governments as a result of the policy of multiculturalism introduced in Canada in 1971.[2033] Besides erecting monuments to famous UPA leaders, the Ukrainian nationalist émigrés celebrated them in public. For example, on 22 June 1980, the thirtieth anniversary of Shukhevych’s death, 6,000 Ukrainian nationalists from Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Pittsburgh, and several other cities gathered in Toronto to attend a religious memorial service.[2034] In 1988 the association of former UPA soldiers unveiled a monument in the Kyїv camp in Oakville (Ontario, Canada), devoted to the “glorious UPA.” Engraved on a piece of rock, it showed a UPA insurgent in a uniform with a huge trident behind him (Fig. 50).[2035]

The act of 30 June 1941 was another significant component of the anti-Soviet commemorations performed regularly by the veterans of the OUN, UPA, Waffen-SS Galizien and their children. A modified version of the text of the state proclamation of 30 June 1941 was presented yearly in nationalist newspapers as a brave, anti-German act of the “renewal of Ukrainian statehood.” The Ukrainian nationalists had removed the expressions of admiration for Hitler and the desire for close collaboration with the “National Socialist Great Germany, which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe.” This adjustment allowed them to perceive the act of 30 June 1941 as a symbol of deep and sincere Ukrainian patriotism and resistance against Nazi Germany. [2036]

In the early 1980s the Ukrainian diaspora, in particular the Ukrainian communities that commemorated Bandera as their Providnyk, or the state proclamation of 30 June 1941 as an anti-German act, developed another essential nationalist narrative, namely of the artificial famine in Soviet Ukraine of 1932–1933, which they called the “Famine Holocaust” or the “Ukrainian Holocaust.” They thus drew a parallel with the destruction of European Jews during the Second World War, known since the late 1970s as the Holocaust. The term “Holodomor” became popular in Ukraine and among the diaspora especially in the late 1980s. The phonetic similarity of Holodomor to Holocaust was not a coincidence. The immediate trigger for the nationalists’ famine discourse was the popular miniseries Holocaust, which was broadcast in 1978 by NBC and was watched by millions of North Americans. Presenting the story of one Jewish family from Berlin since the coming of the Nazis to power in 1933 until the end of the Second World War, the miniseries drew the attention of many North Americans to the destruction of European Jews. The miniseries presented Ukrainians as Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators. Holocaust thereby clashed with the ideological Bandera symbolism and the way that the Ukrainian diaspora dealt with its past, particularly as to the denial of Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust and collaboration with Nazi Germany.[2037]

At that time and into the 1980s, relatively little demographic research had been conducted on the subject of the famine; this made it easier to exaggerate the number of victims. The approximate number of 2.5 to 3.9 million Ukrainian victims of the famine became known only in the early 1990s. The nationalist elements of the diaspora claimed that during the “Holodomor” more Ukrainians were killed than Jews were during the Holocaust. In articles, leaflets, books and on monuments, they inflated the numbers to five, seven, eight, or 10 million Ukrainian victims of the famine.[2038] They sometimes counted Ukrainian victims between 1921 and 1956 generally, and claimed 15 million victims, which figure they presented in contrast to the 6 million Jewish victims.[2039] Roman Serbyn, Professor of East European history at the University of Montreal, at which Dontsov was teaching after the Second World War, wrote: “Much has been written in recent years about the man-made famine that ravaged Ukraine in 1932–1933 and caused the deaths of seven to ten million people.”[2040] In an academic volume published in 1986, Marco Carynnyk compared the Ukrainian victims of the famine to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.[2041] The participants of the Holodomor discourse instrumentalized the suffering of the famine victims for various reasons, the most important of which were to draw attention to the Soviet denial of the famine and to the political situation in Soviet Ukraine, and to respond to the accusations concerning Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust.[2042]

Shortly before the twenty-fifth anniversary of Bandera’s assassination, two important Ukrainian nationalist activists died: Stepan Bandera’s son Andrii on 19 July 1984, and Iosyf Slipyi, charismatic head of the Greek Catholic Church and an important symbol of Ukrainian nationalism, on 7 September 1984. Ukrainian nationalist papers such as the Munich-based Shliakh peremohy and the Toronto-based Homin Ukraïny immediately began transforming both the deceased into heroes and martyrs as they had previously dealt with Bandera and several other personalities.[2043]

Despite these two losses, 1984 was a special year for all Bandera admirers, as it included the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death and seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of their Providnyk. Early in the year, Shliakh peremohy brought out a red-and-black wall calendar with Bandera’s portrait and a quotation from Bandera’s posthumously edited volume Perspectives of the Ukrainian Revolution.[2044] In May Homin Ukraїny designated Bandera and Shukhevych as heroes of the month.[2045] On 17 October, it published Bandera’s portrait on the first page, together with a picture of the pro-Bandera demonstration in Munich in 1979. An article reminded its readers that the portrait showed the symbol of the Ukrainian nation.[2046] The KUK summoned the “Ukrainian citizens of Canada” to commemorate Bandera as “one of the greatest twentieth-century defenders against the communist-Russian empire.”[2047]

One day before the anniversary, Shliakh peremohy published Bandera’s portrait on the first page. In the article surrounding the portrait, it summarized Bandera’s life in a standardized heroic and laudatory narrative, set in the “time of iron and blood.”[2048] On another page, it explained that the Munich émigrés frequently took their foreign visitors to Bandera’s grave.[2049] In the next issue, Shliakh peremohy published further articles about the revolutionary nature of the Providnyk, pictures of his funeral, and of his grave covered with wreaths.[2050] A week later, it stated that October was Bandera month in Munich and informed its readers that in 1984, as in previous years, Ukrainians from numerous countries around the world would make a pilgrimage to Bandera’s grave. After their arrival, the participants first attended a politicized panakhyda and then went to the hall of the Munich Conservatory for a commemorative gathering. During the ceremony, Stets’ko reminded the audience that the revolutionary struggle was not over: “Around us is the world of enemies—the post-Versailles system that legalized the occupation of Ukraine.” In Cossack costumes, the Nottingham choir sang UPA songs under a huge portrait of Bandera. Finally, 800 participants marched through the city with torches and banners in their hands. Instead of walking to Kreittmayrstrasse 7 and burning a Soviet flag as in previous years, the crowd marched to the Odeonsplatz, where SUM activists had built a stand. They delivered anticommunist speeches and informed passers-by, in German and Ukrainian, about the purpose of their activism.[2051]

On 20 October 1984 in London, after a church service in remembrance of the Providnyk, about 1,500 people walked through the city with banners, shouting anti-Soviet slogans. In the afternoon, they assembled to hear a speech by Vasyl’ Oles’kiv, and anticommunist and revolutionary nationalist songs such as “We Were Born from the Blood of the Nation,” performed by the Manchester choir in Cossack and folk costumes, under a huge portrait of Stepan Bandera.[2052] In addition to the numerous regular locations of Bandera anniversaries, such as New York, Washington, and Winnipeg, Ukrainian nationalists performed their anticommunist rituals in honor of Bandera, in Hollywood in 1984.[2053]

The next round of Bandera commemorations took place in 1989 without the OUN and ABN leader Iaroslav Stets’ko, who had died in Munich on 5 July 1986. Slava (Iaroslava) Stets’ko, the widow of the “last premier of Ukraine,” became the new leader of the ABN. Vasyl’ Oles’kiv assumed the leadership of the OUN.[2054] Shortly after his death, Stets’ko also became a cult figure, although he was not admired and celebrated as intensively and lavishly as Bandera. Forty days after Stets’ko’s death, an anonymous poet published a poem entitled “For the Providnyk,” devoted to the legendary leader of the ABN. It praised Stets’ko’s strong belief in the “Holy Truth,” his willingness to make sacrifices, and his determination. It also mourned the loss of Stets’ko, which was compared to the loss of Bandera. Together with a dozen other equally pathetic and bellicose poems, the poem was recited by SUM members in their brown uniforms at a commemorative gathering in Munich on 13 August 1986.[2055] Even before this commemoration, the death of Stets’ko was also officially honored in Taipei on 19 July, during a congress of the Captive Nations.[2056]

Stets’ko’s passing certainly affected the nationalist Ukrainian communities but it did not prevent them from prolonging the struggle against the “red devil” while staging further commemorations in honor of Bandera, and performing numerous anticommunist rituals. On 15 October 1989, Shliakh peremohy published a photograph of Bandera’s bust on the first page, with his signature and the article “Stepan Bandera—The Maker of a New Era.” As in previous years, Bandera was introduced as the first son of the nation, which was underlined by Leonid Poltava’s motto “You will never forget the one who became the banner of the people!” Further, the Banderite newspaper based in Munich published a poem devoted to the Providnyk on the first page, and an article about the trial of Bohdan Stashyns’kyi written by Stepan Lenkavs’kyi, who had died in 1977.[2057]

In 1989 the commemorations in Munich proceeded as usual. Bishop Platon and other priests performed a panakhyda at the grave, which was attended by numerous nationalists, both young and old, in uniforms or plain clothes. Many of them carried red-and-black flags. Oles’kiv, the new OUN leader, delivered a speech. Later, the nationalists went to a commemorative gathering organized by Kashuba, a former SB officer. Volodymyr Mazur delivered a speech about the “vicious enemies” and the “enormous suffering” of the Ukrainian nation. He stood at a podium covered with an embroidered cloth, and the stage behind him was decorated with a huge Bandera poster with “1959” and “1989” on either side. Various musical groups played and sang nationalist and folk pieces for the Providnyk. The main difference between this and all previous festivities was that similar commemorations in western Ukraine, particularly in Bandera’s birthplace Staryi Uhryniv, were mentioned in the diaspora press. This was a sign of upcoming political changes.[2058]

The first museum devoted to Bandera was unveiled on 20 October 1962, one day after the announcement of the verdict in the trial of Bohdan Stashyns’kyi. The Stepan Bandera Museum of the Ukrainian Liberation Struggle (Muzei Ukraїns’koї Vyzvol’noї borot’by im. Stepana Bandery) was opened in the building of the SUB in Nottingham, England.[2059] The core items in the museum were Bandera’s personal belongings. The ZCh OUN regarded Britain as a safer place for these “sacred” objects than Munich.[2060]

In 1978 the museum was relocated to London and reopened on 6 October 1979.[2061] According to Vasyl’ Oles’kiv, leader of the ZCh OUN from 1986 to 1991 and longstanding director of the museum, the idea behind the relocation was to make it more accessible for foreign visitors.[2062] The museum, however, was never designed to attract the general public, but served as a pilgrimage site for Ukrainian nationalists, known only to insiders.[2063] The wish of the founders of the museum was to save Bandera’s personal belongings for future generations. They shipped a substantial portion of them from Bandera’s office and home in Munich to Nottingham and later to London, where they were located on the first floor of the building of the OUN publishing house, Ukrainian Publishers, at 200 Liverpool Road. The entire museum has been located there ever since, in a dark, bunker-like room of about twenty-six square meters, with small windows immediately below the ceiling. The two central exhibits of the museum are Bandera’s death mask and the clothes in which he was assassinated. His suit and shirt bear traces of the blood that he allegedly spat out after Stashyns’kyi fired the capsule with potassium cyanide at his face. The death mask was taken from Bandera’s face in order to immortalize Bandera’s physiognomy, charisma, and greatness (Fig. 51). The main purpose behind displaying the bloodstained clothes is to invoke the terrible moment of assassination, which symbolizes the extinction of Ukraine and Ukrainians by the Soviet oppressors. Other belongings of the Providnyk are located in his wardrobe, which stands open. Inside, visitors see Bandera’s jackets, shirts, including one with a tie, dark leather gloves, a hat, briefcase, pullovers, coat, pajamas, dark leather shoes, sport shoes, walking boots, ice skates, and even a small folding spade.

Standing in the museum room between Bandera’s wardrobe, radio, sofa, commode, and a large wooden desk with a huge semi-circular stamp, a wooden desk clock, and a typewriter that had belonged to Ievhen Konovalets’, visitors receive the impression that they are somewhere between Bandera’s office, living room, and bedroom. The impression is strengthened by the portraits of Konovalets’ and Petliura that hang in the same order as they had hung in Bandera’s office in Munich, on either

Fig. 51. Bandera’s death mask in the Bandera museum London.

Lizun, Vbyvstvo Stepana Bandery, 80.

 

side of a cross, above a trident, on the wall behind the desk. Although the blood on the jacket and shirt informs the visitor about Bandera’s death, the bust behind the desk, the death mask, and the dried flowers from the funeral wreaths revise the impression and suggest that the Providnyk is actually there among the visitors. A number of items are exhibited in six display cases and on the walls. Some of them did not belong to Bandera but conceptualize Bandera as a symbol of the OUN, UPA, and Ukrainian nationalism in general.[2064]

One of such objects is Shukhevych’s bust. It was prepared, like Bandera’s, by Chereshn’ovs’kyi. Both busts are placed on pedestals from which they appear to look at the visitors. The collection of Bandera’s articles edited posthumously by his adherents and published in 1978 under the title The Perspectives of the Ukrainian Revolution lies on a table covered with an embroidered cloth. It resembles a Bible on an altar. One of the display cases contains Bandera’s bloody jacket, shirt, and his shoulder holster, but without the pistol that was found on him at the hospital. Another display case exhibits two leather bags of a UPA partisan who, as a small paper strip informs the visitors, arrived in Bavaria from Ukraine in 1947. The other four display cases show items of different provenance. Many of them are propaganda materials like newspapers, leaflets, and pamphlets from the 1940s and 1950s, some of them brought from Ukraine to Bavaria, others printed in the diaspora. Also included in this group are medals, OUN and UPA stickers, booklets, organizational awards, and diplomas. One display case contains a dozen embroidered cloths of different types and implies the interrelation between Ukrainian nationalism and Ukrainian folklore. Another group includes portraits of OUN and UPA leaders, several photographs of the Providnyk and objects related to him, such as the house in which he grew up in Staryi Uhryniv, the church where his father served, pictures from his youth, including one in a Cossack costume and with a rifle in his hands (Fig. 4, page 95), pictures of his family in Munich, and of an interview with journalists. Finally, the display cases demonstrate a collection of Bandera cinderella stamps, two postcards bearing these stamps, and some bofons, or bonds for the OUN combat fund, including a 100 hryvnia Bandera bofon (Fig. 52).[2065]

The exhibits on one wall are a set of portraits of OUN members and a set of colored drawings showing Ukrainian prisoners in the Auschwitz camp. The portraits are divided into two rows. The top one displays male OUN members: Ievhen Konovalets’ in the middle, Stepan Bandera and Iaroslav Stets’ko on either side of him, and then Mykhailo Soroka and Stepan Lenkavs’kyi; the row below shows the female members: Alla Hors’ka, Iryna Senyk, Oksana Popovych, Kateryna Zaryts’ka-Soroka, Halyna Dydyk, and Oksana Meshko.

The drawings with scenes from Auschwitz, which was both a concentration camp and an extermination camp, hang in a row of fifteen paintings under the portraits of the male and female OUN heroes. The author of the drawings is Petro Balei, a prisoner of the camp and the author of several books, including one about Bandera. The

Fig. 52. A hundred hryvnia Bandera bofon with Iaroslav Stets’ko’s inscription, 1982. ASBML.

pictures are the only exhibits in the museum that are related to the Holocaust. Yet they do not hang in the museum to explain what Auschwitz or the Holocaust were, or what people were detained and annihilated there, and why. The drawings and the inscriptions beneath them suggest to visitors that the only prisoners in Auschwitz were Ukrainians, in particular the OUN-B members, and therefore imply that the Ukrainian nationalists could not have been involved in the Holocaust.

The drawings show personalities such as Stepan Lenkavs’kyi, Lev Rebet, Mykola Klymyshyn, and Iulian Zablots’kyi in striped uniforms, lying or sitting on their beds, smoking cigarettes, stealing food, being beaten by the Kapos and Germans with cudgels and whips, standing in a row during a roll call, cleaning the barracks, or sweeping the camp. One picture shows prisoners being gassed in a gas chamber. There is no inscription that would specify who these people are. Other drawings suggest that they can only be OUN-B members. Furthermore, there is no explicit or implicit indication that there were also Jews in Auschwitz, not to mention the fact that they made up the vast majority of the victims. Moreover, nothing in the pictures or in the museum indicates that the Ukrainian prisoners of Auschwitz did not share the fate of the Jews, of whom the vast majority were killed in the camps, whereas the majority of Ukrainians survived the camp.[2066]

A very similar interpretation of Ukrainians in concentration and death camps was presented in 1945 and 1946 by two anonymous authors, very likely OUN members, in the publication Why the World Is Silent. The authors did not mention Jews as prisoners of German camps. The only Jews in their publication are Jewish Kapos. Ukrainian prisoners are divided into traitors and patriots. The patriots are mainly Banderites, and the Ukrainian patriots are the main victims of the German concentration camps. The authors claim that Ukrainian patriots were murdered and mistreated not only by camp guards but also by other prisoners, in particular Poles, Russians, and Bolsheviks. The Bandera museum follows a very similar logic, turning the OUN and in particular the OUN-B, into the main victims of the Holocaust.[2067]

Pictures on another wall of the Bandera museum are devoted to the UPA, which Bandera never led or even belonged to, but of which he was the spiritual leader and eventually one of its main symbols. The pictures show UPA leaders such as Rostyslav Voloshyn, Volodymyr Shchyhel’s’kyi (Captain “Burlaka”), Vasyl’ Sydor, and a priest with four UPA partisans in front of a collective grave of UPA partisans with a huge cross, partisans conducting a medical inspection of other partisans, a small UPA unit from 1946, and pictures that allegedly show bodies of murdered UPA partisans. Next to this collection, visitors see a poster announcing the opening of the museum on 20 October 1962 in Nottingham, and a historically stylized announcement “The Appeal of Struggling Ukraine” to the youth of the Ukrainian diaspora, which informs the young Ukrainian audience:

In exile you have to become the avant-garde of the liberating struggle, just like us, the youth in the homeland. You have entirely devoted yourselves to the interests of struggling Ukraine … fight next to your fellows [in Ukraine] who with arms in their hands struggle for the liberation of the nation. ... Before you, Ukrainian youth, just as before our whole emigration, lies the task of familiarizing foreigners with the liberation struggle of the Ukrainian nation. Do it on every occasion and with all resources. Use for it your personal friendships, contacts with the youth of other nations, and international youth organizations. Inspire the youth of all nations for a struggle against Bolshevism.[2068]

The bottom part of the frame in a historically stylized announcement displays the first commander in chief Shukhevych reading “The Appeal of Struggling Ukraine” to Ukrainian youth, which is divided into intelligentsia listening to the UPA leader, and fighters who, with rifles in their hands and OUN banners, run into a battle against the Soviets.[2069]

The Bandera museum that was opened in Nottingham and relocated to London has been a nationalist shrine rather than an educational institution. It was not created to elucidate Bandera’s life, the concept of a leader, or the history of the OUN and UPA, but to worship the Providnyk and to deny the problematic aspects of the “liberation movement,” with the help of the Bandera cult and his distorted and victimized image. Its creators were OUN members and veterans of Waffen-SS Galizien and the UPA, who had worshiped Bandera in the 1930s and 1940s and who tried to pass on the cult to their children. The museum exemplifies very well how the Ukrainian nationalists sacralized the Providnyk and turned him into a transcendent object of admiration. Similarly, it demonstrates how its creators heroized and victimized their collective memory of the Second World War and how they turned OUN members and UPA veterans into heroes, martyrs, and victims of the Nazis. The subject of Poles, Jews, and other victims of the Ukrainian nationalists is completely absent from the museum, although the OUN and UPA are featured extensively.

As well as being celebrated at numerous nationalist commemorations and anti-Soviet demonstrations and worshiped in the museum, the Providnyk also became a very important component of the narrative of Ukrainian history and an object of historiographical extolment. Diaspora historians represented the Providnyk as a national hero who sacrificed his life for Ukraine, and they omitted or denied all compromising facts about him and the OUN. They embedded him in the narrative of a “national liberation” struggle for an “independent Ukrainian state,” conducted by the OUN, the UPA, and the Waffen-SS Division Galizien, all of which were whitewashed in respect of war crimes, and the Waffen-SS Galizien in respect of collaboration with Nazi Germany. This way of presenting Bandera was related to the fact that many of the historians who published on Bandera were OUN members, veterans of the Waffen-SS Galizien and the UPA, or sincere admirers of the Providnyk and his political ideas. This manner of explaining Ukrainian twentieth-century history impacted also on historians who were not rooted in the diaspora communities but who, due to the anticommunist Cold War narrative, the lack of archival documents, or other reasons, took over partly or entirely the narrative established and propagated by the diaspora communities.

Petro Mirchuk, Bandera’s first hagiographer, was an OUN-B member and, prior to the Second World War, head of a division of the propaganda apparatus in the national executive.[2070] Mirchuk was also an Auschwitz survivor, an organizer of numerous Bandera commemorations, and an advocate of Jewish-Ukrainian reconciliation—on condition that the Jews acknowledged that Ukrainians did not kill Jews during the Second World War, that the OUN and UPA rescued them, and that Ukrainians were victims of the Holocaust equally with Jews. After the Second World War, Mirchuk stayed in DP camps until 1950, when he settled in the United States. He wrote a number of publications on Ukrainian nationalism, and his works had a significant influence on the way the Ukrainian diaspora understood the OUN, the UPA, and Ukrainian nationalism in general. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of Mirchuk’s publications were republished in Ukraine. They were regarded as important, academic, and reliable works. In his publications Mirchuk transformed Bandera into the symbol of the OUN, UPA, Waffen-SS Galizien, the “national liberation movement,” and all other groups of patriotic and nationalist insurgents. Although some of Mirchuk’s publications were fabricated, several of them contain valuable facts, but leave out even more, and introduce false information. The main aim of his writings was to provide the far-right narrative with credibility and to fortify the right-wing diaspora communities in their politicized self-understanding.

In the introduction to his 1961 biography, Stepan Bandera: Symbol of Revolutionary Uncompromisingness, Mirchuk stated that he was writing the biography in the genre of hagiography (Ukr. zhyttia sviatykh) because he believed that this was the only correct genre for the portrayal of the life of “one of the greatest of Ukrainian patriots, one of the greatest Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists.” He argued that Ukrainians needed such a publication because it would be a “source of power, which reinforces our belief in the Ukrainian nation.”[2071] Mirchuk did not deny the range of assassinations conducted in 1933–1934 under the leadership of Bandera; at least not those that were already known. However, he legitimized and rationalized them by depicting them as a legitimate answer to the “Polish terror” or as patriotic deeds. Thus Bandera was introduced not as a leader of a terrorist nationalist organization but as a “patriotic revolutionary” protecting the Ukrainian nation against the Polish occupiers. Killing politicians or civilians whom the OUN accused of harming or betraying the nation was, for Mirchuk, a patriotic deed that had nothing to do with violence or terrorism. On the contrary, it was an appropriate expression of patriotic feelings.[2072]

According to Mirchuk, investigating “totalitarian” and “dictatorial” tendencies in the OUN or in Bandera was illegitimate and was a frequent practice of the enemies of the OUN. Bandera was a democrat who differentiated between the “legal social-civic life and the [necessary] forms of revolutionary underground.” Like every OUN member, he obeyed democratic order and respected democracy and human rights.[2073] Describing Bandera after his arrest on 14 June 1934, Mirchuk condemned the torture of Ukrainian prisoners in Polish jails and delivered a detailed description. He claimed that the “handcuffed and tortured Stepan Bandera was the epitome of the mythical Prometheus,” who suffered for Ukraine.[2074] Describing the trial of the OUN in Warsaw in 1935–1936, Mirchuk changed the political meaning of the fascist salute “Slava Ukraїni!” which the OUN members performed several times in the courtroom. He described how the OUN members shouted “Slava Ukraїni!” but did not mention that they extended their right arms. He thereby turned this greeting into something for which Ukrainian patriots born after the Second World War could have sympathy.[2075] Similarly, Mirchuk explained Bandera’s and the OUN’s conduct during the Second World War:

The leadership of the revolutionary OUN under the leadership of Stepan Bandera did not delude itself and did not hope that Hitler’s Germany would support rebuilding the independent Ukrainian state. ... Thus it definitely declined any kind of collaboration with Hitler’s party and in particular any conjunction of the OUN’s deeds with the politics of Hitler’s Germany.[2076]

Because it was, however, impossible to entirely deny OUN-B collaboration with Nazi Germany, Mirchuk claimed that the OUN-B “decided that it was not only possible but also necessary to make contact with the anti-Hitler circles of the German army. [This cooperation] was necessary [in order] to have Ukrainian troops in Ukrainian territory in the first weeks of the war, who would become the core of a regular Ukrainian army.”[2077] The questions of Jews and the Holocaust were not discussed in this section, although the pogroms took place at the time and in the location of the revolutionary actions of the OUN-B. Furthermore, the OUN-B did not intend to install a fascist dictatorship in Ukraine but established a “Ukrainian National Committee” to represent all Ukrainians in the government established by the OUN-B. Moreover, the OUN-B combated Soviet and German imperialism from the very beginning of the “Ukrainian National Revolution.”[2078] Mirchuk confirmed that the OUN-B killed OUN-M members but only those who worked for the Gestapo or who handed over OUN-B members. The murder of Stsibors’kyi and Senyk was, however, a Soviet act and had nothing to do with Bandera or the OUN-B.[2079]

Repeating the proclamation of the Ukrainian state from 30 June 1941, Mirchuk omitted all references to collaboration and friendly relations with “National Socialist Great Germany, which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world, and is helping the Ukrainian nation liberate itself from Muscovite occupation,” which had been mentioned in the proclamation.[2080] Thus according to Bandera’s first hagiographer, “on the political level, the Act of 30 June 1941 was a manifestation of the freedom of the Ukrainian nation and its attitude toward new deeds performed in front of the whole world and in front of history.” And further, the act was the beginning of the “armed rising against Hitler’s Germany.”[2081]

After his arrest by the Germans, Bandera suffered, but he did not give up, and was “not afraid of torture or death for the freedom of Ukraine as previously [he had not been] from the hands of Poles.”[2082] The Providnyk opposed the Germans until the end of the Second World War, despite the tortures of the Gestapo to which he was exposed:

And this “No” [to the collaboration with Germany] Bandera could keep until the collapse of Hitler’s Germany, although he had to suffer for it long years of hard imprisonment in German prisons and camps, being prepared every day for death. ... The moral strength of Stepan Bandera and his physical endurance against torture appeared to be more powerful than the entire physical strength of the Gestapo.[2083]

The best proof for Mirchuk of Bandera’s refusal to collaborate with the Germans during the Second World War was the Providnyk’s denial of this collaboration, which can be found in several of Bandera’s articles written after the Second World War.[2084]

In general, Mirchuk claimed that the OUN-B was the only Ukrainian organization that opposed Hitler and Stalin. All other political bodies compromised themselves through collaboration.[2085] Banderites were for Mirchuk those brave people who fought for Ukraine and never collaborated with Nazi Germany.[2086] Other organizations and individuals also “worked for the nation,” but in collaboration with Nazi Germany. “They wrote memorials to the government of Germany, Hitler, Himmler, and other leaders of contemporary German politics.”[2087]

After his release from Sachsenhausen, Bandera, according to Mirchuk, “again led the revolutionary struggle of the whole Ukrainian nation against the Red Moscow occupier.”[2088] After the Second World War, the struggle for independence was even more difficult than before, because of those elements of the OUN and the Ukrainian diaspora who did not subordinate themselves to the Providnyk. As in previous parts of the biography, Mirchuk omitted here that the OUN-B killed opponents and suspects in the DP camps.[2089] During the Cold War, Bandera was again for Mirchuk the sole Ukrainian politician who was prepared to collaborate only with those anti-Soviet powers that accepted his demand for an independent Ukrainian state.[2090]

One of the most interesting sections of Mirchuk’s biography is about the nation, the party, and democracy. In this section, Mirchuk introduces the argument that the nation must be ruled by only one organization, cites Bandera’s “Word to the Ukrainian Nationalists” from 1946, and argues that the OUN did not represent a particular element of Ukrainian society but the whole nation:

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (revolutionaries) … is not a representative of the interests of any particular part of the nation. ... The OUN is struggling for the good of the whole Ukrainian nation and all citizens of Ukraine, and not for any particular part, social strata, and the like. The OUN derives its program from the needs of the whole Ukrainian nation.[2091]

On democracy, Mirchuk writes:

Stepan Bandera never misused the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic,’ he never fought with phrases about democracy, because he disdained shallow demagogy. At the same time, he was always a fighter for the principles of democracy in Ukrainian political life, in the future Ukrainian state, and also in current life; and ideas propagated by him during his life, which we have already cited, substantiate this very convincingly.[2092]

Logically, only enemies of the OUN-B or of the Ukrainian people spread rumors that Bandera was “antidemocratic” and “totalitarian.”[2093]

In another publication, My Meetings and Discussions in Israel (Are Ukrainians “Traditionally anti-Semites”?), published by the “Ukrainian Survivors of the Holocaust,” Mirchuk approached the problem of Jewish-Ukrainian relations and the role of the OUN-B in them.[2094] The monograph begins not with an introduction but with a short biographical note about the author, from which readers learn that he is a mem-
 

ber of the Society for Jewish-Ukrainian Collaboration, an honorary member of the Jewish Identity Centre, and that he was a prisoner of Auschwitz from July 1942 until 19 January 1945. The biographical note also contains pictures of Mirchuk in characteristic striped prisoner’s garb. What it does not contain is any clarification why he and other non-Jewish inmates of Auschwitz did not share the fate of Jews in Auschwitz, and how the OUN-B was involved in pogroms before some of its members were imprisoned in the concentration camps.[2095]

The difference between a Jew and a non-Jew in Auschwitz was significant. What Stanisław Krajewski elaborated for Poles and Jews is even truer for Ukrainians:

For “Aryans,” Auschwitz was “merely” a destructive labor camp with the threat of death. Their families were frequently free. For the Jews, Auschwitz was a death camp, frequently for their whole families. Outside the camp, at large, nobody was waiting for them. Even if their later experiences were comparable with those of other inmates they did not share the same fate.

The tattoo with the number on the underarm meant for a Jew a happy destination; he avoided immediate death in the gas chamber. For a Pole [or a Ukrainian] it was one of the most terrible options.[2096]

Because of their political status, the OUN-B members had even greater chances of survival than an average Polish or Ukrainian prisoner, but Bandera’s first hagiographer understood the matter differently. During his visit to Israel in 1981, which resulted in My Meetings and Discussions in Israel, Mirchuk showed his Auschwitz tattoo to a number of people. At Yad Vashem, he displayed it to a young person, mourning relatives who had been killed in Auschwitz, and informed her: “I saw it [the Auschwitz camp] with my own eyes, I personally experienced it.” In the remainder of the conversation, he felt it necessary to point out that “there were [in Auschwitz] thousands like me—Ukrainians.”[2097]

Mirchuk also met a number of Holocaust historians in Israel, mainly directors and other employees of museums, and informed them that their perception of the Holocaust and Ukraine was completely wrong, for which he, a Ukrainian prisoner of Auschwitz with a tattoo on his arm, was the best evidence. In every conversation, he repeated that Ukrainians had never been antisemitic and that they were not involved in any kind of atrocities during the Second World War. Mirchuk’s best evidence for the “misperception” of Ukrainians and “misinformation” as to the involvement of Ukrainians in the Holocaust was the anti-Ukrainian sentiment among Holocaust historians and Jews. Once he stated: “[Only] the Auschwitz ‘disclosure’ on my arm … stops anti-Ukrainian assailment.”[2098]

In a conversation with Rabbi David Kahana, who had been saved by Sheptyts’kyi, Mirchuk could not understand why Yad Vashem was reluctant to honor Sheptyts’kyi. The evidence, that in the summer of 1941 Sheptyts’kyi reinforced Stets’ko’s government with a pastoral letter and later supported the creation of the Waffen-SS Division Galizien, was for Mirchuk merely anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Discussing with Kahana the complicated nature of Sheptyts’ky, he repeated the OUN-B’s antisemitic stereotypes of “Jewish Bolshevism” from 1941: “No Rabbi, it’s the bitter truth. Jews willingly became the bulwark of the Red Russian occupation of Ukraine, the bloody Bolshevik terrorism. And very often they also became the organizers—overt and covert leaders.”[2099]

The subject of Ukrainian-German collaboration during the Second World War was also for Mirchuk mere anti-Ukrainian propaganda. According to him, “it was not Ukrainians, but actually Jews, who collaborated with German Nazis in the destruction of Jews. Jewish ‘Judenrats,’ Jewish police, Jewish informers, and the ‘Sonderkommando’ were composed only of young Jews in concentration camps.” He was very much convinced of the truth of his understanding of the Second World War and the Holocaust. When criticized for some of his explanations, he claimed that his history was true because he would not state anything that was “untrue.”[2100]

In addition to denying Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust, Mirchuk also claimed that not Jews but Ukrainians were the main victims of Nazi policy. Anyone who did not agree with Mirchuk on this matter or even worse, addressed the OUN’s or UPA’s war crimes, in particular the crimes against Jews, or the collaboration with Nazi Germany, was for him “anti-Ukrainian.” The only way not to be “anti-Ukrainian” was to deny the OUN’s war crimes and to claim that the OUN and UPA were resistance movements, and that Ukrainians such as Stepan Bandera were national heroes and victims of Nazi policies. According to Mirchuk, only “the Bolsheviks call everyone who opposes Russian imperialism ‘bandits’ and ‘fascists.’ They even use these same labels when attacking those American presidents who oppose their aims and methods, such as President Reagan.”[2101]

Such a way of dealing with the subjects of Bandera, the OUN and UPA, the Holocaust, and the Second World War strongly affected the youth of the Ukrainian diaspora, who, as a result, believed in a range of political myths related to these questions. Elements of Ukrainian diaspora youth became a negative mirror image of Soviet Ukrainian youth. In 1983 a group of Ukrainian college students from the United States and Canada traveled through Europe with Professor Petro Goi and Sonia Szereg. Visiting the museum at the Dachau concentration camp, the young Ukrainians realized that “there is no mention of Ukraine or Ukrainians, yet many of the students had heard of or were personally acquainted with Ukrainians who had been prisoners in Dachau.” The students decided to “take action.” On 17 August at 4:00 p.m. seventeen students, two professors, and one priest came to the museum with banners and “formed a circle in the hall of nations where Ukraine is not represented.” As the museum’s assistant director asked them for the reason for this demonstration they explained it and declared that they were ready for a hunger strike. After the museum directorate decided to meet the demands of the protestors, one of which was to display the Ukrainian flag along with the flags of other nations, the students celebrated a panakhyda in the chapel in the grounds of the camp.[2102] The fact that some Ukrainians from the Waffen-SS Galizien were trained in the vicinity of Dachau did not attract the attention of the students.[2103]

The last publication related to Mirchuk that should be briefly described is I Am Alive Thanks to the UPA, a short autobiography of Stella Krentsbakh, a Jewish woman who owed her survival to the UPA but who apparently did not exist. The autobiography appeared in a volume of articles coedited by Mirchuk, and was forged by Mirchuk himself or another OUN veteran.[2104] The short text begins with the words: “I attribute the fact that I am alive today, and devoting all the energy of my thirty-eight years to a free Israel, exclusively to the Almighty and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).” The autobiography includes many expressions that come very close to antisemitic stereotypes and tells the story of a Jewish woman who was born in “the town of B., which lies seventy-five kilometers from Lviv” and who, when at a Ukrainian high school, “began to hate the enemies of Ukraine and to love its friends.” During the Second World War she “became a member of the heroic UPA,” survived the war among people who “do not divide people into races, only into honest people and dishonest ones.” After the war she went to live in Israel.[2105]

Another significant Bandera hagiographer was the poet, writer, and political activist Leonid Poltava (Leonid Parkhomovych). Poltava published not strictly historical but rather artistic publications about the Providnyk. He collected poems and songs about Bandera and published them together with Bandera stamps and pictures of Bandera’s busts and portraits in The Image of Stepan Bandera in Literature and Art. Poltava’s main motivation was to lay the foundations for a larger project that would honor the Providnyk by collecting artistic items devoted to him. In general, those collected and presented by Poltava seem to be a concoction of far-right, neo-fascist, and romantic ideas. Many of the poems mourn the loss of the Providnyk or Vozhd’. They emphasize the heroism and magnitude of the leader and stress that he did not die, because the Banderites were continuing the revolution. In one place, Poltava stated that Bandera is the banner of Ukraine because the word “bandera” means “banner” in Spanish. For Poltava, the fact that the Madrid radio station in Franco’s Spain broadcasted songs about Bandera was evidence of the greatness of the Ukrainian Providnyk.[2106]

In another publication, The Life of Stepan Bandera, Poltava published a range of private pictures from Bandera’s youth and of his family members in order to show readers the ordinary side of the Providnyk. Bandera’s biography was introduced as the Providnyk wrote it in 1959 for the United States consulate in Munich. In the main part, Poltava presented pictures of Bandera, in Cossack costume with a rifle in his hands, with other Plast members at a railway station, in the meadow and in a forest, with other students, as part of a collage from the Warsaw and Lviv trials, laughing together with other OUN members, next to a portrait of Stets’ko, in Germany after the Second World War with UPA soldiers to be sent to Ukraine, with the SUM youth in folk costumes, on vacation with his children and wife in summer and winter, and giving a speech at the grave of Konovalets’ on the anniversary of his death. Poltava’s comments on the pictures reinforced the idea that Bandera was both an ordinary man and extraordinary Providnyk.[2107]

The heroic discourse on the OUN-UPA and the “liberation movement” was shaped by a number of other historians and activists, in addition to Poltava and Mirchuk.[2108] Some of them were members of the OUN-B, such as Volodymyr Kosyk,[2109] Ivan Hryn’okh,[2110] Iaroslav Stets’ko, Mykola Klymyshyn,[2111] Stepan Lenkavs’kyi,[2112] Stepan Bandera himself,[2113] Volodymyr Ianiv,[2114] Mykola Lebed’,[2115] Roman Ilnytzkyi[2116] and Taras Hunchak.[2117] Others such as Petro Potichnyj[2118] were veterans of the UPA, and still others of the Waffen-SS Galizien, such as Vasyl’ Veryha,[2119] Oleksa Horbatsch,[2120] Roman Drazhn’ovs’kyi,[2121] and Petro Savaryn.[2122] A number of them, such as Ilnytzkyi, Hryn’okh, and Horbatsch worked at the Free Ukrainian University (UVU) in Munich; others such as Mirchuk and Kosyk were associated with the UVU or completed PhDs at this university.[2123] Ianiv was the rector of the UVU from 1968 until 1986, and Drazhn’ovs’kyi from 1993 to 1995.[2124] Hunchak was a professor at Rutgers University, Potichnyj at McMaster University. Horbatsch was professor of Slavic languages at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main from 1965 to 1982.[2125] Petro Savaryn was chancellor of the University of Alberta from 1982 to 1986.[2126] Bohdan Osadczuk, who was neither in the OUN nor the Waffen-SS Galizien but published articles in the collaborationist newspaper Krakivs’ki visti in 1943, was a professor at the Otto-Suhr-Institut for Political Science of the Free University of Berlin from 1966.

The falsification of documents was another well-organized and institutionalized activity related to the discourse of extolling and denying. Lebed’, who had whitewashed the history of the OUN-UPA in a monograph published as early as 1946,[2127] retyped a number of documents from the time of the Second World War. After his death in 1998, they were donated to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The HURI considered all the documents received from Lebed’ as original, and it invited radical right historians such as Volodymyr V’’iatrovych to study them and to popularize them among “patriotic” historians in post-Soviet Ukraine.[2128] Only a few political activists, such as Mykola Klymyshyn, were honest enough to admit that their writings had been whitewashed at the personal request of Bandera or at their own initiative.[2129] Among OUN members, apparently, only Ievhen Stakhiv tried to oppose the discourse of denial and pointed out how OUN activists such as Lebed’ falsified history.[2130] In his memoirs, however, even Stakhiv omitted the 1941 pogroms.[2131]

At a commemorative gathering in Munich in 1950, Ianiv, OUN member and long-time rector of the UVU in Munich, characterized Shukhevych as “one of the greatest legends of mankind” whose political career began when he killed the Polish official Sobiński in 1926. When discussing the Second World War and the Ukrainian nationalists, Ianiv omitted all war crimes committed by the UPA under the leadership of Shukhevych.[2132] In an interview in 1977, Ianiv proudly recalled the act of killing Sobiński and implied that reading the historical drama Kordian, written by the Polish romantic writer and poet Juliusz Słowacki, made him rationalize this crime and consider it a noble act.[2133]

In the 1970s, the Ukrainian diaspora established two major academic institutions, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) in 1973 and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) at the University of Alberta in 1976. Neither was as massively infiltrated by OUN-B members as the UVU in Munich, and they were not as heavily involved in the denial of war atrocities and the extolment of the OUN and UPA, but both failed to come to terms with the past, particularly on the subject of the Second World War. In 1976 the CIUS together with the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Europe initiated a huge project entitled Encyclopedia of Ukraine. The head of this important academic project was Volodymyr Kubiiovych, one of the major Ukrainian collaborators with the Nazis, and who, after the Second World War, became the Secretary General of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. This project, on the one hand, gave rise to a useful and authoritative encyclopedia of Ukrainian history, but, on the other hand, it presented a nationalist narrative of the Second World War in Ukraine and did not even include an entry on the Holocaust.[2134]

After 1945, very few Ukrainian intellectuals in the diaspora tried to rethink Ukrainian extreme nationalism or objected to the nationalist obfuscation of history. One was Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, a professor at the University of Alberta from 1971 until his death in 1984, who, during the Second World War, had published in the collaborationist newspaper Krakivs’ki visti.[2135] In his postwar essays Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi described the OUN-B’s fascism as “home-grown fascism” and emphasized that the OUN had more in common with other East Central European movements than with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: “One should look for the nearest relatives of the Ukrainian nationalism first of all not in German National Socialism or Italian Fascism—both products of urbanized and industrialized societies but rather among parties of this kind in agrarian, backward nations of Eastern Europe: the Croatian Ustaša, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Slovak Hlinka Party, the Polish ONR (National Radical Camp) etc.”[2136]

Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi was also one of very few Ukrainian émigré intellectuals who was aware of the difference between democracy and nationalism. Because he distinguished between these two political concepts, other émigré intellectuals perceived him as a leftist, which in Ukrainian intellectual émigré discourses meant communist and “traitor.” Unlike many other intellectuals, Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi understood the impact of nationalist activism on academia, and the openness of Ukrainian intellectuals to far-right thinking, as a problem. In his opinion, the most dangerous influence on Ukrainian intellectuals came from the OUN-B activists. In letters from 26 April 1974 onward to his uncle, Ivan Kedryn-Rudnyts’kyi, Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi pointed out that the OUN-B did not change its political views after the Second World War. What changed was that the majority of the Ukrainian diaspora began to accept OUN-B far-right discourses and interpretation of history as standard scholarly explanations. According to him, the OUN-B tried to dominate the Ukrainian diaspora as it had tried to dominate Ukrainian political life in the 1930s and 1940s. It prolonged the cult of a leader, applied “mafia-conspiratorial methods” to deal with its opponents, and suppressed open debates. He understood the prolongation of the “home-grown fascist” politics by Ukrainian émigré intellectuals as very harmful or,

the main evil in the life of the Ukrainian diaspora. It … brings us into derision and compromises us in the eyes of the western world, isolates us from processes that take place in Ukraine, spiritually and politically paralyzes us. The hegemony of the OUN-B movement [banderivshchyna] desacralizes the Ukrainian national idea. What is worth this idea if “free” Ukrainians cannot oppose bolshevism with nothing better than a more primitive creation of the same bolshevism? I hold the opinion that our home-grown totalitarianists do not differ in terms of morality from Bolsheviks, they are only less intelligent than they [the Bolsheviks].[2137]

The denying-extolling discourse on the OUN-UPA and Ukrainian nationalism became especially strong in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was also affected by the Cold War and the anti-Soviet and dissident nature of the 1970s and 1980s, when the anticommunist and anti-Soviet features of the OUN-UPA were highly respected by almost all Ukrainian diaspora intellectuals and equated with democratic values. Interest in a critical exploration of the role of Ukrainians or Ukrainian nationalists in the Second World War or the Holocaust was frequently regarded with suspicion, resentment, or hostility.

Authoritarian and fascist leaders, parties, and other organizations also became popular among dissidents in countries other than Ukraine at that time. In Poland for example, the anticommunist and anti-Soviet movement Solidarność revitalized the Piłsudski cult by publishing stamps, envelopes, and posters, depicting Piłsudski alone or accompanied by other politicians of the Second Republic, soldiers who fought for the Polish state in 1918, and such contemporary figures as Lech Wałęsa and Pope John-Paul II.[2138]

The anticommunist discourse impacted on historians and the historical discipline as such. In 1985 David Marples published an article in The Ukrainian Weekly, in which he euphemized and minimized the OUN and UPA crimes against Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, claiming that “some undisciplined actions on the part of an armed group were almost inevitable.” He further claimed that the UPA was a multicultural force: “according to a Western source, the nationality groups within the [UPA’s] ranks included Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Tatars, and Jews.” Given that Marples did not investigate this subject on his own at that time and apparently had no sympathy for Ukrainian nationalism, as he argued twenty-five years later, it must have been the common political or academic discourse about the OUN, UPA, and the Second World War that, in the 1980s, shaped his understanding of the subject. After the millennium Marples began to investigate Ukrainian nationalism and to publish important and original works about the OUN and UPA, and the Second World War in Ukraine. He became a true critic of the nationalist apologists and also a nuanced and sophisticated interpreter of the difficult past.[2139]

John-Paul Himka—who in the 1970s and 1980s wrote excellent books on nineteenth-century socialism, the Ukrainian peasants, and the Greek-Catholic Church—characterized the UPA, in an article published in Labour Focus on Eastern Europe in 1982 about the opposition in Ukraine, as “an anti-Nazi and subsequently anti-Soviet resistance force” and did not mention any atrocities committed by it or the OUN.[2140] In an article “World Wars” for the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, he did not mention that the OUN and UPA persecuted Jews during the Second World War and stated that “in the spring of 1943 thousands of Ukrainian policemen in German service deserted to form the fighting nucleus of the UPA [in order to attack] German outposts.” Similarly, he did not mention that in 1944 the OUN-UPA began collaborating once again with Nazi Germany. He asserted that the “UPA began liquidating Polish settlements in Volhynia” but omitted the fact that they also did so in eastern Galicia, and he relativized it with: “This soon escalated into full-scale Polish-Ukrainian ethnic warfare across western Ukraine.”[2141] In the 1990s Himka, similarly to Marples, changed his views on the OUN, UPA, and the Second World War in Ukraine.[2142]

When analyzing the approach of historians to the OUN and UPA in the 1980s, it is necessary to point out that there were various reasons for extolling the OUN and UPA and for denying or euphemizing their crimes. Certainly, not all historians extolled Ukrainian nationalism or euphemized the OUN’s and UPA’s atrocities because they were Ukrainian nationalists or believed in the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism. Another important reason for uncritical treatment of the OUN and UPA was the lack of critical scholarly research on this subject. The archetypal monograph on the OUN and the Second World War was John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism, first published in 1955. As already mentioned, Armstrong omitted two central events in his study: pogroms against Jews in western Ukraine in the summer of 1941 and the ethnic cleansing against the Polish population by the UPA in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in 1943–1944. There are at least four reasons for these and several other omissions from Armstrong’s monograph. First, Soviet archives during the Cold War were inaccessible, as the result of which he was unable to study many important documents. Second, Armstrong obtained information about the conduct of Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War while conducting interviews with OUN activists and UPA veterans, who gave him whitewashed self-portraits and incorrect and apologetic accounts of the movement. Although Armstrong claimed to regard the interviews as “highly colored,” he relied on them as primary sources. Third, he did not work with the testimonies of the Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian survivors of the OUN and UPA atrocities which describe events in western Ukraine during the Second World War very differently from the interviews of the OUN activists and UPA veterans, and also differently from German documents, of which many did not contain any information concerning the OUN-UPA’s violence. Fourth, the Cold War and the anti-Soviet and anticommunist nature of the OUN-UPA affected the perception of Ukrainian nationalism among Western scholars. Ukrainian nationalists were regarded during the Cold War as anticommunist “freedom fighters,” and because they did not mention their involvement in the Holocaust and labeled any investigation as anti-Ukrainian or as Soviet propaganda, even scholars of the Second World War and Ukrainian history accepted their narrative, rather than critically investigate the subject on the basis of archival documents, including testimonies of the survivors.[2143]

Although in 1987–1988 Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer debated the question of “rational” German scholarship versus the “mythical memory” of the Holocaust victims, the testimonies of Jewish survivors were until the late 1990s not regarded as reliable documents for the study of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This approach was common, not only among Ukrainian nationalist historians but also among many professional historians. German historians, in particular, repeatedly stressed the “subjectivity” and unreliability of Holocaust survivors’ testimonies and the “objectivity” and reliability of the perpetrators’ documents, in particular those of the meticulous German officers. This approach enabled many German, Ukrainian, and other historians to avoid facing the horrifying reality and complexity of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but it had a disastrous impact on the process of writing the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Histories written according to this method missed many significant aspects, they did not correlate with the reality and complexity of the past, their facts cannot be empirically verified without extensive omissions, and they legitimized the nationalist memory politics popularized by the diaspora communities and national conservative historians in democratic states.

Historians such as Armstrong, who did not investigate the violence of the OUN and other similar movements and marginalized the Holocaust in general, also looked for alternatives to the term “fascism.” Armstrong, the author of the first comprehensive monograph on the OUN, coined the term “integral nationalism.” This concept was for him something similar to fascism, but he argued that the OUN, Ustaša, and similar movements should not be called “fascist,” apparently because the term “fascism” and the concept of fascism were contested and politicized, and its use could suggest to readers that the historian in question was a communist or anti-Ukrainian, and destroy the historian’s career. Soviet propaganda labeled the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, and other capitalist states and also non-fascist authoritarian regimes as fascist. Communist and other left-wing activists in Western countries used the term to discredit political enemies of various orientations. Such a use of the term made it meaningless and strongly affected its meaning to scholars. The term “integral nationalism,” on the other hand, naturally became very popular both among anticommunist scholars like Armstrong,[2144] and among nationalist diaspora activists. “Integral nationalism” did not depict the OUN and its veterans as “fascist” but suggested that Ukrainian nationalism was a genuine, independent, self-sufficient nationalist movement, which had nothing in common with fascist ideology, other fascist movements, and especially not with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.[2145]

Bandera’s hagiographer, Mirchuk, emphasized the uniqueness of Ukrainian nationalism and claimed that only “enemies of Ukraine” and “opponents of the OUN” could claim that the OUN was fascist or approved of fascism and copied it. According to him, the OUN obtained its ideas and ideological foundations exclusively from “Ukrainian spirituality and tradition” and could not be fascist because fascism was not compatible with Ukrainian traditions and history.[2146] Political scientist Alexander Motyl wrote in 1980 that the OUN was a radical nationalist organization with all the features typical of fascist movements, but he added that the OUN could not have been fascist because there was no Ukrainian state in which the OUN could practice fascist politics.[2147] The fact that the “stateless state” was common for East European fascist organizations, parties, and movements, and that only a few of them achieved a state attracted the attention of very few scholars at that time, including scholars of fascism.[2148]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bandera’s assassination sincerely distressed those factions of the Ukrainian diaspora who knew him as a brave, devoted, and idealistic freedom fighter or as the legendary Providnyk. His loss was mourned by various Ukrainian anticommunist and far-right nationalist communities around the globe for weeks. Newspapers such as Shliakh peremohy, Homin Ukraїny, and Ukraїns’ka dumka published hundreds of mournful articles and poems, and expressed their disapproval of people who connected Bandera with the crimes committed by the OUN and the UPA, even if they understood Bandera to be the main symbol of this movement. These crimes were then denied or ascribed to the Soviet partisans, the Soviet army, and the Germans. The fifteenth of October became a very important date in the calendar of those factions of the Ukrainian diaspora who commemorated Bandera as a martyr and national hero at panakhydas, political gatherings, and anticommunist demonstrations. The first Bandera museum, unveiled in 1962, exhibited Bandera’s various personal effects in addition to artifacts related to the OUN and UPA “liberation struggle,” the cruelty of the Soviet occupation and the suffering of the OUN-B members at Auschwitz. The ethnic and political violence committed by the OUN and UPA during and after the Second World War was not exhibited in the museum although the movement was an integral, if not the central part of the exhibition. The OUN-B members were presented as tragic heroes and the sole inmates of Auschwitz. A similar narrative appeared in Petro Mirchuk’s numerous publications about the Second World War. Mirchuk also wrote the first Bandera hagiography and paved the way for a number of post-Soviet Bandera “patriotic” biographers.

The apologetic discourses on Bandera and the OUN and UPA, along with the victimization discourses on the Ukrainian famine in 1932–1933 and the suffering of Ukrainians during and after the Second World War were so powerful, especially in the final decades of the Cold War, that even open-minded scholars such as John-Paul Himka and David Marples were also impacted by them. John Armstrong’s standard monograph about the Ukrainian nationalist movement and the Second World War contained very little information about the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA, and was therefore highly prized by the Ukrainian diaspora and its historians. Only a very few scholars at that time, such as Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, objected to the apologetic discourses and the use of scholarship for propagating denial and creating various nationalist myths. Nevertheless, even Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi did not have any problems with silence about Volodymyr Kubiiovych’s past, because the former head of the UTsK initiated the Encyclopedia of Ukraine and supported several other projects that were perceived by the Ukrainian diaspora as being very important. The climate of the Cold War and the OUN’s determination to support the Western bloc in the fight against the “red devil” buried the dark moments of the OUN and UPA in oblivion. Any mention of them was perceived as Soviet, Polish, Jewish, and other forms of anti-Ukrainian propaganda.