With the coming of the Bolsheviks to Kamianetsk-Podilsk, Bachynsky was arrested, but through fortunate concurrence of circumstances, he was able to escape from prison, and managed to get illegally to Tarnov, in Poland, by that time the location of the government of UPR. He was sent to an internment camp for non-commissioned officers of the UPR.

After his discharge in 1921, he settled down in Boikivshchyna (Boiko Region), the home of his forefathers, and there worked as a school principal. In 1923, Bachynsky moved to the Carpathian Ukraine. After teaching there for a year, in the town Sevliush, he moves to Uzhgorod and taught at the State Commercial Academy and later in the local secondary school. There, in 1924, he founded the Plast publishing house "Vatra," which at the expense of the founder published 25 books for the Ukrainian population of the Carpathian Ukraine.

He played a great part in establishing the Ukrainian Scout organization, Plast, which educated the local youth in the Ukrainian patriotic spirit. His valiant inspiration in the ideas of the Plast attracted hundreds of young people to become members and to establish 28 Plast kurens (youth associations).

Leonyd Bachynsky organized camps and Plast congresses. He often inspected Plast’s numerous sections encouraging everyone to work and display endurance in it. He demanded a strict and consistent discharge of the Plast duties from everyone, through which he wished to educate the prime and pride of the Ukrainian youth in full awareness of the great moral and practical importance of this organization. He was more strict and exacting of himself, sparing for the idea neither time nor health, ready even to lay down his life for it.

His practical activities and obvious Ukrainian loyalties aroused opposition and counteraction from the Czechoslovak government of that time, and in 1929 he was forced to leave the Carpathian Ukraine. Then his life brought him to Peremyshl where he headed the Ukrainian Girls' Institute. The hard time of World War II brought him to Germany from where not long after he moved to the United States and settled in Cleveland, Ohio. There he founded the Ukrainian Archives Museum and the Plast Museum, which he headed for 25 long years till 1977. With the efforts of the guard (keeper) of the Plast glory — Leonyd Bachynsky — a rich collection of the Plast materials have been preserved. A special room in the museum is dedicated to the memory of the First Plastun "The Gray Lion," Severyn Levytsky, whose personal belongings as one of the founders of the Ukrainian Plast are kept there. Leonyd Bachynsky died on the 25th of June, 1989, in Denver, USA.

LINKS TO UKRAINIAN SCOUTING-PLAST