Vytanovych, Illia

Vytanovych, Illia [Витанович, Ілля; Vytanovyč, Illja], b 9 August 1899 in Burshtyn, Rohatyn county, Galicia, d 30 December 1973 in New York. Historian, pedagogue, and co-operative movement activist; member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society from 1933. He served in the ranks of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, the Ukrainian Galician Army, and the Army of the Ukrainian National Republic. He studied at Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University and Lviv University (1923–7), taught at the economic school of the Ridna Shkola society (1927–37), and directed the Co-operative Lyceum in Lviv (1937–40). A postwar refugee, he was a professor at the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute, the Ukrainian Higher School of Economics, and the Ukrainian Free University in Munich from 1946 and then emigrated to the United States in 1949. He was a longtime associate of Entsyklopediia ukraïnoznavstva (Encyclopedia of Ukraine) and a founding member of the Ukrainian Historical Association. He wrote on economic history, in which field is his major work, Istoriia ukraïns’koho kooperatyvnoho rukhu (History of the Ukrainian Co-operative Movement, 1964). He also wrote studies of the Cossack army under Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny and of the methodology and historiography of Mykhailo Hrushevsky.

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