Tesliuk, Mykhailo

Tesliuk, Mykhailo [Теслюк, Михайло; Tesljuk, Myxajlo; pseudonyms: Ernest, Horyn, Led, Masalsky], b 12 November 1899 in Kaminka-Strumylova, Galicia, d 19 February 1985 in Lviv. Galician Communist figure. A founding member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU) in 1919, he organized Party cells in Kaminka-Strumylova, Radekhiv, and Busk and from 1921 served as the secretary of its committees for Kaminka-Strumylova and for the Drohobych, Stryi, and Lviv districts. For his activities Tesliuk spent time in Polish prisons (1919, November 1921 to February 1923, October 1923 to June 1924). As a secretary of the KPZU Central Committe (1924–8) and a candidate (1925–6) and member (1926–8) of its Politburo, he was in charge of the party's trade unions, rural, and Jewish work. A member of the Osyp Vasylkiv faction, which supported Oleksander Shumsky in his Ukrainization policies, he was removed from the Central Committee in 1928 but remained active in the Lviv organization. In 1932 he was called to Soviet Ukraine, where he worked as a lecturer in Kharkiv and was arrested in 1933 along with many other national-communist activists. In 1949 he was released from the concentration camps in the far north and sent to cultivate the virgin lands in Central Asia. After being amnestied and rehabilitated in 1956, he returned to Lviv and worked as a researcher at the Lviv oblast archive. His memoirs appeared in 1979 and were republished in 1988.

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