Nationalist, fascist, and other totalitarian leaders played an important role in twentieth-century European history. They symbolized various political ideas, including genocidal ones, mobilized movements and sometimes even whole societies to fight against other people, set up political cults around themselves, and claimed to represent the pride of their nations. Stepan Bandera, the legendary Providnyk of the OUN-B, was one of the central figures of the revolutionary and genocidal Ukrainian nationalist movement, which resembled movements such as the Ustaša, the Iron Guard, and the Hlinka Party. As one of the most significant symbols of the OUN and UPA, Bandera has for decades occupied an important place in the Ukrainian collective memory and identity. Ukrainian patriots and nationalists have remembered him as a true national hero and anticommunist martyr who struggled and fell for Ukraine, and have worshiped him as a brave freedom fighter.
To understand Bandera, it is important to distinguish between two levels. The first level comprises the different politics of memory and collective memories that glorify Bandera and those that stigmatize him. The second level consists of the history of his life, his cult, and his movement. In order to investigate these two, not entirely separate, levels it was necessary to examine Bandera, his movement, and his cult from various perspectives but without equating the perspectives offered by different kinds of documents. To equate testimonies of the survivors of the OUN or UPA atrocities with OUN-UPA propaganda leaflets that deny the experiences recorded in such testimonies, would relativize and distort history. Similarly, one should be critical of documents such as records of NKVD coercive interrogations, and Soviet articles and pamphlets, in which Bandera and his followers were accused of crimes that they had not committed.
Bandera and his cohorts changed in the course of time. They adjusted to new political and social circumstances but they did not substantially change their far-right, essentially fascist, convictions, or abandon the idea of “liberating” Ukraine and turning it into an authoritarian nation state of a fascist type. Despite his expectations, Bandera did not become the Providnyk of a Ukrainian collaborationist state in 1941. This fact, as well as his detention until September 1944, helped him to avoid arrest and repression after the Second World War and enabled him to prolong the “liberation struggle” against the “enemies of the Ukrainian nation” during the Cold War. Unlike Pavelić in Croatia, who had been more “lucky” and “successful” than the Providnyk in 1941, Bandera did not need to ask Perón or Franco for protection after the Second World War, although the Caudillo invited him to settle in Spain. At that time, Bandera allied himself with some Western intelligence services and enjoyed their protection.
The OUN, as a movement rooted in western Ukraine, changed between the 1930s and the early 1950s but, similarly to Bandera, it did not give up its nationalist and ethnic orientation. The OUN was the offspring of the terrorist UVO and in the 1930s it remained a terrorist and ultranationalist organization very similar to the Ustaša, with which it closely cooperated. It began to develop in a different direction from that of the Ustaša, after Hitler did not recognize the Ukrainian state proclaimed on 30 June 1941 in Lviv, and had a number of leading OUN-B members arrested. Nevertheless, in terms of ethnic violence the OUN did not differ substantially from the Ustaša and several other East Central European fascist movements. After founding the UPA in late 1942 and early 1943, the OUN became a partisan underground movement similar to the Forest Brothers in the Baltic States but once again it did not give up its fanatical and suicidal nationalism and did not cease killing civilians en masse.
The ambiguity concerning Bandera, his movement, and his cult may be illustrated by the use of the term “Banderite,” which has been employed to describe different kinds of people and concepts. People were known as Banderites or otherwise identified with Bandera at different times, for different reasons, and in different circumstances. Among “Banderites” we would find, on the one hand, war criminals, fascist revolutionaries, and people in the diaspora or in post-Soviet Ukraine, who, for various reasons, developed a positive attitude to Bandera and who commemorated and sacralized him. On the other, we would also find people who were named after Bandera because they were accused of helping the OUN-UPA, or because they spoke Ukrainian in Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, or because they were considered to be opponents of the Soviet regime. When evaluating the Bandera cult, it is important to recall these differences and to emphasize the various politicizations of the subject.
It would be wrong to impose on Bandera only one political identity, and label him as a nationalist, fascist, terrorist, or opponent of the Soviet Union, or a revolutionary idealist. As this study has shown, Bandera was influenced by a number of ideologies and environments, and also by religion. Depending on the specific point in time, he was more open to fascism than to nationalism, or to terrorism than to revolutionary idealism. Beside his political career he also had a private life: he was the son of a Greek Catholic priest, a brother to three sisters and three brothers, a husband and father of three children, the friend of a large number of people, some of whom liked his sense of humor, and a father figure to some of his comrades-in-arms. He was also allegedly an unsuccessful rapist and a man obsessed with women. Conflicting ideas flowed through his mind and he engaged in various activities, but his most important achievement was to become the leader of a movement that tried to establish an authoritarian nation state of a fascist type, and that attempted to “cleanse” this state of ethnic enemies and political opponents, including Jews, Poles, Russians, “Soviets,” and even communist, leftist, conservative, and democratic Ukrainians.
Bandera seems not necessarily to have had an evil, monstrous or sadistic personality, as some of his critics would argue. The main discomfort caused by his personality results from the fact that he totally subordinated himself to the idea of “liberating” Ukraine. He accepted mass violence as a means to that end and as a result, he lacked empathy toward certain kinds of people, in particular the “occupiers” and the “enemies of the nation.” He regarded their elimination as a political success and was prepared to send thousands of his followers to certain death. Even if some of his ideals such as protecting the Ukrainians against Poles and Russians might appear to have been noble, the methods he and his movement used should be exposed and criticized, together with their ongoing denial and euphemization.
Bandera grew up in a patriotic and religious family and environment. His mind-set was initially shaped by his father, a Greek Catholic priest and national activist who engaged in the struggle for a Ukrainian state. Religion was a very important value for Bandera but not more than nationalism. In his youth, Bandera’s attitudes were influenced by the unsuccessful attempts to establish a Ukrainian state and by the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The state proclaimed by Ukrainians in November 1918 in Lviv was destroyed by Poles. The state the Ukrainians tried to establish in Kiev, at about the same time, was destroyed by the Soviets. Ukrainians in the Second Polish Republic regarded Poles as occupiers of Ukrainian territories, while Poles often treated Ukrainians as second-class citizens. Polish authorities closed Ukrainian-language schools, forbade the use of the term “Ukrainian,” and in 1934 even repudiated the Little Treaty of Versailles, which had guaranteed minority rights to Byelorussians, Jews, Lithuanians, Russians, Ukrainians, and other non-Polish citizens of the Second Republic. This state of affairs and also the situation of Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine, in particular the famine of 1932–1933, had a substantial impact on Bandera. It convinced him and many other young Ukrainians that they had to use every method, including war and mass violence, to establish a state that would allow the Ukrainian people to “survive.”
In his high-school period, Bandera studied Mikhnovs’kyi, Dontsov, and other ideologists who radicalized Ukrainian nationalism, which, in the nineteenth century, had been social and moderate rather than ethnic, racist, and aggressive. Bandera was also fascinated by various secret revolutionary and terrorist organizations such as the Russian nihilists, the Polish insurgents, the Bolsheviks, Italian Fascists, and German National Socialists. Under the influence of Dontsov, Bandera’s fascination with Lenin was transformed into a hatred of communism. As head of the propaganda apparatus of and later the leader of the homeland executive, Bandera demonstrated that he had internalized the ideological notions of extreme Ukrainian nationalism and European authoritarian, fascist, and racist discourses.
Ukrainian far-right nationalism was rooted in eastern Galicia, where it became religious, populist, and mystical. Nevertheless, some of its most important ideologists, such as Mykhnovs’kyi and Dontsov, came from Russian Ukraine. Ukrainians from regions other than eastern Galicia had major difficulties comprehending the spiritualized and populist form of Galician nationalism. Galician Ukrainians understood nationalism not as an ideological or political substance but most of all as culture. They based nationalism on religion and blurred the boundaries between them, of which one good example was Lenkavs’kyi’s “The Ten Commandments of a Ukrainian Nationalist.” By this means the extremist Ukrainian nationalists undermined religious morality with ideological immorality and called their ideology the “new religion, the religion of Ukrainian nationalism.”
The writings of Mikhnovs’kyi and Dontsov are crucial for the understanding of the worldview of the Bandera generation. Mikhnovs’kyi, an early propagator of an ethnic Ukrainian nationalism, coined the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” and recommended Ukrainians not to “marry a foreign woman because your children will be your enemies.” Dontsov, the main ideologist of the Bandera generation, combined various nationalist, fascist, populist, and racist motifs. Like Mussolini, he was a socialist before the First World War. After the war, he became a far-right thinker and a passionate critic of communism, socialism, and democracy. He cleared moderate and socialist components out of Ukrainian nationalism and tried to transform it into a fascist ideology which was intended to protect Ukrainians against the Soviet Union and other “enemies.”
Racism and eugenics were popularized in the Ukrainian nationalist discourse both before and after the First World War by intellectuals such as Stepan Rudnyts’kyi, whose influence on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism should not be underestimated. Rudnyts’kyi used racist theories to emphasize cultural and political differences between Ukrainians, and Poles and Russians, who, after centuries of close coexistence in the Ukrainian territories had become culturally and also linguistically quite similar. Young Ukrainian nationalists such as Bandera and Stets’ko came together at high schools, universities, and in organizations such as Plast, Sokil, and Luh. After school they read Mikhnovs’kyi, Dontsov, and Rudnyts’kyi; they discussed politics and their favored ideologists and followed the international authoritarian and fascist discourses. The Polish authorities strengthened their fascination with racism, fascism, and authoritarianism, by forbidding almost all activities that enhanced Ukrainian culture and consciousness. Polish policy motivated young Ukrainian nationalists to engage in forbidden conspiratorial organizations, to conduct terrorist acts, and to kill the “traitors of the Ukrainian nation.”
UVO, the first terrorist and nationalist organization, founded in 1920 in Prague by Ukrainian veterans of the First World War, did not play any major political role. Ukrainian nationalists became more popular and powerful only during the establishment of the OUN which absorbed other nationalist and fascist organizations and could mobilize an increasing number of Ukrainians for its ultranationalist ideas. The leaders of the OUN promised to change the stateless condition of the Ukrainian nation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles and to establish a Ukrainian state which would protect the Ukrainians. Although the OUN sometimes collaborated with right-wing factions of the UNDO, it criticized this national-democratic party and other centrist parties for their collaboration with the Polish authorities. In this manner the OUN weakened any democratic tendencies in Ukrainian society. The OUN’s admiration of and orientation toward Nazi Germany, the cult of ethnic and political violence, its fascination with fascism, and its fervent hostility toward ethnic “enemies” and political opponents enabled it to win an increasing number of supporters. The nationalist policies practiced in Poland, especially after Piłsudski’s death, strengthened the OUN, which promised to liberate Ukraine from its “occupiers” and to rid its territory of its ethnic foes and political opponents.
The OUN was from the very beginning divided into two generations, one born around 1890 and one around 1910. Bandera, one of the most eager and determined representatives of the younger generation, rose quickly through the ranks of the OUN. After becoming the Providnyk of the OUN homeland executive in 1932, Bandera essentially contributed to the radicalization of the organization, which consisted, however, of many other elements not less fanatical than him. In this sense there was a reciprocal relationship of radicalization and fanaticization between the main subject of this study and other young nationalists such as Stets’ko, Shukhevych, Lenkavs’kyi, and Lebed’. The OUN homeland executive under Bandera’s leadership began killing more and more Ukrainians, among them OUN members accused of betrayal. If the executioners expressed moral doubts about killing other OUN members, who were frequently Ukrainian students or high school pupils accused of betrayal or collaboration with Polish authorities, Bandera insisted that his orders be carried out. Although Bandera in his role as the leader of the homeland executive was subordinated to Konovalets’ and the leadership in exile, his contribution to the terror was significant. His eagerness and ruthlessness might have surprised his superiors, who were alarmed by the killing of other Ukrainians, especially OUN members. The plans to organize “green cadres” or a partisan movement suggest that Bandera and his homeland executive considered changing their tactics from organized terror to an underground movement, which would conduct an uprising and try to take power.
Bandera’s cult emerged for the first time during the trials in Warsaw and Lviv in 1935 and 1936, after Pieracki’s assassination. The propaganda apparatus of Piłsudski’s Sanacja party portrayed Pieracki as a martyr, implied that he died for Poland, and tried to set up a political myth around him. This campaign stirred up collective anger among the Poles, which rebounded against the OUN when the authorities announced who, in the capital of Poland, had killed the minister and fighter for Polish independence. In this manner the Pieracki campaign unintentionally contributed to the formation of the Bandera cult. In particular the Warsaw trial drew much attention to the situation of Ukrainians in Poland, and to the revolutionary struggle of the Ukrainian nationalists. During the trials the OUN tried to use the court as a political stage; the defendants presented the organization as a movement that was driven by idealism and deeply patriotic feelings and sought to liberate the Ukrainian nation from the Polish and Soviet occupation. The defendants and witnesses frequently performed fascist salutes to the words “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!) in front of the court and the press, for which they were punished by the court. The defendants demonstrated that they regarded Bandera as their Providnyk and implied that he might become the leader of the Ukrainian people after a change of political circumstances. Ukrainians followed the trials, reading reports in newspapers, discussing them, and writing folk songs about them and the brave Bandera.
The trials were political but they were not show trials. The “heroic” and patriotic conduct of the young Ukrainian idealists, who were punished for speaking their mother language, caused Polish intellectuals such as Mieczysław and Ksawery Pruszyński to romanticize the OUN and to compare Polish-Ukrainian relations to British-Irish and Spanish-Catalonian relations. The expertise of the prosecutor, Żeleński, concerning the morality of the organization, its ruthlessness toward its enemies, and the use of terror for propagandist and financial purposes, did not challenge the image of the romantic and idealistic OUN revolutionaries. Bandera’s death sentence, even though commuted to life imprisonment, turned him into a hero and martyr in the eyes of many Ukrainians in the Second Republic.
Although the press reported much less about the Lviv trial than the one in Warsaw, the second trial was very significant for the formation of the Bandera cult. During the Lviv trial, the OUN mounted a ritualized propagandist spectacle. Bandera acted as the Providnyk of a fascist revolutionary organization that represented the Ukrainian nation and fought for the rights of the Ukrainian people. Fascist salutes were performed in Lviv even more often than in the first trial. Unlike in Warsaw, the defendants were allowed to speak in Ukrainian, which made them feel more comfortable and encouraged them to deliver political speeches. Unlike in Warsaw, during the Lviv trial Bandera did not deny his involvement in the terrorist activities of the OUN or the fact that the organization had killed the Polish minister and a number of other persons. On the contrary, he recalled the killings and proudly announced that he personally ordered many of them to be carried out. According to him, they were a part of the Ukrainian “liberation struggle,” even if the majority of the victims were other Ukrainian patriots. Important for the understanding of Bandera’s worldview in the 1930s was his speech on 26 June 1936 during the Lviv trial, during which he stated that “our idea in our understanding is so huge that as it comes to its realization, not hundreds but thousands of human lives have to be sacrificed in order to carry it out.”
The attempts to release Bandera from Polish prisons suggest that a faction of the OUN regarded him as very significant for the movement and wanted him to become the new OUN leader after Konovalets’ assassination in May 1938. However, it was only the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 that set Bandera free. It also started a new and essential period in his life and in the history of the movement. Poland disappeared from the map of Europe, and the western Ukrainian territories were included in Soviet Ukraine. Ukrainian nationalists and other Ukrainian political groups allied themselves with Nazi Germany, the main power in Europe, which they believed could help them to establish a Ukrainian state. The ideological similarities between the National Socialists and Ukrainian nationalists facilitated this cooperation, but the OUN did not have much contact with leading Nazi circles, and cooperated mainly with the Abwehr. At that time the conflict between the two generations within the OUN escalated and caused a split in the organization. The Bandera faction was better organized than the Mel’nyk group. It had better connections with the nationalist underground in western Ukraine and succeeded in incorporating more members. The two OUN factions regarded each other as enemies. After the German attack on the Soviet Union the OUN-B killed a number of OUN-M members including Mykola Stsibors’kyi, the author of Natsiokratiia. Before the attack Bandera complained that Stsibors’kyi had lived with a “suspicious Russian Jewish woman,” and was thus “a traitor and a Bolshevik agent.”
During the period of more than twenty months between the beginning of the Second World War and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Cracow and the General Government became the center of OUN-B activities. The OUN-B collaborated with the Abwehr in the preparations for Operation Barbarossa. The Germans provided the OUN with various facilities and supported it financially. The OUN trained its members in police academies, established the Nachtigall and Roland battalions, and organized about 800 people in the task forces. According to Klymiv, head of the OUN-B in Ukraine, the OUN-B had 20,000 members and 7,000 youth members in the underground in Ukraine. OUN groups from western Ukraine crossed the German-Soviet border to undergo military training in the General Government and to stay in touch with the leadership.
In April 1941 the younger generation of OUN members organized the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow. At this congress Bandera was officially elected leader of the OUN. The congress introduced the Führerprinzip and officially introduced a number of fascist principles, symbols and rituals, including the authoritarian principle “one nation, one party, one leader” (odyn narid, odyn provid, odna vlada), the red-and-black flag symbolizing blood and earth (Blut und Boden), and the fascist salute while calling “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!) and responding “Glory to the Heroes!” (Heroiam Slava!”) The fascistization of the OUN reached its peak at that time.
While involved in the preparation of Operation Barbarossa, the OUN-B planned the “Ukrainian National Revolution.” Bandera, together with Lenkavs’kyi, Shukhevych, and Stets’ko, composed a document called “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.” Two main interrelated aims expressed in this document were to establish a state, which would be ruled by the OUN, and to eliminate the ethnic and political enemies of this state and introduce a fascist dictatorship. Bandera as the Providnyk of the OUN-B would become the Providnyk of this state. In preparing the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” the OUN-B was inspired by the Hlinka Party and the Ustaša, which, in collaboration with Nazi Germany, had established similar states in March 1939 and April 1941 respectively. However, while planning the “Ukrainian National Revolution” and waiting for the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the OUN-B leadership did not have much political contact with or support from the Nazi leadership. Bandera and the OUN-B seem to have simply hoped that Hitler would accept the new Ukrainian state to be proclaimed by the OUN-B, just as he had accepted Slovakia and Croatia.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union began on 22 June 1941, the NKVD executed over 8,000 prisoners in the Ukrainian SSR, among them Bandera’s father Andrii. This terror contributed to the radicalization of the political situation in Ukraine and increased the hostility toward Jews. The OUN-B activists left the underground and acted according to the instructions set out in “Struggle and Activities.” Bandera did not cross the former border between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, possibly because the Germans did not allow him to go to the “newly occupied territories.” Instead Stets’ko went to Lviv, where, in the evening of 30 June he proclaimed Ukrainian statehood. In the proclamation, Stets’ko stressed that the OUN-B wanted to closely cooperate with the “National Socialist Great Germany, which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world.”[2387] In his brief autobiography written several days after the proclamation, Stets’ko stated that he supported the “destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.”[2388]
The OUN-B members in the task forces, which followed the front line during Operation Barbarossa, made similar proclamations in hundreds of places, mainly in western Ukraine. The proclamations frequently coincided with pogroms, the perpetrators of which consisted of Germans, OUN activists, and local people. The OUN-B’s role in the pogroms should not be underestimated, as the OUN-B controlled the underground in many localities and indoctrinated Ukrainians with various antisemitic and racist leaflets and booklets. When considering the OUN-B’s role in the pogroms, it should be noted that pogroms broke out in places that the Germans did not invade, and also that the OUN-B activists complained about the Hungarian and Slovak troops who restricted their violent activities toward Jews and other “enemies of the Ukrainian nation.” In those parts of Ukraine where the OUN was not active, pogroms did not take place or were much smaller than in eastern Galicia and in Volhynia. Germans in eastern Ukraine complained that they could not mobilize the local Ukrainians to anti-Jewish violence. Officially, however, the OUN-B regarded the Russians and not the Jews as their main enemies. “Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine,”[2389] commented Stets’ko on the OUN-B’s complicated relations with Russians, Soviets and Jews. Similarly, we should not forget that the social composition of pogromists cannot be limited to OUN-B members and OUN-B sympathizers alone. The perpetrators came from different social groups and killed Jews not only for nationalist but also for economic and other reasons.
The worst pogrom in western Ukraine, which took place in Lviv, was unleashed by the Germans with the collaboration of the Ukrainian militia established by the OUN-B. The perpetrators blamed local Jews for the deaths of prisoners killed by the NKVD, and mobilized the local population to mistreat and murder the Jews. Similar cooperation between the Ukrainian militia and the German troops, including Einsatzkommandos 5 and 6, came about during the first mass shooting of Jews in Lviv. The OUN-B also helped Germans to apprehend Polish professors and their relatives, who were shot shortly after the pogrom by a German security force. The collaboration between the OUN-B militia and the units subordinated to the RSHA was not prevented by the fact that the RSHA limited the political aspirations of the leaders of the OUN-B after 22 June 1941 forbidding some of them to go to the “newly occupied territories.”
At the time of the pogrom and the first mass shootings, Stets’ko wrote letters to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Pavelić, in an attempt to persuade them to recognize the OUN-B state with Bandera as its Providnyk. Meanwhile, Bandera tried to convince Kundt in Cracow that Nazi Germany needed a Ukrainian state ruled by the OUN-B. The Providnyk assured the German official that the OUN-B was loyal to the Nazi leaders, was helping the German army in the struggle against the Soviet Union, wanted to collaborate closely with Hitler’s Germany, and he hoped that Germany would accept his state. However, the Nazi leaders did not approve of this state, and did not plan to establish any national states in this part of Europe, although some of them, including Rosenberg, played with such ideas. A few weeks after the proclamation, eastern Galicia was included in the General Government and other Ukrainian territories became Reichskommissariat Ukraine.
After his arrest in early July 1941, Bandera spent the next three years in Berlin and Sachsenhausen. He was placed under house arrest until September 1941, when he was moved to the jail at Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin. In 1942 or 1943, he was transferred to the Zellenbau barrack, a special building for special political prisoners within the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, close to Berlin, where his wife and daughter were living. During the war, a number of other OUN-B members were arrested and sent to German concentration camps where they remained with the status of political prisoners until late 1944 and early 1945. Among those who did not survive the concentration camps were Bandera’s two brothers, Vasyl’ and Oleksandr.
In letters to Rosenberg in August and December 1941, Bandera tried to bring about a reconciliation with Nazi Germany and to persuade the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories that Germany needed a Ukrainian state and ought to cooperate with the OUN-B. Similarly, in December 1941, he asked his deputy Lebed’ to attempt to repair German-Ukrainian relations. In an open letter dated 4 August 1941, Stets’ko, who was brought to Berlin shortly after Bandera in early July 1941, encouraged Ukrainians to help the German army in their struggle against the Soviet Union. At that time however, the Germans were not interested in further collaboration with the OUN-B. They collaborated with the UTsK and also with the OUN-M, regarding people such as Kubiiovych as more reliable partners.
Despite the arrest of the OUN-B leadership and the persecution of several less prominent OUN-B members, there was, however, unofficial collaboration between the Nazis and many OUN-B members. Although in late 1941, the OUN-B went underground, it sent its members into the Ukrainian police, which supported the Germans during the destruction of the Jewish population in Ukraine. Without their help the murder of the Jews in western Ukraine, would not have been possible. In the spring of 1943, many of the policemen deserted to the UPA, which had been formed in late 1942 by the OUN-B to “clear” the Ukrainian territory of Poles and to fight against Soviet partisans and less frequently against the Germans. Between early 1943 and mid-1945, the UPA murdered between 70,000 and 100,000 Polish civilians, and hundreds or even thousands of Jews who had escaped from the ghettos and tried to survive by hiding in the woods or in peasants’ houses. The AK and other Polish troops, on the other hand, killed between 10,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian civilians, the majority of them outside the territories in which the UPA killed Poles. While in Berlin and Sachsenhausen, Bandera had some limited contact with the OUN-B and UPA leadership in Ukraine through his wife and apparently other channels, but we do not know to what extent he was informed about events in western Ukraine and whether he had any influence on them. Nevertheless, the atrocities committed by the OUN-B and UPA were not inconsistent with Bandera’s pre-war beliefs, nor with his ideas expressed in “Struggle and Activities” in 1941, nor with the general attitude of the OUN-B toward the “enemies of the Ukrainian nation” when Bandera had been its Providnyk. After the war Bandera never condemned these crimes or admitted that they happened.
Not all young Ukrainians joined the UPA for ideological reasons. Some joined by chance, others because their friends were in the UPA, or because they were forced by the OUN-B, and still others because they were in the police and feared Soviet retribution. However, whatever the reasons why they joined the UPA, service in this movement transformed many ordinary Ukrainians into ruthless killers. The process of such a transformation was elaborated by Christopher Browning in Ordinary Men and Harald Welzer in Täter (Perpetrators).[2390] Both scholars studied the psychological processes of German soldiers who killed civilians on a mass scale during the Holocaust.
When evaluating the involvement of Ukrainian nationalists in the annihilation of the Jews, it is important to clarify certain matters. First, 85 to 90 percent of the Jews in western Ukraine were not killed by the OUN and UPA but by the Germans and the Ukrainian police. Among the latter were members of and sympathizers with both factions of the OUN. The remaining 10 to 15 percent, who tried to survive in the woods or various hideouts in the countryside were murdered by the Germans, the Ukrainian nationalists (OUN-B, UPA, SB of the OUN-B, and other groups), Ukrainian police, and by the local Ukrainian and to a lesser extent Polish population. Second, we find among the Ukrainian perpetrators (OUN, UPA, Ukrainian police and the local population), people of different social classes, political convictions, or with different educational backgrounds, who acted for different motives, of which nationalism was only one, but in the case of the OUN and UPA, the most important one. Third, the majority of the Jews in western Ukraine were killed by the Germans with the help of the Ukrainian police before the UPA began to play an important role in the region. Ukrainians formed the majority of the police staff, especially in the countryside, and therefore played a significant part in the annihilation of the Ukrainian Jews. They assisted the Einsatzgruppen, guarded the Jews in the ghettos, hunted for refugees in the woods, and sent them from the ghettos to the extermination camps. In spring 1943 a number of these policemen deserted to the UPA. Fourth, Jews who tried to survive in the woods were hunted not only by the OUN and UPA but also by Ukrainian policemen, peasants, and bandits. Fifth, the murder of the Jews by the OUN-UPA was related to the annihilation of Poles in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. Sixth, a small number of Jews survived in the UPA, mainly because they escaped from the UPA shortly before or after the arrival of the Red Army in western Ukraine.
Important for the evaluation and understanding of the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA during the Second World War are the testimonies of Jewish survivors. Until recently, survivor testimonies and memoirs have been regarded as unreliable and “subjective” in contrast to the reliable and “objective” documents of the Holocaust perpetrators, especially the German ones. Perpetrators were believed to be rational and to have kept clear records of their atrocities. On the other hand, historians assumed that the survivors were traumatized, that they exaggerated, and that one could not rely on their experiences and memory or use their testimonies and memoirs to study the Second World War or the Holocaust. In the first decades after the war, this approach to history fulfilled the role of a shelter. It enabled the post-war generations not to perceive many brutal and horrible features of the Holocaust, the feelings and experiences of survivors and also sometimes to preserve the good name of the nation. But this attitude to the survivors and their memory re-humiliated the victims of the Holocaust and other atrocities. Also, from a methodological point of view, the negation of the testimonies was incorrect and led to serious misrepresentations of history. Although it is certainly true that historians should not take every detail from survivor testimony or memoirs for granted and should not write history based on this kind of document alone, one cannot write the history of the Holocaust in regions such as Volhynia and eastern Galicia while dismissing the survivor testimonies and memoirs as post-traumatic fantasy. By ignoring these documents, we miss many crucial aspects of the annihilation of the Jews, especially aspects related to the groups who persecuted the Jews at the local level. German documents do not say much about the anti-Jewish violence of the Ukrainian extreme nationalists, because the Germans did not make any records of OUN-UPA crimes, with the exception of a few cases when the nationalists boasted to have killed a group of Jews, in order to obtain new weapons or ammunition. Nor did OUN documents say much about this type of atrocity because the leadership of the OUN and UPA collected and destroyed documents that documented their war crimes. After the war the veterans propagated a heroic version of UPA history and also argued that Ukrainian nationalists had rescued Jews. There are therefore several important aspects of the Holocaust that are found only in the testimonies and memoirs of Jewish survivors.
The very popular term “liberation movement” (Ukr. vyzvol’nyi rukh) used to describe the OUN and UPA is misleading and was used in this study only in quotation marks because of its ideological meaning. The “liberation struggle” or “liberation war” practiced by the OUN and UPA could not have been liberation because it was not necessary to kill several thousand civilians to liberate Ukraine. The term “liberation movement” suggests that the OUN and UPA were entirely or primarily devoted to the liberation of Ukraine. The study of the movement, however, shows that the OUN and UPA were very much preoccupied with the idea of “cleansing” the Ukrainian territories of ethnic and political opponents.
The conduct of the Greek Catholic Church during and shortly after the Second World War was investigated only as a sideline in this study. It is difficult to talk about a single stream of policy of the Greek Catholic Church toward the minorities targeted by the OUN, the UPA, and the Germans, because the church consisted of various types of people. During the pogroms in 1941, Greek Catholic priests behaved in different ways toward the Jews. Some of them cursed the Jews and organized pogroms; others helped Jews in various ways. In 1943 and 1944, when the UPA conducted the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, some Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests blessed axes, pitchforks, scythes, and other weapons used for murder, and they supported the Ukrainian nationalists in other ways. Sheptyts’kyi, the head of the Greek Catholic Church, demonstrated ambiguous behavior. On the one hand, he rescued and helped to rescue more than a hundred Jews. On the other hand, he failed to condemn the genocidal policies of the Ukrainian nationalists or condemned them only very indirectly, and refused to believe certain facts related to the mass violence conducted by Ukrainians.
In addition to conducting the ethnic cleansing of the Poles and hunting down the Jews, the UPA fought against the Soviet partisans and later the Red Army, even killing one of their generals. To a much smaller extent, the UPA had also attacked Germans before it began to collaborate with them in spring 1944. Bandera and a few dozen other OUN political prisoners were released in September 1944 because Germany was losing the war and the Nazi leaders decided to use the detained Ukrainian politicians to mobilize Ukrainians against their common enemy. Because Bandera and other Ukrainian politicians refused to cooperate with the “Russian imperialist” Vlasov, Rosenberg created the UNK, in which the Ukrainian politicians supported the Germans in their last, desperate military activities. Bandera helped the Germans until he went from Berlin to Vienna in early February 1945. A few weeks before he left for Vienna, the Providnyk, according to Shandruk, had opted for “full support to the end, whatever it may be.”
The extent to which Bandera was responsible for atrocities committed by Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War is a difficult and complex question, which can be answered appropriately only in a nuanced way. When planning the “Ukrainian National Revolution,” Bandera prepared the OUN-B to perform ethnic and political violence, which, during the revolution, took mainly the form of pogroms. Bandera co-authored “Struggle and Activities,” discussed plans with the Abwehr, and played the role of the Providnyk in front of the groups of OUN-B activists who arrived in the General Government from Ukraine. He encouraged them to fight against the “enemies of the Ukrainian nation” and to “liberate” Ukraine from Soviet occupation. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Bandera did not go to the “newly occupied territories” but stayed in the General Government as the Germans had advised him. Although he did not meet Klymiv after 22 June 1941, “Struggle and Activities” gave Klymiv general and specific instructions how to act after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and the “Ukrainian National Revolution.” It is not known whether, after the German attack on the Soviet Union, Bandera issued direct orders concerning the question of ethnic and political violence. Stets’ko informed his Providnyk in a telegram on 25 June that “We are setting up a militia that will help to remove the Jews and protect the population.” Bandera’s communications to Stets’ko, however, unlike Stets’ko’s telegrams to the Providnyk, did not find their way into the archives. As the Providnyk of the OUN-B, Bandera must have been well informed about the run of events in Ukraine, including the anti-Jewish violence. With the help of couriers, he also stayed in contact with the task forces. Bandera’s later denial of the pogroms was typical of the behavior of other OUN-B members, such as Hryn’okh and Stets’ko, who were in Lviv during the pogrom, knew exactly what happened there, or were involved in establishing the OUN-B militia. After the war, they insisted that they did not see any anti-Jewish incidents in Lviv between 30 June and 2 July 1941 and were not aware that a pogrom in the city took place, although they confirmed in their testimonies and memoirs that they walked through the city at that time, like Hryn’okh, or controlled the Ukrainian militia, like Stets’ko.
In this context, we should also ask whether Bandera’s physical absence from the “newly occupied territories” in late June and early July 1941 exonerates him of the crimes committed by the OUN and similarly of the various atrocities later committed by the UPA. No reasonable person would doubt that Hitler was politically and morally responsible for the various atrocities committed in Auschwitz or at the Eastern Front, although the Führer did not personally supervise the Einsatzkommandos in Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus; nor did he stand in front of the gas chambers, controlling the procedure in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Similarly, Pavelić is considered to be responsible for the Ustaša’s killings of Serbs, Jews, and Roma, although he might not have known all the details concerning the particular killings. Nevertheless, there is a difference in terms of agency between Hitler, Pavelić, and Bandera, because Hitler and Pavelić were not detained when their forces committed war crimes and other atrocities. Thus the scope of their involvement was different from Bandera’s, especially concerning the crimes committed when Bandera was either in Berlin or Sachsenhausen, and when his contact with the leadership of the OUN and UPA was limited. To hold Bandera personally responsible for the crimes committed by the UPA during the period of his arrest would be counterfactual and irrational. Nevertheless, the question of Bandera’s moral responsibility is much more complex, because in terms of enthusiasm for or approval of mass violence against “enemies” or against particular ethnic group he seems not to have differed substantially from Hitler or Pavelić. Similarly, according to Hannah Arendt’s concept of justice and the notions of transformative justice and of transitional justice, Bandera seems to be responsible for “crimes against humanity” because his actions in 1941 and the actions of his movement during the entire war were an attack on both human plurality and particular ethnic groups and thus on humanity as such. A court in a democratic Ukraine, interested in recognizing the victims of the OUN-B, promoting civic trust and strengthening democracy, would have convicted Bandera and other members of the OUN for their numerous violations of human rights.[2391]
When discussing Bandera, the OUN and UPA, and atrocities conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists, we should also re-evaluate the ideological notion of leadership. The Providnyk or Vozhd’, like the Führer, Duce, or Poglavnik, was an essential practical and ideological element of a fascist movement. The Providnyk was an important aspect of the official propaganda of the OUN and of the worldview of its members. Bandera’s followers believed in the Providnyk, admired him, and fought for him. In return, he encouraged and inspired them, even if many of them never met him in person. As indicated in chapters 4 and 5, Bandera was perceived as the Providnyk of the movement and its spiritual leader during and after his detention, although Lebed’, who, however, did not enjoy the charisma established around Bandera, replaced him. After his arrest, therefore, Bandera was still referred to as the Providnyk in various OUN-B and UPA publications and was commemorated at the anniversaries of the proclamation of 30 June 1941. This did not change, even after Lebed’ was replaced with a triumvirate in February 1943, and the OUN-B decided to break away from fascism and totalitarianism. This does not incriminate Bandera but emphasizes that many of the OUN members and UPA partisans involved in the atrocities against Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and other ethnic groups regarded Bandera as their spiritual leader and identified with him while “cleansing” the territory of the “enemies of the Ukrainian nation.”
During the Second World War, the Bandera cult and myth went through further metamorphoses. After the split of the OUN into the OUN-B and the OUN-M, Bandera’s followers called themselves, and were called by others, Banderites. Although the term “Banderites” did not predominate during the “Ukrainian National Revolution” in the summer of 1941, it became one of the main terms describing the Ukrainian nationalists loyal to Bandera in 1942, and even more in 1943 and 1944. Jews and Poles used it to describe OUN members and UPA insurgents and sometimes other Ukrainian perpetrators, such as peasants mobilized to ethnic violence by the OUN and the UPA. The survivors used the word in a very pragmatic way. They described as “Banderites” those Ukrainian nationalists who might arrive and kill them at any time. The AK, Germans, and Soviet partisans also used “Banderites” to refer to the Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviet propaganda apparatus started to apply the term in early 1944 and radically changed the meaning of the word. “Banderites” became in the Soviet propaganda discourse an expression used to discredit the opponents of the Soviet Union. Soviet ideology transformed it into one of the most powerful and militant propaganda slogans. The extensive use of the word in the Soviet media also influenced Bandera himself, who understood it as evidence of his greatness.
In order not to be deported to the Soviet Union after the Second World War, Bandera and other Ukrainian émigrés manipulated their identity and falsified the history of the movement, in particular the anti-Jewish, anti-Polish, and anti-Ukrainian violence. One of Bandera’s IDs said that he was “kept from 15.9.1941 to 6.5.1945 in Nazi-German concentration camps and was liberated from the concentration camp at Mauthausen,” although Bandera never was an inmate of this camp. In 1946 Lebed’ published a book about the UPA, in which he omitted or denied the participation of the OUN in the pogroms of 1941, collaboration with the Germans, plans and attempts to establish a fascist authoritarian state, the ethnic cleansing conducted by the UPA in 1943–1944 in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, and a number of other matters that could have jeopardized his new career as a CIA agent and the future of many Ukrainian OUN veterans who decided to stay in the Western bloc.
The intelligence services of the United Kingdom, the United States, and later West Germany were interested in cooperation with the anti-Soviet underground in western Ukraine and therefore worked together with Bandera, Lebed’, and other émigrés. They trained OUN agents, supported the émigrés financially, and protected them against the KGB. A former officer in Rosenberg’s Ostministerium, Gerhard von Mende, who after the war worked in the Office for Displaced Persons, helped Bandera to regulate his status and to solve bureaucratic and political problems. Franco offered Bandera resettlement in Spain, but Bandera refused. He felt safe in West Germany and did not want to give up the structures he had built up there.
The conflicts within the OUN did not cease after the Second World War. Former friends deeply distrusted each other, fired weapons at each other, and ordered each other’s assassinations. One reason for the new conflicts was the competition for resources supplied by Western intelligence services. Another important reason was the existence of ideological differences among the factions in the ZCh OUN. Bandera and a number of his supporters insisted on leading the organization according to the Führerprinzip, as in 1941. The Providnyk demanded total subordination from all OUN members, but other nationalists opposed these policies, which they regarded as outdated. They wanted a more pragmatic or “democratic” organization although they never introduced radical changes such as an open and non-denial-oriented attitude to the history of the movement. Bandera’s fundamental nationalism, authoritarianism, and obsession with fascism scared a number of former like-minded comrades. They took the view that Bandera had not changed since 1941 and refused to cooperate with him.
Bandera’s worldview after the Second World War did not alter but rather adjusted to the reality of the Cold War. He did not mention Jews and Poles as the enemies of the Ukrainian nation, because they did not live in Ukraine any longer. The Providnyk directed his hatred against the Soviet Union without substantially changing his far-right convictions. Many of his post-war ideas were in harmony with anti-Soviet and anticommunist politics of that time. Bandera defended the Caudillo against “attacks” from the democratic states but was at the same time irritated by any suggestion that the ZCh OUN was not democratic or that Ukrainian genocidal nationalism was anti-democratic. He never admitted the crimes committed by the Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, and claimed that he had always opposed the German and Soviet regimes and was a victim of both. He presented himself in interviews given in the 1950s as a leader of the anti-Soviet underground movement, which had not stopped fighting against the “red devil.”
While Bandera tried to dominate the ZCh OUN and planned to “liberate” Ukraine, some groups of UPA insurgents continued fighting in western Ukraine until the late 1940s and early 1950s. They continued to kill civilians en masse, but the main perpetrators at that time were the NKVD (from 1946 the MVD), and the new victims of political violence were the families of the insurgents, and Ukrainians accused of supporting the UPA or of being Ukrainian nationalists. The last category included actual war criminals and various Nazi collaborators as well as people who “betrayed the Soviet fatherland.” During the ruthless conflict with the OUN-UPA the Soviets killed 153,000 people, arrested 134,000, and deported 203,000 to the Gulag and to Siberia. Altogether until 1953, about 490,000 western Ukrainians, or nearly one person in every western Ukrainian family suffered under Soviet repression. At the same time, the OUN-UPA murdered over 20,000 civilians and killed about 10,000 Soviet soldiers, members of the destruction battalions, and NKVD staff. Most of those killed by the nationalist partisans were workers from kolkhozes, teachers, nurses, and doctors resettled from eastern Ukraine. Blinded by genocidal nationalism, suicidal romanticism, anticommunism, and deluded by the stories about the upcoming third world war distributed by Bandera and other nationalist émigrés, the UPA ignored the fact that it could not win a war against the Soviet Union, which was many times stronger than the western Ukrainian insurgent groups. Under the ruthless terror of the Soviet regime, the Ukrainian population withdrew its support for the nationalist insurgents. Nevertheless, Soviet terror and Soviet propaganda substantially strengthened anti-Soviet resentment in western Ukraine, dissolved the memory of the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists, and thereby helped the Ukrainian insurgents to gradually reappear as heroic anti-Soviet icons.
When the OUN and UPA were fighting against the NKVD in Ukraine, Bandera’s life in exile was overshadowed by the KGB, which tried to kidnap and kill him. Bandera, and to a lesser extent his family, had very good reasons to fear for their lives, although they were protected by the SB of the ZCh OUN and warned by the CIC about the plans of the KGB. They used other names and were forced to hide several times when the KGB was after them. The Soviet leaders assassinated the Providnyk fourteen years after the end of the Second World War. The assassination was prepared almost perfectly, and its details became known only when the assassin submitted himself to the West German police.
The question whether Bandera was a fascist, or in which sense and to what extent, depends on the question of how we define fascism and at which time we consider Bandera and the OUN to have been fascist. Cold War historians such as Armstrong, some Ukrainian diaspora historians, and also historians in post-Soviet Ukraine considered the OUN to be a form of “integral nationalism.” This suggestion, however, is misleading, because of the actual meaning of this concept. Furthermore, it does not allow the contextualization of the OUN, because of the absence of comparative studies on “integral nationalism.” In order to correctly contextualize Bandera and the extreme, revolutionary, ethnic, and genocidal form of Ukrainian nationalism, and to comprehend the nature of this movement, we used the theoretical concepts established by scholars such as Eatwell, Griffin, Sternhell, Paxton, Kershaw, Mann, Mosse, Nolte, and Payne, and the criteria of a fascist movement, which were explained and presented in the introduction.
The OUN in the 1930s and early 1940s met all the basic criteria of a fascist movement, which were formulated in Nolte’s “fascist minimum” or in the enlarged version presented in the introduction to this study. In addition, the OUN fulfilled two other crucial characteristics of a fascist movement. First, it tried to take power through a revolution and establish its own authoritarian nation state of a fascist type. Second, it anticipated the salvation and renewal of society through palingenesis, which in the Ukrainian case was related to the idea that the Ukrainian nation would die out if the OUN did not establish a state. Only a state governed by the OUN-B would allow the Ukrainians to survive, be reborn, and thrive.
In 1941 the OUN-B proclaimed a state and established a government, but it could not retain them. As demonstrated in chapter 4, this was not because of ideological differences between the Ukrainian nationalists and National Socialists or the “inability” and “naivety” of the OUN-B leaders, but because of outside factors on which the OUN-B did not have much or any influence. The Nazi leaders had plans for the Ukrainian territories that were different from those for Croatia and Slovakia, but similar to those for Lithuania.
Conflicts, even very serious ones with lethal consequences, were not unusual between fascist, authoritarian, and other far-right movements. Their ideologies made them feel related and united them against communism and democracy. But for fascist and authoritarian leaders, practical matters were in general more important than ideological similarities. A classic inter-fascist conflict prior to the Second World War occurred between the Austrofascists and the German National Socialists. Despite ideological similarities, the National Socialists killed the first Austrofascist leader Dollfuss, and after incorporating Austria in the Reich, they imprisoned his successor Schuschnigg and kept him in the same concentration camp as Bandera although under different conditions. Similarly, when the conflict in Romania between Antonescu and the Iron Guard escalated in early 1941, more than 300 legionaries fled to Germany and were detained in German camps. The leader of the Iron Guard, Horia Sima, was detained in Zellenbau, the same building for special political prisoners in which Bandera was confined.
Especially in the 1920s, its ideologists argued that the OUN could not be a typical fascist movement because of their own national traditions or matters of culture and language. These arguments, however, were typical of all small fascist movements such as the Ustaša, HSLS, and the Iron Guard. Ukrainian nationalists were independent in the sense of fighting for independence or for a state that would be independent of Poland, Russia, or the Soviet Union. However, they were dependent on Nazi Germany, without which they could not hope to establish and maintain a state. The OUN-B needed the protection of Nazi Germany and for that reason it collaborated with Germany and presented itself as a movement related to it. The model of the Ukrainian state, as elaborated by the leading OUN ideologist Stsibors’kyi in Natsiokratiia and by the OUN-B leadership at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in Cracow a few months before the German attack on the Soviet Union, displayed most characteristics typical of fascist states.
Because the OUN-B leadership outlined the independent Ukrainian state as an ethnic nation state or “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” according to one of the OUN-B slogans, the state was to be “purified” of non-Ukrainian inhabitants. For this reason, the OUN made ethnic violence and the cult of war the central concepts of its ideology. For the same reason, the OUN-B leadership combined the proclamation of the state in 1941 with anti-Jewish violence and the killing of other ethnic and political opponents. By the same token, it “cleansed” the western Ukrainian territories of Poles, and Jews in hiding. The annihilation of the Jews by the Germans with the help of the Ukrainian police also met the expectations of the OUN-B, because it helped rid the territory of non-Ukrainian elements. It also provided the Ukrainian policemen, who in early 1943 deserted for the UPA, with practical knowledge as to how to annihilate an entire ethnic group in a region, in a relatively short period. The OUN-B leadership made extensive use of this knowledge in order to “clear” Volhynia, and later eastern Galicia, of Poles. Given the forms of violence conducted by the OUN, it belonged to the more rather than to the less violent fascist movements. Similarly, the concept of the “enemy of the Ukrainian nation” and the kind of mass violence practiced to annihilate the non-Ukrainian inhabitants of the “Ukrainian territories” suggest that the OUN belonged to the more rather than the less racist movements. The questions that arise in this context are whether and when the OUN ceased to be a typical East Central European fascist movement. Did it happen after Bandera’s arrest and the German rejection of the state proclaimed by the OUN-B on 30 June 1941, or when the OUN-B formed the UPA in late 1942 and early 1943, or after the Second World War, when the UPA opposed the Soviet Union until the early 1950s, or has the OUN remained fascist until today?
When evaluating the question of fascism, we should also recall the theoretical concepts that contradict the assumption than the OUN was a typical fascist movement. Paxton, for example, suggested that fascism can only appear in a state after a period of democracy or a period of disappointment with democracy. According to this reasoning, it would only be possible to consider the OUN a fascist organization if we were to accept that there was a period of democracy in the Second Republic, in which the OUN emerged and acted prior to the Second World War. This assumption, however, would not be entirely convincing, for at least two reasons. First, the Second Republic was a multiethnic state ruled by Poles, and not a Ukrainian state with a democratic political system. Second, it is difficult to talk about democracy in the Second Polish Republic, especially after Piłsudski’s coup d’état in 1926. Paxton would have classified the OUN as a fascism “created by mimicry,” or as one of the movements that borrowed “elements of fascist décor in order to lend themselves an aura of force, vitality, and mass mobilization,” rather than a typical fascist movement. According to his classification of five stages, the OUN would reach stage three but only for a very short period of time.[2392]
The Ukrainian extreme nationalists, with the exception of a few ideologists, did not usually call themselves fascists, although they claimed to be related to other fascist movements. Between 1918 and 1945, the word “fascism” occurred in the Ukrainian far-right discourse less frequently than the terms “Ukrainian nationalism” and “revolutionary nationalism.” “Ukrainian nationalism” became the official description of the OUN movement, similar to “National Socialism” and “Italian Fascism.” Bandera and the OUN understood themselves as Ukrainian nationalists, spiritually related to the National Socialists, Italian Fascists, and similar movements, such as the Ustaša and Iron Guard. They did not understand “nationalism” and “fascism” to be mutually exclusive. Only after the conflict with Nazi Germany, and even more so after Germany began to lose the war, the OUN and UPA leaders started to distinguish between Ukrainian nationalism and fascism. Nevertheless, Bandera and his ZCh OUN faction did not develop any negative feelings toward fascism during and after the end of the Second World War although they publicly announced that Ukrainian nationalism had never been related to fascism and had nothing in common with it.
No fascist movement can exist without a leader. The Ukrainian language has two terms for leader, Providnyk and Vozhd’. Bandera was usually referred to as the Providnyk, and only less frequently, Vozhd’. Unlike Providnyk, Vozhd’ also means leader in Russian and was used by Lenin and Stalin, among others. In Ukrainian in the 1920s and 1930s, Vozhd’ had a more totalitarian meaning than Providnyk, but this distinction evaporated in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the 1920s and 1930s, the UVO and the OUN used Providnyk to describe the leader of the entire organization, the leader of the homeland executive, or the leader of a combat unit. At that time, Vozhd’ was the more appropriate translation of Duce or Führer. The term “Vozhd’” appeared in documents such as Stsibors’kyi’s Natsiokratiia, in 1935. After Konovalets’ assassination in 1938, the leadership of the OUN gave Mel’nyk the title of Vozhd’. In order to distinguish themselves from the older generation, the younger ultranationalists referred to their leader as the Providnyk, on whom they based their own Führerprinzip. The advantage of the word Providnyk was that it did not occur in Russian, and therefore Bandera could not have been confused with Stalin. Nevertheless, some sectors of the OUN-B, unaware of the policies of the OUN-B leadership in the General Government, referred to Bandera as Vozhd’ during the “Ukrainian National Revolution.” The OUN-B intended to make Bandera the Providnyk of the Ukrainian state that it succeeded in proclaiming but failed to keep. The term Providnyk remained in use during the Second World War. When Nazi Germany began losing the war, the OUN and UPA leadership officially distanced itself from fascism, denied ever having been fascist and replaced the Führerprinzip based on the Providnyk, with a triumvirate. Nevertheless, Ukrainian nationalists loyal to Bandera continued to regard him as their Providnyk. Similarly during the Cold War, nationalists supporting Bandera continued to call him the Providnyk. After Bandera’s assassination, the term “Providnyk” was used to describe Bandera as the legendary leader of the movement; first by the Ukrainian diaspora and later by Bandera’s admirers in post-Soviet Ukraine. While they honored Bandera as the Providnyk, they did not necessarily intend to do so in respect of Bandera as a fascist leader. When they used the term, they usually meant the leader of a movement that tried to liberate Ukraine from German and Soviet occupation, and they honored Bandera as the symbol of the “liberation struggle,” frequently not being aware of the actual meaning of the term, and sometimes the history of the movement.
When evaluating Bandera and his cult in the context of fascism, we should also discuss the question of Ukrainian neo-fascism, or the rebirth of fascism. The epoch of fascism “officially” finished with the end of the Second World War, the collapse of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and the disappearance of other fascist movements and regimes. The atrocities committed by Nazis and similar movements completely discredited fascism, but the fascists did not evaporate after 1945 or suddenly become democrats. The rise of the Bandera cult after his assassination did not transform or retransform the Ukrainian diaspora and later post-Soviet Ukrainians into fascists. Nevertheless, the communities which, during the Cold War or after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, began to glorify Bandera, his movement, or his political ideas, developed a positive form of memory of Bandera and the OUN. By commemorating and celebrating Bandera, they did not allow the epoch of fascism to pass away. Similarly, they refused to accept a critical and unapologetic dealing with the movement’s past. Instead, they made Bandera and the OUN an essential component of their identity and continued to sacralize them. Paxton suggested that organizations that “imitate the exotic colored-shirts of an earlier generation” are not the most interesting phenomena today. According to him, “new functional equivalent of fascism would probably work best, as George Orwell reminded us, clad in the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time.” This apocalyptic suggestion seems to materialize in today’s western Ukraine, where young admirers of Bandera, or the Waffen-SS Galizien, wear patriotic clothes, in particular embroidered shirts and other items of folk wardrobe, perform fascist salutes during their “patriotic” Bandera events, and shout various fascist and neo-fascist slogans.[2393]
The two capsules of cyanide fired by the western Ukrainian KGB agent Bohdan Stashyns’kyi into Bandera’s face at about 1:00 p.m. on 15 October 1959 were the beginning of the Providnyk’s turbulent afterlife. Newspapers controlled by OUN-B émigrés, such as Shliakh peremohy, Homin Ukraїny, and Ukraїns’ka dumka commemorated Bandera’s death for weeks, presenting him as a hero and martyr who fell for Ukraine. About 1,500 admirers attended Bandera’s funeral in Munich. Others mourned the Providnyk in churches and at commemorative gatherings in a number of localities in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, the United Kingdom, West Germany, New Zealand, and the United States. The resettlement of the DPs in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the basis for the globalization of Bandera’s afterlife. The OUN, UPA, and Waffen-SS Galizien veterans passed the Bandera cult on to the younger generations. The cult did not start to disappear in the nationalist diaspora communities until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and has not even done so in some of them at the time of writing.
By commemorating Bandera, the diaspora communities—among them individuals who had admired the Providnyk in the 1930s and 1940s—turned themselves again into “charismatic communities.” Bandera’s commemorations were deeply ritualized. They were usually composed of a religious part—the panakhyda—and a political gathering. The distinction between religion and nationalism blurred during the commemorations, composing a powerful anti-Soviet mixture. The Bandera cult was also propagated during protest marches and anti-Soviet demonstrations in cities such as London, Ottawa, and Washington. In Munich, the mecca of the Banderites, members of the “charismatic community” visited the Bandera grave and burned Soviet flags in front of the apartment building in which the Providnyk was assassinated. In late 1959, some of the Bandera worshipers also mourned and extolled the Croatian Poglavnik, Pavelić, who died two months after Bandera, as the result of an assassination attempt in April 1957. The Bandera commemorations were also related to and sometimes embedded in various militaristic and religious celebrations of the Waffen-SS Galizien, UPA, Weapons Holidays, and Feast of Saint Mary the Protectress.
In addition to commemorations and demonstrations, the Bandera cult manifested itself in the Bandera museum established in Nottingham and relocated to London. The creators of this institution honored Bandera as a hero and martyr who fought and fell for Ukraine, as the spiritual leader of the OUN and UPA, and also as the symbol of the Ukrainian “liberation struggle.” The museum was not established to educate visitors about Bandera’s life, or Ukrainian genocidal nationalism. It was created to eulogize and sacralize the Providnyk and the “tragic” but “heroic” struggle of his generation. The creators of the museum created an interesting connection between Bandera and the UPA. Although Bandera never joined this army, the UPA became one of the central features of the exhibition. This was not entirely unjustified, because some of the UPA partisans had regarded Bandera as the spiritual leader of Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism and strongly identified with him. Nevertheless, the main purpose of prominently featuring the UPA in the Bandera museum seems to be the denial of UPA atrocities through Bandera’s victimization and glorification. The Holocaust and the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust were completely ignored in the museum. The pictures of the Ukrainian prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp suggested that only OUN-B members were kept and annihilated in this camp. Petro Mirchuk, the first Bandera hagiographer, similarly presented the Jewish-Ukrainian relationship during the Second World War in his publications about Bandera and the Ukrainian nationalists. Mirchuk paved the way for later Bandera hagiographers and deniers of the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust and of other atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists.
The apologetic and eulogizing narrative about Bandera and his “liberation movement” was created not only by nationalist fanatics, Bandera’s hard admirers and far-right activists, but also by a number of scholars who worked at universities in Canada, Germany, France, and the United States. Some of these scholars, such as Taras Hunchak, Petro Potichnyi, and Volodymyr Kosyk were veterans of the OUN or UPA. John Armstrong, the first professional historian who investigated the Ukrainian nationalists during the Second World War, was not entirely uncritical about his object of study but, for various reasons, he did not include in his research the pogroms in 1941, the ethnic cleansing in 1943–1944, the murder of Jews by the UPA, and several other matters that need to be considered when writing the history of Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War. Armstrong, like many other historians at that time, worked with and relied on Ukrainian and German sources alone. He ignored the perspective and experiences of OUN and UPA victims. In addition, he seems to have been impacted by the Cold War revival of national narratives of the states on which communism had been imposed in 1944. For these and other reasons, the author of the first comprehensive monograph on Ukrainian nationalism presented a number of erroneous conclusions, which were not perceived as such at the time and by some historians even today. His study was regarded not only by Ukrainian nationalists—such as Dontsov, who quoted and praised Armstrong in his foreword to Stets’ko’s book 30 chervnia 1941 (30 June 1941)—but also by politically unmotivated professional historians as a standard, academic, objective, and reliable monograph on Ukrainian nationalism during the Second World War.[2394]
Ivan Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi was not the only Galician Ukrainian who left Ukraine during the Second World War, worked at a Western university during the Cold War, and had the opportunity to rethink genocidal nationalism or to open himself towards democracy. As indicated in chapter 9, many other Ukrainian intellectuals worked during the Cold War at various universities in Canada, France, West Germany, and the United States. The majority of them however, unlike Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, erected ideological walls and began to protect their nationalist ideas as patriotic traditions or anticommunist convictions. They did not investigate the Second World War, Ukrainian fascism, and the Holocaust but instead, either ignored these subjects or wrote apologetic and distorted histories, which presented the Ukrainian nationalists as anti-German and anti-Soviet freedom fighters. Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi, both a historian and contemporary witness, rethought rather than empirically investigated the OUN and the Second World War. He was critical of the OUN-B, whose members he had known from Ukraine and also from his life after emigration.
Nevertheless, Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi seems to have had no objections concerning post-war collaboration with people such as Kubiiovych. The former UTsK leader was in his eyes a more moderate and rational individual than the banderivshchyna, not least because after the Second World War Kubiiovych initiated many valuable projects, such as the Ukrainian Encyclopedia. The question whether it was necessary to ignore what Kubiiovych had done during the Second World War in order to develop the Encyclopedia and other projects did not matter to Lysiak-Rudnyts’kyi.
Although the Bandera cult during the Cold War was a typical far-right nationalist and neo-fascist cult, the diaspora Ukrainians joined the “charismatic communities” commemorating Bandera for various reasons. Some of them commemorated Bandera because they had already admired the Providnyk during the trials in Warsaw and Lviv in 1935–1936, or during the “Ukrainian National Revolution” in 1941. Other Ukrainians engaged in the Bandera cult because they were Ukrainian patriots, or because they thought that performing Bandera rituals, or honoring the “freedom fighters” of the UPA, would be effective ways of protesting against the Soviet regime. Younger people who were raised in the diaspora communities were involved in the Bandera cult by their parents, friends, or youth organizations such as SUM and Plast. A part of the “charismatic community,” at least the OUN and UPA veterans who had participated in the Holocaust or collaborated with Germans during the Second World War, were aware of the atrocities committed by the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists, the fascistization of the movement, and the collaboration with Nazi Germany. They also understood that commemorating Bandera, or celebrating him as a Ukrainian national hero or as a victim of the Soviet regime, was a good way of denying the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA, and other “inconvenient” moments of OUN history. Nevertheless, some other sections of the Ukrainian communities might not have been aware of the OUN and UPA atrocities, because Armstrong and other historians did not explain them in their studies or because the Bandera cult suggested that heroes and martyrs did not kill civilians and did not collaborate with Nazis.
During the Cold War, the OUN-B leaders were recognized as anticommunist “freedom fighters” not only by the far-right Ukrainian diaspora communities but also by many other anti-Soviet groups, including the leading politicians of the largest and most powerful states of the Western bloc. During the 1950s, Bandera gave interviews on the radio, in which he assured the West German audience that the OUN and UPA were composed of patriotic freedom fighters who had fought against the Nazi regime and continued the struggle against the Soviet one. Stets’ko, who in 1941 had written letters to the Führer, the Duce, the Poglavnik, and the Caudillo, asking them to accept the newly proclaimed Ukrainian state, was in 1966 designated an honorary citizen of the Canadian city of Winnipeg. In 1983 he was invited to the Capitol and the White House, where George Bush and Ronald Reagan received the “last premier of a free Ukrainian state.” On 11 July 1982 during Captive Nations Week, the red-and-black flag of the OUN-B, introduced at the Second Great Congress of the Ukrainian Nationalists in 1941, flew over the United States Capitol. It symbolized freedom and democracy, and not ethnic purity and genocidal fascism. Nobody understood that it was the same flag that had flown from the Lviv city hall and other buildings, under which Jewish civilians were mistreated and killed in July 1941 by individuals who identified themselves with the flag.
Soviet propaganda, which depicted Bandera in complete contrast to the narrative of the Ukrainian diaspora, infuriated and radicalized the Ukrainian far-right diaspora communities and strengthened the Bandera cult. According to Soviet ideology, Bandera and his followers betrayed the Ukrainian nation similarly to the way Vlasov and his movement betrayed the Russian nation. Soviet propaganda provided the term “Banderites” with new connotations. The meaning of the word changed from “murderer”—as used by Poles and Jews exposed to OUN and UPA mass violence in 1943 and 1944—to “traitor,” “bandit,” “fascist” and “capitalist.” Between 1944 and 1946, Soviet propaganda also used the term “German-Ukrainian nationalists” very frequently, to refer to UPA insurgents. It suggested that the Ukrainian nationalists were lackeys or a limb of Nazi Germany, which continued fighting against the Soviet Union even after the defeat of its master. A few years after the end of the Second World War, Soviet propaganda started to favor the term “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” which condemned the Ukrainian nationalists as “capitalists.”
Like the UPA, the Soviet regime understood and used violence as propaganda. The NKVD hanged UPA partisans and disfigured their bodies before the eyes of locals, including even groups of school children, while spreading rumors about human ears found in the pockets of the Banderites. Soviet ideology transformed the Ukrainian communist writer Iaroslav Halan, who denounced the Ukrainian nationalists and was allegedly killed by a UPA rebel, into a hero and martyr. In general, the Soviet discourse transformed all kinds of victims killed by the Ukrainian nationalists into martyrs and heroes of the Soviet Union. Soviet propaganda also ignored and denied the war crimes committed by the NKVD, Soviet partisans, and Red Army soldiers, and did not allow the victims’ relatives to mourn their loss. In these circumstances many ordinary Ukrainians turned the OUN and UPA into anti-Soviet heroes and forgot their atrocities against Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians.
During the period of perestroika, when the Bandera cult re-emerged in western Ukraine, people there were exposed to two propagandist narratives—the Soviet and the Ukrainian nationalist. The anti-Soviet movement, composed in western Ukraine of dissidents and nationalists, used Bandera and the OUN-UPA as anticommunist icons, symbolizing freedom and independence. The first and the second Bandera monuments erected in Staryi Uhryniv, Bandera’s birthplace, were demolished by a Soviet task force. The third monument of the Providnyk was ironically and symbolically recast from a statue of Lenin. Many monuments devoted to the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists or to the heroes of the Soviet Union were replaced by monuments devoted to Bandera and the OUN and UPA “heroes.” Bandera and the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists again became important elements of western Ukrainian identity. Not only far-right activists but also the mainstream of western Ukrainian society, including high-school teachers and university professors, considered Bandera to be a Ukrainian national hero, a freedom fighter, and a person who should be honored for his struggle against the Soviet Union. The post-Soviet memory politics in Ukraine completely ignored democratic values and did not develop any kind of non-apologetic approach to history. Nationalism became the main foundation of the collective identity in western Ukraine, and a kind of post-Soviet and pro-Russian populist communism in eastern Ukraine.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, OUN émigrés such as Slava Stets’ko, the widow of Iaroslav Stets’ko, returned to Ukraine, where they founded far-right political organizations such as the KUN, explained to young historians, at conferences organized by the OUN, how to write history, and facilitated the popularization of the Bandera cult in other ways. Local OUN veterans such as Petro Duzhyi, and leaders of paramilitary and far-right organizations such as Ievhen Perepicha published voluminous hagiographies of the Providnyk. Other OUN émigrés, such as Volodymyr Kosyk, initiated the TsDVR, which was incorporated into the Lviv Academy of Sciences. The TsDVR provided an academic foundation for the Bandera cult and has continued to whitewash the Ukrainian history of OUN and UPA atrocities. It thereby continued a process begun by OUN émigrés such as Mykola Lebed’, Petro Mirchuk, and Kosyk in the early Cold War years. The director of the TsDVR, Volodymyr V’’iatrovych, had a significant influence on the memory politics of the Ukrainian government during Iushchenko’s presidency. This resulted in the designation of Bandera and other leaders of the OUN and UPA as heroes of Ukraine.
In addition to V’’iatrovych, a number of other historians propagated and legitimized the Bandera cult. Some of them, such as Mykola Posivynch, composed hagiographic biographies; others, such as Alexander Gogun, assumed that everything that was anti-Soviet, like Bandera, the OUN-UPA, Vlasov, and the ROA, was democratic. Some historians, similarly to the far-right activists, legitimized the new post-Soviet narratives or denied the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust with the help of Soviet discourses and stereotypes, which they claimed to deconstruct. Edward Prus’ biography of Bandera, published in 2004, appears to totally contradict these post-Soviet nationalist distortions. The kresowiacy historian combined Soviet discourses with the Polish nationalist and martyrological narrative. Although he came to completely different conclusions from those of V’’iatrovych and Hunchak, Prus agreed with them that “Jewish Bolshevism” was not a stereotype or a nationalist perception of reality, but the reality.
By 2009 about thirty Bandera monuments were unveiled in western Ukraine, four Bandera museums were opened, and an unknown number of streets were renamed after him. The Bandera cult that appeared in post-Soviet Ukraine resembles that which the Ukrainian diaspora had practiced during the Cold War. The new enemies of the Banderites became Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainians, Russians, democrats, and occasionally Poles, Jews, and others. The spectrum of people who practice this cult is very wide. Among the Bandera admirers, one can find on the one hand far-right activists with shaved heads performing the fascist salute during their commemorations, and arguing that the Holocaust was the brightest episode in Ukrainian history, and on the other hand, high-school teachers and university professors. Both groups assume that Ukraine is dependent on Russia. Occasionally, they argue that Ukraine is occupied by democrats or Russified eastern Ukrainians, whom they would like to Ukrainianize or Banderize. Similarly, they perceive constructive critique or academic inquiry on the subject of Bandera or Ukrainian nationalism as a political campaign against their nation or as banderophobia.
In general, the Bandera cult in post-Soviet Ukraine took more eccentric forms than in the diaspora. Businessmen and far-right activists commercialized the cult while opening UPA pubs, and organizing Bandera music festivals. The cult was also made attractive to people who considered the Bandera monument in Lviv too monumental or did not want to belong to far-right paramilitary organizations. Similarly, the cult attracted a number of leading intellectuals and scholars into far-right organizations. One good example is Serhii Kvit, the rector of the National University of Kiev-Mohyla Academy, who, apart from writing an apologetic dissertation about Dmytro Dontsov at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, was a member of the KUN. The process of sacralizing Bandera in western Ukraine was accompanied by erecting monuments devoted to Stalin and to the victims of the UPA, and preserving numerous monuments to Lenin and to various Soviet heroes in eastern Ukraine.
Another problematic form of commemorating Bandera and the OUN-UPA was established by the community of Polish kresowiacy. This group embedded the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and eastern Galicia in the nationalist narrative of Polish martyrology, denying the Polish nationalist policies in the Second Republic, and atrocities committed by Polish troops against Ukrainian civilians during the Second World War. In a number of nationalist publications, they instrumentalized the suffering of the victims of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and eastern Galicia. To understand the nature of the kresowiacy community, one needs to recall two aspects. First, that between 1945 and 1990 communist policy in Poland did not give much or any opportunity to mourn the victims of the OUN and UPA and to come to terms with this difficult aspect of Polish history. Second, that after 1990, the generally uncritical multipatriotic and populist policy of reconciliation between Poland and Ukraine did not pay much respect to the victims of Ukrainian genocidal nationalism and of the Polish military units that murdered Ukrainian civilians. This policy, in which many leading Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals and politicians engaged, preferred to honor anti-Soviet armies, such as the UPA and AK, which fought for the “independence” of their nations.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a number of nationalist factions of the Ukrainian diaspora did not cease to commemorate the Providnyk, but a few OUN and UPA veterans—who stayed in Munich after the war and knew Bandera in person—stated in interviews given to me in 2008 that they could not understand the obsessive fascination with Bandera in western Ukraine. They said that this fervent admiration of the Providnyk reminded them of the cult they had experienced in the 1930s and 1940s. They also stated that it distorted Bandera as a person and the movement that he represented. Some of them were also concerned about the collective denial of the atrocities committed by the OUN and UPA, which they experienced during the Second World War, although they never wanted to talk about particular war crimes. Similarly, Ukrainians outside the area of the Bandera cult could not comprehend the fascination with the Providnyk. The city council of Uzhhorod in Transcarpathia, in reaction to the proposal from eastern Galician Ternopil’ to erect a Bandera monument, stated that they “do not share the fascination with” Bandera and “consider agitation for any radical actions as outrageous.” Scholars such as Himka and Marples, who had been uncritical of the OUN and UPA for various reasons in the 1980s, rethought their understanding of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1990s and began to investigate this movement. In contrast, several “liberal” postcommunist historians from both western and eastern Ukraine expressed the opinion that the history of Bandera and his movement should be distorted, in order to reconcile western and eastern Ukrainians and to help Ukraine to join the European Union.
Half a decade before the Bandera debate, Sofia Grachova criticized the Ukrainian “liberal” historian Iaroslav Hrytsak for marginalizing the pogroms, questioning information about their size, blaming the pogroms on Germans, Soviets, and indirectly on the very victims—Jews, questioning Jewish memoirs because of their “anti-Ukrainian” character, denying the antisemitic element of OUN ideology, adopting the perspective of the OUN-B activist Iaroslav Stets’ko, believing in the stereotype of “Jewish Bolshevism,” having more sympathy for traditional than politically active Jews, and several other problematic matters. Grachova’s criticism was alarming, because it was essentially correct and because Hrytsak represented the progressive and open-minded factions of Ukrainian historians. Hrytsak’s book Sketch of Ukrainian History, first published in 1996 and later republished, was extensively used at Ukrainian universities and in schools. Despite its weaknesses related to the Second World War, it has still been one of the best available books on modern Ukrainian history.
The Bandera debate in 2009–2010 has finally demonstrated that not only Ukrainian nationalists but also a number of Ukrainian “liberal” and “progressive” intellectuals are not immune to the Bandera cult and for various reasons refuse to take notice of studies on the subject of Ukrainian nationalism. On the one hand, some of these intellectuals criticize the nationalist historians and far-right activists such as V’’iatrovych and Tiahnybok but, on the other hand, they propagate and legitimize the Bandera cult in a more subtle way. Unlike V’’iatrovych and Tiahnybok, who try to establish a far-right nationalist Bandera cult, the “liberal” intellectuals vote for the cult of a person who symbolizes resistance. During the Bandera debate, some of them protected Bandera as an “inconvenient hero.” Others argued that Bandera is an element of the “regional pluralism of symbols” or an integral element of the Ukrainian collective identity.
The question whether the political conflicts in 2013–2014 and the civil war in 2014 were in some way related to the Bandera cult and the apologetic attitude of some sections of Ukrainian society toward Ukrainian extreme nationalism is not the subject of this study, but it should be briefly discussed because of the disturbing nature and horrific consequences of the violent events of 2013 and 2014 for Ukrainian society and the Ukrainian state. It would be wrong to assume that the Bandera cult or the apologetic attitude to Ukrainian nationalism, led solely or in the first instance, to these violent events. Such an assumption would distort the complex cultural and political relationships between “western” and “eastern” Ukrainians and between Ukraine and Russia. It would also ignore the complicated political situation within Ukraine, and exonerate the policies of Vladimir Putin and other involved parties. Nevertheless, the rise of nationalism in western Ukraine and the inability to rethink Bandera and his epoch has contributed to the polarization and radicalization of postcommunist Ukraine. This process has manifested itself in western Ukraine, in the erection of monuments devoted to Bandera and other nationalists; and in the east, in the preservation of Lenin monuments and other Soviet monuments and the erection of new monuments to Stalin. On the other hand, democracy and the concept of civil society have not played any major role in Ukrainian cultural, intellectual, and political life, and they have sometimes become confused with nationalism and other forms of extremism.
The first open debate about Bandera in 2009–2010 demonstrated that it is possible to discuss Bandera, the OUN, the UPA, the Holocaust, or the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust, but it also showed that Ukrainian intellectuals are not prepared to rethink these subjects. One important reason why Ukrainians cannot rethink the “uncomfortable” elements of Ukrainian history is that one needs to feel empathy for the victims of Ukrainian nationalism in order to sympathize with them, and to be able to comprehend all aspects of Ukrainian national history, including the mass violence of the Ukrainian nationalists. Such empathy, however, cannot be established because the Bandera cult and the glorification and sacralization of the perpetrators declare the genocidal policies of the murderers to be correct, and the victims of the OUN and UPA to be guilty of being killed. This kind of thinking simultaneously belittles, denies, and glorifies the crimes committed by the OUN and UPA and invites Ukrainians to identify themselves with the perpetrators, known in the post-Soviet discourse as “national heroes,” “eternal heroes,” or “heroes of Ukraine.” This state of affairs can be also described as a coalition of silence, or collective or organized denial. It comes about to a large extent unconsciously, and it may be compared to the situation in Germany in the first decades after the Second World War. The few individuals who do not admire the perpetrators and who develop empathy for the victims of Ukrainian nationalism are condemned and discredited by other members of the community.
It is interesting to observe that some scholars, mainly “liberals” in postcommunist Ukraine, can better empathize with the Polish than with the Jewish and Ukrainian victims of the OUN-UPA mass violence. These intellectuals confirm that Polish civilians were murdered by the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists, but they are unable to recognize and state the fact that a substantial number of Jewish and Ukrainian civilians were murdered by the same formations of Ukrainian nationalists for similar reasons. That more research has been done on the ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and eastern Galicia than on the anti-Jewish and anti-Ukrainian terror, can explain this phenomenon only to a certain extent, because the anti-Jewish and anti-Ukrainian mass violence of the OUN-UPA has also been investigated by several scholars and the basic facts about this kind of mass violence have been known for years. The reasons for disavowing the anti-Jewish and anti-Ukrainian mass violence seem, however, to differ from each other. Whereas the reason for the disavowal of anti-Jewish violence seems to be nationalism, which is still deeply rooted in Ukrainian academic and political culture, in the case of the anti-Ukrainian violence it is a deep feeling of shame concerning “national heroes” who had killed members of their own ethnic community.
The thorough and longstanding nationalist sacralization of the Providnyk and his movement would be much more difficult without the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, the Soviet terror in western Ukraine, and Soviet propaganda. The Soviet regime not only defeated the OUN and UPA but it also extensively and brutally targeted the civilian population in western Ukraine. Almost every family in eastern Galicia and Volhynia suffered in some manner from the Soviet terror. Many people who supported the UPA were killed, arrested, or deported to the Gulag—as were many who did not support the UPA. In these circumstances, Ukrainians in eastern Galicia, and to a lesser extent in Volhynia, turned Bandera and his followers into a symbol of resistance against the Soviet regime.
The celebration of Bandera not as a “fascist” but only as a symbol of “resistance” is a result of the post-Soviet patriotic sacralization of the Providnyk and his movement. It allows the admiration of Bandera, while avoiding the accusation of identifying with and approving of Bandera’s genocidal ideas. It suggests that one who has established a positive emotional attitude to Bandera, only honors him because Bandera resisted the Soviet Union and not because he tried to introduce a fascist dictatorship in Ukraine, or voted for wiping out the ethnic and political “enemies of the Ukrainian nation.” This also suggests that the OUN and UPA, of which Bandera became a symbol, can be commemorated only as a movement that resisted the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and not as a movement that imitated and adopted fascism and killed over 100,000 non-Ukrainian and Ukrainian inhabitants of the western Ukrainian territories. This kind of memory of Bandera and his movement makes the process of coming to terms with the Ukrainian past impossible. Indirectly, it denies the Holocaust or the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust and pays no respect to the victims of Ukrainian nationalism.
The process of mastering its own history is a process of healing a society. It moves the society from a posttraumatic state into a state of awareness of all aspects of its own past. In this sense, the Bandera cult is not only a historical but also a sociological and psychological matter. It suppresses one Ukrainian trauma with the help of another one. The killing of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians by the Ukrainian nationalists caused a classic perpetrator trauma in western Ukrainian society. This trauma was followed by another one, a victim trauma, caused by the Soviet terror. In the following decades, Ukrainians either had no opportunity to come to terms with their history or deliberately refused to do so. They could mourn neither the perpetrator trauma, nor the victim trauma. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, such mourning was impossible because of the Soviet memory politics and the diaspora discourse. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Bandera cult suppressed the memory of the crimes committed by the OUN and UPA with the help of the suffering caused to Ukrainians by the Soviet regime.
An increasing number of Ukrainian historians are aware of the “unpleasant” elements of the Ukrainian history and are concerned about the extensive and ritualized denial of OUN and UPA atrocities. Cultural, social, and political pressure, however, discourages many Ukrainian intellectuals from openly expressing their opinions and constrains them to express only relativized views that appear to be appropriate in the Ukrainian context. Similarly, these scholars do not publish on Ukrainian nationalism in a direct and unapologetic way, because they fear that they will be collectively berated by their colleagues, friends, and relatives. For the same reason, some of them publicly condemn critical research on Ukrainian nationalism and on the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust.
In the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, an entire spectrum of methods to protect the nationalist discourse has been developed by various elements of Ukrainian society, and also by a number of non-Ukrainian historians who sympathize with Ukrainian nationalism. These methods were invented and applied in order to discredit scholars who investigate Ukrainian nationalism and thereby uncover new aspects of the ethnic and political violence of Ukrainian extreme nationalism, or the nationalist distortions of Ukrainian history. The spectrum of these methods is wide and has been observed before in similar forms in other debates in which the honor of the nation was at stake. Scholars who investigate the subject may, for example, use “wrong methodology” or may not be “scholarly enough.” They may have “bad intentions” toward Ukrainians, or they may investigate the OUN and UPA in the context of Holocaust and fascist studies, and not in the context of Ukrainian studies or the Ukrainian resistance. Similarly, all kinds of real and alleged mistakes are found in the publications of these historians and are presented as sins against science in order to discredit them and thereby to protect the good name of the nation or to maintain good relationships with Ukrainian scholars.
One of the most alarming issues related to the sacralization of Bandera and the OUN and UPA is the question of values represented by Bandera, and of the atrocities conducted by the Ukrainian nationalists. The process of heroization and sacralization does not only whitewash the movement of atrocities and other “unpleasant” aspects such as fascistization or collaboration with Nazi Germany but it also sacralizes the perpetrators. It transforms their genocidal deeds into taboo, a discussion of which is beyond any social norm because it would cause harm to the community. Societies that have established such taboos have usually suffered from a trauma and are very sensitive about their past. They protect distorted and sometimes ridiculous explanations of their past in order to avoid the pain that would result from uncovering their obfuscated history.
The Bandera cult is not the only phenomenon, but certainly one of the most important ones, that does not allow Ukrainians to mourn the past and rethink their history. Although, theoretically, mourning the past appears to be easy, it is not easy at all. It requires a period of latency. The mourning community has to act out and work though the trauma. It needs time to recognize that “its members, instead of being heroes, have been perpetrators who violated the cultural premises of their own identity.”[2395] Given the state of cultural, social and political affairs and the level of intellectual and political culture in Ukraine, it might take decades until the “heroes” leave Ukraine and enable Ukrainians to mourn and rethink their history. Also, many intermediate stages, which change little or nothing, might occur.