Chapter 6:
Third World War and the Globalization
of Ukrainian Nationalism

On 8 May 1945 in Berlin-Karlshorst, Fieldmarshal Wilhelm Keitel signed an instrument of surrender on behalf of the German armed forces, officially bringing active operations to a close. The Second World War, the greatest political catastrophe in the history of mankind, had cost some forty-five million human lives and seen many cities, towns, and villages razed to the ground. While millions of people not only in Europe but across the world were breathing a sigh of relief, the OUN and UPA were yearning for the outbreak of a third world war. The OUN leaders hoped that, after the defeat of Germany, the Western Allies would attack the Soviet Union, enabling the OUN to establish an independent state. Although until at least 1951 the intelligence services of the United States and the United Kingdom did not rule out a Soviet attack against the West, the Western governments were much more reluctant than the OUN leadership to spark off another war. Instead, the ideological conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western powers resulted in the Cold War, which divided the world, apart from the non-aligned nations, into Eastern and Western blocs until 1991.[1411]

Once the Red Army had pushed the Wehrmacht westwards in the spring and summer of 1944, the Soviet authorities began to reestablish their power in western Ukraine. It was clear to Stalin by this time, and after the Yalta conference of 4–11 February 1945 also to the Allies, that western Ukraine would remain in Soviet hands after the war. On 9 September 1944, an agreement was signed between the Polish Committee of National Liberation (Polski Komitet Wyzwolenia Narodowego, PKWN) and the government of the Ukrainian SSR, regulating the resettlement of Poles from Ukraine and of Ukrainians from Poland. Between 1944 and 1946, 700,000 Poles, survivors of the massacres in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, were resettled in Poland from the Ukrainian SSR, and 488,000 Ukrainians from newly-communist Poland were resettled in the Ukrainian SSR. During Operation Vistula (Pol. Akcja Wisła) in 1947, 140,000 Ukrainians who had remained in south-east Poland were forcibly resettled in the northern and western territories of Poland. The Polish army used very cruel methods against the Ukrainian population, and numerous Ukrainian civilians were killed, robbed, raped, and otherwise mistreated during the resettlement. After these ethnic relocations the Polish-Ukrainian
 

Map 6. Eastern Europe 1945. YIVO Encyclopedia, 2:2146.

borderland was ethnically separated for the first time in centuries.[1412]

Between 1941 and 1944, almost all the Jews of western Ukraine were annihilated by the Germans, with the help of the Ukrainian police and local people, and also by the OUN and UPA, both on their own and in collaboration with the Germans. In June 1941, before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, about 250,000 Jews lived in Volhynia and about 570,000 in eastern Galicia (Distrikt Galizien). Of these, only about 1.5 percent survived the German occupation in Volhynia and only 2 to 3 percent in eastern Galicia.[1413] The only enemies of the OUN and UPA remaining after the Second World War in western Ukraine were the Soviet authorities, who, ironically enough, implemented some of the main goals of the Ukrainian nationalists. By the incorporation of western Ukraine into the Ukrainian SSR, the Soviet rulers had achieved the sobornist’, or unification of Ukrainian territories in one state, and, by resettling the Poles and other nationalities, they had made Ukraine more homogenous than it had ever been before.

In general, many Soviet policies bore striking similarities to those of the OUN-B. Both were totalitarian and authoritarian in nature and both used ethnic violence to solve political problems. Bandera was the ultranationalist or fascist alternative to Stalin and Khrushchev. Though the OUN-B frequently claimed after the Second World War that the UPA was fighting against the totalitarian Soviet Union for a nationalist democratic Ukraine, the reference to democracy was nothing more than a pretence, intended to persuade the United Kingdom and the United States to provide support for the insurgent movement.

After the Red Army arrived in western Ukraine in the summer of 1944, the Soviet authorities renewed the policy of Sovietization they had begun in 1939. One item of this policy was to subordinate the Greek Catholic Church, a very important component of eastern Galician identity and of Ukrainian nationalism. The body of the Greek Catholic Church consisted in 1939 of 4,200,000 believers, 2,950 priests, 1,090 nuns, 520 monks, 3,400 parishes, and 4,400 churches.[1414]

In 1943–1944 the Soviet government was ready to compromise with the Greek Catholic Church and also tried to establish relations with the Vatican.[1415] Sheptyts’kyi and his follower, Bishop Slipyi, also tried to negotiate with the Soviet Union. Together with Bishop Hryhorii Khomyshyn in late 1944, they called on the UPA to “return from the wrong path.” Sheptyts’kyi prepared emissaries to go to Kiev and Moscow and to welcome the Soviet authorities and Stalin. After Sheptyts’kyi’s death in November 1944, Slipyi sent a delegation to Moscow to assure the Soviet government of the loyalty of the Church. In late 1944, the Soviet authorities treated the Greek Catholic Church as equal to other churches but were disappointed by the positive attitude of many Greek Catholic priests to the OUN-UPA underground. The Soviet leaders were also troubled by the anticommunism of the Vatican, to which the Greek Catholic Church was subordinate. In January 1945, the Orthodox Church referred to the Vatican as an enemy. Shortly afterwards in early spring 1945, the attitude of the Soviet authorities to the Greek Catholic Church changed entirely.[1416]

In March 1945, Stalin ordered the incorporation of the Greek Catholic Church into the Russian Orthodox Church. On 8 April 1945, the newspaper Vil’na Ukraïna published Iaroslav Halan’s article “With a Sword or with a Knife?” which accused the church of collaborating with the Germans, supporting the OUN-UPA, and betraying the Ukrainian nation.[1417] In April, Slipyi and thirty-three other clergymen were arrested. Slipyi, accused of being a “Vatican agent” and an “accomplice of the Germans and the Bandera underground,” was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, and it was only in 1963 that he was released and allowed to leave the Soviet Union. After Slipyi’s arrest, the church was coordinated by an “Initiative Group” organized by the Soviet authorities and headed by the Greek Catholic priest Havryïl Kostel’nyk. The task of the group was to unite priests who wanted to dissolve the union of 1596 with the Vatican and to join the Russian Orthodox Church.[1418]

During the following months, under ruthless pressure from the Soviet authorities, more than 70 percent of the Greek Catholic priests joined the Initiative Group. The majority of priests did not do so out of conviction but because they were afraid of being repressed or deported.[1419] Those who resisted were arrested as “Vatican agents,” “Bandera agents,” “Nazi collaborators,” or “bourgeois nationalists.” In late September 1945, 78 clergymen were arrested in the Lviv region alone.[1420] According to church statements, between 500 and 800 priests were in prison in western Ukraine in 1946.[1421] According to official statistics, by 8 March 1946 when the Greek Catholic Church was officially dissolved, 908 priests had joined the Initiative Group and 251 stayed out of it. Bohdan Bociurkiw, an expert on the Greek Catholic Church, concludes that as 1,684 priests were registered in September 1945, there is a discrepancy of 525 priests between that figure and the 1,159 who either joined or refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church. However, it is hard to estimate how many of these 525 priests were arrested, deported, or killed by the Soviet authorities, because some of them had left with the Germans in 1944 and others had left the church, or gone underground, or had simply died. The number of monks and nuns declined significantly as a result of Soviet repression.[1422]

In addition to being terrorized by the Soviet police, many Greek Catholic priests, particularly those who collaborated with the Soviet authorities, were attacked and executed by the OUN-UPA. The OUN announced in summer 1946 that those priests who joined the Russian Orthodox Church should publicly conceal their transfer, or they would be killed or otherwise punished. Kostel’nyk, head of the Initiative Group, was killed on 20 September 1948.[1423]

The act of dissolving the Brest Union of 1596 with the Vatican and joining the Russian Orthodox Church was a farce. The synod, in which 216 clergymen and nineteen laymen participated, took place on 8 March 1946 under the auspices of the Soviet authorities and was filmed for propaganda purposes. The Initiative Group was represented by Kostel’nyk, Antonii Pel’vets’kyi, and Mykhailo Mel’nyk. Pel’vets’kyi said in his speech that “the great Soviet Union liberated us from German fascist slavery.” Kostel’nyk stated that “the union [with the Vatican] is a declaration of religious war against the entire Orthodox world for the glory of Rome.” On 31 March Kostel’nyk, Pel’vets’kyi, and Mel’nyk went to Kiev, where they met with Khrushchev and watched a film about the synod. Two days later, they continued to Moscow where Kostel’nyk asked Patriarch Alexy to “admit us to the All-Russian Orthodox Church.” When interviewed, Kostel’nyk denied that there had been mass arrests of Greek Catholic priests and stated that only the leaders of the church, such as Slipyi, were arrested for “active treacherous activity as accessories to the advantage of the German occupiers, and [that] their indictments were passed to the Military Tribunal.”[1424]

In addition to the total destruction of the Jewish population and the resettlement of the Polish population, Ukraine experienced another human tragedy caused by the brutal conflict between the OUN-UPA and the Soviet regime. In the first half of 1944, 120,000 western Ukrainians, among them many collaborators, left Ukraine with the Germans in order to escape Soviet persecution.[1425] In the following years, several thousand Ukrainians loyal to the Soviet regime were sent from eastern Ukraine to the western regions as teachers, nurses, physicians, engineers, and so forth. In 1946 drought and confiscation of crops from the collective farms in eastern Ukraine caused a famine in which 800,000 to 1,000,000 people died.[1426] By 1950, 1,850,000 Ukrainians who had worked during the war in Germany as forced laborers returned to Ukraine. Many of them were branded as “traitors” but were not sent to the Gulag, as historians during the Cold War believed. The majority of them, 58 percent, were sent to their places of origin, 19 percent were conscripted into the Red Army, 14 percent were enlisted in working battalions of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, 6.5 percent ended up in NKVD spetskontingents (workers in the Gulag administered by the NKVD chief administration), and 2 percent were sent to camps as reserve units.[1427]

The greatest challenge to the plan for Sovietizing western Ukraine was the OUN-UPA underground. At the zenith of its strength in 1944, the UPA numbered 25,000 to 30,000 partisans and could mobilize up to 100,000 people.[1428] To prevent young people from joining the UPA, the Soviet regime conscripted the astonishingly high number of 700,000 people in western Ukraine into the Red Army, in the period between its arrival in the summer of 1944 and the end of 1945.[1429] The new authorities also tried, by means of an extensive and intensive ideological repertoire, to Sovietize young people’s minds, through schools, youth and debating clubs, libraries, and cinemas. The OUN and UPA were frequently depicted in the darkest propagandist colors: They were “German-Ukrainian nationalists,” “traitors,” “bandits,” and the “enemies of the Ukrainian and Soviet people.” Several hundred agitators were sent to western Ukraine in order to persuade the population to accept the Soviet idea. In November and December 1944, 4,000 propaganda meetings were organized in the Drohobych district alone. In May 1945, 170 newspapers propagating the Soviet idea appeared in western Ukraine.[1430]

In order to mobilize local people against the OUN and UPA, the Soviet authorities organized destruction battalions (istrebitel’nye batal’ony) under the command of the central NKVD Destruction Battalion Headquarters, which from 1 December 1944 was controlled by the Head of the NKVD Directorate for the Struggle against Banditry. The battalions in western Ukraine had 100–159 men at first. When the tactics of the guerrillas changed, the battalions were dispersed in platoons of 25–50, or even in sections with 10–12 men. To a great extent, the militia recruited the members of the destruction battalions from people who were threatened by the OUN-UPA. At the outset, service in the destruction battalions was unpaid, but many local people joined in order to protect themselves and their relatives. The recruits included peasants, relatives of Red Army soldiers, demobilized Red Army soldiers, amnestied OUN-UPA members, people from eastern Ukraine, those whose relatives had been killed by the OUN-UPA, and ethnic minorities, in particular Poles. In the Drohobych region, Poles constituted up to 40 percent of the destruction battalions. The Soviet authorities also recruited neighborhood watch units (gruppy sodeistviia istrebitel’nym batal’onam), groups of lightly armed village activists, which supported the destruction battalions. On 1 January 1945, the destruction battalions in western Ukraine counted 23,906 members, and the watch units 24,025. On 1 January 1946, the destruction battalions counted 39,727 members, and the watch units 26,000—more in total than the number of OUN-UPA partisans at that time.[1431]

The situation in western Ukraine in the first years after the Second World War resembled a civil war. In addition to protecting the local population against the OUN-UPA and banditry, the destruction battalions committed numerous criminal acts, frequently as a result of greed or a desire to exact revenge for OUN-UPA crimes. The UPA, on the other hand, regarded the destruction battalions as its armory and frequently attacked them. Between 1 January and 30 March 1946 in the Stanislaviv region alone, the UPA disarmed forty militia units totaling 700 men and captured 605 weapons. Because the destruction battalions and district police were infiltrated by the nationalist underground, the Soviet authorities purged almost half their members in July 1946. Subsequently the militiamen were better screened and received more thorough indoctrination and training than the members of the destruction battalions. In 1948, when the OUN-UPA consisted of no more than a few hundred members, there were 85,421 people in the militia in western Ukraine.[1432]

A very powerful measure used to halt support for and cooperation with the UPA, to diminish its size, and to persuade the rebellious parts of the population to adopt the Soviet idea, was deportation. OUN-B member Burian already complained on 13 November 1944: “The whole population is losing spirit. … The attitude of the population has changed considerably in comparison with a month ago. People have been powerfully intimidated by arrest and exile to Siberia. Now in general they don’t want to take [anyone] into their apartments, because they are afraid of denunciations.”[1433]

Another OUN-B member stated: “The population looks at us as if we’re sentenced to death. They sympathize with us but don’t believe in our success and don’t want to tie their own fate to ours.”[1434] As a result of deportations and other measures, Ukrainians began in late 1944 not only to doubt the OUN propaganda and to withdraw their support from the UPA but also to help the Soviet authorities combat the nationalist insurgents.[1435]

The first secretary of the Party Committee in Lviv stated that “the most sensitive point of the bandits is their family.”[1436] By February 1944, Khrushchev had already proposed the deportation of the families of people active in the underground. The first deportation of 2,000 people started on 7 May 1944. On account of the very difficult conditions, many people, especially children, died during the deportations. Western Ukrainians were deported to the Komi Republic, the Irkutsk region, and other distant places in the interior of the USSR, where they worked in forestry or coal mines. In 1944, 12,762 people were deported; in 1945, 17,497.[1437] The largest deportations took place in 1947 (77,791 people), 1949 (25,527 people), and 1950 (41,149).[1438] Altogether, the Soviet regime deported about 203,000 people from western Ukraine,[1439] of whom 171,000 were accused of belonging to or supporting the OUN-UPA or of being the kin of an OUN-UPA member.[1440] The majority of the deportees were women and children whose OUN-UPA husbands and fathers were either hiding in the forests or had died in the struggle against the Soviet regime. Families could take up to 500 kilograms of belongings with them, and the rest of their property was confiscated. They were deported for periods ranging from five to twenty-five years.[1441]

Deportation was a regular Soviet method of resolving political problems and caused a great deal of sorrow. Thousands of western Ukrainians were deported because their relatives were in the OUN-UPA, or because they were accused of helping and supporting the OUN-UPA, which they might have done under duress, or of which they might have been entirely innocent. Because of the crimes committed by the OUN and UPA, however, the deportations released very different emotions in western Ukrainian society. On 21 October 1947, a woman waiting for the deportation train began to lament. Another woman, who was not being deported, asked:

Why are you screaming now? You should have screamed earlier. Then, you were certainly laughing. Then, when your son was murdering my husband, and I wept close to the bed of a child bereft of its father, I knew that you would pay twofold, and I was not wrong. You and only you are responsible for our suffering, for the tears of orphaned children, widows … whose fathers and husbands died at the hands of your son and other bandits.[1442]

Another measure related to the deportations, and which weakened the UPA, was the collectivization of farms. By this means, the Soviet authorities intended to change the organization of agriculture and to halt the supply of food to the insurgents. Two-thirds of the 77,791 persons deported in 1947 after the beginning of collectivization were people from seredniak and kulak families, that is, according to Soviet standards, medium-rich and rich families.[1443] The collectivization in western Ukraine was completed earlier than in Belarus, which suggests that the conflict with the OUN and UPA accelerated it. In 1950, 98.7 percent of all western Ukrainian farms were collective. In general, peasants did not join the kolkhozes (collective farms) voluntarily, but out of fear and necessity.[1444] Those peasants who joined the collectives were terrorized by the UPA and constituted a substantial portion of their victims. After a while, the local residents turned their backs on the insurgents and denounced them.[1445] According to Statiev, during the early Sovietization of western Ukraine, the UPA leader Shukhevych claimed: “Not a single village should recognize Soviet authority. The OUN should destroy all those who recognize Soviet authority. Not intimidate but destroy. We should not be concerned that people might damn us for brutality. Nothing horrible would happen if only half of the forty million Ukrainians survived.”[1446]

Another effective method of eradicating support for the OUN-UPA was terror against real and alleged UPA helpers and sympathizers. Although it was officially forbidden, the NKVD (from 1946 the MVD) and the NKGB (from 1946 MGB) frequently killed or otherwise mistreated people who did not belong to the OUN-UPA or had not committed any crime.[1447] This happened because the NKVD regarded all western Ukrainians as “bandits” or “nationalists,” and also so that they could report progress in defeating the “bandits.” Random individuals or the entire families of suspects were killed quite regularly, sometimes by drunken policemen, and sometimes for sadistic reasons. Rape of female prisoners was common and dozens of women who resisted rape were killed by the NKVD police. The NKVD officers usually reported these victims as “bandits,” “nationalists,” or “Banderites” and were rarely made to face justice for their actions.[1448] In March 1946, for example, an NKVD unit, consisting mainly of Ukrainian soldiers, was sent to the Ukrainian village of Rodarychi:

Before going on the mission, [Lieutenant] Iliubaev, [Sergeant] Rezin and Private Saiko drank a liter of moonshine. … Having searched the house of Kutovik and found nothing suspicious, Iliubaev and his section walked to the neighboring house, that of Maria Fedorovna Kul’chitskaia. … At that time, Anna Kutovik ran out of her house toward the village council, shouting that she had been robbed. … Private Saiko beat her up with a submachine gun and then shot her dead in the street. On hearing the shots, a local resident, 50-year-old Stanislav Ivanovich Tovbukh, ran out of his house. … Saiko took Tovbukh 100 meters away and shot him. … After that, Iluibaev ordered that everyone in [Kul’chitskaia’s] house be shot. … Saiko, Soloviev and Khalitov lined up 21-year-old Emilia Kul’chitskaia, 13-year-old Ekaterina Kul’chitskaia, and a disabled man, 76-year-old Ivan Priima, into a single row by the bed. The teenager wept and begged them not to kill her, while the disabled Priima fell to his knees and asked them to spare him. But Saiko, Solov’ev and Khalitov shot the girls dead, while Priima feigned death and thus survived. … Iliubaev reported to the Battalion commander, Captain Shtefanov, that he had liquidated five bandits.[1449]

As during the first occupation of western Ukraine in 1939–1941, the NKVD frequently mistreated and tortured people during interrogations. Although beating was the primary method of obtaining information, the NKVD also electrocuted suspects and burned them with cigarettes.[1450]

In 1944 the Soviet authorities arrested Iurii Stel’mashchuk, an important OUN and UPA leader. With his help, they were able to track down and kill “Klym Savur” (Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi) on 12 February 1945, the first OUN-B leader of the UPA and the main organizer of the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia in early 1943. Savur’s killing outraged many OUN-UPA members and deteriorated the mood of many UPA partisans. The NKVD also used Stel’mashchuk to identify, arrest, and kill several other nationalist insurgents and, with his help at meetings, to propagate the Soviet idea. In late 1945, Stel’mashchuk was sentenced to death and executed.[1451]

The Soviet regime practiced public executions from at least 1943 until 1951.[1452] In Ukraine, the idea of hanging “bandits” publicly was popularized by Khrushchev. “In order to intimidate the bandits,” he wrote in a letter to Stalin on 15 November 1944, “those sentenced to death … should be hanged rather than shot. The trials should be open and the local population should be invited. … The execution of the sentence pronounced by a tribunal should be carried out publicly in the village where the sentenced committed the crime. This will sober the bandits.”[1453] In mid-December 1944 in the village of Dobrosyn in the Zhovkva district, the NKVD hanged the local commander of the SB, while about fifty people looked on. In late December 1944, three people were hanged in the square in the town of Bus’k. Placards with the inscription “For the Betrayal of the Ukrainian Nation” were hung on their chests. Sometimes the Soviet executioners left the bodies to hang for several days, in order to observe the reaction of passers-by and determine thereby who was related to the dead nationalists.[1454] Shimon Redlich, who observed the hanging in Berezhany, noticed that the victims were referred to as Banderites.[1455] Janina Kwiatkowska remembered that the Soviets hanged Banderites in public places in Chortkiv, in order to frighten the population, end its support of the OUN and UPA, and to demonstrate that the Banderites were “bandits” and “traitors.”[1456] The number of people hanged in public by the NKVD is hard to estimate. Toward the end of 1944 in the Stanislaviv district alone, the Soviet authorities publicly executed twenty-eight people.[1457]

In order to enable OUN-UPA members to return to society and thereby weaken the structure of the underground, the Soviet authorities announced several amnesties. The first was declared on 12 February 1944,[1458] another in November 1944, and a third in May 1945. Between 1946 and 1949 four further amnesties were announced. The first did not persuade many partisans to surrender. Nevertheless, the winter and difficult conditions in the underground discouraged a substantial number of them, including peasants without much patriotic enthusiasm, from hiding any longer in the forests and from resisting the Soviet authorities.[1459] The amnesties helped such people return home. Up to July 1946, a total of 111,809 fugitives surrendered in western Ukraine, of whom 62,357 claimed to be draft evaders.[1460] The OUN-UPA leadership regarded surrender as betrayal, and the SB of the OUN frequently punished surrender with death.[1461] The general attitude of the Soviet authorities toward OUN-UPA members who surrendered was different from their attitude toward those who were captured. In general, the Soviet authorities did not kill those who surrendered. The sporadic shooting of those who had surrendered was regarded as a violation of “socialist legality” and punished accordingly.[1462]

The UPA partisans who surrendered were usually used by the Soviet authorities for two purposes: propaganda, and the detection of members of the underground. The life of such ex-partisans depended on these requirements and on new loyalty to the Soviet authorities. They were allowed to speak at public meetings and were expected to explain why they had gone underground, how they had killed people, and how they realized that joining the “bourgeois nationalists” was a mistake. This was intended to make a strong impression on the audience. The authorities also expected the former UPA partisans to persuade their relatives to leave the underground and to work in the police force or destruction battalions. Those who had surrendered were regarded by the SB of the OUN as traitors and were frequently killed by them.[1463]

Some of the nationalists who surrendered under the amnesties, and who confessed their crimes, were tried and sentenced only after the elapse of several years. In the 1980s a number of such trials took place. One defendant was Iakov Ostrovs’kyi, who during the first Soviet occupation of western Ukraine had denounced the Ukrainian nationalists, and who had served in the Ukrainian police during the German occupation, remaining in contact with the OUN. In March 1943 he left the police, and in July 1943 he joined the UPA, in which he remained until July 1944, when he surrendered to the Soviet authorities. During an NKVD interrogation Ostrovs’kyi confessed to murdering “only twenty-five to thirty” people. Although the Extraordinary State Commission[1464] found a witness to Ostrovs’kyi’s crimes, he was not prosecuted at the time, possibly because he had given himself up. His case was reopened only in 1981. On the basis of his own testimony and other evidence, Ostrovs’kyi was sentenced to death and executed in 1983.[1465]

The attitude of local Ukrainians to the OUN-UPA changed, not only due to the deportations, collectivization, and the Soviet terror but also as a result of the terror of the OUN-UPA against the local population, and the fanatical fight of the OUN-UPA against an enemy they could not defeat. The OUN-UPA was fairly popular between early 1943 and mid-1944. At that time, it could count on support from a substantial part of the western Ukrainian population. During the war, western Ukrainians were exposed to a different kind of foreign terror, and many of them believed that the UPA could liberate Ukraine. Bunkers and hideouts in which the rebels could hide were very widespread in western Ukraine. In 1945 the Soviet police found such hideouts in every fourth peasant cottage in the Lviv region, and many remained undiscovered. Some of the bunkers were designed to function as hospitals, libraries, archives, or warehouses. One bunker was so large that it could hold 200 people. In the two-year period 1945–1946 alone, Soviet forces in western Ukraine uncovered 28,986 hideouts.[1466]

As the local population began to have doubts about the nationalist underground movement and to withdraw its support, the OUN-UPA started terrorizing the local Ukrainians, enforcing assistance, and spreading frightening propaganda. A very popular rumor was that Stalin would resettle all western Ukrainians in Siberia, and that only the OUN-UPA could prevent this, or that “the western Ukrainians will be exterminated [by the Soviets], exactly as the Jews were destroyed by the Germans.”[1467] One UPA leaflet claimed that the Soviet authorities began collectivization in order to annihilate the Ukrainians by famine, as in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933.[1468] The insurgents also tried to strengthen their popularity by spreading a belief about the imminent outbreak of a third world war, in which the OUN-UPA, together with American and British troops, would defeat the Soviet Union and establish a Ukrainian state.[1469]

At least since 1945, an increasing number of western Ukrainians ceased to believe the insurgents’ propaganda rumors, as a result of which the OUN leadership was compelled to conscript Ukrainians into the UPA by force. Similarly, individuals in the OUN-UPA who did not believe that the OUN-UPA could defeat the Soviet Union, and who spoke out in favor of surrender, were killed by the SB of the OUN.[1470] The SB killed hundreds of OUN members and UPA partisans whom it suspected of betrayal or of being seksoty (informers).[1471] In 1945 in Volhynia alone, the SB killed about 1000 UPA partisans.[1472] From 1 January to 1 April 1945, the SB investigated 938 OUN members, of whom they murdered 889 for “collaboration with the Soviets.”[1473] Like the NKVD, the SB applied the principle of collective responsibility, and frequently punished not only “unfaithful” individuals but also their families, with death. As a result, more and more ordinary Ukrainians regarded the insurgents as bandits and denounced them to the NKVD.[1474] Sometimes even the families of OUN-UPA members refused to help their relatives and advised them to give themselves up.[1475] If peasants delayed or failed to deliver food supplies, the SB regarded them as foes.[1476] As early as August 1944 one OUN leader believed that 90 percent of the peasants desired to remain neutral in the conflict between the OUN-UPA and the Soviet authorities. Another leader reported: “The masses are disappointed to such a degree that they refuse to give shelter or food even to those [UPA partisans] they know.”[1477] In 1948 one OUN member testified that “the local population stopped supporting bandits [OUN-UPA]; we have to take supplies by force or under threat of weapons. When we come to houses the dwellers say directly: ‘Go away, otherwise we’ll go to Siberia because of you.’”[1478]

In general, people in western Ukraine were in a very difficult situation. They had to navigate survival in the face of two brutal and cruel regimes which were in combat with each other, and each of which demanded their loyalty. Supporting the Soviet power meant death at the hands of the OUN-UPA. Supporting the OUN-UPA meant either death or deportation at the hands of the NKVD. In the autumn of 1946, when the Soviet authorities tried to raise grain requisitions, the OUN-UPA left the message: “Soon the Bolsheviks will conduct the grain levy. Anyone among you who brings grain to the collection points will be killed like a dog, and your entire family butchered.”[1479]

The elections to the Supreme Soviet on 10 February 1946 became a bilateral demonstration of power. The OUN-UPA tried to persuade Ukrainians not to take part, in order to delegitimize Soviet power, at least symbolically. The Soviet authorities forced the Ukrainians to vote, frequently convoying entire groups to the polling stations or visiting the resistant individuals at home with a ballot box and “asking” them to vote.[1480] On 30 June 1946 in villages near Kolomyia, the OUN-UPA hung up eight “nationalistic flags” that “they secured with mines.” Four people died when the Soviet police forced peasants to take them down.[1481] On 27 May 1947, OUN activists blew up a Lenin monument in Iavoriv.[1482] The nationalist insurgents destroyed several trucks with equipment that the Soviet officials were using to show propaganda movies.[1483]

In 1944 and 1945, the UPA fought several battles with the Red Army and other Soviet troops but in general, it tried to avoid open confrontation with the Red Army, which was much stronger and better armed.[1484] The main victims of the OUN-UPA were informers, people accused of supporting Soviet power or who joined the kolkhozes, and people transferred from eastern Ukraine to western Ukraine and who worked as teachers or administrative staff. The UPA frequently burned the houses of peasants who joined the collectives. They also killed village chairmen, collective-farm directors, and individuals who “betrayed the nation” or “contributed to the establishment of Soviet power,” together with their entire families. The methods employed by the OUN-UPA were sometimes very cruel and sadistic, and the corpses were used for propaganda purposes. The OUN-UPA developed an entire spectrum of rituals to mutilate the corpses. One instruction included: “Liquidation of informers [seksoty] with all possible methods, firing, hanging, and also quartering with the inscription on the chest ‘For collaboration with the NKVD.’”[1485]

In the center of a village in the Rivne region in June 1944, the OUN-UPA hanged a local peasant suspected of collaboration. They then “hacked the corpse of the hanged bandit to pieces with an axe.” In the Lviv region in August 1944, OUN-UPA members gouged out the eyes of members of two whole families, one by one in front of the others, and then hacked them to pieces in front of the villagers.[1486] On 3 May 1946 in the village of Mil’s’k, the perpetrators tortured two officials to death, “taking out their eyes, cutting them with knives, burning their bodies with iron, hitting them with a ramrod.”[1487] They frequently used axes, hatchets, and other tools, as they had during the ethnic cleansing in 1943 in Volhynia and in 1944 in eastern Galicia. In the town of Sernyky in the Rivne region, five people from the family of a collective farm were slaughtered with a hatchet in 1948.[1488]

The nationalist insurgents frequently worked with texts and symbols. On 3 September 1944 in Staryi Lysets’, six people were killed. A sign was posted on a fence: “For the betrayal of the Ukrainian nation, all will die in the same way.”[1489] On 11 September 1944, a couple named Marżenko and their four-year-old daughter were killed. The culprits left a letter: “Death to the informers of the NKVD—the enemies of the working people. Death to the Bolshevik fascists, imperialists, and capitalists.”[1490] On 24 December 1944 in Volia Vysots’ka, eighteen families were killed. The inscription “For the betrayal of the Ukrainian nation. Death to the NKVD informers” was left on the bodies.[1491] On 31 July 1944, about twenty bandits raided the village of Verbovets’. They went to the house of Teodor Protsiuk. He was not at home but the bandits found his wife, and four children between the ages of four and thirteen. They killed all the children and fatally wounded the wife. They then went to the adjacent house of Ivan Ulin, strangled him, and left the inscription on his corpse: “All traitors and NKVD employees will die such a dog’s death,” which they signed with “The Revolutionary Army.” They next went to the home of Ivan Kuchera, another member of the village administration, and asked him to give them a ride to the next village. They killed him 300 meters from the village and left the same inscription on his corpse as they had on Ulin’s.[1492]

Alexander Statiev, who studied the conflict between the OUN-UPA and the Soviet regime in depth, pointed out that the “list of deeds that the UPA regarded as treason was endless.” In Pisochne in Volhynia, the UPA killed eight boys and four girls whose fathers had reported to the Red Army for mobilization. The UPA regarded even peasants who joined a collective farm under coercion as “communist traitors.”[1493] In Pidzvirynets’ on 27 May 1947, the UPA killed twelve persons and injured two. Among the victims were members of the village council, the family of its members, the school principal, and two women from eastern Ukraine.[1494] On 28 March 1946 in Molotkiv, four former OUN members, who had legalized themselves under an amnesty, decided to re-join the OUN. They disarmed fifty-four members of a unit of the destruction battalion, killed four of them, went to the house of another, and murdered his entire family of five people.[1495] On the night of 15 to 16 May 1948 in the village of Vychivka, all six members of the family of a fighter with a destruction battalion were killed.[1496]

On the night of 21 November 1944, forty Ukrainian nationalist insurgents raided the village of Dubechno. They shot the head of the village soviet in front of the villagers and fastened a note to his back: “The person who has been shot is the head of the village soviet, and if anyone takes his place, the same fate will befall him.” They then went to the village soviet, where they killed the armed guard, and a peasant, on whose back they fastened a note with a bayonet driven into his spine: “This corpse is a traitor to the Ukrainian people who defended the Soviets. If anyone comes to work in his place, he will perish in the same way.” In the same premises, the nationalists glued anti-Soviet slogans to the walls, tore up portraits of party and state leaders, and smeared the faces on the portraits with the victims’ blood.[1497]

The homes of the accused were frequently burned down. The OUN-UPA sometimes killed entire groups of people accused of loyalty to the Soviet regime or who had come as teachers or administrative staff from eastern Ukraine. In the village of Shchepiatyn’, for example, eighty-seven people from eastern Ukraine were killed.[1498] On 15 December 1948, the OUN-UPA member B. Baryliak returned to his home in Semykhiv. After learning that his parents had joined the collective farm, he shot his seventy-year-old father and badly injured his sixty-three-year-old mother.[1499] OUN-UPA members also killed themselves and their colleagues, in order to prevent the disclosure of information about fellow partisans.[1500]

It took the Soviet authorities more than five years to destroy the nationalist underground in western Ukraine. Among the most important factors that strengthened the nationalist resistance were revolutionary idealism, fanaticism, vehement hatred of the Soviet Union, and sacralized suicidal nationalism. A set of instructions in 1947 declared, “The enemy has an advantage in numbers, weaponry, and military technology, but we surpass him in our sacred idea.”[1501] The Soviets killed the majority of the OUN-UPA members in 1944 and 1945, but they could not destroy the OUN-UPA hard core, which went underground and became undetectable. In 1946 the Soviet authorities realized that they had to change their methods in order to liquidate the nationalist underground. In February 1947, they decided to proceed against the OUN-UPA with small specialized security forces, instead of army units, and to work more and more with the help of agents and informers (agentura). Because the OUN-B tried to turn the NKVD agents, parallel agentura networks appeared.[1502] But with time, the NKVD system emerged victorious. By 1948 the OUN member Ruslan wrote: “The Bolsheviks try to take us from within, through the agentura. And this is a horrifying and terrible method [because] you can never know directly in whose hands you will find yourself. At every step you can expect [an enemy] agent. From such a network of spies, whole teams are often penetrated.”[1503]

In addition to using the agentura, the NKVD conducted practical psychological warfare. If a captured OUN-UPA member did not reveal the whereabouts of fellow members, even under torture, NKVD agents, disguised as SB officers or OUN-UPA members, would pretend to rescue him, in order to get the information. In one such case, the NKVD obtained names of 600 OUN members, of whom ninety-nine were arrested and 123 killed.[1504]

In July 1946, the OUN-UPA leadership decided to dissolve the UPA battalions and replace them with small OUN and SB units that were harder to detect. In 1948 there were very few UPA units, hiding mainly in the Carpathian Mountains, but the idea of a third world war was still alive in them.[1505] In 1949 there were only two UPA units.[1506] The number of OUN-UPA anti-Soviet actions dropped in 1947 to 2,068, and in 1948 to 1,387. They were directed mainly against employees of collective farms and Soviet activists. Between 1 January and 30 April 1950, the OUN-UPA killed twenty chairmen of village councils, nineteen directors of collective farms, and thirty regional militia auxiliaries in the Stanislaviv region.[1507] Many OUN-UPA members lived in bunkers dug in forests, under the houses of peasants, or under buildings that were only seldom controlled by the NKVD, such as schools and collective farms. The nationalist insurgents usually left the bunkers only at night, disguised as peasants. In winter, they tried not to leave their bunkers for entire months. Usually they had four to five associates in every village who informed them about what was happening in the region.[1508]

On 5 March 1950, the UPA commander-in-chief, Roman Shukhevych, shot himself during an attempt to arrest him in the village of Bilohorshcha near Lviv, in order to avoid being arrested. The OUN-UPA in Ukraine continued to exist for another few years, but their membership was reduced to several dozen individuals. They were unable to wage a struggle against Soviet troops, but they did not surrender and continued to kill civilians whom they accused of “betraying Ukraine.” They regarded the beginning of the Korean War on 25 July 1950 as the herald of a third world war. According to incomplete data, there were 647 OUN-UPA members in Ukraine in 1952. Communications between OUN-UPA units was often poor. The OUN-UPA partisans usually knew only about OUN-UPA units in the immediate vicinity. Vasyl’ Kuk, the last commander of the UPA, was arrested on 24 May 1954. In 1955 the Soviet authorities were still looking for 475 OUN-UPA members, of whom fifty were still conducting “anti-Soviet acts.” In 1955 the OUN-UPA conducted thirty-five operations in which ten or fifteen people were killed. The last OUN-B unit, consisting of three people, was arrested in 1960. A small number allegedly hid in bunkers with the help of their relatives until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.[1509]

Outside western Ukraine, the UPA underground functioned in the Polish, Czechoslovak, and Belarusian territories that bordered on Ukraine. In 1944–1946 the UPA tried to stop the resettlement of Ukrainians from Poland to Ukraine, by attacking the Polish troops who were conducting it, and by blowing up railway tracks and destroying Polish villages.[1510] The UPA also organized several raids into Czechoslovakia. During one of the first raids, from 2 to 13 December 1945, UPA partisans stole cattle, robbed shops, and killed eighteen “communists and Jews,” eleven of them Jews in Kolbasov. This was probably one of the last pogroms that the OUN-UPA organized. Some of the UPA troops who came to Czechoslovakia later crossed the border to Poland, or to Austria and later Bavaria, where they surrendered to the Americans and sought out Ukrainians who had remained in Germany after the war.[1511] In Belarus, the structure of the OUN-UPA existed in the territories that Ukrainian nationalists claimed to be Ukrainian. As in Ukraine, the OUN-UPA killed people suspected of loyalty to the Soviet regime, and they destroyed collective farm property. Between 1944 and 1947, the Ukrainian underground killed 1,225 people in Belarus. As in Ukraine, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the OUN-UPA in Belarus was liquidated in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[1512]

The OUN-UPA had eliminated extreme antisemitism from their propaganda in 1942 and 1943 but the question of the Jews did not entirely vanish in OUN-UPA brochures, even though there were almost no Jews in Ukraine. In 1950 the OUN distributed a brochure addressed to “Jews—Citizens of Ukraine” and signed “Ukrainian Insurgents.” Although the authors sought reconciliation with the Jewish population, they threatened them:

If anyone should, you Jews should treat the entire national-liberation struggle of the Ukrainian nation with respect and sympathy. …

Remember that you are on Ukrainian land and that it is in your own interest to live in complete harmony with its rightful owners—the Ukrainians. Stop being an instrument in the hands of Muscovite-Bolshevik imperialists. The moment is soon coming when the times of Khmel’nyts’kyi will be repeated, but this time we would prefer that they were without anti-Jewish pogroms.[1513]

Some of the OUN activists and UPA partisans who were deported to the Gulag set up organizational structures there. This helped to protect them against organized crime in the camps and enabled them to organize or participate in uprisings and strikes. It seems that the OUN-UPA members, like the underground in the Baltic republics, played an important role in these uprisings, although it is difficult to estimate how significant it was. The largest uprising occurred after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953, in the camps in Noril’sk, Vorkuta, and Kengir. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the Gulag as a prisoner, wrote: “in our camp it began with the arrival of the Dubovka transport—mainly western Ukrainians, OUN members. The movement everywhere owed a lot to these people, and indeed it was they who set the wheels in motion. The Dubovka transport brought us the bacillus of rebellion.”[1514] Yet Solzhenitsyn also explains that the OUN members brought with them a new law for the killing of “traitors”:

Murders now followed one another in quicker succession than escapes in the best period. They were carried out confidently and anonymously: no one went with a blood-stained knife to give himself up; they saved themselves and their knives for another deed. At their favorite time—when a single warder was unlocking huts one after another, and while nearly all the prisoners were still sleeping—the masked avengers entered a particular section, went up to a particular bunk, and unhesitatingly killed the traitor, who might be awake and howling in terror or might be still asleep. When they had made sure that he was dead, they walked swiftly away. … And so murder (although as yet there had been fewer than a dozen) became the rule, became a normal occurrence. “Anybody been killed today?” prisoners would ask each other when they went to wash or collect their morning rations.[1515]

According to Soviet documents and estimates by historians, during the conflict with the OUN-UPA the Soviet authorities killed a total of 153,000 people, arrested another 134,000, and deported 203,000,[1516] mainly in 1944–1945.[1517] A much greater proportion of the population was killed or persecuted in western Ukraine than in other Ukrainian territories. One important reason for the extensive Soviet terror in western Ukraine was the strengthening of Soviet power and loyalty to Soviet Union in the “rebellious” territory that had not belonged to the Soviet Union before 1939. It is impossible to say how many western Ukrainians who were arrested, sentenced, or killed were actual members of the OUN or UPA, or were simply accused of being “Ukrainian nationalists.” That one was a “Ukrainian nationalist” was a very serious accusation. It meant that one either murdered “Soviet people” or “betrayed” the “Soviet Ukrainian fatherland” by collaborating with the Nazis, even if only by cooking meals for them under constraint, for example. For some Soviet judges and persecutors “it was worse to be a Ukrainian nationalist than to participate in the murder of hundreds of Jews.”[1518] Nevertheless, a number of the Ukrainians sentenced as “Ukrainian nationalists” or “Banderites” were not only “traitors to the Soviet Ukrainian fatherland” but actual war criminals who had killed civilians.

During the conflict with the Soviet authorities, the OUN-UPA murdered more than 20,000 civilians and killed less than 10,000 Soviet soldiers, members of the destruction battalions, and NKVD staff. The majority of the civilian victims of the OUN-UPA were workers at the kolkhozes, and peasants accused of supporting the Soviet authorities.[1519] By 1953 about 490,000 western Ukrainians had suffered murder, arrest, or deportation, as the result of the Soviet repressions.[1520] The severity of the Soviet terror in western Ukraine cannot be explained solely by the “rebellious” activities of the OUN and UPA. Other, more important factors that inflated this conflict were the policies of Stalinism, the strengthening of Soviet power and of loyalty to the Soviet authorities, and matters such as local revenge or conflicts between neighbors. There is no doubt, however, that fanatical Ukrainian nationalism, which blinded the leaders of the OUN and UPA, escalated the bloody conflict, and cost the lives of many Ukrainian civilians.

During the second half of 1944, the leadership of the OUN-B and the UHVR sent a task force, including Lebed’, Hryn’okh, and Myroslav Prokop, to establish contact with the Western allies. The task force went to Croatia and Italy; Vrets’ona was also sent to Switzerland. The first attempts to establish contact were not successful.[1521] Nevertheless, OUN-B activists and UPA partisans in Ukraine soon began to disseminate rumors about their successful collaboration with the American and British armies. One rumor spread in 1944 said that an army of 8,000 Ukrainian Canadians was to invade the Soviet Union. Another said that 200,000 American Ukrainians were marching to Ukraine from Italy.[1522] Other rumors said that America and England would help the OUN-UPA to defeat the Soviets and establish a Ukrainian state, when they finished the war against Germany.[1523] The main purpose of the rumors was to enhance the OUN-UPA’s reputation among Ukrainians and to give them hope of liberation from the Soviet regime:

At the end of June [1945] in village Lyshnevychi in Brody raion, rebels convened a village assembly, [using their] weapons to force local peasants into the meeting. The chairman of the village soviet was led into the meeting [at the point of] two tommy guns and seated at the presidium. … Speaking at the meeting, a rebel whose name was not given said: “You, peasants. The Bolsheviks and the NKVD men, who want to build a Belomor canal with the bones of the Ukrainian people, say that the war [with the Germans] is over. And this is true, but this does not concern us because we are only just beginning the true war for ‘the independence of Ukraine.’ England and America will help us. Our representatives have already agreed with England on this question, and even the Bolshevik Manul’s’kyi has agreed to it. You should not fulfill the demands of the Soviets because anyone who works [for them] will be hanged as a traitor to the Ukrainian land. We have more power, you can see that for yourselves. Soon the Bolsheviks will conduct a grain levy. If anyone of you carries grain to the stations, then we will kill you like a dog, and your family will be hanged and cut to pieces. That should be understandable enough. And if you understand, then get back to your homes.”[1524]

In a village assembly in the Kamianets’-Podil’s’kyi region in December 1945, another OUN member announced: “War between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Americans is inevitable. The start of the war is planned for spring or autumn 1946.”[1525] Similarly, rumors about Bandera were spread. One said that he was seen in early September 1944 in Bolekhiv and other villages in the Stanislaviv region, in a jeep with eight American soldiers.[1526]

Churchill’s “Iron Curtain Speech” of 5 March 1946, which made it clear how tense were relations between the Eastern and Western blocs, had an enormous influence on the OUN-UPA. In his speech, Churchill stated: “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason, the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound.”[1527] His speech distressed the Soviet leaders and, in an interview a few days after the speech, Stalin called Churchill a “firebrand of war.” “I do not know whether Mr. Churchill and his friends will succeed in organizing … a new crusade against ‘Eastern Europe,’” Stalin said. “But if they succeed in this … one may confidently say they will be beaten just as they were beaten twenty-six years ago.”[1528]

Ukrainian nationalists regularly exploited Churchill’s speech. In order to nourish hope and assert their position, OUN activists and UPA partisans in Ukraine repeated phrases like “If not today, then tomorrow England will declare war on the USSR” or “There will be a war and Ukraine will be made independent, under the protection of America.” In the twelve months following Churchill’s speech, the activity of the OUN-UPA increased by more than 300 percent.[1529] On 17 December 1946, V. S. Riasnoi, deputy director of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstvo Vnutrennikh Del, MVD) of the Ukrainian SSR, wrote in a document to his director, Timofei Strokach: “Notify all operations personnel in the organs of the MVD that work in the struggle against OUN rebels is simultaneously a struggle against agents of foreign intelligence services.”[1530] In January 1947, as a result of the alleged and real cooperation between the OUN-UPA and the American and British intelligence services, the Soviet authorities changed their tactics for combating the OUN-UPA. The Soviet apparatus began to regard the OUN-UPA not only as internal enemies but also as foreign enemies, and the Soviet counter-insurgency apparatus was transferred from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD, before 1946 NKVD) to the Ministry of State Security (MGB, before 1946 NKGB).[1531]

Even if the actual support from the United States and the United Kingdom was much smaller than that presented in nationalist propaganda, assumptions about cooperation with foreign intelligence services were not baseless. In 1946 some American politicians like George Kennan and Allan Dulles, later director of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initiated Operation Rollback, which was officially adopted in 1948. The operation was not in the hands of the CIA but the innocuous-sounding Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). The operation was financed by Marshall Plan funds, up to $100 million a year by 1951.[1532]

The aim of the operation was the “rollback of communism” in Eastern Europe. This was intended to come about through the strengthening of Eastern European nationalist movements that would destroy the Soviet Union from within. One goal of the operation, according to a document from 30 August 1948, was to “establish contact with the various national underground representatives in free countries and through these intermediaries pass on assistance and guidance to the resistance movements behind the iron curtain.”[1533] To some extent, the plan resembled the OUN plan to involve nations located in the Soviet Union in a multi-nationalist revolution that would disintegrate the Soviet Union. In this matter, the expectations of the OPC toward Eastern Europe overlapped with the plans of the OUN-B. Such personalities as Bandera, Stets’ko, and Lebed’ appeared as anti-Soviet experts in this field. The OUN-UPA, still active behind the Iron Curtain, was a brilliant example of a guerrilla movement that Operation Rollback was meant to support. The main goal was psychological support, as a consequence of which, the operation heated up the atmosphere of the Cold War and turned a third world war into a subject that neither the Western nor the Eastern bloc could exclude. “The political warfare initiative was the greatest mistake I ever made,” Kennan, the architect of Operation Rollback, admitted in 1975. “It did not work out at all the way I had conceived it.”[1534]

Toward the end of the Second World War, the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, were looking for people and organizations that could provide them with intelligence about the Soviet Union, in order to “get any early warning of a Soviet attack on Western Europe.”[1535] In this regard also, the Ukrainian nationalist underground was attractive to them. Evan Thomas claimed that Frank Wisner, the director of the OPC, “sought to learn the lessons of the German defeat in the East—a defeat he felt was due in large measures because the Nazis failed to capitalize on the anticommunist sentiment of the Russian people.”[1536] Furthermore, there were many Ukrainian political émigrés in the West who could have been recruited as Cold War soldiers and agents. Randolph F. Carroll, an agent of the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), stated in 1947, “Ukrainian emigration in the territory of Germany, Austria, France, Italy, in the greatest majority is a healthy, uncompromising element in the fight against the Bolsheviks. In case of war, there can be recruited a minimum of 130,000 good, idealistically inclined soldiers with an experienced cadre of young officers.”[1537]

After the Second World War, of the 8 million displaced persons (DPs) in German territory, about 2.5 million were Ukrainians. The majority of the Ukrainian DPs had been deported to Germany during the war as forced laborers (Ostarbeiter). By 1950, 1,850,000 persons had returned to the Ukrainian SSR; the majority of them in the first two years after the war. They were not deported to the Gulag or Siberia as many people in the West believed during the Cold War, but were mainly sent to their places of origin. At home, however, they frequently faced discrimination. In 1947 about 200,000 Ukrainians remained in West Germany and about 50,000 in Austria and Italy. They lived mainly in DP camps. Among these 250,000 Ukrainians, there were 120,000 who had left Ukraine with the retreating German army in the summer of 1944 because they were afraid of the consequences of their collaboration with the Germans or had other reasons for avoiding a confrontation with the Soviet authorities. Among them were almost all the radical right intellectuals who, in the 1930s and 1940s, had regarded fascism and antisemitism as progressive European politics.[1538]

The Soviet authorities demanded that all its citizens return home, but a number of Ukrainian DPs organized an anti-repatriation movement. They faked their identities, boycotted screenings, and wrote memoranda to the British and American governments, in which they protested against screenings, especially if screening measures were assisted by Soviet officials. Sometimes, the Ukrainians rendered screening impossible. For example, when a Soviet repatriation mission wanted to enter a camp in Mittenwald, the Ukrainians attacked it with bricks. According to OUN-B activist Mechnyk, the mobilization of Ukrainian DPs against the repatriation was an important activity of the OUN. One avoidance strategy was to organize a church service and remain there when the officials came to the camp. The resistance of Ukrainian and other DPs jeopardized the image of the Soviet Union. The Soviet secret service kidnapped a number of individuals and repatriated them by force. Many of them were later tortured during investigations, died in prisons, or were sent to the Gulag. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which was responsible for the DP camps, assumed that Ukrainians tried to avoid screening because many of them were former Nazi collaborators. A popular method of avoiding repatriation among western Ukrainians was to insist that they were not Soviet citizens, because they had lived in Poland before the Second World War and therefore should not be repatriated to Soviet Ukraine.[1539] In July 1947, UNRRA was replaced by the International Refugee Organization, or IRO, which in general was more sympathetic to DP anticommunism and reluctance to return to the Soviet Union.[1540]

The Ukrainian DPs lived mainly in the American and British occupation zones. They gave their camps Ukrainian names like Orlyk and Lysenko. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people lived in each camp. Ukrainian DPs organized schools for their children and relocated the Ukrainian Free University (Ukraїns’kyi Vil’nyi Universytet, UVU) from Prague to Munich. In addition, the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute in Regensburg, the Ukrainian Higher School of Economics in Munich, and the Ukrainian Theological Seminary were founded. The scouting organization Plast was recreated. In 1946 the ZCh OUN—consisting of OUN-B members who left Ukraine with the Germans in 1944 or were released from the concentration camps—set up the scouting organization Ukrainian Youth Organization (Spilka Ukraїns’koї Molodi, SUM) in Augsburg.[1541] The ZCh OUN had a network of its representatives in all DP camps in the American, British, and French occupation zones. It also recruited new members for its cadres and penetrated the DP camps. The general anticommunist and anti-Soviet attitude of Ukrainians made the ZCh OUN an attractive organization. In 1948 the ZCh OUN had 5,000 members in Western Europe, of whom 70 percent lived in DP camps.[1542] US intelligence officials estimated in 1948 that up to 80 percent of all Ukrainian DPs from eastern Galicia were loyal to Bandera.[1543]

Life in post-war Germany was difficult and chaotic for both the Germans and the DPs. The DPs were viewed by the German public as a social and economic problem. Apart from the Ukrainians, there were Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and other national groups in the DP camps. There was not much interaction between the different groups, although some were united by anticommunism. In addition, there were also cultural and political divisions within the national groups. The German police frequently raided the camps and mistreated the DPs because of real or alleged involvement in the black market and other criminal activities. When Shmuel Danziger, a concentration camp survivor, was shot to death in March 1946 by a German policeman, the situation changed slightly. After this incident, the American military authorities forbade the German police to enter the camps unless accompanied by American military police.[1544]

Resistance against deportations strengthened nationalism among the DPs, and hatred toward the Soviet Union.[1545] The DPs organized anticommunist demonstrations and rallies outside the camps. One such demonstration took place on 10 April 1949 in Munich, the capital of Bavaria. Several thousand DPs assembled to protest against religious persecution in the Soviet Union.[1546] Because the authorities did not allow a political demonstration, the Ukrainian organizers assured them that it would be a religious gathering. But in reality it became an event at which the distinction between religious and nationalist elements became entirely blurred. The demonstration began with a multi-denominational religious service, including Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. The Greek Catholic Church presented as martyrs people such as the Roman Catholic Archbishop Aloysius Viktor Stepinac of Croatia, who had collaborated with the Ustaša regime during the war and who was later sentenced by the Yugoslav authorities to sixteen years imprisonment. Representatives of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Slovaks, Cossacks, and Turkestanis gave speeches, in which they condemned the lack of religious freedom in their homelands, and introduced the history of their national “liberation movements.”[1547] The OUN-B member Petro Mirchuk spoke on behalf of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) but was interrupted when someone cut the microphone cable. Another OUN-B activist recognized the saboteur as a “German communist and a Muscovite.”[1548] When the demonstrators began marching toward the former headquarters of the Soviet mission, the German police and American military forces tried to stop the crowd with tear gas and bayonets.[1549]

The demonstration in April 1949 took place at a time when DPs were leaving Germany, but it was not the last anticommunist demonstration in Germany that the ABN and the OUN staged. They would hold several hundred more in the countries in which they would be resettled. Among the Ukrainian DPs who were resettled were OUN members, many of whom did not change their revolutionary, ultranationalist, or fascist convictions after 1945. The anti-Soviet and anticommunist climate of the Cold War made it possible to adjust their far-right worldviews to the new situation, without revising it substantially. The resettlement of the DPs therefore resulted in the internalization and globalization of Ukrainian nationalism, with all its fascist and radical right facets.[1550]

After the end of the Second World War, Ukrainian communities in countries such as Canada and the United States began to lobby their governments to allow the displaced Ukrainians to settle there, and not to return them to the Soviet Union. The most popular and convincing argument that the Ukrainian lobbyists used was the “anticommunist” character of the Ukrainian DPs. One Ukrainian lobbying group in Canada wrote: “These people are anticommunist, and are representatives of every walk of life. … These displaced persons, if assisted to settle in Canada, would spearhead the movement and combat Communism since they are victims of its menace.”[1551]

The soldiers of the Waffen-SS Galizien shared the fate of the DPs. Before the Waffen-SS Galizien surrendered to the British in Austria on 10 May 1945, the division was renamed the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Ukraїns’ka Natsional’na Armiia, UNA). The UNA had been established on 17 March 1945, in accordance with a proposal of Rosenberg’s, under the command of General Shandruk. Until the very end of the war however, the German High Command continued to list it as the Ukrainian 14th SS Grenadier Division, in its order of battle. After surrender, the Waffen-SS Galizien soldiers avoided repatriation, with the help of the Vatican. As Shandruk, head of the UNA, wrote: “The Archbishop [Ivan Buchko] had pleaded with His Holiness Pope Pius XII to intercede for soldiers of the Division, who are the flower of the Ukrainian nation.”[1552] Negotiating with the British, Shandruk also used the argument that, unlike the soldiers of the Vlasov army, the Ukrainian soldiers were Polish citizens.[1553] Ukrainian soldiers from the Waffen-SS Galizien who surrendered to the British in Austria were detained in a camp in Rimini.[1554]

The British changed the status of the Waffen-SS Galizien soldiers from that of prisoners of war to that of surrendered enemy personnel and wanted to distribute them throughout the Commonwealth. However, some countries, including Canada, were not pleased with this idea. The Canadian government only changed its attitude after persistent lobbying by Ukrainian institutions, which bombarded Ottawa with letters, in which they portrayed the soldiers from the Waffen-SS Galizien as “western minded, religious, democratic, good, strong, and healthy workers” and as “valuable and desirable citizens.” The lobby praised the “anti-Soviet” and “anticommunist” views of the Waffen-SS Galizien Ukrainians and argued that they had been conscripted only because of their patriotism. Other arguments the lobby used were that the Waffen-SS Galizien soldiers had never fought against Western armies, and that they had not fought for Nazi Germany, but for an independent Ukraine.[1555]

On 13 July 1948, the British government sent a secret telegram to all Commonwealth governments, including a proposal to end Nazi war crime trials in the British zone of Germany, which would accelerate the resettlement. The screening process undergone by the DPs could not be effective in any event, due to the lack of access to documents. These were either in the possession of the Soviet Union, which regarded all DPs as war criminals, or in the possession of the American and British intelligence services, which were preoccupied with looking for “dangerous” communists and were not paying much attention to war criminals. Officials undertaking the screening process were inexperienced and had little knowledge about the Nazi regime or the situation in Ukraine during the Second World War. More important for them was whether the particular individual could work hard, than whether he had been involved in war crimes or had been indoctrinated by Himmler’s SS. They also failed to make any physical search for SS tattoos. The Soviet Union, which again and again made the ridiculous claim that all DPs were war criminals, motivated the screening officials to regard all Ukrainians as victims of Soviet accusations.[1556]

In December 1952, when the resettlement was almost finished, the British SIS intervened with the Canadian government on behalf of individuals who did not meet normal security requirements. The Canadian government set up a committee on defectors and allowed these individuals to enter with this status. The governments of Canada, Britain, and the United States made the decision that information about these “defectors” could be revealed only with the agreement of all three governments. The term “defector” became a synonym for former Nazis or Nazi collaborators posing as anticommunists.[1557] Eventually, about 90 percent of the 250,000 Ukrainian DPs moved between 1947 and 1955 from Germany and Austria to Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, France, the United States, and Venezuela. The majority went to the United States and Canada.[1558] Of the 11,000 Waffen-SS Galizien Ukrainians who surrendered to the British, 3,000 were returned to the Ukrainian SSR. The rest were admitted to Britain in 1947. The Canadian government agreed to admit the Waffen-SS Galizien veterans despite protests from the Canadian Jewish Congress. In total, between 1,200 and 2,000 of them moved to Canada.[1559]

During the Second World War the ethnic configuration of people in the western Ukrainian territories changed entirely. The Germans, Ukrainian policemen, OUN and UPA, and local population killed almost all the Jews there. Those Poles who survived the ethnic cleansing conducted by the UPA were resettled in Poland, and Ukrainians from Poland were resettled in Ukraine. The Greek Catholic Church, a very important component of the identity of western Ukrainians, was dissolved by the Soviet authorities who, after their coming to power in western Ukraine in the spring and summer of 1944, also began to liquidate the nationalist underground. The UPA resisted the Soviet authorities until the early 1950s. The local population suffered severely during this conflict from both sides. The UPA killed over 20,000 civilians and close to 10,000 Soviet soldiers, members of the destruction battalions, and NKVD staff. According to Soviet documents, the Soviet authorities killed 153,000 Ukrainians, arrested 134,000 and deported 203,000. Among the Soviet victims were many civilians who neither belonged to the nationalist underground nor supported it.

In 1944 about 120,000 Ukrainians left Ukraine together with the Germans in order to avoid a confrontation with the Soviet authorities. After the war they stayed in DP camps together with some OUN members and other elements of Ukrainian society, who during the war had been confined in concentration camps and did not want to return to Soviet Ukraine. Both within and outside Ukraine the OUN hoped that a third world war would break out between the Soviet Union and the Western states and that this would help them liberate Ukraine. Although this did not come about, the Cold War enabled Bandera and other OUN members to ally with the British and American intelligence services. The American Central Intelligence Agency, which aimed for the “rollback of communism” in Eastern Europe, was willing to collaborate with émigrés who had contacts with movements such as the UPA. At the same time, the OUN-B continued to kill its opponents and also tried to control those Ukrainian DPs who resisted resettlement to the Soviet Union. By 1955, 250,000 Ukrainians had moved from German and Austrian DP camps to different Western countries around the globe; among them were numerous Bandera adherents.