The Ukrainian National Party (, Ukrainska Natsionalna Partiia, UNP; , PNU) was a right-wing agrarian group, representing the Ukrainian minority in Romania. Its founder and president was the scholar Volodymyr Zalozetsky-Sas, who supported the "classocratic" Hetmanism of Pavlo Skoropadskyi and Vyacheslav Lypynsky; the PNU leadership also included Vasyl Dutchak, Teodor Ivanytsky, and Lev Kohut, who stood for more moderate currents of Ukrainian nationalism. Always strongest among the Ukrainians of Bukovina, the party was united in its opposition to Romanianization, but overall accepted Romanian rule. Its more radical faction, supportive of "Greater Ukraine", gravitated toward the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists after 1933; the mainstream did not.
The UNP emerged after a seven-year hiatus, during which many Ukrainians boycotted Romanian politics, concentrated on cultural campaigns, or took up repressed causes such as socialism. Returning from self-imposed exile, Zalozetsky-Sas took over for Dutchak and his Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, synchronizing with the Ukrainian nationalist groups in Poland and Czechoslovakia. The attempts to spread the movement into Bessarabia and Maramureș were disavowed by the Romanian authorities.
Founded in 1926, the UNP registered its first electoral gains in 1928, an ally of the National Peasants' Party. Its team contested all the elections of the following nine years, often against other Ukrainians or Rusyns, and almost always in alliance with mainstream parties. Around 1933, its anti-communism made it prone to infiltration by Nazi agents. Its final appearance was during the 1937 race, when it won its last seat in Parliament in cartel with the National Liberal Party. Like all other Romanian parties, the UNP was banned, in early 1938, by the National Renaissance Front. Zalozetsky-Sas and other former UNP leaders served as Ukrainian representatives within the Front before the Soviet occupation of 1940.
History
Background
By the end of World War I, Austria-Hungary's Duchy of Bukovina had come to be disputed between the Kingdom of Romania and the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR). Most of the Bukovinian Ukrainians, centered in the northern half, supported incorporation with a Ukrainian state; the Romanians, who were concentrated in the south, formed a General Congress of Bukovina, which obtained the region's de facto incorporation into Greater Romania. As a result, the Ukrainian elites opted to boycott the Congress—Zalozetsky-Sas, Hierotheus Pihuliak, and Stepan Smal-Stotskyi left Bukovina in protest, confident that the Paris Peace Conference would sort matters in their favor. Father Kassian Bogatyrets, who stood for the prewar Russophile movement, remained in Romanian-held territory and represented the Ukrainian community at negotiations with the new administration.
To 1919, Zalozetsky-Sas served the ZUNR's foreign diplomacy as an envoy to German-Austria and Switzerland. After the ZUNR's disestablishment, he also became a celebrated art historian, researching the impact of Gothic and Baroque architecture in Western Ukraine. Politically, he and his mentor Vyacheslav Lypynsky supported the revival of a monarchical Ukrainian Hetmanate, and were ideologically opposed to the left-leaning People's Republic (UNR) and Symon Petliura. Their "classocratic" program fused agrarianism, producerism and corporatism, criticizing party democracy, and upholding Skoropadskyi as the guarantee of Ukrainian unity. In Vienna, Zalozetsky-Sas joined Lypynsky's Ukrainian Agrarian Statist Party (USKhD), which, in 1921, also organized a chapter in Romania—the Union of Ukrainian Agrarians, presided upon by P. Novitsky in Bucharest.
In Bukovina, the Romanian nationalist Ion Nistor and his Democratic Union Party seized the opportunity and ran pro-Romanian Ukrainians and Poles as candidates for the 1919 elections. Active on the left side of the spectrum, Constantin Krakalia joined the Socialist Party. In early 1920, he spent time in prison for protesting against the People's Party (PP) government's clampdown on Ukrainian socialism. He ran in the elections of May against Bogatyrets, taking a seat in the Assembly of Deputies, where he demanded a plebiscite over the territorial status of Bukovina and Maramureș. The election of November 1922 were held under the watch of National Liberal Party (PNL), which supported centralizing policies. During the race, the incumbent Rusyn Senator Jevhen Kozak was arrested and intimidated. Fearing persecution, Krakalia made his way into the opposition Peasants' Party; the other Ukrainian socialists soon came into contact with the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, and were either arrested or pushed to leave Romania.