For Ukraine and Belarus’s freedom

Ivan Kraskovsky, an outstanding figure of the Ukrainian and Belarusian national liberation movements, was born on June 24, 1880, in the village of Dubychi Tserkovni in the family of the Orthodox priest Hnat Kraskovsky (1850-1909) whose grave is still in the Dubychi churchyard. The village belonged to the Bielsk district of Grodno gubernia (province), which included Berestia region and northern Pidliashshia, areas populated by ethnic Ukrainians. During the 19th and early 20th centuries many members of the extended Kraskovsky family were priests. The population of Dubychi Tserkovni and the entire eastern part of Bielsk, Brest, and Kobryn districts, as well as the adjacent southern part of Pruzhansk district was ethnically Ukrainian and Ukrainian-speaking. But neither in the 19th nor in the early 20th centuries was there any organized Ukrainian life in these far- flung ethnic Ukrainian territories, which together with the Pinsk lands had been forcibly attached to the Belarusian and Lithuanian gubernias of the Russian Empire’s so-called North-Eastern Territory.

Thus it is no surprise that the residents of this territory were not involved in the Ukrainian national and cultural movement or the struggle to establish a nation state. One of the few exceptions was Ivan Kraskovsky, who also maintained close ties with the Belarusian national movement.

Kraskovsky obtained his secondary education in Vilnius, and in 1903 he was admitted to the Faculty of History and Philology at Warsaw University. In 1905 he was arrested for membership in a student organization and was expelled from the university. He moved to St. Petersburg, where he completed a full university course in history and economics. In 1907-1914 he taught history and geography at two Vilnius high schools. At the time this city was the hub of the Belarusian national movement, which received a powerful impetus during the 1905 revolution. Kraskovsky plunged into this movement, becoming a member of the Belarusian Teachers’ Union and a number of other educational societies.

When World War I broke out, Kraskovsky was in Ukraine. Some information about the Ternopil period of his biography may be found in the memoirs of Dmytro Doroshenko, the distinguished Ukrainian historian and participant of the national-liberation movement (My Reminiscences of the Recent Past (1914-1920), Munich, 1969) who calls Kraskovsky a notable Ukrainian-Belarusian figure and educator.

This source first mentions Kraskovsky in connection with his election to the South-Western Front Committee of the All-Russian League of Cities in late 1916. This committee was a non-governmental organization that provided medical and, later, technical assistance to the army. At first the committee, which operated in Ukraine, was headed by the Russian liberal, Prince Sergei Urusov. In the fall of 1915 the committee was headed by a Ukrainian, Baron Fedir Stengel, who recruited many Ukrainian activists to what soon became a purely Ukrainian organization that began to work with the population of Halychyna and Bukovyna, which were occupied by the Russian army. Similar work was being done on the same territory by the Zemstvo Union. P. Lynnychenko, who was in charge of its public assistance department, invited Kraskovsky to manage the school division. One of the problems that the organization had to address was textbooks: although they were printed in Ukrainian, the content and spirit of the textbooks from the Austro- Hungarian era were not suitable for the new schools. It was decided to use Ukrainian textbooks that had been published after 1906 in Kyiv and which were being stored in book warehouses because Ukrainian-language instruction was forbidden in the Russian Empire. These textbooks were also free of the Russian state spirit.

In 1917, after the February Revolution and the creation of the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, both Doroshenko and Kraskovsky came to Kyiv, where Ukrainian political institutions were emerging. One of the burning issues of the day was the administration of the occupied parts of Halychyna and Bukovyna. Kraskovsky and Lynnychenko, a Zemstvo Union commissioner, managed to persuade the ministers of the Provisional Government to appoint none other than Doroshenko as regional commissioner for Halychyna and Bukovyna. Accordingly, on April 22, 1917, the Provisional Government recalled Prince Dolgorukov and appointed Doroshenko in his place.

Some time later Doroshenko, in his capacity as regional commissioner, appointed Kraskovsky as the commissioner of Ternopil gubernia. In all probability, he arrived in that city in May. Unfortunately, Doroshenko left very few notes about Kraskovsky’s activities in this office. “Kraskovsky arrived soon after me and took the administration of the gubernia into his own hands. Things gradually took their course. He allowed almost all the gubernia chancellery staff to stay on...In some places Kraskovsky also allowed officials of the old police force to remain in service, e.g., in Stanislav, which was located right on the front line and subjected to vicious enemy artillery fire for almost a year. Service here was tough and dangerous. Krasnovsky was glad to see that the civil servants carried out their duties very well, even though they were often exposed to grave danger.”

The new administration of Halychyna and Bukovyna, mostly run by Ukrainians, existed from May to July 1917. In late July, on the initiative of the then chairman of the Provisional Government, Prince Georgiy Lvov, the Russian army launched an offensive in Halychyna. After some initial successes the demoralized army, undermined by Bolshevik agitation, was incapable of organized actions. This not only brought the first achievements to naught, but also led to a pogrom in the captured city of Kalush. Doroshenko wrote, “Intoxicated on vodka and all kinds of liquor found in Kalush, the demoralized soldiers rushed to plunder and loot shops, private and community houses, torture people, and rape women. But one thing was odd: the looters seemed to be guided by somebody’s experienced hand that was pointing exclusively to Ukrainian civic institutions and private houses, while all the Polish houses remained intact. Those who suffered from the pogrom were almost exclusively the Ukrainians and Jews. Dr. Ivan Kurovets, who fled from Kalush to Chernivtsi, told me the harrowing details of this pogrom. The investigation found later that the pogrom was indeed masterminded by a group of people who had organized a nest in army institutions, associates of Gerovsky and Budylovych (Muscophiles in Halychyna — Author). As soon as Kraskovsky heard about the Kalush events, he went there and personally fought off the looters, displaying extreme courage and valor. But his efforts were in vain because the soldiers were drunk and their officers were hiding from them. The Austrians were shelling the city heavily, and they soon recaptured it. Kraskovsky made a narrow escape under heavy fire. Then the Austrians mounted a counteroffensive, and the Russian troops began to retreat from the territory they had been holding until July 1917.”

Kraskovsky’s further activity in Ukraine was associated with the government of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR): in December 1917 he was appointed deputy secretary-general for internal affairs. In 1918, when Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky came to power, Kraskovsky worked at the foreign ministry under Doroshenko. When the UNR was restored, he became deputy minister of foreign affairs and later headed the UNR’s diplomatic mission in the Caucasus, where he negotiated with the Kuban government and Caucasian highlanders, who were seeking to unite with Ukraine.

After the collapse of Ukrainian statehood, Kraskovsky lived in Vilnius in 1921-1924 and then in Lithuania and Latvia, where he took an active part in local Belarusian organizations. In 1925 he moved to the Soviet Union and settled in Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus, where he worked at the Belarusian State Planning Committee and taught at Belarusian State University as associate professor of history. In 1930 he was transferred to the USSR State Planning Committee in Moscow. At the end of that year he was arrested on a charge of collaborating with Belarusian national democrats. Exiled to Samara, he lived there from 1931 to 1941, working at the local state planning committee. Kraskovsky was rearrested in 1937 and was held in custody without trial until 1940. Then he worked as a school teacher in Kuybyshev oblast until 1949. In 1953, after he retired and his wife had died, he managed to obtain permission to go to Bratislava, where his daughter Liudmyla lived. He died there on Aug. 23, 1955.

The life and career of Ivan Kraskovsky is an important component in the history of the Ukrainian liberation struggle and the Belarusian national reawakening of the early 20th century. His biography has not been adequately researched and much work remains to be done in archives. Professor Volodymyr Serhiychuk recently discovered some materials on Kraskovsky’s activities as head of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission in the Caucasus, which were stored at the Kyiv-based Central State Archive of the Higher Organs of Government and Administration of Ukraine. He has handed these materials over to the journal Nad Buhom i Narwoju. I hope that other researchers will also make an effort to study Ivan Kraskovsky’s life history. My hope is based not only on regional patriotism but also the conviction that he was a distinguished figure in the struggle for which he spared neither effort nor expense and is thus worthy of being remembered in independent Ukraine.