Vyacheslav (Viacheslav) Kazymyrovych Lypynsky (5 April 1882 — 14 June 1931) was a Ukrainian historian, social and political activist, known as a leading ideologue of Ukrainian conservatism. Born to a Catholic Polish noble family in Volhynia, he adopted a Ukrainian identity in his youth and became one of the prominent leaders of the Ukrainian national movement. During the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917, he became the founder of the Ukrainian Democratic–Agrarian Party. Under the government of Hetmanate, Lypynsky served as the Ukrainian ambassador to Austria. After the defeat of Ukrainian struggle for independence, he stayed in emigration and took leading positions in the Hetmanite movement, promoting the establishment of a Ukrainian monarchy.
Biography Family lineage
The Polish noble Lypynsky family, also transliterated as Lipiński, is of Mazovian origin, coming from the settlement of Lipiny in the Nur Land of the Duchy of Masovia - or the Nurska land "de Antiqua Lipiny". At the beginning of the 18th century, one branch of the family permanently settled in Podolia after Kazimierz-Józef Lipiński purchased the village of in 1759. Józef-Antoni then became stolnik of Drohiczyn and sub-steward of the Cherkasy Land. His son, Antoni, was the owner of , the subchamberlain of Kamianets, and an elected district marshal of the nobility.
The family's connection to Zaturtsi stemmed from the marriage of Emilia Bechkowska to Włodzimierz-Severyn-Marian Lipiński in 1839. Bechkowska gave the village of Zaturtsi as her dowry.
Early life Lypynsky was born on in the village of , then part of the Vladimir-Volynsky Uyezd of the Volhynia Governorate in the Russian Empire (now in Volyn Oblast, Ukraine). He was baptized by the name Wacław‑Wikenty Lipiński. He was the firstborn son of Kazimir Lypynsky and Klara Rokicka, both of whom were Roman Catholics. His father, Kazimir, was the lord of Zaturtsi and a participant in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), retiring as a staff captain. In 1881, he married Klara Rokicka, of the Rogala coat of arms Apolinary Rokick, who was the Lord of Chernivtsi (a small village in Podolia). Vyacheslav later had three more siblings: Stanislav (born 1884), Wlodzimierz (born 1887), and Vanda-Yulianna (born 1891).
According to Lypynsky, his first language was Ukrainian, but the family spoke Polish or French at home. As he later wrote, Ukrainian was his first language because his nanny, a peasant, "did not know Polish", and although he was "a Pole in terms of spoken language and religion, and a Russophile in the political views inherited from home", the imagery of Ukrainian culture, such as the Zaporozhian Cossacks, drew him in. As a young boy, he was significantly influenced by his uncle, Adam Apollonariyovych Rokytsky, who was a landowner. According to a researcher, L. Bilas, Rokytsky shaped his viewpoint into Ukrainian nationalism.
Until the age of 11, he homeschooled with a private tutor, a French governess, but passed entrance examinations to attend a gymnasium on 21 August 1893. He was first enrolled in the second section of the first class of the , where he stayed until 15 August 1898, completing 4 classes there. He was noted for his excellent grades there and was also a pupil of future pianist Józef Turczyński. Upon completing his fourth class, his parents switched him to the , presumably due to his poor health, where he studied for another two years until 15 May 1900.
He then received a leaving certificate to go to the , which he studied at for another two years until 1 June 1902, where he predominantly studied languages, especially Latin and Ancient Greek. According to multiple sources, the First Kyiv Gymnasium is where he began to further his views on Ukraine, which were grounded by territorial principles and not class-based or an ethnic identity. He was part of the so-called circle of Mariia Trebinska, which had formed in Kyiv in the 1890s. The circle involved many people, some intelligentsia, but mainly gathered for their "love for Ukraine". He had joined the circle probably in the autumn of 1900, and was mainly impressed by Mykola Vasylenko, a historian who extensively talked about Ukrainian history and territorial principles at the meetings. Among other associates of the circle were Volodymyr Naumenko, Klyment Kvitka and Izydora Kosach-Borysova. In May 1902, he passed his examinations to obtain his certificate of maturity.
Military service and university years
Immediately upon graduating from the gymnasium, he enlisted in the 31st Riga Dragoon Regiment, a cavalry regiment of the Imperial Russian Army stationed in Kremenets, Kremenetsky Uyezd. He was enlisted as a one-year volunteer (вольноопределяющийся), who, after the implementation of conscription were people with higher or secondary education who voluntarily entered military service without being enrolled due to the conscription (but in practice were mostly wealthy young men who were landowners). They thus would be allowed a shorter duration of service, and after an examination would receive the rank of reserve officer at the end of the one-year period. It has been hypothesized that being stationed at Kremenets probably influenced his later choice to study in Austria-Hungary instead of the Russian Empire, as the city was located on the border and he intermingled with many Austro-Hungarians during his military stint. He completed his service in August 1903 as an ensign of the army cavalry reserve.
In the autumn of 1903, after finishing his military service, he enrolled at Jagiellonian University in agronomy, which was then located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was probably due to the family tradition of agricultural production at their estate in Zaturtsi. At the university, he was greatly influenced by W.L. Jaworski, a politician and professor who was a member of the or the West Galician conservative movement that published the , whom he would recall taught him "the fundamentals of law and political thinking". Perhaps most influential to him during this time, however, was Bohdan Lepky. After overhearing a lecture by Lepky, he decided to enroll in the Ukrainian language study circle and began to cultivate a relationship with him, where they spoke extensively about a Ukrainian national idea. Lepsky also introduced him to the Ukrainian student community, the Prosvita society, and Ukrainian historian Stepan Tomashivskyi, who pushed him into the field of history.
He left the study of agronomy in 1905 after two years, but did not graduate because he did not complete the required promotion exams. There is a brief one-year period afterwords during which his activities were unknown and not documented, although his sister Vanda maintained that he was studying history in Krakow. Either way, perhaps motivated by the revolutions occurring at the time against the Imperial Russian government, in the autumn of 1906 he moved to Geneva and began courses in the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences at the University of Geneva. However, after only one academic year, he returned to Kraków after falling ill due to the Alpine winds, causing him to have "pleurisy with fluid." Thus, he went to the Polish sanatorium at Villa Jerzewo in Zakopane for half a year of recovery. During this time, he interacted closely with historian Vasyl Domanytsky, who was also a patient in Zakopane, during which time Domanytsky helped translate into Ukrainian the verses Lypynsky was incorporating into his monograph from Danylo Bratkovsky and encouraged him to publish some of his writing. He then intended to return to Ukraine and study history, first at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and then Lviv University, but his plans fell apart, and he returned to Jagiellonian University in 1908. He was then an "ordinary listener" to attend courses, but left soon after from Jagiellonian to start working and never formally completed his education.
Pre-World War I and literary activities Cooperation with Rada and the Rakowski affair
After leaving his schooling, he became employed as a writer at the first Ukrainian daily newspaper Rada. He mostly wrote under the pseudonym "V. Pravoberezhets" for the newspaper (Pravoberezhets literally translating to "Right-Banker"), although he sometimes used his real name or "Prav.", intermittently in 1908, 1910, and 1911-12. His first article for the newspaper came from his friendship with the newspaper's official publisher, Borys Hrinchenko, who commissioned him to compile Polish books suitable for Ukrainian translation. He worked for the newspaper for free because he stated it was his personal duty to the Ukrainian cause to promote it. The vast majority of his articles for Rada addressed Polish-Ukrainian relations, both in Russian and in the Austro-Hungarian-ruled Ukraine. He stated there were three Polish political currents in Russian-ruled Ukraine: the conciliationists, the all-Polish nationalists, and the democratic-Ukrainophiles. He dismissed the first two groups as hostile to Ukraine but identified with the latter. He also attacked the spread of equivalences between Galician Ruthenians and Russians in Western Europe, arguing that the all-Polish press was using this to conceal Ukrainian nationalism from the world, and argued that Russian and Polish reactionaries shared a common ideological platform of a common hatred of the "Ukrainian national revival".
He drew immense attention to himself and Rada when in the summer of 1910 the Polish newspaper Goniec Wieczorny published so-called "revelations" from Bolesław Rakowski, who claimed he was a Polish spy within Prussia who had found the existence of documents that proved the Ukrainian nationalism movement was financed by Prussia. He named four people - "Fedorchuk, Shelukhin, Lutsenko, and Lipinsky" - and several Ukrainian newspapers that were alleged to have been paid with Prussian marks, with the Lipinsky being immediately identified as Lypynsky by Goniec Wieczorny. The accusations quickly spread through Polish publications, to which he published the article "Knights of Lies and False Denunciations" in Rada, where he called the accusations baseless and accused the main newspaper spreading the accusations, Dziennik Kijowski, of knowingly spreading false information. Lypynsky, soon after, in June 1910, confirmed he would sue the editors of the accusations in court alongside Rada. However, the case never made it to court as the two newspapers he was suing - Goniec Wieczorny and Kurjer Warszawski, gave official apologies for the damages caused and confirmed the accusations were unfounded.
However, just two years later, he left the newspaper in 1912. He stated in a letter when he distanced himself from the newspaper in 1912 that there was a fundamental ideological difference growing between himself and the newspaper as his motivation for leaving. He thought that Rada had begun to represent the populist-democratic Ukrainian intelligentsia, who were only advocating for autonomy within Russia and were willing to entertain the ideas of pan-Slavic solidarity. However, Lypynskyy identified himself as a conservative territorial independentist and considered the intelligentsia politically useless and timid in separatism. In order to remedy the drift, in late 1912, the founder of Rada, Yevhen Chykalenko, offered him to be the lead editor. However, he wrote back in a letter to Chykalenko that it would be impossible for him - who believed in a separatist Ukrainian movement, was a Catholic, a noble - to be the editor, and rejected the proposal.
Szlachta na Ukrainie