Stsiborsky, Mykola

Stsiborsky, Mykola [Сціборський, Микола; Scibors’kyj] (pseuds: Zhytomyrsky, Orhansky, Rokosh), b 28 March 1897 in Zhytomyr, d 30 August 1941 in Zhytomyr. Nationalist publicist and ideologue. A captain in the Ukrainian National Republic cavalry during the Ukrainian-Soviet War, 1917–21, he was interned in 1920–2 with other UNR Army soldiers in a Polish internment camp in Kalisz, where he received special training and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1922 he emigrated to Czechoslovakia. There he was one of the leaders of the League of Ukrainian Nationalists (1925–9) and studied engineering at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady. A member from 1926 of the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (PUN) in charge of organizational affairs and then propaganda, and a founding member of the clandestine Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) (est 1929), from 1930 he lived in Paris and organized OUN branches in Ukrainian émigré centers in Central and Western Europe.

Stsiborsky elaborated the ideology of ‘solidarism’ and state corporatism in official OUN publications, contributed many articles to nationalist periodicals, such as Derzhavna natsiia, Rozbudova natsiï, Samostiina dumka, Surma (1927–34), Ukraïns’ke slovo (Paris), and Proboiem, and coauthored the 1940 OUN draft constitution for an independent Ukrainian state. Published separately were his book Natsiokratiia (Natiocracy, 1935, 3 editions) and brochures and booklets on the OUN and the peasantry (1933), the OUN and the working class (1935), Bolshevik nationality policy in Ukraine (1938; trans into English [Ukraine and Russia: A Survey of Soviet Russia's Twenty-Year Occupation of Eastern Ukraine, 1940], French, and German), democracy, Stalinism (1938, 1941, 1947), Ukraine and Soviet nationality policy (1944), the land question (1939), and Ukraine's population and economy (1940; German edition 1944). Stsiborsky's article ‘La question ukrainienne’ appeared in La revue économique internationale (March 1940).

After moving to Cracow in late 1939 to run the clandestine OUN political training school, Stsiborsky compiled the OUN white book on the 1940 split and remained loyal to Andrii Melnyk. He and Omelian Senyk organized and initially led the OUN expeditionary groups of the OUN (Melnyk faction) that penetrated into central and eastern Ukraine during the Nazi invasion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1941. They were assassinated by S. Kozii, a member of the rival OUN (Bandera faction) and a former Communist.

Roman Senkus

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]