Taran, Teodosii

Taran, Teodosii (Таран, Теодосій; real name: Honcharenko; alternate pseud F. Mosenko), b 11 April 1897 in Postav-Muka, Lokhvytsia county, Poltava gubernia, d 24 December 1937. Soviet Ukrainian journalist. A member of the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party (Independentists), in 1919 he joined the Borotbists and led one of their partisan detachments (see Partisan movement in Ukraine, 1918–22) in the Kremenchuk region. He was one of Panas Liubchenko’s closest associates, and in the 1920s he joined the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and became associate editor of the central Soviet Ukrainian government newspaper, Visti VUTsVK. In its literary supplement, Kul'tura i pobut, he serialized Mykola Khvylovy’s polemical pamphlets. When the CP(B)U paper Komunist was Ukrainized in 1926, he served as its associate editor and later as its de facto chief editor. After the Party’s condemnation of Khvylovyism he published Stalinist articles in Komunist denouncing Khvylovy, the writers’ group Vaplite, Les Kurbas, and the Berezil theater and criticizing cultural trends in Soviet Ukraine. In 1933 he became chief editor of Visti VUTsVK. Shortly after being elected to the Central Committee of the CP(B)U he was arrested together with the other committee members and executed.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]