Zaiachkivsky, Myron

Zaiachkivsky, Myron [Заячківський, Мирон; Zajačkivs’kyj; pseudonym: Kosar], b 18 November 1897 in Kolomyia, Galicia, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia region, RSFSR. Communist organizer; son of Tyt Zaiachkivsky. During the First World War he was captured and interned in a Russian prisoner of war camp. During the Ukrainian-Polish War in Galicia, 1918–19, he served as a military doctor in the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA). In 1920 he was among the UHA soldiers who were absorbed into the Red Army within the ranks of the Red Ukrainian Galician Army. He joined the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine. After the Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21, Zaiachkivsky worked as a lecturer and edited a Party newspaper in Berdychiv and then headed the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Uman Okruha Party Committee (1924–6) and the CC CP(B)U Department of Agitation in Kharkiv (1926–8). Upon returning to Galicia for underground work he was elected to the CC of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, and directed its operations from the Party center in Berlin. After the purge of the Osyp Vasylkiv faction from the Party he was promoted to its Politburo. In 1933 he was called to Moscow. He was arrested in 1934 and sent to a GULAG concentration camp, where he was executed by the NKVD. He was posthumously ‘rehabilitated’ in 1956.

[This article was updated in 2020.]