Pidhainy, Semen

Pidhainy, Semen [Підгайний, Семен; Pidhajnyj], b 17 April 1907 in Novominska Stanytsia, Kuban, d 14 November 1965 in Toronto, Ontario. Historian, writer, civic and political activist; father of Oleh Pidhainy. A graduate of the Kyiv Institute of People's Education and the Kharkiv Scientific Research Institute of Material Culture, he worked at the Museum of Slobidska Ukraine and the Kharkiv Institute of People's Education and was a research associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. From 1933 to 1941 he was an inmate of Soviet labor camps, mostly in the Solovets Islands. He fled from the USSR in 1943 and emigrated to Canada in 1949. He was deputy secretary of the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic party and a member of the Ukrainian National Council. He organized and headed the Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror and the World Federation of Ukrainian Former Political Prisoners and Victims of the Soviet Regime. He wrote a number of works on Soviet terror, including Ukraïns'ka inteligentsiia na Solovkakh (The Ukrainian Intelligentsia in the Solovets Islands, 1947) and a memoir Nedostriliani (Those Left Unshot, 2 vols, 1949; Eng trans Islands of Death 1953), and edited The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A White Book (2 vols, 1953). He also published the New Review.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]