Simirenko, Alex

Simirenko, Alex [Симиренко, Олекса; Symyrenko, Oleksa], b 6 September 1931 in Kyiv, d 27 April 1979 in State College, Pennsylvania, USA. Sociologist; son of Volodymyr Symyrenko. He and his mother fled from Soviet Ukraine in the late 1930s and lived as refugees in Prague and postwar displaced persons in Bavaria. In 1950 they emigrated to the United States of America. Simirenko graduated from the University of Minnesota (PH D, 1961) and was a professor of sociology at the University of Nevada (1960–9), California State University (Northridge, California, 1968–71), and Pennsylvania State University (from 1969). A specialist in American ethnic studies and Soviet sociology, he wrote Pilgrims, Colonists, and Frontiersmen: An Ethnic Community in Transition (1964), about the community of immigrants from Transcarpathia living in Minneapolis, and edited, with introductions, the collections Soviet Sociology: Historical Antecedents and Current Appraisals (1966) and Social Thought in the Soviet Union (1969). An edition of his selected articles, The Professionalization of Soviet Society, was published posthumously in 1982.

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