Conclusion

Ukraine was influenced through the centuries by various cultures, religions, and political movements, and was at the beginning of the twentieth century a very heterogeneous territory. Until the First World War Ukrainians lived in the Habsburg Empire together with such groups as Poles, Jews, and Romanians, and in the Russian Empire with Russians, Jews, and Poles. The Ukrainian national movement, which was rooted in eastern Galicia, was weaker than the Polish and Russian ones. After the First World War, Ukrainians failed in their efforts to establish a state and lived in the interwar period in Soviet Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. In 1920, a group of Ukrainian veterans founded the UVO, which became a terrorist organization without much political significance. The situation only changed a decade later when the OUN entered the stage, involved the youth, and became a nationalist mass movement similar to the Ustaša, Hlinka Party, and Iron Guard. The OUN members lived only in Poland and in exile and had no impact on the political situation in Soviet Ukraine. Although the OUN emphasized its national, patriotic and romantic nature, it was essentially a typical East Central European fascist movement. It attempted to take power in the Ukrainian territories and to establish a state with a fascist dictatorship.

The OUN was composed of two generations: one born around 1890 and one around 1910. The older generation created the UVO and lived in exile. The younger generation controlled the homeland executive of the OUN, which was subordinated to the leadership in exile. Especially after Bandera became the leader of the homeland executive the younger generation proved to be more radical than the older one. Nevertheless, both generations were open to and fascinated with fascism. The OUN ideology combined ultranationalism with racism, mysticism, antisemitism, a cult of war and violence, anticommunism, hostility to democracy, communism and socialism. The younger generation was shaped especially by Dmytro Dontsov, who before the First World War had been a Marxist and after the war argued that Ukrainian nationalism was one of the European fascist movements. Nevertheless, he reminded Ukrainians to avoid using the term “fascism,” in order not to be perceived as a part of an international movement. The democratic Ukrainian parties in the Second Republic such as the UNDO were fragile and the political situation in Poland was not favorable to them.