In 1920 Ukrainian veterans of the Sich Riflemen, such as Ievhen Konovalets’, Andrii Mel’nyk, and Roman Sushko, founded the UVO in Prague. Its object was to continue the struggle for a Ukrainian state, but it became a terrorist organization. It financed itself by carrying out espionage-related tasks for other countries and did not play any important political role among Ukrainian parties. This situation changed, however, a few years later when the UVO leaders realized that, in order to become a dominant political force, they needed to incorporate other right-wing political organizations and to include youth in its ranks. For that purpose they founded the OUN at the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was held in Vienna between 28 January and 3 February 1929. Throughout the 1930s the OUN was composed of a leadership in exile, and a homeland executive in Poland.[189]

The main political goal of both the UVO in the 1920s and the OUN in the 1930s was to mobilize the “Ukrainian masses” for a revolution, as a result of which a violent conflict between Ukrainians and their “occupiers” would be triggered. The OUN believed that “only a national revolution can liberate a nation from slavery” and allow it to “achieve independence and statehood.”[190] In referring to their “occupiers” the Ukrainian nationalists primarily meant Poland and the Soviet Union. Their foes were all non-Ukrainians who lived in the “Ukrainian ethnic territories,” particularly Jews, Poles, and Russians. Ukrainians who did not support the OUN’s vision of an ethnically pure state and ultranationalist revolutionary policies were also perceived and persecuted as enemies, especially if they cooperated with the Polish authorities. One of these enemies was the UNDO, the largest Ukrainian party in the Second Republic, which aimed to achieve a Ukrainian state by legal means. Nevertheless, we should not forget that there was informal cooperation between the OUN and the right-wing faction of the UNDO. [191]

To further its political aims, the OUN adopted two concepts of revolution: “permanent revolution” and “national revolution.” The two notions were interrelated but were not identical. In general, the “permanent revolution” was a process of preparing the Ukrainian people for the “national revolution,” which was intended to become an uprising or a revolutionary act, as a result of which the OUN would defeat their enemies and establish a Ukrainian state.[192] By planning the revolution, the OUN combined many different elements that could help it seize power. It modeled itself on the Polish and Russian insurgents and revolutionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the contemporary fascist and ultranationalist revolutionaries. After taking power in the “ethnic Ukrainian territories” the OUN would subordinate all non-loyal elements and establish a one-party system. The new authority would represent all social strata of Ukrainians, whose loyalty to the OUN would be enforced. The state the OUN planned to establish after the revolution would be dictatorial. Democracy was, for the OUN, a hostile and dangerous political system, distrusted by OUN members because of its non-nationalist nature.[193]

The immediate target of UVO and OUN activities was the Second Polish Republic, which they perceived as an illegitimate “enemy-occupier” of the “ethnic Ukrainian territories.”[194] Czechoslovakia and Romania were not regarded by the OUN as significant enemies. Neither the UVO nor the OUN operated in Soviet Ukraine but they regarded the Soviet Union as the most dangerous enemy of the Ukrainians and the main occupier of Ukrainian territory. During the interwar period, the Soviet authorities only became the target of OUN terror when OUN member Mykola Lemyk attempted to assassinate the Soviet consul in Lviv on 22 October 1933, but murdered the secretary of the consulate, Aleksei Mailov, by mistake.[195] In various European countries, many UVO and OUN members living there were infiltrated by the Polish intelligence service and its informers.[196]

The UVO and the OUN propagated a very western Ukrainian or Galician form of nationalism and they believed that Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine would approve of its plans for “liberating Ukraine.” During the Second World War this belief would cause the OUN considerable problems, when the organization would be confronted for the first time with eastern Ukrainians and their dislike for ethnic nationalism, racism and fascism. The western Ukrainian or Galician form of nationalism was also not entirely compatible with the mentality of Volhynian Ukrainians, who found it very difficult to comprehend the mystical nationalism of the Galician type.[197]

The Generation Gap and the Transformation into a Mass Movement

From the very beginning the OUN was divided into two generations: the older one born around 1890 and the younger one around 1910. The generations were divided by many factors, of which the most important seems to be the violence and brutality experienced by the older group during the First World War. The younger generation were not exposed to this experience, had a more romantic image of war, and were more eager to use violence. The older generation consisted of people such as Ievhen Konovalets’ (1891–1938), Andrii Mel’nyk (1890–1964), and Riko Iaryi (1898–1969). They had received their military training in the Austro-Hungarian army, had fought during and after the First World War in various armies and had tried to establish and preserve a Ukrainian state. As the result of pressure from the Polish authorities, or of their own choice, some of them emigrated from Poland after the First World War, to countries such as Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Lithuania.[198] The most important representatives of the OUN outside the Ukrainian area were Riko Iaryi in Berlin, Ievhen Onats’kyi in Italy, Ivan Reviuk-Bartovych in Lithuania, and Andrii Fedyna in Gdańsk (Danzig).[199]

The younger generation of the OUN consisted of such people as Stepan Bandera, Iaroslav Stets’ko (1912–1986), Stepan Lenkavs’kyi (1904–1977), Volodymyr Ianiv (1908–1991), and Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950). Their life in the 1920s and 1930s was different from that of the older generation, who lived in more comfortable circumstances in exile.[200] The younger generation, later referred to as the “Bandera generation,”[201] was too young to fight in the First World War or to assist in the foundation of the UVO. The UVO and the OUN were for them fascinating secret organizations that could be joined only by brave Ukrainians who were ready to die for independence. This generation idealized the war much more than the older one. It believed that it had missed a war and hoped to fight another one. Leading individuals of this generation grew up in patriotic and religious western Ukrainian families. During their time at high school and university in the 1920s, they were active in the Organization of the Upper Grades of the Ukrainian High Schools (Orhanizatsiia Vyshchykh Klias Ukraїns’kykh Himnazii, OVKUH) and the Union of Ukrainian Nationalistic Youth (Soiuz ukraїns’koï natsionalistychnoї molodi, SUNM). These organizations cooperated with the UVO and later the OUN, and together with them or alone, organized various nationalist and religious commemorative events and demonstrations.[202]

The process of opening the UVO to Galician youth, and transforming it into a Ukrainian nationalist mass movement, began in the second half of the 1920s. For this purpose, the older generation, on the one hand, tried to win young Ukrainians from the OVKUH, SUNM, and other youthful organizations operating in the Second Republic.[203] The UVO leaders also established the paramilitary organization Dorost for children aged eight to fifteen, and the Iunatstvo for youth between fifteen and twenty-five.[204] On the other hand, the UVO leaders tried to include other parties and political organizations. At the First Conference of Ukrainian Nationalists from 3 to 7 November 1927 in Berlin, the UVO leaders established the Leadership of the Ukrainian Nationalists (Provid Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv, PUN) and asked other organizations and parties such as the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists (Lehiia Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv, LUN) and the UNDO to merge and to hand over their leadership to the PUN. This plan did not work because no group or party was really willing to give up its sovereignty and to subordinate itself to the PUN. The situation changed, however, after the OUN was founded. At this stage of the creation of a Ukrainian nationalist mass movement, a number of organizations, including the LUN, OVKUH, and SUNM, agreed to merge and to be represented by the PUN. The PUN consisted of leading OUN members and became a kind of synonym for the leadership in exile of the OUN. Konovalets’, the leader of the OUN, was the leader of the PUN.[205]

The UVO did not disappear immediately after the foundation of the OUN but existed simultaneously with it for a few years, serving as a military arm of the OUN. The most active and vigorous new members came to the OUN from the OVKUH and SUNM. Zynovii Knysh characterized these individuals as ambitious, zealous, idealistic, and willing to make sacrifices, but without any political experience.[206] Among the organizations whose members went over to the OUN was the League of Ukrainian Fascists (Soiuz ukraïns’kykh fashystiv, SUF), which invented the fascist greeting “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!).[207]

Ukrainian youth was also divided. Not all young Ukrainians supported the extreme version of Ukrainian nationalism represented by the OUN. The SUNM, for example, was divided into a radical branch, which consisted of OUN activists or sympathizers, and a moderate one, which sympathized with the UNDO. Relations between these two branches were so tense that students who belonged to the moderate branch of the SUNM, and who lived in the Ukrainian Academic House in Lviv, used an external canteen elsewhere, in order to avoid eating together with the fascistized nationalists.[208]

The younger generation began to control the homeland executive of the OUN in 1931–1932. This political body was subordinated to the leadership in exile but it was in charge of OUN policy in eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Stepan Okhrymovych, an SUNM member, became the leader of the homeland executive in 1931. He entrusted its propaganda apparatus to his friend, schoolmate, and fellow-member of Plast, Stepan Bandera. According to Mirchuk, Okhrymovych and Bandera had studied Mikhnovs’kyi’s Samostiina Ukraїna together during their high school years in Stryi (Stryj).[209]

In May 1932, Bohdan Kordiuk became the new Providnyk of the homeland executive; Bandera became the deputy leader; Volodymyr Ianiv became the head of the political-ideological apparatus; Iaroslav Stets’ko, Ianiv’s deputy; Roman Shukhevych, the head of the military apparatus.[210] The younger generation, although formally dependent on the leadership in exile, attempted to formulate its own policies. In so doing, they soon proved themselves even more radical than the older generation. They were more willing to make sacrifices, to use terror as a political means, and to kill OUN members and other Ukrainians accused of working for the Polish police, and of other forms of betrayal. This difference manifested itself in particular after Bandera became the leader of the OUN’s homeland executive in June 1933.[211]

Although the younger generation was generally more radical and fanatical, it did not necessarily adopt ideas that were more fascist in nature than those of the older generation. In the late 1920s and 1930s the main propagators of fascism in the OUN were Mykola Stsibors’kyi and Ievhen Onats’kyi. Like Dontsov, these men worked on a Ukrainian concept of fascism. Andrii Mel’nyk, who succeeded Konovalets’ as leader of the OUN, seems also to have been an adherent of fascism. In a letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1938, Mel’nyk claimed that the OUN was “ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.”[212] At the Second General Congress of the OUN in August 1939 in Rome, the title of Vozhd’ was used officially for the first time in the history of the organization and was bestowed upon Mel’nyk.[213] The younger generation, on the other hand, had adopted various fascist principles, such as the Führerprinzip, mainly thanks to their favorite writer Dontsov. In leaflets that were obviously produced by them for Pentecost 1934, Konovalets’ was characterized as the “leader of the Ukrainian nation and the national revolution.”[214]

The younger OUN members committed spectacular acts of terror and were encouraged to do so by older members of the leadership in exile, who used the publicity for the purpose of collecting funds from Ukrainians living in North America. They advertised terror as a patriotic struggle against the occupiers. Trials after assassinations were used to inform the global community about the Ukrainian question. At a conference in June 1933 in Berlin, Konovalets’ did not formally approve Bandera’s proposal to use terror, but he did not try to stop the terrorist acts of the younger generation.[215]

After Pieracki’s assassination, the mass arrests conducted in June 1934 caused chaos in the OUN. Bandera, as the leader of the homeland executive, was succeeded by Osyp Mashchak, who, after his arrest on 20 December 1934, was followed by the more moderate Lev Rebet. After Bandera’s arrest, the homeland executive put a stop to the assassinations and other spectacular propagandist actions and concentrated on strengthening the structure of the movement in Volhynia. More and more Ukrainians became involved in the movement. Shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, the OUN counted between 8,000 and 20,000 members and had several thousand sympathizers.[216]

Ethnic and Political Violence

During the interwar period the UVO and the OUN tried to assassinate a number of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians, but not always successfully. Some of the Polish potential victims such as Józef Piłsudski were regarded as the founders or important statesmen of an “occupying power.” Others such as Tadeusz Hołówko, head of the Department for Eastern Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Henryk Józewski, governor of Volhynia, were committed to Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation. Ukrainians such as high school director Ivan Babii and the journalist and political activist Sydir Tverdokhlib did not approve of the measures of the OUN and cooperated with the Polish authorities. After Bandera became the leader of the homeland executive, a number of OUN members, such as Iakiv Bachyns’kyi and Maria Kovaliukivna, were murdered by the organization. In addition to carrying out political assassinations, the OUN killed a number of people in the course of armed robberies of banks, post offices, police stations, and private households.[217]

The OUN regarded terror as a propaganda tool that would draw international attention to the situation of Ukrainians in Poland and Soviet Ukraine, and also to its “struggle for liberation.” In terms of publicity, assassinations were the most powerful type of terror acts. In reaction to some Ukrainian mass terror acts, the Polish authorities reacted with counter-terror. Between 12 July and 24 September 1930 for example, with the help of its youthful associates, the OUN set fire to Polish crops and farm buildings, and destroyed railway tracks and telecommunication lines. On 16 September 1930, in order to put an end to this violence, the Polish authorities began a campaign, euphemistically called pacification (Pol. pacyfikacja), which lasted until 30 November 1930. For the purpose of suppressing the OUN terror, the Polish authorities used the army and police. A number of Ukrainians accused of supporting the OUN were arrested, humiliated, beaten, and otherwise mistreated. A few were killed. The scouting organization Plast was banned, and the three Ukrainian high schools were closed. It is not known whether the OUN conducted the arson and sabotage in order to spark off an uprising, to provoke a bloody reaction, or to prevent negotiations between Polish and Ukrainian politicians. The pacification did, however, give the OUN and a number of other political Ukrainian organizations grounds for complaint to the League of Nations, concerning the policies of the Polish government and the situation of Ukrainians in Poland. The attention of several international newspapers was also drawn to the mistreatment of Ukrainians in Poland.[218]

It is difficult to establish how many people the UVO and OUN killed between 1921 and 1939. Relying on information supplied by Petro Mirchuk, Alexander Motyl estimated that the UVO and OUN attempted to kill sixty-three persons between 1921 and 1939: thirty-six Ukrainians, twenty-five Poles, one Russian, and one Jew. It should be noted that Mirchuk was an OUN member and the head of a division of the propaganda apparatus in the national executive in 1939. After the Second World War, he extolled the UVO, OUN, and UPA in his numerous publications, whitewashing a substantial number of their crimes. Motyl added correctly that, in his opinion, the actual number of persons killed by the UVO and OUN may well have been higher.[219] Maksym Hon, a specialist on the subject of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, proved that Mirchuk’s suggestion, that only one Jew was killed by the OUN, was false.[220] The application of common sense and the use of historical literature and archival documents also cast doubt on Mirchuk’s estimates. This is particularly apparent when we consider that the UVO and OUN had many members in the villages and smaller towns of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, where they killed people not only for political but also for economic and other reasons. By 1922 the UVO had already set 2,200 Polish farms on fire.[221] In 1937 alone, the OUN carried out 830 violent acts against Polish citizens or their property. Of these offences, 540 were classified by the Security Service of the Polish Interior Ministry as anti-Polish, 242 as anti-Jewish, sixty-seven as anti-Ukrainian, and seventeen as anti-Communist.[222] Unfortunately, no comprehensive study of this question has been carried out, and we can therefore only estimate that the number of victims killed by the UVO and OUN in the interwar period was at least several hundred.

Cooperation, Exile, and Funding

Countries such as Germany and Lithuania supported OUN newspapers and journals, provided the organization with passports, and arranged military courses for their members. With the help of the Humboldt-Stiftung, the Germans also supported Ukrainian nationalist student organizations at the University of Technology in Gdańsk (Danzig) and at other universities. The UVO and the OUN were therefore dependent on Germany and Lithuania and provided them with espionage services in return. Germany and Lithuania also supported the Ukrainian nationalists because they regarded Poland as their countries’ enemy, and like the Ukrainians, they laid claim to parts of Polish territories. Some UVO and OUN politicians, such as Osyp Dumin, were willing to collaborate with the Soviet Union, but it is not clear whether the Soviet authorities actually financed the UVO or the OUN. According to the Polish Intelligence Service, the OUN also collaborated with the British Secret Intelligence Service. The relationships between the UVO-OUN and these supporting states were frequently based on cooperation between the OUN and a particular institution—in Germany, for example, the Abwehr (military intelligence). In official statements however, the OUN denied that it cooperated with other countries, and it claimed to be financially and politically independent. Ukrainian emigrants, particularly those living in North America, also provided a further source of income for the OUN. For example, the Ukrainian War Veterans’ Association and the Ukrainian National Federation raised $40,000 for the UVO combat fund and the OUN liberation fund between 1928 and 1939. In addition, the robbery of banks, post offices, and private persons in Poland provided the OUN with supplementary income.[223]

One important reason why the OUN collaborated with Germany was the political order established by the Treaty of Versailles. after the First World War. Because Germany had lost many territories, it intended to reverse the geopolitical order established by the Allies. At the same time, the Ukrainians were, in an even worse situation than Germany was. The Treaty of Versailles left them without a state and made Germany their most important partner. Two events that affected—but did not interrupt—the cooperation between the OUN and Germany and Lithuania were the German-Polish non-aggression pact signed on 26 January 1934 and the assassination of Minister Pieracki by the OUN on 15 June 1934. On the day of Pieracki’s murder, the German minister of propaganda was on an official visit to Warsaw. Mykola Lebed’, who was suspected of carrying out Pieracki’s assassination, fled shortly afterwards to Germany. Despite friendly German-Ukrainian relations, he was then expelled to Poland at the request of Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin. After the German-Polish non-aggression pact, German politicians promised not to cooperate with the OUN. Nevertheless, both the Abwehr and Lithuanian politicians continued to collaborate with the OUN during the second half of the 1930s.[224]

Mussolini’s Italy was another important partner of the OUN, as was the Croatian Ustaša, which was founded in 1929. Similarly to the OUN, the Ustaša operated until the Second World War as an ultranationalist terrorist organization. Like the OUN, it fought for an independent state against its “occupiers” and against its ethnic and political enemies in Croatia. Contact with Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić was established in late 1933 or early 1934 in Berlin, where Pavelić met with Iaryi and Lebed’. After this meeting the two OUN members visited the Ustaša camp in Italy.[225] During the course of the cooperation between the two organizations, some OUN members were trained together with Ustaša activists in paramilitary camps in Italy, which were established and sponsored by Mussolini. A leading OUN member, Mykhailo Kolodzins’kyi, gave military courses in this camp. He also began work there on “The War Doctrine of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” an important OUN document in which he planned a Ukrainian uprising, propagated the cult of war, and presented a Ukrainian version of imperialism, which was intended to protect “our own race” and to extend the Ukrainian territories.[226] Kolodzins’kyi argued in “The War Doctrine” that during a national uprising, the western Ukrainian territories should be fully “cleansed” of Poles, and also that “the more Jews killed during the uprising, the better for the Ukrainian state.”[227] OUN member Zynovii Knysh characterized the relationship between the Ukrainian and Croatian revolutionary nationalists as very warm:

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had good relations with the leading circles of the revolutionary Croatian organization Ustaša. These relations, between the two Leaderships, became even closer in exile, outside the borders of Croatia. … In general, Croatians—and in particular Croatian students—respected the OUN, trusted their members, regarded the Ukrainian nationalists as more experienced in matters of revolutionary struggle, and invited them to their discussions, meetings, and congresses.[228]

The relationship between Italy and the Ukrainian and Croatian revolutionary nationalists was complicated by the assassination of Pieracki by the OUN, and the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles on 9 October 1934 by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (Vnatrešna makedonska revolucionerna organizacija, VMRO). During the Pieracki trial, it was revealed that Mussolini supported the Ustaša, which was also involved in the assassination in Marseilles. The revelation of the cooperation of Italy with the OUN and Ustaša was very inconvenient for Mussolini. The simultaneous trials in respect of the killings of Alexander I and of Pieracki further complicated the situation.[229] As the facts became known, Mussolini decided to detain the OUN and Ustaša members in two separate localities in Sicily. The OUN stayed in the village of Tortorici until June 1937. Among the OUN members recruited by Mussolini was Stepan Bandera’s brother Oleksandr, who had come to Italy in early 1933 as a student together with three other young Ukrainians. Oleksandr lived at first in Rome on a grant from the Italian government. After coming to Rome and beginning his studies in political science, Oleksandr and two other Ukrainian students in Rome joined the Italian student fascist group, Gruppi universitari fascisti, in order to establish contact with Italian fascist youth. In Rome, they also founded the Ukrainian student organization Zaravo, to familiarize Ukrainian students there with nationalist politics.[230]

As already indicated, the OUN became very popular among Ukrainian emigrants, especially in the second half of the 1930s. Two other influential groups uniting Ukrainian émigrés were the conservative group led by Hetman Skoropads’kyi, and the Ukrainian National Association (Ukraїns’ke Natsional’ne Obiednannia, UNO). The OUN competed for German funding, particularly with the Hetmanite group, which controlled the Ukrainian Scientific Institute (Ukrainisches Wissenschaftliches Institut, UWI) in Berlin. The OUN, however, had significant influence on Ukrainian student organizations in Germany, such as Zarevo, Osnova, and Sich. In the second half of the 1930s, the OUN also began to take control of the UNO and some other émigré organizations, which, like the OUN, developed an interest in cooperation with Germany and began to regard Ukrainian nationalism as a movement belonging to the family of European fascist movements.[231] These groups, like the OUN, began emphasizing that Ukrainian nationalism was equal to National Socialism and other fascist and nationalist movements, and states, which anticipated the opportunity to combat communism and to change the geopolitical order in Europe:

The future Ukrainian state will be a state that is based on National Socialist fundamental principles. Ukrainians use the word “nationalism” in the sense of “National Socialism” or “Fascism.” Ukrainians are on cordial terms with other contemporary nationalistic states and nations because they see in them healthy forces that will combat Bolshevism.[232]

Ukrainian students in Canada were convinced, like their colleagues in Europe, that Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco were doing good work. A significant number of Ukrainian First World War veterans in Canada, who were united in the Ukrainian National Federation (UNF), supported the OUN and its racial plans for Ukraine. Like the OUN, they regarded parliamentary democracy as a sham. In 1933 the Ukrainian Canadian newspaper Novyi shliakh, which was controlled by the Ukrainian War Veteran’s Association (UWVA), compared Konovalets’ to Hitler and Mussolini.[233] According to Karol Grünberg and Bolesław Sprengel, Konovalets’ met Hitler in 1933. After the meeting, the leader of the OUN appealed to Ukrainians to support the Führer because he would “open the doors to the East.”[234]

Ideology

The ideology of Ukrainian nationalism provided the OUN with orientation, united its members, and allowed them to avoid qualms of conscience when acting in criminal or ethically unacceptable ways. The main ideologist of this radical form of Ukrainian nationalism was Dmytro Dontsov, a spiritual father of the OUN, who, however, never formally belonged to the organization. Dontsov and other leading ideologists of the OUN—such as Mykola Stsibors’kyi, Ievhen Onats’kyi, Volodymyr Martynets’, and Iaroslav Orshan—regarded Ukrainian nationalism as one of the European fascist movements. Ideology was also for Dontsov a “secular religion.” In order to be effective, it ought not be contaminated or questioned. Believers in the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism were, according to him, expected to “maintain the purity of one’s own ideology, clear in content and active of will, as well as a faith that knows no doubts. If we lose this ideology, then the most heroic efforts of the nation will be branded as banditry. If we maintain it, then we will attain everything.”[235]

The OUN leaders in exile respected Dontsov and regarded him as their main ideologist and intellectual guide. On several occasions, they tried to persuade him to join the organization and to become the head of its ideological department, but he never accepted. Because he lived in Poland he might have feared arrest had he joined the OUN. For the same reasons he did not direct his criticism against the Poles and the Second Republic. Another reason why Dontsov did not join the organization was to keep his distance from the older OUN members. Dontsov did not regard that generation as the “new type of man” he was interested in creating. By the same token, he was more enthusiastic about the younger generation, encouraging them to break with Ukrainian traditions and the existing political Ukrainian parties and to create their own new revolutionary fascist movement. Many young Ukrainians of the Bandera generation followed him.[236]

For his ideological purposes, Dontsov simplified and vulgarized the writings of such philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because of this philosophical undertone, his texts were not comprehensible to all, but they were particularly popular among high school and university youth. Members of the OVKUH and the SUNM read them eagerly, felt enchanted by them, and encouraged other young Ukrainians to study them. In his ideology, Dontsov sought to reverse the common or universal system of values and morality. The fundamental concepts of his ideology included romanticism, dogmatism, fanaticism, and also amorality (amoral’nist’). Dontsov argued that all deeds that would help Ukrainians to achieve a Ukrainian state, regardless of their nature, were moral and right. He thereby encouraged the younger generation to reject “common ethics” and to embrace fanaticism because, as he claimed, only fanaticism could change history and enable the Ukrainians to establish a state. Dontsov’s new system of morality was obviously problematic, because it justified all kinds of crimes and violence as long as they were conducted for the good of the nation, or in order to achieve statehood. In general, the ideologist of the Bandera generation copied many of his ideas from other European far-right and fascist discourses, in particular German and Italian.[237]

Dontsov also tried to break with the moderate and past-orientated nationalism that such people as Drahomanov, Hrushevs’kyi, and Franko had shaped. The Ukrainian radical right ideologist blamed these thinkers for their interest in socialism, their preference for universal rather than national morality, and for being moderate, rational, and eager to make compromises. He called the earlier thinkers drahomanivtsi, after Drahomanov, whose thinking was influenced by the nineteenth-century socialist discourses.[238] Dontsov claimed that the drahomanivtsi were responsible for the lack of a state and for the weakness of Ukrainian nationalism.[239] Like the ideologists of the OUN, he also vehemently disapproved of democracy and liberalism.[240]

Dontsov began to admire fascism in late 1922. By 1926 he had already translated parts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Ukrainian and had published them. For Dontsov, Hitler was the ideal of a fascist leader. The Ukrainian ideologist compared the Führer to Jesus and to Saint Joan of Arc. In addition to extreme nationalism and fascism, Dontsov also popularized antisemitism. In the late 1930s, he opted for the racist kind of antisemitism preached and practiced by the National Socialists in the German Reich.[241] Nazi Germany was for him the ideal fascist state, although it was the Italian Fascists who first drew his attention to the phenomenon of fascism. In 1932 Dontsov translated Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism (La Dottrina Del Fascismo) into Ukrainian and published it.[242] In 1934 a biography of Mussolini by Mykhailo Ostroverkha appeared as the first volume of the Knyhozbirnia Vistnyka (library of Vistnyk), which was edited by Dontsov. In the same year, Knyhozbirnia Vistnyka published a biography of Hitler by Rostyslav Iendyk. Both biographies were written in the genre of hagiography and far-right propaganda, and both began with an apologetic introduction by Dontsov. Mussolini and Hitler were presented as modern, trendsetting politicians and as the embodiments of movements that guaranteed order and peace in Europe. These biographies familiarized Ukrainians with the concept of a fascist leader who rules by virtue of the will of the nation and symbolizes the nation. In addition, Vistnyk published writings by such Nazi ideologists as Josef Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg.[243] According to the memoirs of Lev Rebet, leader of the homeland executive from 1934 until 1938, Ukrainian nationalist youth read Vistnyk very enthusiastically, and their ideas were extensively shaped by this journal.[244]

Dontsov regarded the interwar Ukrainian nationalism as a form of fascism. He radicalized and modified Ukrainian nationalism in order to integrate it into the family of European fascist movements. His attempts to familiarize western Ukrainian youth with this political phenomenon were quite successful. In 1934, the same year in which Hitler’s and Mussolini’s biographies were published by Knyhozbirnia Vistnyka, Volodymyr Levyns’kyi observed: “Oh, how widespread is the cult of Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascist strongmen among Ukrainian students! How many little Mussolinis and Hitlers have sprung up under the influence of Dontsov’s writings!”[245]

Many Ukrainian students and high school pupils dreamed of being a Führer or a Duce. There were debates among Ukrainian nationalists about the two fascist leaders, the systems they represented, and the states they ruled. Because of his fundamental antisemitism and anticommunism, and the way he seized power in Germany, Hitler was more popular than Mussolini among many Ukrainian nationalists. In 1935, Ihor Virlyi wrote that Hitler fascinated western Ukrainians, because he “wrote on his banners: Perish, Jew!—because the Jews were propagators of the communist pattern, and he was striking at the foundations of communism.”[246] The teacher Sofiia Rusova noticed that, when her grandson joined the scouting organization Plast, which, according to him, was full of nationalists, he began to take a great interest in nationalism, Mussolini, and Hitler.[247]

The verdict of not guilty in the trial of Sholom Schwartzbard—who had murdered Symon Petliura in Paris on 25 May 1926—had a significant influence on Dontsov’s attitude to Jews. Schwartzbard was found not guilty, having claimed that he had killed Petliura to avenge the pogroms that Petliura’s army had committed in Ukraine.[248] The verdict had a strong impact on Ukrainian nationalists who, after the trial, ceased to veil their antisemitism. Dontsov became one of the main propagators of antisemitism among the Ukrainian ideologists. On the one hand, he attacked Jews as a “race.” On the other hand, he adapted antisemitism to the Ukrainian political situation by associating Jews with the Soviet Union, which he viewed as the main “occupier” of Ukrainian territory and the main enemy of Ukrainians. For Dontsov, the Jews were guilty for many reasons, but not as guilty as the Russians who were the actual “occupiers” of Ukraine. In reaction to the Schwartzbard trial, Dontsov claimed that the Russian and the Jewish problem were interwoven and that the Ukrainians must solve the Russian problem in order to be able to solve the Jewish question:

This murder is an act of revenge by an agent of Russian imperialism against a person who became a symbol of the national struggle against Russian oppression. It does not matter that in this case a Jew became an agent of Russian imperialism. … We have to and we will fight against the aspiration of Jewry to play the inappropriate role of lords in Ukraine. … No other government took as many Jews into its service as did the Bolsheviks, and one might expect that like Pilate the Russians will wash their hands and say to the oppressed nations, “The Jew is guilty of everything.”

Jews are guilty, terribly guilty, because they helped consolidate Russian rule in Ukraine, but “the Jew is not guilty of everything.” Russian imperialism is guilty of everything. Only when Russia falls in Ukraine will we be able to settle the Jewish question in our country in a way that suits the interest of the Ukrainian people.[249]

The younger generation in the OUN adopted Dontsov’s characterization of Jews and repeated it in the resolutions of the Second Great Congress, held by the OUN-B in April 1941 in Cracow.[250] When, on 7 June 1936, the OUN commemorated the death of Symon Petliura, OUN activists distributed leaflets with the message: “Attention, kill and beat the Jews for our Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura, the Jews should be removed from Ukraine, long live the Ukrainian state.”[251]

The modern kind of antisemitism, which defined Jews as a race and not as a religious group, became popular among Ukrainian nationalists, especially in the 1930s. This antisemitism was popularized in publications such as The Jewish Problem in Ukraine, a brochure written by OUN member and ideologist Volodymyr Martynets’, who was fascinated by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. Unlike Dontsov, who claimed that the Jews were the helpers of the Russian imperialists and were pillars of the Soviet Union, Martynets’ adapted the antisemitic discourse of the National Socialists in Germany. Like them, he defined the “Jewish problem” as a “racial issue.” And like the Nazis, he claimed that the Ukrainian nation was the victim of the Jews, on which they preyed. For Martynets’, the “Jewish problem” in Ukraine was more difficult than in other European countries, because there were more Jews in Ukraine than elsewhere in Europe. Particularly problematic were the cities, which were inhabited more by Jews than by Ukrainians. Martynets’ claimed that it was necessary to “cleanse” the cities of Jews, and thus solve the “vital problem of the [Ukrainian] nation.” The first step to solve the “Jewish problem” would be to isolate them from Ukrainians. Martynets’ argued that the Jews would otherwise corrupt the psychology and the blood of the Ukrainian race, and contaminate the Ukrainian nation. Every kind of direct coexistence with Jews was therefore undesirable. In order to prevent the interrelation between the two “races,” Jews were to have their own schools, newspapers, restaurants, cafes, theatres, brothels, and cabarets, and were to be forbidden the use of the Ukrainian equivalents. Intermarriage between Jews and Ukrainians had to be forbidden, as in Germany.[252]

The OUN actively put the antisemitic components of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism into practice. In 1935 OUN activists conducted an operation, during which they smashed windows in Jewish houses in the Zhydachiv (Żydaczów), Kalush (Kałusz), Stanyslaviv, and Stryi districts.[253] At a meeting in July 1936 in Volhynia, the OUN in the Kostopil’ (Kostopol) raion (district) concluded that “Jews are harmful to the Ukrainian nation.” Soon afterwards, OUN activists in the Kostopil’ raion set several Jewish houses on fire. Approximately one hundred Jewish families were left without a roof over their heads as a result of this arson.[254]

Of the Ukrainians living in the Second Republic, it was not only Ukrainian nationalists who were obsessed with “Jewish Bolshevism.” This antisemitic stereotype was also widespread among the so-called Ukrainian democratic parties. The UNDO claimed in autumn 1936 that “Jews are the most faithful and almost sole propagators of communism.”[255] While antisemitism was thriving in the 1930s, western Ukrainians denied their antisemitism and made fun of the fact that others perceived them as antisemites (Fig. 1).

Related to antisemitism was the OUN’s fascination with fascism. After promoting the UVO and OUN in the United States, OUN member Ievhen Liakhovych was staying in London and tried to meet with Sir Oswald Mosley, Britain’s leading fascist politician. Instead, he was able to meet with the chief of the propaganda department and his deputy. During this talk, Liakhovych explained the nature of Ukrainian antisemitism to his fascist counterpart: “Antisemitism is an irrational and unjustifiable hatred. ... We [the OUN] are combating the Jews because they have always done us harm.” His interlocutor agreed with him that the situation was similar in England.[256]

In Natsiokratiia, a treatise written in 1935, leading OUN member and ideologist Mykola Stsibors’kyi condemned democracy, socialism, and communism; at the same time, he praised fascism and dictatorship. He introduced a political system that he called natsiokratiia—the “dictatorship of the nation”—and proposed that it would become the political system of the state that the OUN would establish in the course of a national revolution. Stsibors’kyi himself could not decide whether natsiokratiia was fascist or not. On the one hand, he claimed that the “Ukrainian state will be neither fascist nor National Socialist,” that Ukrainian nationalism was a singular and independent movement, and that it was only their foes who accused Ukrainian nationalists of being fascists. On the other hand, however, he claimed that “fascism itself is first of all nationalism: the love of one’s own motherland, patriotic feeling brought to the level

Fig. 1. The front page of the satirical magazine Komar, 15 February 1934.

of self-sacrifice, and the cult of self-sacrificing fanaticism.” More important than Stsibors’kyi’s indecision and ambiguity is the fact that natsiokratiia was modeled on fascism. According to natsiokratiia, the Ukrainian state would be ruled by the “Leader of the Nation [Vozhd’ Natsiї], the greatest of the great sons of the nation who, due to the general trust of the nation and to his own integral attributes, will hold in his hand the power of the state.”[257]

After Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, Mel’nyk asked Stsibors’kyi to write a constitution for a Ukrainian state. According to Stsibors’kyi’s draft, natsiokratiia would be the official political system of the Ukrainian state, as he had proposed in his 1935 treatise. According to the draft constitution, the Ukrainian state was to be based on the totalitarian dictatorship of a nation that would be defined in a nationalist and racial sense and would therefore guarantee rights to ethnic Ukrainians alone. Other than the OUN, all political groups, parties, and other such organizations would be forbidden. As in natsiokratiia, the leader of the OUN would be the “Head of the State—The Leader of the Nation [Holova Derzhavy-Vozhd’ Natsiї],” whose period of office would be unlimited. In this sense, all aspects of political, social, and cultural life would be controlled by the OUN, the only legal party and organization in the state.[258]

According to the OUN’s concept of fascism, the nation would be represented by and subordinated to the leader (Vozhd’ or Providnyk), who would be the head of the OUN. This was the same absolute authority of the leader that the Nazis called Führerprinzip. Within the OUN, the Führerprinzip concept was officially introduced at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists on 27 August 1939 in Rome, but the idea had already manifested itself previously, as for example in Natsiokratiia in 1935, and in the behavior of the OUN members during their trials in Warsaw and Lviv in 1935 and 1936.[259]

Fascism became very popular among Ukrainian nationalists during the 1930s. The OUN was its main but not its only promoter in Ukraine. Two other important persons who sympathized with fascism were Dmytro Paliїv, founder of the Front of National Unity (Front natsional’noї iednosti, FNIe) and of the newspaper Novyi Chas, and the Ukrainophile, Wilhelm von Habsburg.[260] In the 1930s a group of young people in Przemyśl, set up a Society of Fascist Studies (Tovarystvo fashyzmoznavstva). In a letter to Dontsov they stated that “Fascism is a universal phenomenon, because it is not a political doctrine but an entire worldview of indestructible principles based on religion and morality.” In their letter they asked Dontsov to contribute to their journal, to give them leadership and guidance. They finished their letter