The Soviet Perspective

Though Soviet propaganda rarely focused specifically on OUN-UPA actions against the Polish minority, it was replete with attempts to discredit the insurgents and their cruelty toward the local populations.

However, one of the main vehicles for such denigration, the newspaper Pravda Ukrainy, began a discussion in early 1990, following the publication of an article that tried to understand the motivation of UPA fighters. One interviewee had explained that the UPA fought for an independent Ukraine; that it fought against both the Russians and the Germans. True, it had massacred Poles, but this was a response to the shooting of “our people” across the Buh River.³ This article elicited numerous responses from readers, some of which described the attacks on Poles, albeit without much focus on the nature and meaning of the assault. Many readers scoffed at the notion of using the archives to discover what had occurred. One stated that any mentally sane Volhynian could testify that the UPA were murderers “condemned with the eternal stamp of Cain’’ and that they had seen what happened with their own eyes. A former member of the OUN, who later left the organization and “recanted,” commented that 1943 was a climatic year. In the spring, the OUN had put together a group and ordered people to carry axes. The writer was left behind, but next day he learned that the axes had been used to carry out a “bloody massacre” in neighboring villages that did not spare even children. Villages were burned down, wells stuffed with dead bodies, and horses, cattle, and other livestock were driven away. The news disillusioned the writer who then broke with the nationalists and went into hiding. Another eyewitness maintains that the “bandits” were cowardly because they refused to fight the Soviet Partisans. Rather they practiced their bravery and chivalry on the defenseless population.⁴

Maslovs'kyi focuses on the Polish massacres in passing when examining the issue of “victims of OUN-UPA.” He writes that statistics on the number of victims either do not exist or are imprecise.

Current writing (in 1991) placed the number of victims somewhere between 30,000 and 1.5 million. He cites the Association of Victims of Ukrainian Nationalists that was created in Wroclaw in the fall of 1990, which addressed an open letter to members of the Polish Sejm and senators. This letter declared that Ukrainian nationalists had killed some 500,000 Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. The Association requested an unambiguous statement from the Polish parliament and the government that would clearly and precisely attribute the crimes committed by the Ukrainian nationalists as genocide, and denounce them as Fascist criminal organizations, particularly the OUN, the UPA, the battalions Nachtigal and Roland, the SS Division, and the Ukrainian police. The letter declared that all crimes could not be written off as in the past, and it referred to a law that demanded that such criminals be prosecuted. Maslovs'kyi expresses his disappointment with the way that these issues were being dealt with in Ukraine by certain officials and journalists. He refers to the newspaper Robitnycha hazeta, which announced on 3 December 1988 that Ukrainian nationalists had accounted for the deaths of some 30,000 Soviet citizens. In February 1990, the Ukrainian KGB also announced in the media that over 30,000 civilians, as well as some 25,000 soldiers, NKVD personnel, and border guards had died at the hands of the Banderites. How can this be, asks the author, when in L’viv region alone (excluding Drohobych district), between July 1944 and May 1946, the nationalists killed 5,088 Soviet citizens, including 44 teachers, 218 village soviet heads and their deputies, 406 members of destruction battalions, and 3,105 peasants? In his view, the figure of 30,000 does not reflect the scale of the massacres carried out by the Banderites. He cites his own figures that in 1944-52, OUN-UPA accounted for the deaths of over 80,000 citizens, and that the wartime toll is likely to be twice as high. Data are lacking and “even today” it is difficult to access special archives.⁵

In July 1991, an article by S.

Dluskiy focused on the tragedy of the Polish village of Hanachevka, which had been founded by Franciscan monks and had a pre-Second World War population of about 3,000 people. The author notes that in the spring and fall of 1940 (following the Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland), about 260 inhabitants were deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia, but several potential deportees managed to hide among their Ukrainian neighbors in nearby villages. Hanachevka is depicted as a Polish island amid a Ukrainian Greek Catholic population. Peace prevailed and there were high rates of intermarriage. Hostilities began, however, during the German occupation. In July 1941, Dluskiy writes, the OUN members carried out the first excesses, burning houses and stealing cattle. With these acts came OUN propaganda, with leaflets distributed demanding that the Polish peasants leave their homes and move to the territory of the General Government, otherwise they would be killed. By the fall of 1941 the attacks had become more frequent. Polish peasants sought protection from the Polish Committee in L'viv and managed to establish contact with the Polish Home Army. The latter could not provide weapons but sent members to organize self-defense units. Weapons were purchased from Hungarian soldiers, and training was conducted secretly in the forests. The German police discovered these units and arrested about a dozen residents. In early 1943, the OUN killed 12 and wounded 20 people, and 8 insurgents were killed in response. On 22 January 1944, Soviet Partisans arrived in the Polish village and reportedly helped the Poles establish defensive units. But several days later, on 2 February, the OUN conducted a massive attack, and the German police declined to intervene. One hundred people died and 80 houses were burned down. Atrocities were perpetrated on the victims. Polish peasants from neighboring villages arrived to evacuate the wounded and bury the dead. The village population was reduced to 1,500 inhabitants, but two subsequent attacks from “UPA” reduced the total to 400.

Before long the village was completely eradicated.⁶

Articles such as the one cited above by Dluskiy clearly had the intention of countering efforts to revisit OUN-UPA in order to revise the impressions created by the long period of Soviet propaganda, when its members had been depicted as criminals and traitors. This is also the purpose of the article entitled “The Well of Death” that appeared in two issues of Pravda Ukrainy in the summer of 1991. The well in question was constructed by Wladislaw La- budinski, a resident of the village Dyadkovichi in Rivne oblast. The village was subjected to an attack by members of the UPA security service, headed by a V. Slobodyuk. The victims in this case were reportedly Poles, fleeing Soviet POWs, members of the Komsomol, militiamen, Jews, Czechs, and Soviet sympathizers. As the UPA was under instructions to save bullets, the victims were choked with ropes, writes the author. The second part of the article focuses on the motives behind the massacres. On 1 January 1945, a group of UPA soldiers was executed in Rivne, consisting of the following names: S. K. Trofim- chuk, A. Zaichikov, V. S. Lohvynovych, A. S. Kyrylyuk, A. V. Hrytsyuk, V. Podolets', N. T. Slobodyuk, and V. A. Slobodyuk. The author comments that in the early 1990s the Nationalist press presented these people as martyrs for the cause of attaining an independent Ukraine. The author challenges this viewpoint by illustrating the reported crimes of each soldier in detail. One of the UPA members, V. Slobodyuk, described during his interrogation the murders of Poles in Dyadkovichi perpetrated by Security Unit 4 of the UPA District 10. Many of the UPA members did not initially belong to the security service, but had been recruited by V. Slobodyuk, who had arrived from Germany in 1942. The article provides no details of what he might have been doing in Germany. Early in August 1943, all members of the security service were called to Dyadkovichi where they were instructed by district head “Makar” to kill all enemies of the UPA, burning their homes and expropriating their property.

They were also to shoot all Soviet POWs that had fled from German camps, and to ensure that local peasants offered regular supplies of food to the UPA, with reprisals against saboteurs. Failure to comply with the above orders was punishable by death. Most of the victims ended up in La- budinski's well, according to this article.⁷

To the Soviet perspective can be added the writings of Wiktor Poliszczuk, whose work is an indictment of the OUN and UPA, and who stresses that, in the spring of 1943, Mykola Lebed', the head of the OUN-B Provid, along with Shukhevych, carried out the proclamation of the First Congress of the OUN by massacring the Polish civilian population of Volhynia. Up to that time, the deaths of Poles at the hands of Ukrainians had been somewhat random and a result of personal animosities. He notes that in this period, the OUN-B demanded of the Ukrainian police still in the service of the Germans that they flee to the forests taking their weapons with them. Former members of the Schutzmannschaften Battalion 201 arrived in Volhynia from Belarus, having completed the brutal pacification of Belarusian villages on behalf of the Germans. These men, he adds, in a similar vein to Snyder's account, had experience with the elimination of the Jewish population and were now to make up the foundation of the military forces of the OUN-B, along with the Security Service run by Lebed'. Most of the latter forces were made up of Ukrainians from Halychyna. Using the basis of the First OUN Congress and the Second OUN Conference, it was Lebed' who provided the instruction to the troops to undertake the systematic extermination of the Polish population of Volhynia. The deaths ran into the tens of thousands, he writes. Members of the Mel'nyk wing of the OUN, where present, were coerced into the same activity. The picture portrayed is one of ruthless ethnic cleansing led by the nationalist security units that had received training at the German political school in Zakopane in 1939-40.⁸ Poliszczuk makes little attempt to explain the reasons behind the atrocities and his monograph, though detailed, takes the form of a polemic. Thus his book can be added to the Soviet perspective from which it differs little in terms of the one-sidedness of the outline. Nevertheless, all those dealing with the OUN-UPA as warriors for an independent Ukraine (particularly those who allege that the two organizations had taken on a more moderate and democratic complexion by 1943), have to come to terms with the events of Volhynia, which appear to contradict such an assessment.

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Source: Marples David R.. Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine. udapest—New York: Central European University Press,2007. — 363 p.. 2007

The Soviet Perspective

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