Contemporary discussions on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) have been structured around two dominant discourses.
This is perhaps unsurprising in view of Maurice Halbwachs’s assertion that “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections” (Halbwachs 1952, 43).
However, some explanation is required concerning why these discourses appear to be so starkly opposed. A condemnatory discourse has focused on the OUN’s attitude toward Nazi Germany prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the UPA’s role in the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, and the complicity of both organizations in the Holocaust. A second discourse has celebrated the two organizations for their contribution to the country’s long national liberation struggle. Both discourses have been influenced by post-1991 history writing, recent archival discoveries, and the events of 2014.1In Soviet times, the authorities made unsuccessful efforts to expunge the memory of anti-regime partisans from collective consciousness. After 1991, when the process of filling “memory gaps” began, the study of nationalism’s history was seen as a way of countering earlier Soviet and present Russian disinformation practices. Whereas Soviet narratives had cast the OUN and UPA as history’s arch-villains, the counter-narrative elevated them as heroes. When the Russian government attempted to brand the Euromaidan’s democratic reformers as “fascists” and “Banderites,” this only strengthened positive sentiments toward the OUN and UPA. A similar reaction followed the election in 2015 of the Law and Justice Party in Poland. As the government in Warsaw shifted toward authoritarian and nationalist positions, and insisted that the OUN and UPA should be seen as criminal organizations while members of the Polish underground should be depicted in wartime histories as victims, many Ukrainians felt compelled to reject such a double standard. After all, they argued, the Polish underground had also collaborated at times with German forces and committed atrocities against civilian populations. This attempt by foreign governments
The Ukrainian Underground of the 1940s 113 to manipulate collective memory was met in Ukraine by the “decommunization campaign.” Launched in 2015, it looked favorably upon the OUN and UPA, granting its members a degree of protection against criticism. This, of course, added fuel to the already heated debate over how to characterize the two organizations.