Voitiuk, Yakiv

Voitiuk, Yakiv [Войтюк, Яків; Vojtjuk, Jakiv], b 2 April 1894 in Siltse, Kholm county, d 3 November 1937 in Sandarmokh, Karelia, RSFSR. Civic and political leader. He studied in the historical-philological faculty of Moscow University for two years and belonged to a socialist student circle. During the First World War he served in the Russian army in the Ternopil region, and in 1919 he organized the Polisian Sich in Kobryn to fight the Poles. In 1922 he was elected to the Polish Sejm, where he was secretary of the Ukrainian caucus (see Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation) and then founder and chairman of the Ukrainian Social Democratic caucus (1924) and chairman of the communist parliamentary faction. In 1928 he emigrated to Soviet Ukraine. He was arrested in 1933, sentenced to 10 years but then, after being found guilty in October 1937 by an NKVD tribunal of ‘belonging to a counterrevolutionary organization,’ murdered during the mass executions of political and other prisoners marking the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917. He was posthumously ‘rehabilitated’ in 1959.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]