For the first anniversary of the liberation of Lviv by the Red Army, the stage in the opera house was decorated with a huge portrait of Stalin.[1873] Shortly afterwards, on 27 July 1945, Vil’na Ukraїna published a black-and-white drawing of Stalin with Marshal of the Soviet Army Georgii Zhukov on his right and Khrushchev on his left, standing in a place that seems to be the market square in Lviv (Fig. 33). The happy crowd around the three Soviet leaders smiles at them. A man dressed in peasant clothing holds bread and salt. A little girl of about five hands flowers to Stalin and leans her head against him. The Vozhd’ puts his left hand on her head. A huge red banner with the coat of arms of Soviet Ukraine waves above the three Soviet leaders. Another one waves from the tower of the town hall. The simple black-and-white picture with two red elements was a perfect explanation of who held power in western Ukraine at the end of the Second World War.[1874]

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, during which such names as Bandera, Mel’nyk, and Kubiiovych were mentioned, again drew the attention of the Soviet propaganda apparatus to the question of Ukrainian radical nationalism. The Soviet Ukrainian press began to demand that the OUN leaders and other Ukrainian politicians be put in the dock. The real defendants at Nuremberg were, however, only Germans. No Croatian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovak, or Ukrainian collaborators or war criminals were prosecuted there. Some other leaders such as Ion Antonescu, Jozef Tiso, and Ferenc Szálasi were convicted in their respective countries. Others, such as Pavelić, Sima, and Bandera were not prosecuted, because they distorted and concealed the crimes committed by their movements, or because there was not enough evidence to put them on trial, or they were protected by Western intelligence, or disappeared.[1875]

The stormy campaign against the “Ukrainian-German nationalists” ended in early 1947. The timing seems to be related to the fact that, in December 1946, the Soviet authorities realized that the OUN and UPA were not only an insurgent movement rooted in western Ukraine but also an organization that was attacking the Soviet Union from outside with the help of Western intelligence.[1876] At about the same time, Soviet propaganda began to refer to the OUN and UPA underground in Ukraine, the ZCh OUN, UHVR, and other Ukrainian nationalist organizations, as “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists.” The campaign against the “bourgeois nationalists,” unlike the previous one, stressed from the outset the relationship between Ukrainian nationalism and capitalism or capitalist states such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and West Germany. Fascism was still an important component of the campaign directed against the Ukrainian genocidal nationalists but, in the course of the Cold War, the main enemy of the Soviet Union became capitalism, which Soviet ideology considered to be a deformed variant of fascism.[1877]

On 24 January 1948, Radians’ka Ukraїna published what was probably the most complex caricature of Ukrainian nationalism (Fig. 34 and 35).[1878] The cartoon portrays

Fig. 34. “The hope of restoring capitalism in Ukraine.” Radians‘ka Ukraїna 24 January 1948.

 

 

Fig. 35. “The hope of restoring capitalism in Ukraine.” Radians‘ka Ukraїna 24 January 1948.

 

the funeral of the “hope of restoring capitalism in Ukraine.” It illustrates very well how Soviet propaganda at that time shaped the image of Ukrainian nationalism in Soviet Ukrainian media. The cartoon is more abstract than the usual Soviet cartoons of that period. It depicts the Ukrainian nationalists in unusual roles among western politicians and thereby explains what the Ukrainian nationalist leaders were doing outside Ukraine. Bandera, portrayed as the widow of the late economic and political system, is located at the very center of the cartoon. He has large breasts, wears a mourning dress and a veil. His sorrow is represented by the huge tears that he wipes away with a white handkerchief. He is accompanied on his left by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, who says, “Don’t pester me, Mr. Bandera. I can barely stay on my feet. Try to get support from Marshall.” He walks immediately behind the hearse, on which two crows are perched. “There seems to be no corpse, but even so it reeks of carrion,” one says to the other.

George C. Marshall, the American military leader for whom the economic plan for rebuilding Europe was named, is walking directly behind the widow and holding Bandera’s right hand. Bandera looks so sad and stunned that he obviously needs this help. Marshall’s eyes are closed; his head tilted up as if he were trying not to see what is going on and to stay calm. A woman and two men in mourning dress march behind Marshall. The woman is Lady Astor, the first woman to take up her seat in House of Commons, and a firm critic of communism and Stalin. One of the men next to Lady Astor might be Clement Attlee, British prime minister from 1945 to 1951.

A funeral band—a conductor, two men with tubas, and one with a drum—marches behind Lady Astor and the two gentlemen. The conductor is labeled as “Kherst” and is William Randolph Hearst, owner of a chain of American anticommunist newspapers who had sympathized with National Socialism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s. Four ducks sit in the tubas. Two of them hold a poster with the inscription “Hearst—McCormick and Co.,” which refers to another anticommunist newspaper chain, owned by Robert R. McCormick. The drummer is the pan-Turk politician Aydin Yalcin, another enemy of the Soviet Union. A long file of war veterans, who resemble bandits more than soldiers, marches behind the orchestra. One of them holds a ragged banner with the inscription “SS Galicia Division” and a swastika under it. Another carries a poster with the inscription, “Who Said That We Are Bandits? We Are Insurgents!” One of the veterans is holding a pistol and is about to shoot Yalcin, but another veteran tries to restrain him by saying, “This is our man.” Behind the Waffen-SS Galizien veterans march two dapper men. The sign they are carrying reads, “Ukrainian Canadian Committee.” Behind them march the DPs who have followed them to Canada.

On the left of the cartoon, a cameraman is filming the procession while standing on a car. It is labeled “Hollywood.” The dollar sign on its hood emphasizes the commercial nature of this institution. Next to the car, Alex Birns, a Jewish-American mobster and racketeer, looks at the veteran who is about to shoot Yalcin. “Frankly speaking, this fighter won’t bring in capital for our company,” Birns says. Like Hearst and KUK, he symbolizes the new continent and its capitalist nature. The introduction of a Jewish-American mobster as a symbol of criminality interwoven with capitalism might be a sign of the antisemitism that existed in the Soviet Union after the Second World War.[1879] The long row of Waffen-SS Galizien veterans and other nationalists in the procession indicates their emigration to capitalist countries which, according to the cartoon, were no less criminal than the Ukrainian nationalists themselves.

Lower down, to the left of the procession, the poet Ievhen Malaniuk sits and recites a poem while playing a hurdy-gurdy. Malaniuk was published in the 1930s in Vistnyk, a newspaper edited by Dontsov. His traditional Cossack-style haircut, known as a khokhol, makes him unrecognizable. Only the caption on the leg of his shabby pants reveals his identity. The poet has put his hat out in the hope of getting some coins. One unidentified man stands behind Malaniuk, another one beside him. Like the poet, both keep their eyes down. One of them holds his hand out for alms.

To the right of the funeral crowd, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, walks beside Ferenc Nagy, prime minister of Hungary between February 1946 and May 1947, who resigned under duress and left for the United States. Mikołajczyk has a flask in his coat pocket and is holding a small cup. Nagy asks Mikołajczyk what’s wrong. “I myself don’t feel well,” Mikołajczyk answers. An older woman asks a policeman “Who is being buried?” and gets the harsh answer that they are burying a person who needs to be buried.

A horse is pulling the hearse, in which a vase is standing on a box. An inscription says, “The Hope of Restoration of Capitalism in Ukraine.” The horse that is pulling the hearse says, “My carriage is the most suitable one for this crowd!” Kubiiovych, former head of the UTsK who, as General Secretary of the Shevchenko Scientific Society after the war, became an important émigré politician, is leading the horse. Dontsov, the ideologist who radicalized and fascistized Ukrainian nationalism, marches on the other side of the horse. The position of Kubiiovych and Dontsov in front of the hearse suggests the continuity of political orientation among Ukrainian émigrés. A man labeled as “Bully” (John Bull) and a man captioned as “Earl” are marching on one side of the hearse. Both are carrying torches. On the other side, Winston Churchill with his characteristic cigar is carrying a torch and shedding a tear.

Six men and a boy are leading the procession. Franco, one of the last European dictators, is marching at the very front. He is carrying a pillow with a scepter and looking at Charles de Gaulle, the French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during the war. De Gaulle is holding a pillow with a trident, the symbol of Ukraine as introduced by the Ukrainian national movement in the late nineteenth century. The small and stout Franco looks at the tall and thin de Gaulle and asks, “Tell me, General, who is the man in the black mask?”—referring to a man behind them wearing a top hat and with a mask over his eyes. “A president who wants to stay anonymous,” de Gaulle answers.

The man with the mask is Harry Truman, president of the USA. He carries a wreath with a black ribbon with the inscription “From Wall Street.” On his right, marches Father Vasyl’ Laba, a chaplain of the Waffen-SS Galizien. Laba, carrying a wreath from Pope Pius XII, is shedding a tear. To the left of Truman in the caricature, marches Władysław Anders, the Polish general who, after the war, was associated with the Polish anticommunist government-in-exile in London. Anders is carrying a wreath with the inscription “From Forest Colleagues” referring to the Polish nationalist underground (Pol. leśni ludzie), which fought against the communists after the Second World War. Randolph Churchill, a small man with a cigar in his mouth, marches in front of the president of the USA. He holds his head high and seems to enjoy himself in the role of an important personality. The identity of the son of the most famous twentieth-century British politician is indicated not only by his cigar but also by the inscription on the ribbon of his wreath: “From Father and Me, R. Churchill.” Besides him marches an archetype of a German Nazi, a mixture of Hitler and a conservative general. The plaster on his cheek symbolizes that he is already defeated, but the Spitzhaube, or Prussian army helmet, which he carries on a pillow over his head, indicates pride and a will to continue. On the pillow, lower than the Spitzhaube we read “Tsentral’na Rada,” the assembly of Ukrainian politicians during the First World War, which collaborated with and depended on the German Empire. The inscription on the banner above the funeral procession reads, “Hopes and Dreams Have Been Shattered.” The message is strengthened by a swastika at one end of the banner and by a trident at the other. The inscription under the cartoon says, “They are sad because we are happy.”

All in all, the cartoon provided the Soviet audience with a range of messages. It informed its recipients that the Ukrainian nationalists were working with western capitalists who were allied with fascists and continued their anti-Soviet policies in a slightly modified version. The connection between fascism and capitalism was indicated, among other ways, by the prominent positioning of Franco at the very head of the funeral procession, the depiction of Hearst, who sympathized with National Socialism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s, and by several other symbols such as the archetype of a German Nazi mentioned. It also indicated that there was no real difference between fascism and capitalism. Capitalism appeared as a kind of successor to fascism, which had to be replaced after Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were defeated. The cartoon not only marginalized the significance of democracy in the Western bloc after 1945 but also introduced representatives of democratic states as enemies of the Soviet Union, marching along with Nazis. Finally, the cartoon informed its recipients that Ukrainian nationalists had already lost the battle and would not seize power in Ukraine or establish capitalism there but would continue attacking the Soviet Union with the help of “fascists” and “capitalists.”

The OUN in Ukraine reacted to the Soviet propaganda and began to protect its image. One significant publication that defended the OUN and Bandera was the brochure Who Are the Banderites and What Are They Fighting For. The Russian version appeared in 1948, the Ukrainian one in 1950.[1880] The Ukrainian version was

 

Fig. 36. Nil Khasevych. Bandera’s woodcut portrait.

published with illustrations by the artist Nil Khasevych, among them Bandera’s woodcut portrait. The Russian version appeared without illustrations. Both editions were published anonymously but their author was Petro Fedun, alias Poltava, a member of the OUN, UPA, and UHVR who, unlike Bandera, claimed the supremacy of the UHVR over the OUN. A few years after the publication, Poltava and Khasevych were killed by the NKVD: Poltava in December 1951, Khasevych in March 1952.

One important point in Poltava’s brochure was his definition of Banderites:

Banderites is a popular term for all members of the insurgent and underground struggle that the Ukrainian nation began during the German occupation. ... This term comes from the name of the famous son of the Ukrainian nation, a longstanding revolutionary fighter for the freedom and state independence of Ukraine, the Leader of the revolutionary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)—Stepan Bandera. ... Thus, according to their organization or party membership Banderites are either a) members of the OUN, led by S. Bandera, or b) Ukrainian patriots without a party affiliation who struggle for the freedom and state independence of Ukraine either in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) or in the revolutionary underground.[1881]

Poltava provided a common understanding of the term that would change slightly over time and had a very different meaning in other discourses, in particular the Soviet one. Elsewhere, Poltava added that “deep patriotism” is another important characteristic of Banderites. One proof for the “deep patriotism” of Banderites was the argument that they did not surrender to enemies but shot themselves with their last bullets.[1882]

According to Poltava there was nobody in the entire Soviet Union who had not heard about Banderites. Yet the majority of people did not know the truth about them, because they believed Soviet propaganda and therefore thought that Banderites were “‘Ukrainian-German nationalists,’ that is Hitlerites, or in accordance with the more recent Bolshevik lie, English-American agents, or real ‘kurkuls’ or ‘bourgeois’, or real ‘bandits.’”[1883] Then Poltava claimed that all Soviet propaganda was a lie and that the task of the brochure was therefore “to tell the Soviet people a short truth about us, Banderites, about our revolutionary liberation movement.”[1884] Thereby, Poltava used Soviet propaganda, which obviously distorted the OUN and the nationalist underground, in order to present his distorted image of the OUN-UPA as a true one. Like many other ideologists in Ukraine and in the diaspora at that time, he depicted the OUN-UPA as a “revolutionary liberation movement,” composed of “freedom-loving patriots” and “idealistic romantics” who did not commit any war crimes but only fought for justice, liberty, and independence.

With the help of Soviet propaganda, Poltava also denied collaboration with Germany: “In particular we Banderites have never collaborated with Germans as the Bolshevik enemies of the nation lie about us.”[1885] Similarly, the author denied the OUN-UPA’s terror against Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians and claimed that, because of the Banderites’ “famous and heroic” past, the “nation loves and support us.”[1886] Banderites were for him a group that would rescue not only Ukrainians but all non-Russian nations from the Soviet regime: “We Banderites fight against Bolsheviks because they conduct policies of severe national suppression and economic exploitation of Ukraine and all the other non-Russian nations of the USSR.”[1887] Poltava also claimed that Bolsheviks “burn alive Ukrainian patriots,” by whom he meant Banderites, or sent them to Siberia “for our love for Ukraine.” He enumerated several dreadful crimes and stated that Bolsheviks committed them against Ukrainian patriots.[1888]

Introducing the program and political aims of the Banderites, Poltava claimed that they were trying to establish “an independent Ukrainian national state in the Ukrainian ethnographic territory.” At the same time, he believed that the “Banderite revolutionary movement had nothing in common either with fascism or with Hitlerism” and that only “Bolshevik enemies of the nation connect us with fascism.”[1889] He also introduced the ABN, which, together with the OUN-UPA, was trying to mobilize other nations of the Soviet Union for a struggle against the Soviet regime and stressed that the ABN would be glad if the Russian nation would join their revolutionary struggle.[1890]

In addition to his denial of crimes against Jews and Poles, Poltava denied the crimes by the OUN and UPA against those civilians whom the nationalists accused of being communists or supporters of the Soviet regime, and of whom they killed more than 20,000 civilians, including women and children from the families of the “communist traitors”: “We do not fight against the Soviet national masses. ... We liquidate only the leading representatives of the party, MVD and MGB agents, and all those collaborating venal elements who actively oppose our movement and are hostile to the Ukrainian nation.”[1891]