Kuchabsky, Vasyl

Kuchabsky, Vasyl [Кучабський, Василь; Kučabs’kyj, Vasyl’], b 4 November 1895 in Pustomyty, Lviv county, Galicia, d 28 June 1971 in Blankenburg am Harz, East Germany. (Photo: Vasyl Kuchabsky.) Historian, publicist, and military figure; from 1935 full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. The First World War interrupted his law studies at Lviv University. An officer of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the Sich Riflemen (commander of the 2nd Infantry), he was a member of the Riflemen Council. In late 1922 he emigrated and lived in Berlin, where he worked as a librarian. He earned a doctorate from the University of Berlin (history and Slavic philology) in 1930. His historical works were strongly influenced by the statist views of Viacheslav Lypynsky. Besides articles on Ukrainian history and politics for German journals, Kuchabsky wrote a number of monographs about the Sich Riflemen and Ukraine's struggle for independence (1917–20), including Bol’shevyzm i suchasne zavdannia ukraïns’koho zakhodu (Bolshevism and the Current Task of the Ukrainian West, 1925), Ukraïna i Pol’shcha: Otverta vidpovid’ pol’s’komu konservatystovi (Ukraine and Poland: A Frank Answer to a Polish Conservative, 1933), and Die West-Ukraine im Kampfe mit Polen und dem Bolschewismus in den Jahren 1918–23 (1934) (an English translation of this monograph under the title Western Ukraine in Conflict with Poland and Bolshevism, 1918–1923 was published in Canada in 2009). During the Second World War Kuchabsky worked as director of a library in Lublin. In July 1944 he moved to Germany. He managed to conceal his past activities from the Communist authorities and lived in obscurity working as a school teacher in the town of Blankenburg in East Germany.

[This article was updated in 2009.]