The post-Soviet Bandera and OUN-UPA commemorations excited thousands of Ukrainian nationalists and enabled thousands or possibly even millions of Ukrainian patriots to believe in the greatness of the Providnyk and the “liberation movement.” However, they were perceived very differently by people whose relatives or acquaintances had been persecuted or murdered by OUN members and UPA partisans. One such person was Bela Feld. She emigrated in 1935 from the Polish town of Brzezany to Palestine. Bela’s immediate family was killed during the Second World War. In 1997 she visited the town of her youth. During this visit, she asked inhabitants of the now homogenously Ukrainian town of Berezhany for one of her childhood friends, Halyna Dydyk. At the time of her visit, the inhabitants were celebrating the anniversary of the establishment of the Ukrainian state, “dressed in their colorful peasant folk costumes.” After asking for her childhood friend, Bela was immediately urged by the celebrants to visit the grave of her friend, who, during her struggle for a Ukrainian state, had become a “national hero.” Hearing this and seeing the exited crowd of celebrants around her, Bela felt “like running away.” She did not want to go to the grave and was “emotionally exhausted.” Furthermore, she did not know how to behave, because she knew from survivors who had arrived in Israel after the war that “the Bandera people, the members of the Ukrainian underground, were the worst.” She also “remembered Halyna the way she was before the war, before all that. And suddenly she turned into a hero and a martyr, associated with that name, Bandera. I knew that something was wrong, ‘s’iz nisht git.’” Then she politely refused the invitation.[2312]

The Providnyk in Festivals, Pubs, Novels, and the Cinema

In post-Soviet Ukraine, the Bandera cult took even more eccentric shapes than in the diaspora. It was disseminated by the previously described historians, politicians, veterans, and nationalist activists, and in addition, by writers, film directors, journalists, organizers of bicycle trips, businessmen who opened UPA pubs, and various musical groups that sang at the alternative music festival Bandershtat, organized by the far-right National Alliance (Natsional’nyi Al’ians). Also, newspapers such as Banderivets’, published by the ultranationalist paramilitary Stepan Bandera Trident Organization from Drohobych, propagated the Bandera cult in various ways.[2313]