Roman Rosdolsky

Roman Osipovich Rosdolsky (Russian: Роман Осипович Роздольский; Ukrainian: Рома́н О́сипович Роздо́льський Roman Osipovič Rozdol's'kyj) (July 19, 1898, Lemberg – October 20, 1967, Detroit) was an important Marxian scholar and political revolutionary. He was born in Lemberg (Lviv) in Galicia, at that time in the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in Ukraine, and died in Detroit, MI (USA). The city of Lviv was annexed by Poland after the world war, occupied by the Red Army in September 1939, occupied by the Nazis in 1941, and liberated in 1944 by the Red Army. Rosdolsky's father was a Ukrainian linguist of some repute.

As a youth, Rosdolsky was a member of the Ukrainian socialist Drahomanov Circles. He was drafted in the imperial army in 1915, and edited with Roman Turiansky the journal Klyči in 1917. He was a founder of the International Revolutionary Social Democracy (IRSD) and studied law in Prague. During World War I he founded the antimilitaristic "Internationale Revolutionäre Sozialistische Jugend Galiziens" (International Revolutionary Socialist Youth of Galizia) . He became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Eastern Galicia, representing its émigré organization 1921-1924 and a leading publicist of the Vasylkivtsi faction of the Ukrainian Communists. In 1925, he refused to condemn Trotsky and his Left Opposition, and was later, at the end of the 1920s, expelled from the Communist Party.

In 1926-1931, he was correspondent in Vienna of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, searching for archival materials. At that time, in 1927, he met his wife Emily. When the labour movement in Austria suffered repression, he emigrated in 1934 back to L'viv, where he worked at the university as lecturer. He published the Trotskyist periodical Žittja i slovo 1934-1938, and was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, but survived internment for three years in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Oranienburg. He emigrated to the USA in 1947, and worked there as independent scholar - failing to obtain a university post. He published also under pseudonyms such as "Roman Prokopovycz", "P.Suk.", "Tenet" and "W.S.".

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