Another major radical right party founded in 1991 was the Social-National Party of Ukraine (Sotsial-natsional’na partiia Ukraïny, SNPU). Its official party symbol was the Wolfsangel, or wolf’s hook, used previously by various SS Divisions and far-right, fascist, and neo-fascist movements. The SNPU claimed that its ideology was derived from such writings as Stets’ko’s Two Revolutions. In 2004 the SNPU gave birth to the All-Ukrainian Union Svoboda (Freedom), or Svoboda Party which became a member of the Alliance of European National Movements (AENM) and has been connected since 2009 with such other radical right parties as the French National Front, the Hungarian Jobbik, the Italian Tricolor Flame, the National Rebirth of Poland, and the Belgian National Front.[2176] The views of the charismatic, populist, revolutionary, and ultranationalist leader of the Svoboda Party, Oleh Tiahnybok, are well illustrated by a speech that he gave in 2004, during which he said:

The enemy came and took their [UPA’s] Ukraine. But they [UPA fighters] were not afraid; likewise we must not be afraid. They hung their machine guns on their necks and went into the woods. They fought against the Russians, Germans, Jews, and other scum who wanted to take away our Ukrainian state! And therefore our task—for every one of you, the young, the old, the grey-headed and the youthful—is to defend our native land! … These young men and you, the grey-headed, are the very combination that the Russian and Jewish mafia that is ruling Ukraine fears most.[2177]

With the growth of nationalism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the OUN and UPA became a significant component of western Ukrainian identity. Similarly to Ukrainians in the diaspora during the Cold War, many people in western Ukraine began to commemorate Bandera as a national hero and freedom fighter and to deny the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists. After the Soviet Union was dissolved, it ceased to be perceived as the main enemy of Ukraine, and the hatred against it was re-directed against left-wingers, Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians, and occasionally the European Union. Far-right nationalists began to claim that Ukraine was occupied by democrats, Russians, or Russified eastern Ukrainians who ought to be Ukrainized or Banderized. Many western Ukrainians complained that Ukraine was dependent on Russian culture, economy, politics, radio, television, and language. They also argued that people who criticized Bandera and the OUN and UPA were afflicted by banderophobia, which they defined as holding a hostile attitude toward Ukrainian culture.[2178]

The growth of nationalism and radical right activism in Ukraine led to ethnic and political harassment and violence. It is difficult to say how many people became victims of nationalist violence but, because of it, a number of Russians and Jews left or tried to leave Ukraine. A few such cases were documented by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Although we should be critical of these documents, because some refugees might have exaggerated in order to gain admission to the United States, we should not reject their reports as anti-Ukrainian fantasy. Irina Chtchetinin, an ethnic Russian and Jew living in Lviv, decided to leave Ukraine with her husband and three children after radical right groups attacked her Jewish-Russian neighbors. According to the historian Jeffrey Burds, who investigated the reports, Irina’s neighbors were brutally tortured in their own apartment: “The husband was branded with a hot electric clothes iron, his wife’s eye was ripped out of its socket, while their assailants screamed anti-Russian and anti-Semitic epithets. Ukrainian police refused even to take a report of the attack, or to follow up with an investigation of the incidents.”[2179] Another Jewish-Russian woman, Vera Korablina from Kiev, testified that a new ultranationalist boss fired all the Jewish workers in her section in 1990, and that in 1993, nationalists beat her new employer. They demanded from him “payment of special dues for Russians and Jews who worked in Ukraine.” Like her friend, she received death threats by telephone and mail. In early 1994, she was tortured by men who argued that “her Russian surname and passport could not conceal her ‘Yid’ origins.” In September 1994, the walls and furniture in her office were painted with anti-Russian and antisemitic graffiti. Her Jewish employer disappeared soon after this incident.[2180]

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the Ukrainian state caused changes in the field of professional history but almost none in the field of apologetic historical writing. The process of change was determined by the opening up of Soviet archives, rediscovery of testimonies of the victims as a source to study the Holocaust and far-right movements, and the de-nationalization and de-ideologization of professional history after the end of the Cold War. Historians such as John-Paul Himka gradually ceased to regard the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism as an important narrative of Ukrainian history and began to investigate the actual history of the OUN, UPA, and the Second World War in Ukraine.[2181] John Armstrong, on the other hand, the main historian during the Cold War who dealt with Ukrainian nationalism, seems to have ceased altogether to apply a critical approach to Ukrainian history, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At a conference in Lviv in August 1993, he claimed that “the objective of the historian … is to clarify the true position of the hero in his own time.” He admired Bandera, Shukhevych, Lebed’, Stets’ko, Dontsov, Kubiiovych, and Sheptyts’kyi and did not pay any attention to the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists during and after the Second World War or to their collaboration with Nazi Germany.[2182]

The discourse on Bandera and the OUN-UPA in Ukraine also became nationalized and radicalized in reaction to the Soviet legacy. Historians who were socialized in Soviet Ukraine began to invent a new narrative, which defined itself through the negation of the Soviet narrative and resembled Cold War writings by OUN émigrés. The radical right sector of the Ukrainian diaspora also contributed to the radicalization of the post-Soviet historical discourse in a practical way. The OUN organized historical conferences, for example in Kiev on 28 and 29 March 1992, at which Slava Stets’ko and Volodymyr Kosyk explained to the Ukrainian historians how to write history.[2183] The OUN émigrés established the Institute for the Study of the Liberation Movement (Tsentr doslidzhen’ vyzvol’noho rukhu, TsDVR),[2184] whose office has been located since then in the building of the Academy of Sciences at 4 Kozel’nyts’ka Street in Lviv.[2185]

The agenda of the TsDVR has been to reproduce and popularize the work of such OUN-B historians as Petro Mirchuk and Volodymyr Kosyk and to produce its own works according to the nationalist narrative initiated by the OUN émigrés. This has meant promoting the OUN as a democratic organization and the UPA as an army of liberation, and denying their ultranationalist nature and the atrocities that they had committed. The deeper purpose behind this activity was to elevate the “liberation movement” as a very important component of Ukrainian identity. The TsDVR expressed its agenda in a language that bears a striking resemblance to the language of OUN-B diaspora historians:

The history of the struggle of liberation is the basis of the national idea of every state, the basis for its values and orientation. The past of the Ukrainian people—in particular its liberation struggle—was for many years silenced and twisted by the totalitarian regimes. Therefore, a new non-prejudiced view of the Ukrainian liberation movement is extraordinarily urgently needed. The twentieth century was the high point of the development of the Ukrainian resistance—the best example is the struggle of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army from the 1920s to the 1950s. Unfortunately, today, the activities of those structures remain one of the least studied parts of the Ukrainian historiography. The study of the various aspects of the struggle of the Ukrainians for their national and social freedom is the main purpose of The Center for the Study of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement.[2186]

The diaspora and the OUN émigrés continued to publish on the subject of Bandera and the OUN-UPA after 1991. Petro Goi, head of the branch of the Ukrainian Free University in New York, collected several hundred articles about Bandera’s assassination, published them in ten thick volumes and called his monumental edition the foundation for the science about Bandera, or Banderology (banderoznavstvo). His wish was to enable “Ukrainian historians in the future” to “study the tragic incidents around the murder of Stepan Bandera” and to make the Providnyk the object of an academic cult.[2187]

The new ultranationalist narrative that appeared in post-Soviet Ukraine was a negative mirror image of the Soviet one, but because it negated the Soviet narrative it appeared to historians socialized in Soviet or post-Soviet Ukraine to be critical and true. The denial-oriented publications written by the OUN émigrés were used as evidence for claims that the OUN-UPA did not conduct ethnic cleansing in 1943–1944, did not kill Jews, and that the OUN-B did not adopt fascism in the 1930s. Mykola Lebed’s first monograph on the UPA from 1946 was reprinted in 1993.[2188] In 1995 the Vidrodzhennia publishing house reprinted Petro Poltava’s Who Are the Banderites and What Are They Fighting For from 1950. In 1999 it reprinted Bandera’s Perspectives of the Ukrainian Revolution, and several other nationalist publications. Vidrodzhennia provided the reprints with nationalist introductions and added contemporary pictures of demonstrations and ceremonies conducted by paramilitary organizations, such as a photograph of a unit of the Stepan Bandera Tryzub standing in front of the Bandera monument.[2189] A number of prominent Ukrainian scholars and politicians engaged in such organizations and took part in such ceremonies. Serhii Kvit, who in 2007 became the rector of the most prestigious Ukrainian university, the National University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy, had in the 1990s been the centurion (sotnyk) of the Stepan Bandera Tryzub and member of the KUN.[2190]

Popular Biographies

The popular and academic discourse about Bandera in Ukraine was influenced by two groups. One was composed of OUN émigrés such as Mirchuk, and nationalist dissidents such as Levko Luk”ianenko, holder of an honorary Doctorate in Law from the University of Alberta, who argued that Jews controlled the Soviet Union and were responsible for a significant number of Soviet atrocities. The second group consisted of OUN and UPA veterans who lived in Soviet Ukraine and were allowed for the first time to express their opinions without Soviet censorship. Many declared themselves to be the only true sources on OUN-UPA history. Their interpretations did not differ greatly from those of such veterans and historians as Mirchuk and Potichnyi, who lived and published after the Second World War in the diaspora, without Soviet censorship.[2191]

The first major post-Soviet Bandera biography, Stepan Bandera—Symbol of the Nation, was published by former OUN-B member and anticommunist activist Petro Duzhyi (1916–1997). Duzhyi joined the OUN in 1932 and participated in the “Ukrainian National Revolution” of 1941 as a member of an OUN-B task force. In 1944 he became the director of the propaganda department of the OUN. In June 1945, he was arrested by the NKVD and, after two years imprisonment in Kiev, he was detained in the Gulag until 1960.[2192]

Like Mirchuk, the main OUN diaspora historian and Bandera hagiographer Duzhyi was not a professional historian. Archival documents and critical thinking were alien to him. He wrote and published a Bandera biography in two volumes, to confirm the nationalist interpretation of Bandera’s life. Although Duzhyi’s book about the Providnyk contained a good deal of valuable information, it was embedded in the genre of denial and apologetics. One would not learn from Duzhyi’s biography anything about the influence of antisemitism and fascism on Bandera’s thinking and acting, or about OUN-B collaboration with Nazi Germany, or the pogroms of July 1941. Similarly, one would not learn anything about the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the UPA, or the killing of Ukrainian and Russian civilians, although Duzhyi devoted a substantial part of his book to describing the UPA. Instead, one learns that only Bolsheviks and other foes called the OUN fascist, that Ukrainian nationalism is based on Shevchenko’s poetry, and that there was nothing wrong with the assassinations organized by the OUN in the 1930s, because they were only “acts of retribution.”[2193]

One aspect that made Duzhyi’s biography different from Mirchuk’s was the very extensive incorporation of such documents as Bandera’s brief autobiography, articles he wrote, and transcripts of interviews he gave. These documents were published in the diaspora after Mirchuk had finished his hagiography. Duzhyi regarded these documents as reliable sources and took everything in them for granted. Thus his biography, almost 500 pages long, is essentially an extension of Bandera’s thirteen-page autobiography. Duzhyi began each of the numerous short chapters of his book with a quotation from Bandera’s autobiography, or from his articles, or from pieces written by other OUN members. He then extended these quotations with his own contributions which, in terms of language and argument, did not differ greatly from the quoted documents.[2194]

A very popular Bandera biography, republished at least three times, including once by the Bandera museum in Dubliany, was written by the Lviv writer Halyna Hordasevych.[2195] She was not in the OUN but stated that if she had been ten years older she would have joined it and followed the Providnyk.[2196] In the introduction, Hordasevych wrote that she intended to introduce Bandera as a human being. She was motivated by the observation that everyone in Ukraine and many people in other former Soviet republics used the term “Banderites” in the sense of “enemy of the people” but knew little or nothing about the person. She claimed that, especially in eastern Ukraine, anyone who spoke Ukrainian was labeled as a Banderite. Making an analogy between Banderites, Petliurites (derived from Symon Petliura), and Mazepites (derived from the seventeenth-century Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa), she claimed that Ukrainians accused of treason were first called Mazepites, then Petliurites, and finally Banderites. This comparison had frequently appeared in the Soviet literature. In post-Soviet Ukraine its negative meaning was turned into an element of the heroic invention of tradition and became a common motif of various affirmative Bandera biographies.[2197]

In order to challenge the ideological notion of Banderites as traitors, and to present Bandera as a human being, Hordasevych studied a range of Soviet and diaspora publications about him. In her book, she signaled several times that she trusted neither the nationalist nor the Soviet historiographical genre, but she eventually arrived at the typical post-Soviet nationalist conclusion: “He was a man around whom myths have been created, which is however, a feature only of heroic personalities; therefore Stepan Bandera is the hero of Ukraine.”[2198] Like other post-Soviet biographers, she used Soviet propaganda to deny that Bandera collaborated with Germany and that the OUN-B and UPA were involved in ethnic and political violence. An analysis of her biography demonstrates how much of a symbol Bandera was in Soviet and post-Soviet discourses, and how difficult it was in post-Soviet Ukraine to write about the person and about the movement that the Providnyk represented.[2199]

Ievhen Perepichka, a far-right activist and the head of the Lviv KUN, wrote another monumental and popular Bandera biography titled The Phenomenon of Stepan Bandera.[2200] In addition to collecting documents about Bandera, Perepichka had, since the early 1990s, organized various ultranationalist and neo-fascist manifestations and celebrations, frequently with the participation of paramilitary groups.[2201] Like Duzhyi and Hordasevych, Perepichka did not have any historical training, did not care about academic standards, and extensively quoted forged documents published in diaspora publications.[2202] Given Perepichka’s convictions and methods, it is not surprising that he regarded Bandera as

a legendary person, what a pride, the symbol of the Ukrainian nation. The whole epoch of the national-liberating struggle and all the fighters for the liberation of Ukraine were named after him. The Muscovite occupiers called all Ukrainians Banderites and also the patriots from other nations who fought for the liberation of their homelands: Lithuanian Banderites, Latvian Banderites, Kazakh Banderites, Estonian Banderites, Kyrgyzstani Banderites.[2203]

Perepichka began his Bandera biography with the Bandera family tree and finished it with that of his own family.[2204] Between the two, Perepichka described all the possible deeds that the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism classifies as the “suffering of the Ukrainian nation,” including the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-1933. He reduced the Second World War to the killing of Ukrainians mainly by Soviet and German forces and, like Mirchuk and Duzhyi, did not analyze or even mention the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA during and after the Second World War.[2205] The only Jews who appear in Perepichka’s biography are those who were rescued by Ukrainians.[2206] Moreover, OUN members and UPA insurgents, not Jewish, Polish, or Ukrainian civilians, appear to have been the main victims of the atrocities committed by the German and Soviet occupiers of Ukraine. Bandera appears to be the symbol of Ukrainian suffering in general.

Ihor Tsar wrote a short but very popular Bandera biography, with the unambiguous title, What We Love Bandera For. He argued that it was God who sent Bandera to Ukrainians:

Stepan Bandera is the hero of the twentieth century, a legendary person, the most prominent person in Ukrainian history. The time came to raise his name in the whole free Ukraine in order to enable every living soul to thank God that He sent us, in the darkest times of the history of mankind, such a bright personality. In particular, Bandera rescued the honor of Ukraine in the twentieth century because he could motivate the nation to a self-sacrificing struggle against Stalinist communism, fascism, and chauvinism. … Bandera elevated the Ukrainian nationalism of love to the highest willingness to make sacrifices. His slogan was “God and Ukraine!” We love Bandera for that.[2207]

Bandera and Academia

In the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, no professional historian has written a critical biography of Bandera; but a number of historians, such as Omer Bartov, Karel Berkhoff, John-Paul Himka, Frank Golczewski, Grzegorz Motyka, and Dieter Pohl, were investigating such related subjects as the Second World War and the Holocaust in Ukraine, Soviet politics in Ukraine during and after the Second World War, and the OUN and UPA. The publications of these historians had almost no impact on post-Soviet historians who rather published material that stimulated nationalist activists and politicians to erect Bandera monuments and to perform various OUN and UPA commemorations. Similarly to the diaspora historians before them, the post-Soviet historians collected some important empirical data but applied nationalist interpretations and frequently did not pay much attention to academic standards.[2208]

The most prolific Bandera biographer has been Mykola Posivnych. As far as 2012, Posivnych had edited three volumes, including excerpts from memoirs and documents about Bandera, republished the indictment from the Warsaw trial in 1935 in Ukrainian, and published a short Bandera biography.[2209] Posivnych’s three volumes consist partially of the same excerpts from the memoirs of OUN members and various OUN documents as those compiled by other writers. The introduction to the three volumes was written by OUN-B member and diaspora historian Volodymyr Kosyk who, in the 1950s, had been the ZCh OUN liaison to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan and Franco’s Spain. The three volumes include a biographical text about Bandera’s youth, written by Posivnych in a narrative that does not differ greatly from Kosyk’s or Mirchuk’s, but which contains much more valuable empirical data.[2210]

In his three volumes, Posivnych did not comment on the republished extracts of memoirs and added only brief biographical comments about their authors. Because all of them were written by OUN members, in particular OUN-B, this kind of editing is problematic, or even inadmissible. The editor republished, for example, an article about Bandera at the Lviv trial, written by Stsibors’kyi in 1936, in which he prizes Bandera’s “heroic” behavior. In the biographical note for Stsibors’kyi’, however, Posivnych did not mention that, in a letter to Mel’nyk, which the editor even republished in the same volume, Bandera called Stsibors’kyi a “treacherous Bolshevik agent” who was living with a “suspicious Moscow Jewish woman” or that Stsibors’kyi was killed on 30 August 1941, in all probability by the OUN-B, on Bandera’s order. Similarly, Posivnych did not comment on another republished document, Bandera’s letter to Mel’nyk from September 1940, which contains several nationalist and antisemitic passages. Instead of publishing original archival documents, which are accessible in Ukrainian achieves, Posivnych reprinted some documents from diaspora publications without paying attention to the fact that OUN émigrés had forged and manipulated some documents.[2211] In general, Posivnych’s volumes contain extracts from memoirs and documents that are significant for the understanding of Bandera, but their unprofessional editing suggests that they have a commemorative rather than a scholarly character. In addition to popularizing important sources, they also propagate the Bandera cult.[2212]

In his short biography Stepan Bandera—A Life Devoted to Freedom, Posivnych indicated the sources on which he relied, and applied some other academic standards, but he wrote it in a narrative, which resembles the narratives that structure Mirchuk’s, Duzhyi’s, Hordasevych’s, and Perepichka’s Bandera biographies. Instead of analyzing all aspects of Bandera’s life, his political activities, or the OUN’s policies, Posivnych described only those features that caused Bandera and the OUN to appear as heroic and admirable elements of the Ukrainian past, and thus valuable elements of the Ukrainian identity. Describing the OUN before the Second World War, he justified the crimes committed by the OUN in the early 1930s as having been decided upon by the OUN court.[2213] Describing the trials in Warsaw and Lviv, he wrote that the OUN used the greeting “Glory to Ukraine!” but did not point out that OUN members used it as part of a fascist salute. The omission might be the result of reliance on diaspora publications that falsified the records, or it might have been a conscious decision to deny the actual meaning of the salute.[2214] Similarly, when describing the role of the OUN-B and UPA during the Second World War, Posivnych omitted the fact that they were involved in numerous atrocities.[2215]

Many books on the subject of Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA have been published since 2000 by the OUN-founded TsDVR. After the election of Viktor Iushchenko to the presidency of Ukraine in 2005, the Ukrainian government began to promote the TsDVR’s nationalist and selective approach to history as part of the official state history. To establish a coherent national version of Ukrainian history, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (Ukraїns’kyi instytut natsional’noї pam”iati, UINP) was established in 2006 in Kiev, and Ihor Iukhnovs’kyi, a physicist and a sympathizer with the radical right SNPU, became its director. In 2007, the director of the TsDVR, Volodymyr V”iatrovych, became the representative of the UINP in the Lviv oblast. From 2008 until the end of Iushchenko’s tenure in power in early 2010, V”iatrovych worked in Kiev, first for the UINP and then as director of the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukraїny, SBU), the successor of the KGB. The SBU played a major role in determining on which documents the UINP should base its nationalist version of Ukrainian history and how this history should be written. From the outset, the UINP concentrated on promoting two ideologically interrelated aspects of Ukrainian history, which were intended to unite Ukrainians through victimization and heroization. The first was the promotion of the famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933 as an act of genocide against Ukrainians, in the execution of which many Jews were involved as perpetrators. The second was the extolment of the OUN and UPA and the denial of their atrocities, as practiced before by the Ukrainian diaspora and the TsDVR.[2216]

Unsurprisingly, the UINP with its nationalist director Iukhnovs’kyi and the “patriotic” historian V”iatrovych had a great impact on the politics of memory in Ukraine. On 16 May 2007, at the urging of the UINP, Iushchenko ordered the organization of a series of ceremonies, honoring Iaroslav and Iaroslava Stets’ko. On 12 September 2007, he designated Shukhevych as a Hero of Ukraine, and on 20 January 2010, shortly before the end of his term in office, he did the same with Bandera. The latter designation unleashed a debate about the OUN-UPA, Ukrainian nationalism, and Bandera’s role in Ukrainian history.[2217]

The nationalist interpretation of history practiced at the TsDVR was one of the main reasons why Iushchenko promoted and relied on this institution. This kind of history allowed the Second World War to be dealt with, without paying any attention to the Ukrainian involvement in the Holocaust and other atrocities, which destabilized the process of creating a national Ukrainian collective identity. In 2006 V”iatrovych, at that time the director of the TsDVR, published a short book, The Attitude of the OUN to the Jews, which allows us to understand how nationalist post-Soviet historians deal with the genocide of the Jews. V”iatrovych wrote the monograph to demonstrate that the OUN was not hostile to Jews, did not murder them, and rescued a significant number.[2218] John-Paul Himka and Taras Kurylo commented on V’’iatrovych’s method of presenting history:

V”iatrovych manages to exonerate the OUN of charges of antisemitism and complicity in the Holocaust only by employing a series of highly dubious procedures: rejecting sources that compromise the OUN, accepting uncritically censored sources from émigré OUN circles, failing to recognize antisemitism in OUN texts, limiting the source base to official OUN proclamations and decisions, excluding Jewish memoirs, refusing to consider contextual and comparative factors, failing to consult German document collections, and ignoring the mass of historical monographs on his subject written in the English and German languages.[2219]

The result of applying this method confirmed the expectation that the OUN was not hostile to Jews. In the entire book V”iatrovych introduced only one critical publication on antisemitism in the OUN, written by Berkhoff and Carynnyk, but dismissed it with the claim that it reminded him of Soviet publications.[2220] Similarly, V”iatrovych argued that the OUN member and diaspora historian Taras Hunchak delivered the best research on the Jews and Ukrainian nationalism and repeated after him that the stereotype of “Judeo-Bolshevism” was not a stereotype but reality.[2221] Referring to Hrytsak’s article “Ukrainians in Anti-Jewish Actions in the Time of the Second World War,” V”iatrovych claimed that the document from the Third Extraordinary Great Assembly in August 1943, in which the OUN-B distanced itself from anti-Jewish violence, was a falsification, because it would verify the “myth about the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in anti-Jewish actions in 1941–1943.”[2222] A document from July 1941, according to which OUN-B member Lenkavs’kyi stated that “regarding the Jews we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction,” was referred to by V”iatrovych as a Soviet “falsification with the purpose of provocation.”[2223] He explicitly denied the involvement of the OUN-B in the pogroms of July 1941 and denied the killing of Jews by the UPA.[2224] In order to equate the killing of a few dozen OUN members with the killing of millions of Jews, the director of the TsDVR published, next to pictures of a mass grave containing the bodies of Jews, a picture of a row of young men who, according to the caption, were OUN members shot by the Germans.[2225] Furthermore, V”iatrovych introduced the OUN and UPA as rescuers of Jews. He described the collective farms at which the UPA forced Jews to work but omitted the fact that the OUN and UPA liquidated the Jews working on these farms. Similarly, he omitted to point out that the SB of the OUN-B killed Jewish doctors and nurses who worked in the UPA. In writing about the few Jews who survived the UPA, he mentioned the fictitious biography of Stella Krentsbakh published by Mirchuk in 1957. Relying on the memoirs of Roman Shukhevych’s wife Natalia Shukhevych, which were written by Vasyl’ Kuk and Iurii Shukhevych, V”iatrovych wrote that she rescued a Jewish girl in 1942–1943, without mentioning Shukhevych’s involvement in mass violence, and without clarifying the circumstances in which his wife allegedly rescued the girl.[2226]

No less effective than V”iatrovych was the poet Moisei Fishbein who, like V”iatrovych, ignored research on the OUN, UPA, and the Holocaust in Ukraine and who, with the support of Iushchenko’s government, promoted a similar interpretation of relations between Jews and Ukrainian nationalists to that of V’’iatrovych. At the Conference on Ukrainian Subjects at the University of Illinois in 2009, Fishbein mentioned the names of a few Jews who allegedly survived in the UPA, and tried to persuade the audience that Ukrainian nationalists were not hostile to Jews during the Second World War:

The claim that “the UPA engaged in anti-Jewish actions” is a provocation engineered by Moscow. It is a provocation. It is a lie that the UPA destroyed Jews. Tell me: how could the UPA have destroyed Jews, when Jews were serving members of the UPA? I knew a Jew who served in the UPA. I also knew Dr. Abraham Shtertser, who settled in Israel after the war. There was Samuel Noiman whose [UPA] codename was Maksymovych. There was Shai Varma (codename Skrypal/Violinist). There was Roman Vynnytsky whose codename was Sam.

There was another distinguished figure in the UPA, a woman by the name of Stella Krenzbach, who later wrote her memoirs. She was born in Bolekhiv in the Lviv region. She was the daughter of a rabbi, she was a Zionist, and in Bolekhiv she was friends with Olia, the daughter of a [Ukrainian] Greek-Catholic priest. In 1939 Stella Krenzbach graduated from Lviv University’s Faculty of Philosophy. From 1943 she served in the UPA as a nurse and intelligence agent. In the spring of 1945 she was captured by the NKVD while meeting a courier in Rozhniativ. She was imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death. Later, this Jewish woman was sprung from prison by UPA soldiers. In the summer of 1945 she crossed into the Carpathian Mountains together with a group of Ukrainian insurgents, and on 1 October 1946 she reached the British Zone of Occupation in Austria. Eventually, she reached Israel. In her memoirs, Stella Krenzbach writes: “I attribute the fact that I am alive today and devoting all the strength of my thirty-eight years to a free Israel, only to God and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. I became a member of the heroic UPA on 7 November 1943. In our group I counted twelve Jews, eight of whom were doctors.”[2227]

Ukrainian historians who have denied or diminished the war crimes of the OUN and UPA, and their involvement in the Holocaust, have been supported by two Russian historians, Alexander Gogun and Kirill Aleksandrov. These historians found a parallel with Bandera and the OUN-UPA, in Vlasov and the ROA. Like Bandera, Vlasov collaborated with Nazi Germany. He was executed by the Soviet regime in 1946. As in the case of Bandera, Soviet propaganda described Vlasov as a “traitor” and “enemy of the Soviet people” and like Bandera, he was rehabilitated by the post-Soviet intellectuals and presented as a democrat. Gogun stated, for example, in an article about the ROA: “The Vlasov movement was a democratic movement [Vlasovskoe dvizhenie bylo dvizheniem demokraticheskim].” In order to prove this, relying on Aleksandrov’s publication, Gogun detected in the ROA a few non-Russian soldiers, in particular three alleged Jews.[2228] In another article, “Jews in the Struggle for an Independent Ukraine,” co-authored with Oleksandr Vovk, Gogun applied a similar method to the UPA. The authors omitted the anti-Jewish violence of the OUN and UPA and gave the impression that Jews served and fought willingly in the UPA “for an independent Ukraine—against Hitler and Stalin.”[2229] In an article about Bandera, Alexandrov argued that, as a “Muscovite historian,” he could not criticize Bandera and the OUN-UPA because their nature was distorted by Soviet stereotypes. He argued that a critical investigation of Bandera and his movement was less important than the refutation of Soviet myths. Then, through the negation of the Soviet myths, he reintroduced Bandera as a hero who deserved to be honored like Vlasov.[2230]

Iurii Mykhal’chyshyn, political scientist and official ideologist of the Svoboda Party, applied a rather different although no less problematical approach to the history of the OUN-UPA and Ukrainian nationalism. He did not deny the fascism of the OUN or the participation of the OUN-UPA in atrocities, nor did he claim that the UPA rescued Jews or that Jews patriotically fought for the Ukrainian state. The Svoboda ideologist approved of the OUN-UPA atrocities and OUN fascism and proudly insisted that the Holocaust was “a bright episode in European civilization.”[2231] After defending his PhD (kandydat nauk) thesis entitled “Transformation of a Political Movement into a Massive Political Party of a New Type: The Case of NSDAP and PNF (Comparative Analysis)” at the Department of Political Science at Ivan Franko University, Mykhal’chyshyn published a collection of essays on fascist ideology called Vatra 1.0.[2232] He brought together the programs of the National Fascist Party of Italy and of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, and texts by Italian, German, and Ukrainian ideologists, such as Mykola Stsibors’kyi, Iarsolav Stets’ko, Josef Goebbels, Ernst Röhm, and Alfred Rosenberg. On the website of the journal Vatra: National—Revolutionary Journal, Mykhal’chyshyn declared: “Our banner carriers and heroes [are] Ievhen Konvalets’, … Stepan Bandera, and Roman Shukhevych, Horst Wessel and Walther Stennes, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera and Léon Degrelle, Corneliu Codreanu and Oswald Mosley, and thousands of other comrades.”[2233] Mykhal’chyshyn’s approach to Ukrainian history confused many patriotic and “liberal” historians and intellectuals who were accustomed to deny the fascist tendencies of the OUN and atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA, or who understood Ukrainian nationalism to be a “national liberation movement.”[2234]

Resurrection in Dubliany

During the academic year 1930–1931 and from the beginning of the next academic year until February 1932, Bandera lived in Dubliany, a town of about 10,000 people, very close to Lviv.[2235] Sixty years later, this fact became extremely important to the citizens of this suburb of Lviv, in particular to the administration of the Lviv State Agrarian University (L’vivs’kyi natsional’nyi ahrarnyi universytet, LNAU). In 1993 a memorial plaque was unveiled at the student residence where Bandera lived for a short period.[2236] Five years later, Petro Hots’, a Lviv librarian and nationalist poet, looking for a grant for the publication of his new collection of poems The High Castle (Vysokyi zamok), gave a copy of his manuscript to Volodymyr Snityns’kyi, the new director of the LNAU, a “Ukrainian patriot and a quite active, progressive person.” Snityns’kyi grew up in the “nationally conscious village” of Kozivka where a Bandera bust had been unveiled in 1992.[2237] In The High Castle the director of the LNAU discovered the poem “Stepan Bandera in Dubliany.” It began with the phrases: “A student like all the rest, it seems: tempered in the village, with a village disposition … [Student, zdaietsia, iak i vsi: Selians’kyi hart, selians’ka vdacha …].” The poem inspired Snityns’kyi to return Bandera’s spirit to Dubliany. Snityns’kyi decided to set up a Bandera museum at the LNUA and asked Hots’ to take the position of the director of this institution. He also set about erecting a Bandera monument in Dubliany on the campus of the LNAU.[2238]

Hots’ needed time to consider the offer because he was not a historian but a poet who had studied library science and philology and had worked for years as a librarian. He specialized in Ukrainian romantic literature and poetry and not in nationalism, fascism, antisemitism, or ethnic violence. Nevertheless, this did not prevent him from accepting the proposal and becoming director of the museum, not least because, as he wrote, “already in the third grade I was called a Banderite and nationalist.”[2239] He soon became involved in the subject of Bandera, although quite differently from the way a critical historian or museologist would have done. In 2003 Hots’ published a small collection of poems devoted to the Providnyk, titled Stepan’s Birthday.[2240]

The museum was opened on 4 January 1999 and became the Stepan Bandera Museum: Centre of National-Patriotic Education (Muzei Stepana Bandery: Tsentr natsional’no-patryiotychnoho vykhovannia). During the opening ceremony, the museum was blessed by a priest from the Greek Catholic Church and one from the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. On the same day, the two priests also blessed an oblong black granite stone, which bore the inscription: “At this Place the Stepan Bandera Monument Will Be Erected.” The stone was located in front of the old building of the LNAU, in the middle of a square where a monument to Lenin had stood. The opening ceremony of the museum and the blessing of the stone were attended by such personalities as Slava Stets’ko, Iurii Shukhevych, Vasyl’ Kuk, and Ivan Hel’, and by a group of UPA veterans with Bandera banners and blue-and-yellow and red-and-black flags.[2241]

The actual monument was not unveiled until 2002. It was a statue about three and a half meters (eleven feet) high, prepared by the sculptor Iaroslav Loza, his son Volodymyr, and the architects Mykola Shpak and Volodymyr Bliusiuk. The statue showed Bandera wearing a suit and an unbuttoned knee-length coat. He was shown as a student in the early 1930s but in the pose of a thinker or romantic poet. His head and right leg were turned to the right, but his torso and left leg remained straight. He did not appear to be moving in the direction in which he was looking. His right hand was on his heart and he was holding a book in his left. The symbolism of the gesture suggested love for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people and a devotion to knowledge and science.[2242]

At the unveiling on 5 October 2002, a number of nationalist activists appeared again in Dubliany. The monument was blessed by Greek Catholic and Orthodox priests. “It is an honor for us to unveil this monument at our academy where Stepan Bandera once studied,” Snityns’kyi stated in his speech and continued:

Not only the heroic UPA fighters who opposed the most powerful totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the Nazi and communist ones, were named after him but also all fighters for the independence of Ukraine in the following generations. Therefore the memory of him obliges us to self-sacrificing work in the name of the development of our state.[2243]

Iurii Shukhevych stressed in his speech that, although Bandera had spent much time in Polish and German prisons, he had remained the spiritual leader of the UPA. He encouraged the gathering to remain faithful to Bandera’s principles. Other prominent speakers included the leader of the Brotherhood of OUN-UPA Fighters, Oles’ Humeniuk; the head of the Lviv KUN organization, Mykhailo Vovk; the head of the Lviv city council, Liubomyr Buniak; Bandera’s relatives, Myroslava Shtumf and Zenovii Davydiuk, and a number of deputies, among them the radical right and populist politician Oleh Tiahnybok.[2244] The artistic part of the celebration was performed by the vocal group Sokil, which recited the poem “Stepan Bandera” by Petro Hots’. The poem informed the celebrants that Bandera “was given to us by heaven as a symbol.”[2245] Some students were dressed in folk costumes and carried flowers to the monument. Other students lined the way to the monument. UPA veterans appeared at the ceremony in uniform, carrying blue-and-yellow and red-and-black flags, or Bandera banners.[2246]

The Bandera museum opened in Dubliany in 1999 was located in two rooms in the new building of the LNAU. One room was about twelve square meters (130 square feet), the other about thirty square meters (323 square feet). According to Snityns’kyi the fundamental idea of the museum was the “personalization of [Ukrainian] history” by means of the Ukrainian Providnyk Stepan Bandera.[2247] Hots’, the director and sole employee of the museum, tried to accomplish this task by

 

Fig. 54. Stepan Bandera Museum:

Centre of National-Patriotic Education in the LNAU in Dubliany.

 

embedding Bandera’s biography in a narrative of Ukrainian history that was reduced to the “national-revolutionary liberation struggle for an independent Ukraine.” This history was presented in the museum in twenty-four display cases, each of which contained pictures with a brief description. The majority of the pictures were photocopies of photographs printed in diaspora publications by OUN activists such as Mirchuk. The exhibition was divided into four parts: Bandera’s youth and family, the student period, the OUN and UPA, and the assassination and rebirth. Each part was embedded in a narrative that characterized the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian nationalists as victims, with the help of the history of the Bandera family. Parts of the exhibition paid special attention to the nationalists who studied in Dubliany. A descriptive analysis of the exhibition allows us to see how those who constructed it understood Bandera and intended to represent him (Fig. 54).

The first display case was devoted to Bandera’s father Andrii. It depicted him as a person who lived a pious and spiritual life, struggled for Ukraine, helped shape the Providnyk, and died for Ukraine when he was executed by the Soviets in July 1941. It exhibited pictures of objects relating to Andrii Bandera, such as the church in which he served, and photocopies of archival documents reprinted in diaspora publications. The next display case held pictures of Bandera’s three sisters and three brothers. Their pictures were located around one of the Providnyk. A further display case bore the inscription “The Tragic Fate of the Family” and exhibited pictures of Bandera’s sisters and other relatives as well. The “tragic fate of the family” was also an essential component of guided tours through the museum. These were conducted by the director, Hots’, who retired in 2007, and by his successor, Oksana Horda, a professor of Ukrainian studies at the LUAN. Like the OUN émigrés and post-Soviet nationalist historians on whom they based their knowledge, Hots’ and Horda emphasized the suffering of the Bandera family in order to portray Ukrainians, and in particular Ukrainian nationalists, as victims of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. A display case titled “In the Home Village” contained pictures of the graves of Bandera’s sister and mother, OUN and UPA members from Staryi Uhryniv, a village church, and Bandera among young Ukrainians in Staryi Uhryniv. Another one titled “Home Nest” indicated that, despite the “tragic fate,” the Bandera family did not pass into oblivion. It held pictures of the first and third Bandera monuments in Staryi Uhryniv, a piece of the destroyed first monument, the old and rebuilt building of the Bandera museum in Staryi Uhryniv, a memorial plaque in the house of Bandera’s birth, a well close to the house of Bandera’s family in Staryi Uhryniv, and a rebuilt chapel close to the building.[2248]

The section of the exhibition relating to Bandera’s education indicated that, after Ukraine became independent, the spirit of the Providnyk returned to his former educational institutions. A picture of the high school in Stryi attended by Bandera in the 1920s showed a monument to the Providnyk in front of the building. Other pictures showed Bandera’s fellow-pupils who became OUN members, such as Stepan Lenkavs’kyi, Zenon Kossak, and Stepan Okhrymovych. Another display case showed the student residence where Bandera lived in Lviv, the Polytechnic building in Lviv, and Bandera’s course record books. Two further display cases, devoted to his studies in Lviv and Dubliany, showed various student residences and local houses in which Bandera lived or ate, the Bandera monument at the campus of the LNAU, and also Iosyf Tushnyts’kyi, a local resident who claimed to remember the legendary nationalist student. The director placed his poem “Stepan Bandera in Dubliany” among the pictures. All in all, this part of the exhibition made it clear that the places that were once touched by Bandera’s foot were to remain special. Students were to be made aware that the young Providnyk and “freedom fighter” studied, lived, or dined in them.

The part of the exhibition devoted to the revolutionary struggle of the OUN began with a display case titled “Those Who Sacrificed Their Lives for Ukraine.” It included Ol’ha Basarab, the first UVO member who became a famous martyr; Mykola Lemyk, who assassinated the secretary of the Soviet consulate; Hryhorii Matseiko, Pieracki’s assassin, and other OUN martyrs and heroes. A further display case introduced the arrest of Bandera in 1934 and the trials in Warsaw and Lviv. It displayed a picture of the student residence where Bandera was arrested, copies of documents, and a picture of Lviv University, which it erroneously described as the “building of the district court in which many Ukrainian nationalists were sentenced.” A visitor interested in learning why Bandera was arrested and sentenced or what happened during the trials in Warsaw and Lviv did not find any such information in the exhibition.

The display case titled “The Renewal of the Ukrainian State” bore in the middle an amended version of the “Act of the Renewal of the Ukrainian State of 30 June 1941.” The exhibited version omitted the phrase about close collaboration with “National Socialist Great Germany, which under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe.”[2249] Pictures of such OUN members as Stets’ko, Lebed’, Shukhevych, Klymiv, and Rebet surrounded the fabricated text. The display case devoted to the OUN task forces who marched through Ukraine after the German attack on the Soviet Union showed pictures of some members of these units, such as Klymyshyn and Stakhiv. Like the previous case, it did not contain any information about the fascistization of the OUN, its collaboration with Nazi Germany, its involvement in the pogroms of July 1941, or its attempts to establish a fascist state that the OUN-B wanted to “cleanse” of non-Ukrainians.

As in the London museum, the UPA occupied an important place in the Dubliany museum, although Bandera never led or even joined this army, was only its spiritual leader, and had a rather marginal impact on its policies. In the middle of one display case devoted to the nationalist insurgents, the creator of the museum placed the portrait of UPA partisan Danylo Kuz’mins’kyi, a graduate of the Lviv Polytechnic and its branch in Dubliany. The portrait was surrounded by pictures of other UPA partisans, with very brief descriptions containing names, pseudonyms, and dates and places of birth. Another display case introduced the medical service of the UPA. It presented a number of portraits of mainly female UPA partisans who tended the wounded partisans, and a picture of a priest behind sickbeds. The picture was described as a UPA hospital. The inscriptions informed visitors how many years a particular UPA member spent in Soviet prisons or Gulag for serving in the UPA. A further display case exhibited UPA propaganda. It showed portraits of propaganda officers such as Petro Fedun, photocopies of propaganda documents, the text of the oath of a UPA partisan, and a picture of a partisan taking an oath in 1944. The last UPA display case introduced the UPA leaders, with Kliachkivs’kyi and Shukhevych in the center. The ethnic and political violence conducted by the UPA under the leadership of Kliachkivs’kyi and Shukhevych was not included in the exhibition. Unlike the OUN and UPA atrocities, the NKVD crimes were not omitted. On the contrary, this part of the exhibition contained quite a quantity of text and explained extensively how the Soviet police mistreated and killed Ukrainian civilians and destroyed the nationalist underground. The exhibition interrelated these atrocities with the assassination of Bandera, which symbolized the suffering of Ukraine and the most tragic moment in its history.

The last part of the exhibition portrayed Bandera’s life in exile, his funeral, and his resurrection in independent Ukraine. One display case showed pictures of Bandera with journalists, and his journalist identification cards. Another featured pictures that presented Bandera as a father who loved his wife and children, a man who liked to joke with friends, and a devoted politician who never ceased working on the
 

Ukrainian revolution. The display case devoted to the assassination and funeral presented pictures of the large cross on Bandera’s grave in Munich, and a picture of the Providnyk’s death mask. The last two display cases familiarized visitors with recent history, in particular Bandera’s post-Soviet rebirth. One of them contained a poem by Hots’, dedicated to the Providnyk, titled “This Man Was an Entire Era.” The poem was surrounded by pictures of Bandera monuments in Stryi, Staryi Uhryniv, Boryslav, and several other western Ukrainian locations.

The narrative of the exhibition suggested that Bandera had been resurrected in Ukraine because he led the “national liberation struggle,” fell in the struggle for Ukraine’s independence, and became the symbol of an entire epoch of heroes and martyrs. The selectiveness of the exhibition narrative, in particular the omission of the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA, was necessary to portray Bandera and the “Bandera generation” as brave and tragic heroes. Bandera’s family played an important part in the exhibition because many of its members suffered at the hands of the Soviet and Nazi regimes. The family history strengthened the narrative of victimization and enabled the museum visitors to identify with the OUN and UPA as victims of the two regimes.

In addition to the mounted display cases, the museum also exhibited various objects in twelve standing display cases, and on a table and a chair located in the smaller room, which was also the office of the museum director. A considerable number of the exhibited objects were nationalist publications about Bandera and the OUN and UPA, which had appeared in the diaspora or in Ukraine after 1991. Some of them lay open in the display cases and showed photographs of Shelepin and Stashyns’kyi and the order that Stashyns’kyi received from Shelepin to murder Bandera. Other items included various devotional objects, such as posters, stamps, plates, postcards, and calendars with pictures of Bandera monuments, museums, and memorial plaques. A small bust, a videotape of Oles’ Ianchuk’s film Assassination: An Autumn Murder in Munich, and a UPA uniform were another significant part of the exhibition. Issues of the newspaper News from the Stepan Bandera Museum in Dubliany, a portrait of the LNAU rector Snityns’kyi, pictures of some famous visitors, newspaper articles about Bandera and his family, pictures of diaspora commemorations at Bandera’s grave, diaspora journals such as Vyzvol’nyi shliakh, brochures of such neo-fascist organizations as the “social-nationalist organization” Patriot Ukraïny, and pictures and figures of saints were located among the diaspora publications or between the display cases.

The exhibits were collected in order to refute the Soviet image of Bandera and to invent a contradictory one, which however, despite its positive nature, very much resembled the Soviet version. A closer look at the exhibition, the arrangement of exhibits, and the director’s narrative suggest that some of the items such as soil, a symbol of ethnic nationalism, were regarded as particularly important. The soil—from Staryi Uhryniv, the birthplace of the Providnyk—was exhibited in a small bowl, which stands among pictures of Bandera’s blood-stained suit, and a tape with his voice. Other very significant objects were the pictures of Bandera’s grandson Stephen (Stepan) who, after 1991, became a kind of reincarnated Providnyk and a new star of Ukrainian nationalism. He was frequently invited as an honored guest to monument unveilings and museum openings, and other nationalist celebrations.