Coverage in Lviv’s Dilo and the Nationalist Press of the 1930s1

Myroslav Shkandrij

The years 1932-34 were a turning point in Soviet Ukraine. On 21 November 1933, Pavel Postyshev declared Ukrainian nationalism to be the “greatest danger.” Russian great-power chauvinism had held this dis­tinction since the Twelfth Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1923.

Although the rhetoric in favor of Ukrainization continued after 1932, it masked the real goal of reining in and removing those who believed in cul­tural distinctiveness and national statehood—an approach that Shapoval has called “double bookkeeping” (Shapoval 1993, 26). A violent “militant Bolshevik” writing denounced sabotage and resistance by “Petliurites,” “bourgeois nationalists,” and “kulaks.” Perhaps the most notorious exam­ples in Ukrainian literature are Tychyna’s Partiia vede (The Party Leads, 1933) and Pervomaiskyi’s poems from 1932 to 1933.² The point of view of the victimized would only be made available after the war, in works by writers like Teodosii Osmachka and Vasyl Barka. Osmachka’s novels deal with collectivization and the arrest and persecution of people from farm­ing communities.³

These events were, however, commented upon at the time in Polish- ruled Galicia (Halychyna) and in the Ukrainian emigre communities of Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and Warsaw. Yurii Klen (Oswald Burghardt), who was allowed to emigrate in 1932 owing to his German background, contributed both poetry and journalism to the Lviv Vistnyk (Herald) and other publications. Vitalii Yurchenko (real name Holynskyi), who found employment in Galicia as an inspector of community coopera­tives, vividly described the experience of Ukrainization, Bolshevik terror, collectivization, imprisonment, and escape from Solovki in Shliakhmy na Solovky (Iz zapysok zaslantsia) (Notes of an Exile, 1931), Zi Solovets- koho pekla na voliu (From the Soviet Hell to Freedom, 1931), and Peklo na zemli (V usevloni OGPU—Na Solovkakh) (Hell on Earth: Captive of the OGPU in Solovki, 1932).

Interwar Poland contained the largest Ukrainian community outside the Soviet Union. There were over 5 million Ukrainians in Galicia, Vol- hynia, and Polisia (Polesie in Polish), of whom 30,000 were political refu­gees from the 1917-20 struggle for independence. The terror and Great Famine of 1932-33 were widely reported in the Galician Ukrainian press, and the information had a dramatic impact throughout Western Ukraine and the emigre communities. The fullest coverage was in the largest Ukrainian newspaper outside the Soviet Union, Dilo (Deed), a Lviv daily and a beacon of democratic journalism in troubled times. As will be seen, in the summer of 1933, as the famine’s scope became clear, a number of figures in the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (CPWU) publicized their break with the organization in its pages. At the same time, the news­paper reported with alarm the growth of a radical form of nationalism associated with the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). His­torians have identified the main reasons for this organization’s growth as the weakness of Polish democracy and the country’s inability to deal with the national question (Motyka 2006, 73).⁴ Like the wider Ukrainian society, the OUN voiced grievances against the Polonization campaign and against the government’s refusal to implement the autonomy it had promised in 1919-23 when, under international agreements, it had been allowed to establish an administration in Galicia. However, the news of unfolding disasters in Soviet Ukraine also influenced attitudes in Western Ukraine.

The OUN’s agitation called for the establishment of an independent state on all territories with a majority Ukrainian population, which meant primarily adjacent lands under Soviet, Polish, Romanian, and Czecho­slovakian rule.

It was a time when I, a nationalist, could for several weeks (on my own) give talks in the communist student Hromada (Collective), argu­ing the absurdity and unreality of communist concepts. But is this, in fact, so strange when one considers that these communists fought for Ukrainian post-secondary schools in Lviv alongside others in the com­mon anti-Polish front?

(Martynets 1949, 20)

He felt that this generation shared the same wartime and postwar expe­riences, and often found a common language more quickly than “like­minded” party members. News of the disasters in Ukraine were therefore an ideological blow to the CPWU and a potential benefit to the OUN in the competition for the hearts and minds of Galicians.

The communist press described the Polish regime as “fascist” and sup­ported the use of terrorism against it. Soviet journals claimed that in fact the CPWU was leading the national liberation struggle, and that the OUN was merely surfing a wave of legitimate revolutionary anger. In an article from 1929, the Kyiv journal Bilshovyk Ukrainy (Bolshevik of Ukraine) called for educating the masses “in a spirit of proletarian nationalism” (Bratkivskyi 1929, 84). However, the CPWU suffered setbacks at this time: in 1928, there was an internal revolt against the Soviet nationalities policy, and then news of collectivization and the Great Famine (described in Ukraine today as the Holodomor) began affecting its Ukrainian base.

For one thing, the Famine was widely publicized by the press of mod­erate (liberal and democratic) nationalists. The daily Dilo was edited by Vasyl Mudryi, a member of the Polish parliament (Sejm) and the leader of the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO). This party held over twenty seats in the Sejm after the election of 1928. It supported autonomy for Galicia within Poland, and wished to see Soviet Ukraine become an independent state with a parliamentary democracy and equal rights for all minorities and religious groups. The newspaper devoted extensive coverage to the Pacification campaign of 1930, during which the Polish military and police beat hundreds of people (several of whom died as a result) and destroyed the property of many individuals and institutions.

According to official sources, 450 villages were surrounded either by the police or the army, told to pay contributions, and then punished when the money was not produced. Often the fact that someone subscribed to a Ukrainian newspaper or sent their child to a Ukrainian school was the pre­text for violence (Smolii 2002, 550). Yuliian Holovinskyi, the OUN leader in Galicia, was murdered, and many institutions were closed down, includ­ing cooperatives, Prosvita branches, the scouting organization Plast, and the sporting organizations Luh and Sokil.

Dilo consistently denounced not only the Pacification campaign, but also the OUN’s terrorism. A turning point was reached in 1932 when a botched raid on the post office in Horodok caused the death of two postal workers and led to the hanging of two students, Dmytro Danylyshyn and Vasyl Bilas. Along with other newspapers like the Catholic Meta, Dilo condemned the act. The OUN was also censured for abetting stu­dents who jeered and stoned the Ukrainska Molod Khrystovi (Ukrainian Youth for Christ) parades during the first week of May 1933 (“Zhertvy” 1933). The OUN periodical Nash klych (Our Call) had taken a lenient line toward the disruptions and the resulting outcry was seen as a strong condemnation of the Nationalists.⁵ Although some student resolutions urged boycotting the gatherings, the large demonstrations and parades of 6-7 May showed that public support was with the church. As a result, organizers of the boycott backed off, and this action was not repeated. The conflict was discussed by Mudryi and by Vladimir Kisilewsky of the Ukrainian Bureau in London, who wrote articles for Dilo and visited Lviv in 1933.⁶ Mudryi felt that the Youth for Christ fiasco “could lead to a crisis and decline of the Nationalists” (Kaye 3 May 1933).⁷

However, Dilo^,s journalists were aware of a deeper problem. One writer commented that belief in a violent Social Darwinism was cap­turing young people (Gotskyi 1933). Another warned against placing the nation above God. People, he wrote, are the highest value, and not all means are justifiable and ethical (Konrad 1933). A third discussed why youth found authoritarianism attractive: “The main reason is that we live among undemocratic states and slogans. Willy-nilly we submit to overly strong foreign influences, and become infected with dubious pseudo-democrats, who are especially plentiful among our neighbors.” Democracy, he argued, tries to regulate relations between individuals and national groups. Whenever a middle class is lacking or weak and the pos­sibility for social advancement is not available, authoritarianism grows (Tvorydlo 1933).

The most direct attacks on the OUN came from Mudryi and from Volodymyr Tselevych, the secretary of UNDO and editor of the party’s official organ Svoboda (Freedom). Kisilewsky wrote that in January 1933, Mudryi spoke to him of the irresponsibility of Nationalist youth, and “the creation in Galicia of something akin to the Irish ‘gunmen’ who are beginning to terrorize the Ukrainian community.” An assassination attempt had been planned against him for his article in Dilo condemn­ing the attack on the post office in Horodok (Kaye, 13 January 1933). Tselevych spoke out against the OUN at many gatherings. In 1933, he published a series of articles in Dilo condemning terrorist tactics.⁸ Some young people, he argued, were beginning to believe that the end justifies the means, and this amoral attitude was affecting all aspects of political and civil life. The youth were reading Dontsov but not analyzing him, Tselevych said, and as a result, Dontsov’s Natsionalizm (Nationalism 1926) had poisoned minds. Moreover, the legal and illegal literature of the OUN had not been challenged in the press, except for the occasional comment about “the absurd thesis of the so-called revolutionary ideol­ogy” (Tselevych 1933b). Tselevych, like his fellow journalist Zenon Pelen- skyi (not to be confused with Zynovii Pelenskyi, a Ukrainian member of the Sejm), had themselves belonged to the underground UVO (Ukrainian Military Organization), which had conducted assassinations and acts of sabotage in the 1920s and which in 1929 became part of the OUN. By the 1930s, both had become prominent supporters of democratic forms of struggle, and opponents of terrorism.

When the Kurier Lwowski (Lviv Courier), an organ of the Polish nation­alist Endeks (National Democrats), attempted to throw the responsibility for terrorism onto the whole Ukrainian community, Dilo replied that the origin of the problem lay in Polish laws and nationality policy, which provided the soil in which terrorism grew. Polish nationalism, wrote Dilo, thought that the terrorists could “never be satisfied,” and that any gains would be used to demand more. The newspaper answered that this position “rejects a priori the rights of Ukrainians to a legal, evolutionary struggle” within the state and was a way of telling Ukrainians that they could expect no further political gains. The OUN, said the newspaper, “does not hang in the stratosphere,” but had arisen in social-cultural cir­cumstances that make youth into material for the OUN: “When these sources dry up, it will become more difficult to draw youth into revolu­tionary work” (“Iaku garantiiu” 1933).

Dilo, therefore, made a distinction between “nationalism” as the legiti­mate defense of a nation and its interests, and “Nationalism” as the ideol­ogy and tactics of the OUN. It argued that the violence that occurs during war and in acts of self-defense is impermissible in peacetime. As for ter­rorism against one’s own community, Tselevych wrote: “nationalism has never, anywhere used these methods of struggle” (Tselevych 1933b). This position made the newspaper’s condemnation of Soviet terror credible and effective.

Dilo had earlier praised the Soviet Ukraine’s successes in film, theater, and scholarship. While generally positive, this coverage criticized the “planetary” (imperialistic) views of Russians concerning Ukraine (“Real- izatory” 1927). It followed closely the censuring of Oleksandr Shumskyi and Mykola Khvylovyi, who championed a faster pace of Ukrainization in the 1920s. The issue of Ukrainization resonated in Galicia because not only had the Polish government reneged on promises it had given to Western powers that autonomy would be given to Eastern Galicia, but Ukrainians found themselves excluded from universities and govern­ment jobs, and witnessed the closing of their schools, the leveling of their churches, and attacks on their organizations. They equated their own struggles against Polonization with resistance to Russification in Soviet Ukraine.

The watershed moment appears to have come in 1933, when Soviet policy turned decisively against Ukrainization and news of the famine spread. Both Mykola Skrypnyk and Khvylovyi, two figures who were emblematic of the Ukrainian cultural “renaissance” of 1923-33, com­mitted suicide. Within months, prominent figures in the CPWU made public statements and quit the party, leaving it more closely identified with its Polish and Jewish membership. Stepan Volynets, a former mem­ber of the Sejm for the Sel-Rob party (Ukrainian Peasant and Workers Socialist Alliance, a legal wing of the communists), published a letter of protest against Moscow’s nationality policy, mentioning that the suicides of Skrypnyk and Khvylovyi had spurred him to break with his former colleagues (“Holos” 1933). Another article quoted Shumskyi’s words that “the Russian communist rules in the party,” and explained that the rusotiapy (unconsciously prejudiced pro-Russians) were now again ascendant in the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine CP(B)U (B. M. 1933). One writer insisted that the nationalities politics of the USSR was merely a “chess move” and that all along, Moscow had continued to view Ukraine as a colony or province. Much of the bureaucracy had remained non-Ukrainian, and after biding its time, was now turning against the local population (“Polityka” 1933). Particularly important in the Gali­cian context were the attacks on Shumskyi and former members of the CPWU like Karl Maksymovych, who were familiar to the population there. Equally eloquent was the suicide on 3 August 1933 of Mykola Stronskyi, a secretary of the Soviet consulate in Lviv, who had fought for independence with the Ukrainian Sich Riflement and the Ukrainian Gali­cian Army. One former communist wrote a personal letter of recantation in which he likened Moscow’s politics to absolutism, described Ukraine’s treatment as a crime against national liberation struggles everywhere, and stated that behind the internationalist facade lay the “national chau­vinism of the dominant Russian [Moskovska] nation” (“Nedavni” 1933).

The fate of the Krushelnytskyis, the most prominent Sovietophile fam­ily in Galicia, shocked all of Western Ukraine. Antin Krushelnytskyi and almost his entire family had moved to Kharkiv on 8 May 1934, to par­ticipate in the Ukrainization movement. They had been seen off at the Lviv railway station by a large crowd. All were arrested on 7 November. The two sons, Ivan and Taras, were part of the 28 immediately executed. Dilo printed the text of the sentence in large type on the front page of its issue of 22 December 1934, listing their names alongside the other writ­ers to be shot. The other Krushelnytskyi family members were executed in the Gulag in 1937; Antin died there in 1941. A resolute enemy of the OUN, he had edited the journals Novi shliakhy (New Paths, 1928-32) and Krytyka (Criticism, 1933), which had been closed by the Polish gov­ernment along with all other Sovietophile publications. The accusation that the family were agents of the OUN and complicit in the murder of Kirov were patently ridiculous, and caused a sensation in the Ukrainian and Polish press.

Equally absurd were the allegations against Skrypnyk. One of them was that he had hired 1,500 teachers from Western Ukraine as part of a group sent by “international imperialism” (Hetmanchuk 2010, 125). Another Galician communist, Fedir Konar (also known as Palashchuk), who had risen to the position of deputy head of the People’s Commis­sariat of Agriculture, was executed for working for foreign powers. He confessed to having been a spy for thirteen years (M. O. 1933). His trial was incongruously linked to the arrest and execution of thirty-five “sabo­teurs and spies” at Metropolitan-Vickers, a British engineering firm. At this time, one British engineer had reported back to England that there were starving people in his apartment block, and that one person had died outside his door. Soviet authorities were, of course, infuriated by any such attempts to spread abroad news of famine. Postyshev was reported in Dilo as saying that all Ukrainians were spies.

The UNDO had in 1930 played a leading role in protesting the Pacifi­cation; it now did the same concerning the famine. Although the emigre OUN supported some of these publicity efforts, it could not play a signifi­cant role because its terrorist activities effectively excluded it from main­stream politics. Some in the OUN leadership within Galicia even rejected these efforts to gain publicity, seeing them as serving only to spread an illusory faith in democracy and “parliamentary” procedures. The organi­zation’s support, however, began to grow at this time, probably boosted by outrage at events in Soviet Ukraine, and by frustration with Western democracies, who appeared unwilling or unable to act.

Already in the winter of 1931-32, there had been newspaper reports of famine in Soviet Ukraine. An estimated 150,000 people died, and numer­ous individuals had escaped across the border to Romania and Poland. There were descriptions of people being shot while attempting the cross­ing. The Romanian government and British parliamentarians expressed their concern in the press. Ukrainians in the bordering countries protested the forcible return of the many refugees, who faced immediate execution. As a result of this publicity, in the first half of 1933, the Soviet Union heavily reinforced the border to prevent similar escapes in the future. It cleared much of the local population from the border areas and inserted a large number of Russian troops—actions that have been seen by some as evidence that the regime already foresaw the possibility of another famine as a result of its policies (Papuha 2008, 33).

Newspaper coverage of the Great Famine of 1932-33 began in the latter part of 1932 and went through several phases. Initially, it was only reported through letters describing hard times. Jewish colonists told of persecution and arrests, and their survival with some scant help from abroad, or their exile to Kazakhstan (“Zhydy” 1932). The coverage began to include stories translated from Western newspapers, which were con­sidered authoritative and often had access to well-informed sources. The story of these Jewish colonists, for example, was taken from the Vienna paper Nation und Staat (Nation and State). Initially the extent of the famine appeared incredible and readers might have viewed some reports as exaggerated. A number of articles tried to explain the unaccountable phenomenon of a bountiful harvest being exported while the population was allowed to starve. Moreover, there were bald-faced denials. In October 1932, Gareth Jones’s “Will there be soup?” (Jones 1932) appeared and was immediately countered with “France: Herriot a Mother” (“France” 1932). It was not until the spring of 1933 that Jones warned of the enormity of what was taking place in his “Famine grips Russia” (Jones 1933). This report was immediately answered the following day by Wal­ter Duranty’s mendacious “Russians Hungry, but not Starving” (Duranty 1933)⁹. One Ukrainian, who had returned to the USA from a visit to Ukraine, wrote in Dilo on 4 February 1933 of the planned destruction of his former homeland. He insisted that there were many Jews and sons of former estate managers among the higher commissars, and suggested that they were taking revenge on Ukrainian villagers because these had been hostile toward Jews during the revolution when land had been taken away from landowners. He warned of a cataclysm because no one had a chance against the well-fed Red Army and there could be no hope for Soviet mercy (“Bezposeredni visty” 1933).

The coverage in Dilo was not generally antisemitic. The paper occa­sionally printed sympathetic accounts of Jews who had been victims of crimes. It also covered Zionist conferences and mentioned events in the Jewish community. When the New York congressman Hamilton Fish spoke out on 25 May against the treatment of Jews in Germany, this was reported. Fish also condemned the Communist Party for preaching class hatred and the destruction of religious communities and private owner­ship. He did not deny that Jews played a role in German communism but stated that this in no way made 600,000 German Jews guilty (“Zhyd” 1933).

By May/June of 1933, reports were streaming in of a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Readers were informed that millions were dying, while the heavy military presence at the border prevented desper­ate people from escaping to neighboring countries (Baran 1933). A letter from Ukraine mentioned “the best people” being arrested and charged retroactively with having participated in the armies of Denikin or Petliura. It spoke of food confiscations and starvation rations (“Nuzhda” 1933). This was followed by a letter to a brother outside the USSR describing dying family members and pleading for help (“Z krainy” 1933). As the evidence piled up, it was confirmed by information translated from West­ern European and North American newspapers. In some cases, the for­eign press coverage was summarized, with brief quotations from different sources (see “Vidhuky” 1933). Among the more powerful indictments, one could mention Gareth Jones’s interview in the New York American and two letters to Le Matin from the North Caucasus and Black Sea region, both of which Dilo reported (“V oboroni” 1933; “Maten” 1933). Jones’s article had originally appeared on 31 March, and Bertillon’s on 29 August, which suggests a delay of at least a month before its publi­cation in Ukrainian translation. The more frequently referenced foreign newspapers were Neue Zuricher Zeitung, Kolnischer Zeitung, Le Matin, Manchester Guardian, Daily Telegraph, and Catholic Herald. Quotations from the English press were particularly vivid and effective. The Ukrai­nian Bureau in London, which was run by Kisilewsky, played an impor­tant role in providing Dilo with information and translations of British coverage. The Christian Science Monitor was reported as writing on 7 Sep­tember that some people had been eating only weeds and tree bark for months. The Yorkshire Observer was reported as saying on 14 September that anyone who wanted to know what real persecution was like should travel through Ukraine. It was a state in which people really were shot for taking a few grains of wheat, which they themselves had sown in their own field. They were being executed not by a few fanatics, but legally and officially by the regime. These reports appeared in Dilo only ten days after their publication in Britain (“Anhliiska presa” 1933).

One reporter tried to estimate the scale of the tragedy by analyzing the Soviet press. Based on his reading of Izvestiia from 5, 8, and 9 September, he wrote that hungry children were being mobilized to guard granaries and to denounce their parents to the GPU (Soviet secret police) when these were found stealing grain (Danko 1933a). The testimony of a Ger­man visitor described the presence in Moscow of many peasants who had escaped from Ukraine and were begging for bread (“Holod” 13 September 1933).

Other Galician papers also carried information, especially Svoboda (Freedom), Nova zoria (New Star), Ukrainska nyva (Ukrainian Field), Meta (Goal), Nedilia (Sunday), Novyi chas (New Time), Nove selo (New Village), Nash klych (Our Call) and Za Ukrainu (For Ukraine). The last, whose first issue appeared 1 October 1933, was specially created to carry news of the disaster (Papuha 2008, 17, 19-21). As major Western newspa­pers began to speak insistently of the event and scores of refugees arrived despite the tight border controls (between twenty and fifty managed to escape each month during 1933), Galician society began a coordinated mobilization. On 25 July, an aid group (Ukrainskyi Hromadskyi Komitet Riatunku Ukrainy, Ukrainian Civil Committee for Saving Ukraine) was formed at an UNDO conference. The leadership included the parliamen­tarians Vasyl Mudryi, Milena Rudnytska, Zynovii Pelenskyi, and Volody­myr Tselevych. It began spreading information and issued an appeal urging all people to speak up about the disaster (“Byimo” 1933). On 28 July 1933, Dilo published a series of articles from the European press on the Famine. One, by Ewald Ammende, the General Secretary of the European Congress for Nationalities in Vienna, outlined what had hap­pened and described the hundreds of letters he was receiving daily. He mentioned Gareth Jones’s reporting and described what was occurring as a war against both the peasantry and separatism. He thought that the antagonism between Russians and Ukrainians had called forth a reac­tion against the “cultural desires of Ukraine,” and lamented the fact that while surplus grain was being burned in Kansas, no help was being given to the starving (“Holod” 28 July 1933). At this point, other articles from the foreign press had become available and were translated, among them Malcolm Muggeridge’s piece “The Soviets’ War on the Peasants,” which had appeared in the Fortnightly Review in May (“Strakhittia” 1933). The reporting of foreign press coverage also mentioned denials, such those by Duranty and the scoffing by Izvestiia (Moscow) on 20 July at “absurd provocative fabrications” (“Antisovetskaia kleveta” 1933). The CPWU continually denied the famine throughout this period, claiming that the reports were part of war preparations by Western powers, that they were the writings of insane people, and so on (Papuha 2008, 83-84).

It was, however, only in late August and early September that the press reported a large-scale and coordinated response in Galician society. The Ukrainian Catholic Church put out an appeal over the signature of Metro­politan Andrei Sheptytskyi for prayers and active engagement (“Ukraina” 1933). Another appeal urged that meetings be summoned throughout Western Ukraine and committees elected to organize protests and days of mourning, to collect money for relief, and to inform society at large and Ukrainians throughout the world. This call was signed by all Ukrainian parliamentary representatives and thirty-four community organizations on 30 August 1933 (“Komitet” 1933). Groups throughout Galicia raised funds and attempted to send help, either in the form of food or money. These were often hindered by Soviet authorities, who inflated costs and the currency exchange rate. In any case, the help—when it got through— could benefit only very few (Papuha 2008, 110-18). The Soviets also made it known that some individuals would be allowed to emigrate if they could pay a large fee (Papuha 2007 indicated in text, 31). Protest actions spread throughout Western Ukraine in an attempt to stir Western governments to action (ibid., 131-234).

The first statistical evidence appears to have been presented in late August (“Statystyka” 1933). It showed that thousands had died in spe­cific villages, and gave graphic descriptions of cannibalism; mention­ing, for example, that burials of the recently deceased were forbidden, because “fresh” corpses were being dug up and eaten. A more systematic reporting of the information that had become available in Western news­papers began in September (Danko 1933b; “Strashne lykholittia” 1933). A translation was printed of an eyewitness report that had appeared in Le Matin (Paris) of 30 August 1933. This was a moving description by Marta Stebalo, a woman who had emigrated from Ukraine fifteen years earlier and had returned in July as an American tourist. She traveled via Moscow and Leningrad to Kyiv, from where she visited several neighbor­ing villages. The translation appeared twelve days after the original report (“Polityka” 1933). By 10 September, the figure of 3-4 million deaths was being presented. However, in the absence of reliable information, various estimates concerning the number of deaths were circulating. In October, Berlin sources were cited as receiving information from the Soviet Union that 6 million had died, or around 15% of the population of Ukraine. These sources added that about 9 million people in all had been displaced by the catastrophe and that “a commission had been created to colonize the empty spaces with Russians and Jews.” The Soviet authorities, it was said, privately admitted to 2 million dead (“Les Kurbas” 1933). It is likely that this information had come from Otto Schiller, the German cultural attache in Moscow, who was relaying information back to Berlin, which then shared it with other Western governments. Germany was follow­ing the news closely. Its embassy had already been besieged since the fall of 1929 by Germans, mainly Mennonites, who spoke of the horrors of collectivization and were desperate to leave (Martin 2001, 319-20). Moreover, the German population of the Volga also suffered badly from famine in 1932-33.

The aid committee continued to issue protests, to coordinate the actions of other groups, and to issue publications.¹⁰ It wrote to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, asking for diplomatic pressure to be applied on Moscow. It issued appeals, drawing attention to the fact that hunger and terror were raging throughout Ukraine and the Kuban, that foreign cor­respondents were prevented from entering the areas, and that large-scale deportations to forced-labor camps in Siberia and the Arctic were occur­ring. These events threatened to “erase the Ukrainian nation from the face of the earth” (“Do kulturnoho svitu!” 1933). Ukrainian socialist and social-democratic parties issued their own declaration, and protested against the arrests and executions and the export of food “Ukrainski sot- sialisty” 1933).

An appeal to women of all nations to protest “the cruel treatment of the defenseless” appeared in mid-September. It reported that thousands of letters had come from starving people, and that the famine was accom­panied by the destruction of Ukrainian autonomy and the conduct of monstrous show trials:

All this is occurring in front of the civilized world’s silence. Only in the last while have the Christian churches in several European coun­tries raised their voices in protest and the desire to help. Responsible people in government remain quiet. Filing away the recently-signed “pacts of non-aggression” with the Bolsheviks and commercial agree­ments (which among other things are concerned with the bloody grain of Ukraine), they turn a blind eye to “the internal affairs” of “friendly countries,” maintain a loyal silence and await the end of the Bolshevik experiment.

(“Do zhinotstva” 1933)

The letter represented an indirect attack on the Polish government, which had signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1932.

Although the Polish Kurier Warzawski had reported that people who had died of hunger were lying on the streets of Kyiv, and that hundreds of orphans were roaming the land, Dilo reported that only on 23 October 1933 did Kurier describe the extent of the catastrophe and warn that the same scenario could be repeated in the following year. A contemporary researcher has written that the Ukrainian campaign “did not receive understanding in Polish society” (Kushnezh 2005, 138). The Hustrowany Kurier Codzienny wrote on the same day: “Under the pretext of saving their brothers in Soviet Ukraine, the Ukrainian press began an anti-Soviet politics” (quoted in ibid.). Dilo put the Polish silence down to the “Sovi- etophile mania” that had taken hold following the signing of a Polish­Soviet pact and complained that even the Catholic bishops had not let their voices be heard. The newspaper indicated that the French had also signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in the same year but that their press had not hesitated to speak out about what was occur­ring (“Prolomana polska movchanka” 1933). The Polish administration banned public demonstrations in Lviv on 24 October 1933, during a day of solidarity with the people in Ukraine. Instead, the organizers were lim­ited to conducting church services and holding lectures.

The international response began to gather strength in August. A del­egation that included two Ukrainian members of the Polish Sejm, Milena Rudnytska and Zynovii Pelenskyi, and two Bukovynian parliamentary representatives, Volodymyr Zalozetskyi and Yurii Serbeniuk, traveled to Geneva to meet with delegates to the European Congress of Nation­alities. It then met the president of the League of Nations (and prime minister of Norway), Johan Mowinckel, shortly before the League’s Sep­tember session. He agreed to take up the matter, even though it was not on the agenda. The League expressed its shock at hearing the details, and its solidarity with Ukrainians and the people who continued to suffer in the USSR. In spite of Mowinckel’s urging, the League’s Council declined to raise the matter directly with the Soviet Union, but decided to send the collected information to the Red Cross and to inform the USSR of this action. The Liaison Committee of the International Women’s Organiza­tion had earlier supported discussion of the matter in the League and had published a letter over the signature of Margaret Corbett Ashby. The Ukrainian delegation left pleased that at least the facts of the famine had been accepted. Dilo reported that Mowinckel had given an inter­view to Le Matin on 1 October (“Holova” 1933). At this same time, the Ukrainian Bureau in London organized a meeting with British parlia­mentarians and various humanitarian organizations (“Holod na Radi- anskii” 1933).

Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna had already spoken out about the catastro­phe. On 19 August, he had written a letter which appeared throughout the Austrian press under the title “To the Christian World! Appeal by Cardi­nal and Archbishop of Vienna” (“Kardinal” 1933). On his journey back to Lviv, Zynovii Pelenskyi visited the cardinal in Vienna and informed him of what had happened at the League of Nations. Dilo reported that the cardinal was pleased with the de facto international recogni­tion (“Holod na Ukraini” 12 October 1933). Soon after this, Innitzer called an interfaith gathering of church leaders and spoke to them of the

famine’s horrors. A series of actions were planned and public communi­ques were issued (St. 1933). These initiatives culminated in a conference in Vienna on 16-17 December 1933, at which Milena Rudnytska admit­ted that she had hoped for a stronger international response, one that would have immediately put an end to the famine, and was disappointed with “Europe’s silence” (Papuha 2008, 55). The conference issued its own appeal to the international community. Ewald Ammende was particularly active at the conference, and issued his book Muss Russland Hungern? (Ammende 1935) shortly afterwards.

Several facts stand out concerning the coverage. The first is its rela­tive lateness. Spontaneous mobilizations, such as initiatives taken by individual church groups, had occurred earlier, and the issue of wide­spread famine had been raised in the Sejm, where one Ukrainian member had publicly struck a communist member (Kushnezh 2005, 131-132). The lateness is, perhaps, less surprising if one considers that the deaths from hunger peaked in June 1933, and that most Galician and Western reports appeared in the summer of that year. A number of important works were published later, including Gareth Jones’s “Reds Let Peas­ants Starve” (1935); William Henry Chamberlin’s Russia’s Iron Age (1935); Ewald Ammende’s Muss Russland Hungern? (1935), translated as Human life in Russia (1936); and Eugene Lyons’s Assignment in Uto­pia (1937). It should also be recalled that the Soviet press and pro-Soviet organizations such as the CPWU were either silent about the extent of the famine or issued aggressive denials. The Soviet news agency TASS consistently attacked what it called “rumors” and insisted that the har­vest was an “unbelievable” success. It might also be pointed out that even a relatively well-informed figure like Antin Krushelnytskyi, who had strong contacts with Soviet writers, seemed unaware of the famine’s scope or the nature of the terror campaign against Ukrainian intellectu­als. According to his granddaughter, before leaving for Ukraine he com­mented: “We have survived more than one famine; it won’t last forever” (Krushelnytska 2008, 90). Cheap grain from Soviet Ukraine was being sold in Galicia, a fact that was used by the CPWU to deny the famine and to ridicule the stories of cannibalism. Some CPWU members even crossed the border illegally in order to see for themselves. The lucky ones—now no longer famine-deniers—were arrested and sent back (Pak- harenko 2005, 131-32).

In Galicia, coverage of the Great Famine was almost immediately identified as an attack on Ukrainian cultural and biological survival. Many Western European observers linked the disaster to the arrests of Ukrainian oppositionists in the Communist Party and the crushing of the country’s cultural demands. Ammende has already been mentioned in this regard. Suzanne Bertillon took a similar line in her story, “Famine in Ukraine,” published in Le Matin 30 August 1933: “Systematically orga­nized, it strives to destroy the nation whose only crime is their aspiration to freedom.” Implicitly, so did the pro-Soviet Louis Fischer in his Soviet Journey (1935), where he wrote:

The Bolsheviks were carrying out a major policy on which the strength and character of their regime depended. The peasants were reacting as normal human beings would. [... ] In the final analysis, the 1932 famine was a concomitant of the last battle between private capitalism and socialism in Russia. The peasants wanted to destroy collectivization. The government wanted to retain collectivization. The peasants used the best means at their disposal. The government used the best means at its disposal. The government won.

This argument here is a Social Darwinian one that issued from the Soviet camp. Pro-communists were making the case that “to make an omelet, one has to break eggs,” or in other words, that the opposition to collec­tivization had to be crushed—whatever the cost in human lives.

Galicians and emigre Ukrainians, including dissident members of the CPWU, were all in agreement that the attacks on Ukrainization and the famine were linked. Their argument was that Stalin was determined to destroy the roots of Ukrainian resistance to the regime, which lay in the countryside. Mykola Kovalevskyi, who in 1919 had served as minister of agrarian affairs in the government of the UNR (Ukrainian People’s Republic), wrote in 1937:

The slogan of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine was under­stood by the communist administration as a slogan of struggle against the largest social group of the Ukrainian people—the peas­antry. The introduction of collectivization became transformed into the systematic destruction of material wealth, and, when resistance was encountered, into the physical destruction of the Ukrainian peas­antry. Collectivization was the reason for the complete disorganiza­tion of production and called forth local revolts of the peasantry against Soviet power. These were put down with great ruthlessness, as in an occupied country.

(Kovalevskyi 1937, 126-27)

He concluded that the famine “will always remain a terrible example of the clear destruction of the Ukrainian people by the Russian occupier” (ibid., 128).

The focus on national survival and the fear of extinction moved the rhetoric of liberals and democrats of all stripes closer to that of the “capi­tal N” Nationalists. Dilo, for example, on 16 August carried an article that commented:

It is not simply a case of human outrage, nor of sympathy and pity for the misfortune of someone close, a family member. It is a question of the psychic mobilization of the entire people. It is neces­sary that the idea should enter the blood and bone of every Ukrai­nian that Russia [Moskovshchyna] and communism are mortal enemies that have to be broken: communism must disappear from the face of the earth, leaving behind it the memory of a frenzied idea and one insane experiment, and Moscow has to be confined to its ethnographic territories.

(“Ves narid” 1933) The biological-survivalist imagery was also used in an article by Senex, who argued that “sick” individuals need “disinfecting” from the “national organism” for the latter’s “correct functioning.” The country was full of “nihilists, godless, hooligans, bandits, who have taken the form of commune-Bolsheviks. But political wreckers also include janissaries, ren­egades, Moscophiles, and turncoats [khruni]” (Senex 1933).

A further example of how the rhetoric shifted toward themes that the OUN was repeating is provided by an article from a Ukrainian member of the Sejm, who expressed a sense of powerlessness and guilt when con­fronted with the scale of the horror. It was necessary, he wrote, to ask how this could have happened. The Soviet economic system was the main reason, but the other was “our own guilt.” Ukrainians had been unable to grasp the moment when the tsarist state collapsed to win and main­tain their own state because of “internationalist and materialist-socialist ideas” that had distracted them from the task at hand (Khrutskyi 1933). Naturally, all commentators identified the botched project of collectiv­ization and its mad tempo, along with the mismanagement and cruelty of the leadership, as the main causes of the tragedy. However, the sense of guilt, coupled with the condemnation of a weak and confused leader­ship, harmonized with the OUN’s propaganda. The charge of weakness was increasingly directed by the OUN against UNDO and the Western democracies, whose protests against the famine were seen as completely ineffective.

At this time, Tselevych wrote an attack against the “mass actions” that were sanctioned by the OUN underground in Galicia and which involved “sabotage” in state schools: smashing windows, destroying Pol­ish books, vandalizing property, and the physical intimidation of teachers and students. Tselevych called for political struggle, not the child’s play of smashing windows, which would only lead to arrests, the loss of sym­pathy in the wider community, and general demoralization (Tselevych 1933c). However, the impotence of democrats in the face of the enor­mous catastrophe across the border, and the inadequateness of the inter­national response, undermined their case. In some quarters, the feeling of political helplessness was translated into support for terrorism. On 21 October 1933, Mykola Lemyk assassinated Alexei Mailov, an official of the Soviet consulate in Lviv, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He avoided the death penalty because he was under 21 years of age. The

58 Myroslav Shkandrij assassination had been planned by the OUN as an act of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and was announced as such. Although the govern­ment prevented the trial from being used to publicize the Great Famine, the organization nonetheless gained a great deal of publicity, and many observers probably agreed that the assassination was “an appropriate response” to the tragedy across the border (Papuha 2008, 81). Dilo did not condemn the assassination. It carried articles on Lemyk’s trial and reported on the OUN’s anti-Soviet activities with some degree of sympa­thy. At the time, few were aware that the assassination of Antin Krushel- nytskyi, which had also been planned for the same day as Mailov’s, was called off by the OUN only at the last moment (ibid., 76).

The Soviet Union was recognized by the USA in December 1933 and accepted into the League of Nations in the following September. Pres­sure for good relations was being put on governments by businesses who saw the potential for trade and who preferred to believe that reports of famine were exaggerated. In the end, five governments voted against admitting the USSR to the League, including Switzerland, which raised the issue of famine. Ireland, Germany, and Spain voted in the League for immediate action.

Although Dmytro Andriievskyi of the OUN’s Brussels press bureau was active in helping the Ukrainian community publicize the Great Famine, the OUN’s publications were relatively subdued on the issue. It received little mention in the Lviv-based Nash klych (Our Call) or Vist- nyk (Herald). Nash klych strongly criticized appeals to international bod­ies: “Moscow,” it wrote, “is an active and real force; it cannot be removed from Ukraine by any protests but only by the real force of revolution” (“Den” 1933). The emigre OUN’s major response was the publication of Samchuk’s Maria (1934). Famine was also the subject of a play, O. Zaden- na’s Vidplata (Payback), which was serialized in the OUN’s organ Samo- stiina dumka (Independent Thought) in 1934. (This journal appeared in Chernivtsi, in Romanian-ruled Bukovyna.) However, the purpose of both works was to demonstrate the strength of resistance to communist ideol­ogy and the need for mass militancy. This was the standard response in Nationalist publications, and explains why the OUN felt discomfort with the issue. The depiction of helplessness and victimization went against its search for images of strong, assertive behavior; its primary message was the need to fight or die. Two articles in Rozbudova natsii (Building the Nation), the OUN’s main organ (published in Prague), dealt with Western newspaper reports of the Famine: “Hodi movchaty!” by M. and “S.O.S.” by K. Syretskyi. The first was published in the July/August issue, and the second in the September/October issue of 1933. They summarize infor­mation presented in the international press and mention protests and the suppression of popular resistance. The journal preferred stories of defi­ance and success. Yevhen Onatskyi’s article “Kult uspikhu” (“Cult of Suc­cess,” 1934) briefly mentioned the famine in the penultimate paragraph

in order to affirm that the nation was showing “an ever more mighty spirit and refuses to put down its arms in the struggle for its national and spiritual liberation” (Onatskyi 1934, 169). In 1934, Oleh Olzhych, the OUN’s cultural theorist, wrote an erudite article on depictions of hunger in Ukrainian literature. He interpreted Samchuk’s famine scenes in Maria as “the fruit of violence by a hostile doctrine over the organic Ukrainian element” and indicated that the way forward lay in “this element’s pro­test and victorious uprising” (Olzhych 2009, 247). The OUN’s negative attitude toward the widespread publicity is perhaps best expressed in Onatskyi’s diary entry from 14 September 1934, in which he states that the mass destruction of Ukrainians through famine and deportations had convinced the world:

that Ukraine was finished, and that all its paper protests are an expression and proof of the complete powerlessness of Ukrainians, and so there is nothing left to do but to negotiate with Moscow in an attempt to tame and “domesticate” it, so as to have it, if not as a partner, then at least not as an enemy.

(Onatskyi 1989, 286)

Restrained reporting in later OUN publications can be explained by this need to deny powerlessness. In 1936-37, party ideologist Volodymyr Martynets mentioned the famine briefly and incongruously in a discus­sion of the inadequate diet of Ukrainians. No doubt influenced by Mari­netti’s futurist cookbook, which urged Italians to develop their machismo by eating more meat and avoiding pasta, Martynets describes why car­nivorous people resemble more aggressive nations and not impotent veg­etarian ones (travoidy, or herbivores) (Martynets 1937, 24, 29). In the context of this discussion, the famine served as an embarrassing indica­tion of weakness and degeneration. Partly because of greater exposure to Eastern Ukrainians who had suffered in the Holodomor, the OUN’s reporting gradually increased. In 1940, during the occupation of Galicia under the terms of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, Mykola Stsiborskyi, another leading ideologist of the OUN, calculated from census figures that the Ukrainian nation had lost 5 million people in the Great Famine (Stsiborskyi 1940, 9).

Ivan Kedryn (real name Rudnytskyi), who in the 1930s became an editor of Dilo but who always maintained good personal relations with Yevhen Konovalets, the leader of the OUN, and acted as the newspaper’s liaison with the latter, describes in his memoirs the visit of his sister Milena Rudnytska to the League of Nations without mentioning her attempts to draw attention to the Holodomor. He leaves the impression that her mission was purely to bring attention to the Pacification campaign and the Polish government’s attempts to assimilate Ukrainians (Kedryn 1976, 323-324). This omission may have been a symptom of the significant psychological shift which occurred in the wider Ukrainian society dur­ing the 1930s: it involved downplaying passivity and victimization, while emphasizing mobilization and the need for activism.

By the late 1930s, press attention was focused on the waves of arrests in the Soviet Union and on Hitler’s political maneuvering. Although cov­erage of the Great Famine diminished, it did not disappear. In 1937, Dilo reminded readers of the destruction of the Ukrainian village: “Let us remember the situation of the French press in 1933 when hunger raged in Ukraine, when millions of Ukrainians died, and the French press under Mr. Herriot’s direction wrote about the ‘good life and the paradise’ of the Soviets.” Herriot, the former French prime minister, had returned from a visit to the Soviet Union in 1933 and declared that there was no famine. The newspaper recalled this in 1937 on the occasion of a speech in Lviv by Carlo Agrati, an Italian journalist who had visited Ukraine in 1934 and who recalled that guides had tried to prevent outsiders from seeing the villages, the disorganization and filth, and the ubiquitous portraits of unsmiling Lenin and Stalin: “The Russians [Moskali] deny it but the general conviction is that the population has shrunk significantly. [...] Certainly, villages have been depopulated” (“V Ukraini” 1937).

Soon, however, the partitioning of Poland in accord with the Hitler- Stalin pact of 1939, and the outbreak of the Second World War it provoked, dominated the press. When the Soviet Union invaded and incorporated Galicia, Dilo was banned and most of the UNDO leaders arrested. The OUN, which had worked as a clandestine organization and had steadily rebuilt its network since the mass arrests of 1935, was practically the only non-communist political organization able to continue operating, albeit underground.

In the postwar period, there was little interest in the 1932-33 Famine among Western commentators, many of whom saw attempts to raise the issue as a Cold War, anti-communist tactic. However, the Ukrainian press consistently explained the disaster in the way this had been done during the 1930s—as an attack on the nation. For example, in 1963, when dis­cussing the anthology of eyewitness reports entitled Black Deeds of the Kremlin, one commentator wrote that “the destruction of the Ukrainian village” and of the “Ukrainian national substance” had been an end in itself. Because “like a tree firmly rooted in the earth, which always puts forth fresh shoots, the Ukrainian village had continually revived after repeated hard times,” Moscow saw Ukrainians as “bourgeois national­ists” with roots in an alien rural Ukraine (V. T. 1963).¹¹ The emigres from Eastern Ukraine were the driving force behind this need to remember the tragedy; in many cases, they had experienced it personally.

Today it is clear that Stalin micromanaged the policies that caused the Great Famine; he issued the rhetoric and political statements that accompanied it, which included the notorious “five ears of corn” law, and ordered the strict surveillance of the countryside (Davies et al. 2003, 164). Self-deluding behavior was required of famine-deniers, as it was of those who concocted incredible, self-contradictory charges against the hundreds of thousands who were caught up in waves of arrests; they had to act in front of one another as though they believed in the fan­tasy. Among the more inane fabrications was the charge that Trotsky and Zinoviev were “Gestapo agents” and “sworn enemies of the working class” (ibid., 134). Dilo reported that Trotsky was accused of making an agreement with Germany, which allowed the latter to take over Ukraine and install a government there (“Z zhyttia” 1937). Stalin, who triggered campaigns of vilification, may or may not have believed his own fan­tasies, but he insisted that everyone else act them out. The result was a completely inadequate understanding of reality among perpetrators and observers. In 1937, Dilo reported with astonishment the mass arrests of communist party leaders, officers, and administrators (“Areshtovano” 1937; “GPU” 1937). Readers were transfixed by reports of recent mass murderers meekly confessing to long lists of fabricated charges. The tri­als of Piatakov and Radek were quickly followed by news of Postyshev’s arrest.

As this chapter has suggested, the Great Famine was “instrumen­talized” from the beginning by various political forces, each of which placed its own interpretation on the event or the coverage. Already in 1933, Edouard Herriot claimed that it was merely a fantasy of the Ger­mans. In the same way as the latter had invented Ukraine during the First World War, they had now, he claimed, invented the Great Famine: “those thousands of letters that arrive from various ends of the Soviet Union, that write about the starving and plead for any possible help, are all organized by Germans on Soviet territory” (Dilo 1933; quoted in Babiak 2009, 134). In later decades, mention of famine was often attributed to the machinations of “Ukrainian fascists.” Douglas Tottle’s infamous Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (1987) is a classic of Soviet disinformation along these lines. It deliberately links “fascism,” Ukrainian nationalism, and public discussion of the tragedy, in an attempt to discredit the politi­cal emigration and Western scholars involved in researching the issue. Fifty years after the event, the Soviet Union still denied the famine’s extent and preventability. Tottle’s book was part of this campaign. It praised the “integrity” of the famine-deniers Edouard Herriot and Sir John Maynard, and smeared all critics of the Soviet leadership. In the book, Harvard is described as a “center of anti-communist research,” Muggeridge is “a former British intelligence agent,” and all emigre crit­ics of the Soviet Union are linked to Nazi collaborators. Estimates for the number of victims are called “absurd,” but the book provides no fig­ures. It concludes: “the population of Ukraine did not decline in absolute terms; between 1926 and 1939, the population increased by 3,339,000 persons” (Tottle 1987, 74). In the 1980s, it was convenient for Soviet

62 Myroslav Shkandrij apologists to make “nationalism” the issue in order to deflect attention from the Great Famine’s causes and extent.

The muted reaction in the West to the Holodomor is an issue in itself. It resulted from a number of factors, including Soviet disinformation, the presence of dupes in the Western communities, diplomatic reticence, bias among historians, and apologism among those who believed “there was no other way.” Robert Conquest has also suggested that a role was played by the inability to admit a war against national resistance. He wrote that in the postwar period “the idea that Ukraine was a nation, that its people had national feelings, had not established itself in the West, as Polish nationhood had done” (Conquest et al. 1984, 8). In the early 1950s, Harvard University—in conjunction with the US Air Force— conducted an oral history project which interviewed former Soviet citi­zens, about a third of whom were Ukrainians. Reading the transcripts of these interviews, researchers have been struck by the absence of informa­tion concerning the Great Famine. James Mace has explained that all the Ukrainians had stories to tell:

There were many of them, and the interviewers were not particu­larly interested in the famine. Notations appear in the transcripts, which still exist, that the interviewer just stopped the recorder when the respondent began talking about the famine of 1933. The person became very emotional, and the interviewer became very sympa­thetic. Once they had finished with the subject, the interviewer again started asking questions and recording.

(quoted in ibid., 19)

This passage is a reminder that researchers often look for evidence that fits their own “horizon of expectation” or constructed narrative.

Coverage of events in Soviet Ukraine was extensive in the Western Ukrainian press of the 1930s, with various social, religious, and politi­cal groups contributing to the reporting. Many of the issues raised have continued to resonate in present-day discussions, particularly those that focus on the way the Soviet experience affected Galician society.

Notes

1. First published in Myroslav Shkandrij, “Ukrainianization, Terror and Famine: Coverage in Lviv’s Dilo and the Nationalist Press of the 1930s.” Nationali­ties Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 40.3 (2012): 431-452. Copyright © Association for the Study of Nationalities reprinted by permis­sion of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com on behalf of Associa­tion for the Study of Nationalities. The author would like to thank Andrij Makuch and Serge Cipko for reading and providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

2. These are discussed in Chapter 4.

3. Osmachka’s Plan do dvoru, Povist (Annihilation, A Novel) appeared in 1951 and his Rotonda dushohubtsiv: Opovidannia (Rotunda of Assassins: A Story) in 1956. Barka’s Rai (Paradise) appeared in 1953 and his novel about the Famine Zhovtyi kniaz (Yellow Prince) in 1962 (second edition 1968).

4. On the importance of the famine in the Western Ukrainian press, see espe­cially Papuha (2008); Kuhutiak (2003); Kushnezh (2006, 199-209; 2005, 131-41); Pakharenko (2005). Ziφba (1993; 2010) links the OUN’s rise to internal Ukrainian politics and the need to raise money from the Ukrainian community abroad. For recent accounts of the OUN in the interwar period see also Golczewski (2010) and Bruder (2007).

5. Members and supporters of the OUN are referred to as Nationalists (capital­ized), while other supporters of national independence, which included most of the Ukrainian population in Galicia and in emigration are referred to as nationalists (uncapitalized).

6. Vladimir J. Kisilewsky (Kysilevsky, Kaye) had spent six years in Canada and was a naturalized British subject. He was hired by Jacob Makohin to head the Ukrainian Bureau in London. Kisilewsky knew several languages and as the son of Olena Kisilewska, a Ukrainian feminist and member of the Polish Senate, was well connected. He wrote for the Lviv dailies Dilo and Novyi chas, both of which were sympathetic to the UNDO. He established contacts with several leading British politicians and journalists such as Malcolm Mug- geridge and Gareth Jones. His extensive archives, including his London diary, are housed in the National Archives, Ottawa. I wish to thank Orest Mar- tynowych for allowing me to read his unpublished paper on “The Ukrainian Bureau in London: Diplomacy, Propaganda and Political Consolidation” and for sharing his knowledge of Kisilewsky with me.

7. The OUN’s relationship to the church was troubled and contradictory. Yevhen Liakhovych, for example, thought that “the historical goals of the state always demand religious ecstasy,” that “national feelings have all the characteristics of religious feelings,” and that the church’s duty was to “fill itself with national content and recognize national perfection as one element of eternal perfection” (Liakhovych 1932, 280-281). However, Armstrong was probably correct with reference to the period 1929-39 when he wrote that there remained “strong elements of liberal and democratic, as well as Christian, principles, even when the participants in the movement verbally rejected them” (Armstrong 1963, 23). Andrii Melnyk, who took over the OUN after the assassination of Yevhen Konovalets in 1938, had earlier been chairman of the Ukrainian Catholic youth organization in Galicia. On the other hand, the younger generation was much more anti-clerical and sometimes anti-Christian.

8. “Ne mozhna movchaty” (I Cannot Remain Silent), 3 June 1933; “Treba pro- tydiiaty” (Counteraction is Required), 17 June 1933; “Ti, shcho vnosiat khaos v ukrainske zhyttia” (Those Spreading Chaos in Ukrainian Life), 25 June 1933; “Shkidlyvi sabotazhnyky” (Harmful Saboteurs), 11 October 1933.

9. Although this of course represents part of the growing antisemitic discourse in Galicia during the 1930s, it should be pointed out that the perception of Jews as active in the Soviet repressive apparatus was not a fantasy. In Ukraine there were a substantial number of Jews within the secret police from the organiza­tion’s early years until the later thirties. Vadym Zolotarov has calculated that of the top ninety people in the Ukrainian NKVD in 1935-36, 60 were Jewish (66.67%), 14 Russian (15.55%), 6 Ukrainian (6.67%), 3 Latvian (3.33%), 2 Belarusian (2.22%), and 1 Polish (1.11%) (Zolotarov 2009, 67).

10. See especially Zhuk (1933a; 1933b).

11. For the anthology, see Pidhainy (1953-1955).

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