Turning the pages back... September 29, 1888 (09/27/98)

Turning the pages back...

September 29, 1888

Ivan Navizivsky (Nawizowski), a.k.a. John Navis, was born in the family of an impoverished cobbler and part-time farm laborer on September 29, 1888, in the village of Vorvulyntsi in the Zalischyky district of Galicia, about 40 miles east of Kolomyia. He gained admission to the teachers' seminary in Zalischyky and fell in with clandestine socialist circles.

In 1908, to escape harassment from the authorities and the Austrian draft, Navizivsky emigrated as a laborer to the U.S., landing in New York, where he joined the Socialist Party of America. Over the ensuing three years he worked on ranches in Texas and in mines in Pennsylvania, making his way northward to Canada then west again.

In 1911 he arrived in Winnipeg and worked as a printer at Robochyi Narod, the weekly organ of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party of Canada, which was in a state of chaos, as the editor of the newspaper, Myroslav Stechishin, had just resigned. Navizivsky took over as editor for a year, until September 1913. He remained with the editorial board in a lesser position and was radicalized by Canadian authorities, who grew increasingly paranoid over the large presence of "enemy aliens" from Austria and the social unrest caused by years of unrelenting recession.

As the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, Navizivsky was among those swayed by Lenin's denunciations of Russian tsarist imperialism, and who dismissed reservations about Bolshevik attacks on Ukraine's Central Rada, raised by other Ukrainian socialists, as "bourgeois." In 1918, he was among the leading organizers of the Ukrainian Labor-Farmer Temple Association and the Workmen's Benevolent Association, along with John Boychuk (Boyd), Danylo Lobai and Matviy Popovich. The ULFTA's strong rural and urban base provided a foundation for the establishment of the Communist Party of Canada in 1921, which by the early 1930s was about one-third Ukrainian Canadian.

In 1930, Navizivsky was called before a CPC disciplinary committee for insisting on ULFTA's autonomy and submitted to party discipline. In April 1931, he traveled to the Ukrainian SSR with a "labor-farmer delegation" and returned with glowing reports about conditions there. Neither the increasing Bolshevization of the ULFTA nor reports about the famine of 1932-1933 swayed him from the Stalinist line adopted by the CPC.

In 1940, the ULFTA and the CPC were banned and Navizivsky was arrested together with other leading Canadian communists and interned for two years. In 1946 he was among the co-founders of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (established as members of the ULFTA emerged from the underground) and worked on the periodicals Ukrainske Zhyttia and The Ukrainian Canadian.

In 1954, Navizivsky once again traveled to the Soviet Union and on the return voyage he died at sea on April 25, 1954.

Sources: "Navizivsky, Ivan," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Orest Martynowych, "Ukrainians in Canada" (Edmonton: CIUS Press, 1991).

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