Who was StepanBandera, and what was the Ukrainian Insurgent Army?
Much in the same way as the tsarist government in its day branded all patriotic Ukrainians as "Mazepists" after Hetman Ivan Mazepa, the Russian state-controlled media have labeled EuroMaidan activists as “Banderites” after the twentieth- century nationalist leader Stepan Bandera (1909-1959).
This stigmatization is unjust because radical nationalists constituted only a small minority among EuroMaidan revolutionaries, and their political parties performed poorly in the parliamentary elections that followed the revolution. Yet, it was a clever propaganda trick to associate a separate Ukrainian national identity exclusively with the most radical branch of Ukrainian nationalism. To most Russians and many Russian- speakers in eastern Ukraine, the term “Banderite" still carries negative historical connotations, established in Stalin's time. After World War II ended, the Soviet press denounced the Bandera-led insurgents, who resisted the Sovietization of eastern Galicia.Radical Ukrainian nationalism originated in Galicia under Polish rule in the 1920s. Disaffected veterans of the Ukrainian Revolution, who refused to accept Polish domination of their land following the Polish-Ukrainian war, formed the Ukrainian Military Organization (1923) and then the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (1929). Soon they were joined by radical students, who were antagonized by the Polish administration's oppressive policies. Stepan Bandera belonged to the latter group. The son of a Ukrainian Catholic priest from Galicia, he studied agronomy at Lviv Polytechnical University, but chose the career of an underground fighter against Polish rule. In the 1930s, he organized protest campaigns and assassinations of Polish officials. In 1938, when Bandera was serving a life sentence in a Polish prison, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists split into the more radical Banderite branch and a more moderate Melnikite branch (led from abroad by Andrii Melnyk).
Bandera was freed from prison following the outbreak of war in 1939, and at first his followers sought to use the Nazi invasion as an opportunity to restore a Ukrainian state in the form of a German satellite. After the German army took Lviv in June 1941, the Banderites (in Bandera's absence) solemnly proclaimed the creation of the Ukrainian state. The Nazis were angered by this unauthorized declaration, because their plans for Ukraine involved only unfettered economic exploitation, not cooperation with local leaders. After they refused to rescind the declaration, Bandera and many prominent Banderites were arrested and spent most of the war in German concentration camps. Bandera was released from the Sachsenhausen camp only in the fall of 1944; two of his brothers perished in Auschwitz.
While Bandera was languishing in Sachsenhausen, popular dissatisfaction with the brutality of Nazi rule grew in Ukraine. By 1943 the Banderites had formed a small guerrilla force calling itself the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and began fashioning it into a mass partisan movement of over 40,000 fighters. At first, this army fought against the Germans, but by 1944 the Germans and the UPA largely observed neutrality in the face of an approaching common enemy, the Red Army. Bandera's insurgents did not serve in the volunteer SS Galicia Division as some historical accounts would claim; the Division was in fact a project of the rival Melnyk faction. However, this is not to absolve the Banderites of war crimes. Like all sides in the messy guerrilla warfare that engulfed much of western Ukraine, they engaged in the killing of civilians. The ideologically motivated mass extermination of Polish civilians in the region of Volhynia during 1943-1944 was essentially an ethnic cleansing aimed at making Volhynia a “Ukrainian” land. The victims numbered in the tens of thousands, perhaps 50,000.1°
The Soviets managed to destroy larger UPA detachments by 1947, but smaller cells continued armed resistance to Soviet power in western Ukraine until the early 1950s.
It was during the first postwar decade that Stalinist culture propagated the image of brutal Banderites shooting Soviet soldiers in the back and slaughtering female schoolteachers sent in from Russia. This myth has outlived Bandera, who was killed by a Soviet agent in Munich in 1959, as well as the Banderite political organization, which never developed any significant following in post-communist Ukraine.In 2010 the outgoing Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, his approval rating having dropped by then to single digits, awarded Bandera a posthumous Hero of Ukraine medal in an act calculated to infuriate Russia and salvage Yushchenko's popularity in western Ukraine. Yet the ensuing scandal only highlighted the changing meaning of Bandera as a political symbol. The ideology of radical Ukrainian nationalism with its cult of a strong leader and subjugation of individual will to the interests of an ethnic nation belongs to the past. In present-day Ukrainian mass culture, Bandera functions more as a recognizable symbol of anti-Russian resistance, a vague protest statement not unlike the image of Che Guevara on a T-shirt.
In the first years of independence, nationalist-dominated municipal councils in the westernmost regions created a Bandera cult complete with Lenin-like statues of the leader, but the modern, European- oriented urban society developing there is outgrowing it already. The conflict with Russia may have delayed this process, but in the long run it is impossible to remake Bandera into a symbol of a new, European Ukraine, if only because the closest European neighbor, Poland, opposes his glorification as well.