Shemet, Serhii

Shemet, Serhii [Шемет, Сергій; Šemet, Serhij], b 6 June 1875 at Oleksandrivka khutir, Lubny county, Poltava gubernia, d 5 May 1957 in Melbourne, Australia. Engineer and civic and political activist; brother of Volodymyr Shemet. He graduated from the Technological Institute in Saint Petersburg where he headed the Ukrainian Student Hromada in Saint Petersburg. A landowner in the Poltava region, he was a founding member of the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian party in Lubny (1917). He favored the Ukrainianization of the Hetman government and opposed its overthrow in November 1918. After emigrating to Tarnów in 1919 and then to Vienna, Berlin, and Paris he became active, with Viacheslav Lypynsky, in the monarchist or Hetmanite movement: he was a member of the Ukrainian Union of Agrarians-Statists (USKhD), a contributor to the journal Khliborobs’ka Ukraïna and other hetmanite publications, personal secretary to Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, and a member of the USKhD Central Council.

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