Panas Fedenko: Returning from Historical Limbo
Ukrainian history is full of prominent personalities forgotten, unfortunately, by their compatriots for some objective reasons. The National Museum of Ukrainian History (2, Volodymyrska St., Kyiv) hosted the other day a soiree in memory of Panas Vasyliovych Fedenko (1893 — 1981), an outstanding political figure of Ukraine, member of the Ukrainian Central Rada, historian, and political journalist.
Paying tribute to Panas Fedenko, the audience marked, with deep respect, his invaluable contribution to the Ukrainian socialist movement in the first half of the twentieth century, and the preservation of Ukrainian historical and cultural traditions. In the presence of representatives of Kyiv’s major museums and researchers of Ukrainian history, Ministry of Foreign Affair of Ukraine functionaries handed over some pieces of Panas Fedenko’s creative heritage, until recently carefully kept by his daughter-in-law Nina Fedenko, to the National Museum of Ukrainian History. Among the materials transferred are researches on the early-twentieth-century Ukrainian political movement; monographs dedicated to the memory of Isaak Mazepa, his closest friend and political comrade-in-arms, former premier of the Ukrainian People’s Republic; historical novels; etc.
Panas Vasyliovych Fedenko was born December 13, 1893, into an eight-child peasant family. The Fedenkos had lived for some time at a farmstead near the village Veseli Terny, Katerynoslav province (now Kirovohrad oblast). Then, to enable their children to receive a good education, the parents decided to move to the above-mentioned village, where there were two schools. As Panas Fedenko proved to be a diligent and apt pupil, he was transferred, on his teachers’ advice, to a grammar school in Aleksandriya, which he successfully graduated from in 1913. Later that year he was enrolled in the Petersburg Institute of History and Philology. He dreamed of teaching the Ukrainian language and history at the school of his native Veseli Terny.
The wide spread of socialist ideas in the early twentieth century played a major role in shaping the outlook of our hero, a future rural schoolteacher. In 1915, while in Petersburg, he joined the Ukrainian Social Democratic Labor Party (USDRP), an underground organization until February 1917. At the same time, he was increasingly taking up journalism. Panas Fedenko wrote a series of political articles, contributing to the journals Nashe zhyttia (Our Life) and Ukrainskaya zhizn (Ukrainain Life), the former being published by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and the latter by Symon Petliura in Moscow.
After the 1917 February Revolution and the downfall of the autocracy, Panas Fedenko returned to his native Katerynoslav province in Ukraine. Once in his homeland, he began, together with other like-minded people, to achieve his lifelong dream to establish the first Ukrainian-medium grammar school (gymnasium) in Veseli Terny. When this school was established, Fedenko taught the English language, literature, and history in it for a certain period of time.
Some time later, the Ukrainian Central Rada appointed Panas Fedenko officer in charge of political education and organization of the masses in Verkhniedniprovsky district, Katerynoslav province. A congress of this district’s peasants elected him delegate to the Ukrainian Central Rada, in which he worked until the 1918 coup in Kyiv, when Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky took power.
Active political work forced Fedenko to move to Katerynoslav, where he, as a USDRP member, participated in publishing Nasha sprava (Our Cause), the party’s official organ. Working there, he met and became a lifelong friend of Isaak Mazepa. He simultaneously taught at the Katerynoslav Teacher Training Institute.
In January 1919, Panas Fedenko and Isaak Mazepa were elected delegates to the VI USDRP and Ukraine’s Labor Congress in Kyiv. Fedenko proposed resolutions that laid the groundwork for the Law on Government and the Labor Congress Universal (Decree — Ed.) that approved the reunification of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (ZUNR) on January 28, 1919. As Mazepa became head of the UNR government, Fedenko was appointed one of the political commissars of the Ukrainian Army (at the age of 25 only!). He also took part in drawing up the Declaration of the UNR Government approved in Chortoryi, Volyn, and then participated in the First Winter Military Expedition of December 6, 1919 — May 6, 1920.
The advance of the Bolshevik army into Ukraine forced Fedenko to move to Lviv and then to Poland. In March 1921 the UNR government in exile, in which Panas Fedenko represented USDRP, began to function in Tarnow. In Poland, too, he began to publish the journals Vilna Ukrayina (Free Ukraine) and Sotsialistychna dumka (Socialist Thought). As the Polish administration took an extremely negative attitude toward all things Ukrainian, Panas Fedenko and Isaak Mazepa went to Germany after some time.
In Berlin, Fedenko presented a report to the Ukrainian embassy on the situation in Ukraine after the Bolsheviks had come to power. He published The Ukrainian National Liberation Struggle and, in collaboration with Isaak Mazepa, Famine in Ukraine in 1923 in Berlin.
From 1923 to 1945 Panas Fedenko resided in Prague, Czechoslovakia, combining political work with academic research. In 1923 Fedenko successfully defended a doctoral dissertation at Prague Free University’s school of philosophy. From the next year on, he taught at the Mykhailo Drahomanov Ukrainian High Pedagogical Institute, where he soon became a department chair and, some time later, dean of the history school. In 1932 he was awarded an associate professorship at the Ukrainian Free University.
Attending Prague’s academic libraries and archives, Panas Fedenko got access to sources that helped him explore Cossack-period Ukrainian history. All his historical researches were highly appreciated by the leading historians of the time. It is at that period that Fedenko published his first fundamental studies of the early-20th-century Ukrainian political history, including the book Ukrainian Social Movement in the Twentieth Century (1933).
The Soviet system would not leave its emigre adversaries alone. The trial of the imaginary Ukrainian Liberation Union in Kharkiv in 1930 also mentioned the names of Panas Fedenko and Isaak Mazepa. In response to this show of hypocrisy on the part of the Bolshevik power, Fedenko published an open letter in the Lviv-based newspaper Dilo, in which he exposed the crimes of the Stalinist totalitarian system against the Ukrainian intelligentsia.
After World War Two, Panas Fedenko settled in Germany. He continued his political work and participated in the Ukrainian National Council’s proceedings. In 1951 he published the book Ukraine’s Freedom Struggle, in which he, as a direct participant, tried to shed light on the national liberation struggle in the first half of the twentieth century.
The Ukrainian political movement, extremely active in the 1900s-1940s, then took a certain downturn: it became passive and essentially boiled down to plain demagogy and bickering among diverse political parties, associations, and groups. Of course, this disappointed Panas Fedenko very much. After Isaak Mazepa’s death in March 1952, he abandoned politics and plunged into research.
Having moved to London, Panas Fedenko began to publish the newspaper Nashe slovo (Our Word). Some time later he published at the same place his books The Ukrainian Movement in the Twentieth Century and Isaak Mazepa as Fighter for Ukraine’s Freedom (written in memory of his comrade). He also brought out works of fiction, such as Non-Fatal Glory (under the pen name of Vasyl Tyrsa) and Amor Patrial...
In 1959 Panas Fedenko was invited back to Germany to work at the Munich-based Institute for Research on the USSR. In his final years he conducted research the evolution of the USSR’s communist regime and published a number of works, including Marxist and Bolshevik Theories of the Nationalities Question, Old and New Socialism, and The New History of the USSR... Panas Fedenko died in Munich in 1981. He was an individual who dashed like a meteor across the dark sky of our twentieth-century history and was an example of self-denying service to Ukraine.
