Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist

During the interwar period, Bandera and the OUN called themselves “nationalists,” but regarded the OUN as a movement related to the Italian Fascists, the National Socialists, the Iron Guard, and similar movements. In this study, therefore, they will be called either nationalist or fascist, depending on the context. Individuals or groups during the Cold War or after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, who established a cultural, spiritual, or emotional continuity between themselves and the interwar OUN, its leaders and members, or its politics, will be referred to as “nationalist,” “neo-fascist,” “radical right,” or “far right,” depending on the context. “Neo-fascism” in this study means the rebirth of fascist ideas and aesthetics after the end of the Second World War, when the main fascist states had disappeared, and fascism as an ideology was completely discredited on account of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and other similar movements and regimes.

The terms “fascism” and “radical right” or “far right” do not mean the same thing. The term “radical right” is also an ambiguous one. On the one hand, it has been used since the 1950s, especially by political scientists, to describe ultranationalist, anticommunist, fundamentalist, or populist parties. On the other hand, scholars use it in a more general context to refer to modern radical nationalist movements, which have been emerging in Europe since the late nineteenth century. In general, the term “radical right” is a broader one than “fascism.” “Fascism” bears a more specific meaning than “radical right.” It refers to a specific kind of “radical right” movement that emerged after the First World War, such as the Italian Fascists, the National Socialists, and a number of other smaller parties or organizations that sought to take power and introduce fascist dictatorships.[63]

Sacralization of Politics

and the Heroization-Demonization Dichotomy

The sacralization of politics is a theoretical concept related to the previously discussed notions of cult, myth, charisma, and fascism. Emilio Gentile, one of the leading theorists of this concept, argued that totalitarian movements and regimes have the tendency to sacralize politics and to create political religions. According to Gentile, the “sacralisation of politics takes place when politics is conceived, lived and represented through myths, rituals, and symbols that demand faith in the sacralised secular entity, dedication among the community of believers, enthusiasm for action, and a warlike spirit and sacrifice in order to secure its defense and its triumph.”[64]

When analyzing the radical and revolutionary form of Ukrainian nationalism, which was deeply influenced by religion, it is important to keep in mind that the “sacralization of politics does not necessarily lead to conflict with traditional religions, and neither does it lead to a denial of the existence of any supernatural supreme being.”[65] On the contrary, the relationship between political and traditional religion is very complex. Political religions take over religious elements and “transform them into a system of beliefs, myths and rituals,” in consequence of which, the boundaries between them frequently blur: ordinary individuals are transformed into worshipers, political symbols became sacralized, and national heroes are perceived as secular saints.[66]

Gentile correctly observed that the sacralization of politics in the twentieth century was catalyzed by the First World War, during which several countries used God and religion to legitimize violence. After the war, even movements that had been declared to be atheist or anti-religious used religious symbols to legitimize their ideologies and to attract the masses. The cult of the fallen, heroes and martyrs, the symbolism of death and resurrection, dedication to and exaltation of the nation, and the mystic qualities of blood and sacrifice were very common elements of militarist and totalitarian movements.[67] The sacralization of the state was another significant variety of political religion, which became especially important in the Ukrainian context. When Ukrainians did not succeed in establishing a state, the attempt to do so became, for the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists, a matter of life and death.[68]

After the Second World War, because of specific political circumstances, elements of the Ukrainian revolutionary nationalists continued to sacralize politics, especially in the diaspora. Both before and after Bandera’s assassination, his cult was composed of various religious elements. After his death, the transformation of Bandera into a martyr was one of them. In order to explore this matter, Gentile’s approach will be combined with Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description.” Using descriptive analyses of its rituals and its creation of various hagiographic items, we will try to understand the meaning of the Bandera cult, and the role it has played in the invention of Ukrainian tradition.[69]

Related to the question of sacralization is the heroization-demonization dichotomy. This notion will be explored in this study, but it should not prevent us from uncovering Bandera’s life and the history of his movement. The depiction of individuals as heroes and villains, or friends and enemies, is an intrinsic element of totalitarian ideologies. The main question to be investigated in this context is: Which ideology met what kind of needs, while depicting Bandera as a hero, or as a villain, and what kind of hero or villain did Bandera become?[70]

The investigation of Bandera, the OUN, and Ukrainian nationalism must also relate to the Soviet Union and Soviet ideology. The OUN perceived the Soviet Union as its most important enemy, before—and especially after—Jews and Poles had largely disappeared from Ukraine. Bandera’s ultranationalist revolution after the Second World War was intended to take place in Soviet Ukraine and was directed against Soviet power. What is more, Soviet propaganda created its own Bandera image, which, during the Cold War, affected the perception of Bandera in the Western bloc and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in post-Soviet Ukraine. Therefore, the investigation of Soviet questions concerning Bandera and Ukrainian revolutionary nationalism is an important aspect of this study.[71]

Memory, Identity, Symbol, and Denial

The last theoretical notion that needs to be shortly introduced—before we move to the empirical part of this book—is memory. Bandera’s image in the collective memories of different communities has varied from the very beginning. Bandera was remembered in an idealized and heroic way by people who participated in his cult and who believed in his myth. The way that Polish, Jewish, and other survivors of the OUN and UPA terror remembered Bandera was very different from the way his worshipers among the Ukrainian diaspora did. Soviet propaganda shaped a very negative and offensive way of remembering and presenting Bandera and the OUN-UPA. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the memory of Bandera has divided post-Soviet Ukraine.

In order to analyze the different memories of Bandera, we must differentiate between at least three concepts: individual memory, collective memory, and the politics of memory. A number of people knew Bandera and thus possessed some kind of personal memory of him. The publication and dissemination of their memories allowed other individuals, who did not know Bandera in person, to familiarize themselves with his life and to develop some emotional bond with him, if they had not already done so through the cult and myth. This obviously influenced the collective memory of a community who shared a similar identity and a similar realm of experience. Both kinds of memories were influenced by the politics of memory, which defined how to conduct official commemorations, or how a biography, film, or exhibition should present the Providnyk, in order to meet the political expectations of a community, a society, or a state.[72]

The investigation of memory—like the investigation of the cult and myth—should not, however, obstruct the investigation of the “real” history of Ukrainian nationalism and the “real” personality of Bandera. Neglecting actual history or trying to understand history through the framework of memory is a dangerous tendency in contemporary historiography which, especially in fields like the Second World War or the Holocaust, opens doors to various radical right activists and other abusers of history. To avoid such problems, we should examine a memory also in the light of Holocaust denial and Holocaust obfuscation and pay particular attention to the question whether those far-right groups and nationalist communities that commemorated Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA recalled, ignored, or deliberately denied the Ukrainian contribution to the Holocaust, and other atrocities committed by the Ukrainian nationalists.[73] With this in mind, we should examine the “archives of silence,” which are the result of collective ignorance of history. These archives are full of suppressed and forgotten—but very important—elements of national history, particularly history related to ethnic and political violence, and other elements that do not correspond with a patriotic interpretation of history.[74] “‘I did that,’ says my memory. I couldn’t have done that—says my pride, and stands its ground. Finally, memory gives in,” remarked Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886.[75]

Genocide, Mass Violence, and the Complexity of the Holocaust

“Genocide” is a contested term and a concept that makes more sense in legal and political discourse than in historical studies. The use of the term may interfere with academic analysis, by obscuring links between different forms of mass violence conducted by the same group of perpetrators against various ethnic and political enemies.[76] It is not the purpose of this book to argue that some atrocities committed by the OUN, the Nazis, or the Ustaša were genocidal and that others were not, or to equate the Holocaust with other mass crimes in order to elevate the status of suffering of a particular group. My use of the term “genocide” assumes the intention of the perpetrators to annihilate a group or a community because of its national or ethnic identity. By the same token it is important to emphasize the multifarious nature of OUN violence, which was directed against all kinds of ethnic enemies and political opponents, but not against each of them to the same extent. Depending on the context, I frequently prefer terms such as “mass violence,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “crimes against humanity.” In the last two chapters I explain how various groups of political activists and even scholars have abused the term “genocide” by promoting the narrative of victimization.

For a long time, historians who studied the Holocaust, or movements such as the OUN, concentrated on perpetrator documents and overlooked the testimonies, memoirs, reports, and other accounts left by survivors. Those historians believed that the perpetrator documents hold much more reliable data than the documents left by survivors, victims, and bystanders. In the view of such historians, perpetrators were objective, exact and emotionally detached. Survivors, on the other hand, were considered to be emotional, traumatized, and not able to produce any reliable account of the events. This approach was typical of historians such as the OUN specialist John Armstrong, and some German historians such as Martin Broszat, Thilo Vogelsang, and Andreas Hillgruber, who had grown up in Nazi Germany and served in the German army. Similarly, some leading Holocaust historians such as Raul Hilberg and the first director of Yad Vashem, Ben-Zion Duner, also applied this approach. Historians such as Joseph Wulf or Léon Poliakov, who objected to the perpetrator-oriented approach, were mainly Holocaust survivors themselves. They were discredited especially by the German historians as “unscholarly.”[77]

The first public discussion of this methodological problem took place in 1987–1988 between the director of the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte) in Munich, Martin Broszat, who had joined the NSDAP on 4 April 1944, and the Holocaust survivor and leading Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer. One of the main issues in this debate was “rational” German scholarship versus the “mythical memory” of the victims.[78] The discussion, did not undo the distrust of survivor accounts but the situation began to change a decade later. In 1997 Friedländer returned to the debate in his study Nazi Germany and the Jews. He pointed out the methodological problems that were the result of neglecting survivor perspectives, and pleaded for the use of documents of both perpetrators and survivors, in order to achieve an integrated and comprehensive history.[79] Four years later, Jan Tomasz Gross published a study about the Polish town of Jedwabne. Relying on survivor testimonies Gross proved that the local Polish population killed the Jews of this locality on their own initiative and without any significant help from the Germans.[80] In the following years, historians such as Christopher Browning and Omer Bartov, who had previously concentrated on perpetrators, questioned the alleged uselessness of accounts left by victims and survivors, and provided a methodological foundation for the study of the neglected issues with the help of these documents.[81]

In this study we will follow Freidländer’s plea for an integrated history, and will use two kinds of documents: those left by perpetrators and those left by victims and survivors. This approach will enable us to obtain a full picture of the events. We will obviously deal with both kinds of documents critically. With regard to perpetrator documents, it is necessary to distinguish between propaganda documents, internal documents relating to practical matters, and apologetic postwar memoirs. We must examine the intentions of their authors and consider the circumstances under which they were written. The survivor testimonies and memoirs, on the other hand, should be read against each other and placed in context with perpetrator and bystander documents. Similarly, when analyzing records of NKVD interrogations, we should be aware that such investigations were sometimes conducted under coercive circumstances that affected the content of the records.[82]

Documents, Interpretations and Manipulations

The investigation of Bandera’s life, his cult, and the history of the OUN and UPA are highly contingent upon the study of archival documents and original publications. Because of the extremist nature of the OUN and its involvement in the Holocaust and other kinds of ethnic and political mass violence during and after the Second World War, OUN émigrés and UPA veterans began producing forged or manipulated documents during the Cold War, by means of which they whitewashed their own history. They removed undesirable and inconvenient phrases from republished documents, especially those relating to fascism, the Holocaust, and other atrocities. In 1955, for example, in a new edition of documents entitled The OUN in the Light of the Resolutions of Great Congresses, the OUN reprinted the resolutions of the Second Great Congress of the OUN in Cracow in April 1941. According to the original resolutions, the OUN adopted a fascist salute, consisting of raising the right arm “slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head,” while saying “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!), and answering “Glory to the Heroes!”(Heroiam Slava!). The 1955 edition left out this particular part of the text.[83]

Such an approach to history resembles the Soviet approach, and to the question of how to represent Bandera and the OUN. For example, the Cultural Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Komunistychna Partiia Ukraїny, or KPU) advised the producers of the film The Killer Is Known to show Bandera only at the moment when he metamorphoses into a swastika.[84] But not only OUN or Soviet publications related to the Bandera discourse contain striking misrepresentations. The book Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide contains a picture of Archbishop Andrei Sheptyts’kyi with a swastika and suggests that the head of the Greek Catholic Church carried it during the Second World War because he sympathized with Nazi Germany. The picture, however, must have been taken in the 1920s. It shows Sheptyts’kyi with two men in the uniforms of Plast, the Ukrainian scouting organization. Plast used the swastika as a symbol in the 1920s but the organization was outlawed in 1930. Moreover, Sheptyts’kyi is shown standing on his own two feet, whereas he was already confined to a wheelchair before the Second World War.[85]

Other indications of this process can be found in post-war memoirs. Mykola Klymyshyn, a close companion of Stepan Bandera, was the author of several important historical and autobiographical publications related to the Providnyk, and an important progenitor of his cult. Klymyshyn was honest enough to admit that dark spots in his publications had been whitewashed at the personal request of Stepan Bandera. He admitted this with the object of warning future generations, who would question the omission of certain aspects in his descriptions.[86] Ievhen Stakhiv, another OUN member and the author of important autobiographical publications, admits that Mykola Lebed’, another important OUN leader, asked him to forget and not to mention uncomfortable elements of the past, such as Bandera’s direction to the movement in late 1941 to repair relations with Nazi Germany and to attempt further collaboration with the Nazis.[87] To review the different kinds of “forgotten” or instrumentalized history, it is necessary to study the original documents. Some of them, and their locations, are briefly introduced here.

The Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych, AAN) holds collections of documents concerning the history of the UVO and OUN in the inter-war period. Documents relating to the investigation of OUN members involved in Bronisław Pieracki’s assassination, and to the Warsaw and Lviv trials, can be found in the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv, TDIA) and in the State Archives of Lviv Oblast (Derzhavnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koї oblasti, DALO). A number of documents—including the twenty-four volumes of the investigation records prepared for the Warsaw trial—could not be found. In all probability, they were lost during the Second World War.

Many important documents relating to Bandera and the OUN-UPA during the Second World War are located in two Kiev archives: the Central State Archives of the Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, TsDAVOV) and the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads’kykh obiednan’ Ukrainy, TsDAHO). The State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kiev (Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, HDA SBU) holds collections of NKVD interrogation files, which also contain some information on the Ukrainian nationalists. Because NKVD interrogations were coercive, and in some cases torture was applied, such documents should be used carefully and checked against other sources. The Provincial Archives of Alberta, in Edmonton, also hold essential documents on the “Ukrainian National Revolution” and the conduct of the OUN and UPA during the Second World War.[88]

Other crucial documents relating to Bandera, the OUN-UPA, and the German occupation of Ukraine are located in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv, BA) in Berlin and Koblenz, in the Military Archives (Militärarchiv, MA) in Freiburg, and in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, PAAA). In the Provincial Archives of Nordrhein-Westfalen (Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, LN-W), one can study documents from the preliminary proceedings against Theodor Oberländer. The Oberländer records are important for the study of the Lviv pogrom in 1941 and of the campaign against the Adenauer government’s Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims.

In Moscow, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-poiliticheskoi istorii, RGASOI) are two further important sources of document collections relating to Ukraine during the Second World War. The Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Warsaw (Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, AŻIH) hold a huge collection of Jewish survivor testimonies, mainly collected between 1944 and 1947 in Poland by the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH).[89] Two other important collections of survivor testimonies are located in the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and in the archives of Yad Vashem. The Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, which was founded in 1994, also collected a huge number of survivor testimonies. The early documents collected by the AŻIH are especially important for this study.[90]

The Bavarian Main State Archives (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, BayHStA) and the Munich State Archives (Staatsarchiv München, StM) mainly hold police documents relating to Bandera and the OUN after the Second World War. Documents in the possession of the intelligence services are another important source for the study of Bandera and the OUN during the Cold War, but not all intelligence services have made them accessible. Some documents on Bandera during the Cold War may be found in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. A number of important interrogation records of OUN members and UPA partisans, and other documents relating to the Cold War are located in the HAD SBU. The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii, FSB) has informed me that its archives do not contain any documents concerning Bandera’s assassination. The Federal Intelligence Service of Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) has not made most of the relevant documents available to researchers who are interested in its collaboration with the OUN.

The archives of the Stepan Bandera Museum in London hold some documents relating to Bandera’s assassination and about OUN émigrés in the Cold War period. During the last two decades, several important editions of documents relating to Stepan Bandera and the OUN-UPA have appeared in Ukraine. Some of these, such as the three volumes of Stepan Bandera in the Documents of the Soviet Organs of the State Security, together with documents from the State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, were an important source of information for this study.[91]

Literature

Until the current study, no academic biography and no study of the Bandera cult had been written, but in the last two decades a number of important studies on related subjects have appeared in German, English, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages. These studies include subjects such as the OUN, the UPA, the Second World War in Ukraine, the Holocaust in Ukraine, the Soviet occupation of Ukraine, and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict during the interwar period. Because of their huge volume, only the most relevant for the purposes of this study will be briefly introduced at this point.

The complications of the interwar period and of relations between the Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians in the Second Polish Republic, and the political situation of the Ukrainians in particular were investigated by historians such as Christoph Mick, Maksym Hon, Timothy Snyder, Jerzy Tomaszewski, and Robert Potocki.[92] Frank Golczewski published a monumental and very informative monograph on German-Ukrainian relations between 1914 and 1939.[93] The fate of Ukrainians in the Habsburg and Russian Empires, and the subject of Ukrainian nationalism in the nineteenth century were explored in the 1980s, among others by John-Paul Himka, and later by historians such as Iaroslav Hrytsak.[94] The multiethnic character of the Ukrainian territories was portrayed by scholars such as Andreas Kappeler, Natalia Yakovenko, Mark von Hagen, and a number of other scholars.[95] Bohdan Bociurkiw published an important monograph on the Greek-Catholic Church.[96] Antony Polonsky wrote a three-volume study about the Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.[97]