Ukrainian Party of Labor

Ukrainian Party of Labor (Ukrainska partiia pratsi, or UPP). A political party formed in Lviv on 7 May 1927 by the followers of Yevhen Petrushevych as a breakaway group from the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO), largely in reaction to UNDO's growing anti-Soviet stance. The UPP remained to the left of the Galician political mainstream and was a strong opponent of the Polish state. The main item of its political platform was the unification of all ethnic Ukrainian lands into one independent country, although it relegated specific legal and state issues in that area to a secondary position. In its quest for a united Ukraine the party aligned itself to the national fortunes of the Ukrainian SSR, which it acknowledged as the core of the future state. Accordingly the UPP experienced a major crisis as a result of the arrest and subsequent show trial (March–April 1930) in Soviet Ukraine of 45 members of the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine (SVU). The party suffered a further setback with its poor success during the November 1930 elections to the Polish Sejm. It was dissolved almost immediately thereafter. The leaders of the UPP included Viacheslav Budzynovsky, Mykhailo Zakhidny, and M. Topolnytsky. It publications were the biweekly Rada (Lviv) and the weekly Pratsia (1927–34).

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