Among a small cohort of Ukrainian figures who spent many years working honorably and successfully in the Ukrainian publishing and journalistic field in Italy, Vasyl Fedoronchuk has been the least studied one. One can find a few lines of his unusually concise biography in the Ukrainian-language Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies, published in Munich and Paris. Foreigners can read a short article in English about this extraordinary person in The Encyclopedia of Ukraine, published by the University of Toronto in Canada.
His time in Rome, where he spent more than half his life, from 1942 until his death in 1984, made him into editor, publisher, journalist, politician, and public figure, as he went about his diverse professional and public activities. Fedoronchuk was born in the village of Skoliv, Ternopil region in 1915. After graduating from a gymnasium in Lviv in 1936, he went to Paris to pursue higher education. There, he studied journalism and history at the Sorbonne and mastered several European languages.
On his arrival in Rome in 1942, Fedoronchuk started contributing to Italian and Ukrainian newspapers and initiating contacts with major education and research figures.
After the Germans unexpectedly arrested the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) Leadership’s representative in Italy Yevhen Onatsky at his Rome office and sent him to a Gestapo prison in Berlin, the OUN’s Melnyk faction found itself needing a worthy replacement for the position. They chose Fedoronchuk. A committed nationalist for years, he agreed to take this job. Even as he served in it, Fedoronchuk studied at the University of Rome, defended his doctorate in political science, and led the Ukrainian student community in Italy, and then the Ukrainian community in Rome.
A SERIES OF ITALIAN-LANGUAGE BOOKLETS ABOUT UKRAINE
Following the end of World War II, Ukrainian exiles in West Germany initiated creation of an international political organization, called the Liberty International. It proclaimed combating the Russian Bolshevik ideology as its chief program objective. The organization saw immigrants from Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Bohemia, Croatia, and Albania joining it in droves. Due to an expansion of its activities, the organization’s headquarters moved to the capital of Italy in 1952. Simultaneously, Fedoronchuk became general secretary of the Liberty International, while Hungarian K. Kallai was its chairman of the presidium since 1954.
It was working for that international organization, which enjoyed reliable funding, that enabled Fedoronchuk to implement several important publishing projects intended to acquaint the international community with postwar issues facing Ukraine and Ukrainians. We refer here, first of all, to a series of propaganda booklets, authored by the journalist himself, which dealt with the history of the Ukrainian question and Russian-Ukrainian relations. The series included, in particular, The Historic Reality of the Ukrainian Issue, The Ukrainian Issue in the Historical Perspective, and Ukraine under the Yoke of Moscow.
Exploiting this rare opportunity to harness potential of an international organization for the international promotion of the Ukrainian cause, the Ukrainian secretary of the Liberty International decided to found a publishing house, called Edizioni Ucraina (Ukraine Publishers). We have been unable to find any archival materials on the establishment and financial situation of the publishing house in Italy, but books bearing its imprint are extant in the library-archive of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Rome. For instance, Fedoronchuk wrote and published The Historic Reality of the Ukrainian Issue in the first year of his work for the International, and it bears the imprint of Edizioni del Lavoro (Rome), but his next title, The Ukrainian Issue in the Historical Perspective, was marked as a publication of Edizioni Ucraina.
THE PUBLISHING HOUSE AND UCRAINA MAGAZINE
There are strong grounds for a suggestion that another Fedoronchuk’s project, Italian-language quarterly (intended as bimonthly) Ucraina, founded at the time of his work for the International, also passed through its namesake publisher. However, no publisher was specified in the magazine’s masthead.
The first issue was released in late 1954, while 1955 saw publication of three more. Significantly, the editor-in-chief earnestly strived to offer Italians a Ukraine-themed periodical which would not go unnoticed. First of all, he paid much attention to the magazine’s modern cover and inside art. The covers were all monochromatic, varying between issues from blue to yellow, crimson, and green. For every issue, the dominant visual motif was a Ukrainian symbol or recognizable image, like the trident, a portrait of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, the Red Building of Kyiv University, and the Ukrainian Catholics’ mother church, St. George’s Cathedral in Lviv.
Commonly for Ukrainian exile periodicals, pagination of this magazine was a continuous one through individual issues. For example, No. 4, 1955 (the fifth issue since the publication’s launch, and the last we were able to find in the library-archive of the UCU) ends with page 375.
In addition to active publishing work, Fedoronchuk did his bit for the Ukrainian cause also as a radio journalist. For almost a quarter of a century (from 1951 to 1975), he led the Italian state radio’s Ukrainian program. The program was funded by the Italian government and was an important complement to Vatican Radio’s Ukrainian broadcasts.
It so happened that after Onatsky’s departure for Buenos Aires, Fedoronchuk found himself filling niches left by the “prominent Roman Ukrainian” in the fields where constant Ukrainian presence was extremely important. It happened this way at the University of Rome, too, where courses in Ukrainian language were offered since 1940. Fedoronchuk went about reviving this program in the early 1960s. Newspaper Visti z Rymu, No. 3, 1963, said the following about the result: “Thanks to great efforts and sacrifices of Dr. Fedoronchuk, who has lived in Rome since some decades, engages in considerable political activities and creates Ukrainian broadcasts for the Italian radio, the public University of Rome will reopen courses in Ukrainian language at the school’s Philosophical Department’s Institute of Slavic Studies at the beginning of the 1963/1964 academic year. The prolonged efforts have come to fruition thanks to support of Italian Professor Dr. Ricardo Piccio. Similar lessons were offered at the same university back before the war by Professor Onatsky, now residing in Argentina.” By the way, the courses involved not only an intensive program in Ukrainian language, but lessons in ethnography and history of Ukraine as well. Professor Roman Skaba, who served on the faculty of the Ukrainian Pontifical College of Saint Josaphat, led the courses at the university.
Fedoronchuk’s publishing house went out of business at the beginning of the 1960s, mainly due to the dissolution of the Liberty International.
The former editor and publisher spent the late 1960s and 1970s serving in major positions in the government-in-exile of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (he led that body’s department of foreign affairs from 1967, and was the head of government for two years in 1972-74). Fedoronchuk frequently traveled to Italy and other Western European countries to present reports on the human rights situation in Soviet Ukraine and the USSR. He died and was buried in Rome in 1984.
The history of Ukrainian book publishing and press knows this figure as a tireless promoter of the Ukrainian cause abroad.
