The Revolutionary Movement

A qualitatively different variety of Ukrainian nationalism emerged in the interwar period. In the 19th century, the nationalism of the largely liberal or socialist Ukrainian intelligentsia was a rather amorphous combination of national consciousness, patriotism, and humanist values.

In the Ukrainian case, the genesis of integral nationalism lay primarily in the setbacks of 1917–20. As Alexander Motyl notes: “In essence, Ukrainian nationalism was an attempt to explain why Ukrainian statehood had been lost and how it was to be regained.”³ Convinced that socialist and democratic approaches encouraged the party strife, poor leadership, conflicting purposes, and lack of direction that led to their defeat, young veterans of the war for independence rejected the old ideologies. Instead they called for the creation of a new type of Ukrainian, one who was unconditionally committed to the nation as a whole and to independent statehood. These tendencies were most forcefully articulated by Dmytro Dontsov, an East Ukrainian emigre and former socialist, who became the principal ideologue of Ukrainian integral nationalism. The ideology

Ukrainian integral nationalism was not based on a closely reasoned system of ideas; rather it rested on several key concepts whose main goal was not to interpret reality but to incite people to action.

Integral nationalism espoused collectivism, which placed the nation above the individual. Nonethless, it also urged its proponents to be “strong individuals” who would stop at nothing to attain their goals. One goal was to have the nation function as an integrated whole, not as disparate parties, classes, or regional groups. Hence the all-encompassing scope of the movement, its stress on sobornist (national unity), its rejection of regionalism, and its desire to control all aspects of Ukrainian society. Integral nationalists were urged to “force their way into all areas of national life, into all its recesses, into all its institutions, societies, and groups, into every city and village, into every family.”⁴ Along with this need to monopolize all aspects of national life came intolerance. Convinced that theirs was the only way to attain national goals, integral nationalists were ready to do battle with all who stood in their path.

Dontsov and other ideologues of the movement were vague about the type of state and society they wished to have once independence was achieved. They had little to say about socioeconomic organization, noting only that it would be basically agrarian and would rest on cooperation between the state, cooperatives, and private capital.

Ukrainian integral nationalism clearly contained elements of fascism and totalitarianism. These tendencies were spreading throughout Europe in the 1920s and their influence, especially that of Italian fascism, was widespread in Eastern Europe. But, as Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky has argued, Western fascism, which developed in urban, industrialized surroundings, was not the closest relative of Ukrainian integral nationalism.⁵ The latter was far more similar to the radical rightist movements in agrarian East European societies, such as the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustashi in Croatia, the Arrow Cross in Hungary, and related movements in Slovakia and Poland. In the final analysis, however, Ukrainian integral nationalism was genetically independent, that is, its primary sources lay within its own society. Confronted with the tragic plight of Ukrainians under Polish and Soviet rule, having lost faith in traditional legal methods, and disillusioned with the Western democracies, which had ignored Ukrainian pleas for support and were themselves mired in crisis, Ukrainian integral nationalists believed that they had nothing to gain from the status quo and that they had to use radical means to change it. The organization

Even before the final formulation of their ideology, scattered groups of future integral nationalists had appeared in Galicia and especially among the emigreś in Czechoslovakia. In 1920, a small group of officers in Prague established UVO (Ukrainska Viiskova Orhanizatsiia – Ukrainian Military Organization), an underground organization that sought to continue the armed struggle against Polish occupation. Soon afterward, Colonel levhen Konovalets, a Galician who had led the crack Sich Riflemen units in the East Ukrainian armies and a prominent leader in the struggle for independence, was chosen to be UVO’s commander.

Initially, UVO was strictly a military organization with a military command structure. It secretly prepared demobilized veterans in Galicia and interned soldiers in Czechoslovakia for a possible anti-Polish uprising, and it carried out operations designed to destabilize the Polish occupation. The most notable of its operations were the attempted assassination of Piłsudski, the Polish head of state, by Stepan Fedak in 1921 and the widespread sabotage campaign of 1922. Consisting of an estimated 2000 men, the organization maintained contacts with both the East and West Ukrainian governments-in-exile and secretly received funding from West Ukrainian political parties.

But in 1923 UVO’s position changed drastically. When the Allied recognition of Polish rule in Eastern Galicia raised doubts among many West Ukrainians about the sense of continuing armed resistance, many seasoned members left UVO. The organization, however, refused to modify its demand for militant action against the Poles, thereby alienating the legal parties that now rejected terrorist tactics. Polish police pressure forced Konovalets and much of the leadership to flee Galicia and establish their headquarters abroad.

The ensuing crisis caused a major reorientation in UVO. Konovalets turned to foreign powers, especially Poland’s enemies, Germany and Lithuania, for political and financial support. Back in Eastern Galicia, UVO began to recruit gymnazium and university students to replenish its dwindling ranks. To propagate its hard-line views in Galicia, the organization smuggled in its journal, Surma, from abroad. Most important, UVO established contacts with several student groups, such as Ukrainian Nationalist Youth in Prague, the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists in Podebrady (Czechoslovakia), and the Association of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth in Lviv, for the purpose of forming an expanded nationalist organization.

The role the OUN took upon itself was much broader than that of UVO. Like its predecessor, OUN remained an “underground army.” It adhered to military principles of leadership, conspiratorial techniques, and strict discipline and engaged in a campaign of political terror against the Polish state and its representatives. But it also strove to become a broadly based ideological/revolutionary movement, whose objective was the achievement of integral nationalist goals. It made a special effort to popularize its views, especially among the youth, and attempted to dominate all the West Ukrainian social, political, and economic organizations. Those Ukrainians who obstructed the OUN’s plans were vulnerable to the same terrorist attacks as Polish officials.

Undoubtedly OUN’s greatest success was its ability to attract widespread support among Ukrainian youth. Its stress on revolutionary action, radical solutions, and the creation of a new breed of “super” Ukrainians appealed to youths who felt victimized by the Polish government, frustrated by lack of employment, and disillusioned by the failures of their elders. Initially, OUN attracted a large portion of the university and upper-gymnazium students in Eastern Galicia. Almost every secondary school and every university in Poland and abroad where Ukrainians studied had OUN cells. The dormitory (Akademichnyi dim) of the Ukrainian university students in Lviv, who were led by Bohdan Kravtsiv, Stefan Lenkavsky, Stepan Okhrymovych, Ivan Grabrusevych, and Volodymyr Ianiv, became a regular integral nationalist stronghold. When some of these youths returned to their native villages, they spread integral nationalist ideas in the countryside.

In order to expand its influence, OUN also infiltrated various economic, educational, and youth organizations; organized massive patriotic demonstrations, student protests, and boycotts of Polish goods; published numerous newspapers and brochures; and energetically spread its message among the students, peasants, and workers of Galicia and Volhynia. In this work it enlisted the aid of a number of talented young poets, such as Ievhen Malaniuk, Oleh Olzhych-Kandyba, Olena Teliha, and Bohdan Kravtsiv. The major forum for integral nationalist views was the Prague-based journal Rozbudova Natsii. With time, however, a series of other publications came under integral nationalist influence.

Although it is exceedingly difficult to establish the size of the OUN’s membership, on the eve of the Second World War it is estimated to have had about 20,000 members. The number of sympathizers was many times greater. In any case, the preponderance of youthful, energetic, idealistic, and committed members in its ranks quickly made OUN the most dynamic factor in West Ukrainian political life during the interwar period.

Throughout the 1930s, OUN continued its “war” against the Polish regime, attacking government agencies and post offices in order to obtain funds for its activities, and engaging in sabotage against government property and assassinations. But OUN (and UVO) did not see violence or terror as an end in itself. Its members believed that they were waging a national-liberation struggle by revolutionary means, much like the Irish in the anti-English Sinn Fein and Piłsudski’s prewar anti-Russian underground organization. The immediate objectives of such tactics were to persuade Ukrainians that resistance was possible and to keep Ukrainian society in a state of “constant revolutionary ferment.” In 1930 an integral nationalist publication elaborated on this concept of “permanent revolution”: “By means of individual assassinations and occasional mass actions, we will attract large segments of the population to the idea of liberation and into the revolutionary ranks… Only with continually repeated actions can we sustain and nurture a permanent spirit of protest against the occupying power and maintain hatred of the enemy and the desire for final retribution. The people dare not get used to their chains, they dare not feel comfortable in an enemy state.”⁶

In the early 1930s, besides hundreds of acts of sabotage and dozens of “expropriations” of government funds, OUN members staged over sixty actual or attempted assassinations. Among their most important victims were Tadeusz Hołowko (1931), a well-known Polish proponent of Polish/Ukrainian compromise; Emilian Czechowski (1932), a Polish police commissioner in Lviv; Aleksei Mailov (1933), a Soviet consular official in Lviv who was killed as a response to the famine of 1932–33 in Soviet Ukraine; and Bronisław Pieracki (1934), the Polish minister of the interior, who was held responsible by the OUN for the pacification of 1930. Many assassination attempts were directed against Ukrainians who disagreed with OUN policies. Of these, the most notable was the killing in 1934 of Ivan Babii, a respected Ukrainian pedagogue.

But the policy of violence and confrontation cost OUN dearly. In 1930 Iuliian Holovinsky, the leader of its “combat unit,” was assassinated by a police agent. A year later, two young workers, Vasyl Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn, were hanged for killing an official during an “expropriation.” After the assassination of Pieracki in 1934, the Polish police launched a widespread crackdown that netted the entire krai (regional) leadership of OUN in Galicia, including Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed, who had organized the attack. After a much publicized series of trials, the youthful leaders received lengthy sentences in the Bereza Kartuzka concentration camp. They were joined by hundreds of OUN rank-and-file members who were rounded up at this time.

These setbacks were only part of OUN’s troubles. It soon became evident that the police had infiltrated the organization, a development that was to be expected once OUN began to recruit on a mass scale. Even more demoralizing was the growing criticism that OUN encountered from its fellow Ukrainians. Parents were incensed that the organization exposed their inexperienced teenagers to dangerous activities that often ended tragically. Social, cultural, and youth organizations resented the OUN’s attempts to take them over. The legal political parties blamed the integral nationalists for giving the government an excuse to restrict legal Ukrainian activities. And Metropolitan Sheptytsky sharply denounced OUN’s “amorality.” These accusations and counter-accusations reflected the tensions that had arisen between the generation of fathers in the legal or “organic” sector and that of their children in the revolutionary underground.

Generational tensions emerged in the OUN itself, especially among the leadership. Brought up in the more “civilized” prewar era and tempered by age and experience, the older generation of Konovalets and his associates from the 1917–20 period, such as Dmytro Andrievsky, Omelian Senyk, Mykola Stsiborsky, and Roman Sushko, led the movement from abroad. Although they had their doubts about some OUN tactics, especially the assassinations, they often found it difficult to control their subordinates from a distance. While they did not reject the use of violence, Konovalets and his staff preferred to concentrate on obtaining foreign, especially German, support.

By contrast, the subordinate regional (krai) leadership in Galicia, which included Stepan Bandera, Mykola Lebed, Iaroslav Stetsko, Ivan Klymiv, Mykola Klymyshyn, and Roman Shukhevych, was committed to revolutionary action. Mostly in their early twenties, they had not fought in the war for independence and had grown up under the demeaning conditions and frustrations of Polish rule. Their youthfulness and constant exposure to foreign oppression predisposed them to a violent, heroic type of resistance and they were contemptuous of the relative moderation (and more comfortable lifestyle) of their elders abroad. This resentment deepened after 1934, when the entire Galician leadership was incarcerated in the Bereza Kartuzka concentration camp and it was rumored that their capture was the result of the carelessness or even betrayal of some members of the leadership abroad.

Yet the authority, prestige, and diplomatic skills of Konovalets were great enough to prevent the simmering conflict from deepening. It was, therefore, a great setback to the integral nationalist movement when Konovalets was assassinated in 1938 in Rotterdam by a Soviet agent. Thus, on the eve of cataclysmic events, the OUN found itself without an experienced and generally acknowledged vozhd (supreme leader). But it is a telling indication of the commitment, dynamism, and discipline of its rank and file that, despite these setbacks, the organization not only avoided disintegration but continued to expand.