The Narrative of National Liberation
A narrative casting the two organizations as freedom fighters has taken root in Ukraine in recent years. It argues that because the desire to create an independent state turned out to be the definitive factor in Ukraine’s evolution, the OUN and UPA should be treated with respect.
During the war, when Russia (behind its mask of a pseudo-internationalist USSR), Nazi Germany and its allies Hungary and Romania, and Poland all competed for Ukraine’s territories, the UPA was “the only military force then and afterwards that fought for Ukraine’s sovereignty against all its enemies” (Isaievych et al. 2003, 5). In 1944, the UPA created an umbrella body called the UHVR (Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council), which claimed to be a government in the underground representing all parties and tendencies. This 1944-50 phase of the partisan movement is often romanticized. However, in today’s Ukraine, there is little awareness of the OUN(B)'s postwar history, which saw the organization split in 1956 because of the leadership’s failure to support democratic principles and refusal to denounce vozhdism (cult of the leader).17 Both unreformed authoritarians and genuine democrats remained in the organization in the postwar years, a fact that partially explains why in Ukraine today, the liberal-minded and the authoritarian are simultaneously able to lay claim to parts of the OUN’s legacy. It should be noted that the intellectuals who broke from Bandera’s party to eventually in 1956 create the OUN(Z) (for Zakordonom, meaning abroad) supported the democratic program produced by the UHVR in the underground. For three decades they produced the best informed and most influential emigre journal Suchasnist (Contemporary Time), which included articles by scholars of all political persuasions, and their publishing house Prolog issued many important books that educated an entire generation, both in the emigration and Ukraine. The OUN(Z) also produced the most incisive critiques of the Bandera leadership’s reluctance to accept democratic norms (see, for example, Krychevskyi 1962).However, the events of 2013-14 have played the most important role in reviving interest in the nationalist underground. A surge of patriotic feelings and a desire to identify with political militants in previous generations stimulated a search for “vernacular” memory (eyewitness accounts transmitted by ordinary people) and for “official” memory (publications produced by former members and sympathizers of the two organizations). Both types of memory have been accessed to create a positive image of the two organizations. A dearth of probing analyses into their histories, coupled with the need for new symbols to replace discredited Soviet mythmaking, have allowed romanticized accounts to appear. Many contemporary narratives fail to reference the views held by the members of the OUN in the thirties.18 The contemporary “heroic” rebranding of the organizations also omits any mention of the murders
The Ukrainian Underground of the 1940s 121 committed by the OUN’s secret police, the SB, of rival Ukrainian organizations and an estimated 30,676 Ukrainian citizens, many of whom had been forced into collective farms by Soviet authorities (Derkach. et al. 2003, 68-69). The organization’s violent history requires research, whether one blames it primarily on the “racist roots” of the OUN(B)'s ideas (Rossolinski-Liebe 2014, 268) or takes the more balanced view that a general decivilizing process in society was the result of German and Soviet rule (Snyder 2003a, 2003b).
There was one phase of the struggle against Soviet rule in which the UPA did perform heroically and gained legendary status among local populations. This was during the resistance to the population transfers that the Polish and Soviet governments conducted after the war. According to an official Soviet report of 15 August 1946, over the preceding two years, 808,576 Poles were deported from Soviet Ukraine to Poland (among them 33,000 returning Jews), and an estimated 482,187 Ukrainian were moved from Poland to Soviet Ukraine (Gousseff 2015, 195).19
Already in the late 1930s, both governments had attempting to solve the problems posed by their minorities by changing the ethnic structure of regions.
The Poles settled their military veterans in Volhynia and destroyed scores of Ukrainian churches in the Chelm region.20 Stalin deported entire national groups as a way of removing perceived threats to the state. Then, in the years 1939-41, Hitler and Stalin exchanged populations as part of their pact. Families of German origin (or Volks- deutsche, as they were called in 1938) were allowed to “return” to Germany as part of the drive to create an ethnically homogenized Europe, while 13,500 Ukrainian families in Chelm and Volhynia were persuaded to leave for the Soviet Union. While this was occurring, Soviet authorities arrested more than 100,000 people in Soviet-occupied Polish territory and deported close to 500,000—first Poles, then Ukrainians (Mick 2011, 341-42).21 When the German-Soviet war began, the Germans sent 2 million Ukrainians to work as slave laborers in the Reich’s factories and farms. Simultaneously, in 1942, they displaced the population around Chelm, Zamosc, and Hrubieszow, so that 25,000 Volksdeutsche could be settled there.At the end of the war, Ukrainians living west of the Curzon line (in the Lublin, Przemysl, and Lemko areas) resisted the Soviet-Polish program of exchanging populations. The ideology generated by this resistance was double-voiced; the “voices of despair” coming from villagers blended with the “national liberation narrative” coming from Ukrainian nationalists (Gousseff 2015, 270). Although some local people tried to negotiate with the authorities; they agreed to resettle, or—in an effort to demonstrate their Polishness—to convert to Roman Catholicism. However, their pleas were disregarded. Both Poland and the Soviet Union had
decided upon a policy of population homogenization, and resolved to expel the Ukrainian population.
The initial plan, devised in 1944, had been to exchange the entire Ukrainian population of Poland for the Polish population of Soviet Ukraine. It envisaged uprooting Ukrainian communities in three regions of Poland: (a) the northeast (Chelm, Zamosc, Hrubieszow), (b) the south (Przemysl), and (c) the southwest (the Lemko/Rusyn region around Sanok, Lesko, and the border with Czechoslovakia).
At first, 80,000 Orthodox believers in the Chelm region were persuaded in 1944 to move to Soviet Ukraine, but most immediately tried to go back after seeing conditions in the collective farms (ibid., 192-93).The Ukrainian Catholic population in the Przemysl and Jaroslaw regions, an ancient center of Ukrainian life, had already learned of the terrible conditions on collective farms and had experienced the chaos of Soviet-directed deportations. Thousands had waited to be sent to Ukraine at railway stations for months, while armed gangs preyed upon them. They finally returned home and prepared to defend themselves, both against marauding gangs and government forces. From 1944, with the aid of UPA fighters who had arrived from Ukraine, this population of 150,000 put up a powerful resistance to the Polish army. The resulting massacres, rapes, and mutilations lasted over six months, reaching a peak in the first months of 1946 (ibid, 299-300).
In the southwest, along the border with Czechoslovakia, 14,000 in the Lemko and Rusyn populations had also declared themselves willing to resettle in Soviet Ukraine. However, when returnees described the appalling conditions in Soviet collective farms, they, too, resisted (ibid., 141, 159). Nonetheless, the Polish state and its Soviet taskmasters insisted on the community’s total transplantation, and 140,000 were forcibly evicted in Operation Vistula (Akcja Wisla), which began on 28 April 1947.22 Although justification was found in the need to liquidate terrorism, many Poles appear to have supported it as an act of revenge against Ukrainians for their role as auxiliaries in the German police or for the massacres in Volhynia.23 However, the most convincing explanation for these transfers is to be found in the belief held by both Polish and Soviet governments that by consolidating populations on their “home” territories, all problems with national minorities and all forms of Ukrainian nationalism would be eliminated.
In the end, when the Polish government realized the impossibility of transferring the entire Ukrainian population to Soviet Ukraine—because of local resistance, as well as economic and political costs—it resolved to distribute the population over a large area in northern and western Poland, so as to encouraging assimilation and loss of identity.Many officers who participated in Operation Vistula were Soviet- trained Poles. They cooperated with Soviet security forces in a campaign that destroyed scores of churches and burned villages. The entire action
The Ukrainian Underground of the 1940s 123 left a deep trauma in the remaining population and descendants of the deported. It also burnished the image of the UPA as a legendary army of resistance.
At the same time as the actions against the Przemysl and Lemko regions were taking place, the Soviet government was conducting its brutal counter-insurgency war in Western Ukraine, during which an estimated 150,000 local people were killed and 400,000 imprisoned. These simultaneous operations on both sides of the border effectively destroyed the UPA, although a few leaders were only discovered and shot later, in the early fifties.