Ripetsky, Stepan

Ripetsky, Stepan [Ріпецький, Степан; Ripec'kyj], b 22 December 1894 in Sambir, Galicia, d 2 October 1986 in Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA. Civic and political figure and publicist; son of Teodor Ripetsky. He completed law studies in Lviv and Prague and served as an officer in the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen during the First World War. Later he was head of the Ukrainian Academic Hromada (1921), a lecturer in sociology at the Ukrainian Pedagogical Institute in Prague, and a member of the Foreign Delegation of the Ukrainian Party of Socialist Revolutionaries. In 1926 he returned to Galicia, where he was an executive member of the Ukrainian Socialist Radical party until 1939. He was arrested and interned by the Germans in 1943, and in postwar Germany he served as an executive member of the Ukrainian Socialist party and a representative member of the Ukrainian National Rada. After moving to the United States of America in 1949, he edited the journal Vil’na Ukraïna (United States) and wrote and edited several books concerning the struggle for statehood in Western Ukraine, including Za voliu Ukraïny (For the Freedom of Ukraine, 1967).

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