Kravchenko

A kravets is a tailor, the man who cut. Kravchenko is his child: the trade word plus -enko, the ending of the central Ukrainian lands that says descent and nothing else, not rank, not estate, not place.

That flatness was the point. An -enko name does not bend for gender, so a tailor's daughter is written exactly as his son is.

The tailors of the Ukrainian west did not work in villages. They worked inside towns holding a written charter of self-government, and the charter almost always came from one place: Magdeburg. Built on Roman municipal and merchant practice, the Magdeburg rights were granted in the 13th and 14th centuries to more than a hundred cities beyond Germany, taken up by the rulers of Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Galicia-Volhynia and Lithuania, who called it German or Teutonic law.

The law existed to regulate trade in favour of the local merchants and artisans, who were the elite of such a town. A visiting merchant could not trade on his own account inside the walls: he had to sell what he had brought to a resident trader. Power sat with the vogt, or wojt, appointed at first by the ruler, though communes increasingly bought the office and made it elective, and with the councillors, the rajcy, who formed the magistrate that governed the town.

Zlotoryja took the law first, in 1211, and through the 13th century Krakow, Poznan, Sandomierz and Wroclaw followed. In Galicia-Volhynia the first city known to have adopted Magdeburg rights was Volodymyr in Volhynia, where the grant at first covered only the ethnic German inhabitants. That changed in 1339, when King Yuri II Boleslav gave the rights to the whole population of Sanok, the first town where the charter belonged to everyone in it rather than to an immigrant colony.

After the Polish-Lithuanian union of 1385 the law moved east again, to Vilnius, Brest and Kaunas first, then across the 15th and 16th centuries to Trakai, Grodno, Kyiv, Polotsk, Minsk and Vitebsk. Lviv, Lutsk, Zhytomyr, Kamianets-Podilskyi, Vinnytsia, Poltava and Uman were settled on German law of the same family, and after 1654 the Hetmanate's chartered cities had their rights confirmed.

Ukrainian practice was never the German original. In most towns the law was implemented only in part, with the vogt or starosta appointed separately from the burgomasters, and in the Hetmanate the regimental courts pushed into city business as they pleased. Joseph II abolished the law in Galicia in 1786, a tsar's decree ended it across the Russian Empire in 1831, and Kyiv lost its rights in 1835.

Self-government meant the crafts governed themselves, and the privilege that mattered was that only members of a guild could sell their goods or practise their skill inside the walls. Tailoring was formalised across Europe on this model: in 1244 the tailors' guild of Bologna set down statutes requiring anyone working as a tailor in the city to join it, and guilds elsewhere held the same authority by charter, fixing prices, trading hours and how many apprentices a master might keep.

What the guild was protecting was a difficult craft. Cloth is flat and people are not, and from the 14th century padded underlayers were built into men's jackets area by area so a coat would sit clean on a chest that was never symmetrical to begin with. Cloth was also the expensive part, and the oldest technical book of the trade is about not wasting it: Juan de Alcega's Libro de Geometria of 1580 laid out 163 patterns to scale, each cut from the least fabric. Every town with cloth needed a man who could do this, which is why Kravchenko stands with the miller and smith names of Ukraine.

Mykhailo Stepanovych Kravchenko was born in 1858 at Velyki Sorochyntsi in Myrhorod county, caught scrofula at fifteen and lost his sight. At seventeen he began learning to sing psalms under Samiylo Yashny, and became one of the outstanding kobzars of Poltava province. He was very poor, supporting his own family and his sick brother's, and made up the shortfall weaving rope, the standard fallback for a blind man and ruinous for a player: weave rope for a month, he said, and twenty layers of skin come off your fingertips.

The Myrhorod artist Opanas Slastion took an interest in him in 1900 and wrote him up in Kievan Antiquities, and the article carried his name to folklorists well beyond Ukraine. The Russian Geographical Society brought him to Saint Petersburg in 1902; that autumn he performed at the Twelfth Archaeological Conference in Kharkiv, and in 1906 at the Kyiv artisans' exhibition.

When Sorochyntsi rose at the end of 1905 and the revolt was put down by tsarist Cossacks, Kravchenko set the rising and the repression into two dumy of his own, The Sorochyntsi Matters of 1905 and Dark Sunday in Sorochyntsi. Filaret Kolessa recorded six dumy from him on the 1908 expedition through Left-bank Ukraine. He died on 22 April 1917, aged fifty-nine; his last bandura is in the Myrhorod ethnographic museum.

Nicolai Ivanovich Kravchenko (1867-1941) left the Odessa school of fine arts with a silver medal in 1888, went into the battle painting class at the Imperial Academy of Arts, quarrelled with the professors and walked out. Paris took him instead. In 1902 he travelled to Manchuria and China to gather material on the Russian campaign of 1900, and his dispatches became the illustrated book To China. He was at Port Arthur for the Russo-Japanese War and saw the battleship Petropavlovsk go down on Japanese mines. He died in Leningrad on 22 November 1941, and of his large family only two grandchildren came through the blockade winter.

Aleksei Ilyich Kravchenko (1889-1940), no relation the record establishes, trained in Munich and then in Moscow under Korovin and Serov, graduating with distinction in 1910, and sold well enough by 1912 to sail for India and Ceylon. In 1914 he was commissioned as an official war artist and spent that winter on the Galician Front. He turned to wood engraving, cutting the plates for Gogol's Portrait and Hoffmann's Meister Floh in 1929. His own paintings he never showed, fearing a charge of bourgeois formalism; they were first exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1974.

Ivan Yakovlevich Kravchenko was born in 1905 at Studeniki in Poltava Governorate and worked as a postman before his call-up in 1927. On 11 February 1940, in the fighting to break the Mannerheim Line on the Karelian Isthmus, his battalion commander was killed and Kravchenko took the unit through the fortifications on Hill 65.5, taking a serious wound; he was made Hero of the Soviet Union that March. He helped organise the southern sector of the defence of Tula in the autumn of 1941, and died on 8 April 1942 of a wound taken during the Rzhev-Vyazma offensive.

Grigory Panteleyevich Kravchenko, born in 1912 to a Ukrainian peasant family in the village of Golubovka, was a test pilot before he was a fighter ace. Sent to China in 1938 with the Soviet volunteers, he flew 78 sorties and rose to squadron commander, and was made Hero of the Soviet Union in February 1939 for a war the newspapers were not allowed to name. At Khalkhin Gol he chased a Japanese aircraft until his fuel ran out and he belly-landed; his regiment had already wired Moscow to report him dead when he was found two days later. He and Sergey Gritsevets were the first men to hold the title twice, and his ashes lie in the Kremlin Wall.

Valentina Flegontovna Kravchenko trained at the Tomsk aeroclub and the Kherson Aviation School and was instructing at Saratov when the war came. She flew as a squadron navigator in the Pe-2 dive bombers of what became the 125th Guards Regiment, over Stalingrad, the Kuban bridgehead, Kursk, Smolensk and the Kalinin Front. On 27 August 1943 anti-aircraft fire tore up her aircraft and she helped bring the crippled machine down at a nearby airfield.