Zaiats, Mykhailo [Заяць, Михайло; Zajac', Myxajlo], b 18 December 1899 in Horozhanka Mala, Rudky county, Galicia, d 1941 in a Soviet GULAG labor camp. Lawyer and political activist. While working as a lawyer in Lviv he belonged to a Russophile Marxist group associated with the paper Volia naroda. He served on the secretariat of the People's Will party (PNV) from April 1926 and on the Central Committee of Sel-Rob, which originated from PNV’s merger with Sel-Soiuz, from October 1926. Eventually he became a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, and he was arrested by the Polish authorities several times in the 1930s. After the occupation of Galicia by Soviet forces in 1939, Zaiats was an editor of Vil’na Ukraïna (Lviv) until June 1941, when he was arrested by the NKVD. He died in a Soviet GULAG concentration camp.

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