The Government Commission Report of2004

From the early years of independence, a commission comprising several Ukrainian historians was tasked with perusing the activities of OUN-UPA. In February 1993, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet approved a resolution “On the investigation of OUN-UPA activities,” and in June 1994, the Ministry of Justice convoked a council of experts to examine the problem.

The key theses (Historical Conclusions) are divided into fourteen sections, thirteen of which we will outline briefly before offering an assessment.⁷ Sec­tion 1, “The subject of research,” points out that the OUN and UPA were dis­tinct entities that performed different functions, and their titles should not be linked by a hyphen. The problem of OUN-UPA can only be examined as indi­vidual entities.

Section 3 is concerned with the “situational alliance between Ukrainian na­tionalists and Hitler's Germany.” It notes that relations between both wings of the OUN and the Germans remained virtually problem-free between Septem­ber 1939 and June 1941. Having no access to Hitler, the nationalists did not know the Germans' plans for Ukraine. After 22 June 1941, acting out of en­thusiasm, but without coordinating their actions with German officials, the nationalists seized power in 187 out of 200 districts of Western Ukraine and 26 districts of Right-Bank Ukraine. They set up regional administrations in Ternopil', L'viv, Rivne, Drohobych, Stanyslaviv, and Luts'k.

By June 1941, Nachtigal was fully staffed with men wearing the Wehrmacht field uniform and included in the special regiment, Brandenburg 800, com­manded by Roman Shukhevych with its German contact person designated as Oberleutnant Oberlaender. It entered L'viv on 30 June and occupied all the strategic locations. Yaroslav Stets'ko, deputy chief of the OUN Provid, de­clared the national independence of Ukraine on L'viv Radio that same night and on the following morning. Members of Nachtigal were then granted a week's leave and German police forces took over the main points of the city. After the arrests of Bandera, Stets'ko, and other OUN-B leaders, Shukhevych informed the Wehrmacht Supreme Command that the battalion would no longer be subordinated to the German army.

Section 5 examines Hitler's plans for Ukraine, noting initially that of the two wings of the OUN, the OUN-B acted more confidently as it was operating on Ukrainian land. Before the German attack, the OUN-M addressed the is­sue of the formation of a Ukrainian state that would extend well beyond the ethnic boundaries of Ukraine, and which anticipated the immigration of Ukrainians in Siberia and the Far East into the new state. OUN-B perceived its relationship to Nazi Germany as one of an ally. It warned Hitler that the German troops would be greeted as liberators in Ukraine, but that attitude would not last unless a Ukrainian state was created. The OUN-B tried to con­vince the Germans that the creation of an independent Ukraine was in accord with Germany's own interests. Bandera insisted that Ukraine could not be treated in the same way as the puppet states of Slovakia and Croatia because of its size and population. The authors make two qualifying points in their assessment of the German-OUN relationship. First, the leaders of the Third Reich did not consider the Ukrainian nationalists a politically significant force and did not wish to engage in interaction.

The question of culpability, in the view of the Working Group, must be ex­amined within the context of time. They comment that before September 1939, the Third Reich had not committed the crimes that any civilized human being shudders to think about. They also point out—and its relevance is not immediately obvious—that the accusers should be reminded that it was the Soviet leadership that had signed an agreement on friendship and borders with Germany. The OUN, without doubt, wished to cooperate with Germany, the authors state, and on the German side, Alfred Rosenberg in particular regarded Ukraine as a very important ally. The OUN leaders appear to have known about German plans to divide the Soviet Union, but they did not know that after his initial military triumphs Hitler had decided to introduce his plans for the creation of a Greater Germany that would include Ukrainian territory. These embraced Himmler's grotesque 30-year plan that envisaged the deportation or extermination of almost the entire Polish population, 75% of Belarusians, and 65% of Galician Ukrainians, some 30-45 million people in total. The Working Group comments that Mel'nyk and Bandera were operat­ing in a situation in which war was a fact of life, but they did not realize that in this way they were subordinating the revival of national statehood to the defeat of the Soviet Union by Germany. The main issues are first, in order to strengthen opposition to the USSR by establishing an alliance with the Ger­mans, the nationalists ended up in the anti-Alliance camp; and second, that they sought friendship with a state that had secret plans to colonize their land, but that they had no prior knowledge of the intended borders of Greater Germany.

Section 6 examines the “Akt” of 30 June 1941, which was clearly an at­tempt at a fait accompli on the part of the nationalists. Possibly they perceived this state as subordinate or allied to the Third Reich but, say the authors in another instance of strained logic, they were not collaborators since that no­tion refers to cooperation between a dominant and subordinate ally. After 22 June 1941, Berlin did not recognize such allies. The authors cite the full word­ing of the Akt: “The restored Ukrainian state will be engaged in close coopera­tion with the National-Socialist Greater Germany which, under Fuehrer Adolf Hitler's leadership, is establishing a new order in Europe and the world, and helping the Ukrainian People to break free from Moscow's occupation.” The damning phrase was omitted in postwar emigre literature and made the main focus in Soviet accounts. The Germans reacted “in a relaxed manner” at first, but when Bandera refused to retract the Akt and continued to insist on OUN’s equal role in negotiations the German attitude changed. Thus the Reichskommisariat Ukraine was established on 20 August 1941, and on 15 September, the security service of the new state sent a report to Berlin, warn­ing that the OUN-B posed a danger to German interests. OUN leaders found themselves in prison, and later in the Sachsenhausen camp, near Berlin. On 25 November, almost five months after Stet’sko’s proclamation, German spe­cial services disseminated an order that all activists of the Bandera movement should be arrested immediately and executed following a detailed interroga­tion. Did the nationalists then adopt an anti-German stance? The issue is the subject of Section 7, which concludes that the strategic line of the OUN was a wait-and-see approach: Germany was a foreign occupier but an armed struggle against it was seen as premature. Until the end of 1942, the nationalists be­lieved that the Soviet Union would be defeated in the war, and they did not plan to begin their armed struggle until Germany had exhausted itself as a military power.

The resistance movement appeared in the winter of 1941-42, and accord­ing to German reports it consisted of the two wings of the OUN, as well as detachments led by Taras Borovets’ (Bul’ba), linked politically to the 1918 Ukrainian government. Among members of the OUN-M, only the faction of O. Olzhych can be considered participants in the resistance, because Andrii Mel’nyk and his associates retained their pro-German stance. Following the resolutions of its Second Conference in 1942, the OUN-B began preparations to deploy its own armed forces in Galicia, Volhynia, and Polissya. In the spring and summer of that year, its actions against the Germans were passive ones, though some rank-and-file units engaged in occasional responses to bru­tal German actions against the local population. Turning to the formation of UPA—the subject of Section 8—the Working Group exposes the fallacy of dating it from October 1942 as in emigre literature, since that date could only refer to the UPA-Polis’ka Sich unit led by Bul’ba-Borovets’. While it is true that armed units of the UPA began to emerge in Polissya and Volhynia in the autumn of 1942, they had as yet no clear direction. So why was the date 14 October 1942 selected as the founding date of UPA? The Working Group explains that the date 19 November 1942 saw the Red Army’s counter­offensive at Stalingrad. By demonstrating that they began to oppose the Ger­man occupiers before knowing that Germany would lose the war, and the Al­lies attain a victory, the nationalists would improve their standing in the eyes of the West. In reality, the UPA undertook no active operations in 1942 since such actions would, indirectly, only assist the cause of the Bolshevik armies.

Section 9 of the Report turns attention to “UPA's anti-Nazi armed opera­tions.” It begins with the 3rd OUN Conference held in the L'viv region, which made a final decision to launch an armed uprising. Yet the choice of the key target remains a matter of dispute. At that time, the nationalists perceived three main enemies: the Germans, the Soviet Partisans, and the emigre Polish gov­ernment structures. Opinions at the conference reportedly differed as to how the UPA should assess its priorities. The local Western Ukrainian OUN leader, M. Stepanyak, favored a large-scale uprising against the Germans and the for­mation of a national government that could conduct negotiations with the Western allies. The OUN leader in the south-western region D. Klyachkivs'kyi and the OUN military leader Shukhevych, on the other hand, thought the upris­ing should be directed against the Red Partisans and Poles rather than the al­ready struggling Germans.

By mid-March 1943, Ukrainian police left their barracks on the orders of the OUN-B and headed into the forests with arms and ammunition. By 13 May, Kly­achkivs'kyi became the Chief Commander of the UPA and its strength reached 30,000 by 1944. At the 3rd Extraordinary OUN Grand Assembly in Ternopil' region in 1943, chaired by Shukhevych, the slogan adopted was “Let us struggle against the imperialism of Moscow and Berlin.” Nevertheless, Stepanyak's sugges­tion to turn on the Germans was rejected, because the Soviet Union was recog­nized as the principal enemy. The commander of a Partisan force is cited as re­porting that “The nationalists do not engage in subversion. They fight Germans only in those areas in which the Germans terrorize the Ukrainian population and when Germans attack them [the nationalists].” The authors state that in the win­ter of 1943-44 the OUN and UPA leaders were trying to avoid clashes with the Germans because the front line of the war was now approaching. Several unfruit­ful efforts were made to negotiate with the German side from March to July 1944 in Ternopil' and L'viv. In July 1944, a Constitutional Assembly of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR) took place, with K. Osmak appointed chairman of the presidium and Shukhevych head of the General Secretariat. The UPA was formally subordinated to the UHVR. An order of 22 August 1944 commanded the UPA group West-Carpathians to close the anti-German front. It stated that the Germans were no longer occupying Ukraine and therefore could not be considered a major foe, and recommended that the UPA avoid clashes with Germans or Hungarians. The historians conclude Section 9 by noting that UPA's anti-German actions in 1943 through to mid-1944 did not have strategic importance in the context of the Soviet-German war. Rather they were limited to restricting the occupation regime's authority in the territory of Volhynia and Polissya, the main UPA strongholds.

Section 10 deals succinctly and negatively with the issue of the SS Division Halychyna which, they say, did not have a direct link to the OUN or UPA, even though individual insurgents may have served in the Division. They re­count the formation of the Division on the initiative of German governor Waechter, and then they apply some scathing criticism: the emigre intelligent­sia was forced to accept the formation of the SS Division because of its de­pendence on the German administration. They tried to justify their actions by declaring that the military formation would serve “the Ukrainian cause.’’ Some propagandists even went so far as to interpret the SS acronym as “Sichove striletstvo” (Sich Sharpshooters). Yet in the authors' view, the Divi­sion was a typical collaborationist formation and had a very negative impact on the Ukrainian cause. The OUN Provid commented at the end of 1943 that the formation of the Division would reflect badly on their efforts to establish themselves as a sovereign political factor, particularly in international eyes. Stalin had wanted its members deported by the Western allies at the end of the war, but the Allies declined on the grounds that its members were, for­mally, Polish citizens. On the other hand, while the formation of the Division was a serious error, there have been no indications that it was involved in war crimes. Its activities were checked thoroughly and its members were then al­lowed to reside in the United States.⁹ The Division, the Report assures, had nothing in common with the elite SS units that comprised fanatical devotees of Nazi doctrine and were stained with crimes. Rather it resembled other SS divisions in Nazi-occupied territories. There were even two Russian SS divi­sions, but, it is noted, that fact “is known to hardly anyone.”

On the Ukrainian-Polish confrontation (Section 11), the working group notes that both the Ukrainian and Polish intelligentsia collaborated with the German occupiers, while the latter were actively involved in inciting ethnic hostilities in the region. Under conditions of extreme ethnic tension, ordinary Poles and Ukrainians tended to lay the blame for their misfortunes on the ri­val ethnic group, rather than on the occuping regime that usually appointed members of the groups to serve as officials. After the formation of UPA, the police—hitherto mainly Ukrainian—were made up of Poles. The OUN used this situation as a pretext to ascribe all responsibility to Poles for the confron­tation and ordered those serving in the local administration and police to leave their posts. Social factors that fuelled the conflict were no less explosive than ethnic or religious ones. The memory of Polish rule in the interwar pe­riod also rankled among Ukrainians. The Volhynia events have been ob­scured, the report notes, because the Ukrainian-Polish confrontation was never mentioned in Polish or Soviet historiography prior to the late 1980s.

However, the working group notes in particular the responsibility of the so- called Volhynia OUN led by Dmytro Klyachkivs'kyi, as well as the entire in­surgent movement, for a massacre that saw not only Polish officials, but Pol­ish women and children ruthlessly butchered. Diaspora scholars generally agree that the Volhynia tragedy constitutes a “dark stain” on the history of the OUN-B and UPA, which cannot be justified or explained. Further, the authors assert, one cannot blame Klyachkivs'kyi alone without laying culpability on the entire insurgent movement. The only way to avoid responsibility was to maintain a silence. Thus Klyachkivs'kyi's name did not even appear in the biographies contained in Entsyklopediya ukrainoznavstva. In other regions, however, it was the Ukrainians who suffered the worst losses in the conflict.

Section 12 outlines the confrontation during wartime between Ukrainian nationalists and the Soviet authorities and begins with the issue of whether the UPA can be considered a Second World War combatant given that it fought the Axis powers and the Soviet Union at the same time. If the point of refer­ence is the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the fighting against the Germans, then the answer is clearly no. The UPA are not participants for those who regard the conflict as the Great Patriotic War. The OUN's and UPA's hostile attitude toward the Soviet Union prevented them from taking an active role in the conflict against the German occupiers. Khrushchev, in turn, informed Soviet Partisans that the nationalists were Nazi agents (in some cases including people who had been fooled by bourgeois nationalist propaganda) and regarded UPA insurgents as traitors who deserved particu­larly harsh punishment. This malevolence was reflected in the mass deporta­tions from the region that began as early as 1945. As the front line moved westward, the UPA and OUN developed more active contacts with the Wehrmacht, and as before arms, and ammunition were exchanged for intelli­gence data. By this time the Germans were prepared to provide the UPA with arms in unlimited quantities and even without payment. Luftwaffe planes de­livered military equipment and arms through established air routes. Data listed in the Report on deaths, captures, arrests, and surrender of insurgents in 1944-45 comply with those cited elsewhere in this monograph. The insur­gents survived the Soviet onslaught and entered a period of post-war confron­tation with the Soviet authorities—the subject of Section 13.

Section 13 deals with probably the most critical issue in terms of healing deep rifts in Ukrainian society. The war was over and the Soviet authorities tried to impose their rule on a recalcitrant region, particularly on occasions such as the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1946. The UPA called on the population to boycott the elections and threatened those who participated in them. Moscow in turn mounted an operation called the “great blockade.” Over 3,500 regular army units, NKVD troops, and punitive battal­ion soldiers were deployed in the western regions between January and April

1946. They blocked off the insurgents’ access to villages during the winter months but failed to eradicate them. The UPA divided into smaller groups and began to use ambushes as the main form of attack. The authorities fre­quently offered amnesty to those who gave themselves up. On 28 May 1946, the Report states, Ukrainian Minister of the Interior T. Strokach declared that a decisive defeat had been inflicted on the insurgents. However, he was obliged to add that a few fanatics continued the struggle. Why did they fight under such conditions? The Report cited a comment from the wife of Shuk- hevych. She told the insurgent commander that he had no transport and that he and his troops would be discovered and shot. He responded: “You know how much I love you. But I love Ukraine even more...” The Soviet offensive was renewed during the period of elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR in 1947. In the countryside troops surrounded the polling sta­tions and the Interior Ministry units killed some prominent UPA leaders. Yet even according to Soviet sources, OUN cells and the UPA carried out 272 armed actions between January and March 1947. Therefore the CC CPU issued a resolution on 5 April “On intensifying the struggle against the remaining gangs of Ukrainian-German nationalists in the western regions of the Ukrain­ian SSR.” Military and security service operations increased and over 77,000 people—”gang supporters”—were deported to remote regions of the USSR in

1947. By 1948, Khrushchev reassigned priorities and ordered the MGB to complete the task of eliminating the UPA. Intelligence played a key role and the priority assignment was to infiltrate the underground organizations.

In this period, the UPA exhausted its resources. Soviet operations, deporta­tions, and collectivization of farms all took their toll on the insurgency, the Report notes. The penetration of the UPA by Soviet agents created an atmos­phere of suspicion and not infrequently the UPA sections dissolved them­selves. On 3 September 1949, Shukhevych issued an order concerning the termination of the military activities of the insurgents and headquarters, and their transformation into OUN-B underground structures. By 1949, the spe­cial groups of the MGB were disbanded. The authors suspect that the reason was they had committed criminal actions and had become well-known to the local population. In late 1949, the notorious P. Sudoplatov was sent on a six- month mission to L’viv with a special operational unit assigned to locate Shukhevych. On 5 March 1950, the UPA leader was trapped in the village of Bilohoshcha, near L’viv, and killed. Other key leaders of the movement were eliminated in 1951-52 (R. Kravchuk, I. Lytvynchuk, and P. Fedun [Petro Pol­tava]). On 23 May 1954, Vasyl Kuk, head of the UHVR General Secretariat, leader of the OUN Provid in Ukraine, and UPA Chief Commander, was cap­tured. After 1954, only isolated actions were conducted by the insurgent movement, which had been practically destroyed. The Report cites a resolu­tion of the CC CPSU of 26 May 1953 “On the political and economic situa­tion in the western regions of Ukraine,” which summed up the results of the struggle between 1944 and 1952. I have divided these for convenience and comprehension into several tables below.

Table 1: State “Repressions” in Western Ukraine, 1944-1952

Number of arrested: 134,000

Number of killed: 153,000

Number of deported: 203,000

Table 2: KGB Figures (1957) on Underground Casualties, 1944-1956

Total casualties: 155,108

In Eastern Ukraine: 1,746

Voluntary surrenders: 76,753

Arrests for “nationalist activities”: 103,866

Including convictions: 87,756

Table 3: Soviet Casualties, 1944-1953¹⁰

Total casualties: 30,676

NKGB-MGB: 687

Militia: 1,864

Servicemen of internal forces, border guards, and army: 3,199

Punitive battalions: 2,590

Members of Supreme Soviet: 2

Heads of oblast executive committees: 1

Heads of city executive committees: 8

Heads of rayon executive committees: 32

Heads of village councils: 1,454

Other Soviet officials: 1,235

Party secretaries (oblast, city, and rayon): 207

Members of collective farms: 15,355

Workers: 676

Representatives of intelligentsia: 1,931

Children, elderly people, and housewives: 860