Levytsky, Borys

Levytsky, Borys [Левицький, Борис; Levyc'kyi, also Lewytzkyj], b 19 May 1915 in Vienna, d 28 October 1984 in Munich. Journalist, political activist, and Sovietologist. While studying philosophy and psychology at Lviv University (MA, 1938) he edited Nove selo (1936–9) and was active in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). With the outbreak of the Soviet-German War he went east with Ivan Mitrynga’s group (see OUN expeditionary groups) and helped found the Ukrainian People's Democratic party. After the Second World War he left the OUN and helped organize the Ukrainian Revolutionary Democratic party, in which, together with Ivan Maistrenko, he headed a leftist faction and edited Vpered (Munich) (1949–56). In 1948 he founded his own research bureau for Soviet affairs, which published a monthly bulletin about the higher officials of the Communist Party. In the 1950s he was a contributor to the German liberal daily Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich (under the pen name Paul Sikora) and research associate of the East European Research Service in Düsseldorf. In the 1970s he worked as a specialist on Soviet affairs for the German Social Democratic party. He wrote numerous works on the Soviet Union, including Vom roten Terror zur sozialistischen Gesellschaft (1961), Die Sowjetukraine, 1944–1963 (1964), Die rote Inquisition (1967; trans: The Uses of Terror, 1971), The Soviet Political Elite (1969), Die sowjetische Nationalitüatenpolitik nach Stalins Tod, 1953–1970 (1970), Die Marschüalle und die Politik (1971), Sowjetische Entspannungspolitik heute (1975), and Politics and Society in Soviet Ukraine, 1953–1980 (1984). He also compiled several biographical dictionaries, such as The Stalinist Terror in the Thirties (1974) and Who’s Who in the Socialist Countries (1978).

Bohdan Osadchuk

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]