Hero of Ukraine linked to Jewish killings

By David Marples, Freelance
 
On Jan. 22, Ukraine’s Unity Day, outgoing president Viktor Yushchenko formally designated Stepan Bandera a Hero of Ukraine. The award has aroused polarized reactions. The Winnipeg-based Ukrainian Canadian Congress has welcomed it. The Simon Wiesenthal Center in United States, conversely, expressed its “deep revulsion” at the award to a man linked to the deaths of “thousands of Jews.”
Who was Stepan Bandera and why is he capable of arousing such emotions 50 years after his death?

He was born on Jan. 1, 1909, in the village of Staryi Uhryniv into the family of a Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest, in what was then the Austrian empire. His mother died when he was 13, and a sister in infancy. Three sisters were deported after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, and his father was executed by Stalin’s NKVD.
Stepan first came to prominence under Polish rule. At the Paris peace treaties of 1918, western Ukrainian lands were divided between several powers, but mostly came under Polish rule. Eastern Ukraine became part of the U.S.S.R. from late 1922. The Poles promised to allow some autonomy to their huge Ukrainian minority in the east.

That promise was not kept. On the contrary, the region was pacified and settled with Polish colonists. A large Ukrainian democratic party sought to attain changes through the Polish parliament, but gradually extremists became more influential. By the 1930s, the prevailing ideology in Europe was fascism. Mussolini had been in power since 1922 in Italy, and by January 1933, Hitler had become chancellor of Germany.In 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was formed from a former Ukrainian military organization and led by Col. Evhen Konovalets. Its goal was to revise the results of the Paris and Riga peace treaties, based on 10 “commandments” that included such tenets as “Attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it,” and “Aspire to strengthen the Ukrainian state even by means of enslaving foreigners.” It was a typically fascist movement of the interwar period not dissimilar to the Italian version.

In 1931, Bandera became head of the OUN regional executive in Western Ukraine. The OUN carried out terrorist acts, assassinating a member of the Soviet Consulate in L’viv in response to Stalin’s engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1933, and the Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Pieracki in 1934. Bandera was arrested for his part in the latter and sentenced to death after two long trials. The verdict was commuted to seven terms of life imprisonment and he spent over five years in Polish jails until released by the Germans, who invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.
After a Soviet agent assassinated Konovalets in 1938, the OUN eventually split into two wings. In April 1941, Bandera was approved as leader of the revolutionary faction (OUN-B). The other faction was led by Andrii Melnyk (OUN-M).

Both groups collaborated with the Germans. Bandera saw a German invasion as the best hope for an independent Ukraine. The OUN-B also helped train two Ukrainian Wehrmacht battalions to advance eastward with the main German army. In late June 1941, the Nachtigall battalion followed the Germans into L’viv and the OUN-B declared the independence of Ukraine on the local radio.
Members of the OUN-B spearheaded pogroms in L’viv in the summer of 1941 when about 4,000 Jews were killed.

Hitler did not accept Ukrainian independence, and upon Bandera’s refusal to withdraw the proclamation, confined him in Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin for the next three years. The Germans began mass arrests of OUN-B members by September 1941.

The OUN-B also had the key role in the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under Roman Shukhevych, former commander of the Nachtigall battalion. UPA emerged in Volhynia, where in the spring and summer of 1943 it massacred 30,000 to 60,000 Poles, mainly elderly and children, in a fanatical bid to reclaim Ukrainian lands.

From 1944 to 1953, UPA and Soviet security forces fought a brutal battle in Western Ukraine (now under Soviet rule). In 1948-49, Stalin authorized mass deportations of Western Ukrainians to Gulag camps. Shukhevych was killed near L’viv in 1950. UPA was supplied in part by the CIA, but survived mainly through support of the local population.
Bandera played no role in this lengthy conflict. He had moved to Munich after the war and organized the now factionalized OUN abroad. His single overriding goal remained the attainment of an independent Ukraine. On the orders of the KGB, Bohdan Stashynsky assassinated Bandera on Oct. 15, 1959, at the entrance to his apartment building.

In the 21st century, his views seem archaic and dangerous. He embraced violence, terror and intolerance toward other ethnicities living on Ukrainian lands. But he lived through perhaps the bleakest times in Ukrainian history, when independence seemed a remote dream.

Yushchenko surely erred when he conferred on Bandera the title — paradoxically it sounds typically Soviet — Hero of Ukraine. Bandera was a Ukrainian patriot, but his elevation only provokes divisions in a society that has very disparate views of the recent past.

David Marples, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, is the author of Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (2008).
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

Re “Hero of Ukraine linked to Jewish Killings” Edmonton Journal, February 7,2010.

The headline “Hero of Ukraine linked to Jewish Killings” is a totally Vladimir Putin-style ex-KGB falsification topping an article by David Marples which contains outright lies.

The statement that stands out in particular is the following:
“Members of the OUN-B spearheaded pogroms in Lviv in the summer of 1941 when about 4,000 Jews were killed.”

In February 2008, the Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) archive representative Oleksander Ishchuk showed declassified documents, which provide an objective basis to state that OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), is not connected with any violent actions against the civil population of Lviv on orafter July 4, 1941.

The declassified documents of SBU indicate that on July 4-7 of 1941, representatives of Gestapo, who arrived in Lviv, turned to the Ukrainian population enciting them to carry out an anti-Jewish pogrom. "The OUN leadership, having got to know about that, informed its members that it was a German provocation in order to compromise Ukrainians with massacres", the document reads.

Prior to the German invasion, the Soviet NKVD, in which Jews had disproportionate membership, was involved in the killing of 4,000 to 8,000 civilian prisoners ­ a fact the Nazis hoped would provoke Ukrainian retaliation.

Furthermore, while the Israeli Holocaust Musem Yad Vashem has also attempted to pin the Lviv Massacres on Ukrainians, especially Roman Shukhevych, leader of the Nachtigall batallion and later the anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the head of the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations of Ukraine, Vaad Yosyp Zisels, asked Yad Vashem for documentary evidence to prove that claim and was unable to obtain it.

In a January 27 story posted on the web site of the Religious Information Service of Ukraine, which is run by the Ukrainian Catholic University, with which Marples’ own Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta cooperates, noted that this proves the accusations against Shukhevych are “groundless”.

He also called upon Ukrainians and Jews to give up the accusations and focus on developing new, harmonious relations. “If we, the Jews, continue to count how many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis and the Ukrainians continue to count how many Jews served in Cheka, GPU, NKVD, and KGB, we will forever stay in historical impasse where conflicts could easily erupt,” noted Zisels.
 
Marco Levytsky
Editor,
Ukrainian News,
Edmonton