Mudry, Vasyl

Mudry, Vasyl [Мудрий, Василь; Mudryj, Vasyl'], b 19 March 1893 in Vikno, Skalat county, Galicia, d 19 March 1966 in New York. Civic and political leader, and journalist; full member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1958. As a student at Lviv University he was an executive member of the Ukrainian Student Union and the Academic Hromada (Lviv). Having been elected to the Proskuriv zemstvo executive in 1918, he was in charge of education in the county and in the fall of 1920 was county head. After returning to Lviv in 1921, he helped organize the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University, of which he served as finance officer and secretary (1921–5). He joined the editorial board of the daily Dilo in 1926 and soon became its chief editor (1927–35). He was also active in the Prosvita society as a member of its central executive (from 1921), general secretary (1925–31), and first vice-president (1932–9). In 1931–3 he chaired the Franko Monument Committee and, in 1933, the Committee to Save Ukraine, which organized famine relief for Soviet Ukraine. As one of the founders of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO) he drafted the party program that was adopted in 1926 and served as the party's first vice-president (1928–35) and president (1935–9). He was elected to the Polish Sejm in 1935 and 1938, and there he was the chief proponent of the policy of Normalization and served as leader of the Ukrainian Parliamentary Representation and vice-marshal of the Sejm. After leaving Ukraine in 1944, he served as a vice-president of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (1944–7), executive chairman of the Ukrainian National Council, and the first president (1945–9) of the Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration in Germany. In 1949 he emigrated to the United States, where he became executive director of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and an executive member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee. In addition to numerous articles on political and cultural topics in the press, he wrote several pamphlets, on the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3, the Prosvita society, the UNDO, and the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University, and a book on the campaign to establish a Ukrainian university in Lviv titled Borot'ba za ohnyshche ukraïns'koï kul'tury v zakhidnykh zemliakh Ukraïny (The Struggle for the Hearth of Ukrainian Culture in Ukraine's Western Lands, 1923). He also edited Lviv: A Symposium on Its 700th Anniversary (1962).

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