The Nazi-Soviet Pact and its Aftermath

The period of 1939-41 is a critical one in Ukrainian history and for the OUN-B. It begins with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939, an event that led to the reunification of Ukrainian lands inside a single republic, similar to the borders of the contemporary state.⁵⁰ This event has been the subject of an ac­claimed book by the Polish-American historian Jan Gross, which provides an accurate perspective of the mixed blessings of Soviet rule for the local popula­tion.⁵¹ From the Soviet perspective, the Pact with Hitler was a strategic neces­sity that led directly to the “liberation” of territories that had long yearned for reunion with their ethnic counterparts in Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorus- sia.

One of the earliest discussions of the Perestroika period to comment on the consequences of the Pact with Hitler appeared in October 1988 in a L'viv newspaper. The article, by S. Makarchuk, set out to explain how Western Ukraine became part of the USSR after the Soviet invasion of 17 September 1939.

A deputy of the L'viv city council, V. E. Honcharuk, addressed the “Act of Union” of Western Ukraine with Soviet Ukraine in a speech of early 1991.

In this same year of 1991, historian V. Kovalyuk examined the impact of the Ukrainian question on the making of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He agrees with the emigre historian Basil Dmytryshyn that the Ukrainian question was one of Stalin's key considerations in pursuing an agreement with Germany. The Germans sought to use the Ukraine issue to destabilize Poland, thus using the OUN underground, but never contemplated seriously the formation of an in­dependent Ukrainian state.

The Pact receives short shrift from historian Yurii Shapoval. He notes that Communists “then and now” have claimed that the Pact permitted the post­ponement of the inevitable conflict between Hitler's forces and the Red Army for 20 months, but says that this is only part of the story. In fact, Stalin's re­gime had violated the very principles of Leninist diplomacy that opposed any secret treaties. How can one ignore the fact that the Pact led to the dissolution of the Polish state, he asks? Such an agreement was brazen aggression that had little to do with the liberation of Ukrainian and Belarusian territories, par­ticularly when one takes into account the NKVD reprisals against the local population that occurred after 1939.

We older people became accustomed to many things under the Soviets. We learned not to be surprised by anything. But the young people are not only shocked, they are also angry. In the demonstrations of friendship with the instigators of pogroms they see treason on the part of the party leader­ship. We teach young people to hate Fascism and yet Stalin stands along­side these people.

Shapoval stresses that the secret protocols that supplemented the Pact— specifying the division of Polish and Baltic territories between Germany and the Soviet Union—were unknown not only to the population, but also to many Politburo and Central Committee members. They were thus manifesta­tions of Stalin's personal authority that did not reflect the mood of the people, who could not understand why it was necessary to form an alliance with the enemy. Shapoval discusses the disruptive impact of the Pact on Communist parties worldwide and the failure thereafter of the common front against Fas­cism. In fact many German Communists who had sought refuge in the USSR were handed over to the Gestapo.⁵⁵

So should the date 17 September 1939, when the Red Army crossed the Soviet border, be celebrated as an important date in Ukrainian national his­tory? Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi calls for a thorough and accurate analysis of the various events. He looks in depth at the terms of the Pact, signed on 23 Au­gust in Moscow with a secret protocol that envisaged the division of “zones of mutual interests” between the two signatories. The second article of the secret protocol declared that most of the German-Soviet line demarking control was to run along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers, with the larger part of Polish territory falling under Soviet control. Kul’chyts’kyi sees the Pact as the start of the Second World War (rather than 22 June 1941, the traditional Soviet start­ing point), and argues that Hitler hoped the Western democracies would sim­ply swallow the occupation of Poland in the same way they had accepted— albeit grudgingly—the Anschluss of Austria and the incorporation of most of Czechoslovakia into Germany.

German diplomats were disappointed with the publicly expressed Soviet perspective, particularly as Molotov admitted in his conversations with Schulenberg that the USSR hitherto had not expressed concern for national minorities in Poland. The new interpretation of the invasion forced the Soviet leadership to abandon plans to occupy Lublin and a portion of Warsaw prov­inces, as stipulated by the Pact. In a subsequent agreement of 27 September 1939 Stalin allowed Germany to occupy these territories in return for obtain­ing Lithuania. Hitler meanwhile was obliged to go along with Stalin’s wishes at this point because he could not risk a two-front war. As is well known, nei­ther the British nor the French declared war on the Soviet Union after the latter’s invasion of Poland, and the Polish Government-in-Exile (which moved from Romania to France, and ultimately to London, England) was obliged to accept the situation, too. Kul’chyts’kyi acknowledges that initially the popula­tion of Eastern Poland welcomed the Soviet troops, and the Ukrainian SSR grew by almost 8 million people. Initially he perceives both benefits and drawbacks to Soviet rule from the Ukrainian perspective: standards of living rose and unemployment was virtually eradicated, and about 500,000 peasant families received land and property, while industrial goods began to arrive from Eastern Ukraine. On the other hand, repressions soon began against so- called unreliable elements. The Poles estimated that about 1 million ethnic Poles had been removed from their native lands but, Kul’chyts’kyi notes, the Soviet side remained unwilling to divulge such information. One should ad­mit, he points out, that the Soviet authorities had played a crucial role in re­uniting Ukrainian territories, but on the other hand it is also possible to com­prehend why local Ukrainians offered such a hearty welcome to Hitler’s forces when they crossed the border on 22 June 1941.⁵⁷

Kul’chyts’kyi also observes that some basic facts from this period have rarely entered the debate hitherto. On 31 July 1941, the USSR officially de­clared the Nazi-Soviet Pact to be invalid. In September 1941, the USSR joined the Atlantic Charter, rejecting the use of force to gain advantages in international relations. Thirdly, the conferences of the wartime leaders at Te­hran (November-December 1943) and Crimea (February 1945) recognized Soviet control over formerly Polish territories, while the Poles were compen­sated by the return of western and southern regions that had been German­ized since medieval times. In conclusion, he believes that the analysis of the Pact requires a broad-minded approach. The historical circumstances of 1939 provided a rare opportunity to reunite Ukrainian territories and it was neces­sary to take advantage of this situation—Kul’chyts’kyi does not incidentally indicate why Stalin would have wanted to expand the territory of Ukraine specifically; particular given this same author’s depiction of Stalin’s hostile attitude to Ukrainians during the Famine of 1932-33. However, only at this juncture and under the corresponding circumstances was it possible to ensure international recognition of the new Ukrainian borders. Thus, had such bor­ders only been changed in later years, as Soviet Ukraine underwent a meta­morphosis into an independent state, the international community would not have supported such a notion. Therefore notwithstanding some of the nega­tive connotations, 17 September is a great historical date for Ukrainians and should be celebrated accordingly.⁵⁸ The logic of Kul’chyts’kyi’s argument is somewhat bewildering if one is to believe that violent annexation of territory rather than negotiated treaty was a means to ensure that most ethnic Ukrain­ian territories were to be included in what became the modern state. An ar­gument could equally be made that according to the principles of the Paris peace treaties that followed the First World War, the independent Polish state had agreed to the autonomy of the large region inhabited by ethnic Ukraini­ans. Presumably what is behind his statement is an understandable reluctance to even broach the question of potential revisions of the borders of contempo­rary Ukraine. However, such a question—other than briefly over the future of Crimea in the early 1990s—has never entered public discussion.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact also changed the situation of the OUN, which faced a leadership crisis after the assassination of Konovalets'. Historian Mykhailo Koval' provides an entertaining outline of the evolution of the OUN, includ­ing the period of the German and Soviet occupation of Ukrainian lands in the period September 1939 to June 1941. Koval' notes that Stepan Bandera be­came one of the most important figures of the Western Ukrainian “national liberation movement.” “The intense winds of history,” i.e., the start of the Second World War, brought about a split in the OUN leadership. There had been serious differences regarding tactical strategy that manifested themselves at an early stage in the movement's history. He points out that at the OUN conference in February 1940, the older generation of members supported An- drii Mel'nyk, but the majority of the attendees—young people of the democ­ratic persuasion (he does not define what he means by democratic)—backed Bandera as leader. In April 1941, the followers of Bandera convened for the Second Great Congress of the OUN in Krakow. At this meeting Mel'nyk was excluded from the organization, and the OUN formally split into two wings: the group following Mel'nyk (OUN-M) and that following Bandera (OUN-B). The split was caused in part by disagreements concerning their respective atti­tudes toward Germany. German preparations for an attack on the USSR were well known and thus played a role in the key question of the leadership of an anticipated future independent Ukrainian state. Should those leaders be the veterans of the organization or the leaders of the younger generation? Koval' seems in no doubt as to the correct answer to this question. The rift, which lasted for dozens of years, prevented the unification of all national liberation movements in Western Ukraine, thus enabling foreigners to take control of Ukrainian lands. However, the consequences of the division were not imme­diately apparent as OUN leaders wished to take advantage of an international situation that promised much for the emergence of an independent Ukraine.⁵⁹

What Koval' deems as requiring an explanation is why the strategic concep­tions of the OUN anticipated that an alliance with the German dictator would be of benefit or advantage to Ukraine. He cites OUN leader Myroslav Prokop,

who wrote in 1989 that in post-Versailles Europe only one revisionist force had the capability to start a war that could alter the international situation by force. Therefore the OUN oriented itself toward Germany and sought allies among the members of the German government. Koval' also comments that the strategic thinking of the OUN was based on the ideas of Dmytro Dontsov, according to whose writings Ukraine would be liberated from the Bolsheviks “in the shadow of the German war in the east.” The Germans regarded both factions of the OUN as reliable partners in the quest to transform Germany into a great power. In turn, the Ukrainian leaders did not anticipate German aggression against Ukraine during the coming military operations. From a scientific perspective, Koval' reflects, that paradox is hard to explain. In retro­spect, it is plain that the OUN leaders would have little impact on the thinking of the Nazi leadership, but they seem to have been swayed by the old image of the relatively tolerant German leadership under Kaiser Wilhelm II that had seen German troops occupy Ukraine in the latter months of the First World War. Such naivety, says Koval', betrayed a lack of political skill on behalf of the OUN leadership. However, the OUN-Nazi link emulated similar contacts by authoritarian governments of Central Europe during the 1930s. It should not be described as collaboration, in part because most of the OUN function­aries were not Soviet citizens, and even Stalin and Molotov had entered into a union with the Nazis—the logic of this deduction is somewhat hard to fol­low.⁶⁰

The period 1939-41 in the Soviet-held territory was a relatively quiet one in terms of overt activities of the OUN, the leaders of which for the most part had moved to the German-occupied lands. However, the political situation for the Ukrainian population in the Soviet zone soon began to deteriorate. Shapoval notes that one of the consequences of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was the deportation between the autumn of 1939 and autumn of 1940 of 312,000 families, or 1,173,170 people.⁶¹ Most of these early victims were Poles. Ac­cording to another writer, V. Kovalyuk, who is commemorating the 50th an­niversary of a little-known event, the first OUN encounter with the NKVD occurred on 27 February 1941, when seven young Ukrainians rose up against “the regime of Red Terror” on the farmstead Kuleby, located at the juncture of L'viv, Ternopil', and Ivano-Frankivs'k (then Stanyslaviv) oblasts. Two of the rebels are described as “aliens” from Zbarazh Rayon. Kovalyuk portrays the protests as part of a struggle that had lasted hundreds of years and which was continuing, i.e., the desire for Ukraine to become a free country.⁶² In the summer of 1941, the NKVD massacred thousands of prisoners in West Ukrainian jails before retreating eastward. One article focuses on the explora­tion of the prison at Volodymyr-Volyns’k by the L’viv association Memorial. In 1941, the open prison gates confronted the new German occupants and civilians with the sight of hundreds of dead prisoners, but only twenty bodies could be identified. Likely, the author writes, these were not Poles since they had already been moved to the east or killed elsewhere. The skeletons all had a single bullet hole in the back of the head and the majority of victims were young men aged 20-30 years. “The memory,” the title of the non-attributed article states, “shoots right through you.”⁶³