement age, to ''move to Horoshiv and work in [his daughter's] garden." In March 1944, Makukh and his daughter's family began a painstakingly slow journey westward through Slovakia and Hungary, settling in Wahreim, a suburb of Salzburg, in Austria in December.

Two years later they moved to Halein (also near Salzburg) and in the space of three months Makukh completed his extensively detailed memoirs - an invaluable record of the socio-political environment in Galicia from the turn of the century to the 1940s. Ivan Makukh died in Halein on September 18, 1946. His memoirs, edited by fellow USRP activists Matviy Stakhiv, Volodymyr Lysy and Vasyl Verhan, were published posthumously, in 1958 in the United States.

Sources: "Makukh, Ivan," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Ivan Makukh, Na Narodniy Sluzhbi (Detroit: Ukrainian Free Society of America, 1958).

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