Volyn publishing house

Volyn publishing house (Volhynia) [Видавництво «Волинь»; Vydavnytstvo “Volyn”]. A publishing house founded in August 1941 in German-occupied Rivne by a former member of the Polish Sejm, Stepan Skrypnyk (later Patriarch Mstyslav Skrypnyk). It was managed by O. Petliura and, from November 1941, the prominent publisher in interwar Lviv, Ivan Tyktor. Volyn published the nationalist weekly and then semiweekly newspaper Volyn’ (1941–4, 233 issues), edited by Ulas Samchuk and then Ye. Mysechko and P. Zinchenko, with the assistance of Ye. Lazor, R. Bzhesky, and Valentyn Shtul; the monthly children's magazine Orlenia (1941–3), edited by P. Zinchenko; the farming journal Ukraïns’kyi khliborob (1942–3, 10 issues), edited by P. Kolisnyk; books that had been banned under Soviet rule; and anticommunist brochures. Volyn’ was widely read in Volhynia, and its press run grew from 20,000 in 1941 to 102,000 in 1942. Tyktor and many of Volyn's staff were imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1942–3; six of them (including Kolisnyk) were executed.

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