Popovych, Ilko

Popovych, Ilko or Illia [Попович, Ілько; Popovyč, Il'ko], b 1883 in Chernivtsi, d 1 July 1955 in Munich, West Germany. Engineer and civic and political leader; son of Omelian Popovych, brother of Oleksander O. Popovych. He was an organizer of Sich societies and, from 1906, of the Ukrainian Radical party in Bukovyna. He helped edit the party’s paper Hromadianyn in Chernivtsi (1909–10). When Ukrainians took control of Bukovyna in November 1918, he served briefly as military commander of Chernivtsi and then fled from the invading Romanian troops to Galicia. There he became a member of the Ukrainian National Rada, and in 1919 he attended the Labor Congress in Kyiv. In the interwar period he lived in Galicia, where he was a member of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Socialist Radical party. He was arrested and deported during the first Soviet occupation of Galicia. He emigrated to Germany after the Second World War, where he served as acting president of the Ukrainian National Council.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]