Turning the pages back... August 17, 1883 (08/15/99)

Turning the pages back...

August 17, 1883

Toma Kobzey, a lifelong indefatigable defender of workers' and peasants' rights, was born in the village of Kniazhe in Sniatyn County, in Galicia on June 30, 1895. He immigrated to Canada in 1911, settled in Winnipeg and joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party. The party was banned in 1918 for organizing anti-war protests, and reconstituted itself as the Ukrainian Labor-Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) that year. Kobzey was among its leading activists, serving as secretary through the 1920s and into the 1930s. He rose to the Politburo of the Communist Party of Canada.

As the civil war raged overseas in 1918-1921, pitting, in part, Symon Petliura's Ukrainian National Republic forces against the Bolshevik Red Army, Kobzey made a fateful choice in favor of the eventual victors. In January 1922, writing in the ULFTA's organ, Robitnychi Visti, he attacked the nationalist camp in Canada for turning the Winnipeg-based Mohyla Institute from a facility dedicated to secular education to a "nursery for priests" and a "boarding house for lawyers" - exploiters of the working people.

Following the establishment of a Soviet Ukrainian state and its adoption of a Ukrainization policy, he and many in the ULFTA had reason to feel triumphant. However, in 10 years he would begin a journey that was to describe a full circle. Kobzey was, as historian John Kolasky wrote, "a man of integrity," and not among those blinded by "a crusading ideology and a faith that gave promise of a proletarian millennium." News of the genocidal artificial famine of 1932-1933 shook his beliefs, and when Canadian activists Myroslav Irchan and Ivan Sambei disappeared in Stalin's gulag in 1934, he'd had enough.

The following year, when the ULFTA convention refused to condemn the mass deportations, terror and famine in Ukraine, Kobzey joined Danylo Lobay, editor of Robitnychi Visti, in a demonstrative walk-out which became known as "the Kobzey-Lobay revolt." They broke away to form a non-Communist labor and cultural organization, the Workers' and Farmers' Educational Association, later merging with other like-minded organizations to establish the Alliance of Ukrainian Organizations (AUO).

In Pravda a newspaper established with Lobay in 1936 (it ceased publishing in 1938), Kobzey attacked Stalin, his murderous famine and purges, his duplicitous nationalities policy, and the Russian chauvinism of the Soviet Communist Party. From 1938 to 1940, he took up the task again as contributing editor of the periodical Vpered.

In 1940, Kobzey was among the leaders who prompted the AUO to reconstitute itself as the Ukrainian Workers' League and join with other non-Communist organizations in the country to form the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (now Congress).

In 1966, Kobzey published a monograph on the writer Vasyl Stefanyk, "Velykyi Rizbar Ukrainskykh Selianskykh Dush" (The Great Sculptor of Ukrainian Peasant Souls). As the literary scholar Danylo Struk noted in his own study of the writings and criticism about the writer, "Whereas any Soviet Ukrainian work on Stefanyk would or could contain the appellation 'Sculptor of Peasant Souls,' Kobzey inserts the adjective 'Ukrainian,' to make sure the point is not missed that these peasants are Ukrainian."

Prof. Struk added: "Kobzey [portrays] Stefanyk as a fighter for peasant rights, but with a nationalist conscience." Kobzey had come full circle.

He managed to complete his detailed memoirs, "Na Ternystykh ta Khreshchatykh Dorohakh" (On Thorny Paths and Ways of Crossroads), which were published soon after his death.

Toma Kobzey died in Winnipeg on August 17, 1972.

Sources: "Kobzei, Toma," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); John Kolasky, "The Shattered Illusion" (Toronto: PMA Books, 1979); Danylo Struk, "A Study of Vasyl Stefanyk" (Littleton, Colo.: Ukrainian Academic Press, 1972).

| Home Page |