Turiansky, Roman

Turiansky, Roman [Турянський, Роман; Turjans'kyj; pseudonym of Roman Kuzma], b 25 May 1894 in Stryivka, Zbarazh county, Galicia, d 16 July 1940 in Moscow. Galician Communist leader and publicist. With Osyp Vasylkiv and Roman Rozdolsky he founded the ‘Drahomanovite’ (ie, inspired by the ideas of Mykhailo Drahomanov) International Revolutionary Social Democratic Youth in Lviv (1915) and edited its publications. In 1919 he served as a physician in the Red Army and joined the see Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. After the war he served as a Party official in Berdychiv okruha, chief of the Kyiv gubernia branch of the Trade Union of Educational Workers, and a member of the Kyiv Gubernia Trade Union Council in Kyiv and taught sociology and political economy. In 1924 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU). He edited its organ Nasha pravda and served as a member of the KPZU Politburo responsible for propaganda and the KPZU representative to the Polish section of the Comintern. He wrote most of the resolutions adopted at the 5th to 9th conferences, the Second Congress, and Central Committee plenums of the KPZU. Together with the KPZU leaders Karlo Maksymovych and Vasylkiv he was expelled from the party in 1928 for supporting Oleksander Shumsky’s policies. In 1932 he was sent by the Comintern to work for the trade-union press in Moscow, and in 1933 he was arrested and imprisoned for five years. He was rearrested in 1939, sentenced to death, and later executed.

[This article originally was updated in 2024.]