Volodymyr Kubiyovych
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Volodymyr Kubiyovych, also spelled Kubiiovych or Kubijovyč (Ukrainian: Володимир Кубійович; (23 September 1900, Nowy Sącz, western Galicia, ( in German Neu Sandez), in old Austria-Hungary - 2 November 1985, Paris, France) was a Ukrainian geographer with a specialty in demography, a cartographer, an encyclopedist, politician, and statesman. Of mixed Ukrainian and Polish family background, he was an important intellectual supporting the Ukrainian national movement in inter-war Poland, and his scholarly works from this period dealt with the Ukrainian ethnic presence in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and with the geographical boundaries of ethnographic Ukraine.
During World War II he headed the Cracow-based Ukrainian Central Committee which organized social and charitable work among Ukrainians in occupied Poland. Kubiyovych became a main proponent of the cooperation between certain Ukrainian Nationalist organizations and Nazi Germany with the ultimate goal of achieving an independent Ukrainian national state. After the war, he retired from political work but became one of the leading scholars of the Ukrainian diaspora in the West. After 1945, and throughout the Cold War, Kubiyovych remained a target of criticism, particularly by the Soviet Union and its allies, for his war-time record, especially his sponsoring of the Ukrainian division of Waffen-SS.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
From 1918, Kubiyovych was educated at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, he served in the ranks of the Ukrainian Galician Army which unsuccessfully fought the Poles for control of the eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia. At the end of the Ukrainian-Polish war, he returned to his studies in geography at the Jagiellonian University. During the years 1928 to 1939, Kubiyovych taught at this institution as a lecturer (dotsent) but in 1939, was relieved of his duties under political pressure from the Polish Ministry of War. In 1940, he was appointed professor of the Ukrainian Free University in Prague which managed to preserve a precarious existence in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. From 1931, Kubiyovych had been a full member of the Galician-based Shevchenko Scientific Society, which had with some difficulty carried on its scholarly work under Polish rule; Kubiyovych headed its geography commission.
Before 1939, Kubiyovych's scholarly works concentrated on the geography and demography of the Carpathian Mountains, especially the eastern Beskids. At this time, he questioned official Polish statistics concerning the ethnic make-up of the inter-war Polish Republic and maintained that the Ukrainian element was grossly underestimated. He was editor and co-author of the pioneering Ukrainian language Atlas of Ukraine and Adjacent Lands (1937) and the equally pioneering Ukrainian language Geography of Ukraine and Neighbouring Lands (1938) and (1943).
[edit] Second World War
During World War II he headed the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) in Cracow which was the officially recognized Ukrainian community and quasi-political organization under Nazi occupation. It was responsible for social services, veteran affairs, education, youth and economic activities.
In 1943 Kubiyovych initiated the creation of the so-called "Galicia Division", Division SS-Galizien and took a leading role in its organization. The division was organized as part of a program of creating foreign formations of the Waffen-SS to fight on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union. The formal organizer of the division was Otto von Wächter, the Nazi governor of Galicia, a former Austrian aristocrat who was familiar with the national conflicts of Galicia and treated the Ukrainians there with somewhat less severity than the Nazi rulers of central and eastern Ukraine treated the Ukrainians in the occupied east. The formation was announced on 28 April 1943. With the examples before him of the Polish and Ukrainian legions formed in Austria-Hungary during the First World War, Kubiyovych was hoping to influence its essence and structure as the core of a future national army which would defend the interests of the Ukrainian people after the defeat of Germany and the chaos that was expected to ensue. However, the Germans would not allow the use of the name "Ukrainian" in the division's name and the end of the Second World War turned out to be quite different from the end of the first.
During the war, on more than one occasion Kubiyovych protested to the German authorities against the rough treatment of the local Ukrainian population. Some of this material was later brought up as evidence at the famous Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals.
Some Ukrainian sources claim that during the war Kubiyovych used his official position to ameliorate Ukrainian-Polish tensions in Galicia and in 1944 called for a halt to the fierce armed underground conflict between the two sides.[1] These sources also credit him with saving some three hundred people, "basically Jews", from persecution by the Nazi authorities.[1]
[edit] Emigration
In 1944, Kubiyovych escaped the westward march of the Red Army to Germany where he at first settled in the American zone of occupation in West Germany and then later moved to France. In Germany, he reorganized the Shevchenko Scientific Society as an émigré institution. He was its Secretary General from 1947 to 1963, and, from 1952, President of its European branch.
In emigration, Kubiyovych became the chief editor of the Ukrainian language Encyclopedia of Knowledge about Ukraine (Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva in Ukrainian) (10 vols., 1949-84), which was the largest scholarly project undertaken by Ukrainian emigre scholars during the Cold War. While written largely reflecting Kubiyovych's own strongly Ukrainophile views, his encyclopedia, which was meant to preserve a Ukrainian national heritage believed to be under threat by the Soviet regime which then ruled Ukraine, remains a valuable reference source to this day.
Kubiyovych later became the chief editor of Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia published in English in 2 vols. (1963-71). This was a translation of the thematic part of the Entsyklopediia ukrainoznavstva. A new English Language edition of the great ten volume alphabetic part was published under the title Encyclopedia of Ukraine with many revisions and additions in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s and was only completed after Kubiyovych's death. It is presently being put on-line.
During his emigre period in France, Kubiyovych enjoyed considerable prestige among Ukrainians in the West as the most prominent Ukrainian emigre scholar alive. He also enjoyed the respect of the influential Polish intellectual, Jerzy Giedroyć, who was, as well, resident in Paris, and who wrote in his autobiography that he thought that Kubiyovych had behaved honourably ("Zachowal się świetnie") during the war. After the attainment of independence in 1991, Ukrainian scholars in the European homeland began the task of reprinting Kubiyovych's major works, especially his encyclopedias, for use of the Ukrainian reading public.
In his later years, Kubiyovych published three volumes of memoirs describing his experiences in inter-war Poland, the Second World War, and emigre scholarly life in Germany and France during the Cold War. The most wide-ranging of these was the Ukrainian language volume titled I am 85 Years Old (Paris-Munich, 1985).
Volodymyr Kubiyovych died on 2 November, 1985 in Paris.
[edit] Modern legacy
After the attainment of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the hostile Soviet line on Kubiyovych, that revolved largely around his involvement in the war, lost its official status and his role in Ukrainian history became a matter of debate. His works, including his encyclopedias, were published in Ukraine where they are now in wide circulation. In 2000 a pre-stamped envelope was issued by the Ukrainian postal service on the centennial of his birth.
[edit] References
- Inline
- ^ a b Dovidnyk z istoriï Ukraïny, 3-Volumes, Article "Kubiyovych Volodymyr" (T. 2), Kiev, 1993-1999, ISBN 5-7707-5190-8 (t. 1), ISBN 5-7707-8552-7 (t. 2), ISBN 966-504-237-8 (t. 3).
- General
- Kubijovyč, Volodymyr ed. (1963). Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-3105-6.
- Article "Kubijovyc, Volodymyr," Encyclopedia of Ukraine (Toronto, 1988), vol.II, p. 697.
- Oleh Shablii, Volodymyr Kubiiovych: Entsyklopediia zhyttia i tvorennia [Volodymyr Kubiyovych: Encyclopedia, Life and Creation](Paris-Lviv, 1996). A sympathetic and detailed account of his life and work in Ukrainian written by a professional geographer.
