Stepan Bandera

There are few more controversial figures in contemporary Ukraine than Stepan Bandera. A national hero to some and a war criminal to others, he is venerated as a hero in many parts of Western Ukraine, with statues, museums, and even one of the more prominent streets of L'viv named after him.

An early and very negative account of Bandera's political career was pro­vided on the pages of Pravda Ukrainy in late 1990 by V.

His main thesis is the close collaboration between Richard Yarii, a man with long-term contacts with the Abwehr, and Bandera, and that the two worked together to bring down the leadership of the Provid. The implication is that the Germans were behind the 1940 split in the OUN leadership, but soon began to be concerned that the mutual assassinations of key members in the two wings of the OUN might prove detrimental to German war aims.

By 1992, writers in the media were trying to “correct” such harsh interpre­tations of Bandera. Ol'ha Ivanova, for example, responds to a reader from Kyiv who did not understand “how can one glorify someone [Bandera] who killed people?” The author calls on her readers to become nationally con­scious, to cast off all past propaganda mixed with lies that had been fed to residents of Ukraine since kindergarten. Instead one should “look into the face of history with honest and unbiased eyes.” One should not turn away from obvious facts known to the world for years, but which Ukrainians still question.

Several articles focus on the background and personality of Bandera. Ro­man Pastukh has tried to reconstruct the Bandera family history, noting that his grandfather Mykhailo, who was a church deacon, lived in Stryi with his wife Yefrosynya. They had two sons and two daughters. The oldest son was Andrii, the father of Stepan. Andrii studied theology in L'viv University and was ordained as a priest in 1906. His house was something of a magnet for the cultural elite, and was the locale for lively discussions on social and political life in Galicia, with regular visits from people like Pavlo Hlozdins'kyi, founder of the Ukrainian cooperative movement, Yaroslav Veselovs'kyi, a member of parliament, and the well-known sculptor Havrylko. When the Habsburg Em­pire disintegrated at the end of the First World War, the author points out, the Ukrainian Galician army emerged, and Andrii became a chaplain in one of the units, returning to Galicia only after this army was defeated in the field. He continued to serve as a priest in the village Uhryniv until 1933, but by then life had become difficult because the Polish police regularly searched the house because of son Stepan's affiliation with the OUN.

Another biography of Bandera's father Andrii appeared in 1999 in the popular youth newspaper Ukraina moloda. It is reportedly based on materials from the Polish police contained in the regional archives of Ivano-Frankivs'k, as well as NKVD materials made available in Kyiv. In addition to the material contained in the earlier account, it also notes that in November 1928, Andrii was arrested for conducting a mass for slain soldiers of the Ukrainian Galician Army. According to the police report, he was attempting to sow hatred of the Poles and the Polish government, and had argued that Galicia was an insepa­rable part of Ukraine, and sooner or later would gain independence. The criminal case also contained several leaflets, which according to the testimony of the witnesses, were disseminated by Stepan Bandera. Four days later, both Andrii and Stepan (who had also been arrested) were released for lack of evi­dence (November 1928). Andrii was arrested by the Soviet authorities who made use of the criminal case conducted in Poland. In this way a direct link is implied between the two occupation authorities, although these countries had remained bitterly hostile between their two wars of 1920 and 1939. Andrii was arrested again on 23 May 1941, together with his daughters Marta and Oksana in the village Trostyanets' in Dolyna district on charges of hiding the OUN member Stefanyshyn.

Would-be biographers have tended to provide a rather wishful characteri­zation of the OUN leader. One writes that he lived a Spartan life and one of constant struggle for his family. “He was a good man and father, and deeply religious with a strong and forceful character. This is why the Communists killed him.”³⁹ Yaroslav Kitura follows suit, observing that Bandera was raised in a patriotic Ukrainian family and joined the Ukrainian youth or­ganizations Plast and Sokil while attending the Ukrainian gymnasium in Stryi. When he was in the fourth grade, writes Kitura, he joined the UVO and became a formal member of the association when he was a university student in 1928. A year later, the OUN was created, and the 20-year-old Bandera became a member. From 1931 he was head of the propaganda sec­tion of the regional OUN executive branch. In 1932-33 he was the deputy leader of the regional branch. In the 1930s, the young nationalist carried out several “revolutionary acts” against representatives of the Polish and Soviet governments. Kitura points out that the Soviet official, Mailov, who was as­sassinated in 1933, was an agent of Stalin's intelligentsia. After the murder of minister Pieracki in 1934, Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment, but he was freed at the beginning of the war and moved to Krakow. This biographical account is notable for several omissions, most notably the split in the OUN in 1940 and its division into the two wings following Mel'nyk and Bandera. This account would imply to an uninformed reader that Ban­dera was the natural successor to Konovalets'. This same author maintains that Bandera was arrested by the Germans in 1941 because he refused to cooperate with them, and that he was assassinated in Munich by the Soviet agent Stashyns'kyi in 1959.⁴⁰

Concerning Bandera's political thought, another account declared that the OUN-B was different from other political parties. It did not represent the in­terests of a certain faction of the population, but struggled for the liberation of an independent and united Ukraine. The Ukrainian people would have an op­portunity to live well only after it was freed from the tyranny of “Russian Bol­shevik imperialism” and had become the sole master in its own state. Bandera, according to this account, never anticipated that Ukraine would be isolated politically. However, it would enter alliances only when such agreements were made by sovereign nations, as equal partners, to achieve common goals with no privileges for one group of people at the expense of another. The principle of sovereignty would not be broken if such alliances were concluded voluntar­ily “by non-imperialist peoples.” Bandera, in Kitura's view, contended that the major objective for Ukrainians should be the restoration of an independent, united Ukraine through the dismemberment of the Russian empire and the destruction of Bolshevism. The author concludes in the same fashion, taking on Bandera's mantle and stressing the importance of the Bandera heritage for modern Ukraine. “The struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty continues. It will end only after the Russian Empire is completely dissolved, regardless of what name or ideology conceals its real aims.”⁴¹ In other words, just as Bandera can be equated with today's Ukraine, so also can Stalin's USSR be equated with the then Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin. In this way, Ban­dera becomes a modern hero rather than a figure of the past.

In addition to the reinterpretation of Bandera and his relatives in the popu­lar press, other means of resurrecting him as a natural hero have also been deployed. These have included monuments and even a movie. The latter was evidently initiated by the Ukrainian Congress of America, and directed by Oles' Yanchuk under the title: “Assassination: the autumn murder in Mu­nich.” The role of Bandera was played by L'viv actor Yaroslav Muka. In an interview, the actor claimed that the major objective of the film was to fill a gap in history, that of Bandera who hitherto had never been depicted on screen. In “Assassination,” Bandera is depicted as a simple man who stands by his beliefs, rather than the “devil incarnate” described in Soviet-era publica­tions. Muka points out that the idea was also to commemorate people who fought for their ideals, for the state, and who frequently sacrificed their lives in a seemingly hopeless struggle, when it seemed impossible to beat the [So­viet] machine. However, they had also fought for the victory that was finally attained by independence in 1991. It was also important to trace the lives of Ukrainian heroes who eventually resurfaced in Canada and the United States, having fled from Stalin's forces. Muka prepared for the role by sifting through photographs collected in American archives and private collections. He tried to depict Bandera as a real, living person. However, he emphasizes, the movie was not only about Bandera because there were other important characters, too.⁴² By 2002 there were several official monuments to Bandera, including one in the village of Dublyany on the premises of the L'viv State Agrarian University, at which Bandera was enrolled as a student.⁴³