Kokhan, Volodymyr

Kokhan, Volodymyr or Kochan [Кохан, Володимир; Koxan], b 4 December 1898 in Tudorkovychi, Sokal county, Galicia, d 13 June 1966 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Politician and community leader. During the First World War he served in the Austrian army and the Ukrainian Galician Army. After the war he was director of the Ukrainian Bank in Sokal and an active organizer of the Ukrainian co-operative movement in Galicia. A member of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), in 1928 he was elected to the Polish Sejm. His political speeches led to his arrest and imprisonment. In 1930 he was reelected but resigned from the Sejm and the UNDO in protest against the new policy of ‘normalization’ of Ukrainian-Polish relations. With other UNDO dissidents he participated in founding the Front of National Unity and in 1936 was elected to its central executive. During the Second World War Kokhan was active in the co-operative movement. A displaced person in Germany after the war, he served as general secretary of the Ukrainian Co-ordinating Committee in Bavaria and edited the journal Na chuzhyni. Emigrating to Canada in 1948, he served as executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (1948–66) and director of the Ukrainian Canadian Relief Fund as well as the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko. He was one of the founders of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.

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