OUN under Polish Rule

Initially, a number of articles attempted to humanize the OUN by focusing on the lives of individual members. In doing so, the emphasis was often on the cruelties of the Polish regime and the creation of nationalist martyrs.

Ukrainian nation was the highest value, to which all other values had to be subordinated, and the ethnically homogeneous group had to seek to establish the future nation by any means. The “national will” found its expression through a charismatic leader figure, and a national elite that was encompassed in a single party. This same critic claims that the strategic objective of Ukrain­ian nationalism, as outlined at the first OUN Congress in Vienna in 1929, was the establishment of a Ukrainian nation in all ethnically Ukrainian territories.

One of the martyrs described in the nationalist vision of history in the early years of independence was Ol'ha Basarab, born Ol'ha Levyts'ka, in 1889 near Rohatyn. Her father was a priest and a nationalist. She was educated at the local gymnasium and later at the University of Vienna and became active in several Ukrainian organizations: the Union of Ukrainian Women, the Red Cross, and the Sich Society, an organization which also included Dontsov. In 1914, Ol'ha married Dmytro Basarab, an officer in the Hungarian army, who was killed in 1915 at the front. In November 1918 when the West Ukrainian Republic was created, Ol'ha Basarab went to Vienna and disseminated propa­ganda among demobilized Ukrainian soldiers of the former Austrian army, with the goal of building up the units of the Ukrainian Galician Army, now engaged in a conflict with the Poles. After the failure of the republic, Basarab worked for the emigre government of Ye. Petrushevych, but was gradually drawn into the orbit of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) led by Yevhen Konovalets'. While she was working in L'viv, on 9 February 1924, the Polish police arrested her by accident when they were searching for a Com­munist. During their search of the premises, the police discovered materials about UVO and demanded to know the origin of the documents. Ol'ha was reportedly subjected to cruel torture for the next three days, suffering beatings and broken fingers, and she was unable to survive such treatment for long. Finally she scratched the following on the wall of her prison cell with her fin­gernails: “Dying a martyr, take revenge!” The article exemplifies the genre of OUN martyrdom, with a young heroine suffering at the hands of her cruel oppressors, in this case the Polish authorities.

Kaidan, became so haunted by her image that he fled to Western Poland. A local priest passed this information to UVO members, who then organized and carried out the murder of Kaidan, in revenge for his treatment of Basarab.¹²

In the early 1990s, there were numerous accounts about the activities of young OUN members in the 1920s and 1930s, which gradually created a pic­ture of the organization in its early days that countered the prevailing former Soviet perspective. One newspaper interviewed Petro Duzhyi, a member of the OUN leadership (Provid). Duzhyi recounted that he had joined the OUN as a 16-year-old in 1932, after being encouraged by his friend Zelenyi, who was two years his senior. He became acquainted with the OUN ideology through the journal Rozbudova natsii, which was published in Prague from 1928 and outlawed in Poland and Romania. The UVO organ Surma as well as Rozbudova natsii stopped circulation in 1934 after the Polish crackdown on the OUN. In Galicia, OUN supporters could read the monthly Yunak, as well as numerous leaflets, brochures, and books by Dmytro Dontsov. When young people joined the OUN, Duzhyi recalled, they had to observe the forty-four rules in the life of a Ukrainian nationalist, compiled by Z. Kossak, as well as the “Prayer of the Ukrainian Nationalist” by Mashchak.¹³ In similar vein is an interview with Marta Kravtsiv-Barabash, daughter of the OUN Provid mem­ber, Mykhailo Kravtsiv. She grew up in Stryi and attended OUN youth or­ganizations where participants read works by Dontsov. In 1937-38 she worked as a liaison person between Oleksa Hasyn and Yaroslav Stets'ko on the one hand, and the regional leaders Lev and Dariya Rebet on the other. She studied in Vienna and had a passport so that she was free to cross the border regularly.

Another article concerned Oleh Kandyba Ol'zhych, a prominent OUN member and son of a famous poet, Oleksandr Oles'. Born in 1907, Ol'zhych attended the department of archeology at Prague University, where he re­ceived a doctoral degree. In 1929 he joined the OUN, and was on personal terms with Konovalets'. In 1938-39 he took part in the unsuccessful cam­paign to secure the independence of Transcarpathian Ukraine, but was taken prisoner by the Hungarians. At the start of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941, Ol'zhych directed the OUN underground in Kyiv and avoided arrest (the article neglects to state that he was a member of the OUN faction that followed Andrii Mel'nyk). He was arrested by the retreating Ger­mans in L'viv in May 1944 and died in the concentration camp at Sachsen­hausen.¹⁵ The portrayal of Ol'zhych was provided under the title of “the un­known warrior.” Other OUN heroes were better known, including two of the most famous figures from the 1930s, Vasyl' Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn, who fulfilled the OUN mission of terrorism by murdering a Polish postmaster after a bungled attempt to rob the post office at Horodok to obtain funds for the organization. The attack took place on 30 December 1932, and after its failure, Bilas and Danylyshyn fled to the village of Veryn. According to one account, Polish police disseminated a rumor that they had robbed the local Ukrainian cooperative, in order to solicit help for the apprehension of the two activists.

A more elaborate account of the same episode is provided by nationalist scribe Roman Pastukh. He writes that the two young men had been “raised in the Ukrainian nationalist spirit” and enrolled in the OUN to avenge Polish oppression of the Ukrainian population. He states that the action took place on 30 November 1932 (rather than 30 December as cited in the earlier arti­cle). The action did not go as planned and resulted in a skirmish, in which there were dead on both sides. Bilas and Danylyshyn attempted to flee to Drohobych but were caught after the ruse by the Polish police. In Pastukh's account, the peasants were informed of the blunder they had made by Danylyshyn, who declared that “We are members of the Ukrainian military organization. If you continue to behave this way, you will never see a free Ukraine.” The peasants then fell on their knees as if before icons, the account continues. Bilas and Danylyshyn were executed in the Bryhidky prison in L'viv on 23 December 1932. Pastukh observes the ways in which the two he­roes have been immortalized in popular memory, and their exploit has been the subject of songs, reflected in a number of scholarly publications, and their portraits hung in the reading rooms of the Prosvita society.¹⁷ The link between “martyrs” like Basarab, Bilas, and Danylyshyn and the modern Ukrainian state is cited frequently by supporters of the nationalist cause. The sixteenth volume of the Litopys UPA series, for example, dates the start of Ukrainian resistance to the Poles to the action in Horodok,¹⁸ and publicist Myron Kuropas links Bilas and Danylyshyn to later martyrs such as Vasyl' Stus (as well as Stepan Ban­dera), as key factors in the ultimate success of Ukrainian independence.¹⁹ The outsider is left to ponder how the death of an innocent postmaster could serve as an act of martyrdom and courage in the Ukrainian cause.

Some of the more general accounts of the creation and evolution of the OUN are replete with hyperbole. Historian Viktor Koval' declares that follow­ing the defeat of the attempt to create an independent Ukrainian state in 1917-20, the “single force” that carried out the will of the Ukrainian people was the OUN underground, which struggled against Polish domination throughout the interwar period. The programmatic goal of the OUN, he writes, was the creation of a Ukrainian independent sovereign state. Because of its military operations against the Polish government, and its organization of mass protests among the Ukrainian community, OUN members constituted a majority of the inmates of the Bereza Kartuska camp.²⁰ The same sort of reasoning is employed by Stepan Mudryk-Mechnyk, who writes that after the loss of statehood in 1920, Ukrainian resistance did not end and activists or­ganized the UVO, which destroyed Polish settlements in “Ukraine,” deprived Poles of money confiscated from Ukrainians, and punished functionaries of the Polish authorities. In January-February 1929, the First Congress of the OUN was held, and the new organization was created from UVO and a num­ber of Ukrainian youth organizations. The OUN, the author writes without corroboration, “represented the majority of Ukrainians” but representatives of other legal parties refused to accept it. The OUN spread its conspiratorial network and directed the struggle against the Polish government. For exam­ple, in response to a Polish ban on the sale of land to Ukrainian peasants, the OUN constructed grave mounds with the inscription “Ukrainian land belongs to the Ukrainian peasants!” In addition to the assassination of Pieracki, the Soviet trade attache in L'viv was also killed to protest the deaths of millions of Ukrainian peasants in the Famine of 1932-33.²¹

Two serious attempts to come to terms with the impact of the OUN on Ukrainian life were offered in 1999 and 2000 by Mykhailo Koval' and Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi. The former writes that the national liberation struggle of 1918-21 failed to bring about a permanent Ukrainian independent state, and therefore other means to accomplish that goal were sought. The OUN, established in 1929, took on this same task and united the “national-liberation forces” of Galicia in response to anti-Ukrainian policies introduced by the Polish government. He also perceives the formation of the OUN as an in­strument to prevent the expansion of the Stalin regime into Western Ukraine, though such an assertion seems to take advantage of the benefit of hindsight. The OUN operated during a period in which totalitarianism dominated the political landscape, not only in Ukraine, but in most of Europe. The OUN was a product of the epoch in the same way as Bolshevism or German National Socialism, Koval' writes, with equivalents in many of the nations of Europe. In the struggle for Ukrainian statehood and independence, the OUN from the outset relied on radical methods, such as propaganda and terror, to accom­plish its goals. The extreme radicalism of this revolutionary organization was expressed in its program, which envisaged a state ruled by the nation, ex­pressed in a leader figure. In its policies of a charismatic leader, economic power merged with the political authority of the nation, and its Russophobia, the OUN adopted several policies that had much in common with German National Socialism.²² This argument is not new, and was propagated by well- known Diaspora historians such as Ivan Lysyak-Rudnyts'kyi in the 1970s, i.e., that the anti-democratic movements appeared to be the main catalysts for change, and that if change were to come to Ukrainian lands, then it was likely to occur through Germany rather than any other power. Thus the title of this section of Koval's book is how the OUN and the Third Reich took advantage of each other, in fulfilling their political goals.

Kul'chyts'kyi writes less frequently about the OUN than he does on the Famine, but he gives a succinct account of the history of UVO, placing the evolution of Ukrainian nationalism in a pan-European context and observing the erosion of democratic ideologies and their gradual replacement with ex­treme nationalism or Communism by the late 1920s. Ukrainian nationalists rejected the liberal slogans offered by writers and philosophers such as Myk- hailo Drahomaniv and Mykhailo Hrushevs'kyi because ostensibly these poli­cies had failed to provide an independent Ukrainian state. Instead, they adopted the ideas of Mikhnovs'kyi—“Ukraine for Ukrainians!” or Dontsov's more moderate slogan of “Ukrainians for Ukraine!” The Nationalist move­ment, in his view, was set in motion by the formation of the Legion of Sich Sharpshooters within the army of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR). The Legion was disbanded in Prague in 1920, and simultaneously its leaders announced the creation of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO). He describes the activities of UVO as terrorist and directed against figures of au­thority within interwar Poland. In 1921, for example, he cites an attempt on the life of Jozef Pilsudski and the L'viv governor, Kazimierz Grabowski, both of which resulted in failure. UVO also practiced sabotage, expropriations of money, and the destruction of farms owned by Polish settlers. The peak of UVO's activities occurred in 1922 when its servicemen destroyed 38 Polish farms and burned 2,300 items of Polish property, but it is difficult to distin­guish its actions from those of the Communists, who conducted similar tac­tics. The UVO suffered a major setback when the Entente Council of Ambas­sadors gave Galicia to Poland, and a split occurred in the movement, with one faction advocating a united Ukraine and a second backing an independent Western Ukrainian state. The former perspective prevailed.²³

Most writers concur that the UVO was one of the principal foundation stones for the creation of OUN, which—Kost' Bondarenko maintains—“was a classical, radical rightist terrorist organization,” ideologically close to Fas­cism of the Italian type, which was believed to be the “avant-garde European ideology” of that time. He warns that Fascism should not be confused with German National Socialism and says that the OUN did not espouse racist principles. Several OUN leaders were married to Jewish women. However, it was commonly believed in Soviet times that the OUN was financed by Ger­many, and indeed Konovalets' had made use of money from a fund set up during the Weimar Republic to support stateless nations. But by the late 1920s, the Germans preferred to finance the former Hetmanate leader Pavlo Skoropads'kyi, and once Hitler came to power, support for the OUN ended. The new donors were Lithuania, Japan, Italy, and the Ukrainian Diaspora in the United States. Bondarenko gives a lengthy account of the best-known event in the interwar history of the OUN, namely the 1934 assassination of the Polish Interior Minister, General Bronislaw Pieracki. He comments on the cooperation between Nazi Germany and Poland in apprehending the culprits: Germany extradited the terrorist Mykola Lebed' to Poland, for example. Other nationalist activists were arrested and later sent to a concentration camp. However, the trials that ensued in Warsaw and L'viv turned into a fo­rum for the OUN, which gained them huge popularity in Galicia and trans­formed them into the most respected political force. In prisons and camps, nationalists and Communists combined to organize actions against the au- thorities.²⁴ Bondarenko's account is for a general readership, offering one of the most sympathetic accounts to that date (2002) of the development and program of the OUN, but it is lacking in detail. One recalls, for example, Kul'chyts'kyi's earlier remark about the difference between those who adhered to the ideas of Mikhnovs'kyi and those who preferred the writings of Dontsov as guidance for their actions, a distinction that is ignored by Bondarenko.

A recent scholarly account, which primarily focuses on the rival Polish- Ukrainian aspirations during the Second World War, also provides a portrayal of the early years of the OUN as well as the opposing Ukrainian perspective. I. I. Il'yushyn writes that by the end of the 1930s the two major influences on Ukrainians had been formed, but two entirely different ideological-political groupings, the UNDO-UNR (followers of Symon Petlyura) and the OUN. The former included activists and supporters of UNDO (which he describes as “the most authoritative” legal force in Ukrainian national democracy in West­ern Ukraine in the interwar period) and activists of the Ukrainian National Republic State Center in exile, which was the only legitimate carrier of Ukrainian statehood after the collapse of the liberation efforts of 1917-20. Il’yushyn’s use of words like “legal” and “legitimate” imply from the outset that the OUN was something contrived and subversive. He continues with an account of the main figures in the UNR camp. They included leader Vasyl' Mudryi, president of the UNR Andrii Livyts'kyi, the Minister of Foreign Af­fairs, Professor Roman Smal'-Stots'kyi, and the War Minister, Volodymyr Sals'kyi.

The ex-government camp anticipated an armed conflict between the de­mocratic western countries and the Bolshevik regime of the USSR, which they believed would end in the defeat of the latter—the so-called Prometheist con­ception. The leading role in that program belonged to Poland, which would form a federation with a newly created Ukrainian state. Hence the Union dis­seminated the view that Ukrainians should cooperate with the Poles rather than oppose them, and questions about the future status of ethnic Ukrainian territories like eastern Galicia, Volhynia, Bukovyna, and Transcarpathia would be decided by the diplomatic route and discussions with the relevant powers, i.e., Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. In contrast, the OUN perspective was formed under the leadership of Andrii Mel'nyk, following the death of Konovalets' in May 1938. The OUN activists, writes Il'yushyn, had a negative attitude toward any form of cooperation with the “occupiers of Ukrainian lands” and their supporters, among which were considered first and foremost the members of the UNR government. They were oriented toward Germany rather than Poland, and saw Poland and the USSR as their chief enemies. The coming conflict, it was hoped, would achieve the OUN's only goal, an inde­pendent sovereign state that would include all Ukrainian lands “without ex- ception.”²⁵ In contrast to Bondarenko's account, Il'yushyn suggests that the OUN was indeed an extremist organization.