Valnytsky, Kyrylo

Valnytsky, Kyrylo [Вальницький, Кирило; Val'nyc'kyj], b 1889 in Markivtsi, Galicia, d ca 1937 in a Soviet GULAG labor camp. Galician Russophile and socialist leader. He founded (ca 1908) and then headed the People's Will party in Lviv. He edited (1921–8) the Lviv Russophile newspaper Volia naroda and its Sovietophile Ukrainian-language successor, Volia narodu. Valnytsky and his group supported the Galician Ukrainian boycott of the 1922 Sejm elections and established a chair of Russian culture and language at the Lviv (Underground) Ukrainian University. By 1924 their views had changed from Russophile to Ukrainophile, pro-Soviet Marxist. In 1925 and early 1926 Valnytsky debated the Ukrainian question with Roman Turiansky in Volia narodu. When the People's Will party merged with the Sel-Soiuz to form the Sel-Rob party, Valnytsky was elected to its Central Committee. As a leader of the pro-Comintern, anti-Osyp Vasylkiv faction he played a key role in the Sel-Rob split, and in 1928 he became the head of the ‘reunited’ Sel-Rob–Yednist federation, editor of its organ Sel’-Rob, and a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Until 1930, when he fled to the USSR, he represented Lviv voivodeship at the Sejm. Arrested in 1933 during the Stalinist terror, he perished in a Soviet concentration camp.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]