Personalities and Heroes
To reverse the Soviet perspective of the armed insurgency, nationalist historians have produced new narratives that describe the bold and heroic deeds of individual members of the UPA troops.
This device has been employed consistently in the nationalist as well as the non-nationalist media of Ukraine in the independence period. The ostensible goal has been to add OUN-UPA members to a pantheon of local heroes that has appended to the list of Boh- dan Khmelnyts'kyi, Ivan Mazepa, and Symon Petlyura, the names of Yevhen Konovalets', Roman Shukhevych, and Stepan Bandera, and a host of lesser figures, all of which are said to have had as their primary goal the attainment of an independent Ukrainian state.22 Such articles date from the first months of Ukrainian independence. They include the story of Yaroslav Halashchuk, a former member of an UPA hundred who spent 44 years in hiding, after concealing himself in his sister's house in 1948, and avoiding the MGB by hiding in a closet.23 Another “hero” was Petro Fedun, a native of the town of Brody, and former member of the Red Army who later fell into German captivity. In 1943 he joined the UPA, losing his brother, a fellow member in 1946, and witnessing the deportation of his parents to Siberia. Under the pseudonym Petro Poltava, Fedun became one of the main ideologues of the underground, counteracting the figure of the “new Soviet man” with the Ukrainian patriot, who knows and is proud of Ukraine's past, and for whom the highest principle is “the good of the nation.”24More common were tales of the heroism of UPA members, and conversely the crimes and general moral degeneracy of their Soviet opponents. An article about the UPA fighter Petro Saranchuk, for example, notes that the first drunken people he ever met were “Soviets.” Saranchuk was earmarked for forced labor in Germany, but escaped from the train and joined the UPA in the forest, even though he was only 14 years of age.
The young conscript organized teenagers from neighboring villages, and convinced them to steal weapons from the Germans. Later, while imprisoned in the Gulag—having been arrested by the NKVD in 1946—Saranchuk was reportedly among the organizers of a rebellion in the camp at Noril'sk.25 The legendary UPA insurgent, Roman Riznyak-Makomats'kyi, together with a companion, disguised himself as a Soviet officer sometime in late 1945 or early 1946, and held up a staff car containing the head of the Drohobych MGB, Saburov. Saburov's life was spared in return for a box of secret documents. In 1948, however, Mako- mats'kyi was ambushed by the MGB and incarcerated. Allegedly his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at the behest of his former captive Saburov.26 The Makomats'kyi story is somewhat unusual in that the MGB representative appears to have a human side. However, the stories vary, and occasionally one reads of UPA members who were not heroes and even vacillated in loyalty between UPA and the authorities, such as Luka Pavlyshyn, who initially had opposed the OUN policy of terrorism in interwar Poland, and was later accused of collaboration with the Soviet forces. Accused by nationalists of betraying the location of UPA leader Roman Shukhevych, Pavly- shyn was arrested by the Soviet authorities a week after Shukhevych's death and imprisoned in the Gulag.27Dmytro Hrytsai joined the underground OUN in the early 1930s and was among those arrested for the assassination of Polish Deputy Defense Minister Bronislaw Pieracki. He spent two years in the concentration camp at Bereza Kartuska and “the Poles beat him cruelly.” In 1939, when the German army invaded Poland, Hrytsai was arrested again by the Polish authorities, but he escaped when the Polish guards deserted their post. He was among those who proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in L'viv on 30 June 1941. In 1943, the Germans arrested Hrytsai, but he was freed “miraculously” by the OUN, who managed to bribe a German prison guard, after which OUN troops, dressed as German guards, escorted him out of L'viv.
He later became a well-known UPA general who was killed in December 1945.28 Another victim of the Germans portrayed in narratives of the early years of Ukrainian independence was Andrii P'yasets'kyi, Minister of Forestry in the government of Stets'ko. He was born in 1909 in Velyki Mosty (L'viv region), and lost an older brother, who died in 1919 serving in the Ukrainian Galician Army. An- drii was a member of the scouting organization Plast, which was dissolved by the Polish authorities during the Pacification of Ukrainian regions. P'ya- sets'kyi graduated from the L'viv Polytechnical Institute and worked in an office that looked after forests on private estates. One of his “customers” was the Greek Catholic Church. In 1941 he was arrested by the NKVD and imprisoned not far from L'viv. On 30 June 1941, he was appointed Minister of Forestry in the newly proclaimed Ukrainian government and organized a research institute. He protested the Germans' cutting down of forests in the following year, after which the Yaniv forests were declared a scientific reserve. The article claims that P'yasets'kyi's initiatives irritated the Germans and thus they arrested him. He was executed together with 99 other hostages in retaliation for the murder of a German police officer.29A fairly typical story is that of Ivan Klymiv-Lehenda, a native of the village Sol'tsi (Sokal' District, L'viv Oblast), who became an OUN member after entering the law faculty at L'viv University. During the Polish pacification campaign, Klymiv was arrested in his native village in September 1930 and “cruelly beaten” by police and gendarmes. In 1932 he was rearrested and given a six-month prison sentence. In 1933 he was sentenced again. In 1936, he began to train OUN members and took the name “Lehenda.” Imprisoned following a trial of forty-two Ukrainian students in Luts'k in 1937, he was freed when the war broke out. He organized the evacuation of Ukrainians from Soviet to German-occupied Poland, and was a close collaborator of Stets'ko in the summer of 1941.
The story continues to relate how he saved Jews and spread the OUN network into Eastern Ukraine. He was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1942 and killed shortly afterward.30 In a subsequent article on the same subject, the same author adds to the biography of Lehenda, noting that in 1935 he spread the OUN's network into Volhynia, as a result of which he was arrested in Luts'k in 1937. During his work in Soviet-occupied Poland, he was responsible for the evacuation into German-held territory of businessmen, priests, lawyers, and writers, and he maintained close contacts with Metropolitan Andrii Sheptyts'kyi in Krakow. When the war broke out, he led mobile groups into Eastern Ukraine, managing to evade arrest for some time by establishing friendly relations with Slovak officers. As with several other nationalist heroes, the story is of a figure who initially seems to have been prepared to cooperate with the Germans (moving people into the German-occupied zone is clear evidence that the USSR was considered the hostile power), but eventually fell foul of them and suffered death as a result.Volodymyr Shchyhel's'kyi (Burlaka) was another legendary UPA commander who led a “hundred” in the territories of the Zakerzonnya (Eastern Poland after the Second World War). He began his service in the Ukrainian police, and in June 1944, on the orders of the UPA, he and his police unit retreated to the Carpathian Mountains. His first combat operation took place in the Stanyslaviv (Ivano-Frankivs’k) region, when his hundred defeated an NKVD unit. In Zakerzonnya, his operations were directed against Poles. The 1947 agreement between the police forces of the USSR and Poland (Czechoslovakia was also a signatory) made UPA operations in Zakerzonnya impossible, particularly after those sympathetic to the insurgents were deported. Bur- laka’s unit was moving westward when it was ambushed by Czechoslovak troops. Burlaka was captured in 1947 and extradited to Poland two years later.31 By contrast, Kharkiv native Andrii Matviyenko entered the UPA via the Red Army, in which he was a lieutenant.
In June 1944, a military tribunal sentenced him to death for desertion. He was imprisoned in L’viv but together with a number of inmates he managed to escape during a German air raid. His desertion is portrayed in the nationalist press as a conscious rejection of Stalinism. He joined the UPA and married a woman from Galicia. During his activities, the NKVD deported Matviyenko’s wife and their small child to Siberia as punishment for their link to “an enemy of the people.” Matviyenko was in charge of an UPA security unit and took the name “Zir.” His exploits included the destruction of a large NKVD unit at the village of Yasinka in 1947. In 1949, he was surrounded by NKVD troops and took his own life. The author comments that the Soviet authorities refused to rehabilitate Matviyenko, a state of affairs that the author hopes will be remedied by independent Ukraine.32Occasionally there are attempts to reconcile the two visions of the war years in Ukraine. Nina Romanyuk focuses specifically on Ukrainian women in the OUN and UPA. She asks whether the Kharkiv nurse working for the Red Army knows that while she carried out her daily work at the front, somewhere far away in Volhynia friends of her age were dying in a different war. They died in disgrace, cursed and forgotten for decades, but all the same young, naive, and committed to their Motherland, albeit a different one. She asks whether that same Kharkiv nurse would be aware that young Ukrainian girls took care of wounded men in the underground hospitals of the UPA, risking their lives, daily and hourly, just like she did. The names of these UPA nurses are not imprinted on memorials and traces of their graves have long since been obliterated by tractors and bulldozers. Someone might erect a cross to commemorate them, but it would be destroyed again and again. Their photographs remained in the archives of the MGB, along with laconic inscriptions like “sentenced” or “killed in the bunker.” The author then provides several biographical accounts of UPA women that she found in the MGB archives.
Included among them is that of Nadiya Borodyuk (born 1921) who heard about the OUN from her brother in 1936, and began to read the Decalogue and underground literature though she did not participate formally in any organizations. She was very much affected by the NKVD massacres of prisoners in Western Ukraine prior to the Soviet retreat from the Germans. In March 1942 she came into contact with the OUN and was ordered to organize a women's network in the district. She left her autobiography in a bunker, with the last entry dated 19 January 1948. On 12 March 1949, the note was found in the bunker by the NKVD after its inhabitants had all been killed. Romanyuk also relates the stories of other women killed in postwar conflicts with the Soviet security forces, including one who collected linen for the insurgents, a typist of the local OUN branch in Hirka Polonka, Luts'k region, and the owner of a house who provided a bunker for the insurgents.33A somewhat different vision is presented in the account of Luka Pavly- shyn's grandfather, who died in 1987. Pavlyshyn studied at the L'viv teachers' training seminary, became involved with the nationalist movement, and began to read the works of Dontsov. He did not fully accept the nationalist Decalogue, and advocated ideas more akin to democracy and humanism. Reportedly he also opposed the OUN's campaign of terrorism in interwar Poland. Nevertheless, Pavlyshyn did become a member of the OUN in 1937, and as a graduate of a Polish military school he was responsible for training peasants in the techniques of warfare. In 1939, he appeared in Krakow, where he made the acquaintance of a number of prominent figures, such as Roman Shuk- hevych (the future commander of the UPA) and Yaroslav Stets'ko. In 1941 he was among those OUN scouting missions dispatched into Eastern Ukraine and subsequently became a member of the UPA. The author offers a sympathetic account of the activities of his grandfather in 1944-47, but it is also evident that he is seeking to defend him from accusations (from OUN-B members) of collaboration with the Soviet authorities. The author maintains that his grandfather worked in the OUN underground and kept in contact with Shukhevych. He responds to reports that Pavlyshyn betrayed the UPA commander by stating that his grandfather and family were arrested one week after Shukhevych's death in 1950. He also describes how in the Gulag, Pavly- shyn organized a prisoners' rebellion. The author concludes by stating that
Some patriots died for the idea, others betrayed it to survive. My grandfather did what he could for Ukraine, but he was not a hero. He survived because he chose the middle ground, saying ‘If we cannot be lions, let us be sly foxes.' The key point is that he did not betray anyone; rather he offered assistance to many people.34
In some reports, the hero figure is forced to serve two masters, and most often joined the UPA before being drafted into the Red Army. One case is that of Kostyantyn Oksenyuk, who was forced to join the UPA after an UPA representative arrived in his village and demanded that every family should send one representative to the insurgents. During his time in the UPA, Ok- senyuk reportedly was engaged in fighting the Germans on eight different occasions. Meanwhile Soviet Partisans attacked the village of Huta Lisovs'ka and beheaded several villagers, demanding to know where “Banderites” were hiding. The same village was later destroyed by the Germans. In the spring of 1944 as the front moved to the west, Oksenyuk returned to his village and was drafted into the Red Army, serving in a punitive battalion before he returned home in 1946. He was arrested on suspicion of supplying food to the “Banderites” and was tortured by the NKVD. On one occasion near his village, Ok- senyuk was obliged to bury slain insurgents in a common grave at Kolky cemetery. After the war he worked on a collective farm, but was never able to shake off the accusations of being linked to the insurgents, and was unable to acquire the status of a war invalid.35 Likewise, Ivan Ivanych joined the UPA as an 18-year old to avoid being sent for forced labor in Germany. In October 1943 his unit was attacked by German forces and Ivanych made for his native village. Three months later he was mobilized into the Red Army. However, in 1947 he was arrested as a former insurgent, despite the fact that he held Soviet military decorations.36