HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

THE WORKERS' UNION AND THE JEWS 195railroad workers in Kiev and elsewhere are mentioned in police andother government documents.The two founders of the union came to Kiev from St. Petersburg.Koval'skaia was an experienced underground activist, and the youngerShchedrin was an enthusiast engaged in clandestine populist workfrom 1876. Together with the Ukrainian Pavlo Ivaniv, a student atKiev University who was expelled after the student riots of 1878, 13 theyformed the nucleus of the organization. Ivaniv was an ardent populistand a Ukrainophile. 14 His connections abroad were instrumental in theunion's acquisition of a printing press originally intended for someUkrainian circles in the city. Other activists in the union were thesisters Sofiia Bohomolets' and Mariia Prysets'ka, I. M. Kashyntsev,and Oleksii Preobrazhens'kyi. 15Prominent among Jewish memberswas Nakhum Hecker (or Gecker), a newcomer to Kiev who was veryactive among factory workers during the last period of the union'sexistence. 16The relatively brief history of the union can be divided into threeunequal stages, with the second and third demarcated by arrests: on24 October 1880 — Koval'skaia and Shchedrin; on 4 January 1881— Kashyntsev, Preobrazhens'kyi and others. The union was liquidatedat the end of April 1881, with the arrest of Ivaniv and the seizureof the press. These events concurred, not accidentally, with the anti-Jewish pogrom in Kiev. The first two imprisonments caused not onlychanges in the leadership of the union, but also some redirection of itsgoals.Koval'skaia and Shchedrin, while still in St. Petersburg, were in-13The description of Ivaniv's relationship to the union as only "a close one"(Revolutsionnoe narodnichestvo, 2:450) is an obvious understatement. Perhaps itwas based on Koval'skaia's casual note published in the article of L. Berman,"Kievskii protsess 21-kh ν 1880 g.," Katorga і ssylka (hereafter Kis), 8-9(1931): 90, fn. 1. But Koval'skaia's memoirs and the documentary evidence tell adifferent story.14Koval'skaia, 1926, p. 48; luzhno-russkie rabochie soiuzy: Sbornik statei,ed. M. Ravich-Cherkaskii (Kharkiv, 1925), p. 13.15Venturi (Roots of Revolution, p. 803, fn. 31) mistook him for his namesake,Hryhorii Preobrazhens'kyi, another revolutionary.16Hecker's memoirs, Nasha iunost', were published in 1913 and republished inRavich-Cherkaskii, luzhno-russkie rabochie soiuzy, pp. 131—43. He also wroteabout an earlier period in his life: "Revoliutsionnye kruzhki ν Beredianske,"Kis 11 (1924): 100-110. Neither work gives much information about his Jewishbackground.