Printing in Ukraine () refers to the interrelated branches of culture and economy involving book publishing, the printing industry itself, and the distribution of printed matter on the territory of modern Ukraine. Printing is reliably documented in Ukraine from the 16th century onward, and from the 15th to the 20th century it was the principal means of mass-disseminating knowledge, news, and ideas. With the development of new media, printed books and periodicals retain a significant role, but the scope of the printing industry has changed.
History Predecessors of Ukrainian printing
The forerunner of printing was the production of impressions from carved wooden blocks (xylography). In Ukraine, paper icons and depictions of monasteries that were distributed to pilgrims were produced in this manner.
Movable-type printing was known in China from the 11th century, first using ceramic type and later wooden and metal type. The European tradition of printing in the modern sense, however, became possible only after Johannes Gutenberg's development in the 1440s of a device for casting metal type in matrices. From Germany, printing spread quickly to Italy (from 1465), France (from 1470), Poland (from 1473), Hungary (from 1473), and other European countries. Within the 16th century roughly 500,000 book titles were printed in Europe, and during the 17th century around 3 million.
Among the early Cyrillic printers active in this period was Schweipolt Fiol, who in Kraków around 1491 printed liturgical books in Church Slavonic for Eastern Orthodox readers, including Oktoechos and Horologion. These editions are considered direct predecessors of East Slavic printing.
Beginning of Ukrainian printing
The Russian printer Ivan Fedorov (Fedorovych), who had earlier worked in Moscow and Zabłudów, settled in Lviv in 1572. There in 1574 he printed two books that mark the conventional starting point of Ukrainian printing: the Apostol (a liturgical edition of the Acts of the Apostles and Epistles) and a Primer (Bukvar), the first known printed schoolbook in the Eastern Slavic lands. Fedorov subsequently moved to Ostroh, where, under the patronage of Prince Vasyl-Kostiantyn Ostrozky, he printed the celebrated Ostrog Bible in 1581, the first complete printed Bible in Church Slavonic.
Following Fedorov's death in 1583, his Lviv press was acquired by the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood, whose printing house became one of the most influential publishing centres in Eastern Europe in the 17th century, producing liturgical, polemical, and educational books in Church Slavonic and Ruthenian.
A regional tradition of printing developed in Volhynia from the late 16th century, with presses operating in Ostroh, Derman, Pochaiv, Lutsk, Kremenets, and other towns. The Pochaiv Lavra press, founded in the early 17th century, became one of the leading Uniate printing centres of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and remained active into the 19th century.
In the 17th century, printing developed extensively across the territory of modern Ukraine. The press of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, founded in 1615 under Yelisey Pletenetsky, became the largest in the Cossack Hetmanate; in 1616 it produced its first book, the Book of Hours, the first book printed in Kyiv. Printing presses also operated at Pochaiv Lavra, Chernihiv, Novhorod-Siverskyi, Univ, and elsewhere. These presses produced not only liturgical books but also works of theology, polemics, history, and grammar, including Meletius Smotrytsky's influential Slavonic Grammar (1619).
Period of tsarist censorship
After the political incorporation of Left-bank Ukraine into the Tsardom of Russia under the Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654) and the subsequent absorption of Kyivan church institutions into the Moscow Patriarchate (1686), Ukrainian-language printing came under direct control of the imperial authorities. A ukase of Peter the Great in 1720 forbade the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and Chernihiv presses from printing any books except those that fully matched Russian editions in language and content. The decree effectively ended independent Ukrainian-language ecclesiastical and scholarly printing in the territory under Russian rule.
In the western Ukrainian lands, which were under Polish and later Austrian rule, printing continued more freely. In Lviv, the first newspaper on the territory of Ukraine, Gazette de Léopol, was published in French in 1776.
First publications in vernacular Ukrainian
The publication of Ivan Kotliarevsky's burlesque travesty Eneida in Saint Petersburg in 1798 is conventionally regarded as the beginning of modern Ukrainian-language literature in print. The first complete edition of the poem was published in Kharkiv in 1842.Other early publications in the vernacular included works by Petro Hulak-Artemovsky, Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, and the literary almanacs of the Kharkiv Romantics.
In Galicia, the literary group known as the Ruthenian Triad (Markiian Shashkevych, Ivan Vahylevych, Yakiv Holovatsky) published the almanac Rusalka Dnistrovaia in Buda in 1837, the first book printed in vernacular Ukrainian using a phonetic spelling.
Period of Russian imperial bans
Two notorious imperial decrees sharply restricted Ukrainian-language publishing within the Russian Empire. The Valuev Circular of 1863, issued by Interior Minister Pyotr Valuev, banned the publication of religious and educational books in Ukrainian. The Ems Ukaz of 1876, issued by Tsar Alexander II, extended the prohibition to virtually all original works and translations into Ukrainian, including theatrical performances, song lyrics, and the import of Ukrainian books from abroad.
As a result, between the 1860s and the early 20th century, Ukrainian-language printing in the Russian Empire was either driven underground or relocated to Galicia under Austro-Hungarian rule. In Lviv and other Galician centres, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (founded 1873, reorganised 1892) and the Prosvita society became the principal publishers of Ukrainian-language scholarship, fiction, and popular education. The first Kyiv edition of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar could only appear in 1889 because of these restrictions.
After the 1905–1907 Revolution The Russian Revolution of 1905 led to a partial relaxation of imperial censorship. Ukrainian-language newspapers, journals, and books appeared legally in Dnieper Ukraine for the first time in decades. Notable titles included the daily Rada (Kyiv, from 1906) and the literary monthly Literaturno-Naukovyi Vistnyk, whose editorial offices were transferred from Lviv to Kyiv in 1907 under the leadership of Mykhailo Hrushevsky. The renewed restrictions of 1910–1914 again narrowed the field, but the publishing infrastructure that emerged in this period laid the basis for the rapid expansion of Ukrainian publishing during the revolutionary years of 1917–1921.
After the First World War
The collapse of the Russian Empire and the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1920) prompted an explosive growth in Ukrainian-language publishing. According to estimates, more than 1,000 Ukrainian-language periodicals appeared during the revolutionary period, and the output of books in Ukrainian increased many times over.
In the early years of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the policy of Ukrainization (especially after 1923) further accelerated this trend. State publishers such as Knyhospilka and the State Publishing House of Ukraine (DVU) issued large editions of Ukrainian classics, contemporary literature, and translations of world authors. Major writers of the period whose works were widely published included Pavlo Tychyna, Maksym Rylsky, Mykola Khvylovy, Valerian Pidmohylny, and Mykola Zerov.
In Western Ukraine, by then under Polish, Czechoslovak, and Romanian rule, an independent Ukrainian publishing sector continued to operate. The largest Ukrainian publishing concern in interwar Galicia was Ivan Tyktor's Ukrainska Presa (1923–1939), based in Lviv.
During Stalinism The Ukrainization policy was reversed in the early 1930s, and the Great Purge devastated the Ukrainian literary and publishing scene in what later became known as the Executed Renaissance. Many writers were arrested, executed, or sent to the Gulag, and their works were withdrawn from libraries and bookshops. Soviet censorship, administered by the Glavlit of the Ukrainian SSR, imposed strict ideological controls on every aspect of book production.
The use of Ukrainian in print was sharply reduced relative to the late 1920s. By the late 1930s, Russian-language editions dominated the publishing programmes of Soviet Ukraine's state publishers, and significant categories of Ukrainian historical and religious literature were entirely banned.
Post-war period After the Second World War, the Soviet authorities consolidated state control over publishing across the entire territory of the Ukrainian SSR, including the newly incorporated western regions. Specialised state publishing houses were established for different fields: Dnipro (literature), Naukova Dumka (academic and scientific works), Veselka (children's books), Mystetstvo (the arts), Radianska Shkola (educational publishing), and others.
The post-war decades saw both major scholarly achievements, including the multi-volume Ukrainian Soviet Encyclopedia (1959–1965; second edition 1977–1985) and the Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language (in 11 volumes) (1970–1980), and intensified Russification, with print runs of Russian-language books in Ukraine consistently exceeding those of Ukrainian-language books from the late 1960s onward. Persecution of writers and dissidents resumed in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Sixtiers generation suffering arrests, internal exile, and publishing bans.
Independence era
The restoration of Ukrainian independence in 1991 transformed the publishing industry. State monopolies were dismantled, dozens of new private publishers emerged, and previously banned authors and works, including Mykhailo Hrushevsky's monumental History of Ukraine-Rus', became freely available.
The 1990s were nevertheless a difficult decade for Ukrainian-language publishing because of economic dislocation, the dominance of low-priced imports from Russia, and weak state support. The situation gradually improved in the 2000s and 2010s, with the emergence of strong domestic publishers such as A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA, Folio, Vydavnytstvo Staroho Leva (Old Lion Publishing House), Nash Format, and Knyholav.
The Publishers' Forum in Lviv (founded 1994) became the largest annual book fair and literary festival in the country. The annual Book Arsenal festival in Kyiv (founded 2011) emerged as the second major industry event.
After the Revolution of Dignity (2014) and especially after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, the share of Ukrainian-language editions in the domestic market increased significantly, while imports of Russian-language books were restricted by law.
Printing in Ukraine by language
The early printed output of Ukrainian lands and presses was multilingual and reflected the region’s complex ecclesiastical, educational, and political affiliations. Liturgical and theological works were commonly printed in Church Slavonic, which remained the dominant sacred language of Orthodox and Greek Catholic print culture well into the early modern period.
Alongside this, Ruthenian was widely used in chronicles, polemical literature, legal-administrative texts, and early educational works, particularly in the 16th–17th centuries, before its gradual displacement by Polish and later vernacular forms. From the late 16th century onward, Latin became increasingly important in scholarly, theological, and political printing, especially in the context of Jesuit education, the Ostroh Academy, and broader European intellectual exchange.