Shevchenko, Fedir – Materials from Personal Inheritance
| Name | Shevchenko, Fedir – Materials from Personal Inheritance |
 F. Shevchenko. Source: OUN Archive, London |
| Catalog Number | T-FŠev | |
| Volume | 16 inventory units, 2 archival boxes | |
| State of Cataloging | The collection has been fully cataloged and is freely accessible | |
| Languages of Documents | Ukrainian, Russian |
Fedir Shevchenko (in Ukrainian Fedir Ivanovych Shevchenko, in Polish Teodor Szewczenko; 8 February 1886–1945?) was a Ukrainian educator and social activist, a member of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU).
He was born in the village of Kyrylivka (now Shevchenkove in the Cherkasy region of Ukraine) in a family related to the most famous Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko; Fedir’s father, Ivan, was nephew of Taras. There are hardly any materials for the biography of F. Shevchenko preserved.
From the context of his correspondence, it can be inferred that before the First World War, Fedir Shevchenko was a folk teacher in a municipal school in the town of Yampil (now in the Vinnytsia region of Ukraine). He and his wife Natalia had a daughter, Halyna (born in 1914). After the outbreak of the First World War, he was mobilized into the Russian Tsarist army, but he soon fell into captivity. In June 1915, he was already held in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Liberec, where he was involved in the activities of Ukrainian liberation and educational associations. He was soon transported to a POW camp for Ukrainians in Freistadt, Austria, where he became the editor of the camp magazine Rozvaha, published with the support of the SVU.
Shevchenko was friends with and exchanged correspondence with important figures of the SVU in Vienna, such as the chief censor Andriy Zhuk and the artist Mykhailo Havrylek, as well as with his extended family. He received correspondence card from his native Kyrylivka written by his father and brother Petr. In Freistadt, he also ran into his cousin Terentiy, with whom he maintained written contact after Terentiy was transferred to the POW labour camp at Tabland.
At that time, attempts to contact Terentii were made by his sister Liudmila Prokopivna Shevchenko (1895–1969), later a prominent Ukrainian Soviet ethnographer, who lived in Przemyśl, Poland. She did, however, make contact with Fedir, as documented by nearly a hundred surviving letters. An encounter with Liudmila Shevchenko is recalled by Vasil Čapla (Vasyl Chaplia, see T-ČAP in the Special Collections of the Slavic Library) in his own biography.
A significant part of the collection consists of letters written by Shevchenko’s wife Natalia from Yampil. Nevertheless, like letters from elsewhere in the Russian Empire, also these were subject to censorship and were thus written in Russian and rather briefly.
After the war, Fedir Shevchenko did not return to Ukraine. He settled in Kalisz, Poland, which had a relatively large Ukrainian community. He last reported his residence to the local police in 1942. According to witnesses, he was arrested by the Soviet counter-intelligence agency SMERSH in 1945 and tortured to death. His long-term poor health had probably contributed to his death.
Shevchenko’s friend and colleague Sozont Basok, on the other hand, returned to his family in Yampil. All that is known from his biography is that he came from Volhynia, considered himself Ukrainian, taught at the Yampil municipal school before the war, and in 1915 was sent to the same POW camps as Fedir Shevchenko. Sozont Basok received letters from the entire extended family. The most interesting ones were sent by his wife Ludmila and her father František Hloušek. Basok’s correspondence was originally deposited with the letters of F. Shevchenko. It forms an integral part of the collection because Basok was Shevchenko’s neighbour and fellow teacher, and, after his return to Yampil, he visited his family and wrote several letters to him in Freistadt.
On his return to Ukraine, Basok left all his correspondence to Shevchenko, which later became part of the collection of the Museum of the Struggle for Liberation of Ukraine in Prague together with Shevchenko’s letters. At the end of the Second World War, it was deposited in the Clementinum and thus passed into the collections of the Slavonic Library, where it was discovered in 2023.
All the letters have preserved notes and numbering in pencil, which are logically complementary to the numbering found on documents deposited in the Kiev Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (TsDAVO; f. 4404, inv. no. 1, issue 103). It is thus clear that the two sets originally formed one collection, a part of which (especially the family photographs) was separated after the Second World War and handed over to the Soviet Union.