Yeremiiv, Mykhailo

Yeremiiv, Mykhailo [Єреміїв, Михайло; Jeremijiv, Myxajlo], b 7 February 1889 in Novoselytsia, Zhytomyr county, Volhynia gubernia, d 16 September 1975 in Geneva, Switzerland. Journalist and civic leader. As a student at the Kyiv Polytechnical Institute he was twice arrested for his Ukrainian activities. In April 1917 he became a student representative to the Central Rada and then a member of its executive committee (representing the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' party [USDRP]) and secretary to the Central Rada (1917–18). He was editor in chief of Visty z Ukraïns’koï Tsentral’noï Rady (1917–18) in Kyiv and a board member of the USDRP’s daily newspaper Robitnycha hazeta (1917–19). An opponent of the Hetman government in 1918, he was assigned in 1919 by the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic as secretary of the diplomatic mission of the Ukrainian National Republic in Rome, where he edited La Voce dell’Ucraina (1919–20).

From 1920 Yeremiiv lived abroad: in Vienna, where he wrote for the journal Volia (Vienna); in Prague; in Poděbrady, where he lectured at the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy (1924–6); and, from 1926, in Paris, where he was a professional journalist and worked with the Promethean movement. In 1928 he founded the Ofinor press agency, of which he was director and editor in chief (1928–44). Because of Soviet diplomatic pressure he was forced to leave France in 1936. He emigrated to Geneva, where the head office of Ofinor was relocated. During the Second World War he founded a Ukrainian refugee aid committee, which was subsequently named Comité Suisse d’Aide aux Réfugiés Ukrainiens. Even in his later years Yeremiiv continued to work with Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian newspapers and published many informational pamphlets on nationalities issues in the USSR, the Revolution of 1917, and Bolshevism.

Arkadii Zhukovsky

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