Fighting the UPA

Although the Red Army recaptured the Ukrainian-speaking regions of the western borderlands in 1944, the communist control of these areas ex­tended only to the cities, railroad lines, and strategic military bases.

The Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), a deeply rooted underground network enjoying popular sup­port, organized the largest anti-Soviet resistance movement in East Central Europe. (The Polish Home Army disbanded on 19 January 1945, after the Red Army cleared Poland of most German military forces.) At the peak of its strength in 1944, OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army attracted be­tween twenty-five thousand and forty-thousand guerrillas and a much larger group of active supporters who procured supplies, collected intel­ligence, distributed propaganda, and provided medical services, number­ing perhaps 400,000 men and women in all.⁴⁸

It is difficult to characterize the typical Ukrainian insurgent, but from the limited records that the UPA commanders created, which survived the conflict, and which were discovered in the archives after 1991, one can establish a provisional profile of the men and women (predominantly men) who entered the ranks of the Ukrainian guerilla movement in Volhynia in 1943-4.⁴⁹ Of the ten thousand guerillas in UPA-North, in the “Bohun” military district, records concerning 1,445 men and women sur­vive.

Who joined UPA in Volhynia between July 1943 and January 1944? The overwhelming majority (98.3 per cent) of the 1,445 men and women iden­tified themselves as Ukrainians. Over 90 per cent were born in the rural areas or small towns, and a greater part (75 per cent) completed a fourth­grade education or less (the educational opportunities in Volhynia for Ukrainians in the 1930s and 1940s were limited). Before joining the UPA, nearly all of its members engaged in agricultural pursuits and most (70 per cent) were young, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. Three- fourths were unmarried and, if married, without children. The majority never experienced life in uniform.⁵⁰

Most had enlisted in the UPA after the Soviet victories at Stalingrad and Kursk, during the Polish-Ukrainian conflagration in Volhynia in 1943-4. All opposed the return of the pre-war Polish regime as well as the Soviets. Although the overwhelming majority came from families with small, sub­sistence landholdings, they opposed the collective farm system. They had much to lose when the Soviets would return and reinstitute collectiviza­tion, introduced in this region between 1939 and 1941. Significantly, a ma­jority (57.9 per cent) did not possess any previous military experience before joining UPA, which suggested that they did not have any formal relationships with the German occupiers. Of the 42.1 per cent who had served in the military, the majority (59.4 per cent) had worn Polish Army or Red Army uniforms. Of those who acquired training with arms, only 25 per cent had served in the German police, the Wehrmacht, the SD, or German fire brigades; the rest (the older ones) fought in the tsarist army or the army of the Ukrainian National Republic.⁵¹

The UPA’s rank and file attracted new recruits for a wide variety of rea­sons.

Once young Ukrainian peasants joined UPA, they entered the world of the damned. Unless they surrendered to the Soviets and cooperated fully with them, there was no going back. They could not return to their villages or resume their lives as peasants. Only a total victory would assure their ultimate physical survival. “Victory or Death” became their mantra after mid-1943.

Although small OUN-B and UPA units reached Stalino, Sumy, and other parts of Eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian resistance concentrated its activities in Galicia and Volhynia, its home base. OUN-B and UPA estab­lished contacts with nationally conscious Ukrainians in central, northern, and southern Ukraine during the German occupation and sought to raise the local population’s political awareness.⁵² Most Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine, even if they possessed a highly developed national consciousness, recognized that once the Germans lost Stalingrad the struggle for an inde­pendent Ukraine became a hopeless cause.

The German atrocities in Reichskommissariat Ukraine and the victorious return of the Red Army outweighed memories of the Holodomor, the purges, and the deportations of the 1930s. In the people’s prioritization of memories, the most recent horrors of the German occupation took prece­dence over those of the Soviet past.

Since most UPA members came from Galicia and from a peasant back­ground, they thrived on the terrain most hospitable to them, areas which the Soviet military and NKVD did not control completely. The steppes did not work; the forests, mountains, and swamps of Western Ukraine did. Unlike the Ukrainians from Eastern, Southern, or Central Ukraine (who survived Erich Koch’s Reichskommissariat Ukraine), Galician Ukrainians, who experienced a more lenient German occupation (in relative terms) in the General Government, developed a different set of memories and came to a different set of conclusions about the return of the Soviets. Ukrainians who survived life in the General Government remembered the Russian occupations during the First World War, the famine of 1932-3 in Eastern Ukraine, and the Soviet repressions and efforts to introduce collectiviza­tion in the newly annexed areas in 1939-41. Despite efforts by the Soviet regime to institutionalize a common memory of the “Great Fatherland War,” the memories of these negative Russian and Soviet experiences took precedence over the memories of the humiliations and indignities they may have experienced under German occupation.

Inasmuch as the OUN-B and UPA could not outfight the Soviet army, they initiated hit-and-run actions.

Although UPA’s leaders came from the urban middle and lower middle classes, the rank and file came from the countryside. Most of the peasants who voluntarily or involuntarily joined the guerrillas came from families with two to five hectares, households which opposed collectivization.⁵³ As members of a traditional agrarian society, they wanted to protect their modest households, fixed landholdings, and unmovable crops from the Soviets and “to be left alone.”⁵⁴

The fear of the reintroduction of collectivization fuelled anti-communist sentiments more than any other anticipated Soviet action.⁵⁵ The Soviet com­mitment to collectivize agriculture challenged local farming traditions. These peasants, less educated, more conservative, and more religious than urban residents, possessed small landholdings, their primary livelihood.⁵⁶ They had struggled against adverse economic conditions and against wealthy Polish landowners for nearly a century after Austria’s emperor emancipated them in 1848.

Ukrainian peasants supported the armed nationalist cause as long as they believed the guerrillas would protect them from the Soviets. But the UPA could not win against the largest army in Eurasia. Between 1944 and 1946, these guerrillas killed over 16,000, mostly civilians, no comparison to the huge losses (114,200 killed and 130,715 arrested) they suffered in the same period.⁵⁷ These losses (which included a large number of innocent bystanders and draft evaders) shocked the local population, making UPA’s active and passive supporters realize that they could not defeat the Soviets without external intervention, which - despite the West’s increasing Cold War rhetoric - would not be forthcoming.

With a mixture of limited agrarian reform and massive repressions, the Soviet government undermined the alliance between the nationalists and the peasants and the peasant solidarity in the countryside. With the start of collectivization in 1948-9, the UPA may have regained some of its earlier popularity, but guerrilla attacks on collective farms and the destruction of communal property deprived the peasants of their livelihoods and turned them against the insurgents.⁵⁸ This scorched-earth policy became counterproductive.

The longer the Soviets stayed in the western regions, the more time they invested in implementing their counter-insurgency doctrine, honed dur­ing the Civil War and in the 1930s. Its major components included the repression of “class enemies,” agrarian reform, deportations, occasional amnesties of guerrilla fighters, and the creation of pro-Soviet volunteer militias. These efforts produced results.⁵⁹

Between 1944 and 1952 Soviet military and security forces killed over 153,000 alleged OUN/UPA operatives, arrested over 134,000, and exiled over 203,000 of their family members from Western Ukraine.⁶⁰ Of the in­surgents killed in this period, two-thirds died between February 1944 and 31 December 1945. During this lopsided conflict, Soviet forces allegedly lost less than 10 per cent of the insurgent casualties.⁶¹

To stop the local Ukrainian population from supporting the UPA, the NKVD started to deport entire villages to Siberia, as well as all relatives of the insurgents in the spring of 1944. Most were sent to hard-labour camps in Siberia to work in tree-felling operations (essentially a death sentence for anyone sentenced to a ten- or twenty-five year incarceration). In addition to the expulsion of families of suspected OUN/UPA members between 1944 and 1952, the Soviet authorities also removed alleged kulaks, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and former members of the Polish Home Army.⁶² During this period, the new ruling elite resettled many Western Ukrainian peasants and young people to Eastern Ukraine’s steppe region and the Donbass, and many Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine to Western Ukraine. Many volun­tarily resettled Ukrainians from Poland’s Zakerzonnia also ended up in Western Ukraine. In addition to these population transfers, the NKVD en­gaged in mass trials and executions of suspected OUN/UPA members.

In the midst of these repressions, the Soviet Ukrainian government de­clared seven amnesties between 12 February 1944 and 30 December 1949. The government hoped to peel away their ideologically less-committed en­emies (such as the above-mentioned draft evaders and deserters) from the true believers.⁶³ In many respects, these efforts succeeded. From February 1944 to July 1946, for example, 114,809 fugitives surrendered, the majority claiming to have avoided mobilization into the Red Army.⁶⁴ In response to these amnesties, “the OUN killed hundreds of former insurgents, their relatives, and the guerrillas who were merely suspected of intending to desert.”⁶⁵ The underground sought to prevent the local population from cooperating with the Soviet government by “publicly killing those who collaborate^], intimidating others who might seek to work with the gov­ernment.”⁶⁶ As in most guerrilla wars, those who swore to protect the local population now had to kill some of its members to preserve the very exis­tence of its own organization. Without the organization, they reasoned, there would be no armed resistance to the Soviets. This merciless conflict would not conform to any ethical standards. In less than a decade after the Soviet return to Western Ukraine, the government’s repressions, reforms, amnesties, and constant pro-government propaganda attracted “the passive part of the population and intimidate[d] rebel supporters into neutrality.”⁶⁷ The ruthless Soviet application of force and incentives in the context of nearly ten years of Soviet/German/Soviet occupations exhausted the local population’s passive endorsement of the guerrillas.

Without Western intervention, members of Ukrainian society, including the peasants, concluded that armed resistance represented a lost cause. They understood that the Soviets had more troops, were better armed, and that - in light of the Russian occupations of 1914-17, the Holodomor, the Soviet occupation of 1939-41, and the prison massacres of 1941 - they were more powerful and more effective than the Poles and could be more lethal than the Germans. They then reluctantly withdrew their passive and active support of the OUN and UPA.

Recognizing that the political dynamics favouring them had changed, the UPA leaders ceased guerrilla operations at the end of 1949. They could no longer implement their “exhaustion strategy of sapping the energy, resources, and support” of the Soviet government.⁶⁸ On 5 March 1950, Soviet security forces discovered UPA commander-in-chief Roman Shukhevych’s hiding place by means of an elaborate NKVD counter-intelligence operation. Operatives surrounded the house, but Shukhevych recognized the entrap­ment, started shooting, then committed suicide.⁶⁹ Although armed resistance in Western Ukraine continued until 1953-4, it slowly petered out.⁷⁰

Although the Communist Party operated within a rigid ideological frame­work that limited its options, its anti-guerrilla campaign in the newly an­nexed territories embraced flexible and innovative methods. Its successful covert operations, skilful intelligence-gathering operations, ruthless inter­rogations, and well-timed amnesties produced results.⁷¹ “Operation Motria,” for example, represented an astonishingly successful Mission Impossible­type counter-intelligence mission against a high-ranking female OUN offi­cial in Bukovina.

As the result of an NKVD operation in rural Chernivtsi Oblast in late December 1944, the security forces captured two prominent OUN officials in Bukovina: Artemiziia Hryhorievna Halytska (code name: “Motria”), a member of the OUN since 1937, and Myroslav Ivanovych Haiduk. Motria did not wish to be taken alive and attempted to commit suicide by shooting herself in the head. She survived and the NKVD took her to a hospital in Chernivtsi, where she again attempted to kill herself. Although physically weak, she steadfastly refused to participate in any interrogations.

In order to make her reveal the names of her many subordinates, the NKVD counter-intelligence unit launched an audacious plan. Posing as members of the OUN-B, they raided the hospital and took her to an un­derground location, where, representing themselves as representatives of the central OUN leadership, they thoroughly debriefed Motria about the contacts between the OUN in Bukovina and the central OUN leadership, information which Haiduk provided. As a result of this grand NKVD de­ception, the seriously wounded OUN leader revealed the names of hun­dreds of members of the underground. As a result, the Soviet security forces arrested 123 of them.⁷²

Inasmuch as the Soviet regime had few enthusiastic supporters in the western borderlands in the first post-war years, its agents employed cun­ning, deception, amnesties, and mass violence, often simultaneously, to subdue the local population. The Soviets as well as the insurgents pressed the local population to take sides in public. When forced to choose be­tween government violence and guerrilla violence, the peasants increas­ingly sided with the stronger opponent, the Soviet state, so as to break the vicious cycle of violence and chaos.

If the potential benefits of opposing the Soviets in the early post-Soviet period outweighed the costs, by the late 1940s the costs of opposing the Soviets exceeded the potential benefits, which depended on the outbreak of a new conflagration and a successful Anglo-American invasion of the USSR. By the late 1940s, after employing these elementary rational calcu­lations, the peasants concluded that they had to save themselves and their families by giving up the struggle against Soviet rule and submitting to the collective farm system.