Volodymyr Kubiyovych

Volodymyr Mykhailovych Kubiyovych, also spelled "Kubiiovych" or "Kubijovyč" ( _uk. Володимир Михайлович 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.

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, 1943).

econd 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.

Following the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, Kubiyovych worked with the Germans in the creation of the so-called "Galicia Division", 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Galicia (1st Ukrainian) and took a leading role in its organization. The division was organized after the Stalingrad defeat as part of a German program of creating foreign formations of the Waffen-SS to fight on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union and was to be commanded by German officers. The proponent and formal organizer of the division was SS "Brigadeführer" Otto Wächter, the Nazi governor of the newly created Galicia District and former governor of Cracow. The proposal was made to Himmler on March 1, 1943 and the division was publicly inaugurated on 28 April. [Basil Dmytryshyn, "The Nazis and the SS Volunteer Division 'Galicia'", "American Slavic and East European Review", Vol. 15, No. 1. (Feb., 1956), pp. 3-6.] 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 Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.Fact|date=November 2007

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.Dovidnyk z istoriï Ukraïny, 3-Volumes, Article " [http://www.vesna.org.ua/txt/dov/istukr/IIk_6.html 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).] These sources also credit him with saving some three hundred people, "basically Jews", from persecution by the Nazi authorities.

Emigration

In 1944, Kubiyovych escaped the westward advance 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 Ukrainian Studies" ("Entsyklopediya ukrayinoznavstva", ten volumes, 1949–84), the largest scholarly project undertaken by Ukrainian émigrés 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 in Ukraine, remains a valuable reference source to this day.

Kubiyovych later became the chief editor of "Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia" published in two volumes (1963–71), an English translation of the thematic part of the "Entsyklopediya ukrayinoznavstva". A new revised and expanded English-language edition of the great ten-volume alphabetic part was published under the title "Encyclopedia of Ukraine" in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, and was only completed after Kubiyovych's death. It is presently being put on-line.

During his émigré period in France, Kubiyovych enjoyed considerable prestige among Ukrainians in the West as the most prominent Ukrainian émigré scholar alive. He also enjoyed the respect of the influential Polish intellectual, Jerzy Giedroyć, another resident of Paris, and who wrote in his autobiography that he thought that Kubiyovych had behaved honourably during the war ("Zachowal się świetnie"). After Ukraine attained independence in 1991, scholars in Ukraine 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 émigré 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.

Modern legacy

After the attainment of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the hostile Soviet line on Kubiyovych, revolving 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.

References

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* A sympathetic and detailed account of his life and work in Ukrainian written by a professional geographer.

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External links

* [http://galiciadivision.onestop.net/main/ Українська Дивізія Галичина]