Ukrainian Americans

UKRAINIAN AMERICANS. The Ukrainian immigrant Left, strongly but ambivalently linked to political events in Russia and Austria-Hungary, had a forceful if foreshortened role in the ethnic working-class community. Like numerous other eastern European groups, Ukrainians had never achieved political independence in their homeland. Not until the end of the nineteenth century did the population at large accept a common designation, easing out the “Ruthenian” cognomen given Ukrainian subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire and retained for decades by American immigration records. Ethno-cultural revival and the worsening condition of the peasantry prompted mass immigration to the United States, numbering (according to varying estimates) approximately 500,000 individuals.

Mostly of peasant origin, Ukrainian immigrants clustered in districts of anthracite coal mining, iron and steel production, meat processing, and auto making, with a minority female work force in textiles and light manufacturing. Swept up in the drives for unionization of underpaid and dangerous work, Ukrainians took part in numerous violent labor incidents. Left organizations took shape against this background, along with religious institutions and fraternal or cultural associations. Socialists and, later, Communists organized with the dual purpose of emancipating labor and attaining the homeland’s national independence.

Ukrainian socialists in the homeland, seeking to extend their support network, began to dispatch agitators and propaganda to America after the turn of the century. In the years following the Russian Revolution of 1905, they found a ready welcome in the besida, or public meeting, re-created in the new land. Squabbling over homeland politics and other issues, however, prevented Ukrainian socialists from establishing themselves on a national basis until the outbreak of war in Europe increased membership and consolidated socialist influence in the immigrant community. In 1915 immigrant Ukrainian socialists affiliated twenty locals, numbering approximately a thousand members, with the Socialist Party. Shortly, this membership doubled, with Michigan emerging as a major center of activity. The Ukrainian Federation organ, Robitnyk (Worker), daily from 1917, took an extreme Left position within the Ukrainian community, urging anti-war militance and welcoming the Bolshevik Revolution unreservedly. This position, with events in eastern Europe, fixed the lines of conflict among Ukrainian immigrants, with rival immigrant Social Democrats in the Ukrainian Workingmen’s Association denouncing left-wing Ukrainian supporters in the association’s organ, the Narodnia Volya (People’s Will). The same revolutionary posture also ensured a government attack on Robitnyk with three raids culminating in the 1918 destruction of some nineteen thousand internal documents.

Robitnyk soon reemerged and led a strengthened organization of some six to seven thousand from the Socialist Party to the Communist Party. Meanwhile, fraternal and educational activities blossomed, including “Ukrainian Workers Schools” and women’s organizations, libraries, choirs, and temperance efforts. Just as Ukrainian Communists moved to consolidate their position, government repression struck once more, with destruction of the press as well as jailing and deportation of leading members.

As a result of these experiences, Ukrainian Communists learned a measure of caution. Ukrainskyi Shchodennyi Visti (The Ukrainian Daily News), which began in 1920 and continues weekly to the present, never designated itself as a Communist publication. Although adhering to Moscow-aligned policies, the press concerned itself overwhelmingly with practical immigrant problems. Increasing this inward direction, the Ukrainian Left allied itself with the Soiuz Ukrainskykh Robitnychykh Orhanizatsii, or Union of Ukrainian Workers (SURO), founded in 1923, rather than the Ukrainian Federation of the Communist Party. As such, it operated freely within the immigrant community. With considerable success, the Ukrainian Left made the argument that a Communist homeland state was superior to not having a unified country. It also successfully urged more participation in the movement for industrial unions, and in a cultural effort to train the second generation in Ukrainian customs and language.

During the heyday of Communist influence, this practical approach to immigrant problems, and an undaunted devotion to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, nearly overcame the distrust of immigrants generated by reports of widespread homeland starvation. Ukrainian immigrant Left activities within the community flourished in a host of unions including the furriers, Boot and Shoe Workers, United Mine Workers, and (notably in the New York area) restaurant workers’ organizations. By the later 1930s, Communists became especially strident in their denunciations of right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, somewhat accurately depicted as allied with fascist movements. Left Ukrainians also constituted a vital section of the International Workers Order, whose Ukrainian members (along with SURO) in 1936 launched a highly successful “Ukrainian National Association” against war and fascism that included some twenty thousand radical and nonradical members.

Between the time of the Moscow trials and the advent of World War II, SURO membership and activities plummeted. By 1940, SURO ceased to function, while the Left-supported “League of American Ukrainians” numbered scarcely more than a thousand members. Unlike other eastern European Communists, the Ukrainian Left failed to rebound significantly during the World War II. The resurgence of right-wing nationalism among a new generation of notably non-proletarian immigrants, general mistrust of the Soviet Union, and, finally, Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Soviet Congress in 1956 virtually eradicated Communist support. Remaining public activities of the Ukrainian American Left tended to be largely cultural in nature. A rival immigrant movement, Ukrainian American Social Democrats, centering organizationally in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and publishing Narodnia Volya (1911–??), exerted considerably less influence, but survived on a narrower gauge, shifting increasingly toward the center of a rightward-turning immigrant public.

Kuropas, Myron. “The Making of the Ukrainian American, 1884–1939: A Study of Ethno-National Education.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1974.

Nastisivskyi, M. Ukrainska Imigratsia v Spoluchenykh Derzhavakh. New York: Union of Ukrainian Labor Organizations, 1934.