Anton Klimentievich Vasinchuk (Polish Antoni Wasyńczuk, Antin Wasyńczuk, Antin Wasylczuk, Ukrainian Антін Климентійович Васиньчук, July 16 / November 21, 1885, Chelm, Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire - May 13, 1935, Chelm, Republic of Poland) is a Ukrainian public and political figure, the founder of the Rodnaya Khata society and the newspaper Our Life.
In 1918 he became the authorized representative of the Ukrainian People's Republic for repatriation. From 1922 to 1927 he was a deputy of the Sejm of the Second Polish Republic of the 1st convocation, where he headed the Ukrainian parliamentary representation in 1922–1924. He organized the Ukrainian cooperative movement in the Chelm region. He advocated broad autonomy for the Ukrainian population within the Polish state and strove for mutual understanding with the authorities of the interwar Polish Republic. He fought against the spread among Ukrainians living within the contemporary borders of Poland, both communist and extreme nationalist views.
Biography Early years The Ukrainian Greek Catholic family of Vasinchuk came from the village of Ilova in the Chełm Land. In 1810, Nikolai Vasinchuk (1765-1845), Anton's great-great-grandfather, settled in Chelm. Since then, the Vasinchuk family has lived in this city. Anton Vasinchuk was the first-born in the family of philistine farmers Clement (Clemens) and Maria (née Jaman). He had brothers Pavel (1893-1944), Nikolai (born 1897) and sister Maria (1905-1945).
In various materials about Anton and his brother Pavel, their surname is often found in the form "Vasilchuk" (especially in the Cyrillic notation). As Vasinchuk's biographer Dr. Miroslav Shumylo[pl] points out, in 1917 Anton, Pavel and their cousin Jerzy changed their surname to the above (in the early 1920s Anton had personal documents with the surname "Vasilchuk"). They returned to the original version in 1923, but the Ukrainian press continued to use the form "Vasilchuk".
In most publications dedicated to the personality of Vasinchuk, July 16 is listed as the date of his birth. However, the date of November 21, 1885, is indicated by the data of civil status records stored in Chelm, as well as the entry in the passport of Vasinchuk himself, to which Miroslav Shumilo refers. Anton was baptized in the Orthodox Cathedral in Chelm (in May 1919 transferred by the Polish authorities to the Roman Catholic Church and to this day is the Roman Catholic Basilica of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary). He spent the first years in a family house located on Pivovarennaya Street.
Education In 1894, Anton Vasinchuk entered a one-class school that operated at the Kholmsk Orthodox Theological Seminary. Since 1895, he studied at a theological school, where students were prepared to enter the theological seminary. He studied well, but was not enthusiastic about religious disciplines. Nevertheless, in 1900 Anton entered the Kholmsk Orthodox Theological Seminary. Education at the seminary took place in line with the policy of Russification, students were instilled with anti-Catholic and anti-Polish views. This indoctrination had the opposite effect on Vasinchuk. After the revolutionary events of 1905, he joined an illegal cultural and educational organization - the Chelm "Community" (Ukrainian Gromada). When this became known, Vasinchuk had to leave the seminary. He moved to Simferopol in the Crimea, where he continued his studies at the local seminary. There he received a certificate of maturity.
In 1905, Vasinchuk moved to Kyiv, where he studied at the Faculty of Agronomy of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. There he participated in the activities of Ukrainian student societies - independent organizations of the socialist persuasion. At the same time, he established contacts with Poles engaged in similar activities, in particular with the Corporation of Poles - University and Polytechnic Students (Polish Korporacja studentów Polaków Uniwersytetu i Politechniki). In 1909 or 1910, Vasinchuk moved to New Alexandria, where he studied at the Institute of Agriculture and Forestry. He graduated in 1911 and received the title of a scientific agronomist of the 1st category .
There is no exact information about Vasinchuk's further education and his first work experience. Most likely, he studied at a polytechnical institute somewhere in Russia as an assistant, then worked in the Poltava Zemstvo and as a provincial engineer in Grodno. In 1915-1916 he was a student of the economic faculty of the Kyiv Trade Institute. According to some sources, he also studied in Heidelberg, where he met his future wife, Stefania Galińska, a Polish Roman Catholic. They probably married in 1916. On November 11, 1917, their son Clemens was born, and on June 28, 1918, in Nizhyn, their daughter Irena.
Political activity According to separate sources, at the beginning of 1917, Vasinchuk joined the Russian Imperial Army in order to carry out propaganda activities among soldiers of Ukrainian origin aimed at raising their national self-consciousness. During the February Revolution, he took part in the liquidation of the tsarist administration in Kyiv, leading the insurgent telegraph and telephone operators. Subsequently, he was a member of the executive committee of representatives of workers and soldiers, headed the provincial commission responsible for providing the military district with food, and finally became a member of the city council of Kyiv. However, Miroslav Shumilo failed to confirm these data.
On March 27–28, 1917, Vasinchuk was a delegate at the congress of cooperative unions of the Kyiv province. At the same time, he became a member of the Union of Ukrainian Autonomist-Federalists[uk] (later renamed the Ukrainian Party of Socialist-Federalists). The Union supported the Russian Provisional Government and advocated broad autonomy for Ukrainians within a federal Russia. Most likely, Vasinchuk was also a member of the Ukrainian Central Rada.
Plenipotentiary representative of the UNR for repatriation After the October Revolution, the publication of the Third Universal by the Central Rada and the proclamation of the Ukrainian People's Republic on November 20, 1917, Vasinchuk received an offer to join the socialist government of Volodymyr Vynnichenko as vice minister of agriculture or head of a department at the Ministry of the Interior. However, he rejected these proposals due to the radical position of the government, which tried to compete with the Bolsheviks, proposing, among other things, to eliminate private ownership of land. At the same time, after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on February 9, 1918, between the UNR and the Central Powers, according to which the territories of the Kholmshchyna and part of Podlyashya[uk] departed to the Ukrainian People's Republic, Vasinchuk headed a delegation that went to these lands with an inspection. At the end of March 1918 he arrived in Brest.
Most likely in April 1918, Anton Vasinchuk became the authorized representative of the UNR for repatriation. His task was to make possible the return to the aforementioned territories of the Orthodox population, forcibly evacuated in the summer of 1915 along with the retreating Russian army. At that time, Vasinchuk lived in Rivne, and in order to fulfill his duties, he collaborated with representatives of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Polish Regency Council[pl] and the International Committee of the Red Cross. He created an interstate repatriation commission headquartered in Kovel and several smaller commissions in other cities in Volhynia and Polissya. In his work, he did not separate repatriates by nationality, treating both Ukrainians and Poles equally. At that time, Vasinchuk collaborated, among other things, with the national democrat Stanislav Moskalevsky, head of the district department of the Central Civil Committee in Ukraine (Polish: Zarząd Rejonowy Komitetu Centralnego Obywatelskiego na Ukrainie), who was involved in the repatriation of the Poles of the Kingdom of Poland. Vasinchuk advocated Ukrainian-Polish cooperation directed against the Russians.
Socio-political activity in the Kholm region At the turn of 1918–1919, Anton Vasinchuk returned with his family to Chelm. There he focused on social activities aimed at Orthodox Ukrainians living in Poland. At the beginning of 1919, the Ukrainian Charity Committee operated in the house of Vasinchuk, which he headed. The organization focused on material assistance and cultural and educational activities among the Ukrainian population of the Kholm region. Soon the committee was reorganized into the charitable society "Rodnaya Khata". Anton Vasinchuk also actively participated in the activities of the Ukrainian Pedagogical Society, founded in February 1919. This organization was headed by his relative Jerzy Vasinchuk, and its goal was the development of Ukrainian school education.
In the autumn of 1919, Vasinchuk published the Memorandum on the Situation of the Ukrainian Population in the Kholm Region (Polish: Memoriał w sprawie sytuacji ukraińskiej ludności na Chełmszczyźnie), in which he clearly advocated the loyalty of Ukrainians to the Polish authorities. In the document, he described the position of Ukrainians on these lands and called for equal rights with other citizens of the Second Rzeczpospolita, noting that they perform all relevant civil duties. In addition, he argued that the Ukrainians, like the Poles, were hostile to the Bolsheviks. The memorandum also put forward a proposal to open Ukrainian folk schools, a private gymnasium in Chelm, to allow the use of the Ukrainian language in courts and authorities, to streamline church issues and to organize a Ukrainian committee in Chelm with an advisory (for the Polish authorities) function. On October 7, 1919, Vasinchuk, at the head of a delegation, submitted a document to the Ministry of the Interior of Poland, and on October 8, to the office of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The Polish authorities reacted disapprovingly to the text; the document itself remained without an official response. It also failed to officially register the "Native House", which, however, continued to operate.
In the fall of 1919, Vasinchuk headed the Ukrainian Delegation, an inter-party political council that brought together representatives of all Ukrainian parties operating in those territories that were part of the Second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, after the partitions of Poland, were ceded to Russia. In addition, on February 26, 1920, he led a delegation that met with the Lublin governor Stanislav Moskalevsky and put forward proposals similar to those published in the Memorandum on the Situation of the Ukrainian Population in the Kholmshchyna. Although the Polish official promised to study the situation of the Ukrainian population, this visit did not bring any real results. At that time, Vasinchuk had already established contacts with the Polish Socialist Party) and the Lviv Social Democrats. On June 9, 1920, he took part in a conference of Polish and Ukrainian political organizations, held at the initiative of the left and centrist factions of the Polish Sejm. This event was attended by Ukrainians from the Kholmshchyna, Podlasie, western Polissya and Volyn (this delegation was co-chaired by Vasinchuk and Marko Lutskevich[pl]) and representatives of the Polish Socialist Party, the PPP Piast[pl], the PPP Liberation, the PPP Levytsia» and the National Workers' Party. The meeting resulted in a memorandum with a project of national-territorial autonomy of Ukrainians in Poland. The document discussed in detail the issues of administration, school education, language, self-government and religion. The memorandum was supposed to be the subject of discussion in the Seimas of the Commonwealth, but the resignation of the government of Leopold Skulsky prevented this.