 As a radical-minded young man in 1891 he formed a secret student organization.The first Ukrainian national organization with a clearly political purposes was founded by a group of students from Kharkiv and Kyiv Universities, which in summer 1891 took the oath of allegiance to Ukraine, and founded a secret political society, in honor of the poet Taras Shevchenko calling it the "Taras Fraternity".Mikhnovskyy, though he was not among the founders, soon became the ideologue and leader of the fraternity.