Volodymyr Kubiyovych

Who was Volodymyr Kubiyovych?

Volodymyr Mykhailovych Kubiyovych, also spelled Kubiiovych or Kubijovyč was a Ukrainian geographer with a specialty in demography, a cartographer, an encyclopedist, politician, and statesman. Of mixed Ukrainian and Polish ethnic background, he was an important intellectual supporting the Ukrainian national movement in inter-war Poland, and his scholarly works from this period dealt with the Ukrainian ethnic presence in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania, and with the geographical boundaries of ethnographic Ukraine.

During World War II he headed the Cracow-based Ukrainian Central Committee which organized social and charitable work among Ukrainians in occupied Poland. Kubiyovych became a main proponent of the cooperation between certain Ukrainian Nationalist organizations and Nazi Germany with the ultimate goal of achieving an independent Ukrainian national state. After the war, he retired from political work but became one of the leading scholars of the Ukrainian diaspora in the West. After 1945, and throughout the Cold War, Kubiyovych remained a target of vicious attacks by the Soviet propaganda, focusing on some of his wartime activities, in particular his sponsoring of the Ukrainian division of Waffen-SS.