SUMMARY:

Almost no twentieth-century historian has had as profound an influence on current Ukrainian historical writing as Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, aka Ivan L. Rudnytsky (1919–1984). Together with George Luckyj (Iurii Luts’kyi, 1919–2001) and Omeljan Pritsak (1919–2006), he belonged to the “generation of 1919.” Even though his academic career was less successful than theirs, he seems to have left behind a more lasting intellectual legacy matching his remarkable life. He was born in Vienna in 1919 and raised in interwar Lviv/Lwów – a city that was torn by ethnic tensions between Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. Rudnytsky did not succumb to temptations of communism or fascism. He managed to flee the Soviet occupation in 1939 and survived the war under Nazi rule as a university student in Berlin and Prague. After the war he moved to the United States, where he tried to pursue an academic career in 1951–1971, until he obtained a stable position as a tenured professor in Canada. His biography is full of dramatic turns: being half-Jewish, he was blackmailed by Ukrainian nationalists under the Nazis; while in the United States, he was denounced during the MсСarthy era and refused security clearance by the CIA. His cause célèbre was a letter sent in 1967 to Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders, in which he demanded the liberalization of politics in Soviet Ukraine. These episodes set the context for the analysis of his vision of Ukrainian history.