Borovets, Taras

Borovets, Taras [Borovec'] (pseud: Bulba), b 9 March 1908 in Bystrychi, Rivne county, Volhynia gubernia, d 15 May 1981 in New York. (Photo: Taras Borovets.) Civic, political, and military leader. Under the interwar Polish regime Borovets was imprisoned in the concentration camp at Bereza Kartuzka. During the first Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine (1939–41) he began organizing a Ukrainian underground in Polisia, which, with the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, appeared as the Polisian Sich and fought Soviet, and later German, military units. In December 1941 it adopted the name Ukrainian Insurgent Army and on 20 July 1943 changed its name to the Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army. Borovets led the revolutionary and military struggle according to the directives of the chiefs of staff of the Government-in-exile of the Ukrainian National Republic and put forth a democratic program. He was arrested in Berlin in late 1943 while negotiating with the Germans and was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As an émigré in West Germany after the war, he organized the Ukrainian National Guard and published its organ, Mech i volia (1951–3). He emigrated eventually to the United States, where he led the life of a private citizen. Borovets's memoirs, Armiia bez derzhavy: Slava i trahediia ukraïns'koho povstans'koho rukhu (An Army without a State: The Glory and the Tragedy of the Ukrainian Insurgent Movement), were published in Winnipeg in 1981.