The OUN’s Orientation

The OUN’s role in Carpatho-Ukraine is today a controversial topic. The organization had severed contacts with Germany in 1935, when the lat­ter signed a non-aggression treaty with Poland and handed over several leaders of the OUN to Polish authorities.

The War for Carpatho-Ukraine in 1938-39 105 to the territory, which could then serve as a bridge for a German advance eastward (“Dovkola spravy Zakarpattia” 1938).

When Hitler allowed Hungary, with Poland’s support, to occupy Carpatho- Ukraine, and at the same time sent German troops into Prague, Czecho­slovakia ceased to exist. Carpatho-Ukraine declared independence on 14 March, and its parliament ratified this act on the following day. The Carpathian Sich, which by then had grown to over 10,000, seized some weapons from the Czech army and fought the invading Hungarians dur­ing March 15-18. The young men in the Sich put up a spirited resistance, even though they often had no military training and only about 2,000 could be armed. It has been estimated that 100 died in combat, but that as many as 5,000 were captured and executed by Hungarian and Polish forces (Kentii 2005, 145; Smolii 2002, 554).

The OUN’s role in these events has been denounced by Shandor. He describes members of the organization behaving like conspirators, lack­ing knowledge of local conditions, and disguising their incompetence with uncompromising, revolutionary slogans. The organization, accord­ing to him, wielded a decisive and harmful influence on the paramilitary Sich (Shandor 1997, 167). Shandor’s most damning assessment concerns the OUN’s leadership, which created its own headquarters and behaved as though it was entitled to direct both the Sich and the state’s foreign policy. This created the impression of “a second government” and under­mined decisions taken by Voloshyn’s administration (Shandor 1996, 34-35). The OUN leaders of the Sich demanded that Khust send ulti­matums to Prague and conducted unsanctioned “underground” activi­ties (ibid., 38). They refused to answer correspondence from the Khust government, imprisoned and beat citizens with whom they were dissatis­fied, and wrote inflammatory articles in the press (ibid., 38-42). Shan­dor states that an auxiliary, paramilitary force “ought to be subordinated to the government, more precisely to the ministry of internal affairs or defense, because otherwise it can be used against the government, even the state.” Only dictatorships, he writes, maintain armed forces that exist outside the state and are subordinated to a leading, or more often, ruling political party (ibid., 49). According to Shandor, the leadership of Sich made almost no attempts to train and prepare its men, preferring instead to conduct demonstrations, “which are easier to do than teaching youth to use weapons” (ibid., 53).

(ibid., 68). In these events, Riko Jary may have acted as a German agent. He was one of three members in the OUN’s headquarters for Transcar­pathian affairs, where he held the responsibility for military affairs and foreign policy. The other two were Yaroslav Baranovskyi (organizational affairs and internal policy) and Orest Chemerynskyi (press and informa­tion) (ibid., 34). Shandor points out that this last episode, like many oth­ers in the OUN’s history, has never been adequately explained (ibid., 71).

This, of course, is not the way defenders of the OUN have described events. They stress the organization’s successful creation of a self-defense force and its development of a programmatic “Platform,” which was written in September 1938 by Orest Chemerynskyi. Its first clause stated that the issue of Carpatho-Ukraine was inseparable from the ideals and struggles of the 45 million Ukrainian nation in its entirety (Khy- mynets 1991, 76). Yulian Khymynets, a member of the organization, has asserted that the OUN’s Berlin office, which acted under the name Ukrainian Press Service, “took upon itself the political and diplomatic semi-official representation of Transcarpathian affairs,” apparently with Voloshyn’s approval (ibid. 1991, 76). Khymynets, who was head of the Carpatho-Ukrainian foreign delegation that visited Berlin and liaised with the OUN’s office, has noted that neither the leadership of the OUN, nor any of its organizations in Europe, the USA, or Canada “expressed a word of protest when Germany rejected the ethnographic principle dominant at the time, on the basis of which it had taken the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in the Autumn of 1938” (ibid., 84). This led him to conclude that the OUN’s leadership must have “quietly acquiesced to the death of Carpatho-Ukraine” (ibid.).

It appears, therefore, that the emigre OUN leadership was aware that Germany would not allow the Carpatho-Ukrainian state to survive, and quite possibly had received instructions not to resist the Hungarian inva­sion (Mirchuk 1968, 549-550). There was tension between the clandes­tine OUN in the Sich leadership, whose number has been estimated at 300, and the Sich as a whole, which functioned as a regular militia and was mostly outside the OUN’s control (Zlepko 1994, 260-262). This

The War for Carpatho-Ukraine in 1938-39 107 lack of transparency and the indiscipline it created led to persistent prob­lems both within the Sich and with the Voloshyn government (ibid., 262).

The real relations between Rusynophiles, Ukrainophiles, the govern­ment, and the OUN have not been adequately assessed, but they were more complicated that is often assumed. For example, on 22 October 1938, Nova Svoboda (New Freedom) greeted the announcement of autonomy on its front pages with a “Manifesto” demanding that the government not only hold parliamentary elections, but recognize Ukrai­nian as an official language, eliminate Czech and Slovak schools where these have “no legal basis,” ban all political parties in favor of a single National Union, and cooperate with Germany in “every area,” includ­ing building rail lines, a hospital, creating a university, and developing the economy. The fifty-five signatories represented figures from different orientations, but they all favored the development of a viable autono­mous state, self-government, and fairness in economic relations. There was no mention of Ukraine, or any other country other than Germany. As such this document, and the politics of Nova Svoboda as a whole, represent an attempt to reach a compromise between the “Rusyn” and “Ukrainian” orientations.⁸ How this compromise held together in the following months under pressure from outsiders, including members of the OUN who had arrived from Galicia and other lands, still requires a searching analysis.