Turning the pages back... May 15, 1884 (05/11/97)

Turning the pages back...

May 15, 1884

Toma Tomashevsky was born on May 15, 1884, in Stetseva, a village north of Sniatyn, halfway between Kolomyia and Chernivtsi in Halychyna. Upon emigrating to western Canada in 1900 he became very active in socialist circles, particularly the Rivnist Ukrainian Labor Fraternity (Equality), the Slavic Socialist Union (a local miners' group he helped establish in 1907), and became one of the more intrepid fieldworkers in the movement.

He also busied himself in community organizations such as the Brotherhood Benefit Association and the short-lived Independent Greek Church, which, influenced by Presbyterianism, rejected both "Uniates" (Ukrainian Catholics) and "Tsarophiles" (the Orthodox).

After Mykola Sichynsky assassinated Andrzej Potocki, Austria's Polish viceroy in Halychyna, in April 1908, Tomashevsky became a member of the "Council of Seven" that banded together to raise money for the man's defense and that rallied petitions for his amnesty (Sichynsky's death sentence was commuted and he escaped to the U.S. in 1915), touring the Canadian prairies and west coast with Sichynsky's sister Irena when she arrived on a visit.

Eventually, he adopted an anti-Communist position, joining the Federation of Ukrainian Social Democrats (FUSD), the United Farmers of Alberta, and eventually the Commonwealth Cooperative Federation (forerunners of today's New Democratic Party).

Early on in his restless career, he became known as a journalist and editor of an array of newspapers, first joining the staff of Robochyi Narod (Edmonton, 1910), then working as co-editor of Nova Hromada (Edmonton, the official FUSD organ, 1911-1912) then of Postup (Mundare, 1915-1917), then of Pravda i Volia (Vancouver, 1920), the satirical monthly Batih (1921-1922), then, as he became more settled in Edmonton, of Nash Postup (1922-1929).

For a year, in 1928, he took over an Edmonton-based bimonthly known as the Western News. He then sold it to the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Edmonton, which renamed it The Ukrainian News (now an independent operation run by editor-publisher Marco Levytsky).

In the 1930s (while he also edited Farmerskyi Holos) and 1940s, he was a leader in what historian Mykhailo Marunchak termed the "epoch of consumer cooperatives," helping to establish 10 in the province of Alberta, in places such as Vegreville, Smoky Lake, Myrnam, Mundare, Thorold and Cherhill.

Pushing 70 and beyond, Tomashevsky hardly missed a beat in the 1950s, devoting his energies to preserving the legacy of Ukrainian pioneers in Canada. He published and edited the quarterly Ukrainskyi Pionir (1955-1960) and co-founded the Ukrainian Pioneers Association of Alberta. He died in Edmonton on February 4, 1969.

Sources: "Tomashevsky, Toma," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); M.H. Marunchak, "The Ukrainian Canadians" (Winnipeg: Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1982); Orest Martynowych, "Ukrainians in Canada" (Edmonton: CIUS Press, 1991).

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