Martynets, Volodymyr

Martynets, Volodymyr [Мартинець, Володимир; Martynec’], b 15 July 1899 in Lviv, d 10 December 1960 in Winnipeg. Political leader and publicist. He served in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and the Sich Riflemen and was a gubernial official in Polisia, Podlachia, and the Kholm region under the Hetman government. After spending seven months in Polish internment camps he resumed his studies in Lviv and became active in the student movement. He was elected secretary of the Academic Hromada (Lviv), treasurer of the Provincial Student Council, and a trustee of the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University and the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian Higher Polytechnical School, which he had helped organize. In 1923 he moved to Prague, where he studied at the Higher Commercial School and played an important role in student organizations, as vice-president of the Central Union of Ukrainian Students (1926–7) and as editor of Natsional’na dumka (the organ of the Group of Ukrainian National Youth) and of Nash shliakh (the organ of the Ukrainian Student Council). After being summoned by Yevhen Konovalets to Berlin in 1927, he became a member of the Supreme Command of the Ukrainian Military Organization (1927–31) and chief editor of Surma (1927–34) and Rozbudova natsiï (1928–34). At the beginning of 1929 he was one of the key organizers and participants in the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which gave birth to the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In 1934–40 he lived in Paris, where he edited Ukraïns’ke slovo (Paris). Upon returning to Lviv, Martynets served officially as director of the Literary-Artistic Club and president of the Association of Ukrainian Journalists (1941–4), and secretly as leader of the OUN (Melnyk faction) in Western Ukraine (1941–2). In 1944 he was imprisoned in the Brätz concentration camp by the Germans. After emigrating to Canada in 1949, he became an editor of Novyi shliakh in Winnipeg and a member of the presidium of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee. He wrote numerous articles and over a dozen books, of which the most important are Za zuby i pazuri natsiï (For the Nation's Teeth and Claws, 1937), Ukraïns’ke pidpillia: vid UVO do OUN (The Ukrainian Underground: From UVO to OUN, 1949), and Ideolohiia orhanizovanoho i t. zv. volevoho natsionalizmu (The Ideology of Organized and So-Called Voluntarist Nationalism, 1954).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]