Society of the Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence

Why the museum needed a separate society

Prague's Museum of Ukraine's Struggle for Independence became an institution preserving documents about Ukrainian liberation struggles, diplomacy, culture and emigration. Museums, however, do not exist apart from the organisations that create, fund and protect them. This was why the museum society emerged in 1925 with its own statutes, membership, board, assemblies and legal decisions. Historian Maryna Paliienko and archival institutions document the distinction between the society's members, the museum director and the repository's structure. Reducing these to one object would confuse founders, ownership of collections and administrative management. [MS01; MS02; MS03]

In the CMS, R0050 should have a founded_and_governed relationship to R0040, but legal identity is unacceptable. A donation letter may be addressed to the society's board while the museum receives the exhibits; the person heading the society was not necessarily the museum director. This is a fundamental rule for every temporal graph on the platform. [MS01]

Background: documents without a home

After the First World War, Ukrainian military and political émigrés took abroad or preserved substantial documentary collections: records of the Ukrainian National Republic's army, the Ukrainian Galician Army, internment camps and diplomatic missions, as well as artistic and personal archives. According to the archival exhibition marking the museum's centenary, an initiative to create a place to preserve such historical material came in 1924 from Ukrainian Galician Army figures and was addressed to Ukrainian Free University professors. Dmytro Antonovych was among its principal initiators. [MS02]

This was more than a museum exhibition project. Rules were needed for accepting, organising and preserving documents, reporting to donors and funding. The society provided the civic foundation for this work, while the museum operated as its specialised organisation. Results should be assessed through meeting minutes, balance sheets, accession documents and bulletin issues, rather than memories of exhibition rooms alone. [MS01; MS04]

January and May 1925: three different dates

According to the Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine, the society's statutes were approved by Prague's provincial government on 12 January 1925. The TsDAHO archival exhibition documents confirm the existence of a statute extract from January 1925 — f. 269, op. 1, file 455, fol. 1–2; this is an actual catalogue locator, but the complete statutes have not been checked here. Another institutional study gives 23 May 1925 as the date of the founding assembly. The project's initial materials instead contained an approval date of 16 January. No single date can therefore be designated a universal “founding date” without identifying the event type. [MS02; MS03; MS04]

The temporal model requires separate Event records: approval of the statutes, founding assembly and opening of the first museum exhibition. According to research by the Sectoral State Archive of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the first display opened on 1 July 1925. The date of 16 January remains in the discrepancy register pending inspection of the original resolution. This distinction matters to the legal history of both museum and society. [MS02; MS03]

Donations: how a community created an institution

The society's principal resources were membership fees, private donations and diaspora support. Paliienko reports substantial contributions from K.-H. Lysiuk, a Ukrainian entrepreneur in the United States who provided assistance from 1929. Within museum history, this is a documented example of transatlantic resource mobilisation, but each contribution's specific sum and date should be established from cash reports. [MS01; MS04]

By the 1930s, the aim of a permanent “Ukrainian House” had taken shape. A four-storey building was purchased in Prague's Nusle district in 1938, and the museum began operating there the following year. Building ownership, the society's financial responsibility and storage of exhibits require different database fields. Purchase alone does not prove the building survives today: institutional history records extensive destruction in 1945. [MS01; MS02]

Who owned the memory: types of collections

The holdings included documents of Ukrainian governments and diplomatic missions, military material, flags, personal archives, early printed books, journals, artworks and photographs. According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, the archive was divided into political-diplomatic, military, émigré and general departments. The library and museum operated separately. The collection was not static: material arrived from different countries and private collections. [MS01]

The society itself determined collecting policy and civic legitimacy. The Collection database needs separate records for museum objects, library holdings, diplomatic records and personal documents. Not all former exhibits can automatically be labelled “in Prague today”: some were destroyed, some removed and others dispersed among repositories in many countries. This distinction has both informational and ethical value for researchers. [MS01; MS02; MS05]

Visty MVBU as the society's diary

The bulletin Visty Muzeiu vyzvolnoi borotby Ukrainy appeared in 1925–1938. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine website gives 19 issues, whereas Mykola Mushynka's work and exhibition material mention 20 issues. This is another source discrepancy: methods of counting combined issues or catalogue units may differ. The absolute figure is not being standardised until a complete run is inspected. [MS01; MS05]

Visty matters less simply as a museum publication than as systematic evidence of the society's activity: it contains board memberships, reports, thanks to donors, statutory amendments and invitations to join. The TsDAHO archive identifies the first issue, July 1925: f. 269, op. 1, file 456, fol. 1. The exact physical number of issues and the location of a complete run need establishing through separate bibliographic research. [MS04; MS05]

War, destruction and decisions to continue

The museum continued operating in difficult circumstances during Nazi occupation. Bombing of Prague destroyed the building in February 1945, and a substantial part of its collection was lost or relocated. This was a tragic event in the collections' material history, but it did not end the society's legal history. After the war, the organisation sought to arrange surviving documents, negotiate premises and preserve the institution. [MS01; MS02; MS05]

According to the Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine, a general assembly approved renaming as the “Ukrainian Museum in Prague” in April 1945; Mushynka describes the society's postwar board under the name “Society Ukrainian Museum in Prague”. These names cannot all be treated as identical without registration records. In 1948, Czechoslovakia's communist authorities dissolved the museum and society; the institutional exhibition gives 26 March 1948, while the encyclopedia says March 1948. [MS01; MS02; MS05]

After 1948: collections without their original owner

The following decades brought large-scale transfers of collections. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine reports the transport of more than ten tonnes of documents to the Ukrainian SSR in 1958, the formation of 173 fonds during archival processing and the preservation of some material in the Slavonic Library and Czech and Slovak repositories. A separate “Ukrainian Museum in Prague” fond was later formed in Prague. These historical facts should be represented as movements or custody histories of individual collections, rather than a single located_in edge. [MS01; MS05]

For organisation R0050, it is crucial to determine which collection decisions came from board members and which were imposed by external state institutions. In cases of forced seizure, “the society donated the archive” must not be written unless an act of voluntary transfer is found. The cautious relationship type custody_changed_under_political_control allows the story to be told without inventing legal grounds. [MS01; MS05]

Images and collections

• Extract from the society's statutes (January 1925) — TsDAHO, f. 269, op. 1, file 455, fol. 1–2; metadata confirmed by the public exhibition; digital reuse rights not established.
• Society membership card (1930s) — TsDAHO, f. 269, op. 1, file 460, fol. 115; do not assign an arbitrary date to its owner.
• First page of Visty (July 1925) — TsDAHO, f. 269, op. 1, file 456, fol. 1; compare with copies in other libraries.
• Photographs of the Ukrainian House in 1938 and ruins in 1945 — rights and exact provenance require separate investigation.