Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist

It is difficult to establish how many people the UVO and OUN killed between 1921 and 1939. Relying on information supplied by Petro Mirchuk, Alexander Motyl estimated that the UVO and OUN attempted to kill sixty-three persons between 1921 and 1939: thirty-six Ukrainians, twenty-five Poles, one Russian, and one Jew. It should be noted that Mirchuk was an OUN member and the head of a division of the propaganda apparatus in the national executive in 1939. After the Second World War, he extolled the UVO, OUN, and UPA in his numerous publications, whitewashing a substantial number of their crimes. Motyl added correctly that, in his opinion, the actual number of persons killed by the UVO and OUN may well have been higher.[219] Maksym Hon, a specialist on the subject of Jewish-Ukrainian relations, proved that Mirchuk’s suggestion, that only one Jew was killed by the OUN, was false.[220] The application of common sense and the use of historical literature and archival documents also cast doubt on Mirchuk’s estimates. This is particularly apparent when we consider that the UVO and OUN had many members in the villages and smaller towns of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, where they killed people not only for political but also for economic and other reasons. By 1922 the UVO had already set 2,200 Polish farms on fire.[221] In 1937 alone, the OUN carried out 830 violent acts against Polish citizens or their property. Of these offences, 540 were classified by the Security Service of the Polish Interior Ministry as anti-Polish, 242 as anti-Jewish, sixty-seven as anti-Ukrainian, and seventeen as anti-Communist.[222] Unfortunately, no comprehensive study of this question has been carried out, and we can therefore only estimate that the number of victims killed by the UVO and OUN in the interwar period was at least several hundred.

Cooperation, Exile, and Funding

Countries such as Germany and Lithuania supported OUN newspapers and journals, provided the organization with passports, and arranged military courses for their members. With the help of the Humboldt-Stiftung, the Germans also supported Ukrainian nationalist student organizations at the University of Technology in Gdańsk (Danzig) and at other universities. The UVO and the OUN were therefore dependent on Germany and Lithuania and provided them with espionage services in return. Germany and Lithuania also supported the Ukrainian nationalists because they regarded Poland as their countries’ enemy, and like the Ukrainians, they laid claim to parts of Polish territories. Some UVO and OUN politicians, such as Osyp Dumin, were willing to collaborate with the Soviet Union, but it is not clear whether the Soviet authorities actually financed the UVO or the OUN. According to the Polish Intelligence Service, the OUN also collaborated with the British Secret Intelligence Service. The relationships between the UVO-OUN and these supporting states were frequently based on cooperation between the OUN and a particular institution—in Germany, for example, the Abwehr (military intelligence). In official statements however, the OUN denied that it cooperated with other countries, and it claimed to be financially and politically independent. Ukrainian emigrants, particularly those living in North America, also provided a further source of income for the OUN. For example, the Ukrainian War Veterans’ Association and the Ukrainian National Federation raised $40,000 for the UVO combat fund and the OUN liberation fund between 1928 and 1939. In addition, the robbery of banks, post offices, and private persons in Poland provided the OUN with supplementary income.[223]

One important reason why the OUN collaborated with Germany was the political order established by the Treaty of Versailles. after the First World War. Because Germany had lost many territories, it intended to reverse the geopolitical order established by the Allies. At the same time, the Ukrainians were, in an even worse situation than Germany was. The Treaty of Versailles left them without a state and made Germany their most important partner. Two events that affected—but did not interrupt—the cooperation between the OUN and Germany and Lithuania were the German-Polish non-aggression pact signed on 26 January 1934 and the assassination of Minister Pieracki by the OUN on 15 June 1934. On the day of Pieracki’s murder, the German minister of propaganda was on an official visit to Warsaw. Mykola Lebed’, who was suspected of carrying out Pieracki’s assassination, fled shortly afterwards to Germany. Despite friendly German-Ukrainian relations, he was then expelled to Poland at the request of Józef Lipski, the Polish ambassador in Berlin. After the German-Polish non-aggression pact, German politicians promised not to cooperate with the OUN. Nevertheless, both the Abwehr and Lithuanian politicians continued to collaborate with the OUN during the second half of the 1930s.[224]

Mussolini’s Italy was another important partner of the OUN, as was the Croatian Ustaša, which was founded in 1929. Similarly to the OUN, the Ustaša operated until the Second World War as an ultranationalist terrorist organization. Like the OUN, it fought for an independent state against its “occupiers” and against its ethnic and political enemies in Croatia. Contact with Ustaša leader Ante Pavelić was established in late 1933 or early 1934 in Berlin, where Pavelić met with Iaryi and Lebed’. After this meeting the two OUN members visited the Ustaša camp in Italy.[225] During the course of the cooperation between the two organizations, some OUN members were trained together with Ustaša activists in paramilitary camps in Italy, which were established and sponsored by Mussolini. A leading OUN member, Mykhailo Kolodzins’kyi, gave military courses in this camp. He also began work there on “The War Doctrine of the Ukrainian Nationalists,” an important OUN document in which he planned a Ukrainian uprising, propagated the cult of war, and presented a Ukrainian version of imperialism, which was intended to protect “our own race” and to extend the Ukrainian territories.[226] Kolodzins’kyi argued in “The War Doctrine” that during a national uprising, the western Ukrainian territories should be fully “cleansed” of Poles, and also that “the more Jews killed during the uprising, the better for the Ukrainian state.”[227] OUN member Zynovii Knysh characterized the relationship between the Ukrainian and Croatian revolutionary nationalists as very warm:

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had good relations with the leading circles of the revolutionary Croatian organization Ustaša. These relations, between the two Leaderships, became even closer in exile, outside the borders of Croatia. … In general, Croatians—and in particular Croatian students—respected the OUN, trusted their members, regarded the Ukrainian nationalists as more experienced in matters of revolutionary struggle, and invited them to their discussions, meetings, and congresses.[228]

The relationship between Italy and the Ukrainian and Croatian revolutionary nationalists was complicated by the assassination of Pieracki by the OUN, and the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and French foreign minister Louis Barthou in Marseilles on 9 October 1934 by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (Vnatrešna makedonska revolucionerna organizacija, VMRO). During the Pieracki trial, it was revealed that Mussolini supported the Ustaša, which was also involved in the assassination in Marseilles. The revelation of the cooperation of Italy with the OUN and Ustaša was very inconvenient for Mussolini. The simultaneous trials in respect of the killings of Alexander I and of Pieracki further complicated the situation.[229] As the facts became known, Mussolini decided to detain the OUN and Ustaša members in two separate localities in Sicily. The OUN stayed in the village of Tortorici until June 1937. Among the OUN members recruited by Mussolini was Stepan Bandera’s brother Oleksandr, who had come to Italy in early 1933 as a student together with three other young Ukrainians. Oleksandr lived at first in Rome on a grant from the Italian government. After coming to Rome and beginning his studies in political science, Oleksandr and two other Ukrainian students in Rome joined the Italian student fascist group, Gruppi universitari fascisti, in order to establish contact with Italian fascist youth. In Rome, they also founded the Ukrainian student organization Zaravo, to familiarize Ukrainian students there with nationalist politics.[230]

As already indicated, the OUN became very popular among Ukrainian emigrants, especially in the second half of the 1930s. Two other influential groups uniting Ukrainian émigrés were the conservative group led by Hetman Skoropads’kyi, and the Ukrainian National Association (Ukraїns’ke Natsional’ne Obiednannia, UNO). The OUN competed for German funding, particularly with the Hetmanite group, which controlled the Ukrainian Scientific Institute (Ukrainisches Wissenschaftliches Institut, UWI) in Berlin. The OUN, however, had significant influence on Ukrainian student organizations in Germany, such as Zarevo, Osnova, and Sich. In the second half of the 1930s, the OUN also began to take control of the UNO and some other émigré organizations, which, like the OUN, developed an interest in cooperation with Germany and began to regard Ukrainian nationalism as a movement belonging to the family of European fascist movements.[231] These groups, like the OUN, began emphasizing that Ukrainian nationalism was equal to National Socialism and other fascist and nationalist movements, and states, which anticipated the opportunity to combat communism and to change the geopolitical order in Europe:

The future Ukrainian state will be a state that is based on National Socialist fundamental principles. Ukrainians use the word “nationalism” in the sense of “National Socialism” or “Fascism.” Ukrainians are on cordial terms with other contemporary nationalistic states and nations because they see in them healthy forces that will combat Bolshevism.[232]

Ukrainian students in Canada