26 Facts About Alexander Shumsky

Alexander Yakovlevich Shumsky or Oleksandr Yakovych Shumskyi was a Ukrainian communist and activist.

Alexander Shumsky was one of the leaders of the national communism movement in Ukraine and actively supported Ukrainization.

Alexander Shumsky was one of the victims of the Stalinist regime, being arrested and killed by the NKVD in 1946.

Alexander Shumsky was rehabilitated in 1958, during the period of De-Stalinization.

Alexander Shumsky himself wrote that he was born in a family of "batrak".

Yuriy Shapoval indicates that Alexander Shumsky was not fully truthful about his origins, possibly due to the practice of characterising oneself in early Soviet history as coming from the lower class.

Alexander Shumsky's grandfather Danylo Yakovych was a second generation priest, who had been assigned to the village of Turchynka in 1862.

Alexander Shumsky finished school in 1906, either at a village school or a two-year church parish school.

In 1911 Alexander Shumsky began night school at the Shanyavsky Moscow City People's University, but never finished.

Alexander Shumsky entered the Ukrainian Central Council, the Ukrainian parliament, on the party list of the UPSR.

In 1918 Alexander Shumsky was elected to the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly from the Volhynian Governorate.

Alexander Shumsky became one of authors of the law relating to land adopted by the Ukrainian Central Council on 18 January 1918.

Alexander Shumsky defended this strategy in order to pursue the struggle against Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, and later the Direktoria, rapprochement with the Bolsheviks, and establishing a Ukrainian state that was Soviet in its form, but nationalist in its composition.

From Spring of 1919 to March 1920 Alexander Shumsky was a leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party.

Under pressure from the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian Communist Party was dissolved and in March 1920 Alexander Shumsky was added to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine as well as its Political and Organizational bureaus, where he headed the department concerned with rural affairs.

In September 1920 Alexander Shumsky was in political administration and the Revolutionary Military Council of the 12th Army.

At that position Alexander Shumsky was actively requesting liquidation of Ukrainian emigrant organizations and internment camps for the Ukrainian People's Republic Army detachments.

Alexander Shumsky was let go after separate embassies of Ukraine were replaced with one of the Soviet Union.

Since 1922 Alexander Shumsky was a member of the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.

Alexander Shumsky came into conflict with the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Lazar Kaganovich, who was appointed back in April 1925, over these issues of Ukrainization.

Alexander Shumsky sought to replace Kaganovich with Vlas Chubar, who had earlier opposed the appointment of Vyacheslav Molotov as secretary of the Ukrainian communist party.

Joseph Stalin, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, intervened on the side of his ally Kaganovich in a letter to members of Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine accusing Alexander Shumsky of spreading anti-Russian sentiments in Ukraine.

In May 1926 at a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Alexander Shumsky was forced to officially recognize his mistake, but it did not save him.

Alexander Shumsky's removal was hotly debated in the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, which led to its split into "Shumskists" and supporters of the Stalinist position and the eventual dissolution of the party.

Alexander Shumsky expected to return to Ukraine, but he continued to be the object of political attacks in Ukraine.

In 1946 Alexander Shumsky unsuccessfully tried to end his life in suicide twice.