The largest monument to the victims of the OUN-UPA was unveiled in Luhans’k on 8 May 2010 by the Party of Regions, whose candidate Viktor Ianukovych had won the presidential elections in early 2010, succeeding Iushchenko. The Party of Regions
was a negative mirror image of Iushchenko’s Our Ukraine. The Luhans’k monument was erected not far from the Soviet memorial of the Young Guard, a Second World War underground resistance group, who after the war became an important political myth in the Soviet Union. The monument to the victims of the OUN-UPA depicted a mother tied to something resembling a tree. Her face expressed death or unconsciousness. A man on his knees in front of her seemed to protect her and a child looking up at her face. The hands of the man were tied with a rope. The inscription beneath the figures read, “The truth should not be forgotten.” A black granite plaque held the inscription “To the citizens of Luhans’k who were killed by nationalist persecutors from the OUN-UPA 1943–1956” and displayed several names beneath it (Fig. 65).[2337]

The process of erecting monuments devoted to the victims of the OUN-UPA by various communist groups, veterans of the Red Army, and the Party of Regions was related to the rehabilitation of figures such as Stalin. On 5 May 2010, three days before the opening of the monument in Luhans’k, the first Stalin monument to be erected since 1953 was unveiled in the eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia. The 2.5-meter-high (eight-foot) monument showed Stalin from the waist up on a granite block. It was located near the building with the office of the regional branch of the KPU. During the ceremony, Soviet veterans wore uniforms with medals and waved the red flag with hammer and sickle. The unveiling ceremony was picketed by a group of protesters dressed in traditional Ukrainian clothes. Some of them carried Ukrainian nationalist symbols or posters with inscriptions such as “Stalin killed my youth.” On 28 December 2010, the head of the bust was removed and on 31 December the remainder of the Stalin bust was demolished.[2338]

Kresowiacy, Polish Martyrology, and Bandera

Another remarkable discourse about Bandera and the OUN-UPA began a few years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Poland. It was initiated by the community of kresowiacy, composed of people resettled after the Second World War from the former Polish eastern territories, including survivors of the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, and various Polish nationalist activists. Although not all members of the kresowiacy community were vindictive nationalists, the community as a whole invented a victimized narrative of their own past, in which Polish-Ukrainian relations, the Second World War, and the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Volhynia and eastern Galicia were embedded in Polish martyrology. The discourse concentrated on the suffering of Poles, denied the discriminatory policies against the Ukrainians in the Second Polish Republic, and instrumentalized the suffering of the Polish survivors in a way that was not free of a desire for vengeance.

The nature of the kresowiacy community was also determined by two other factors. The first was that the political situation between 1945 and 1990 did not allow the survivors of the ethnic cleansing to come to terms with the traumatic past and to openly mourn the loss of their relatives. The second factor consisted of the generally uncritical, multipatriotic, and multinationalist politics of reconciliation between Poland and Ukraine after 1990. This multipatriotic approach acknowledged the perpetrators on both sides as patriotic soldiers, freedom fighters, or even national heroes, and it did not pay much attention to the victims of the “national heroes.”

Characterizing the kresowiacy community, one should also differentiate between the nationalist instrumentalization of history, conducted by the community activists, and the empirical research conducted by historians associated with the community. Historians such as Ewa Siemaszko and Władysław Siemaszko collected a vast number of survivor testimonies, which are a very important source for the study of the ethnic cleansing conducted against the Poles in 1943‒1944. The testimonies were frequently instrumentalized by other kresowiacy historians, who presented the ethnic cleansing as genocide (ludobójstwo), thereby competing in suffering with other genocides, in particular the Holocaust and the crimes of the Soviet regime. For example, Aleksander Korman described 362 “methods of physical torture, and also of psychological ones applied by the terrorists from the OUN-UPA and other Ukrainian chauvinists … against Poles” and pointed out that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentioned only fifty NKVD torture methods.[2339] Similarly, the kresowiacy community regarded the investigation of Polish crimes against the Ukrainian population as a distortion and falsification of history and accused historians who investigated them, of carrying out a “top-secret instruction” from the OUN to distort the history of the ethnic cleansing against Poles.[2340] No less problematic were the numerous mistakes or deliberate falsifications in the publications of this community. For example, the cover of a photograph album that documents the UPA murders of Poles shows a picture of the corpses of four children bound to a tree. The photograph, however, did not depict OUN-UPA victims but showed children killed in 1923 by a mentally ill mother.[2341]

In 1999 in Wrocław, the kresowiacy community erected a memorial—the silhouette of a crucified Jesus, cut into two massive slabs of stone. The front of the monument bore a plaque with the inscription: “To the Polish citizens murdered in the south-eastern border territories in 1939–1947 by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).” A second plaque fixed to the monument informed viewers that the monument held earth from 2,000 mass graves. A third one honored the Ukrainians who gave shelter to Poles (Fig. 66).[2342] In addition to the one in Wrocław, the kresowiacy communities erected monuments and memorial plaques in other Polish cities, including Gdańsk, Kłodzko, and Chełm. In 2003, on the sixtieth anniversary of the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia, the Society to Commemorate the Victims of the Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists in Wrocław (Stowarzyszenie Upamiętnienia Ofiar Zbrodni Ukraińskich Nacjonalistów z Wrocławia, SUOZUNzW) unveiled a monument in the military cemetery in Przemyśl, which depicted corpses of children bound to a tree with barbed wire, as in the photograph from 1923. When it became apparent that the photograph depicting the dead children was taken twenty years before the ethnic cleansing, the SUOZUNzW denied that the monument was prepared on the basis of this particular

 

 

Fig. 66. Memorial in Wrocław devoted to “the Polish citizens murdered in the south-eastern border territories in 1939–1947 by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)

and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).”

 

photograph and argued that binding children to a tree was one of the UPA’s killing methods. Nevertheless, the monument was dismantled in 2008.[2343] In Legnica in 2009, the city council named a street “The Boulevard of the Victims of the Genocide of the OUN-UPA” (Aleja Ofiar Ludobójstwa OUN-UPA).[2344] In addition to their own monuments, the kresowiacy also identified themselves with the Soviet monuments erected to the victims of the OUN-UPA.[2345]

In 2004 the most prolific historian of the kresowiacy community, Edward Prus, published a Bandera biography titled Stepan Bandera (1909–1959): Symbol of Crime and Cruelty.[2346] Prus began publishing on the subject of the OUN-UPA, in the mid-1980s in communist Poland.[2347] Although he accumulated an impressive amount of documentation on Ukrainian nationalism, the majority of his publications presented a victimized nationalist narrative. Prus omitted and denied atrocities committed by Polish military troops, and he inflated the atrocities of the OUN-UPA into massacres much more horrible than the Holocaust and all other major crimes against humanity. Many of his publications were written in a non-academic format without an appropriate indication of sources. As in the case of Soviet publications, this made it impossible to verify the integrity of the author’s arguments. In addition to imitating offensive Soviet language, he also used propagandist articles in Soviet newspapers, and documents such as Albert Norden’s speech at a press conference in 1959 as sources, exactly as the Soviet historians had done.[2348] In addition, his publications were not free from factual mistakes.[2349]

In the Bandera biography, relying on such Soviet writers as Beliaev, Prus stated that Bandera “in his youth strangled small cats with one hand in the presence of his colleagues, in order to ‘toughen his will’ and after the early 1930s, applied these methods to humans.”[2350] Similarly Prus characterized Bandera as “nasty and cruel. It should be emphasized strongly: in Poland and in Ukraine—in general—Bandera is a symbol of atrocities, crimes, arson, looting—all the most evil things a man can conduct. ‘You bandera! [Pol. Ty bandero!]’ is a swear word for a Ukrainian from Kiev because this term is the negation of the evangelic truth and of good.”[2351] In addition to denying that Ukrainians and other national minorities were discriminated against in Poland, Prus also blamed Bandera, the OUN, and Jews for the Soviet deportations of Poles during the first occupation of eastern Poland in 1939–1941. Like Soviet historians, he wrongly argued that the Nachtigall battalion was the main perpetrator of the Lviv pogrom in July 1941.[2352] In general, the most prominent kresowiacy historian combined the Soviet approach to history with the Polish martyrological one, which was not free of antisemitism. Prus wrote an entire monograph on something he called the “Banderite Holocaust” but simultaneously denied Polish crimes against Jews and presented “Jewish Bolshevism” as a historical fact.[2353]

The Bandera Debate

In early 2009 the online newspaper Zaxid.net published a series of essays about Bandera and started a debate that became more fervent a year later, when President Iushchenko designated Bandera a Hero of Ukraine. It was the first debate in which critical voices were not entirely ignored, and which challenged the apologetic narrative on Bandera, the OUN-UPA, and Ukrainian nationalism. During the debate, Ukrainian intellectuals openly discussed for the first time subjects such as Ukrainian fascism, antisemitism, and the ethnic and political atrocities conducted by the OUN and UPA. At least three groups with different points of view manifested themselves. The first, embodied by Franziska Bruder, John-Paul Himka, David Marples, Per Anders Rudling, Timothy Snyder, and myself, represented a critical approach to Bandera and the OUN and UPA. The second group, represented by “liberal” and “progressive” Ukrainian scholars such as Iaroslav Hrytsak, Andrii Portnov, Vasyl’ Rasevych, and Mykola Riabchuk; and diaspora intellectuals such as Alexander Motyl and Zenon Kohut, tried to combine a critical approach to Bandera and the OUN-UPA with post-Soviet and diaspora nationalism and defended Bandera by using various arguments. The third group, which included Volodymyr V”iatrovych, Marco Levytsky, Askold Lozynskyj, and Stephen Bandera, denied everything that Bandera critics reasoned about the Providnyk and OUN-UPA, and defended them by means of various strategies of omission, denial, and justification.

In early 2009, when Zaxid.net published the essays, it became clear that the subject of the blemishes of Bandera and his movement was still taboo. The popular and progressive internet journal published V”iatrovych’s article without any comment, although he declared that OUN assassinations and murders were not terrorist acts, that the ethnic violence conducted by the OUN-UPA was a legitimate measure of the “national liberation fight,” and that Bandera did not collaborate with Nazi Germany. In contrast, my own article, drawing attention to the atrocities committed by the OUN-B and criticizing the denial-oriented attitude toward such issues in today’s Ukraine, drew the remark from the editors that they “do not agree with a number of the author’s theses.”[2354]

The second debate after the designation of Bandera as a Hero of Ukraine took place, for the most part, in English-language newspapers and journals, and to a smaller extent in Ukraine. On 7 February 2010, David Marples wrote in the Edmonton Journal that Iushchenko “surely erred when he conferred on Bandera the title—paradoxically it sounds typically Soviet—Hero of Ukraine [because] in the 21st century, his [Bandera’s] views seem archaic and dangerous. He embraced violence, terror and intolerance toward other ethnicities living on Ukrainian lands.”[2355] Marples’ statement caused a flow of angry reactions from Ukrainian nationalists and motivated “liberal” historians to write more moderate but no less problematic articles. The debate was not so much about the person of Bandera as it was about the symbol of Ukrainian nationalism and the OUN-UPA, or more precisely about the evaluation of their deeds and their relevance for today’s Ukraine.

In his article “A Fascist Hero in a Democratic Kiev” Snyder wrote that Bandera and the OUN sought “to turn Ukraine into a fascist one-party dictatorship without national minorities.”[2356] In an interview in March 2010, he emphasized that Bandera lived in a fascist era and was very much influenced by fascism. He argued that “in the 1920’s and 30’s, Bandera was ideologically fascist. However these were times when many Europeans were fascists. French writers were fascists, Romanian philosophers were fascists, and the Italian government was fascist. Further, there is no doubt that fascism had a great influence on National Socialism.”[2357] Like Marples, Snyder condemned the violence of the OUN-UPA and criticized Bandera’s designation as a hero:

Firstly, the idea of declaring certain individuals to be heroes is a very Soviet idea, and I think that those people who approve of Bandera’s actions and support declaring him (and especially Shukhevych) a hero, should pause for a moment and consider the fact that the introduction of the hero appellation is a borrowing from the Soviet Union. Both fascists and communists held the view that individuals could be heroes. … People are arguing about who should be declared a hero, but no one is expressing any doubts as to whether there should even be such an appellation.[2358]

Himka described the history of the OUN in terms similar to Snyder’s, but with more details concerning OUN ideology and the war crimes committed by this movement in the name of that ideology:

OUN was indeed a typical fascist organization as shown by many of its features: its leader principle (Führerprinzip), its aspiration to ban all other political parties and movements, its fascist-style slogan (Slava Ukraїni! Heroiam slava!), its red-and-black flag, its raised-arm salute, its xenophobia and antisemitism, its cult of violence, and its admiration of Hitler, Mussolini, and other leaders of fascist Europe. What’s not fascist here?[2359]

Unlike Snyder, Himka also offered a commentary on the present. He explained how apologists present fascism as patriotism, and fascists and war criminals as freedom fighters. One such historian, Kohut, termed by Himka an “ideological watch dog,” had been an expert on pre-modern Ukrainian history. He neither studied Ukrainian nationalism, nor the OUN and UPA, nor published anything about these subjects, but in the debate he reproached Marples and Himka for their assessment of Bandera. Criticizing Kohut, Himka brought attention to the very important and disturbing problem of historians who were socialized in nationalist diaspora communities, identified with the political tradition of Bandera and the OUN-UPA, and had a vested and culturally determined interest in denying the war crimes of that movement.[2360]

Scholars in the next group—described in this book as “progressive” and “liberal”— protected the right to have an “inconvenient hero.” Many of them were not so much interested in history as concerned by current politics, in particular by paragraph 20 of the resolution of the European Parliament from 25 February 2010, which “deeply deplores the decision by the outgoing President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, posthumously to award Stepan Bandera, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which collaborated with Nazi Germany, the title of ‘National Hero of Ukraine’; hopes, in this regard, that the new Ukrainian leadership will reconsider such decisions and will maintain its commitment to European values.”[2361]

Very typical for this group were the opinions expressed by Iaroslav Hrytsak who specialized in Ukrainian nineteenth-century history but also published a few articles on Jewish-Ukrainian relations, the Second World War, and the Holocaust.[2362] During the debate, Hrytsak expressed mainly political concerns about the designation of Bandera as a Hero of Ukraine, because it could jeopardize the process of the integration of Ukraine into the European Union. In an interview given on 27 January 2010, he argued that the status of Bandera, as of every national hero, is contested: “A hero for some is an anti-hero for others,” and that “if we really wish to begin the process of integration with the EU, we have to be careful with the sensitivity of our neighbors—in particular those who are our only strategic partners [Poles].”[2363]

In an article published a few weeks later, he stated that the Holocaust had been an important part of European self-understanding but not in Ukraine and several other countries that had been either republics or satellite states of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he stated that small nations, in which category he included Ukrainians, should have, in terms of dealing with their own history, different rights from those of other nations and should be allowed to commemorate “inconvenient heroes,” such as Bandera, as symbols of resistance:

“Small” nations have the right to have [inconvenient heroes like Bandera], as long as they celebrate those heroes not as symbols of violence against other people, but as symbols of resistance and struggle for their own survival and their own dignity. In the case of Bandera, the issue is not whether he was a fascist—the question is whether the majority of people who celebrate him, celebrate him as a fascist.[2364]

Alexander Motyl also responded to the resolution of the European Parliament. In his evaluation of Bandera and the Ukrainian nationalism, Motyl did not discuss such aspects as fascism in the OUN or the pogroms in 1941. He called the ethnic cleansing in 1943–44 the “Ukrainian-Polish violence in Volhynia,” which, in his view, had nothing in common with ethnic violence conducted by the Ustaša and should be compared instead to the violence of the “Irish nationalists against the British.” In addition to romanticizing the OUN-UPA’s violence, he pointed out the Soviet atrocities committed in Ukraine and the OUN-UPA struggle against the Soviet Union and argued that Bandera represented that struggle.[2365]

In his reflections on Bandera and the EU resolution, Motyl asked, “Does conferral of Hero of Ukraine status represent a disregard for European values?” His answer was: “Viewed historically, European values include above all militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, imperialism, and chauvinism. The values of democracy and human rights are a relatively recent historical addition to the plate and, strictly speaking, are not so much European values as the officially declared values of the European Union. Worse, these EU values are violated as often as they are observed—by Europeans themselves.”[2366] Along these lines, he argued that the European Union and “Europeans” should not interfere in Ukrainian matters because “many nationally conscious Ukrainians—who represent the core of Ukraine’s civil society and democratic movement—resent being singled out for their views of their heroes and point to double standards and European hypocrisy.”[2367]

Mykola Riabchuk, a popular intellectual whose publications portrayed Ukraine as a Russian colony, also explained why Ukrainians need not come to terms with their own past but should rather continue celebrating the Providnyk. Relying on Motyl, he argued:

Ukraine is not just a “normal” nation, with firm identity and secure statehood, that chooses presumably between authoritarianism and democracy, i.e. in this case, between crypto-fascist legacy exemplified by Bandera and OUN and liberal-democratic values promoted by the EU. … The real choice is to either defend the national sovereignty, dignity, and identity, or give them away to Russia and/or its ‘Creole’ subsidiaries. Under these circumstances, the second part of Bandera’s legacy remains relevant—that of patriotism, national solidarity, self-sacrifice, idealistic commitment to common goals and values.[2368]

Andrii Portnov, an ambitious and talented historian also followed similar ways of reasoning. In an article published in Krytyka, he was unconcerned about the heroization of Bandera and the OUN-UPA. Following Armstrong, he called the OUN-UPA “integral nationalists” and suggested that their cult would be a legitimate pursuit, and part of the de-Sovietization of Ukraine. He hesitated as to whether one solution to the problems of contemporary Ukrainian politics of memory could be a “regional pluralism of symbols,” which in the Ukrainian case meant monuments to Stalin in the east and to Bandera in the west.[2369]

The historian Anatolii Rusnachenko, who specialized in the OUN-UPA, took offence at Snyder’s categorization of Bandera as a fascist. He set about correcting Snyder, who, according to him, “does not master the topic very well.” Rusnachenko claimed that “attributing fascism to Bandera is a clear exaggeration, even if there were [fascist] tendencies.” Rather than denying the OUN crimes, Rusnachenko diminished them. “True, the OUN did carry out terror (even though it was not on a significant scale), but we should not forget about the terror that the Poles carried out in occupied Eastern Galicia.” Rusnachenko did not clarify how 70,000 to 100,000 Polish victims of the Ukrainian nationalist terror were not significant, but he was concerned that one who investigates the crimes of the OUN-UPA might forget the Ukrainian victims murdered by Poles during and after the Second World War. Finally, he took Snyder to task for his unwillingness to separate Bandera the fascist leader from Bandera the heroic symbol of Ukrainian patriotism. Snyder, Rusnachenko wrote, “does not want to admit that Bandera was and remains simply a symbol of the liberation movement and a personification of the idea of uncompromising struggle against all enemies of Ukraine and Ukrainianness.”[2370]

Vitalii Ponomar’ov insisted that both Himka’s and Snyder’s characterizations of the OUN as a fascist organization were wrong. His first evidence for this claim was that Soviet propaganda also described the OUN as fascist. Another was that the OUN could not possibly have been fascist because, “as the historian Iaroslav Hrytsak rightly remarked, it is contradictory to the nature of fascism to write about ‘Polish,’ ‘Czech,’ or ‘Ukrainian’ fascism because fascism sought a partial or total destruction of these nations.”[2371]

One of the participants in the debate, Niklas Bernsand, from Lund University, whose article was translated into Ukrainian and published in the leading Ukrainian journal Krytyka, compared the cult of Bandera to that of the Croatian general Ante Gotovina, who was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in April 2011 to twenty-four years imprisonment for crimes against humanity. “Should the Croats,” Bernsand asked, “be judged for their public expressions of sympathy for a person who is responsible for the ethnic cleansing of non-Croat cities and villages?” He answered his question in the negative and applied this logic to the Bandera cult in Ukraine: “I will not ... argue ‘for’ or ‘against’ the presidential decree about turning Bandera into a Hero of Ukraine.”[2372]

The Bandera radical apologists, similarly to some of the “liberal” or diaspora intellectuals, argued with Snyder, Himka, and Marples and tried to correct them. Unlike the “liberal” intellectuals, they openly and extensively used far-right propaganda and introduced erroneous information. In response to Marples’ article, Marco Levytsky, the editor of Ukrainian News in Edmonton, suggested that the linking of
 

the OUN and Bandera to the pogroms in 1941 is “Vladimir Putin-style ex-KGB falsification.” Similarly, he claimed that the Jews “had disproportionate membership” in the NKVD and blamed them for the killing of “4,000 to 8,000 civilian prisoners,” who were murdered by the NKVD after 22 June 1941 in Ukrainian prisons. In addition, he claimed that the UPA did not kill Jews and he quoted Fishbein, who stated that writing about Jews killed by the UPA is a “provocation engineered by Moscow.” Levytsky also enumerated all the famous Ukrainians who saved Jews.[2373]

Stephen Bandera defended the honor of his grandfather, his family, and all those individuals who identified themselves with the Providnyk. In his response to Marples’ article, the Providnyk’s grandson argued that Marples’ column was “a rehash of misinformation.” He claimed that the statement about OUN involvement in the pogrom was misleading. As evidence, he offered the fact that not a single OUN member was brought to trial by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Similarly, in order to evoke the impression that no OUN members were involved in the Holocaust, he pointed out that Bandera’s two brothers were killed in Auschwitz. Furthermore, he argued that “our family cleared the Bandera name before the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada in 1985.” Stephen Bandera ended his article with the argument that “if Stepan Bandera was even guilty of half the crimes of which Marples and his ilk accuse him, then he would have been swinging from the gallows at Nuremberg 65 years ago.”[2374]

The debate did not focus on the person of Bandera but rather on Bandera as the symbol of the OUN and UPA, or of a specific epoch of Ukrainian history, or on the movement associated with his name. During the debate, it became clear that Ukrainian historians and intellectuals were not prepared to distance themselves from difficult elements of the Ukrainian past, such as the fascist tendencies in Ukrainian history and the atrocities committed in the name of Ukrainian nationalism. A huge obstacle to rethinking or discussing the history of Ukrainian nationalism was the fact that the Holocaust was marginalized, ignored, and politically distorted in the Soviet Union, in communities of the Ukrainian diaspora, and also in post-Soviet Ukraine. Another obstacle to debating Bandera was the lack of critical research on Bandera, Ukrainian nationalism, and the involvement of Ukrainians and the OUN-UPA in the Holocaust and other kinds of ethnic and political violence. However, we should keep in mind that several articles and monographs (for example by Marco Carynnyk, Karel Berkhoff, Schmuel Spector, and Grzegorz Motyka) relating to Bandera and the OUN-UPA had already been published a decade before the debate, or even earlier. These publications were known to historians or intellectuals, at least such as Iaroslav Hrytsak, Alexander Motyl, Mykola Riabchuk, and Andrii Portnov, who read English, German, Polish, and other languages. V’’iatrovych also quoted some of the publications, even if only to dismiss them as “Soviet propaganda.” One should therefore not underestimate the impact of the Bandera cult on the course of the debate and on the general understanding of Bandera in post-Soviet Ukraine and in the Ukrainian diaspora.[2375]

Finally, one needs to point out that the debate was not only about history but also about Ukrainian identity, which is still in the process of construction. It is difficult to predict how much time this process will take and what its results will be. The Soviet Union and the far-right factions of the Ukrainian diaspora left Ukrainian intellectuals a difficult and challenging political and intellectual heritage. Nevertheless, Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians are not obliged to preserve and protect victimized, heroized, or otherwise distorted and politicized versions of their own history. Nor do they need to behave as if they could have no control over the Bandera cult and the process of creating a new Ukrainian identity. In the end, none but they would have to rethink Bandera and the difficult part of Ukrainian history related to and associated with him.

During the twentieth century, cults of authoritarian, fascist, nationalist, communist, military, and other leaders erupted in many countries, societies, and movements. They persisted in their original or in mutated forms for different lengths of time. Some of them, like the Bandera cult, have thrived until today. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the cults of communist leaders generally disappeared in East Central Europe, although we should not forget the attempts to rehabilitate Stalin in some parts of the former Soviet territories, including eastern Ukraine. At the same time, cults of former fascist, authoritarian, and other far-right leaders reappeared in several postcommunist countries, although the leaders themselves were already dead. The new cults appeared because of various reasons such as political and cultural confusion, or nostalgic identification with the romanticized forms of former movements or their ideologies. Post-Soviet leader cults have been created by various groups, including paramilitary organizations, intellectuals, restaurant managers, and vendors of wine and T-shirts. A similar kind of commercialization and diffusion of leader cults had already occurred in Italy and to a lesser extent in Germany, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In Poland, the cult of Roman Dmowski—the leader of the Polish Endecja, who in the 1920s and 1930s “elevated antisemitism from a historically and religiously rooted prejudice to the level of political ideology and action”—materialized in a monument to Dmowski, unveiled in 2006 in Warsaw.[2376] Unlike the Bandera cult, the Dmowski cult did not impact on leading historians and intellectuals. It mainly affected or was constructed by conservative and right-wing politicians and by some confused scholars. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the legitimizing power of academic silence around this antidemocratic phenomenon. Similarly to the Bandera cult, that of the Endecja leader was cultivated during the Cold War by factions among emigrants. Like the Bandera worshipers, Dmowski admirers have denied or diminished the antisemitic and extremist views expressed by him and the Endecja movement and have prized his patriotism and his devotion to the process of establishing a nation-state. They have also propagated distorted nationalist versions of Polish history. They have denied the Polish involvement in the Holocaust and have presented the Poles as tragic but brave heroes and martyrs, and the victims of their neighbors, in particular Germans and Russians.[2377]

The rehabilitation of the Romanian authoritarian leader Antonescu was related to the fact that he was convicted by a Romanian communist tribunal and executed by the communist Romanian authorities. This, as in the case of Bandera’s assassination, gave him a touch of martyrdom. Unlike Bandera however, Antonescu was not imprisoned during the Second World War, during which his troops committed numerous war crimes against Jews and other people. National-communist Romanian writers and historians depicted Antonescu as a patriot and victim as early as the 1970s, but the actual rehabilitation of Antonescu took place after 1990. In postcommunist discourses, the Romanian leader was turned into an “anti-Bolshevik fighter,” a “great patriot,” “martyr,” and a “complex personality.” No mention was made of his involvement in the Holocaust, and Jews were remembered only as helpers of the Bolsheviks. Streets were named after him and a few busts were unveiled. Some officers from Antonescu’s government were rehabilitated, among them Prime Minister Gheron Netta who had introduced the racial laws in 1940. It was only in the early 2000s that the Romanian government removed Antonescu monuments, renamed the Antonescu streets and introduced a law prohibiting all kinds of radical right propaganda, in order not to jeopardize Romanian integration into the European Union and NATO.[2378]

In addition to the Antonescu cult, far-right Romanians did not permit the decay of the cult of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the charismatic founder and leader of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, known as the Iron Guard. In contrast to this cult, a cult of Codreanu’s follower Horia Sima did not reemerge in Romania, either during the Cold War or after 1990. Similarly to Bandera, Sima spent a substantial part of the Second World War in German detention. In August 1944, he was released to form a Romanian government and to mobilize Romanians for further struggle against the Soviet Union. After the Second World War, Sima was not prosecuted by international war tribunals because he was not in Romania when the crimes were committed. During the Cold War, Sima lived in Austria, France, and Spain. Like Bandera he became a fervent anticommunist Cold War fighter, and a controversial leader of the far-right Romanian émigrés. Unlike Bandera, he was not assassinated, and died in Madrid in 1993. During the Cold War, veterans of the Iron Guard, living in Canada, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and several Latin American countries, prolonged the cult of Codreanu and worshiped Sima, only to a much lesser extent. After 1990, the Codreanu cult reappeared in Romania but for various reasons did not attract as much attention as the Antonescu cult.[2379]

In postcommunist Slovakia, attempts to rehabilitate the clerical fascist leader Josef Tiso came from nationalist, émigré, and Catholic circles. Tiso had already been turned into a martyr by Slovak far-right émigrés after his execution in April 1947. Afterwards he was commemorated as a hero, patriot, victim of circumstance, or a martyr. During the Cold War, Tiso’s admirers lived similarly to the Ukrainian diaspora in various Western countries. They included personalities such as Ferdinand Ďurčanský, who had been sentenced in absentia to death in the same trial as Tiso, but was not executed, and who, during the Cold War worked together with Stets’ko in the ABN. Another far-right Slovak thinker, Milan Ďurica, a professor in Italy and a Roman Catholic priest, argued that Tiso was a democrat and an opponent of the Nazis, who saved the lives of 35,000 Jews. After the breakup of the Soviet bloc, the Slovak far-right émigrés began, similarly to Bandera’s adherents in Ukraine, to play an important role in reinventing Tiso’s myth in Slovakia. Nevertheless, unlike in Ukraine, some Slovak historians did not succumb to the nationalist myths of the far-right émigrés and began challenging their thesis.[2380] One plaque in memory of Tiso was unveiled in July 1990 in Banovce nad Bebravou and another one in October 1991 at the house of his birth in Bytča. The attempt to install a plaque in 2000 in Žilina was cancelled due to protests from the US embassy in Bratislava and from the Jewish community of Slovakia.[2381] Defending the plaques, some Slovak public figures argued that “Tiso’s contribution to the nation should be separated from his responsibility for the wartime state.” They thereby used arguments similar to those of the Ukrainian “liberal” historians who defended Bandera.[2382] The integration of Slovakia in the EU downplayed the Tiso cult to some extent, but after Slovakia joined the EU in 2004 some far-right, populist, and clerical public figures continued to rehabilitate Tiso. In December 2006 Ján Sokol, Archbishop of Bratislava-Trnava stated that under Tiso’s presidency the country “enjoyed a period of well-being.” Cardinal Ján Chrisostom Korec defended Tiso five months later on television, arguing that Tiso had “very good relations with Jews.”[2383] The Jewish community frequently protested against such attempts to rehabilitate the Slovak Vodca.[2384] James Mace Ward, who in 2013 published the first scholarly biography of Tiso, concluded that: “Only in a moral order that devaluates [the memory of the Holocaust and European values] can Tiso triumph as a martyr.”[2385]

Pavelić seems to have been celebrated and sacralized by Ustaša veterans and radical right sections of the Croatian diaspora, very similarly to Bandera by the far-right factions of the Ukrainian diaspora. After 1990 the Pavelić cult appeared in Croatia but it did not take as lavish and persistent form as the Bandera cult in Ukraine. Uncritical and hagiographical books on Pavelić appeared, cafes and kindergartens were named after him, but no monuments authorized by the Croatian authorities devoted to the Poglavnik were unveiled and no streets were named after him. The Poglavnik and Croatian fascism were rehabilitated to some extent by the policies of reconciliation instituted by the first government of Franjo Tuđman. These policies were intended to bring together the admirers and the opponents of the Ustaša legacy. They diminished Ustaša crimes and sought to differentiate between the good NDH (Independent State of Croatia) and the bad Ustaša. This resembled the distinction between commemorating Bandera as a fascist, or as a symbol of resistance, which was made by some Ukrainian “liberal” and “progressive” intellectuals during the Bandera debate. Radical right groups such as the Croatian Party of Rights (Hrvatska stranka prava, HSP) openly celebrated the Poglavnik, using the former Croatian fascist aesthetics and symbols. They also reintroduced fascist rituals, such as the Ustaša greeting “Ready for the Homeland!” (Za dom spremni!). The radical right activists argued, similarly to the nationalist and some “liberal” historians in Ukraine, that the Ustaša was not involved in the Holocaust, because several Jews survived the Second World War in the territories controlled by the Croatian fascists. An important symbol for Pavelić’s admirers became Bleiburg, where Yugoslav partisans had killed Ustaša functionaries in 1945. The site has been visited by many different types of Croatian patriots and far-right activists, who commemorated the Ustaša members killed in Bleiburg as heroes and martyrs. Ustaša flags frequently waved during these commemorations, and portraits of the Poglavnik and other prominent Ustaša were available at stands. After 2000 the rehabilitation of the Ustaša and Pavelić became less evident, although the nationalist tendency to diminish Ustaša crimes has not evaporated in postcommunist Croatia.[2386]