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April 20, 1889

Petro Shekeryk-Donykiv was born on April 20, 1889, in Holove (40 miles south of Kolomyia) in the Hutsul region. From his youth, he was active in the Sich movement, which promoted sports clubs, physical education, as well as education and national consciousness among the peasants and working class. Throughout his life, Shekeryk-Donykiv also collected ethnographic materials on the Hutsuls and wrote short stories about the Robin-Hood-like "Opryshky" (groups of social brigands) of the region.

After organizing a railwaymen's strike, the writer, scholar and activist Hnat Khotkevych was exiled from Kharkiv and toured Halychyna and Bukovyna. In 1910 he organized the Hutsul Theater. Shekeryk-Donykiv was an avid participant, and one of the group's leading performers (the great director Les Kurbas was a member).

The Sich movement was founded in part by the Ukrainian Radical Party, and so it was logical for Shekeryk-Donykiv to pursue his activism in the political arena. He was the URP's delegate to the Labor Congress in Kyiv in 1918-1919.

After the Bolsheviks took power in 1920, the activist returned to Halychyna to pursue his career, and was elected deputy to the Polish Sejm (1928-1930). In 1933, he won the mayoral elections in the Hutsul town of Zhabie. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin partitioned Halychyna, Shekeryk-Donykiv was arrested by the Soviet NKVD and deported to Siberia. He disappeared, and his exact date and place of death are a mystery.

Source: "Shekeryk-Donykiv, Petro," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 20, 1997, No. 16, Vol. LXV

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