OUN-UPA in the GULAG

Gulag literature pertaining to members of OUN-UPA is a developing indus­try. Such figures already had a place—albeit a far from predominant one—in the writings of Solzhenitsyn. Narratives that have appeared since the late Soviet period have begun to undermine the existing image of the Gulag camps.

The question of deportations was dealt with in some depth in the late So­viet period by M. Buhai. According to his account the decision to deport fami­lies of UPA insurgents to the eastern regions of the Soviet Union was taken by the NKVD in March 1944. By the end of 1945, 967,085 families were living in special settlements, with a total of 2.3 million deportees from across the USSR. This movement of people occurred at the same time as the forced re­location of ethnic minorities displaced by the war, among whom Czechs, Slo­vaks, Poles, and Ukrainians figured prominently (discussed below). NKVD troikas and special councils of the MVD-MGB supervised the process. Once forced collectivization began in Western Ukraine—it began in earnest in 1948—kulaks and former members of the Polish army led by General Anders were also added to the mix. With the death of Stalin in March 1953, the re­gime’s attitude to the “special settlers” relaxed somewhat, and a USSR Coun­cil of Ministers’ decree of 5 July 1954 lifted some of the restrictions, demand­ing that party organs reintensify their efforts to reeducate deportees and pro­mote their integration into “active political and social life.” However, such measures did not apply to the Nationalist insurgents, their accomplices, fam­ily members, and kulaks. Thus by the mid-1950s, 135,762 OUN members and their families remained in special settlements. On 15 May 1956 another gov­ernment decree rescinded the restrictions on nationalist insurgents, and they began to return to their places of origin. However, the numbers were relatively small. By March 1957, the author notes, 20,043 members of the OUN, to­gether with 22,497 accomplices, 1,666 German collaborators, 5,713 people who served in German military formations, and 6,416 people sentenced for anti-Soviet activity returned to Ukraine.²⁵ The period of the most intense activ­ity of nationalist inmates appears to have been in the 1950s, and particularly in the uncertain time between the death of Stalin and the issuing of the new laws as the Khrushchev administration began to distance itself from its prede­cessor.

A fairly typical example of late-Soviet period accounts is that of Oles’ Ler- natovych, a native of Brody region who served in the Polish army and was taken prisoner. He comments that the German POW camps compared fa­vorably with the Gulag. He was accused of belonging to the SS Division Haly- chyna (see below), and offers a recollection of brutal beatings and arduous work in the gold mines. He weighed less than 22 kilograms when he was in the camp.²⁶ A resident of a camp in Irkutsk, Mykhailo Lutsyk, was the subject of an article by Roman Pastukh in early 1991, who offers a stirring story of Lutsyk’s early career working for the OUN cause. In 1943, it is reported, Lut- syk led an UPA unit that freed 500 POWs from a German labor camp. In the following year he was betrayed by a former POW and arrested by the NKVD in Transcarpathia. In the camp he met a Ukrainian inmate who informed him that the camp guards had massacred inmates after they started a brawl, and only one person survived under a pile of corpses. To protect inmates from a similar fate, Lutsyk decided to organize an underground cell for Ukrainian nationalists, which was called the Ukrainian Liberation Organization (UVO) and founded in July 1945. In the cell, every member knew no more than four of his comrades. When prisoners were transferred to other camps, members of UPA were added to the list in order to organize new cells. In his next camp Lutsyk organized an “academy” and taught history, philosophy, and law so that inmates could defend themselves at interrogations. They learned to make weapons, and reportedly could raise six to seven divisions in the camps. Yet the secrecy level was so high that the NKVD could not penetrate the move­ment. This organization, it is stated, lasted until the summer of 1953, when strikes began in the Gulag and many prisoners died. In 1957, Lutsyk was rear­rested and accused of membership in the UVO, insurgency, and terrorism, and received a sentence of fifteen years, which he served in full before being placed in a psychiatric hospital for a further five years.²⁷

The story of Lutsyk contains most of the ingredients of legend: heroic ac­tivities, followed by arrest, but continued resistance in the camp, and long­term persecution by the authorities.

Having arrived at the Kamyshlag camp in Kemerovo oblast of Siberia, Lut- syk noted that he realized that its purpose was to use prisoners for work in the nearby coal mines. The authorities had evidently sent active young inmates there, most of whom were Ukrainian, with convoys arriving from all over Western Ukraine.

In 1953, as Stalin approached his death, Ukrainian coal miners from the camps were the main organizers of a strike that put forward both economic and political demands. The strike began in Vorkuta on 3 March, and Lutsyk remembers how the authorities tried to prevent other prisoners from contact with the OUN. The situation, however, was unclear. Fellow Ukrainians had informed the strikers of Stalin’s illness and they also had information from the radio.

According to Lutsyk, the critical issue at this time was to maintain a grip on events that were happening all-too quickly. A promising sign was the in­creasing criticism of Stalin. However, he considered the most advantageous development to be the rise of nationalism in the Third World. It reinforced his belief that the foundations of “our Ukrainian nationalism” were becoming a global phenomenon, and that the national-liberation ideology was not reac­tionary but held true for all oppressed nations. It is somewhat unclear whether the reference to the “Third World” is applied to less-developed countries as is sometimes implied by this term. It may refer rather to nations besides the Su­per Powers. By this time (after the 20th Party Congress of the CC CPSU in 1956), discipline in the camps had loosened considerably, and it was possible to dress in civilian clothing, grow one's hair, and visit the city twice a week, as well as subscribe to newspapers and magazines. Lutsyk's sentence was short­ened by 15 years, and for good behavior, one day of a sentence would be counted as three. After a meeting with a camp committee—it comprised 10­12 men in civilian clothes—Lutsyk was released on 7 July. “My joy was un­speakable, but Ukraine was still occupied.” The release was a result, he says, partly of “our own efforts.” A difficult life lay ahead, but they were ready to continue the great ideals and goals of their struggle.³¹ Again, the image pre­sented is that of a protracted engagement that transcended the period of documented conflict between nationalist insurgents and the Soviet regime, with incarcerated prisoners keeping their cause alive while in captivity and claiming to represent the interests of Ukraine the nation rather than that of the relatively small area of the uprising.

Other accounts of camp life for insurgents have surfaced periodically. In the mid-1990s a former inmate recounted his experience in the Spask camp, some thirty miles south of Karaganda in Kazakhstan. He maintains that it was a death camp like Auschwitz, in which people were killed by hard labor. He was sent there in 1949, together with 10,000 political prisoners. The camp was run by a Major Vorobyev, and each prisoner had an ID number attached to his clothing and hat. Adjacent to the camp was a women's gulag, in which Ukrainian nationalist women were singled out for violent abuse. He reports that they would be sent into a camp for common criminals for a night and raped. “The guards laughed: ‘Let the fellows have some fun with these Bande­rites. They wanted an independent Ukraine'.”³² More recently an interview was held with Mykola Symchych, an insurgent who spent a total of thirty-two years in Soviet camps and prisons. His unit was encircled by MGB troops on a cold winter night and he was taken prisoner in an unconscious state after the house in which he was staying was set on fire. He was placed in Ivano- Frankivs'k prison where MGB officers tried to persuade him to defect. Fol­lowing his refusal he received a 25-year sentence in the Gulag. He maintains that in 1953, the Bandera prisoners rose up against the criminals; and for his participation in this clash, Symchych received an additional ten years to his sentence. He was transferred to Kolyma to extract lime, which brought on lung disease. His group refused to work there and received a further five years each. Later he served time in Perm region where he encountered many of the so-called 60ers. He portrays these dissidents as successors to the UPA, people who enabled the world to learn about the Ukrainian liberation movement. The author refutes the possible impression that the UPA looked down on the 60ers as Soviet people rather than sincere nationalists. Rather the dissidents were the carriers of the national message into a new generation.³³