Ukrainian People's party

Ukrainian People's party (Ukrainska narodna partiia, or UNP). A numerically small, clandestine organization of nationalistic intellectuals and students founded by Mykola Mikhnovsky in Kharkiv in 1902. Its members, among them Ye. Liubarsky-Pysmenny, O. Makarenko, Serhii Shemet, Volodymyr Shemet, Ivan Lutsenko, and Oleksander Stepanenko, rejected the socialist politics of the Revolutionary Ukrainian party. A 1903 brochure containing the UNP ‘ten commandments’ deemed the Russians, Poles, Jews, Hungarians, and Romanians enemies of the Ukrainian people for as long as they kept exploiting them; it advocated a ‘Ukraine for the Ukrainians,’ the expulsion of all foreigners, the creation of an independent, unitary, democratic, pan-Ukrainian republic, and the use of the Ukrainian language always and everywhere, and condemned marriage and fraternization with non-Ukrainians. Mikhnovsky's draft constitution for an independent Ukraine was published in 1905 in its Lviv organ, Samostiina Ukraïna. Because of its extremist views the UNP had negligible support. In 1906 an ‘autonomist’ faction left the ‘independentist’ UNP and formed the short-lived Ukrainian People's Democratic party. After Mikhnovsky left the UNP in 1907, it became inactive. In 1917, however, its former members established the Ukrainian Party of Socialists-Independentists.

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