Soroka, Mykhailo

Soroka, Mykhailo [Сорока, Михайло; Myxajlo], b 27 March 1911 in Koshliaky, Zbarazh county, Galicia, d 16 June 1971 in the Mordovian ASSR. Political prisoner; husband of Kateryna Zarytska and father of Bohdan Soroka. In 1938 he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for his involvement in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In 1940 he was arrested in Lviv by the NKVD and sentenced to eight years in labor camps in Arctic Russia. After his release he returned to Lviv, but he was rearrested in 1949 and exiled to the Krasnoiarsk territory, in northern Siberia. In 1952 he was again arrested, for allegedly forming an underground organization of Ukrainian political prisoners in a Vorkuta camp, and in September 1953 he was sentenced to 25 years in labor camps in Kazakhstan, Siberia, and Mordovia.

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