Shemet, Volodymyr

Shemet, Volodymyr [Шемет, Володимир; Šemet], b 1 July 1873 at Oleksandrivka khutir, Lubny county, Poltava gubernia, d 14 May 1933 in Kyiv. Civic and political activist; brother of Serhii Shemet. A landowner in the Poltava region, he was a member of the Brotherhood of Taras, a deputy to the First Russian State Duma in 1905, and publisher of the newspaper Khliborob (Lubny) (1905). During the First World War he helped organize a private Ukrainian gymnasium in Kyiv (1915–16). He was a founding member of the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian party (1917) and a deputy from Poltava gubernia to the Central Rada. From 1919 he was a research associate of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Under the Soviet regime he suffered political persecution and died of starvation.

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