The second great trial, this time of twenty-three OUN members—of whom six had already been sentenced in Warsaw—began on 25 May 1936 in Lviv. In addition to Bandera, the following were in the dock: Roman Shukhevych, Iaroslav Makarushka, Oleksandr Pashkevych, Iaroslav Spol’s’kyi, Volodymyr Ianiv, Iaroslav Stets’ko, Bohdan Hnatevych, Volodymyr Kotsiumbas, Bohdan Pidhainyi, Ivan Maliutsa, Osyp Mashchak, Ievhen Kachmars’kyi, Ivan Iarosh, Roman Myhal’, Roman Sen’kiv, Kateryna Zaryts’ka, Vira Svientsits’ka, Anna Daria Fedak, Osyp Fenyk, Volodymyr Ivasyk, Semen Rachun, and Ivan Ravlyk. All of them were accused of belonging to the OUN, twelve were accused of involvement in the murder of Bachyns’kyi, the murder of Ivan Babii, the planning of the murders of Antin Krushel’nyts’kyi, Władysław Kossobudzki, Henryk Józewski, the Soviet consul in Lviv, the murder of the pupil of the seventh grade of the Ukrainian high school Korolyshyn, and of placing a bomb in the office of the newspaper Pratsia. In addition to the defending lawyers from the Warsaw trial, Stepan Shukhevych, Semen Shevchuk, Pylyp Ievyn, and Volodymyr Zahaikevych defended the twenty-three OUN members.[587] Because of the location, the defendants and their lawyers were allowed to speak Ukrainian. Taking advantage of this regulation, some of the defendants testified at great length, and put questions to the witnesses. The most eager questioner and talker was Bandera.
The building where the trial took place, on Batory Street in Lviv, was under strong police protection. Only persons with a special pass, altogether about seventy, were allowed into the courtroom. The last defendant to enter the courtroom, shortly before the trial began, was Bandera. As he entered, he performed a fascist salute, raising his right arm and shouting “Slava!” or “Slava Ukraїni!” All the defendants in the courtroom answered him in the same manner.[588] Shortly after this gesture the trial was opened.[589]
Chairman Dysiewicz tried to put on record the personal details of the defendants. All of them stated that they were of Ukrainian nationality. With the exception of the Orthodox Svientsits’ka, they were all Greek Catholics. Bandera, Mashchak, Spol’s’kyi, Ianiv, and Stets’ko stated, moreover, that they had Ukrainian citizenship. Makarushka stated that he was “basically a Ukrainian citizen but temporarily a Polish one.” When the chairman informed the defendants that a Ukrainian state did not exist and asked them if they wished to record their citizenship as Soviet Ukrainian, they replied that they were by no means Soviet. Spol’s’kyi said that before he answered any questions he wanted to say that the police “chained him, choked him by the neck, twisted his arms, and kicked and beat him.” Stets’ko also remarked that he had been bound in chains. Bandera answered the question as to whether he had been conscripted by saying, “Yes, into the Ukrainian Military Organization.” When the chairman wanted to read out the indictment, Stets’ko, Mashchak, and Bandera demanded that this be done in Ukrainian. The chairman refused their demand, on the grounds that they had not asked for an indictment in Ukrainian and that it was now too late to prepare one.[590]
Bandera, Ianiv, Stets’ko, Makarushka, and Pashkevych had decided before the trial that all the defendants should admit their delinquencies and crimes, and that they should explain that they had committed them as a result of the difficult situation that the Polish nation imposed on the Ukrainian people.[591] On the third day of the trial, 27 May 1936, as Ianiv was being questioned, he tried to implement this plan. He began with polemics against the chairman. In response to the chairman’s statement that he was accused of belonging to the OUN, Ianiv replied that he was being accused only “on the basis of subjective facts and the ‘unofficial’ will of the Ukrainian nation.”[592]
Stets’ko, who was questioned the same day, began in a similar fashion. At the very beginning, he wanted to explain why he was a member of the OUN, and why he had announced that he had Ukrainian citizenship. He stated that, during the investigation, he had admitted to belonging to the OUN, because he had been tortured for three days. He also said that he had joined the OUN because he thought “that at this moment the duty of every Ukrainian is to attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state.” This statement was interrupted by the prosecutor. The defense lawyer Starosols’kyi claimed that, since Stets’ko was accused of attempting to separate a portion of territory from the Polish state, he should be free to explain why he wanted to do so. The prosecutor replied that Stets’ko wanted to separate it because he belonged to the OUN, and further explanation was unnecessary.[593]
When Stets’ko used the phrase “western Ukraine,” the chairman warned him that he would throw him out if he did so again. Stets’ko then tried to explain why the OUN was carrying out the campaign directed against the schools, and why it chose a revolutionary way, but the chairman again interrupted him. He allowed Stets’ko to explain whether the OUN fought against the Soviet Union, but when Stets’ko stated that the struggle “in eastern Ukraine is going on exactly as here,” the chairman had him removed from the courtroom. Close to the exit, Stets’ko turned back to the public, raised his right arm, and called out, “Slava Ukraїni!” The prosecutor said that this was the third time that a defendant had performed a demonstrative act, and that he was requesting that journalists and other observers be removed from the courtroom. The defense lawyers objected, but the court rejected the objection and warned the defendants that if this occurred again, the court would reconsider the matter. For his fascist gesture, Stets’ko was punished with twenty-four hours in a dark room.[594]
The next defendant questioned by the chairman was Ivasyk. His testimony in the courtroom differed from his evidence during the interrogation. When he was asked why this was so, Ivasyk replied that the previous evidence was forced. He said that he had had to sit on a stool for nine days and eight nights, which made him agree to everything the interrogators wanted him to say. The chairman stated that, although evidence might be forced, it was not necessarily wrong, which was a clear approval of the violation of interrogation ethics. He further compared the interrogating officers to a father who hits his child because it did something wrong and does not want to admit it.[595] After the chairman finished, Prosecutor Juliusz Prachtel-Morawiański asked Ivasyk a few detailed questions concerning the torture. From Ivasyk’s answers it became obvious that he might have exaggerated. However, the prosecutor did not get to the bottom of the problem as Żeleński had done in the Warsaw trial with every such claim.[596]
The last defendant to testify on 27 May 1936 was Spol’s’kyi. His evidence was brief. When the chairman stated that the defendant was accused of belonging to the OUN, Spol’s’kyi answered: “I admit that the assumptions in the indictment concerning my person are, with a few exceptions, correct. I admit that I belonged to the OUN but I don’t consider my belonging to the OUN to be a fault, because I consider that the legal status which was created by the act of the Ukrainian state from the year one thousand . . .” At this moment, Spol’s’kyi was interrupted and he was removed from the courtroom. He was probably about to refer to the proclamation of the Ukrainian state in 1918.[597]
On the next day of the trial, the defendant Mashchak tried to defend his actions with the simple fact that he belonged to the OUN. He understood this as a patriotic duty and assumed that it transformed his activities into non-culpable and even admirable deeds. From the first, he stated that he was a Ukrainian nationalist. Then he explained that Babii was a traitor and that sentencing him to death was correct. He answered defense lawyer Zahaikevych’s question about “the task of his life” by saying “Serving the nation with all vigor. I could do this only in the OUN, which I joined.” The defense lawyer completed this statement with the argument that Mashchak did not choose private welfare but the welfare of the nation, and asked him why he chose the OUN. Mashchak replied, “I consider the OUN ideology to be the only one that can achieve the aim of liberating the nation.” In response to this statement, the prosecutor protested and said that “belonging to the OUN is specifically a crime.”[598] Makarushka continued: “I admit that I belonged to the OUN and held the position of intelligence officer, but I do not admit that it was my fault. My activity was legal in the light of Ukrainian acts and laws,” he said. At this point the chairman interrupted him with the comment, “We, however, judge from the position of the law that is in force here.”[599]
Roman Shukhevych was explicitly advised by his lawyer and relative, Stepan Shukhevych, to provide false testimony and to make patriotic statements, which, according to the lawyer, might reach the conscience of the judges and diminish the punishment.[600] The chairman informed Shukhevych that he was accused of belonging to the OUN, and of persuading Lemyk to kill the Soviet consul, which relied on Pidhainyi’s testimony. On the advice of his lawyer, the defendant declared pathetically: “I admit to belonging to the OUN. The reason why I joined the OUN was the request of my heart, but I do not admit that I ordered Lemyk to kill the Soviet consul.”[601] Further, the defendant lied by saying that he had nothing to do with the war department of the homeland executive, and that he had lost contact with the OUN around 1928. He testified that he rejoined the OUN at the official request of some OUN members, only in 1933 and only as a mediator, to help solve a conflict between radical and less radical factions in the OUN.[602]
The defendant Pidhainyi, was also a client and relative of the lawyer Stepan Shukhevych, who induced him to give false testimony, in order to provide Roman Shukhevych’s testimony with credibility. Pidhainyi claimed that he was the director of the war department of the homeland executive, thereby intending to relieve the real director of the war department, Roman Shukhevych, of responsibility.[603] Pidhainyi also testified that he gave Lemyk the gun with which he killed Mailov, and that neither Shukhevych nor Bandera could have done so.[604] In addition to this “act of generosity” toward Shukhevych, Pidhainyi, like a number of other defendants, claimed that he was in the OUN but could not be guilty of anything, because being in the OUN was a patriotic duty.[605]
Bandera testified on 5 June 1936. He spoke at greater length than the other defendants, probably because the chairman allowed him to do so without interrupting each item of propaganda, as he was interested in hearing what the leader of the homeland executive had to say. After the chairman had familiarized Bandera with the charges against him, the defendant said, “I do not confess to any guilt and do not plead guilty, because all my revolutionary activities were the fulfillment of my duty.” Then he asked the chairman to allow him to elucidate all the “facts, circumstances, and motivations” in detail.[606] The chairman asked Bandera if his motive was to split Eastern Little Poland from the Polish state. Bandera responded by saying, “The general motive [of the OUN] is the preparation of a rebirth and the organization of an independent Ukrainian state … also in the Ukrainian territories that belong today to the Polish state.”[607]
Continuing his testimony, Bandera called himself “the leader of the OUN in the western Ukrainian territories, and the commandant of the UVO.” This irritated the chairman.[608] Bandera admitted that he had ordered the killing of Bachyns’kyi because an investigation conducted by the OUN had established that Bachyns’kyi was an informer.[609] He further testified that Babii was sentenced to death by an OUN court for “the crime of betraying the nation.” He said that Babii, “as the director of a branch of a Ukrainian high school, tried to educate the youth at the school in a spirit of subservience to the Polish state … persecuted Ukrainian nationalism, and went so far as to play the role of a police agent. He once caught a Ukrainian student distributing OUN leaflets, not on the premises of the high school [but in church during a service], and called the police.”[610] Bandera explained that he was angry with Babii because he taught his pupils that Ukrainian patriotism required loyalty to the Polish state. Bandera personally disliked Babii, because Babii had caught Bandera helping a fellow high-school student cheat in an examination, and he had taken Bandera’s identity card and given it to the police.[611]
Bandera also testified in detail about the attempts to assassinate the Soviet consul and the newspaper editor Antin Krushel’nytskyi, and about the bomb in the office of the newspaper Pratsia. He stressed his crucial role in these deeds, saying that he ordered Lemyk to kill the Soviet consul.[612] This version was confirmed by Lemyk’s testimony.[613] Bandera also claimed that an “action against the Bolsheviks” was necessary because “Bolshevism is a figure and system with which Moscow afflicts Ukraine,” and because “communism is a movement that is extremely contradictory to nationalism.” He further argued that, in the “eastern Ukrainian territories, a brutal fight for everything is taking place since the Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian territories.” According to Bandera, nobody knew about this fight because “Soviet Ukraine is divided from the civilized world, not only by a Chinese wall, but also by a zone of Communists, Cheka officers, and Red Army soldiers.”[614] Speaking further about the Communists, Bandera argued that: “Because the Bolsheviks use physical methods of fighting, we should also apply these methods toward them.”[615]
Bandera also proudly announced that he had issued the order to kill Kossobudzki because, “as an inspector of the prison guards in [Brygidki prison] in Lviv, he persecuted and oppressed the Ukrainian political prisoners.” The leader of the homeland executive had also ordered Józewski to be killed because “he was a representative of the Polish state … and an actual leader of Polish politics in Volhynia.”[616] The defense lawyer Horbovyi tried to help Bandera testify about deeds of which Bandera was not accused, such as the anti-school campaign in summer 1933. This was probably at Bandera’s or the OUN’s request, in order to hit the headlines and inform as many people as possible about the “liberation struggle” of the OUN.[617] Similarly, Horbovyi asked Bandera to “introduce his biography, and the moments that shaped his worldview.”[618] In his statements, Horbovyi did not rule out the possibility that revenge might have motivated his client to issue some orders to kill.[619]
The problem of fascist greetings in the courtroom appeared again on 16 June 1936, the sixteenth day of the trial, when some OUN members were called as witnesses. The first was Lebed’, who naturally did not admit belonging to the OUN. Leaving the courtroom, he raised his right arm toward the defendants and called out, “Slava Ukraїni!” Stets’ko and Ianiv answered him with the same fascist salute.[620] The next one was Lemyk, Mailov’s assassin. When Lemyk had finished testifying and was leaving the courtroom, he greeted the other defendants with the raised arm and the words “Slava Ukraїni!” The last witness on this day was Oleksandr Kuts. After Kuts used the same Ukrainian fascist salute as Lebed’ and Lemyk before him, the prosecutor again proposed that the trial be closed to the public, but the court rejected his application.[621] References to the fascist greetings were again deleted by the censorship from the newspaper reports.[622]
On 24 June 1936, the twenty-first day of the trial, Prosecutor Prachtel-Morawiański delivered his speech. Referring to Konspiracja, an OUN brochure in Polish translation from 1929, he stated that the OUN did not always hide its criminal deeds but sometimes exposed them during proceedings, in order to attract publicity, as the OUN was doing at this trial.[623] He further asked whom did such members of the OUN as Shukhevych and Bandera represent, and answered by saying, “They are only members of a terrorist organization and do not represent the Ukrainian nation. The OUN cannot represent it because it is condemned by the majority of that society, which is right about this matter.”[624] Prachtel-Morawiański stated that the relatives of the defendants to whom he had spoken also had no sympathy for the organization but only regret (about its nature). Finally, he said that the defendants may have been motivated to commit crimes for political reasons, but “this is Poland and the Polish law that is in force here does not allow the eulogization of crimes.”[625]
On 26 June 1936, the defendants were allowed to respond to Prachtel-Morawiański’s speech, which had been interrupted for this purpose. The defendant Maliutsa said that “every idea has to overcome the examination of death. The OUN did, I did not. In the Warsaw trial, I acted reprehensibly, but I did so because of my breakdown, not because the idea was corrupted.”[626] Stets’ko said that “the aim of his life was a free Ukraine, and that he would not leave this path, even if he were tortured.”[627] Ianiv stated that he acted deliberately and that he was sure that there was only one path before him. His point of view, he said, was determined by faith. Referring to Oswald Spengler, he said that the moment was coming when Ukraine would need a new religion, which was Ukrainian nationalism. Only this religion, according to Ianiv, could enable Ukrainians to survive the threat of communism and other disasters.[628]
After that Bandera delivered a speech. On the one hand, he portrayed himself as a Robin Hood who protected poor Ukrainians from the mean Poles and Soviet Russians. On the other hand, he announced that he was the fascist leader of an enslaved nation, and the Providnyk of all Ukrainians united by nationalism and the fight for independence, according to the principle that the OUN represented the Ukrainian nation, and Bandera represented the OUN. This speech was one of Bandera’s most important oratorical performances. It has excited Ukrainian nationalists down to the present day and has also been regarded as Bandera’s major intellectual achievement. Bandera began by declaring, “The prosecutor said that a group of Ukrainian terrorists and their main headquarters [personnel] took their places in the dock. I want to say that we OUN members are not terrorists, because the OUN deals with all branches of political activities and national life.”[629] Then he complained that he was never allowed to speak about the “entire program of the organization or about [his] entire activity.” This restriction might make him look like a terrorist, whereas he did not regard himself as one. He also announced that he would confine himself “only to those facts and fragments of the revolutionary activity of the OUN that are a subject of this trial.”[630]
Bandera began the factual part of his speech with Kossobudzki. He said that, in autumn 1933, he had received information from colleagues who were in the Brygidki prison that “special methods of bullying and repression” were being applied to Ukrainian political prisoners. Then he stated that he had ordered an investigation and had concluded that Kossobudzki was responsible for bullying and repressing Ukrainian prisoners.[631] Bandera added that he had forbidden the political prisoners to organize a hunger strike, because:
Revenge would later fall on the backs of colleagues who are defenseless, and with whom the administration of the prison can do anything it pleases. I considered that the organization should take charge of these comrades, and I therefore ordered the assassination of Kossobudzki. There was no trial. I have already said that organizational trials dealt only with Ukrainians and not with Poles, because we believe that there is a struggle between Ukraine and Poland, and that there is still military law, and that revolutionary struggle by means of physical methods is a moment of the struggle that has continued forever.[632]
Bandera further claimed that he had personally ordered the killing of Gadomski, Pieracki, and Józewski. He probably said this in order to stress his role in the OUN and to present himself as the brave leader of a ruthless “liberation movement,” rather than to inform the court how decisions to undertake assassinations were made. He claimed that he had issued the orders to kill Gadomski and Pieracki as “representatives of the Polish state,” and Józewski because he wanted to reconcile two nations, which was against the concept of the OUN’s “permanent revolution.”[633] Decisions to kill such Ukrainians as Babii or Bachyns’kyi for “crimes of national betrayal” were made, according to Bandera, not by him in person but by the “revolutionary tribunal.”[634] The tribunal sentenced them to death because, as he elaborated, “It is the duty of all Ukrainians to subordinate their personal life to the good of the nation, and if somebody voluntarily and consciously cooperates with the enemy. … Then we take the view that this degree of national betrayal should be punished only with death.”[635]
Toward the end of his speech, Bandera mixed fanaticism, martyrdom, nationalism, fascism, and sentimentalism, and produced lines that Ukrainian nationalists have learnt by heart for decades, just as they memorized the “Decalogue of a Ukrainian Nationalist”:
Because in this trial the question of assassinations of many persons organized by the OUN was investigated, it might appear that the organization does not cherish human life, either of other persons or of its members. I will respond to this very briefly, that people who are aware that they can lose their life at any moment in their job can appreciate the merit of life. We know the value of our and other lives, but our idea, as we understand it, is so huge that, as it comes to its realization, not hundreds but thousands of human lives have to be sacrificed in order to carry it out. …
Since I have lived for a year with the certainty that I will lose my life, I know what a person who has before him the perspective of losing his greatest treasure, which is life, endures. Yet even so, throughout this period, I did not feel what I felt when I sent other members to certain death, when I sent Lemyk to the consulate, or the one who assassinated Minister Pieracki. The measure of our idea is not that we were prepared to sacrifice our lives, but that we were prepared to sacrifice the lives of others.[636]
Remarkable in this speech is the antifactual and ideologically structured narrative, which aimed to mobilize the emotions and demobilize the mind, something that will remain in Bandera’s speeches and writings until his death and will make his followers regard him as a leader of the Ukrainian “liberation movement,” or even a demigod. Classic propaganda, Bandera’s speech was full of untrue but powerful statements. He stated, for example, that sending Matseiko to his death was painful, whereas he actually disliked Matseiko for helping the police catch the OUN member Mytsyk, and also for “dealing unprofessionally” with Pieracki’s murder.[637]
The most remarkable point in Bandera’s speech is that “our idea, in our understanding, is so huge that, as it comes to its realization, not hundreds but thousands of human lives have to be sacrificed in order to carry it out.” This claim is a continuation of Mikhnovs’kyi’s misanthropic and paranoid ideology, strengthened by Dontsov’s extreme nationalism, and the OUN’s commitment to the ethnic and political mass violence that was an integral part of the “permanent” or “national revolution” and was euphemized as “the liberation struggle.”
After Bandera’s speech, Prosecutor Prachtel-Morawiański continued his speech. He finished it with a patriotic appeal to the jurors “to demonstrate to the parents of Bachyns’kyi and the family of Babii—victims of the Ukrainian organization—that Poles do not approve of the wrongs that the organization did to them and to Ukrainian society.”[638]
When Prachtel-Morawiański had finished his speech, the defending lawyers began theirs. Horbovyi, an OUN member who was defending Bandera not only as his client but also as his Providnyk, said that “love for the motherland was the motive that guided the defendant and his activities.” Then he stated that, because Bandera admitted the deeds that he was accused of and pleaded not guilty, he could not be guilty.[639] Further the OUN member Horbovyi, who was defending his Providnyk, argued that Bandera could not be guilty, because he was not pursuing his private interests but a national mission that was embedded in Ukrainian tradition. [640]
On 27 June 1936, after the other defending lawyers had finished their speeches, the verdict was announced. Bandera and Myhal’ were sentenced to life imprisonment, Pidhainyi, Maliutsa, Kachmars’kyi, Sen’kiv, and Mashchak to fifteen years, Spol’s’kyi to four years and eight months, Makarushka to four years, Zaryts’ka, Pashkevych, Ianiv, Stets’ko, Iarosh, Fenyk, Ivasyk, and Ravlyk to two years and six months, Shukhevych, Hnatevych, and Kotsiumbas to two years. Fedak, Svientsits’ka, and Rachun were acquitted.[641]
The Lviv trial, similarly to the earlier one in Warsaw, was intended both to destroy the structure of the OUN and to put its leading members in prison. Unlike the first one, it did not attempt to show the public, with the help of the media, how the authorities would punish individuals or organizations that attacked the state, conspired against it, or murdered people for political reasons. The Lviv trial, similar to the Warsaw one, was riddled with political motives and exemplified how difficult Polish-Ukrainian relations were. The defendants tried to challenge the court, the judicial system, and the Polish authorities, while insisting that they were not citizens of Poland, that Polish law did not apply to them, and that they had the right to kill people who were involved in the political system that “occupied” Ukraine. The right to speak Ukrainian allowed them to feel more comfortable and to articulate their beliefs and plans more clearly than in Warsaw, although the judges and prosecutors prevented many such attempts.