Lev Okinshevych papers

Lev Okinshevych (1898-1980) was a historian of Ukrainian constitutional law and bibliographer. He was born February 6, 1898, in St. Petersburg, into a Belarusian family; died November 7, 1980, in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland.

He graduated from the Pavlo Galagan Collegium in 1916 and the Kyiv Institute of National Economy in 1921. From 1921 to 1933, he was a member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (VUAN) Commission for the Study of Ukrainian Law. In 1933, he became professor of history at the Nizhyn Pedagogical Institute, but was soon dismissed and exiled to Kazakhstan, where he worked as a legal adviser on the construction of a copper smelter.

From 1937 to 1941, he served as legal counsel for various state enterprises in Smolensk. In 1941, he returned to Kyiv, where he was appointed professor and dean of the Faculty of Law at Kyiv University. After the university was closed, he worked at the Kyiv Research Institute of Regional Studies.

In 1944, Okinshevych was interned in a labor camp in Upper Silesia. He subsequently emigrated, first to Czechoslovakia, where he was elected professor of law at the Ukrainian Free University (UFU/UVU), and later to Munich, where he served as professor and dean of the UFU Faculty of Law from 1945 to 1949.

In 1949, Okinshevych emigrated to the United States. In 1951, he received a special fellowship from the Ford Foundation as part of its Soviet studies research program. From 1954 to 1969, he worked at the Library of Congress as a cataloger and translator.

He was a full member of the Ukrainian Historical Society in Prague, the Shevchenko Scientific Society (NTSh), and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences (UVAN).

Okinshevych was the author of more than 100 important scholarly works, including university textbooks, bibliographic surveys, and studies of Ukrainian law.