Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist

The Ukrainian nationalists used this situation. They portrayed Polish schools as an instrument for Polonizing the Ukrainians, and turning them into “traitors to the Ukrainian nation.” An OUN leaflet explained:

The Poles want by means of schools and teachers to make you into faithful slaves, obedient and obsequious citizens of Poland; they want to teach you to hate every-thing Ukrainian and love everything Polish. They want to make you into traitors of the Ukrainian Nation. … Therefore do not allow the enemies to make you into Janissaries! Do not allow Poles [liakhy] to turn you into their obedient slaves! You should be the knights and fighters for the freedom of Ukraine! There is a great holy war before you.[174]

Similarly, Polish teachers were perceived as instruments of Polonization. Some of them were even shot at, as was the case in the village of Dubshche (Dubszcze) where a Polish teacher had replaced a Ukrainian.[175] Another popular gesture was the profanation of Polish state or national symbols, for instance flags, or portraits of such politicians and political idols of the Second Republic as Piłsudski. Such conduct sometimes provoked further violence, as at the school building in Berezhany (Brzezany) where OUN members tore down a Polish flag and threw it into a toilet. A local Ukrainian who criticized this act was found dead shortly afterwards. “Patriotic” demonstrations and other gatherings also resulted in casualties. In 1939 in Berezhany, Polish high school students organized a “funeral of Ukraine,” marching through the town with a coffin marked “Ukraine is dead.” After a few days, the bodies of two Poles who had taken part in the “funeral” were found in a river in a suburb.[176]

Although Poles made up only about 30 percent of the population of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, they still possessed more land there than the Ukrainians. In addition, settlers (Pol. osadnicy), many of them veterans of the First World War, received land in the eastern parts of the country with the objective of strengthening the Polish element in those regions. This irritated the Ukrainian peasantry, most of whom possessed little land despite their efforts for decades to obtain more.[177]

In general, Ukrainians had very good reasons to resent their Polish rulers. Even in regions with a predominantly Ukrainian population, Ukrainian civil servants were rare. The Ukrainian language was regarded by Polish officials as a substandard variety of Polish, and Ukrainian culture was perceived as inferior to Polish culture. By way of reaction to Polish nationalism and restrictions, Ukrainians withdrew from public life and formed their own organizations and cooperatives. Having completed their degrees, Ukrainians were often unable to make a career in public institutions or to find other employment, because of their ethnicity. Such people frequently ended up working for Ukrainian agricultural companies that hired only Ukrainians. To some extent the situation in the former eastern Galicia was similar to a state within a state.[178]

Every year on 1 November, clashes between Poles and Ukrainians erupted in Lviv and in many other places in western Ukraine. On this date, Ukrainians commemorated the proclamation of the ZUNR, which organization had been defeated by the Poles.[179] On the night of 31 October–1 November 1928, a few weeks after Bandera moved to Lviv, the UVO tried to destroy two monuments devoted to Polish “defenders” of Lviv. In this incident, one policeman was wounded by gunshot. Ukrainian flags with the inscription “UVO” were hoisted at the university building, at the city council, and at the Union of Lublin Mound.[180] On 1 November 1928 Ukrainian nationalists also hung a banner with the letters “UVO” above the Saint George Cathedral while a panakhyda (memorial service) was being celebrated inside. After the service, a crowd tried to march to the city center and there was a shootout with the police. In revenge, Polish youth demolished the buildings of several Ukrainian institutions, such as the Ukrainian Student House and the printing office of the newspaper Dilo.[181]

The second half of the 1930s was especially unfavorable for Polish-Ukrainian relations. It was not so much the renunciation of the Little Treaty of Versailles, or the assassination of the Polish interior minister Bronisław Wilhelm Pieracki by the OUN, both in 1934, but the political changes after Piłsudski’s death that intensified the Polish-Ukrainian conflict. After his death, Polish and Ukrainian politicians who worked to normalize Polish-Ukrainian relations were marginalized, and Polish policies toward the Ukrainians became more and more repressive. In these circumstances the competition between Ukrainian and Polish nationalism increased. In October 1938 the Polish police prevented demonstrations in favor of a Ukrainian Carpathian state. In response Ukrainian agricultural companies refused to deliver butter to Lviv and other cities, and Ukrainian nationalists set several Polish farms on fire. The Polish government reacted with collective punishment, conducting punitive expeditions against Ukrainian villagers and making mass arrests. Ukrainian politicians estimated that in late 1938 about 30,000 Ukrainians sat in Polish jails.[182]

In 1939 local Polish politicians in Lublin were talking about the “extermination” of Ukrainians.[183] A German journalist who travelled to the area in the spring of that year observed that the Ukrainian population hoped that “Uncle Führer” would bring order to the area and solve the problem of the Poles.[184] In the last months before the Second World War, more and more Ukrainians participated in nationalist ceremonies. On 23 May 1939, about 500 people came to the Saint George Cathedral to take part in a panakhyda for Konovalets’. Five days later, 4,000 came to a panakhyda at the graves of Sich Riflemen, where Ivan Hryn’okh delivered a sermon. Shortly after that, another panakhyda was organized at the graves of three famous nationalists—Vasyl’ Bilas, Dmytro Danylyshyn, and Ol’ha Basarab—of whom two were executed for killing a Polish politician and one was believed to have been murdered by Polish interrogators.[185]

During the second half of the 1930s, more and more Ukrainians ceased to view the OUN as an alien and dangerous political body. At that time the UNDO and some other Ukrainian non-nationalistic parties ceased to mistrust the OUN, although they had condemned the terrorist methods of the UVO and the OUN since the early 1920s. In the late 1930s the majority of Ukrainians living in Poland began to consider Nazi Germany as a possible liberator and ally, as the OUN had done since the early 1920s. After 1939 even democratic politicians such as Vasyl’ Mudryi or Kost’ Pan’kivs’kyi, who until then had condemned violence, fascism, and nationalist hatred, began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and to view the OUN as an important “liberation force.”[186] In his memoirs, OUN member Ievhen Stakhiv observed that all Ukrainian movements and organizations, both in exile and in the Second Polish Republic, were orienting themselves toward Nazi Germany in the years leading up to the Second World War. They hoped that Germany would smash Poland and give Ukrainians a chance to establish a state. They saw nothing wrong in cooperating with Nazi Germany and were convinced that this might help them achieve their goals.[187] After the Munich Agreement on 29 September 1938, the Ukrainians tried to establish a Carpatho-Ukrainian state, in territories that had belonged to Czechoslovakia and were inhabited by Ruthenians (Rusyny), people ethnically related to the Ukrainians. The Germans ignored the requests of the Ukrainian nationalists to recognize and support the state and allowed Hungary to occupy these territories; but the disappointment of Ukrainian nationalists concerning the proposed Carpathian-Ukrainian state did not change their attitude toward Nazi Germany.[188]

The OUN: Racism, Fascism, Revolution, Violence,

and the Struggle for a Ukrainian State

In 1920 Ukrainian veterans of the Sich Riflemen, such as Ievhen Konovalets’, Andrii Mel’nyk, and Roman Sushko, founded the UVO in Prague. Its object was to continue the struggle for a Ukrainian state, but it became a terrorist organization. It financed itself by carrying out espionage-related tasks for other countries and did not play any important political role among Ukrainian parties. This situation changed, however, a few years later when the UVO leaders realized that, in order to become a dominant political force, they needed to incorporate other right-wing political organizations and to include youth in its ranks. For that purpose they founded the OUN at the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, which was held in Vienna between 28 January and 3 February 1929. Throughout the 1930s the OUN was composed of a leadership in exile, and a homeland executive in Poland.[189]

The main political goal of both the UVO in the 1920s and the OUN in the 1930s was to mobilize the “Ukrainian masses” for a revolution, as a result of which a violent conflict between Ukrainians and their “occupiers” would be triggered. The OUN believed that “only a national revolution can liberate a nation from slavery” and allow it to “achieve independence and statehood.”[190] In referring to their “occupiers” the Ukrainian nationalists primarily meant Poland and the Soviet Union. Their foes were all non-Ukrainians who lived in the “Ukrainian ethnic territories,” particularly Jews, Poles, and Russians. Ukrainians who did not support the OUN’s vision of an ethnically pure state and ultranationalist revolutionary policies were also perceived and persecuted as enemies, especially if they cooperated with the Polish authorities. One of these enemies was the UNDO, the largest Ukrainian party in the Second Republic, which aimed to achieve a Ukrainian state by legal means. Nevertheless, we should not forget that there was informal cooperation between the OUN and the right-wing faction of the UNDO. [191]

To further its political aims, the OUN adopted two concepts of revolution: “permanent revolution” and “national revolution.” The two notions were interrelated but were not identical. In general, the “permanent revolution” was a process of preparing the Ukrainian people for the “national revolution,” which was intended to become an uprising or a revolutionary act, as a result of which the OUN would defeat their enemies and establish a Ukrainian state.[192] By planning the revolution, the OUN combined many different elements that could help it seize power. It modeled itself on the Polish and Russian insurgents and revolutionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the contemporary fascist and ultranationalist revolutionaries. After taking power in the “ethnic Ukrainian territories” the OUN would subordinate all non-loyal elements and establish a one-party system. The new authority would represent all social strata of Ukrainians, whose loyalty to the OUN would be enforced. The state the OUN planned to establish after the revolution would be dictatorial. Democracy was, for the OUN, a hostile and dangerous political system, distrusted by OUN members because of its non-nationalist nature.[193]

The immediate target of UVO and OUN activities was the Second Polish Republic, which they perceived as an illegitimate “enemy-occupier” of the “ethnic Ukrainian territories.”[194] Czechoslovakia and Romania were not regarded by the OUN as significant enemies. Neither the UVO nor the OUN operated in Soviet Ukraine but they regarded the Soviet Union as the most dangerous enemy of the Ukrainians and the main occupier of Ukrainian territory. During the interwar period, the Soviet authorities only became the target of OUN terror when OUN member Mykola Lemyk attempted to assassinate the Soviet consul in Lviv on 22 October 1933, but murdered the secretary of the consulate, Aleksei Mailov, by mistake.[195] In various European countries, many UVO and OUN members living there were infiltrated by the Polish intelligence service and its informers.[196]

The UVO and the OUN propagated a very western Ukrainian or Galician form of nationalism and they believed that Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine would approve of its plans for “liberating Ukraine.” During the Second World War this belief would cause the OUN considerable problems, when the organization would be confronted for the first time with eastern Ukrainians and their dislike for ethnic nationalism, racism and fascism. The western Ukrainian or Galician form of nationalism was also not entirely compatible with the mentality of Volhynian Ukrainians, who found it very difficult to comprehend the mystical nationalism of the Galician type.[197]

The Generation Gap and the Transformation into a Mass Movement

From the very beginning the OUN was divided into two generations: the older one born around 1890 and the younger one around 1910. The generations were divided by many factors, of which the most important seems to be the violence and brutality experienced by the older group during the First World War. The younger generation were not exposed to this experience, had a more romantic image of war, and were more eager to use violence. The older generation consisted of people such as Ievhen Konovalets’ (1891–1938), Andrii Mel’nyk (1890–1964), and Riko Iaryi (1898–1969). They had received their military training in the Austro-Hungarian army, had fought during and after the First World War in various armies and had tried to establish and preserve a Ukrainian state. As the result of pressure from the Polish authorities, or of their own choice, some of them emigrated from Poland after the First World War, to countries such as Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Lithuania.[198] The most important representatives of the OUN outside the Ukrainian area were Riko Iaryi in Berlin, Ievhen Onats’kyi in Italy, Ivan Reviuk-Bartovych in Lithuania, and Andrii Fedyna in Gdańsk (Danzig).[199]

The younger generation of the OUN consisted of such people as Stepan Bandera, Iaroslav Stets’ko (1912–1986), Stepan Lenkavs’kyi (1904–1977), Volodymyr Ianiv (1908–1991), and Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950). Their life in the 1920s and 1930s was different from that of the older generation, who lived in more comfortable circumstances in exile.[200] The younger generation, later referred to as the “Bandera generation,”[201] was too young to fight in the First World War or to assist in the foundation of the UVO. The UVO and the OUN were for them fascinating secret organizations that could be joined only by brave Ukrainians who were ready to die for independence. This generation idealized the war much more than the older one. It believed that it had missed a war and hoped to fight another one. Leading individuals of this generation grew up in patriotic and religious western Ukrainian families. During their time at high school and university in the 1920s, they were active in the Organization of the Upper Grades of the Ukrainian High Schools (Orhanizatsiia Vyshchykh Klias Ukraїns’kykh Himnazii, OVKUH) and the Union of Ukrainian Nationalistic Youth (Soiuz ukraїns’koï natsionalistychnoї molodi, SUNM). These organizations cooperated with the UVO and later the OUN, and together with them or alone, organized various nationalist and religious commemorative events and demonstrations.[202]

The process of opening the UVO to Galician youth, and transforming it into a Ukrainian nationalist mass movement, began in the second half of the 1920s. For this purpose, the older generation, on the one hand, tried to win young Ukrainians from the OVKUH, SUNM, and other youthful organizations operating in the Second Republic.[203] The UVO leaders also established the paramilitary organization Dorost for children aged eight to fifteen, and the Iunatstvo for youth between fifteen and twenty-five.[204] On the other hand, the UVO leaders tried to include other parties and political organizations. At the First Conference of Ukrainian Nationalists from 3 to 7 November 1927 in Berlin, the UVO leaders established the Leadership of the Ukrainian Nationalists (Provid Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv, PUN) and asked other organizations and parties such as the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists (Lehiia Ukraїns’kykh Natsionalistiv, LUN) and the UNDO to merge and to hand over their leadership to the PUN. This plan did not work because no group or party was really willing to give up its sovereignty and to subordinate itself to the PUN. The situation changed, however, after the OUN was founded. At this stage of the creation of a Ukrainian nationalist mass movement, a number of organizations, including the LUN, OVKUH, and SUNM, agreed to merge and to be represented by the PUN. The PUN consisted of leading OUN members and became a kind of synonym for the leadership in exile of the OUN. Konovalets’, the leader of the OUN, was the leader of the PUN.[205]

The UVO did not disappear immediately after the foundation of the OUN but existed simultaneously with it for a few years, serving as a military arm of the OUN. The most active and vigorous new members came to the OUN from the OVKUH and SUNM. Zynovii Knysh characterized these individuals as ambitious, zealous, idealistic, and willing to make sacrifices, but without any political experience.[206] Among the organizations whose members went over to the OUN was the League of Ukrainian Fascists (Soiuz ukraïns’kykh fashystiv, SUF), which invented the fascist greeting “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!).[207]

Ukrainian youth was also divided. Not all young Ukrainians supported the extreme version of Ukrainian nationalism represented by the OUN. The SUNM, for example, was divided into a radical branch, which consisted of OUN activists or sympathizers, and a moderate one, which sympathized with the UNDO. Relations between these two branches were so tense that students who belonged to the moderate branch of the SUNM, and who lived in the Ukrainian Academic House in Lviv, used an external canteen elsewhere, in order to avoid eating together with the fascistized nationalists.[208]

The younger generation began to control the homeland executive of the OUN in 1931–1932. This political body was subordinated to the leadership in exile but it was in charge of OUN policy in eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Stepan Okhrymovych, an SUNM member, became the leader of the homeland executive in 1931. He entrusted its propaganda apparatus to his friend, schoolmate, and fellow-member of Plast, Stepan Bandera. According to Mirchuk, Okhrymovych and Bandera had studied Mikhnovs’kyi’s Samostiina Ukraїna together during their high school years in Stryi (Stryj).[209]

In May 1932, Bohdan Kordiuk became the new Providnyk of the homeland executive; Bandera became the deputy leader; Volodymyr Ianiv became the head of the political-ideological apparatus; Iaroslav Stets’ko, Ianiv’s deputy; Roman Shukhevych, the head of the military apparatus.[210] The younger generation, although formally dependent on the leadership in exile, attempted to formulate its own policies. In so doing, they soon proved themselves even more radical than the older generation. They were more willing to make sacrifices, to use terror as a political means, and to kill OUN members and other Ukrainians accused of working for the Polish police, and of other forms of betrayal. This difference manifested itself in particular after Bandera became the leader of the OUN’s homeland executive in June 1933.[211]

Although the younger generation was generally more radical and fanatical, it did not necessarily adopt ideas that were more fascist in nature than those of the older generation. In the late 1920s and 1930s the main propagators of fascism in the OUN were Mykola Stsibors’kyi and Ievhen Onats’kyi. Like Dontsov, these men worked on a Ukrainian concept of fascism. Andrii Mel’nyk, who succeeded Konovalets’ as leader of the OUN, seems also to have been an adherent of fascism. In a letter to Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1938, Mel’nyk claimed that the OUN was “ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.”[212] At the Second General Congress of the OUN in August 1939 in Rome, the title of Vozhd’ was used officially for the first time in the history of the organization and was bestowed upon Mel’nyk.[213] The younger generation, on the other hand, had adopted various fascist principles, such as the Führerprinzip, mainly thanks to their favorite writer Dontsov. In leaflets that were obviously produced by them for Pentecost 1934, Konovalets’ was characterized as the “leader of the Ukrainian nation and the national revolution.”[214]

The younger OUN members committed spectacular acts of terror and were encouraged to do so by older members of the leadership in exile, who used the publicity for the purpose of collecting funds from Ukrainians living in North America. They advertised terror as a patriotic struggle against the occupiers. Trials after assassinations were used to inform the global community about the Ukrainian question. At a conference in June 1933 in Berlin, Konovalets’ did not formally approve Bandera’s proposal to use terror, but he did not try to stop the terrorist acts of the younger generation.[215]

After Pieracki’s assassination, the mass arrests conducted in June 1934 caused chaos in the OUN. Bandera, as the leader of the homeland executive, was succeeded by Osyp Mashchak, who, after his arrest on 20 December 1934, was followed by the more moderate Lev Rebet. After Bandera’s arrest, the homeland executive put a stop to the assassinations and other spectacular propagandist actions and concentrated on strengthening the structure of the movement in Volhynia. More and more Ukrainians became involved in the movement. Shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, the OUN counted between 8,000 and 20,000 members and had several thousand sympathizers.[216]

Ethnic and Political Violence

During the interwar period the UVO and the OUN tried to assassinate a number of Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians, but not always successfully. Some of the Polish potential victims such as Józef Piłsudski were regarded as the founders or important statesmen of an “occupying power.” Others such as Tadeusz Hołówko, head of the Department for Eastern Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Henryk Józewski, governor of Volhynia, were committed to Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation. Ukrainians such as high school director Ivan Babii and the journalist and political activist Sydir Tverdokhlib did not approve of the measures of the OUN and cooperated with the Polish authorities. After Bandera became the leader of the homeland executive, a number of OUN members, such as Iakiv Bachyns’kyi and Maria Kovaliukivna, were murdered by the organization. In addition to carrying out political assassinations, the OUN killed a number of people in the course of armed robberies of banks, post offices, police stations, and private households.[217]

The OUN regarded terror as a propaganda tool that would draw international attention to the situation of Ukrainians in Poland and Soviet Ukraine, and also to its “struggle for liberation.” In terms of publicity, assassinations were the most powerful type of terror acts. In reaction to some Ukrainian mass terror acts, the Polish authorities reacted with counter-terror. Between 12 July and 24 September 1930 for example, with the help of its youthful associates, the OUN set fire to Polish crops and farm buildings, and destroyed railway tracks and telecommunication lines. On 16 September 1930, in order to put an end to this violence, the Polish authorities began a campaign, euphemistically called pacification (Pol. pacyfikacja), which lasted until 30 November 1930. For the purpose of suppressing the OUN terror, the Polish authorities used the army and police. A number of Ukrainians accused of supporting the OUN were arrested, humiliated, beaten, and otherwise mistreated. A few were killed. The scouting organization Plast was banned, and the three Ukrainian high schools were closed. It is not known whether the OUN conducted the arson and sabotage in order to spark off an uprising, to provoke a bloody reaction, or to prevent negotiations between Polish and Ukrainian politicians. The pacification did, however, give the OUN and a number of other political Ukrainian organizations grounds for complaint to the League of Nations, concerning the policies of the Polish government and the situation of Ukrainians in Poland. The attention of several international newspapers was also drawn to the mistreatment of Ukrainians in Poland.[218]