Nazaruk, Osyp

Nazaruk, Osyp [Назарук, Осип], b 31 August 1883 in Nahirianka, Buchach county, Galicia, d 31 March 1940 in Cracow. Lawyer, publicist, and civic and political leader. As a law student at Vienna University and Lviv University he was active in student organizations. He was an executive member of the Ukrainian Radical party (1905–19) and editor of its semimonthly Hromads’kyi holos (1916–18). At the outbreak of the First orld War he enlisted with the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS). In 1915 he directed the Press Office of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, and in 1918 he presided over the USS commissariat in Podilia. A member of the Ukrainian National Rada, he was sent with a delegation to Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in November 1918 to obtain military aid for the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR). He remained in central Ukraine and sat on the council of the Sich Riflemen, and later took part in the hetman’s overthrow. His positions under the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic included those of minister of the press and propaganda in Volodymyr Chekhivsky’s cabinet and director of the press and propaganda board during Serhii Ostapenko’s premiership. From the middle of 1919 he collaborated closely with Yevhen Petrushevych and edited the military magazine Strilets’. After moving to Vienna with the ZUNR government he contributed to its organs Ukraïns’kyi prapor and Volia (Vienna). At the end of 1922 he was sent to Canada to raise loans for the ZUNR government-in-exile. After undergoing a conversion from socialism to Catholicism and hetmanite conservatism he moved to the United States, where he edited the weekly Sich in Chicago, infused the Sich society organization there with a hetmanite ideology, organized new Sich branches (later transformed into the United Hetman Organization), and coedited Ameryka (Philadelphia). In 1926 he returned to Lviv, where he was active in the Ukrainian Christian Organization and edited its organ Nova zoria. In 1937–9 he represented Bishop Hryhorii Khomyshyn on the Ukrainian Co-ordinating Committee.

Nazaruk wrote a great many articles on political and historical questions and many books in several genres: memoirs, such as Slidamy USS (In the Footsteps of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, 1916), Nad Zolotoiu Lypoiu (On the Banks of the Zolota Lypa River, 1916), and Rik na Velykii Ukraïni (A Year in Central Ukraine, 1920); historical novelettes, such as Kniaz' Iaroslav Osmomysl (Prince Yaroslav Osmomysl, 1920; repr 1959) and Roksoliana (Roksoliana, 1930; repr 1955); brochures on topics such as the class struggle (1913), the student movement (1921), government corruption (1921), and the workers’ movement and religion (1926); and accounts of his travels in Ukraine, Canada, the United States, and Scandinavia.

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