Petro Panch

(pen name of Petr Iosifovich Panchenko). Born June 22 (July 4), 1891, in the city of Valki, now in Kharkov Oblast. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1940.

Panch graduated from a surveying school in Poltava and from the Odessa Artillery School (1916). He served in the Red Army from 1919 to 1921. From 1941 to 1945 he was editor in chief of Radio Soviet Ukraine. Panch began publishing in 1921. His main theme is the formation of character during the period of the revolution and socialist construction; this theme is found in the collections of short stories and novellas The Sky-Blue Echelons (1928), The Birth (1932), and On the Road (1959) and in the novel Night Siege (1935). His well-known historical novel The Ukraine in Ferment (1954; Russian translation, 1955) is about the Ukrainian national war of liberation of 1648–54.

Panch also wrote books for children: the short-story collections Let Us Fly (1935) and Good Fellows (1959) and the novella Son of the Tarashcha Regiment (1937). His autobiographical novella On the Cranberry-Tree Bridge (1965; Russian translation, 1968) earned him the Shevchenko Prize of the Ukrainian SSR (1966). Panch’s works have been translated into many languages of the USSR and into foreign languages. He has received two orders of Lenin, two other orders, and several medals.