Writings of the Late Glasnost Period
To provide some examples of the flavor of late Soviet writings on OUN-UPA, one can turn to the main party newspaper in Western Ukraine, L’vovs’kaya pravda. In early 1988, the Communist perspective still held sway in the media and readers were still being regaled with horror stories about the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists.
A fairly typical example was the story of a hero of the secret police, Fedor Ulanov, to whom a monument was erected in his native village of Ryhove, in the Turkivs'kyi district of the L'viv region on 14 February 1988. Ulanov was in charge of an MGB unit given the task of capturing alive a “Banderite” leader with the pseudonym of Roman, an operation that began on 16 February 1945. According to the story, four soldiers, together with Ulanov, reached the cottage where Roman was rumored to be hiding. However, only an old woman was found there, and recklessly the MGB allowed her outside her cottage, at which point the soldiers found themselves surrounded by insurgents, clearly forewarned by the old lady. One MGB soldier got trapped in the house covering the retreat of his comrades, and took his own life with his last bullet after killing an insurgent. Ulanov was left alone inside the cottage to face the insurgents. The latter set the cottage ablaze, and Ulanov emerged from the flames, shooting at them with a machine gun. However, he was captured and tortured with needles under his fingernails. He stoically resisted his tormentors, the article continues, and kept silent even though his body was eventually hacked to pieces. His last words—one wonders who recorded them!—were “God damn you animals! Long live Communism!”1The articles often take on a highly moral tone, particularly when making reference to alleged war criminals now living abroad. Thus one related how the village assembly in Radekhiv district had called for the extradition of an OUN member, Ivan Stetsiv, a resident of Canada.
This episode began when Ivanna Semenyuk from Ohlyadiv visited her father in Canada, to which he had emigrated in the 1930s. From her father she heard about the presence of Stetsiv, a name that was well-known to her from stories circulating in her native village. Stetsiv, the article noted, was born in 1916 and became a member of the OUN, fighting against Soviet forces as a member of an unspecified German formation. The writer accuses him of war crimes causing the deaths of peaceful citizens, women, and children. In August 1987 in Radekhiv there was an open trial of a man called R. Didukh, reportedly a collaborator of Stet- siv. In this hearing Didukh revealed that he had joined the OUN in 1941 and was recruited by Stetsiv. The latter ordered the execution of Ohlyadiv “activists” and allegedly tortured two young girls and killed a young male. He also, according to this account, burned an entire family in its home and massacred 21 Polish families in Kuty and was a “willing tool” of the German police. Following the trial Didukh was sentenced to death and the assembled throng appealed to the Canadian government to extradite Stetsiv.2 The tale, gruesome though it may have been, was a fairly typical affair. Whether or not Stetsiv committed the crimes of which he was accused, the key issue for the authorities was to ensure that the villagers believed in such crimes and his and other nationalists' responsibility for them.It was considered important for the Soviet leadership to discredit the OUN and the UPA in every way possible to try to limit their influence among the population of Western Ukraine. This goal was the main theme of a book by Klym Dmytruk, which attempted to expose the history and the class roots of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism” and its connections with “international imperialism.” The two reviewers who discussed the volume in the pages of Lvovskaya pravda support Dmytruk's contention that Ukrainian nationalism is “the enemy of the Ukrainian people” and “a servant of German Fascism.” Dmytruk also chronicles the Soviet struggle against OUN-UPA, including the creation of 292 “destruction battalions” with a total strength of 24,000.3 In a similar vein, the newspaper Pravda Ukrainy ran a series of articles under the general title of “Banderovshchina” in the fall of 1989, a period when the media was becoming more open and the stereotypical perspective of the OUN- UPA became a topic for discussion.
The early articles sought to counter “nationalist” claims that the UPA was a national liberation movement that represented the interests of the population of Western Ukraine. It states that workers, peasants, and intellectuals of that region gave Soviet troops an enthusiastic welcome when they crossed the Soviet border in September 1939, and under the guidance of the Communist Party, the working people eagerly started to rebuild the economy. But from the first days of “liberation” they met ferocious resistance from the leaders of the UPA and the OUN underground. This assertion barely takes into account historical accuracy. In fact, the UPA had not even been formed by 1939, and the OUN went into an underground existence on the Soviet side of the border and began to negotiate with the German military regime on the western side of the former Polish state.4This same series provided an outline of the Communist perspective. The OUN, it noted, was founded by Konovalets', Mel'nyk, and Yaryi, who “personally” took part in shootings of workers, particularly a rebellious faction in the “Arsenal.” Once Hitler came to power in Germany, the OUN became his “paid agents.” The OUN members entered Ukraine as part of the Nachtigal unit, which killed 5,000 civilians. The UPA presented a more difficult subject since the insurgents without doubt opposed the Germans for some time. The Communist discourse counters this apparent contradiction in its narrative by noting an alleged agreement between the Germans and the nationalists that led to the latter changing its tactics. The link between the OUN leadership and the Germans, the article declares, was kept secret from rank-and-file members. Further, the article selectively uses documents to highlight atrocities of OUN-UPA in Western Ukraine, including over 3,000 assaults on Soviet activists, as well as attacks on innocent victims such as women and children. All these actions, the authors declare, were orchestrated by the Germans who to the very last days of the war used nationalist groups behind the lines as saboteurs. However, they also acknowledge that many OUN members were simple and honest people who were duped by the leaders, and that is why toward the end of the war the Soviet authorities offered an amnesty to all OUN personnel who surrendered willingly.
Before the end of the year 1945, state the authors, about 38,000 insurgents gave themselves up.5A lengthy article of October 1989 counters “nationalist” claims that the UPA was a national liberation movement that represented the interests of the population of Western Ukraine. It familiarizes readers with accounts of the postwar trials of “Banderites” and the information uncovered on these occasions about the barbaric methods used by OUN-UPA, including the torturing of prisoners. Of particular concern to the author was coverage of the trial of the assassins of the Soviet agent and writer, Yaroslav Halan: Ilarii Luka- shevych and Mykhailo Stakhur, who conducted this murder on the instructions of the regional OUN leader, Roman Shchepans'kyi (known as Bui-Tur) who was apprehended four years later. After a failed first attempt, the assassins killed Halan with an axe. Lukashevych and Stakhur were executed after a trial in L'viv in 1951. Shchepans'kyi began to speak in Communist language at his trial in 1953, declaring that the OUN was an organization of fanatics and under its influence he committed numerous crimes against the Ukrainian people, the Soviet authorities, and his motherland. He said that he recognized the enormity of the deed—destroying a talented Ukrainian writer—but he had organized the murder on the orders of his higher authorities in the OUN lead- ership.6 The way that Shchepans'kyi confesses to his crimes suggests some lengthy sessions in the hands of the NKVD. Indeed, the Soviet secret police excelled in such tactics, and public confessions were favored during the later years of Stalin's leadership. In print, however, the confessions and admissions of guilt seem formalistic.
Ukrainian Communist newspapers published a number of letters from readers in the late 1980s that expressed concern with the gradual and partial rehabilitation of OUN-UPA, as well as about the denunciations of Stalinist crimes that became more accentuated in the Gorbachev period.
A letter to one newspaper from Mykhailo Hryshchenko of Cherkasy pointed out that in an earlier issue, materials had been published about the horrors of Stalinism, “which was all well and good.” But, he wanted to know, why was there nothing about the atrocities of Banderites in the western regions against their fellow Ukrainians? He sought information about the reburial of the victims of the UPA in the Rivne region, and the testimony of eyewitnesses about these “terrible crimes.”7 Two authors of a summer-1991 article lamented the fact that a Congress of the Brotherhood of UPA soldiers had taken place in April, and defended Fascist ideology while denying Communist accusations that the movement had collaborated with Fascists. It outlined the OUN ideology, which it equated with racism, and declared that the “OUN struggles for the domination over the Ukrainian people and for the expansion of Lebensraum.” The authors cite Ukrainian claims to ethnically linked regions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belarus, the Bryansk, Kursk, and Voronezh regions of Russia, as well as the Kuban'. They describe OUN members as immoral, and operating according to the maxim “the cause justifies the means.” The OUN, the article avows, advocated a totalitarian regime based on the Fuehrer (Leader) principle, and they reproduced a list of OUN tenets.8Sometimes, articles denouncing the OUN could be found in more scholarly form, particularly in the late 1980s when the topic increasingly came up for debate. Soviet writers always stressed the link between the OUN and the Germans, particularly in the 1930s. One author writes that in the interwar period, Ukrainian nationalists, using subsidies and other forms of aid from Berlin and Rome, turned to terrorist methods of struggle against “progressive forces.” Nationalist theoreticians at the same time outlined the general compatibility of Fascism and Ukrainian nationalism. Even in the 1930s, he continues, there is no doubt that the Hitlerites regarded the OUN as political partners, including in terrorist acts such as the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronislaw Pieracki, in 1934.
The attack of the Germans on Poland had led to discussion about the possibility of creating a West Ukrainian puppet state. However, the Germans were accused of betraying the Ukrainians on this issue.9 Another author believes that even more moderate Ukrainian political groups operating under Polish rule in the 1930s were evolving in the direction of Fascism, particularly after the adoption of the Polish Constitution in 1935. He points to the OUN alliance with Germany in the 1930s, the objective of which was to win Ukrainian independence. The value of the nationalists to the Germans increased after the fall of Poland, and theHitler regime had sponsored the creation of the Ukrainian Legion with two units: Nachtigal and Roland by May 1941, and the former entered L'viv in the wake of the German army.10 As the Soviet regime declined and finally dissolved, Ukrainian historians were thus faced with the task of dealing with the thorny topic of OUN-UPA, and how this history should be rewritten. How could one explain the history of an organization that had collaborated with the Hitler regime, even if that link was forged with the sole purpose of creating an independent Ukrainian state? In the world at large the search for proNazi war criminals was continuing apace, and time had not dispelled the gruesome image of the Hitler period. The task was a formidable one, particularly after the lengthy years of Soviet propaganda about OUN-UPA, which led residents of Ukraine to adopt polarized views of the organization. In Western Ukraine, particularly the Galician provinces, the OUN-UPA was resurrected as an organization that embodied patriotism and an independent Ukraine, whereas in the rest of the country it was still regarded as collaborationist and bloodthirsty, and comprised of traitors to the motherland.