SKOB

By Walter Kish

Last week, a friend of mine in Kyiv who is a veteran of the PLAST Ukrainian Youth Scouting Organization, sent me an interesting article outlining a unique recent discovery.  It seems that in 1947, subsequent to the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine following World War II, three leaders of the Lviv PLAST troop known as the Lisovi Chorty (Forest Devils) buried their flag enclosed in a small glass jar under the basement floor of a house in Lviv.  Shortly thereafter, the three were arrested and exiled to Siberia.  Two weeks ago, the only surviving member of the trio, 88 year old Liudmila Starosolska, led a small search party to the spot in the basement where the flag had been buried sixty years previously, and miraculously, it was recovered in good shape. 

The flag had originally been created in 1927 and consecrated in 1929 by Metropolitan Sheptytsky.  When PLAST was banned in Galicia in 1930 by the ruling Polish authorities, the organization as well as the flag went underground.  When the Germans overran Ukraine in 1939, PLAST attempted a revival, but the Germans were no more sympathetic to the organization than had been the Poles.  Later under the Communists, PLAST of course, was ruthlessly suppressed.

The ideals of PLAST were kept alive and flourished in the Ukrainian Diaspora with strong presences in the US, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Argentina.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, PLAST has rebounded in Ukraine with a vengeance and is now present in virtually every oblast region of the country.

The first PLAST troop in Ukraine was organized by Dr. Oleksandr Tysovskiy in Lviv in 1912 at the Academic Gymnasium.  Although similar in principle to the scouting organization organized in Great Britain by Baden-Powell, it had some unique features derived from kozak traditions and practices. 

In fact the word is derived from the Zaporozhian Kozak word for a scout - plastun.  The kozak plastuny were renowned not just for the traditional reconnaissance role played by scouts in any military organization.  They were more akin to elite modern formations such as the Green Berets, Navy Seals or the Soviet Spetsnatz forces, engaging in intelligence gathering, sniper activity, sabotage, ambushes, kidnapping, and other special tasks behind the lines in enemy territory.

Their stealth was legendary.  It was said that a squad of plastuny could pass through a large village in the night and not a single dog would bark.  Even after Catherine the Great destroyed the Kozak state, she incorporated kozak plastun formations in the Russian Army to great effect.  They distinguished themselves in the Crimean War, the Russo-Japanese War and the various conflicts with the Turks.

In one incident during the Crimean War, detailed in a recently published book in Ukraine by the historian Taras Kalandriuk (Zahadky Kozatskykh Kharakternykiv), a detachment of plastuny managed to steal into the Allied Camp and capture two French officers dressed in their ornate dress blue uniforms.  The Russian commander was pleased, but stated he would have been more impressed if they had captured two “reds” (i.e. British officers).  Five plastuny took up the challenge, infiltrated the British lines, and after five days of patient stalking, came back with two senior British officers in full red regalia.

What is particularly interesting about the Crimean War is that detachments of plastuny fought on both sides.  The Turkish Army contained two companies of kozak plastuny (about 1400 men) under the command of Mykhailo Chaikowski or “Sadik Pasha” as he was known to the Turks.  They consistently distinguished themselves in battle.

What few people know is that a number of kozak plastuny also participated in the Boer War (1899 – 1902). As Kalandriuk outlines in his book, some two hundred military advisers, most of them Ukrainian, were sent by the Russians to train and assist the South African Boers in their war against the British.  They included Pavlo Mishchenko, Vasyl Romeyko-Hurko and Pavlo Stakhovych, among others.  As we all know, Lord Baden-Powell was a participant on the British side, and it is speculated that many of his ideas on scouting were picked up from his keen observation of the plastun practices that were passed on to the Boers by their kozak advisors.

It is gratifying to see the kozak traditions live on in PLAST today.  To all the plastuny out there – SKOB! Syl’no, Krasno, Oberezhno, Bystro!