Nykolai Bilaniuk

Nykolai Bilaniuk sat for the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre's oral-history project Ukrainian by Choice. The biography UCRDC published with the interview is short and exact: "Nykolai Bilaniuk has BASc and MASc degrees from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He works in telecommunications and network monitoring."

He first saw Ukraine in the summer the Soviet Union began to come apart. "The first time I went was when the Soviet Union was already very rocky and this was in July 1990 when the Ukrainian ensembles from Toronto went to Ukraine to sing on the anniversary of Ukrainian settlement in Canada," he told his interviewer. He was there as family rather than as a singer — "My wife was singing in the choir and I just tagged along" — and used the trip to break away from the group, visit Kolomyja and knock on doors to find the relatives his family had lost contact with: "I was able to reestablish contact so it meant a lot to me. It's a very emotional moment."

He was back in Kyiv that October for a technical conference. "It was the first so-called Namytove misto or tent City on the Maidan at the time of October, October 1990. Students were protesting against Vitalij Masol, the Premier. He actually resigned while I was there and I went out on the street and the kids were celebrating and so it was an interesting moment and I thought, wow, like the Soviet union really is caving in."

He put a question to himself in that interview — why he had devoted so much more energy to the Ukrainian community than to the German side of his family — and answered it plainly: "especially back in the Soviet period there was this feeling that the Soviets are actually trying to destroy Ukrainian language and culture, nobody was doing that to Germany. Germany was quite stable and healthy as a cultural and linguistic project so I felt that Ukraine needed me more."

He and his wife moved to Ottawa in 1992. The biography published alongside his 2019 interview records him as President of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress — Ottawa branch from 2011 to 2014, Director of Kursy Ukrajinoznavstva (the Ukrainian high school course), on the Parents' Committee at the Ukrainian school, National Head of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and a member of the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association, and describes him as "very active in the Ukrainian community in Ottawa, holding key positions in Plast over the years."