Sevriuk, Oleksander

Sevriuk, Oleksander [Севрюк, Олександер; Sevrjuk], b 1893 in Kyiv, d 26 or 27 December 1941 near Frankfurt an der Oder. Political leader and diplomat. In 1917–18 he represented the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries in the Central Rada. In November 1917 he was elected to the Rada’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution in Ukraine and drafted the law creating the Constituent Assembly of Ukraine. In early 1918 he headed the delegation of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) that negotiated the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers and served as UNR emissary in Berlin. From April 1919 he was a member of the Ukrainian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, and later he worked with the UNR mission in Rome for the repatriation of Ukrainian prisoners of war. In 1920–31 he lived as an émigré in France and then in Germany and was involved in Ukrainian Sovietophile circles. His recollections of the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk appeared in the Paris Sovietophile paper Ukraïns’ki visty (1927). Sevriuk died in a railway accident. There were allegations that he was a Soviet-Nazi double agent and that he was assassinated by the Gestapo.

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