Ukrainian Socialist party (Kyiv)

Ukrainian Socialist party (Kyiv) (Ukrainska sotsiialistychna partiia, or USP). A small revolutionary party founded in Kyiv in 1900 by Polish students sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause and other Poles who considered themselves Ukrainian. The USP was led by Bohdan Yaroshevsky, and modeled its program on that of the Polish Socialist party. Its approx 15 active members propagated among the peasantry of Right-Bank Ukraine the overthrow of tsarist oppression and the creation of an independent, democratic socialist Ukraine. Its five pamphlets (including the first Ukrainian translation of Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto), proclamations, and the organ Dobra novyna (1903, ed Semen Vityk and M. Stanko) were published in Austrian-ruled Lviv with the help of the Ukrainian Social Democratic party there. The USP merged with the Revolutionary Ukrainian party (RUP) in the summer of 1903, but it seceded in December after the Lviv-based RUP Foreign Committee condemned its position on Ukrainian independence as chauvinist. The USP never officially disbanded, but by 1905 most of its members had joined other parties.

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