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TOURING UKRAINIAN OTTAWA 8:|
What’s a Ukrainian boy without his mother? Last time we visited the grave of Vladymyr Kaye- Kysilewsky. Let’s stay in the Ukrainian section of Notre Dame Cemetary and look at gthe grave of Senator Olena Kysilewska. Olena Simenovych was born in Monastyryska, now in Western Ukraine, on March 24, 1869. While attending the academic high school (gymnasium) for girls in Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) she joined the first Ukrainian women’s association (Tovarystvo Ruskykh Zhenshchyn: Society of Ruthenian Women) founded by Natalia Kobrynska. Marrying Vladmir Julian Kysilewsky, a member of the the Imperial Austrian civil service, she settled in Kolomyia with her husband. An active author, she wrote under the pen names of Olena Halychanka and later Kalyna and Neznana. From 1912 she edited women’s page in the newspaper Dilo. During World War I she worked with the Red Cross in Vienna on its relief committee for prisoners & the wounded , eventually being awarded that organization’s Cross of Merit. At the end of the war Western Ukraine (Galicia, Halychyna) fell under Polish control. Active in politics, she became member of the executive of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Lviv and also began to publish Zhinocha dolia (Women’s Destiny) in 1925, the first Ukrainian women’s weekly newspaper. This paper had a Canadian section and many of its subscribers were from Canada. She later published a Ukrainian women’s monthly, Zhinocha volia (Women’s will). In 1928, she was elected to the Polish Senate at Warsaw. Representing the costituency of Lviv, she was a member of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO in Ukrainian). This was a mainstream party, supported by a plurality of Ukrainians living in Galicia. In 1929, she visited Canada and the United States, meeting with many prominent women, feminists and Ukrainian community leaders. She visited almost every European country and wrote a series of travel books. She also visited Turkey and Morocco to study the development of their respective women’s movements. From 1935, she headed the women’s section of Silskyi Hospodar, a Ukrainian agricultural education and promotion organization with an extensive publication program and branches throughout Polish-occupied parts of Ukraine. Becoming a Displaced Person (DP) during World War II, she was brought to Canada by her son in June of 1948 and settled in Ottawa. In November, 1948, she was elected the first president of the World Federation of Ukrainian Women’s Organizations and held this position until her death on March 29, 1956. Borys Gengalo
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RUTHENIAN
The word Ruthenian comes from the Latin Ruthene, for Ukrainian. It was used to describe Ukrainians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which had used Latin as an administrative language until 1848. In Canada, until the early 1920s, most Ukrainians from Galicia were called Ruthenians (probably based on what it said in their Austrian passports).
UKRAINIAN POLITICS IN GALICIA
Many Ukrainians in Canada are under the impression that the main political force in Galicia in the 1920s & 1930s was the radical, underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN- formed in 1923 and first called the Ukrainian Military Organization). In fact, OUN assassinations of Polish and Ukrainian politicians, robberies of Polish post offices and bombings of government institutions repelled most Ukrainians, who supported mainstream political parties like UNDO. The OUN came into its own during World War II, when it became the basis for the anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi Ukrainian Insurgent Army.
At the other end of the political spectrum in Galicia was the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. It had considerable support in urban and industrial areas and was mostly Ukrainian in membership. In 1929 Stalin, acting through the Comintern, ordered it to join with the (ethnically-) Polish Communist Party. Most members resisted this instruction. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, many of these members ended up in the GUALAG camps.
Being members of illegal groups in Poland, both Communists and Nationalists often found themselves placed in the same concentration camps by the Polish Police. Camps such as Bereza Kartusya became centres of political education and activism because of the number of underground political activists incarcerated there.
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