The Late Glasnost Period
Though the later years of the Gorbachev administration in the USSR witnessed a reassessment of Stalinism similar to that of the Khrushchev era, the insurgency of OUN-UPA in Western Ukraine over the years 1942-53 remained more or less a taboo subject.
The insurgents were labeled “bourgeois nationalists,” and described as the “worst enemies of the Ukrainian nation,” traitors who fought against their own people and in collaboration with the German invaders. The portrayal was typified by the book of historian V. Cherednychenko, Natsionalizm proty Natsii, one of the basic Soviet texts of the 1970s.3 The era of Glasnost brought only tentative amendments to this perspective. Even two decades later, P. Maksym'yuk and G. Slyvka, making reference to a 1988 book by the polemicist Klym Dmytruk—author of numerous derogatory works on OUN-UPA and the Ukrainian Catholic Church—agree that Ukrainian nationalism was “the enemy of the Ukrainian people, a servant of German Fascism.” They approve of the way Dmytruk debunks the myths propagated by Ukrainian emigre historians about the OUN's quest for Ukrainian independence.4 Also typical were demands for extradition of insurgents now living abroad for alleged war crimes. One such example was that of OUN member Ivan Stetsiv, a native of Canada, reportedly a member of the German- backed police, and responsible for the deaths of several local pro-Soviet activists, as well as 21 Polish families.5 The usual practice was to inform a local village assembly of the atrocities carried out, after which the assembly demanded the extradition.At the same time, Soviet writers and propagandists went to great lengths to discredit scholarship in the West, particularly articles and books that emanated from Ukrainian institutions. According to one author, the CIA began to establish centers specializing in Ukrainian subjects, such as the Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation in New York in 1952, and Smoloskyp in Baltimore.
The American secret services also reportedly created the international Samizdat headquarters in Munich, Germany in 1977. In such an antiSoviet climate, former “Nazi henchmen” were permitted easy entry into the United States and Canada “disguised as scientists and writers.” This same author maintains that the Russian Institute at Columbia University, spearheaded by Philip Moseley, introduced a project for the study of the Ukrainian SSR in three parts, two of which—1917-20 by J. Reshetar and 1939-45 by J. Armstrong—were completed in 1952 and 1955 respectively. Concerning the OUN and the UPA, the contention is that scholars such as Professor G. Strobel of the University of Mainz tried to introduce the notion, “borrowed from antiSoviet Ukrainology,” that the UPA directed its operations against both the Germans and the Russians. He perceives the goal as the concealment of the connection of “OUN bands” with Fascist German occupation and the intelligence agencies of the Third Reich. In 1981, under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the “falsifiers” organized a round-table on the topic of Ukrainians in the Second World War, featuring as speakers Armstrong, G. Kulchycky, and K. Farmer, who tried to demonstrate that the UPA was a popular movement in Ukraine. Such works are familiar to anyone who has studied the Soviet versions of Ukrainian history, but this one surprisingly appeared as late as 1987 from the leading publisher in Kyiv and at the behest of the Institute of History, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.6In 1989, Pravda Ukrainy published a series of articles on the Bandera movement, which investigated both the early years of the OUN and the UPA insurgency. Having condemned OUN's earlier leaders Evhen Konovalets' and Andrii Mel'nyk for “personally” shooting Kyiv workers in 1918, it accuses the Nationalists of the OUN of participating in pogroms in L'viv after the German invasion of the summer of 1941.
The writers selectively employ documents to demonstrate atrocities of OUN-UPA in Western Ukraine, particularly innocent victims such as old women and children, under the close supervision of the German occupation forces. The authors also acknowledge that many OUN members were “simple, honest people” who had been “duped” by their leaders.7 The ostensible purpose of such a remark is to explain to the readers why so many people in Western Ukraine appeared to sympathize with the insurgency in the later years of the war and early postwar years. The campaign against OUN-UPA also required emphasis on the cruelty of their deeds, particularly on individual examples extracted from the general conflict between the various forces. According to one account, the methods used by the insurgents exceeded those of the Germans in brutality. Before killing their victims, it was pointed out, they would poke out their eyes, cut off their noses and ears, torture them using electric currents, and bury them alive or throw them into wells.8The effectiveness of Soviet propaganda about OUN-UPA is hard to measure. But as late as 1991, a date when the press was relatively open, there were still letters appearing in the press about “nationalist crimes.” A typical example came from the Cherkasy region in the form of a letter to the weekly Visti z Ukrainy. Its author pointed out that issue 48 from 1990 had examined the horrors of the Stalin period, “which was all well and good.” But, he wanted to know, why was there nothing about the atrocities of the Banderites against their fellow Ukrainians in Western Ukraine?9 In his article published in July 1991, V. I. Maslovs'kyi writes that there was a deep political confrontation in Western Ukraine in 1944-52. On one side was the majority of population, the interests of which were protected by the Soviet state under the leadership of the Communist Party and Soviet organs. This sector fought for the final destruction of Nazism and now wished to overcome the political and psychological repercussions of the war.
On the other side stood the Ukrainian nationalists and various sorts of German collaborators, organized in military formations and later in an underground army. They fought fiercely against the Soviet state and its people. The peak of this confrontation occurred in 194447. Today, the author writes, as new conceptions of many historical events are devised, political forces in Western Ukraine are changing the narrative. Destructive, ultra-radical forces disguised as democrats not only declare their heritage in the nationalist formations of the past, but also create new organizations for young people. They attempt to rehabilitate OUN-UPA, deny its collaboration with Nazi Germany, and either keep silent about the crimes of the Banderites or present them as inevitable sacrifices for freedom. They sing the praises of these same people as national heroes and erect monuments to the leaders of the OUN. Nationalist ideas appear on the pages of newspapers and all the so-called nationalists, as well as remnants of nationalist formations abroad, call the national movement of the 1940s “the national liberation struggle.”10Maslovs’kyi’s article is an indicator of the limits to a revision of views by 1991. Clearly by the end of the Soviet period, the OUN-UPA was still widely treated as a treacherous and collaborative body that had committed war crimes in Ukraine. The very terms Banderite or OUNite were considered the worst of epithets outside Galicia and Volhynia, the former Polish territories of
Ukraine. Conversely, the memory of OUN-UPA in emigre Ukrainian circles was quite different: one of heroism against enemies that were far more powerful, as it fought a dual battle against the forces of Hitler's Third Reich, on one hand, and the Soviet Red Army and police forces on the other. Over the past decade what may be termed the heroic conception of OUN-UPA, prevalent among these western circles, and perpetuated by the selections of documents in series like Litopys UPA,11 has gradually come to displace the one-sided and partisan Soviet perspective, though it has been a difficult evolution, not least for historians in contemporary Ukraine.