Shankovsky, Lev

Shankovsky, Lev [Шанковський, Лев; Šankovs'kyj], b 9 September 1903 in Duliby, Stryi county, Galicia, d 25 April 1995 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Military historian; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. After completing studies in Lviv and Warsaw he taught commerce in gymnasiums in Western Ukraine and Poland. A veteran of the Ukrainian Galician Army and the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic, he was a sergeant in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (1942–5) and a founding member of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council. As a postwar refugee and displaced person in Germany he taught at the Ukrainian Higher School of Economics in Munich (1946–9); he then moved to the United States of America, where he worked as a librarian and edited the English-language quarterly Prologue (1957–61) and the newspaper Ameryka (Philadelphia) (1968–76). Many of Shankovsky’s writings have dealt with the Ukrainian struggle for independence (1917–20), in particular the role of military formations in those efforts. He wrote Ukraïns'ka armiia v borot'bi za derzhavnist' (The Ukrainian Army in the Struggle for Statehood, 1958) and a monograph on the OUN expeditionary groups Pokhidni hrupy OUN (The OUN Expeditionary Groups, 1958) and contributed to Istoriia ukraïns'koho viis'ka (History of the Ukrainian Army, 1936; 2nd rev edn 1953), Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva, and Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

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