Fig. 2. Bandera as a high school pupil. Poltava, Zhyttia Stepana Bandery, 13.

at high school, Bandera was actively engaged in a number of youth organizations, to which Ukrainian patriotic education was displaced after the Polish authorities restricted it in Ukrainian schools. Two of these associations were Plast, a scouting organization, and Sokil, an athletic youth organization. In Plast, Bandera was in the Chervona kalyna (Guelder Rose) troop together with people such as Okhrymovych, who would invite him a few years later to engage in the OUN. Bandera stayed in Plast until September 1930, when the Polish authorities banned the organization in Galicia, two years after prohibiting it in Volhynia. During his time at high school, Bandera was also involved in the OVKUH, which, as explained in chapter 1, included in its membership a number of other future leading OUN members, such as Shukhevych, Lenkavs’kyi, and Stets’ko. After graduating from high school, the OVKUH members met again in the SUNM. Both the SUNM and the OVKUH took care of “patriotic upbringing” in Plast, Sokil, and also Luh. The latter was a gymnastic and fire-fighting organization, which, as the result of nationalist indoctrination, occasionally refused to put out a blaze in non-Ukrainian houses. In 1927 Bandera also joined the UVO, for which he performed reconnaissance work.[295]

 

Fig. 3. Bandera as a student. Posivnych, Stepan Bandera: Dokumenty i materialy, 107.