Strashkevych, Volodymyr

Strashkevych, Volodymyr [Страшкевич, Володимир; Straškevyč; pseudonyms: V. P[otochny], V. Hamma, Ester], b 1875 in Vyshevychi, Kyiv gubernia, d 1962? in Vinnytsia. Civic figure, writer, and lexicographer. A member of the Hromada of Kyiv, in the 1900s and 1910s he worked for the Vik publishing house and contributed to Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk and the Kyiv periodicals Svitlo (Kyiv), Kievskie otkliki, Hromads’ka dumka, and Rada (Kyiv). Under the Ukrainian National Republic he was deputy director of a department in the Ministry of Religious Faiths. From 1926 he headed the administrative (dilova) terminology section of the economics department at the Institute of the Ukrainian Scientific Language. Together with M. Doroshenko and Mykola Stanyslavsky Strashkevych compiled the institute’s Russian-Ukrainian dictionary of administrative language (15,000 words and phrases, 1930). A defendant in the 1930 Stalinist show trial of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, he was sentenced to three years in a labor camp. After the Second World War he resided and worked in Vinnytsia and taught at Vinnytsia Pedagogical Institute.

[This article was updated in 2022.]