Rethinking Ukrainian History by Ivan L. Rudnytsky

ĭriven by a desire to combat the influence of the Ukrainian nationalists, Rudnytsky became a leading member of several student organizations in the 1940s. His doctoral advisor was the noted scholar of slavic studies, Eduard Winter, who held Rudnytsky’s oral doctoral defence on a Prague street during an air raid prior to Soviet occupation.

Fearing discovery of their Jewish heritage, he fled with his mother to Prague, Czechoslovakia and continued his studies at Karl-Ferdinands-Universität, receiving his doctorate in History in 1945. There he was awarded his masters degree in international relations in 1943 from the Friedrich Wilhelm University. After the Soviet annexation of Galicia, his mother believed it was only a matter of time before the NKVD would arrest her and so she fled with her son to Krakow, and then in 1940 to Berlin. Rudnytsky began his academic career at the University of Lviv in interwar Poland where he studied law in the years 1937–1939. After his parents divorced when Ivan was 2 years old he lived with his mother, but his material needs to support his intellectual pursuits were taken care of up to 1953 in large part due to his father and mother’s financial help. In his youth, Ivan grew to become an intellectual gourmet growing up within the intensely stimulating environment of the extended Rudnytsky family of luminaries: Ivan Kedryn-Rudnytsky (prominent political leader and publicist of Ukrainian identity), Myhailo Rudnytsky (literary scholar, literary critic, translator), Antin Rudnytsky (conductor and composer) and Volodymyr Rudnytsky (lawyer and social activist). Both were well-known social and political activists from well connected families. His father Pavlo Lysiak was a lawyer and his mother Milena Rudnytska was a professor and politician. Ivan Rudnytsky was born in Vienna, Austria where his parents were residing as political refugees from Galicia, which had been invaded by Poland in the aftermath of its successful war against the West Ukrainian People's Republic (1918 – 1919).

Rethinking Ukrainian History by Ivan L. Rudnytsky