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March 7, 1850

Tomas Masaryk, the great Czech scholar and statesman, was born in Hodonin, Moravia, on March 7, 1850. With a doctorate from Vienna University (obtained in 1876), he taught philosophy at Charles University in Prague from 1882 to 1914, and was the first president of the Czecho-Slovak Republic in 1918-1935.

In contact with Ukrainians at various points in his career, he assisted those students who seceded from Lviv University in 1901-1902, corresponded with poet and scholar Ivan Franko, and defended the rights of Galician Ukrainians to develop freely and independently in the 1908 debates on the Ukrainian-Polish conflict as a deputy to Austria's Parliament.

In the final years of the first world war, he traveled frequently to Ukraine and Russia, organizing Czech and Slovak prisoners of war into a legion, whose extra-territorial status he got the Ukrainian National Republic's government to recognize.

Although Masaryk, a Russophile who hoped Ukraine would federate with a democratic Russia, annulled this agreement after the UNR declared its independence, the Czech-Slovak legion remained neutral in the ensuing Soviet-Ukrainian conflict.

During his visit to the U.S. in May-November 1918, Masaryk organized the Mid-European Democratic Union, an organization of émigré organizations of the Austro-Hungarian empire's various nationalities. The MEDU included New York-based activists Myroslav Sichynsky and Mykola Tsehlynsky, as well as Hryhoriy Zhatkovych of the American National Council of Uhro-Rusyns.

Contacts with the ANCUR resulted in an agreement under which Transcarpathia was incorporated into the new Czecho-Slovak Republic in 1919.

As president of the republic, Masaryk supported the use of local dialects instead of Russian in Transcarpathian schools and administrative institutions, and was sympathetic to the cultural needs of the large émigré community from Russian-ruled Ukraine.

He helped establish such institutions as the Ukrainian Free University in Prague (1921) and the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Podebrady (1922). Masaryk died on September 14, 1937, in Lany, Czecho-Slovakia.

Source: "Masaryk, Tomas," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 2, 1997, No. 9, Vol. LXV

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