Obituary: Peter Krawchuk, 85, Ukrainian Canadian Communist (04/13/97)

Obituary: Peter Krawchuk, 85, Ukrainian Canadian Communist

by Andrij Makuch

TORONTO - Peter Krawchuk, a longtime leader with the Ukrainian-Canadian pro-Communist left, died of complications following surgery in Toronto on February 3. He was 85.

Anathematized by many for his overtly pro-Soviet sentiments, he nonetheless commanded respect, even among people who may not have agreed with him politically, for his love of and commitment to the Ukrainian language and culture.

Mr. Krawchuk was born in the village of Stoyaniv (northeast of Lviv) in western Ukraine on July 6, 1911. His education was interrupted in 1926, when Polish authorities closed the gymnasium in the nearby town of Radekhiv where he was enrolled, but he made use of the local Prosvita Society library to further his personal knowledge. He also became active in the socialist Workers' and Peasants' Party (Selianska Robitnycha Partiya, known as Sel-Rob) as a youth organizer and public speaker, and in the Communist Youth League (Komsomol).

As a result, the activist was often detained by Polish police, and his family home was repeatedly searched and ransacked. This situation exasperated Mr. Krawchuk's father (although himself a Sel-Rob supporter), who arranged to have his son taken in by family members living in Canada.

Mr. Krawchuk arrived in Winnipeg in April 1930. He wasted no time in linking up with the pro-Communist Ukrainian Labor Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA). By 1931 he was a member of the Central Committee of the ULFTA's Youth Section. In 1936, he attended a ULFTA Higher Education Course, a six-month cadre training session.

Upon graduation he was put to work at the ULFTA's flagship daily, Ukrainski Robitnychi Visti (Ukrainian Labor News). Mr. Krawchuk had found his home, and for the next 55 years he was to play a leading role in the Ukrainian Canadian pro-Communist press.

He also broadened his other organizational activities, occupying executive positions and undertaking speaking tours. For the latter, Mr. Krawchuk was aided by a knack for storytelling, an affable manner and an exceptional memory. His growing stature within the organizational ranks was reflected by the fact that in 1940 he was among the ULFTA leaders interned (in his case until February 1942) after a number of left-wing organizations, including the ULFTA, were declared illegal by the Canadian government.

Upon his release, he moved with his wife, Mary (née Sholdra, whom he married in 1936), to Toronto.

In 1947 Mr. Krawchuk was part of a three-person mission to Ukraine that accompanied a large shipment of humanitarian aid for post-war reconstruction. He stayed on after the mission as a special correspondent for several pro-Communist Ukrainian newspapers in the West.

After his return to Canada in 1949, Mr. Krawchuk spoke at public meetings about his generally favorable impressions of Ukraine. These gatherings aroused outrage among many recent Ukrainian arrivals to Canada, who tended to be strongly anti-Soviet in sentiment. Because of common outbreaks of violence, these meetings attracted the attention of the mainstream media.

Mr. Krawchuk had been strident in his opposition to the admission of post-war refugees into Canada and participated vigorously in a smear campaign to portray them as fascist sympathizers.

Over the years, the activist continued to attack the new arrivals in the press and in various publications, with tracts denouncing them as "bourgeois nationalists," "collaborators" and even "war criminals." He published some of the most vicious of these attacks under the pseudonym Marko Terlytsia, with titles such as "Natsionalistychni Skorpiony" (Nationalist Scorpions) and "Here is the Evidence."

Mr. Krawchuk continued his press and organizational work with the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (the ULFTA's successor). At the same time he started writing about the Ukrainian Canadian left's past, using a scheme of history that existed in oral form among the ULFTA leaders but had never appeared fully realized in print.

Mr. Krawchuk also continued to visit Ukraine in a variety of organizational capacities as he gained seniority in AUUC circles, and direct contact between the pro-Communist left in Canada and the Ukrainian SSR increased.

What he and his colleagues saw and experienced was disturbing, particularly in respect to a strong increase in Russification. Their disenchantment eventually led to the creation of a delegation of inquiry sponsored by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (reacting to pressure from the AUUC) to investigate Soviet nationalities policy in Ukraine. Mr. Krawchuk was among the six members of the group that set off to Ukraine in late March 1967.

The mission's final report was critical of Soviet policy. It was, in fact, a bombshell that ignited a major controversy. Moscow applied strong pressure on the CPC to withdraw the report. Mr. Krawchuk and the other Ukrainian delegates of the mission fought against this, but to no avail. In October 1969 the report was withdrawn as an official CPC document, although it was acknowledged as having been received for information purposes.

Mr. Krawchuk was personally criticized in the course of this controversy and, ironically, accused of aiding the "bourgeois nationalists."

Although Mr. Krawchuk criticized Russification, travel restrictions and even the Soviet invasion of Czecho-Slovakia, he did not break with the Communist left, as did fellow Ukrainian Canadian Communist John Kolasky, the author of "Education in Soviet Ukraine" (1968) and "The Shattered Illusion" (1979). In fact, Mr. Krawchuk voted with the AUUC committee that expelled Mr. Kolasky in 1968.

On the other hand, his relations with the CPC were never the same. Through the 1970s and 1980s Mr. Krawchuk retreated from general party work and concentrated on his press, historical and organizational activities, although he served as president of the AUUC from 1979 to 1991.

In 1991, Mr. Krawchuk greeted Ukrainian independence as a positive development.

During the course of his career, Mr. Krawchuk wrote over 40 books about Ukrainian farmers and labor movements in Canada, Ukrainian Canadian service in World War II, the émigré Ukrainian theater and the tribulations of Ukrainian immigrant women pioneers.

In the late 1980s, Mr. Krawchuk became more open with his views on conditions in Ukraine, publishing a two-part article in the journal Kyiv in 1989 that gave an insider's view of the 1967 mission. He wrote a history of the Communist movement in Canada, which was never published in its original Ukrainian format, but appeared in English translation in 1996 as "Our History."

Mr. Krawchuk also published his memoirs, titled "Bez Nedomovok" (Without Regrets), in 1995. In this and other works, he admitted that "mistakes were made," declared his readiness to assume his share of responsibility and dealt with some of the so-called "blank spots" missing in his earlier historical works.

But although his later writings are guardedly critical of certain events, people and policies, they reveal no doubts about "the cause" per se. An anecdote in his obituary in Canada's national daily, The Globe and Mail, read: "Although he lived in the suburbs in a house with a wide driveway and prominent built-in garage, Peter Krawchuk never owned a car. As a good Communist, he said he should never own one." While he stopped paying dues to the CPC in the early 1990s, he never turned in his party card.

Mr. Krawchuk was remembered at a memorial service at Toronto's AUUC Center on March 23. His personal papers, a valuable collection, have been placed in the National Archives of Canada, and most of his library will be donated to the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta in Edmonton.

He is survived by his daughter, Larissa.

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