Historical representation of the wartime accounts of the activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army)
Per Anders Rudling parudling@ualberta.ca
Introduction
When it comes to assessing the history of the violent 20th century, historical analysis hasoften been restricted by ideological blindness and selective interpretation. This is not anissue limited to one side of the ideological spectrum, or to any particular ethnic community.
This article focuses on the nationalist historiography of the post-war or “third wave” of Ukrainian immigrants to North America and the largely positive representation of the OUNand UPA by some high-profile Ukrainian historians. In this paper, I attempt to highlight thediscrepancy between theory and practice, and I suggest that the change in the ideology of the OUN was not followed by changes in practice.
Rather, the political course of the OUN–UPA remained one of uncompromising ideological and ethnic extremism. This translated into a continuation of a policy the implementation of which completed the mass murder initiated in the summer of 1943. I also focus on the unwillingness of a number of Central Ukrainian and diaspora historians to confront this bloody past. This article will consider Ukraine in a European context, adjudged by the same tools of analysis as other European states, which is particularly apposite given contemporary circumstances. Confronting the past means challenging myths, something that is painful for a country still in the process of nation-building and actively constructing national myths. There are attempts at casting the OUN in a heroic light in the official Ukrainian historical narrative.At the same time, the Orange Revolution has shown that many Ukrainians identify with Europe and desire European integration. To a large extent, European integration requires realignment with liberal democratic or “European” values. Much like post-war Germany was forced to confront its history, post-Orange-Revolution Ukraine faces a similar challenge of Vergangenheitsbewältigung . If Ukraine is serious in its attempts to orient itself towards the European Union, the anti-democratic trends of the past need to be confronted rather than allowed to enter the new national mythology as doctored recollections.
The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 2107 (Pittsburgh: University Center for Russian and East European Studies, 2011).
Per Anders Rudling
During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010) there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading figures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko’s legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fight shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN’s own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization’s problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offices of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic.
"Memories of 'Holodomor' and National Socialism in Ukrainian Political Culture"
in Yves Bizeul (ed.) Rekonstruktion des Nationalmythos?: Frankreich, Deutschland und die Ukraine im Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2013), 227-258.
Per Anders Rudling
Subsequently, World War II brought nearly incomprehensible suffering and population losses.
A 2004 study lists the total Ukrainian war deaths at 6,850,000 people, or 16.3 % of the population. Of these, a full 5,200,000 were civilians,whereas military victims “only” constituted 1,650,000. Of these civilian deaths,at least 1.4 million, but perhaps as many as 2.1 million Jews were murdered in Ukraine.
The German occupation of Ukraine was extraordinarily harsh. Ukraine was divided between German, Romanian, and Hungarian occupants, the largest part organized as the so-called
Reichskommisariat Ukraine. The western most part way incorporated into the Greater German Reich, as the Distrikt Galizien.
Here the occupation was considerably milder, and the Ukrainian population played off against the Poles.Whereas Ukrainian national sentiments were suppressed in the rest of Ukraine they were partially supported in Galicia. Talented Ukrainians were offered scholarships to study in the Reich,and in 1943 even a GalicianWaffen-SS Division was formed.
The occupying authorities strictly guarded the sealed border to the Reichskommissariat, where the situation was quite different.
The brutal Reichskommissar Erich Koch banned education above the third grade, and mused that “if I find a Ukrainian who is worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot.”
Ukraine saw considerable resistance to the Nazi occupation. 4.5 million Ukrainians fought in the Red Army to which The estimates differ greatly, and have been manipulated by various political interest groups.
Gregorovich, Andrew: Ukraine’s Population Losses in World War II: 7.5 million
Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine
Ivan Katchanovski
Tudy analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)
and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”
Journal Name: Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 48 (2-3), 217-228
Publication Date: Oct 15, 2015
The OUN, the UPA, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine
Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust, 2019Ivan Katchanovski
Ivan Katchanovski
The issue of the political rehabilitation and glorification of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) became one of the central political issues in Ukraine after the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan. It provoked major political and historical controversies and debates in Ukraine and other countries. Presidents Yushchenko and Poroshenko, their parties, far right organizations, and many Ukrainian historians attempted to recast the OUN-B and the UPA as parts of a popular national liberation movement that fought against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and to present the OUN-B and UPA leaders as national heroes. They denied, minimized or justified the involvement of the OUN-B and the UPA leaders and members in the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians.The analyses of biographic publications, historical studies, and archival documents show that the majority of the OUN-B and UPA leaders and very large proportions of their members collaborated with Nazi Germany, mainly in the beginning of the Second World War. early half of the top and middle-ranked leaders of these organizations andat least until the end of 1943 the majority of UPA members served in various police formations. They assisted the German occupation authorities in implementing genocidal policies towards the Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles by helping to carry out mass shootings and create conditions intended for the physical annihilation of the entire Jewish population and large numbers of Ukrainians, Russians, and Poles, specifically in Volhynia. The fact that many police commanders and large numbers of policemen in various locations and formations followed orders from the OUN-B by deserting en masse from their service, in particular in Volhynia in the spring of 1943, and forming the basis of the UPA shows that these commanders and police members were de facto controlled by the OUN-B.
More Info: In Black , Peter; Rásky, Béla; Windsperger, Marianne (Eds)
Page Numbers: 67-93
Publication Date: 2019
Publication Name: Mittäterschaft in Osteuropa im Zweiten Weltkrieg und im Holocaust / Collaboration in Eastern Europe during World War II and the Holocaust
Ivan Katchanovski
This paper analyzes the mass-murder of Poles in Volhynia in Western Ukraine during World War II. The mass murder of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) during the Nazi occupation of Volhynia in 1943 became an important political issue in Poland and Ukraine after the collapse of communism. Previous studies by Polish, Ukrainian, and Western researchers offered different and often divergent theories of this historical event. It is often presented in Ukraine as a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict. In contrast, in Poland, the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia is often characterized as genocide. A research question is whether this was a Ukrainian-Polish conflict, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This study analyzes a variety of archival documents, historical studies, and eyewitness accounts. It offers an estimate of Polish casualties derived from analysis of OUN-UPA, Polish, and Soviet, and sources and demographic data. This study concludes that the mass murder of the Polish minority in Volhynia by the OUN-B, the UPA, and their security service (SB) represented not a mutual Ukrainian-Polish conflict or genocide of Poles but that it was a part of ethnic cleansing.
More Info: Paper presented at the 19th Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, US, April 24-26, 2014
Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943-1944
Jared McBride
The Ukrainian nationalist-led ethnic cleansing campaign against Poles in Volhynia during 1943–44 has long been the subject of international tension and contentious public and scholarly debate. This article analyzes the topic through a microhistorical lens that looks at one ethnic cleansing operation in the Liuboml’ area of Volhynia that killed hundreds of Poles. Using newly declassified materials from Ukrainian secret police archives, alongside more traditional testimonial sources, I demonstrate that not all participants were prepared nationalist ideologues eager to kill. Rather, there was a range of actors involved in the massacres and the Ukrainian nationalist leadership was able to recruit average peasants to participate in ethnic cleansing through diverse mechanisms. This disaggregation of the killers and their motives not only contributes to growing social science research on mobilization for violence, but also challenges assumptions inherent in the double or triple occupation thesis frequently used to explain violence in Volhynia from 1939 to 1945.
Debating, obfuscating and disciplining the Holocaust: post-Soviet historical discourses on the OUN–UPA and other nationalist movements
Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union the archives of the former republics and satellite states of this multiethnic empire were opened. This allowed historians to investigate the history of nationalist and radical right organisations and armies that, during the Second World War, had been involved in the Holocaust and other atrocities. Among them was the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. For a long time the history of these movements was unknown or distorted by Soviet propaganda and propagandist publications written during the Cold War by veterans of these movements living in the West and cooperating with Western intelligence services. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was simultaneously accompanied by the “rebirth” of nationalism that was not free from antisemitism and racism, and which triggered different types of nationalist distortions of history and obfuscations of the Holocaust. Post-Soviet historical discourses were shaped not only by journalists or political activists, but also by radical right historians. These discourses impacted as well on historians who in general were critical of the post-Soviet rehabilitation of nationalism, war criminality or East Central European fascism. Concentrating on Ukrainian and Polish history, this article explores how the radical right historical discourses appeared in the post-Soviet space, what types of historians were involved in them and what kinds of distortions and obfuscations have predominated.
More Info: East European Jewish Affairs Vol. 42, No. 3, December 2012, 199–241.
“Introduction: The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Post-Soviet Ukrainian Memory Politics, Public Debates, and Foreign Affairs,”
Andreas Umland and Yuliya Yurchuk,
Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 115
This second introduction, like the one to the first special section within this series, does not list many of the previous scholarly studies on this section’s topic in as far asmost of the relevant articles and books are listed in the two special sections’papers’ footnotes. We are very grateful to Julie Fedor for her extremely careful and patient final editing of the contributions to these two special sections (including this introduction). Responsibility for any remaining impressions and misinterpretations here and below lies, however, solely with the respective texts’ authors.
Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past: OUN-UPA Memory Politics and Nation-Building in Ukraine (1991-2016),
Reclaiming the Past, Confronting the Past: OUN-UPA Memory Politics and Nation-Building in Ukraine (1991-2016),
in: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, ed. Julie Fedor, Markku Kangaspuro, Jussi Lassila, and Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2017.
Yuliya Yurchuk
Yuliya Yurchuk
AND THE UKRAINIAN INSURGENT ARMY:UNWELCOME ELEMENTS OF AN IDENTITY PROJECT
Ab Imperio, 4/2010
John-Paul HIMKA
Introduction
What follows below are four polemical texts that aim to repudiate thelegacy of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and of itsarmed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They were motivated by the, unfortunately largely successful, campaign of former presidentViktor Yushchenko in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress(UCC) in the North American diaspora to put the glorication of these radical right nationalists at the very center of the Ukrainian national identity project.
On the most recent Remembrance Day in Canada (November 11, 2010), the UCC issueda statement containing this passage: “As Ukrainian Canadians we also remember and paytribute to the millions of men and women who perished ghting for the freedom of their ancestral Ukrainian homeland. The men and women of the Ukrainian Sich Riemen, the1st Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Armyand the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.” The Ukrainian Sich Riemen foughtfor an independent Ukraine after World War I, and the 1st Ukrainian Division was aWaffen-SS unit in World War II
