Volodymyr Kubiyovych

Volodymyr Mykhailovych Kubiyovych, also spelled Kubiiovych or Kubijovyč (Ukrainian: Володи́мир Миха́йлович Кубійо́вич; 23 September 1900, Nowy Sącz, Austrian Galicia – 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 ethnic 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 vociferous criticism by the Soviet authorities, focusing on some of his wartime activities, in particular his sponsoring of the Ukrainian division of Waffen-SS.

Kubiyovich was born in 1900 in Nowy Sącz; his father was an ethnic Ukrainian while his mother was an ethnic Pole, and he was baptized into the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. 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 (docent) but in 1939, was denied further tenure 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.

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