Kremar, Roman

Kremar, Roman (Кремар, Роман; pseud of Михайло Солодуха; Mykhailo Solodukha), b 5 February 1885 in Verbytsi, Rava Ruska county, Galicia, d 13 January 1953 in Edmonton, Alberta. Political activist and journalist. The son of a wealthy and politically engaged peasant, he was a socialist sympathizer who was ejected from law school at Lviv University for his political activities. Kremar emigrated to Canada in 1909 and ended up in Edmonton. As secretary of the Federation of Ukrainian Social Democrats in Canada in 1910, he quarreled with the editors of Robochyi narod in Winnipeg and precipitated a schism in 1911 by publishing his own paper, Nova hromada, and organizing a rival Federation of Ukrainian Socialists in Canada (FUSC). Within a year both the paper and the FUSC collapsed and Kremar left the socialist camp. He established the newspaper Novyny in Edmonton early in 1913, which supported the attempts of Alberta Ukrainian activists for more Ukrainian-language education and Ukrainian teachers in east central Alberta. But Kremar increasingly began to court Conservative connections and to undercut the work of leading Alberta Ukrainophiles with partisan attacks against them in his newspaper. At the same time he began to speculate in real estate and to become increasingly Catholic. He moved to Winnipeg in 1918 to edit the newspaper Kanadiis’kyi rusyn, which he renamed Kanadiis’kyi ukraïnets’ in April 1919. He also as an advisor to the Ukrainian Catholic bishop Nykyta Budka.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]