Okhrymovych, Yuliian

Okhrymovych, Yuliian [Охримович, Юліян; Oxrymovyč, Julijan], b 1893 in Stryi, Galicia, d 10 October 1921 in Kyiv. Political and civic leader; brother of Volodymyr Okhrymovych. A radical influenced by Mykhailo Drahomanov’s ideas, he studied philosophy and the social sciences at Lviv University from 1911 and was active in the Ukrainian Student Union and editor of its monthly Shliakhy (1913–14). At the outbreak of the First World War he crossed the border into Russian-ruled Ukraine to propagate national revolutionary ideas among students. In 1917–18 he served as a secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries and as a deputy of student organizations on the Central Rada. He was one of the leaders of the party’s central faction and an influential contributor to its organ Borot’ba. He refused to leave Ukraine with the government of the Ukrainian National Republic and found work at the Rukh publishing house in Kharkiv. He was executed by the Bolsheviks for his connection with the Central Insurgent Committee in Kyiv. He completed only the first part (up to Drahomanov) of his Rozvytok ukraïns’koï natsional’no-politychnoï dumky (The Development of Ukrainian National-Political Thought, 1918; repr 1922 and 1965).

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