Bachynsky, Yuliian
Bachynsky, Yuliian [Bačyns'kyj, Julijan], b 28 March 1870 in Novosilka, Pidhaitsi county, Galicia, d 6 June 1940 in a Soviet concentration camp. A community and political leader, journalist, son of Reverend Oleksander Bachynsky, and a leading member of the Ukrainian Radical party (URP). He was the primary leader of the faction of younger URP members influenced by socialism and Marxism. At the 1895 URP congress in Lviv Bachynsky played a crucial role in the passing of the resolution identyfying Ukrainian political independence as one of the party’s main objectives. In 1896 he published Ukraïna Irredenta, in which he advocated the necessity of creating a united, independent Ukrainian state. In 1897 Bachynsky left URP and in 1899 he was one of the principal cofounders of the Ukrainian Social Democratic party (USDP). At various times he edited USDP’s organs Zemlia i volia and Vpered (Lviv). He visited the United States and Canada in 1905–6 to study Ukrainian immigrant life. His findings about the former was published as Ukraïns'ka immigratsiia v Z’iedynenykh Derzhavakh Ameryky (Ukrainian Immigration in the United States of America, 1914; 2d edn, 1994), while his more modest study of the latter was lost either in manuscript form or as an unfinished publication. In 1915 Bachynsky was a member of the General Ukrainian Council. In 1918 he became a member of the Ukrainian National Rada in Galicia, and in 1919–21 Ukrainian National Republic representative in Washington, DC. In 1923 he moved to Berlin and then in 1931 to Prague. In 1933 he moved to the Ukrainian SSR, where he worked on the editorial board of the Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia. He was arrested in November 1934 for alleged counterrevolutionary activity and sentenced in March 1935 to ten years’ deprivation of freedom. He served his sentence in the White Sea-Baltic camp complex of the GULAG. Except for his death date, the details of his fate in the camp are not known. He was rehabilitated in 1957. Bachynsky is also the author of Podil Halychyny (The Partition of Galicia, 1897), Vzaïmni vidnosyny sotsiial-demokratychnykh partii, ukraïns'koï i pol's'koï, v Skhidnii Halychyni (Relations between the Ukrainian and Polish Social-Democratic Parties in Eastern Galicia, 1911), and Bol'shevyts'ka revoliutsiia i ukraïntsi (The Bolshevik Revolution and the Ukrainians, 1928). I. Behei’s study of Bachynsky’s political views appeared in Kyiv in 2001.
Marko Robert Stech
[This article was updated in 2020.]