Konovalets'

One of the most important tasks of those propagating new analyses of the OUN and its incorporation into the mainstream of Ukrainian history is the examination of individual leaders, their lives, and policies.

Konovalets' is one of the most important early leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist cause. At the end of 1938, an editorial in Literaturna Ukraina states, Yevhen Konovalets' tragically lost his life at the age of only 47. He was a colonel in the army of the Ukrainian National Republic, a military leader and politician, commander of the UVO, and Chairman of the Provid of Ukrainian Nationalists.²⁶ However, from the nationalist perspective, his name had been “tarred” by both Bolshevik propagandists and well-known Communist professors. Therefore, Ihor Hulyk, writing in the late Soviet period, sets himself the task of informing the public about Konovalets' and his relevance to the modern Ukrainian state. The article is a straightforward attempt “to set the record straight.” Hulyk notes that Konovalets' was born on 14 June 1891 in the village of Zashkiv (L'viv region). His father was a teacher and supporter of the Ukrainian idea. After finishing the gymnasium, Konovalets' entered the Faculty of Law at L'viv University, and during this period he participated in Prosvita, Ukrainian cooperatives, and the Ukrainian Students' Union. One of the major influences on his ideological outlook was Dontsov. Prior to the First World War, Kono- valets' organized the Sich Sharpshooters. In 1915, fighting on the Austrian side, he was taken prisoner by Russian forces, but he subsequently took part in the formation of the Ukrainian National Republic in Kyiv, and also organized a Galician branch of the Sharpshooters.²⁷

Hulyk's message is explicitly political and he draws a direct line between Konovalets' public career and the situation in Ukraine today.

The struggle for the nation is a lengthy one and “cannot be carried out with kid gloves.” If Ko- novalets' outlook is projected to the present day, declares the author, then its relevance is self-evident. The Galician youngsters' resistance to the Bolsheviks played a direct role in the issuance of the Fourth Universal in January 1918 by which Ukraine declared its full independence from Russia. When Skorop- ads'kyi came to power (at the behest of the German occupation regime), Ko- novalets' proposed an alliance by which the Sharpshooters would support his regime if it confirmed the idea of a sovereign and independent Ukraine. On the other hand, he (Konovalets') refused to assist the West Ukrainian Republic in its conflict with the Poles and did not participate in its alliance with the White Russian general, Anton Denikin. In 1920, Konovalets' created the UVO, which provided both military training for young Ukrainians as well as “political enlightenment.” When Galicia was attached to Poland in 1923, UVO abandoned its enlightenment ideology and four years later, in the wake of the assassination of Symon Petlyura, Konovalets' was able to unite the disjointed nationalist organizations with the first OUN Congress in 1929. In the 1930s, the author writes, Konovalets' lived a precarious existence in Switzerland where he was monitored by Polish police and was the subject of assassination attempts by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. On 23 May 1938, the NKVD finally succeeded, by arranging a meeting with Konovalets' at the Cafe Atlanta in Rotterdam, Holland, and passing on to him a package that exploded. The OUN Provid declared that Moscow had recognized that Kono- valets' represented Ukraine, and Ukraine is Konovalets'. “History confirmed the truth of these words,” writes Hulyk, and “Konovalets' is coming back to us.”²⁸

The same story, with a few modifications, is provided by Volodymyr Yavors'kyi. In 1915, he states, after his capture by the Russian army, Konovalets' spent two years at a Russian POW camp near Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad, today Volgograd).

After the February Revolution broke out in Russia he was freed to travel to Kyiv, where he met with M. Mikhnovs'kyi, and the two Ukrainian leaders began to organize the Ukrainian armed forces, the Sharpshooters' Legion. He imposed strict discipline on his troops and on 18 January 1918, his unit crushed a rebellion at the Kyiv arsenal. He agreed to work for Hetman Skoropads'kyi but only on the condition that the latter would support the Ukrainian cause. Whereas Skoropads'kyi turned to the Russian White Guardists for support, Konovalets' switched his allegiance to the UNR leaders, Petlyura and Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The collapse of the UNR government, the Directory, led Konovalets' to ponder the causes of the defeat, and he reached the conclusion that it had resulted from an underestimation of the Ukrainian national idea, weak discipline in the armed forces, and the “socialist utopianism” of many of the Directory leaders. In the future, writes Yavors'kyi, Konovalets' decided that the struggle for liberation must be based on quite different principles: strength and the nation. Under his leadership the OUN became very active, both in Poland and the Ukrainian SSR, in responding to the Pacification in Poland, and Soviet repressions in Ukraine. As for the death of the OUN leader, Yavors'kyi writes that in Rotterdam he was supposed to meet an OUN delegate from Eastern Ukraine called Valyukh, who turned out to be an agent of the NKVD. By 1992, it became known that the figure who organized the murder was P. A. Sudoplatov.²⁹

Much of the mystery surrounding Konovalets', an upright military figure, has centered on his untimely death and subsequent martyrdom. Thus there are a number of articles that focus on his murder. We will cite two examples here. In 1992, the all-Ukrainian association “Derzhavna Samostiinist' Ukrainy” sent a request to the Prosecutor-General of Ukraine to initiate a criminal case against Pavel Anatol'evich Sudoplatov, a retired general lieutenant in the KGB, born in 1907 and currently residing in Moscow.

The pretext of this appeal, writes Mykola Oleksyuk, was a letter from Sudoplatov to the 23rd Congress of the CC CPSU, in which he clearly and unambiguously stated that on 23 March 1938 in Rotterdam, fulfilling the orders of the Central Committee, he personally eliminated Yevhen Konovalets' using a bomb. This author goes further, however, and accuses Sudoplatov also of murdering the Ukrainian Communist writer Yaroslav Halan in 1949.³⁰ A later article comments that in 1937 the NKVD succeeded in planting an agent inside the OUN, a man called Lebed'. According to Sudoplatov, who was behind the murder of Konovalets', Lebed' was an officer in the Austrian army who served in the war alongside Konovalets'. Reportedly, Lebed' introduced Konovalets' to a man called Valyukh (Sudoplatov), claiming that the latter was a secret member of the OUN. The attack, according to this article, was planned meticulously. In addition to an explosive device, Sudoplatov was equipped with a gun and a large sum of money. He met Konovalets' in the “Atlanta” restaurant and they arranged a second meeting a few hours later. Valyukh gave Konoval- ets' a box of chocolates as a small gift (which later exploded). After the meeting, Sudoplatov left for Paris and subsequently Barcelona. Konovalets' was buried on 23 May in a funeral attended by Ukrainian general Kurmanovych, several nationalists, and a Lithuanian consul.³¹

The significance of these lengthy descriptions is in the link between the past and the present. Sudoplatov, who died in September 1996, is better known for his role in the assassination of L. D. Trotsky in 1940, and for his role in the Soviet atomic project. In some ways he appears the archetypal evil Soviet agent. In this instance he is revealed belatedly to have been the man behind the assassination of one of Ukraine's new heroes, a man bedeviled in his lifetime by adverse depictions of his career, but now perceived as a genuine hero of Ukraine who elevated nationalism and military discipline as the main watchwords in order to attain his future goal.

Sudoplatov, on the other hand, despite his mixed Ukrainian-Russian parentage and Ukrainian birth, represents the truculence of both the Soviet Union and Russia: devious, cunning, and treacherous. Strangely there is a scarcity of discourse about Kono- valets' chosen successor, Andrii Mel'nyk, probably because of the fractious split in the OUN two years later that divided it into two wings: that under Mel'nyk and that under the younger, more dynamic, and more extremist Stepan Bandera. Bandera, on the other hand, is the subject of polemics both for and against him, and in the pantheon of national heroes, it is Bandera—at least in terms of discussion in the newspapers and journals surveyed—who takes his place alongside Konovalets' prior to the UPA leader Roman Shuk- hevych on the national stage. This statement is not to say that Mel'nyk was a less important or even more diplomatic and sensible leader than the headstrong Bandera; it rather suggests that he was less charismatic and unlikely to encourage fanaticism and self-sacrifice on the part of his followers. For this reason, rather than any objective choice, the next figure for focus in this discussion of late- and post-Soviet discourse is Bandera.

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Source: Marples David R.. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. udapest—New York: Central European University Press,2007. — 363 p.. 2007

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