[8] 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).

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.

He was a briefly a member of a conservative, monarchist hetmanite organization but was expelled in 1940 by the leadership for meeting an old acquaintance of his mother’s who was associated with the Ukrainian People's Republic, an action they regarded as political treason.

[17] After the war, Rudnytsky attended the Geneva Graduate Institute where he worked on his second doctorate and where in 1949 he met and married an American Quaker, Joanne Benton.

In keeping with the evolutionary outlook of idealism characteristic in German historicism, Rudnytsky used history to understand the development of socio-political thought, particularly that of Ukraine from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s.

[23] The opposing view in Ukraine was championed by Dmytro Dontsov who took his cues from Italian fascism[24] and became the far right conservative voice of Ukrainian ethnic nationalism.