Tselevych, Volodymyr

Tselevych, Volodymyr [Целевич, Володимир; Celevyč], b 21 April 1891 in Lviv, d ca 1943 or 1944 in Saratov, RSFSR. Political leader in Galicia. A graduate in law from Lviv University, he was one of the leading Ukrainian politicians in Galicia in the interwar period. In 1919–22 he was secretary of the Ukrainian Citizens' Committee in Lviv and then general secretary of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (1925–8 and 1932–7). In 1928 and 1935 he was elected to the Polish Sejm, where he served as vice-president of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation. During the Pacification campaign in 1930 he was arrested and imprisoned in Brest, and in 1935 he conceived the so-called Normalization policy with Vasyl Mudry. He was chief editor of the weekly Svoboda (Lviv) from 1932 to 1935. His political articles, which appeared in Svoboda (Lviv) and Dilo, included items on electoral law (see Elections), self-government, and municipal law. He also wrote political pamphlets, such as Narid, natsiia, derzhava (A People, Nation, and State, 1934). In 1939, during the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of the Second World War), Tselevych was arrested by the NKVD, and disappeared in a Soviet prison.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]