Boidunyk, Osyp

Boidunyk, Osyp [Бойдуник, Осип; Bojdunyk], b 8 December 1895 in Dolyna, Galicia, d 7 April 1966 in Munich, West Germany. Political figure. An officer in the Ukrainian Galician Army, Boidunyk became a founding member of the Ukrainian Military Organization in 1920. From 1920 to 1929 he studied engineering in Prague. In 1930 he became a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ three-member senate. He was imprisoned by the Polish regime in 1931–5, and in 1936–8 founded and edited the weekly Holos natsiï. From 1939 to 1940 he was active in the Ukrainian Central Committee in Cracow and in 1942 helped found the Ukrainian National Council (Kyiv) in Kyiv. In 1944 he was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the Second World War Boidunyk promoted the establishment of the Ukrainian National Council (1948), which he headed for two terms from 1954. He was the author of Natsional'nyi solidaryzm (National Solidarism, 1945), Ukraïns'ka vnutrishnia polityka (Ukrainian Internal Politics, 1948), and the unfinished memoirs Na perelomi (At the Turning Point, 1967).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]