Mstyslav

Who was Mstyslav?

Patriarch Mstyslav, secular name Stepan Ivanovych Skrypnyk, was a Ukrainian Orthodox Church hierarch.

Born in Poltava, Stepan Skrypnyk was the nephew of Symon Petlura, a prominent Ukrainian military and political figure. Skrypnyk attended the Poltava First Classical Gymnasium and dreamt of a military career through his youth. During the Great War years he studied at the Officers' school in Orenburg located in the Russian Ural Mountains.

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution Skrypnyk became a diplomatic courier for the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic. He then served as first sergeant for special missions for Petlura.

In the early 1920s he was interned by Poland to an internment camp in Kalisz. Later, he briefly settled in Volhynia but had to leave under the pressure of the Polish authorities. He then moved to Galicia and became an activist for the Ukrainian movement in Poland which controlled the ethnically Ukrainian territories of Galicia and Volhynia between the world wars. Following his attendance of the Warsaw School of Political Sciences he was elected in 1930 to the Polish Sejm from the Ukrainian population of Volhynia. He also served as vice-mayor of Rivne in the 1930s. In this period Skrypnyk collaborated with the Polish voivode of Volhynia, Henryk Józewski in his Prometheist policies supporting moderate Ukrainians as a counterweight to Soviet communism. Serving in Sejm until 1939 Skrypnyk attained the reputation of the defender of the Ukrainian minority rights in Poland, especially of the Orthodox Faith in the predominantly Orthodox Volhynia against the assimilationist policies of Polish authorities.