Viacheslav Lypynsky. 1918. Central State Audiovisual and Electronic Archive
Having executed its state, a viable nation preserves itself in its family, estate, and class. In these strongholds the spirit of the nation, its state idea remains.
Viacheslav Lypynsky
Viacheslav Lypynsky was a Ukrainian historian, publicist, politician, and public figure. He founded the statehood trend in Ukrainian historiography and the Ukrainian monarchist movement, created a theoretical background of Ukrainian conservatism, was the Ambassador of Ukraine to Austria-Hungary, and represented the second wave of emigration. He lived and worked in Austria and Germany.
Lypynsky was born on April 17, 1882, in Zaturtsi in Volyn into a Polish noble family. In 1902, he graduated from the First Classical Gymnasium in Kyiv. He got his higher education at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland, 1903-1908). Lypynsky studied at the Graduate School of Political Science in Geneva (Switzerland, 1906-1907).
In 1912, in Krakow, he published his work “Z dziejow Ukrainy” (From the History of Ukraine) in Polish. In it and the monograph “Ukraina na perelomi” (Ukraine at the Turning Point, 1920), V. Lypynsky considered the events of the National Liberation Revolution of the Ukrainian people in the mid-seventeenth century as a revival of Ukrainian statehood and praised the state-building activities of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Before the First World War, he formulated the concept of a sovereign Ukrainian state and substantiated the need to fight for Ukraine’s state independence.
Lypynsky was one of the organizers and ideologues of the Ukrainian Democratic Agrarian Party (1917). Unlike the Ukrainian Central Rada leaders, who saw Ukraine as autonomous, the UDAP demanded Ukraine’s state independence. After Pavlo Skoropadsky came to power, V. Lypynsky was appointed ambassador to Austria-Hungary (1918).
Since 1919, he had been in exile. He lived and worked in Austria. Lypynsky was one of the founders of the non-partisan organization Ukrainian Union of Agrarians-Statists. He published the work “Lysty do brativ-khlibotobiv” (Letters to Brothers-Agrarians, 1926), in which he analyzed the problems of Ukrainian people, provided ways to solve them, and outlined a conservative political program. The politician saw the future Ukrainian state as an independent monarchical state with the hereditary power of the Hetman. Based on V. Lypynsky’s ideology, political centers of Ukrainian monarchism appeared in Europe and America in the 1920s.
During 1926-1927, he lived and worked in Germany. Lypynsky headed the Department of state history at the Ukrainian Scientific Institute in Berlin. He then returned to Austria.
Viacheslav Lypynsky died of a severe illness in a sanatorium near Vienna. He was buried in the village of Zaturtsi.
