Savrych, Karlo

Savrych, Karlo [Саврич, Карло; Savryč; pseud: Максимович; Maksymovych], b 18 January 1892 in Kukilnyky, Rohatyn county, Galicia, d June 1936 in the GULAG prison on the Solovets Islands. Western Ukrainian Communist activist. In February 1919 he chaired the conference establishing the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia (KPSH, later the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, or KPZU) in Stanyslaviv. Savrych was elected Party secretary. To escape arrest he fled to Czechoslovakia, and then to Austria (1920). In Vienna he formed the Foreign Committee of the KPSH and founded the newspaper Nasha pravda. Savrych adhered to a national-communist perspective and was a leading figure in the Party’s Osyp Vasylkiv faction. In 1922–4 he was secretary of the Soviet Ukrainian diplomatic mission in Warsaw. In August 1924, after being expelled from Warsaw, he took over the position of director of the Foreign Office of Aid for the Revolutionary Movement in Western Ukraine in Kharkiv and represented the interests of the KPZU before the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (to which he was elected as an alternate member and, from October 1925, a full member). On 3 March 1927 he spoke out strongly at a critical meeting of the CP(B)U Central Committee in defense of Oleksander Shumsky, who had come under attack for his political views. As a result he was later sent into administrative exile in Astrakhan. Subsequently he was arrested and died in the Stalinist terror.

Janusz Radziejowski

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