The Long Struggle: Soviet Security Forces versus UPA

The most documented and discussed aspect of Ukraine during World War II is the conflict that occurred in the later part of the war between the Ukrain­ian Insurgent Army and the Soviet security forces of the NKVD.¹ The NKVD was not the only unit involved, many other forces were deployed against the guerrillas, including members of the Komsomol.

1944. It is also possible that it derives from Soviet propaganda organs. It sig­nified that in official eyes the UPA was a close partner of the retreating Ger­mans and fought on their behalf. However, this view was already being ques­tioned prior to the end of the Soviet period. Thus in 1991, a people's deputy from the Rivne region, Mykola Porovs'kyi, was reminding the public that the 30,000 people reportedly killed by the UPA—mainly party members sent to Western Ukraine—was the lamentable outcome of a fratricidal struggle initi­ated by Stalin and his cronies. He noted the crimes committed against the Ukrainian population by the NKVD and demanded the equal treatment of criminals irrespective of what parties or organizations they represented.²

Perhaps the most important article to appear on the subject in the Soviet period was that of V. I. Maslovs'kyi in the journal Komunist Ukrainy. Its ap­pearance in this source indicated that the question was being discussed at the highest levels of the party hierarchy in Ukraine, with an eye to revising the official perspective. Maslovs'kyi remarked that the complexity of the acute political confrontation in the western areas of Ukraine needed to be reflected truthfully by social scientists and historians.

According to Maslovs'kyi, after the liberation of Western Ukraine from German occupation, it was possible to avoid large-scale conflict with OUN- UPA since the armed underground and armed formations of the nationalists had begun to disintegrate politically, organizationally, and psychologically. At that time, over 13,000 UPA soldiers had given themselves up to Soviet organs. From February 1944 to 1 June 1945, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the NKGB, and the people's “destruction battalions”⁴ had eliminated 9,619 UPA troops, 24,888 had been arrested, and 40,395 had surrendered voluntarily.

1944, reprisals had begun against the families of German collaborators and OUN-UPA members. Illegally repressed, with no resort to trial and adequate investigations, tens of thousands of people (including the elderly and chil­dren) were dispatched to remote areas of the country. Such punishment befell not only prisoners, but even those who had surrendered voluntarily to Soviet organs. Such measures aroused a wave of indignation and immediately in­creased the number of people in the armed underground. This factor was the most significant reason why 300,000 people came through the ranks of the OUN-UPA in the postwar years, writes Maslovs'kyi.⁵

Having revealed such astonishing figures, Maslovs'kyi then tries to con­vince his readers that the pro-Soviet section of the population nonetheless constituted a majority. He writes that from the time of the liberation of West­ern Ukraine from the Germans, i.e., from February 1944 until the autumn of

1945, the Soviet army mobilized over 750,000 working class people from these regions, which was 95-98% of those subject to recruitment.

An article reprinted from the Litopys UPA series noted that numerous NKVD garrisons began to appear in Western Ukraine from January 1946. The NKVD would drive local residents out of their houses. These garrisons were moved frequently from one location to another so that their members could not strike up an acquaintance with local residents.

The image was developed further in a series of articles by Ivan Bilas, which appeared in the reputable weekly of the Ukrainian Writers' Union, Literaturna Ukraina. Bilas begins his account with the story of the most treacherous method used by the Soviet authorities to fight Ukrainian nationalists, namely the creation and deployment of special units that masqueraded as UPA mem­bers and as the security services of the OUN. The goal was to compromise the nationalists by killing civilians in the name of the UPA, as well as to eliminate the leaders of both the OUN and UPA.

Similarly, on 9 June 1949, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Tymofii Strokach, sent a report to his all-Union counterpart in Moscow, S. N. Kruglov, in which he complained that there had been several occasions when persons posing as MGB agents carried out robberies in Western Ukraine. The MGB had provided them with weapons but refused to clamp down on their ties to the criminal world. Consequently, these employees pre­tended to be OUN bandits and robbed and plundered the civilian population.⁹ Bilas clearly has perused the archives in depth in his coverage of the role of NKVD-MGB punitive and military units that operated in Western Ukraine as the Soviet fronts moved westward. In a subsequent article, he notes that there were a total of 26,304 troops of military police forces already in action by the spring of 1944, of which the largest numbers were in Rivne, L'viv, and Volyn oblasts. Two infantry brigades were about to be transferred to the region from the Caucasus, and a tank battalion with 22 tanks was also to be deployed. Later a further 7,700 troops were dispatched from Russia, and this large con­tingent would be increased each year to fight UPA insurgents until 1953. In general, these intruders, according to Bilas's account, behaved barbarically. His examples, taken from the autumn of 1944, portray drunken state officials and troops carrying out rape and murder, executing the elderly, beating priests, and setting fire to property. In one case, in the village of Kryven'ke, Ternopil' oblast, 60 NKVD troops under the command of a Major Polyans'kyi burned 45 households, 20 of which belonged to families of sons currently serving in the Red Army at the front. Several senior officials of the NKGB and NKVD were present during this mission, but did nothing to stop the pro­vocative actions of Polyans'kyi.¹⁰

Bilas points out that Western Ukraine, from the perspective of the authori­ties, was a hostile war zone. He provides stark statistics to illustrate this con­tention (taken from 1 January 1946, seven months after the end of the Second World War in Europe), citing the completion of almost 40,000 security mis­sions, the deaths of 103,313 “bandits,” the arrest of almost 16,000 active in­surgents, and the voluntary surrender of a further 50,058. In the second quar­ter of 1946 there were reportedly instances when Soviet soldiers fell under the influence of OUN-UPA and began to slander the kolkhoz system and demon­strate an unwillingness to fight the “Ukrainian-German nationalists.” One soldier, born in Gorky oblast, evidently commented to his comrades: “I am tired of this duty. Why did they bring us to Western Ukraine? We are fighting Banderites but they have done no harm to us.” Crime rates among these troops began to soar, and, as a result of the lenient attitude of some officers, a number of unit commanders had become morally decayed. Together with subordinates, they embarked on drinking sprees and often took part in com­mitting crimes. Torture and abuse, says Bilas, became common in some units, usually involving drinking vodka or moonshine, and then abusing and raping women (including both pregnant women, minors, and the elderly), and fre­quently posing as OUN bandits. On 23 October 1945, Soviet troops broke into a local branch of the L'viv Historical Museum and stole 18 artworks. Some of the items were discovered after an official inquiry, but others were destroyed or used to decorate local clubs. Another such action occurred at the L'viv archives, involving Soviet cadets training to be military cooks who stole 128 valuable documents of Russian and Polish princes. However, the precise link between this event and those involving actions against Ukrainian insur­gents is difficult to discern from Bilas's text. Yet many MVD and MGB com­manders operating in such capacity are cited as committing robberies, often furnishing their apartments with the takings.¹¹ Alongside the rape and pillage there occurred the systematic deportations of large numbers of Western Ukrainians, which reached a peak of 15,597 persons in 1945, and in the pe­riod 1944-49 totaled 50,453 families and 143,141 residents. During the de­portations, the mortality rates were very high, and many died from hunger and cold. At the special settlement, the regime was harsh and there was a high death rate. On 17 December 1948, Bilas notes, Strokach sent a letter to Kruglov, in which he suggested that as a result of the situation in the western regions of Ukraine, the return of those who had completed their terms in exile was “inexpedient.” On 6 April 1950, the USSR Council of Ministers issued a secret directive that revoked the original sentences and stipulated that there were no term limits on the period in exile.¹²

Bilas's account is a very detailed one that offers a picture of the Soviet se­curity forces as depraved and vindictive, while citing numerous examples of individual atrocities that he found in the Ukrainian Central Archives. It was published during the first year of independence in Ukraine's main literary weekly, arguably the most authoritative newspaper in Ukraine (at least at that time). His articles describe a repressive regime clamping down on the “na­tional liberation movement of the Ukrainian people,” but he seems to adopt a viewpoint that is based on a non-sequitur, namely that if the authorities are repressive, then the movement of the repressed is necessarily democratic and imbued with ideas of freedom and humanity. The question of disguise is also an important one, but raises the question of whether such a ruse could not be adopted by the other side, i.e., UPA insurgents posing as members of the se­curity forces. It is also cited in the publication of an abridged version of the report that Koshars'kyi, the military prosecutor of Ukraine, sent to Nikita Khrushchev in February 1949, concerning the activities of MGB special task forces disguised as UPA combatants. This document enables the editors of the newspaper in which it appeared to brand all accusations against the UPA of crimes against humanity as deliberate falsifications of history. They adopt the perspective that all the crimes were perpetrated by the MGB to discredit UPA. Undoubtedly some were, but the statement is too sweeping. The editors cite from the report the detention and torture of individuals in Western Ukraine, many of which had no links to the Ukrainian underground. In gen­eral, the examples replicate those in the accounts offered by Bilas.¹³ An article written three years later continues this same theme. It was evidently provoked by a publication in the newspaper Vil’na Ukraina, in which an author wrote that an UPA unit had killed twenty-two civilians in the village Novosilky. It was based on the testimony of an H. Boshyk, who had witnessed the events in which his family died. The 1995 author, Bohdan Pasichnyk, refers to the Vil’na Ukraina article as a deliberate attempt to create a rift in OUN ranks. He maintains that it is a creation of Bolshevik propaganda, a fabrication that does not contain a single accurate sentence. He rejects the testimony of Boshyk, who was only 12 years of age at the time, remarking that international law would only consider the testimony of those over 16 years. How does the au­thor know, asks Pasichnyk, that these were not NKVD men in disguise? He adds several examples of NKVD atrocities, and then comments that Boshyk himself belonged to a pro-Soviet family, and that two of his uncles had posi­tions in Soviet destruction battalions.¹⁴

Several articles focus on the early days of the UPA-Soviet conflict and the goals of the opposing sides. Viktor Koval' writes that by the start of 1944, the forces of the UPA had expanded substantially, but so had those of the Soviet Partisans. Following a raid by Partisan leader Sydir Kovpak into the Carpa­thian Mountains, the number of direct clashes between his unit and the UPA began to increase. In this author's opinion, the Red Partisans appeared to aid the Germans against the insurgents. One assumes that such aid was indirect. An anti-Communist underground, Koval' adds, was organized on the territory of Western Ukraine at the time of the defeat of the Germans and the arrival of Soviet power in the region. The UPA could not logically fight against the forces of the Soviet Union. However, the OUN Provid took the view that at the end of the war the empire would be weakened, or else Stalin would be obliged to fight a war with the West. Thus under these circumstances the UPA could lead the entire Ukrainian people for the attainment of independence.¹⁵ Koval's namesake, Mykhailo Koval', notes that the UPA was carrying out the orders of the central leadership of the OUN-B and the decisions of the Third Extraordinary Congress of the OUN (August 1943) (discussed below), which prepared the way for armed clashes with Soviet Partisans and the Red Army. The UPA's achievements, he maintains, were remarkable and elicited as much concern from the Soviet authorities as the major conflicts on the war front. Its methods included poisoning soldiers garrisoned in villages and killing others while they slept (Belashivka, Rivne region, 9 January 1944).¹⁶ In these condi­tions, Khrushchev and his associates demanded ruthless treatment, including the hanging of captured prisoners rather than shooting, in order to intimidate the population. In fact, stresses one author, hardly any prisoners were taken as the NKVD simply killed all the insurgents that fell into its hands.¹⁷

M. V. Koval' states that the local population received the Soviet Army calmly and without enthusiasm, with most people staying in their homes and dealing coldly with soldiers and officers when they were forced to come into contact with them. In conversations recounted by Koval' from local residents, many were afraid of hunger and famine if the collective farm system were to be introduced. However, although the Soviet regime assumed control, there was a competing power structure in all areas in which the OUN operated un­derground. Thus the rival network operated in apartments and lodgings, in forests, at regional, local and national levels. Even in those areas in which the Soviet authorities had a monopoly of power, there was “an invisible” OUN presence under the control of the OUN security service (SB). Practically on a daily basis for the following decade there were reports of the murders of party or Soviet government functionaries, as well teachers, doctors, and industrial leaders who arrived from the eastern regions; attacks on the lodgings of secu­rity and internal police officials; and acts of arson against collective farms, agricultural buildings, silos, and barns. Official figures cited by Koval' note that there were about 14,500 terrorist acts carried out by the OUN in towns and villages, as a result of which more than 30,000 people were killed, includ­ing over 4,000 Soviet officials. Why did such a conflict occur? Koval' believes that failure was guaranteed and the costs for the people would inevitably be high. However, the Bandera leadership was hoping for a Third World War and an Anglo-American victory. After 1943, the OUN reoriented itself from Germany to the United States, as the dominant world power. It faced a vin­dictive Khrushchev, who recommended the sort of “dirty tricks” vis-a-vis the local population as described above.¹⁸

What occurred afterward, according to M. V. Koval's account, was a dec­ade-long “secret war.” The NKVD and MVD acted as if they were above party rules, took on the roles of both judge and executioner, and turned the entire territory of Western Ukraine into an alienated zone. He cites the notes made by Strokach, indicating that cities and villages were covered by a vast network of agents from state security that included more than 13,000 secret informers by 1945, and 22,000 employees of security and internal affairs directed into this area. The MGB went from one workplace and residence to another, ar­resting suspicious characters and deporting some 200,000 insurgents. By 1945, the authorities had introduced an internal passport system, and entire villages were denounced as being “bandit” communities. This conflict ap­peared more natural in the light of the developing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Having followed the general inclination to highlight the deviousness of Soviet methods, Koval' then makes a telling admission: there are signs that in its turn the OUN SB also used its own methods to divert Soviet agents. On 29 November 1944, a large group of “Banderites” dressed in NKVD uniforms and surrounded the village of Bilyi Kamin', located between Zolochiv and Oles'ko (L'viv oblast) and shot 18 fighters from a counter-insurgency battalion that had gathered around a silo to deposit grain. This same author reports other similar attacks that offer a wider perspective of this vicious encounter.¹⁹ Stanislav Kul'chyts'kyi has also made the same point, namely that the UPA (in this case) did not hesitate to use ter­ror to control the local population and Soviet citizens who were sent to work in Western Ukraine.²⁰ In other words, although Soviet methods were arguably barbaric and ruthless, no quarter was offered on either side, as both agencies were seeking control—whether short or long term—over the territory for­merly controlled by Poland prior to September 1939. The key question is whether the population was caught in the middle of two warring factions and obliged to choose one or the other side or whether it was a unified population, led by the forces of OUN-UPA in a quest for independence, which is the pre­vailing line of the more sympathetic narratives that began to appear in 1992.

In 2002, Ivan Krainii conducted an interview with the former UPA insur­gent Mykhailo Zelenchuk, which offered a different perspective of the Soviet- UPA conflict. In Zelenchuk's recollection, Red Army soldiers (as opposed to state security and internal troops) were reluctant to fight. Often, UPA troops and Red Army men would pass each other without firing. He concurs, how­ever, with the reports of the vast network of agents and secret informers in Western Ukraine and offers examples, similar to those cited, of operations to discredit leading insurgents, as well as public displays of violence by the So­viet occupiers. Many peasants, he states, gave in or agreed to cooperate with the Soviet regime, but others continued to supply food and clothing to the insurgents. However, by early 1950 the informer network was so extensive that the UPA could no longer counter it solely with acts of terror. His own unit was forced to use different methods. In one village, for example, they dis­covered that the local priest was informing for the MGB. They confronted the priest and offered him a choice: immediate execution or confession in front of the villagers. He chose confession and betrayed the location of the radio with

which he kept in touch with the MGB. Several days afterward the MGB ar­rested the priest for loss of the radio and he received a 10-year prison sen­tence. Zelenchuk also maintains that the MGB used forms of biological war­fare during the conflict, including supplying clothing to the insurgents that was infected with typhoid lice. In his underground bunker, all the insurgents became ill through such schemes, though none died.²¹ The difficulty in assess­ing the nature of the Soviet-UPA conflict, inevitably, is the partisan nature of reports on both sides. Post-independence narratives have largely succeeded in depicting the Soviet forces as ruthless and cruel, and the stories of rape and theft have analogies in the way Red Army troops behaved when they occupied Eastern Europe in the spring of 1945. What remains debatable is the local response and to what degree it reflected the sentiments of the local popula­tion. Further, it is the vast scale of the conflict that becomes apparent from these discussions, particularly from figures on losses and casualties on both sides.

Turning to the accounts by Viktor Koval' (1996) and M. V. Koval' (1999), we find a variety of figures that at first glance appear inflated. Viktor Koval' cites historians' estimates that in the period of 1944-45, the number of UPA troops reached a maximum of 150,000. The UPA “lost” 56,600 dead and had 108,500 wounded. A further 48,300 “Banderites” emerged from the forest after Soviet promises of an amnesty. He remarks that the Soviet side tends to overestimate the losses of its opponents and underestimate those of its own troops—the same clearly might be said of any participant in a major conflict. He relies instead on the figures provided by the UPA command, which re­ported that in 1946 there were 1,945 clashes in which the UPA sustained losses of 5,186 men and Soviet forces 15,645. In 1947, the respective figures were 342 and 1,406. The UPA reportedly attained such a one-sided result de­spite the fact that in Galicia alone in 1944, the Red Army contingent amounted to 200,000 troops, in addition to over 300,000 punitive detach­ments formed from Partisan units.²² M. V. Koval' has added the following in­formation culled from the recently opened Central Archive of the Defense Ministry of the Russian Federation under the signature of Strokach: in the 21 months after February 1944, there were 26,685 armed operations against OUN-UPA. The “rebels,” in turn, carried out 6,128 operations. Up to that date, 98,846 insurgents had been killed, 104,990 had been arrested, and 48,800 had deserted from the Red Army. On the Soviet side, 9,621 people had been killed, 1,343 wounded, and 2,456 had disappeared.²³ In one docu­ment it was reported that during eight months of fighting, 12,500 people had been killed, 146,000 arrested, and 66,000 rebels from UPA formations and underground sections of the OUN had surrendered. As the UPA losses began to rise, Koval' adds, between 1945 and 1948 about 50,000 insurgents escaped to the West, while those that remained were reorganized into smaller forma­tions. Some foreign reports are cited, which suggest that the UPA controlled formally or informally more than ten oblasts with a combined territory of 150,000 square kilometers, and a population of 15 million people.²⁴ Perhaps this is a case of hyperbole, but these authors make a strong case for a mass movement and a full-scale military confrontation taking place within the con­fines first of the Second World War and later of the Cold War.