Now we have to accumulate all our strength, to liquidate as soon as possible the remains of the fascist occupation, the Banderites, to pull out and destroy this dirt by the roots.”[1841]

An important aspect of the Soviet propagandist approach to the OUN and UPA was the exposure of their war crimes. In contrast, the war crimes of the Red Army or the NKVD were never mentioned. Soviet propaganda frequently introduced Bandera in the context of the crimes of the OUN and UPA. Halan, for example, began one of his articles with the description of a fourteen-year-old girl who could not look at meat because one of the “bandits” who broke into her parents’ house decided not to kill her “to the glory of Stepan Bandera” but killed her parents in her presence and told her that this was her food.[1842]

In early 1945, Soviet propaganda began to refer to the OUN-UPA and other Ukrainian nationalists as “bourgeois.”[1843] This is not surprising if we bear in mind that in Soviet ideology fascism was nothing other than deformed capitalism.[1844] As early as the 1920s Communist thinkers had linked fascism with capitalism and had described the Italian Fascists as petit bourgeois nationalists.[1845] The Ukrainian nationalists were enemies of the Soviet Union not only because they collaborated with Nazi Germany and betrayed the Soviet people but also because they were bourgeois. They were a product of such class enemies as the kurkul, or affluent peasant, and helped such “bourgeois” states as Nazi Germany. According to D. Z. Manuïl’s’kyi, who delivered a speech on 6 January 1945 to western Ukrainian teachers, the kurkul was the class that contributed to the development of the OUN and other Ukrainian nationalists. Because the kurkul class had already been liquidated in Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, the OUN developed only in “the reactionary Polish state” and later under the occupation of “Hitlerite Germany” with which the kurkul class, according to Manuïl’s’kyi, also collaborated.[1846]

On 2 February 1945, a group of Ukrainian academics stated in Vil’na Ukraїna that Banderites were both kurkuls and “Hitler’s agents.” At Hitler’s behest and to maintain their “bourgeois” property, they had killed Poles, and those Ukrainians whom they accused of being communists.[1847] V. Kolisnyk characterized Bandera as a “son of a kurkul near Stanislaviv.”[1848] Another author argued that kurkuls are the “pillar of Ukrainian fascists” and used the term “Banderite-kurkul vampires” (banderivs’ko-kurkul’s’ki upyri).[1849]

Presenting the Ukrainian nationalists as a small group of traitors and enemies of the Ukrainian people was another important aspect of Soviet propaganda. Manuïl’s’kyi in his speech on 6 January 1945 emphasized that the Ukrainian nationalists had nothing in common with the Ukrainians whom they murdered en masse. To substantiate this claim he described the Ukrainian nationalists as “cursed by their people, their parents, without kin, tribe, or motherland” and “armed by Germans, with German Marks in their pockets, with German rifles in their hands, in German coats and trousers, defending the German cause.” Logically they could not be Ukrainian or represent the interests of Ukrainians.[1850]

Describing the “slaughter in villages ... in the Rivne oblast in summer 1943” Manuïl’s’kyi presented Ukrainians, and not Poles, as the main victims of this anti-Polish ethnic cleansing. This resembles the Soviet representation of the Holocaust, the main victims of which were not Jews but Soviet people. Manuïl’s’kyi also pointed out that the Ukrainian nationalists sometimes shouted “Glory to Bandera!” while they were burning small children in houses and barns. He described several methods the Banderites used to murder Ukrainians and came to the conclusion that the Ukrainian people could write its own “Red Book about perfidious extermination, terrible crimes, torturing and killing conducted by Banderites.” Then he began to legitimize the NKVD terror: “And these beasts dare to say that the organs of Soviet power apply terror toward them. Holy is the sword that hacks off the heads of such perpetrators!”[1851]

After explaining that the OUN was advised by the Germans to unleash terror against civilians, and challenging the meaning of the “Ukrainian underground,” Manuïl’s’kyi depicted the Ukrainian nationalists as a homogenous group without any divisions and factions: “All this ‘underground’ army carried black coats of German cloth, with yellow armbands, on which was written: ‘Bandera.’” Bandera, wrote Manuïl’s’kyi, was arrested by the Germans only after he agreed to be arrested.[1852] Ivan Hrushets’kyi, leader of the Lviv oblast Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine (Komunistychna Partiia (bil’shovykiv) Ukraїny, KP(b)U) wrote in a similar tone on 15 January 1945. He appealed to Ukrainians not to believe the Banderites, because they were still “trying to turn Ukraine into a colony of fascist Germany.” Then he stressed that, except for the fact that Banderites spoke Ukrainian, there was no difference between them and Nazis. In order to help the Nazis, according to Hrushets’kyi, Banderites blew up Soviet trains, which were on their way through Ukraine toward the front, and they killed peasants because they did not want them to attend schools where the Soviet authorities would teach them in Ukrainian. Hrushets’kyi also stressed that the leadership of the OUN consisted of kurkuls who exploited poor Ukrainian peasants.[1853]

In this early Soviet discourse, Bandera, as the main symbol of the “Ukrainian-German nationalists,” also became a traitor and deceiver. As such, he deceived thousands of Ukrainians who were named Banderites after him, believed in him, trusted him, and fought for an “independent Ukraine.” In an article titled “Letter to a Dupe” a group of “Ukrainian Soviet writers” wrote:

Do you think that Stepan Bandera calls you to fight ‘for Ukraine’? This is the same Judas who has been eating German bread and drinking German beer for fifteen years. Does he lead the struggle for an ‘independent’ Ukraine from Prague, occupied by Germans, where he sits in the office of the head of the Gestapo? Ha, this scallywag is really a good fighter—only not for Ukraine but for German black profit.[1854]

In a similar manner, the same Soviet writers explained what the OUN, UPA, and UHVR meant:

They invented names for their bands: OUN, UPA. And recently, in order to change colors—something like UHVR. Do you want to know what this dog’s growling means? I will tell you in my simple human language: OUN means Horde of Extraordinary Killers [Orda Ubyvts’ Nesamovytykh], UPA means Mongrels of the Mangy Adolf [Ubliudky Parshyvoho Adol’fa], and UHVR—this is very simple Kill-Steal-Hang-Cut [Ubyvai-Hrabui-Vishai-Rizh]. This is the program of these Cains and Judases.[1855]

Like the Ukrainian nationalists, the Greek Catholic Church was also portrayed as a traitorous institution and an enemy of the Soviet people. On 8 April 1945, using the pseudonym Volodymyr Rasovych, Iaroslav Halan published an article in Vil’na Ukraїna, entitled “With a Sword or with a Knife?”—in which he referred to the Greek Catholic Church as an agent of the Vatican, the German Empire, and Nazi Germany. Halan claimed that Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was financed by the German Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and the Vatican in order to be used for Germany’s colonial plans for Eastern Europe. According to Halan, Sheptyts’kyi used the church to separate the Galician Ukrainians culturally from other Ukrainians. The Ukrainian communist writer explained that Sheptyts’kyi’s plan was to unite all Orthodox churches with the Vatican, with which the Greek Catholic Church had been united since the late sixteenth century. This would make Sheptyts’kyi the head of all Orthodox churches in Ukraine and Russia, from the Zbruch River to Vladivostok. During the First World War, Sheptyts’kyi failed because the Habsburg and German empires lost the war. After Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Sheptyts’kyi naturally began to orient himself toward Germany in order to accomplish his earlier plans. He finished his article with the conclusion: “These enemies of the Ukrainian people, dressed in the cassocks of Greek Catholic priests, are the organizers of the bands of German-Ukrainian nationalists and the agents of German occupiers.”[1856]

According to another author, Kost’ Huslystyi, the very foundation of the Greek Catholic Church was a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. Huslystyi celebrated as heroes the few nobles who opposed the Union of Brest of 1596, an agreement between the Vatican and the Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. For the same reason Huslystyi presented the Cossacks as heroes because they never accepted the Greek Catholic Church and had fought the Polish Catholic nobility. The Orthodox priests and nobles who accepted the union were traitors and enemies of the Ukrainian people. In the Soviet discourse, to be a Banderite frequently implied membership not only of the OUN or UPA but also of the Greek Catholic Church.[1857]

The UTsK and its directors Volodymyr Kubiiovych and Kost’ Pan’kivs’kyi were also introduced by Soviet propaganda as enemies of the Soviet Ukrainian people. Volodymyr Konvisar called Kubiiovych and Pan’kivs’kyi “professor-bandits,” “dogs with tridents,” or “dogs that howl on command from the hangman Hitler.” He neither explained nor even mentioned how and why the UTsK collaborated with the Germans, aryanized Jewish property, spread antisemitic propaganda, supported the setting up of the Waffen-SS Galizien, and so forth. Such facts seem to have been less important for the Soviet regime than emotional phrases.[1858]

Dontsov attracted particular attention from Soviet propaganda. He was characterized as a person who attacked Russian culture and socialist intellectuals, like Drahomanov, who did not support the Ukrainian separatist movement. Soviet ideology claimed that Dontsov spread the “cult of betrayal” among the Ukrainian youth. He was like Hetman Ivan Mazepa, whom Russian national history and Soviet ideology regarded as the Ukrainian traitor par excellence, because he changed sides in 1708 and allied himself with the Swedish king Charles XII, the main enemy of Peter the Great in the Great Northern War. Soviet propaganda condemned Dontsov as the main “ideologist of Ukrainian-German nationalism,” whose publications were “riddled with hostility to mankind.” Osyp Mstyslavets’, who published one of the first articles condemning Dontsov, was well informed about the main ideologist of Ukrainian fascist ideology. He knew that Dontsov published Hitler’s and Mussolini’s biographies and edited the newspaper Vistnyk, and he was aware of many other important facts concerning Dontsov’s life. In his article, Mstyslavets’ established a direct link between the crimes of the OUN and UPA, whose victims he saw for himself in 1944, and the ideology of Dontsov. According to Mstyslavets’, nothing was more responsible for OUN and UPA crimes than Dontsov’s ideology.[1859]

The instrumentalization of Kubiiovych, Dontsov, and the Greek Catholic Church did not play a major role at local assemblies, however, where peasants cursed the Banderites and their masters—the Nazis. Especially after the capitulation of Nazi Germany on 8–9 May 1945, the “Ukrainian-German nationalists” were understood to be the last rump of German fascism and the greatest shame for the Soviet Union because the actual enemy, Nazi Germany, was already defeated. On 23 May 1945, Vil’na Ukraїna filled an entire page with excerpts from speeches at an assembly in the village of Zboїs’ka, and with a photograph of peasants listening to a speech by a Soviet activist. The picture and the excerpts from the speeches appear to be a representation of an ideal village meeting, which other villages were expected to emulate. Andrii Mel’nyk, one of the peasants who spoke at the assembly, said: “The Banderites’ hands are covered with the blood of their own people. They are responsible for many innocent victims. Therefore, they are afraid to leave their dog’s lairs; they are afraid of a severe punishment.”[1860] A peasant, Mariia Ponchyn, claimed to speak on behalf of all “the women of the western oblasts of Ukraine,” who would, according to her, “help the organs of Soviet power to detect the remains of the German accomplices, Ukrainian-German nationalists who do not leave their bunkers in the woods and prolong their sordid doings.”[1861] The head of the village council wondered with whom the “Ukrainian-German nationalists” would collaborate, now that Nazi Germany had been defeated. He also asked when they would finally understand that they had been deceived, and he hoped that this would happen soon, because the Soviet authorities did not want to shed blood.[1862] Mar’ian Khmarnyi, secretary of the village council, said that the Banderites had been “deceived by the German fascists” and had continued the work of their masters like faithful dogs, although their masters were already dead.[1863]

The next issue of Vil’na Ukraїna printed the words of other peasants, as well as workers and holders of other positions in the Lviv oblast. The peasant Hryts’ko Koval’ argued that the “German mercenaries—Banderites” would not prevent Ukrainians from rebuilding Ukraine.[1864] Dmytro Stan’ko, a school director in Lavrykiv said:

Deceived by fascist propaganda, the Ukrainian-German nationalists continue to carry out the orders of Hitlerites, they conduct criminal work directed against the Ukrainian people. … If the bandits do not obey the Soviet government and the Communist Party, they will all, as will all those who help them, be held accountable for betraying our Motherland. …

I, as the school director, will try with all my strength and knowledge to raise children to be honest and devoted patriots of our Soviet state. … And how do the bandits from the forests contribute to our well-being? They, as Hitlerites, destroy cultural facilities and kill honest people. They show their faces to the people and now if they will not rethink and show regret, they will be annihilated. We will contribute to this endeavor. Our conversation with the bandits will be short. Weeds and thistles will grow on their graves, and our children will curse them.[1865]

Shortly after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Banderites became an important subject at a conference of women from the Lviv oblast. Oleksandra Pastushna stated:

The Hitlerite hordes, which intruded into our country in 1941, took all rights from women and men. Only those who killed and robbed Soviet people—together with the Germans—thrived. These were the Ukrainian-German nationalists. These people, these cursed Banderites, killed my husband. Why? Because he liked life on a collective farm.[1866]

A. M. Ahalakova said at the same conference that the “fascist mercenaries—Banderite bandits” burned down her mother’s house because she dated a Soviet officer.[1867] I. P. Senta characterized the OUN-UPA as “forest bandits—Ukrainian-German nationalists” and appealed to all women “to work harder and to conduct a more severe struggle against Banderites.”[1868] Olena Mykytenko, an activist of the KP(b)U committee of the Bibrka region, said:

The Germans’ friends—the Ukrainian-German nationalists intimidate first of all the women, they try to turn them against the Soviet power. Yet the women saw clearly and see now that Banderites are friends of the Germans, that they are the enemies of the Ukrainian people. Attacking our people, they have no mercy for women or children. Recently these beasts hanged the activist Mykolaieva, only because she spread the words of Bolshevik truth among the people. Thereby, the Banderites make themselves more and more unpopular. That’s nothing. Soon they will all be destroyed.[1869]

The heroization of Stalin and the Red Army was another very important part of the propaganda directed against “Ukrainian-German nationalists” and Banderites. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of articles about Stalin and his speeches to the Ukrainian people appeared in Soviet Ukrainian newspapers at the same time as the public condemnation of the Banderites.[1870] At many meetings praise of Stalin was closely related to the condemnation of the “Ukrainian-German nationalists.”[1871] In July 1945 in Lviv, a huge triumphal arch was erected to honor Red Army units that were returning from Germany. Pictures of Red Army trucks with enormous portraits of Stalin driving through the arch appeared in the newspapers.[1872]