Slabchenko’s Scout

Scouts are young people engaged in physical, spiritual and educational development. During the first half of the 20th century the scout movement spread all over the world. The first analogues of scouting appeared in the 1900s in Western Ukraine, and as early as 1911 the first scout troops began to form in Lviv. The best-known societies operating in Western Ukraine were Plast, Sich and Sokil. As for Dnipro Ukraine, which was under the occupation of the Russian Empire for a long time, Western trends arrived more slowly. But with the arrival of Ukrainian power in 1917, the first scout troops began to form. One of them was the Bila Tserkva scout troop, formed by Yevhen Slabchenko, a graduate of the Bila Tserkva gymnasium. He compiled the first textbook in Ukraine, “Ukrainian Scouting”, and wrote the charter of the Bila Tserkva boy-scout kuren, on which all boy-scout detachments of Ukraine later relied. In 1918 Slabchenko took part in the anti-Hetman uprising of the Sich Riflemen, which began from Bila Tserkva on the side of the Directorate. After that he was a diplomat of the UNR in Europe and the USA. In the 1920s he began working in cinema. He became the director of many films in France and Spain and founded the Society “Friends of Ukrainian Cinema”, which promoted Ukrainian films in the world. One of the films by Eugène Deslaw (Slabchenko’s pseudonym abroad) became the best foreign film in one of the nominations in the USA. The small sculpture of Slabchenko is located near one of the city’s sports schools, not far from the place where Bila Tserkva youths loved to swim in the last century.