Petro Soroka (1891-1950) was a Ukrainian actor, singer, and director of Galician theatres.
Biography.
From 1914, he worked at the Ruska Besida Theatre in Lviv, then at the New Lviv Theatre, and from 1921 he had his own company.
From 1939 to 1941, he worked at the Lesia Ukrainka Theatre and the Lviv Opera House (1941-1944), where he performed in operetta and staged, among other things, Franz Lehár's The Lark. During the German occupation of 1941-1944, he worked at the same theatre for one year as deputy director and two years as an artistic director.
From 1944 to 1947, he worked as an artist at the Maria Zankovetska Theatre in Lviv.
Soviet sources give an inaccurate date and place of Soroka's death - 1948, Lviv, while others say that he was exiled for his production of Solovki just after the Soviet annexation of western Ukrainian lands and died shortly afterwards. Now it is known that Petro Soroka arrived at a special settlement on 7 November 1947 in Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Kemerovo region (Russia). There he was sentenced by the Kemerovo Regional Court in 1949 to 25 years in prison for staging "anti-Soviet" plays and for counter-revolutionary activities.
Excerpt from the indictment:
"The preliminary and judicial investigation established that in 1941, while in the temporarily occupied territory of the Ukrainian SSR by German troops and living in the city of Lviv, Soroka voluntarily joined the military service. Lviv, he voluntarily joined the German occupiers as a deputy director of a drama theatre, participated in the staging of the anti-Soviet play The Triumph of Prosecutor Dalsky in Lviv and other nearby cities, thereby aiding and abetting the Germans and conducting propaganda against the Soviet Union. Soroka, being in Mt. Anzhero-Suzhensk, Kemerovo region, as a special resettler, during 1948, he conducted counter-revolutionary propaganda among the people around him: he slandered the living conditions of workers in the USSR, expressed defeatist sentiments towards the USSR, while praising life in the former Polish lordship and during the German occupation.
- Criminal case file of Petro Soroka, no. P-653, Archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Lviv Oblast.
He was posthumously rehabilitated under the Law "On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression in Ukraine" of 17 April 1991.
