Master Narrative

The striking resemblance in the “plot structures” and language allegedly used by prisoners can be attributed to fact that the interrogator wrote most confessions and suggested the choice of protagonists, the location of meetings, and the repentant tone.

For example, Mykhailo Kozoris, when arrested in the UVO case in 1933, quickly realized that the investigators wanted to hear about a “nationalist counterrevolutionary organization” with branches through­out Ukraine, made up mainly of Galicians and, preferably—since it was called the Ukrainian Military Organization—of former soldiers or indi­viduals who had connections to the military.²² In two weeks, under pres­sure, he accepted the rules of the game and provided the required account (Rublov and Cherchenko 1994, 107).

Supervisors prepared the script for the UVO case based on earlier depo­sitions by Hryhorii Kossak, who was arrested on 15 January 1931, and Mykhailo Biliach, who was arrested on 4 February 1931.²³ Kossak described an organization of 3,000 individuals, half of whom were members of the intelligentsia and half farmers; 500 had been soldiers in the Ukrainian Gali­cian Army. The GPU elaborated on this scheme until the organization came to include almost all Galicians working in the Soviet republic and was made responsible for acts of sabotage in scholarly, community, and cultural orga­nizations, even among grain inspectors, who tried to “undermine the mate­rial condition of the peasantry and create a state of famine in the country” (Rublov and Cherchenko 1994, 114). Les Kurbas’s celebrated theater group Berezil, which contained a number of Galicians, was described as a cell (HDA SBU, f.6, spr.75608, ark.9). The script identified Konovalets as the organization’s head, and contact with Berlin, Lviv, Danzig, foreign embas­sies, and states. However, the details in the files of different individuals con­tradicted one another, giving different names for cell leaders, disagreeing on membership lists, would-be assassins, and their targets.

The GPU’s master narrative absorbed every conceivable political current—communist, democratic, nationalist—into a single grand con­spiracy that included individuals in Soviet embassies and consulates abroad, the CPWU, the School for Red Officers in Kharkiv, journals like Zakhidna Ukraina (Western Ukraine), publishing houses like Rukh (Movement), and Soviet newspapers. According to this scenario, the UVO’s leadership abroad included the government-in-exile, prominent CPWU members who had rebelled in 1927-28, Sovietophiles like Antin Krushelnytskyi, the leaders of the UNDO, Dmytro Dontsov, Dmytro Palii, the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytskyi, and other figures. To accept this fantasy, one had to believe that these individuals conferred together in Danzig and other places, where they plotted an expansion of their net­work, infiltrated all aspects of Ukrainian life abroad and many organiza­tions in Ukraine, sent couriers to and received them from Soviet Ukraine,

Fabrication of Nationalist Plots, 1929-34 37 engineered the split in the CPWU, gave Western opinion a negative image of the Soviet Union, and received funds from the Poles, British, Germans, and Americans.