Emigration
In 1944, Kubiyovych, moved to Germany where he at first settled in the American occupation zone in West Germany, and then later moved to France. In Germany, he reorganized the Shevchenko Scientific Society as an émigré institution. He was its Secretary General from 1947 to 1963, and, from 1952, President of its European branch.
In exile, Kubiyovych became the chief editor of the Ukrainian-language Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Studies (Entsyklopediya ukrayinoznavstva, ten volumes, 1949–84), the largest scholarly project undertaken by Ukrainian émigrés during the Cold War. While written largely reflecting Kubiyovych's own strong Ukrainophile views, his encyclopedia, was meant to preserve Ukrainian national heritage which, at that time, was intentionally neglected and downgraded by the Soviet Russian-speaking regime in Ukraine. Kubiyovych's encyklopedia continues to be a valuable source of reference to this day.
Kubiyovych later became the chief editor of Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopædia published in two volumes (1963–71), an English translation of the thematic part of the Entsyklopediya ukrayinoznavstva. A new revised and expanded English-language edition of the great ten-volume alphabetic part was published under the title Encyclopedia of Ukraine in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, and was only completed after Kubiyovych's death. It is presently being put on-line.
During his exile in France, Kubiyovych enjoyed considerable prestige as the most prominent Ukrainian scholar in the free world. He also enjoyed the respect of the influential Polish intellectual, Jerzy Giedroyć, another resident of Paris, and who wrote in his autobiography that he thought that Kubiyovych had behaved honourably during the war ("Zachowal się świetnie"). In 1991, after Ukraine declared independence from the Soviets, scholars in Ukraine began reprinting Kubiyovych's major works, especially his encyclopedias, making them available to a wider readership in the home country for the first time.
In his later years, Kubiyovych published three volumes of memoirs describing his experiences in inter-war Poland, the Second World War, and émigré scholarly life in Germany and France during the Cold War. The most wide-ranging of these was the Ukrainian-language volume titled I am 85 Years Old (Paris-Munich, 1985).
Volodymyr Kubiyovych died on 2 November 1985 in Paris.
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