Under the Iron Heel of Stalinism. OUN, Germany and Hitler. About the hysteria around “betrayal”. The People's Army: Heroism and Cruelty. Change of ideology and worldview of the OUN. Roman Shukhevych - Ukrainian Spartak. People's War: Doom... The Last of the Mohicans.

(End. Read the beginning here: And )

The history of Western Ukraine between the wars gives the impression of some kind of phantasmagoria: Ukrainians and Poles got carried away by their bloody “internecine fight” instead of, on the contrary, uniting and taking seriously the fact that they were squeezed between two of the most terrible totalitarian regimes in the history of mankind. Soon both of them suffered from their own destructiveness, which always turns against the aggressor himself (Ivan Efremov in “The Hour of the Bull” calls this “the arrow of Ahriman”).

In September 1939, Poland fell to the blows of German fascism in a matter of weeks. Stalinism came to Western Ukraine, against which Polish chauvinism seemed like child's play, and soon - Hitlerism, for which both Ukrainians and Poles were “garbage”, “fuel” for crematoria, in the “best” case - free “arbeiters” for building "Thousand Year Reich". We've finished the game!..

Events in Western Ukraine with the arrival of the Bolsheviks were somewhat reminiscent of the plot of Jack London's novel The Iron Heel. However, not all the measures of the Soviet government were negative, but it began almost idyll...

Nowadays it is somehow not customary to remember that the majority of Western Ukrainians greeted the arrival of Soviet power quite friendly and even with hope for a “bright future.” There is even an expression “golden September”, meaning September 1939, when the Red Army entered the territory of Eastern Galicia and Volyn, as a result of which most of Ukraine, with the exception of Bukovina and Transcarpathia, united for the first time in many centuries, albeit a puppet , but a single state - the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Information about the nightmares that took place in Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s, of course, had previously leaked through the “Iron Curtain” of the Soviet-Polish cordon, but at first the Bolsheviks managed to create for themselves the reputation of “liberators” and even justify cooperation with Hitlerism in the division of Poland with the help to the oppressed “brothers” - Ukrainians and Belarusians. The Ukrainians were tired of the Polish regime “worse than margarine,” and the Bolsheviks in every possible way emphasized their “love for Ukraine.”

True, on October 22 they held “democratic” elections, in which 93% of voters voted for the “right” deputies. But there were concrete improvements. By mid-1940, the number of primary schools reached 6900, of which 6 thousand were Ukrainian. The long-standing Polish bastion - Lviv University - received the name of Ivan Franko and switched to the Ukrainian language of instruction. Medical care has improved, especially in rural areas. Industry and trade, previously owned by Poles and Jews, were nationalized. The lands of large Polish landowners were nationalized with the promise of distributing them to the peasants. The Ukrainian intelligentsia received work in cultural and educational institutions.

But it was just a “bait”. Instead of receiving land, peasants began to be forced into collective farms. The intelligentsia was assigned the role of a “cog,” and disobedience was punishable by arrest and exile. The ostentatious “Ukrainianness” was quickly replaced by Russification. The “bearers of the advanced socialist system” represented by the Soviet bureaucracy often turned out to be outright “rude”. The persecution of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches began.

The Bolsheviks dissolved all Ukrainian institutions that even the Poles did not touch: the Prosvita association, reading rooms, libraries, etc. All political parties were dissolved, including the very moderate UNDO. Cooperation was transferred to the Soviet way. Even Western Ukrainian communists, who had just emerged from underground with the fall of Poland, were arrested, exiled, and soon many were shot, because Stalin did not like Western communists. Thousands of Ukrainian activists fled to the territory of German-occupied Poland.

In the spring of 1940, the regime dropped the mask of democracy. Large-scale repressions began against Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, representatives of the former “property classes,” nationalists, and then everyone who came to hand, including “workers and peasants.” Thousands of people were exiled to Siberia and Kazakhstan, and before the retreat under the attacks of Nazi troops, mass executions were carried out by the forces of the notorious NKVD. Thus, after a short period of time, the majority of the population of Western Ukraine, and not Polish Ukrainians, experienced a fierce hatred of everything Bolshevik, Soviet and Russian.

The entire legal sector of society was destroyed by the Bolshevik punitive authorities. The only viable force remained the underground and terrorist OUN.

"OUN and the Germans"

After the fall of Poland, the Ukrainians of the Kholm and Lemko regions fell under the rule of the Third Reich. They were joined by thousands of refugees who, fleeing the Bolsheviks, flocked to the region of Krakow - an important center of the so-called General Government created by the Nazis in most of Poland, where the regime was relatively liberal. Soon after the arrival of the Germans, dozens of Ukrainian self-government committees arose, consisting mainly of OUN members.

With the tacit consent of the German Governor-General Franz Frank, these committees soon formed the Ukrainian Central Committee (UCC) under the leadership of the famous geographer Vladimir Kubiyovych. It was a public social welfare body that cared for sick and elderly people, street children, organized the work of medical institutions, schools, cooperatives and youth associations, and represented the interests of Ukrainian “arbeiters” who went to work in Germany.

Another “déjà vu” has begun: instead of uniting in the fight against the occupiers, Ukrainians and Poles began to compete for their favor! The UCC secretly opposed the influence of the Poles. This suited the Germans to a certain extent: they appointed Ukrainians to minor administrative positions, including the police, and the Ukrainians took revenge on the Poles for pre-war grievances. After the German attack on the USSR and the inclusion of Eastern Galicia into the General Government, the activities of the UCC also spread there.

Nowadays it is somehow not customary to remember that Ukrainian nationalists enthusiastically welcomed the Nazi attack on the USSR. The OUN viewed this as an opportunity to create an independent Ukrainian state. The Germans wanted to use the OUN for sabotage work in the Soviet rear. The OUN did not want to be a tool of the Nazis, but wanted to use the war to spread its influence throughout Ukraine. In short, each wanted to use the other.

The difficulty was that among the Germans there was no consensus on cooperation with Ukrainian nationalists. The Abwehr (military intelligence), led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, maintained a long relationship with the OUN and advocated its continuation. Leading Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg also advocated this. Being one of the few in the Third Reich who understood the situation in the USSR and knew about the desire of many Ukrainians for independence, Rosenberg advocated the use of the national movement in the fight against the Bolsheviks. But Hitler’s elite, who did not suffer from an excess of intelligence, followed their idiotic “racial theories” with stupid tenacity and considered Ukrainians exclusively “untermensch subhumans,” “arbeiters” and “fuel for crematoriums.”

The signature Ukrainian “multi-hetmanism” played a special role. Even wanting to deal with the nationalists, the Germans could not choose between the moderate, but weak Melnikites and the active, numerous, but radical Banderaites. Between the OUN-B and OUN-M lines, a struggle broke out for the favor of the fascists. This fuss, to put it mildly, greatly compromised the OUN and gave rise to various shrill “anti-Ukrainian elements” to shout at all crossroads that all Ukrainian patriots, without exception, are fascists.

Before the attack on the USSR, the “Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists” was created in the German army from pro-Bandera nationalists, consisting of 600 people, consisting of two battalions - “Roland” and “Nachtigall”. The Germans wanted to use them for sabotage purposes in the Soviet rear, and the nationalists believed that they would become the basis of the future Ukrainian army and strengthen the influence of the Bandera faction.

In the very first days, conflict exploded between the Germans and the nationalists. With the support of Nachtigall, the OUN-B embarked on a youthful adventure - on June 30, 1941, in Lvov, they proclaimed a Ukrainian state, and Bandera’s comrade-in-arms, Yaroslav Stetsko, was declared prime minister. Bandera's supporters hoped that the German military command would sooner agree to this, not wanting to go into confrontation at the very beginning of the war. The OUN members even managed to convince the confused population that they were relying on the support of Berlin. Through manipulation, they managed to obtain from the bedridden authoritative Metropolitan Sheptytsky a statement of support for their actions.

But if the completely apolitical Wehrmacht turned a blind eye to such “tricks,” then the reaction of Hitler’s political leadership and the Gestapo was harsh and unambiguous: Bandera and his comrades were arrested and thrown into prison. At this time, the OUN-M, avoiding confrontation with the Germans, tried to take advantage of the failure of its competitors, but soon Melnik’s members spoiled relations with the Nazis.

As part of its strategy - to organize and control the local administration on the territory of Soviet Ukraine without the consent of the Nazis - the OUN sent 2 thousand of its members, mainly from the OUN-B, as part of the famous “marching groups” after the advancing Germans. They identified conscious Ukrainians and created a local administration from them. Marching groups even reached the eastern borders of Ukraine, for example, the group of Evgen Stakhiv mentioned at the beginning operated in the Lugansk region, and Stakhiv claims that in the Krasnodon area (the same one where the Young Guard was) there was no Bolshevik underground, but only Bandera! But even here, the enmity between Bandera and Melnik took ugly forms: in September 1941, in Zhitomir, OUN-M members Omelyan Senik and Mykola Stsiborsky were shot by a member of the OUN-B. Soon, mutual killings and denunciations to the Germans between both factions became commonplace, which greatly discredited Ukrainian nationalism.

In the large cities of Eastern Ukraine, including Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Ukrainian newspapers and public organizations arose. In October 1941, members of the OUN-M in Kyiv took the initiative to create the Ukrainian National Rada, nourishing the naive, almost childish hope that the Germans would establish a Ukrainian state.

In September 1941, the Gestapo arrested and executed many members of the OUN-B marching groups. Two months later, the Nazis struck at the OUN-M and its influential Kyiv group: 40 leading members were shot, including the poetess Olena Teliga. The Nazis then executed the Ukrainian mayor of Kyiv, Vladimir Bagaziy.

It seems that only after this did the nationalists finally “get it” that Hitlerism was as much an enemy of Ukrainian independence as Stalinism or Polish chauvinism. Subsequently, without completely abandoning the tactics of the “hero-conspirators,” they began to rely on the mass partisan national liberation struggle.

About the hysteria around “betrayal”

Accusations of “Banderists”, “nationalists” and “Westerners” in general of betrayal, collaboration with Hitlerism, even fascism, which are still heard to this day from various “Russian-patriotic elements”, have already become “stuck in the teeth”, causing not even irritation, but laughter. O. Subtelny writes that of the million former Soviet citizens who wore German uniforms in 1944, about 220 thousand were Ukrainians, and the rest were predominantly Russian.

In addition to the “Vlasovites,” one can recall thousands of policemen and Russian Cossack SS units, against whose background the Ukrainians may seem much more “loyal”; and a significant part of the Red Army personnel, from privates to generals and marshals, were Ukrainians. One can recall how Stalin, hoping to set some “capitalists” against others, initially supported Hitler with raw materials and supplies, taught Hitler’s military leaders in Soviet military academies, and de facto destroyed the German communists and social democrats, who were the only real force that could resist the coming fascists to power.

And there was also the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and joint parades of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht, the NKVD and SS troops... In general, when you hear something about Ukrainian traitors from areas close to the Moscow Kremlin, the answer may be the old Russian proverb about a cow that , instead of mooing, you should be silent!

By and large, a significant part of Europe can be accused of collaboration with Hitlerism. And in France, half the country surrendered to fascism almost without a fight! Against this background, Ukrainians look like heroes!

As for the “Westerners,” and even more so the “Banderaites,” they were de facto not Soviet citizens, they did not take the oath to “Comrade Stalin” and, strictly speaking, they could even fight for the Pope, which does not at all justify cooperation with Hitlerism , which, together with Stalinism, were the most brutal fascist regimes in the history of earthly civilization. However, the “pranks” of the OUN with the Nazis did not bring much harm to anyone except the OUN itself. And the talk of various “chauvinistic hysterics” that the OUN-UPA were recognized as “enemies of humanity” at the Nuremberg trials is, sorry, a “cheap show-off” aimed at an illiterate public. There was nothing even close to this in Nuremberg - there were more important questions there...

The same applies to another very ambiguous historical fact - the SS division “Galicia”, which various “terry propagandists”, especially for the not very literate “lumpen audience”, deliberately “lumpe together” with “Bandera” and the OUN-UPA. Indeed, in 1943, after the crushing defeat at Stalingrad, the forces of the Third Reich began to dry up. Hitler's bosses decided to abandon their manic contempt for the “Untermensch” and began to form national military units to patch up holes at the front.

Bearing in mind that the absence of a regular army, for example, in 1917-20. did not allow the Ukrainians to choose independence, the head of the UCC V. Kubiyovych and even the authoritative Metropolitan A. Sheptytsky agreed to the creation of the Ukrainian part of the SS “Galicia” consisting of about 10 thousand people, where inexperienced patriotic volunteers, and in fact - naive rural people, immediately signed up boys Moreover, the OUN was categorically against such cooperation. This unit did not participate in any punitive actions - it was an ordinary front-line division of the SS troops. In July 1944, the Germans, in the first battle near Brody in the Lviv region, exposed this unit to a powerful blow from the Red Army, which ended in tragedy. Many soldiers died or were captured, some managed to escape the encirclement and joined the UPA.

People's Army: Heroism and Cruelty

With the withdrawal of the front to the east in 1941, vast territories remained in the rear of Hitler’s troops, in which de facto there was no power, since the Germans lacked the strength and means to control them. Therefore, in the northwestern, forested part of Ukraine, where geographical conditions allowed, partisan detachments of different ethno-national and political colors began to form. For this there were enough both weapons and recruits. Partisan groups arose from the Red Army encirclement, the Bolshevik underground, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists, defector policemen, Jews, fugitive Ostarbeiters and simply peasants who were hiding in the forests.

The first partisan detachments of Ukrainian nationalists arose not in the nationally conscious but densely populated Galychyna, but in rather deserted Volyn and Polesie, which had previously been completely passive. They were founded not by OUN members at all, but by the Ukrainian politician Taras Bulba-Borovets, close to the Ukrainian emigrant government of Symon Petlyura, to whom Poland provided asylum in the interwar period, considering it useful in the event of a possible war with the USSR.

With the beginning of the Soviet-German war, Bulba-Borovets, to fight the remnants of the Red Army who were surrounded, created the irregular unit “Polesskaya Sich”, which was later renamed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army - UPA. Thus, the UPA was not created by the OUN at all, but by a “Petliurist” who, as an ally of the Poles, was actually an enemy of the “Banderaites”. By the end of 1941, the Germans tried to disband the units of Borovets, but he led his fighters “into the forests.” So, the UPA was de facto created in 1941, and not in 1942, so it was more logical to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the UPA in 2011, and the idea of ​​celebrating in 2012 looks somewhat dubious. In 1942, small groups in the forests of Volyn created OUN-B and OUN-M, which hid from persecution by the Nazis.

By the end of 1942, the OUN-B decided to create large partisan forces, thereby laying the foundations for the future regular Ukrainian army. Nationalists believed that the army would be needed to win independence when the USSR and Germany exhausted each other. No one could even think about the imminent victory of the USSR over Germany at that time: after the so-called Kharkov disaster in the summer of 1942, due to the fault of Soviet generals, the strategic advantage received by the Red Army after the defeat of the Nazis near Moscow disappeared like smoke, and Soviet troops barely held the line on the Volga near Stalingrad.

But there was also a task that was closer and more understandable to the broad masses. In the wooded West of Ukraine, everyone fought with everyone: the German occupiers and police units (Schutzmannschaft), the “encirclement” of the Red Army, Soviet partisans penetrating from neighboring Belarus, the Polish “partisan” of two types - the Moscow-supported Army of Ludova and the Army subordinate to the Polish émigré government in London. Craiova.

In addition, the power vacuum inevitably led to the emergence of a huge number of looters. They all saw the local Ukrainian villagers as a “cash cow”, an object of robbery and violence. To protect one's land and people, it was necessary to create an army that would rely on the mass support of the people. So, the UPA is a mass Ukrainian “partisan” (primarily peasants, but not only), in which they united and which was supported by the broad masses of the population for self-defense and to defend their national interests.

The organization of such a militia was undertaken by the most combat-ready and irreconcilable “Banderaites”, who, moreover, had an extensive underground network in Western Ukraine. With their characteristic harshness (not to say cruelty), the OUN-B subjugated parts of Borovets and the OUN-M, finally forming the UPA and physically destroying those who did not want to submit - in this the “Banderaites” were no different from the Bolsheviks. Roman Shukhevych, also known as General Taras Chuprinka, was appointed commander-in-chief.

The army seized control of large parts of Volyn, Polesie and Galicia. Various sources estimate the number of the UPA (at different times) from 30-40 thousand to 100 thousand and even 200 thousand. The UPA was a unique phenomenon because it had practically no foreign assistance, but relied only on the support of the people.

A few words about the abbreviation “OUN-UPA” itself. On the one hand, the OUN and the UPA are, as they say in Odessa, “two big differences”: for the OUN is, in fact, a political party with its own underground propaganda and terrorist network, as well as a security service (SB OUN) like an underground NKVD or Gestapo (times were cruel then: either you, or you!); and the UPA is, we repeat, a massive people’s militia. Even the aforementioned OUN-B conductor Evgen Stakhiv claims that the now fashionable concept of OUN-UPA is nonsense, and he explains the totalitarian methods of the leaders of the movement by the need for severe discipline in that terrible time.

But! The author of these lines, professing his “favorite” psycho-energy-informational approach to the interpretation of social phenomena, would like to make a number of notes. Society is held together not only by the repressive apparatus of power and ego-rational factors, but also by a system of psycho-emotional connections that connects the psychic energy of large masses of people. Social cataclysms, including war, destroy these connections, releasing huge amounts of psychoenergy. This energy must be connected, otherwise society will “go crazy.”

Therefore, the mass, exploded by chaotic passions, through unconscious psychocompensatory mechanisms, is looking for binding symbols, and a leader or institution that personifies a certain universally significant idea. Such an idea could well be served by the very dubious postulates of “integral nationalism”, the institution is the OUN, and the leader is Stepan Bandera, whose importance is greatly exaggerated, if only because it was Shukhevych who led the OUN-UPA struggle at its height. Bandera, having emerged from a concentration camp at the end of the war, settled safely in the West until he was killed by a KGB agent.

For absolutely irrational reasons, it was the name of Bandera, and not Shukhevych, that became a symbol, perhaps even because of its certain “melody”: the word “Bandera” is much more sonorous than “Shukhevych”. Although we repeat that under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych the most heroic stage of the OUN-UPA struggle took place. Without the irreconcilable but cruel “Banderaites”, instead of the militant UPA, there would rather be an anarchic “mess” like the “atamanshchina” in Eastern Ukraine during the civil war. Without support from the massive UPA, the “Banderaites” would have remained a bunch of “hero-conspirators.” Therefore, the concept of OUN-UPA is filled with specific meaning, and this is yet another proof that social phenomena cannot be interpreted solely in superficially rational terms!

The UPA fought against a numerically and technically superior enemy and showed miracles of heroism, not inferior to the defenders of Stalingrad or the Brest Fortress. Once, in 2003, there was a story on television about how for several days 40 UPA fighters fought on the ruins of one of the monasteries in Western Ukraine against an armada of Nazis, who were supported by tanks and aircraft. 10 UPA fighters escaped from the encirclement, the rest died... And in April 1944, in the battles with the UPA near Kremenets, the Bolsheviks had to attract about 30 thousand people from the regular army... This is against the peasant militia!

So few people in the world know how to fight! I had to deal with grandfathers and grandmothers in the UPA uniform, who, despite their clearly authoritarian character and often not a very high level of education, still command respect with their deep conviction in the rightness of their struggle. They received nothing for this struggle, but they did not exchange or sell out. And the country of Ukraine, for which they fought, still cannot recognize them as a “warring party,” apparently waiting for them to go to the “other world” and the problem will “resolve” on its own.

But human psychoenergy is ambivalent. Translated into “normal” language, this means that it can be directed for good and evil, and often at the same time. Therefore, the highest manifestations of heroism and patriotism can coexist with manifestations of sadism, destructiveness and cruelty. This happened in the case of the UPA and greatly discredited it and the national liberation struggle in general.

We are talking about the famous Ukrainian-Polish massacre... Regardless of how the war ended, Ukrainian nationalists, following centuries of enmity, were determined to expel the Poles from Ukrainian lands, some of whom were interwar settlers, but many who had lived here for centuries, often Ukrainians and Poles lived nearby and became related to each other.

In turn, Polish nationalists and their military formation, the Home Army, sought to maintain their control over those Ukrainian lands that were part of Poland. As a result, a bloody struggle broke out, from which, as usual, the civilian population suffered the most. According to Polish data, in Volyn in 1943-44. Ukrainians, primarily OUN-B SB detachments, destroyed 60-80 thousand Poles, including women and children. Ukrainians claim that the massacre was started by the Poles back in 1942, who killed thousands of Ukrainian peasants in the Kholm region, and then in 1944-45. - west of the San River.

The central line of the OUN-B seemed to prohibit actions against the civilian Polish population, but a number of figures from the regional line in Volyn committed such actions. This is a typical manifestation of the Ukrainian “atamanism”, when each “hetman” implements his own “policy”, discrediting the common cause. There is evidence that some young “conductors”, who in 1940, barely graduated from school, went through Hitler’s special schools, in which they trained “butchers” for actions against civilians.

One well-known elderly Ukrainian scientist originally from Western Ukraine (whose last name will not be given here) experienced these events and told how he witnessed a conversation among the Ukrainian personnel of the Nazi police, who were transferred from Galicia to Volyn, and then joined the partisan group: they bragged to each other about the murders of Jews and Poles, savoring the details of their “exploits”...

However, the Poles behaved no better. This was not only a violation of universal human values, but also a betrayal of Ukrainian interests. Thus, the noble goal of protecting and liberating one’s land was significantly discredited by malignant destructive passions. True, there is numerous evidence of how Ukrainians and Poles saved each other from the cruelty of their fellow tribesmen, but rather it emphasizes the horror of those events...

There are many interpretations of this nightmare, which is often blamed on the incitement of the Nazis and Soviet partisans, as well as the doctrines of Ukrainian and Polish nationalists. This mutual surge of mass aggressiveness accumulated over centuries, which cannot be rationally explained, was provoked by a total war of all against all and is the clearest empirical evidence of the presence of irrational destructiveness of man. The sources of cruelty can be social negativity repressed into the unconscious (Horney), malignant passions (Fromm), mass psychoses (Bekhterev), destructive collective and transpersonal contents of the psyche (Jung).

Perinatal psychology sees the cause in the process of human birth, which is accompanied by a threat to life, pain, physical and emotional stress, which forms huge reserves of aggression (Grof). Society and the transpersonal contents of the psyche give such a biological basis a psycho-social form; through protection weakened by social factors, aggressiveness breaks into consciousness. Here again we are talking about the psychic energy inherent in a person, the suppression, perversion and improper use of which can lead to mass destructive psychosis.

In 2003, on the 60th anniversary of the “Volyn massacre”, having heard enough flat explanations from numerous “experts”, the author of these lines tried to at least briefly outline the deep psychological interpretations of this tragedy and proposed it to a number of publications from liberal (in our peasant understanding) to national -patriotic. This idea was a fiasco, because the “liberals” somehow understand only the point of view of the grant givers (the boring tediousness of various “institutions of open societies”, for which they pay their grants, can be regularly read in newspaper advertisements), and the current “patriots” are completely suffering "an acute form of mental deficiency." In a word, the author did manage to publish something, but the brave editors “cut out” the most important thing from the texts, because they simply “didn’t catch up” with what they were talking about.

Change of ideology and worldview of the OUN

Despite the anti-Polish fratricidal psychosis, Ukrainian “integral” nationalists were forced to sharply turn towards... internationalism and democracy. With the beginning of the war, they began to expand beyond the Western Ukrainian area and the Ukrainian-Polish war. First, the nationalists came face to face with the multinational personnel of the Red Army. Then the OUN marching groups reached Eastern Ukraine. Contrary to Bolshevik propaganda, the OUN underground, albeit small in number, operated in the Donbass, Odessa, and the Azov region. The population here was not only multinational, but also cosmopolitan and international in outlook; he was not so interested in national problems as in socio-economic and general democratic ones.

Evgen Stakhiv speaks out in the sense that at first the locals did not perceive the OUN members, considering them narrow-minded, “fixated” on nationalism and even suffering from totalitarian habits, which repelled people who experienced the horrors of Stalinism. OUN ideologists began to realize that the creation of a full-fledged Ukrainian state was impossible on nationalist slogans alone, unthinkable without relying on other nationalities, without some serious socio-economic program and democratic politics. In a word, the nationalists realized that “integral” nationalism as an ideology, doctrine and guide to action is “no good for hell”!

The OUN-B begins to put forward slogans of struggle for the national states of enslaved peoples, against Bolshevik and Hitlerite imperialism, for the solidarity of workers, peasants and workers of all countries, for social equality and justice, for the rights and freedoms of man and citizen, regardless of nationality and religious affiliation. The OUN line demands the abandonment of anti-Russian and anti-Jewish and any other rhetoric that offends national feelings.

Calling on Russians to fight for the overthrow of the Bolshevik dictatorship, the OUN categorically demands to avoid the words “Katsap”, “Muscovite”, “commie” in relation to everything Russian indiscriminately. The task was to attract fighters of other nationalities, including Russians and Jews, into the ranks of the UPA; Well-trained Russian officers and Jewish doctors were highly respected.

Particular attention was paid to work among representatives of the oppressed peoples of the Caucasus, Baltic and Central Asia. Representatives of European peoples, for example Belgians, Croats, French, Hungarians, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, even Germans, who did not want to serve Hitlerism, sometimes ended up in the UPA. The UPA began to create national units with their own command, banners, uniforms and insignia. A number of sources claim that in the fall of 1943 there were 15 national “kurens” in the UPA, and during the Second World War up to 20 thousand fighters of other nationalities passed through the UPA.

This “nationalist international” became the impetus for the event that went down in history as the First Conference of the Captive Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia, which took place on November 21-22, 1943 in the village of Buderazh, Zdolbunovsky district, Rivne region. Delegates from 13 nationalities took part in the work. The conference declared the creation of an anti-Bolshevik military and political front and the Bloc of Peoples. However, a very controversial slogan was put forward:

“Only national revolutions of enslaved peoples will stop military massacres and bring lasting peace. For the quick and final victory of the national revolution, one common front of enslaved peoples is needed.” (For example, the national revolution in Africa in the mid-twentieth century, on the contrary, led to the escalation of interethnic wars that continue to this day; the example of Yugoslavia is also indicative; but this is a separate topic). Moreover, for some reason the OUN-UPA line did not want to introduce such international and humane approaches in relations with its “closest neighbors” - the Poles...

The change in the political and ideological platform of Ukrainian nationalism was consolidated through the Ukrainian Main Vyzvolnaya Rada (UGVR), which was created in July 1944 near the town of Sambir, Lviv region, by delegates of the pre-war political parties of Western Ukraine and representatives of Eastern Ukraine. A number of declarations of this body suggest that Ukrainian nationalism tried to return to the original liberal, social democratic and universal values ​​that it professed at the beginning of the twentieth century. This gives the current “national-patriotic demagogues” a reason to classify Ukrainian nationalists as “democrats” and “liberals,” slyly ignoring their totalitarian character, which in principle could not be otherwise under those conditions.

Let us repeat once again what was said in the previous material “A short course on the real history of the UPA...”, even if this makes the “patriots” grind their teeth until they are ground into powder. Soviet soldiers, career officers, even political workers (!), former members of the Communist Party and Komsomol joined the ranks of the UPA. The overwhelming majority of them retained their views, but Stalin’s regime was rightly considered a criminal perversion of the ideals of socialism-communism. On this topic there are interesting memoirs of participants in those events, published in a semi-handicraft way in our time in scanty editions.

The leadership of the quasi-state formation based on the UPA, known as the Ukrainian Golovna Vizvolna Rada (UGVR), which politically represented the liberation movement, also turned out to have many former communists and socialists, both non-Soviet, in particular UPR, and Soviet origin. In particular, the UGVR was led by Kirilo Osmak, a former “Borotbist-Ukapist”, i.e. Ukrainian communist sovereign. Now, thanks to the legacy of Bolshevism, it is customary to equate communism and concentration camps, although communism, by definition, cannot be such. Many who participated in what was called communist construction were disappointed with Stalinism, because they understood that Stalinism had nothing in common with communism. But that's another topic.

However, the approaching Stalinism turned democratic, international and socialist efforts into empty slogans and declarations - the final tragic chord of the struggle, obviously doomed to defeat, was coming...

Ukrainian Spartak

Speaking about the OUN-UPA, one cannot ignore such an iconic figure of the rebel movement as Roman Shukhevych, who turned 100 years old in 2007.

The author thought for a long time about which of the world-famous fighters Shukhevych could be compared with... Giuseppe Garibaldi? But this all-European favorite and fighter for the national revival of Italy died a natural death... Robin Hood? Too mythological... Rather, Spartacus is a selfless and cruel leader of a slave uprising in Ancient Rome, who ended tragically. But even this comparison is very lame, because Roman Shukhevych was an educated man from an intelligent and fairly wealthy family. By the way, this refutes the hysterical cries of various “lumpen-intellectuals from chauvinism” that, they say, Ukrainian nationalists are entirely half-wild “Banderlogs”, whose only emotion is “animal nationalism”.

In the family of Roman Shukhevych there were lawyers, parliamentarians, officers, scientists, teachers, but most of all in the paternal and maternal lines there were Greek Catholic priests. Nikolai Berdyaev once noticed an interesting detail: among the children of priests there were many famous fighters and revolutionaries, which was facilitated by a certain psychological atmosphere - religious asceticism, dogmatics, denial of worldly temptation in the name of a certain “absolute”, even if a particular individual is an atheist.

Roman Shukhevych was born in Lviv on June 30 or July 7, 1907. His family came from the village of Rakovtsy in modern Ivano-Frankivsk region, and spent his childhood in the town of Kamyanka Strumilova, modern Kamyanka-Bugskaya. Roman's great-grandfather, Joseph Shukhevych, was a priest in the village of Tyshkivtsi, Gorodenkovsky district, and received classical and theological education in the gymnasiums of the Basilian orders in Buchach and the Dominican orders in Lviv. He was the first in Ukrainian literature to translate a number of works by Virgil from Latin, also translated books by Herder and Schiller from German, and Walter Scott from English.

A collection of works by Joseph Shukhevych himself was published after his death with a foreword by 27-year-old Ivan Franko. Roman's grandfather - Professor Vladimir Shukhevych - taught German and Ukrainian at the 1st real school in Lvov, was an adviser to the Galician Metropolitan Cardinal Sylvester Semibratovich; being the head of Prosvita and a full member of the NTS, he was engaged in mass cultural and educational work; founded and edited the first children's newspaper in Galicia, "Dzvinochok", where Ivan Franko first published "Fox Mikita". Vladimir Shukhevych was widely known as the author of the scientific and ethnographic work “Hutsulshchina”.

Roman's father, Joseph Shukhevych, graduated from the Lviv gymnasium and university, was a judge in the town of Krakovets, and played the piano well. During the Polish-Ukrainian War, he proclaimed the manifesto of the Western Ukrainian Republic in Krakovets and was appointed district political commissar of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. Roman's mother, Evgenia Stotskaya, was the daughter of a priest.

Roman studied at the Academic Gymnasium in Lviv, where he lived in his grandfather’s house. He was interested in languages, literature, and history. He studied well: while in the sixth grade, he prepared eighth-graders for final exams, but was, among others, expelled from the gymnasium for protesting against the boorish behavior of a Polish language teacher; I had to move to another gymnasium to take my final exams. He was an active scout. He was involved in many sports, was a champion in athletics, swimming, and skiing. At the age of 15, on the Bug River he saved a child who had fallen through the ice. He played the piano well, at one time he studied at the Music Institute named after. Lysenko. He graduated from the Lviv Polytechnic in 1934 and received a diploma in road construction engineer.

In 1921, at the age of 14, Roman Shukhevych met the conductor of the UVO Evgen Konovalets, which determined his fate. From the age of 16 he took part in “retribution actions” against Polish officials for pacification. In 1929 he became one of the first members of the OUN, and for a long time served as the “combat assistant of the regional executive.” Having been drafted into the Polish army, he entered the school of senior elders as gifted in military affairs, was expelled for unreliability, but in 1930, on behalf of the OUN abroad, he graduated from the school of senior elders. In 1934, after the murder of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peratsky by OUN members, Shukhevych was sentenced to six years, but in 1937 he was released under an amnesty. In 1940 he became a member of the Revolutionary Conduct of the OUN and the regional conductor of Zasyanya, Kholmshchyna and Lemkoshchyna. He created a unique system for training military commanders, which all members of the OUN were required to undergo.

Roman Shukhevych was fluent in Polish, German, Ancient Greek, Latin, and English. He was interested in architecture and literature, had deep knowledge in various fields, and even studied the classics of Marxism-Leninism.

To legally cover the underground network, the OUN created a very successful advertising business, a transport company and a mineral water bottling company, which made it possible to collect the necessary information and employ Ukrainian political prisoners whom no one would hire. Eyewitnesses say that Roman Shukhevych had remarkable business acumen and, if he had emigrated overseas, he could have become a successful businessman. But he had a completely different goal in life.

With the outbreak of World War II, Ukraine found itself sandwiched between two totalitarian states. In Volhynia and Galicia, the Bolsheviks completely discredited themselves with terror. On instructions from the OUN, Major Tur (Roman Shukhevych) joined the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists formed by the Germans, which was to later serve as the basis of the Ukrainian army. He led the Nachtigal battalion, which entered Lviv before the Nazis and supported the proclamation of the Ukrainian state. Here Roman Shukhevych discovered the body of his brother Yuri, mutilated by the Enkavedists. His battalion fought with Soviet troops already near Vinnitsa, when the Gestapo arrested Bandera, Stetsko and other activists in Lvov.

After this, the “legionnaires” refused to carry out the orders of the Wehrmacht, the Nazis disarmed the command of the legion and transported them to Lvov. The battalion was reorganized and sent to Germany, and then to Belarus, from where it went into the forests of Volyn. Chauvinistic speculation that Shukhevych, as part of the Schutzmanate, participated in the punitive actions of the Nazis in Belarus is bullshit, not confirmed by anyone or anything. Even more nonsense are stories about how Himmler himself hung an “iron cross” around Shukhevych’s neck.

After the unification of scattered Ukrainian detachments into the UPA and the further growth of the army’s ranks, in September 1943 the position of commander-in-chief of the UPA was created, which was occupied by the most authoritative and trained officer - Lieutenant Colonel Taras Chuprinka. Roman Shukhevych took this pseudo name for himself: his first name was from Taras Shevchenko, and his last name was from the poet Grigory Chuprinka, who was repressed at a young age. From 1944 to 1950 Roman Shukhevych served as head of the General Secretariat of the Ukrainian Main Vyzvolnaya Rada, chief commander of the UPA and head of the OUN line in Ukraine.

He also led the network of armed “militant” groups of the OUN and almost millions of Ukrainians who waged a people’s war, first against the Nazis, and then against Stalinism. In February 1946, Shukhevych was awarded the unique rank of Coronet General. It was something like an underground military state and army (“two in one”!), based on the patriotism of the masses, there was no analogues to this in world history! He headed this, as every “Russian-speaking lumpen” likes to say, “Banderaism” from 1943 to 1950. not Stepan Bandera, but Roman Iosifovich Shukhevych.

The personality and actions of Roman Shukhevych are heavily mythologized, both by “those” and “them.” Moreover, during the war in the partisan forests there were no “press services”, no “institutes of Ukrainian nationalism”, no CNN with correspondents and film cameras, but there was mass heroism and feat, but also mass cruelty and aggression. These are the laws of a total war of destruction, which inevitably leads to an explosion of mass destructiveness and authoritarian sadism as deep dominants of the social psyche, rooted in the very essence of human civilization (E. Fromm).

Modern Ukrainian “national-patriotic demagoguery,” following the Ukrainian proverb about “passing on the honey to Kutya,” categorically declares that Roman Shukhevych was, they say, a fighter not only for independence, but also for liberal democracy and a pluralistic society, and they say that these “deep thoughts” even found their way into history books...

Yes, Shukhevych could not be a “liberal”, “democrat” and “pluralist”! He was doomed to inevitable death by Stalinism - one of the most cruel fascist regimes in history, in such conditions only the most fearless, but cruel and authoritarian fighters, like Roman Shukhevych, could continue to fight. Just like the leader of the uprising Spartacus, doomed to death by the entire machine of the Roman Empire, in principle could not raise poetic odes to the glory of freedom somewhere in the Colosseum, but was forced to fight brutally, maintain discipline in his ranks with an iron hand and, through terror, impose horror of the Roman authorities.

On the other hand, in Ukraine there are quite a few different “toadies of great-power idiocy” who spread gossip that, they say, it was the bandit Shukhevych, as the commander of the UPA, who carried out the massacre of Poles in Volyn in 1943, that the UPA fighters brought misfortune to the inhabitants of Western Ukraine, that 5th anniversary of the UPA Shukhevych was presented with five severed heads of tortured Poles as a gift by his “bandit accomplices” from the UPA... Stop!

Something is painfully reminiscent of the propaganda of the Russian Black Hundreds, who accused the Jews of eating Orthodox babies alive! Regarding the Volyn massacre of Poles (undoubtedly a terrible crime of the Ukrainians!), Shukhevych’s direct guilt and participation in this has not been proven in any way, the apogee of the “massacre” was in July 1943, and Shukhevych headed the UPA only in the fall. The UPA enjoyed massive support in Western Ukraine, without this it would not have been able to fight for so long, so talk about the misfortune that the UPA brought to Western Ukrainians is complete nonsense!

In general, all the conversations of both “those” and “them” often talk about either political engagement with the transition to prostitution, or about elementary ignorance in matters of mass mental phenomena in moments of great social upheaval, although “tons” of books have been written about this, many of which were sold and are still being sold in Kyiv at the Petrovka book market.

We can only confidently say that Roman Shukhevych was a cruel but skillful fighter who was distinguished by phenomenal fearlessness and dedication. Even his enemies - the leadership of the NKVD - treated him with deep respect, considering him a man of enormous courage and an example of conspiracy. In 1944, his wife Natalya Bereznitskaya was arrested, receiving 10 years in the camps, and her mother, who soon died in prison.

Roman's two children - 11-year-old (!) Yuri and 5-year-old (!!) Maria - were taken to a special orphanage for “children of enemies of the people.” Yuri Shukhevych spent 40 (!!!) years in the camps and lost his sight, but did not renounce his father; He is still alive, but he, an old and sick man, is now, unfortunately, being used by various shrill “riffraff” who are “playing like nationalists.” In 1945, Roman Shukhevych’s mother was “tied up” and exiled to Kazakhstan. In 1947, his sick father was arrested and sent to the Kemerovo region. Father and mother died in the camps.

It evokes respect, even admiration, for the fact that Shukhevych has every opportunity to go to Khapad and get a good job there. True, the NKVD could have “gotten” him there, like Bandera, Rebet, Konovalets and others, although in the conspiracy Shukhevych could have given the NKVD a head start. But he did not go to Europe, knowing for sure that sooner or later he would be destroyed!

Entire operational departments and detachments of the NKVD were involved in the capture of Roman Shukhevych. The desire was so great that he was “killed” three times with identification and drawing up state acts, but each time it turned out to be a “fake”. Only on March 5, 1950, the safe house of Roman Shukhevych in the village of Bilogorscha in Lvov was discovered. The village was surrounded by an entire NKVD unit. Roman Shukhevych did not survive and died in the last battle in a shootout with the task force. According to some reports, he blew up the last grenade while surrounded by the enemy...

The author of these lines has never been a “fan” of nationalism, especially with a totalitarian bent. But people like Roman Shukhevych evoke sincere admiration. He is very well characterized by a quote from the book by the Strugatsky brothers “Inhabited Island”: “A cold and merciless fighter, a fighter from the very cradle, a terrible and admiring creation of a world where the value of human life is zero, knowing nothing but struggle, putting everything aside except struggle.” ...

People's War: doom...

The hope for mutual exhaustion of Hitlerism and Stalinism did not materialize. The return of Stalinism to Western Ukraine raised the question of the advisability of continuing the further struggle against the overwhelming enemy forces before the UPA. The OUN wire nurtured illusory hopes that the defeated Nazis would enter into an alliance with Western countries or that a war between the USSR and the West would begin. In 1944-45. The UPA's numbers continued to increase, and it had more fighters than it could arm.

Replenishment came from the widest network of the OUN underground. After the Soviet-German front went further to the west, vast territories of Western Ukraine were controlled by the UPA, and their own governing bodies were created here. The task of the UGVR was, while waiting for developments in Europe, to prevent the establishment of Stalinism, arrests and deportations of the population, and repressions against the church. Thus, the UPA continued to fulfill the role of the people's army in defense against foreign invaders. For some time this was possible due to the support of the local population and the lack of Soviet troops.

The situation changed dramatically after Germany's surrender. In 1945-46. The Stalinist regime managed to organize widespread actions to block and comb the vast forests of Galicia and Volyn with the forces of the NKVD troops, since there were many Ukrainians in the regular units of the Red Army who did not want to fight against the UPA. In order to cut off the partisans from resources, food and people, entire villages in the areas where the UPA were deployed were evicted to Siberia and succumbed to repression by families against whom there was the slightest suspicion of complicity or even sympathy for the UPA. Thousands of provocateurs, “snitches” and informants were sent and recruited.

To discredit the partisans, NKVD detachments, dressed in UPA uniforms, robbed and killed the local population. The OUN security service responded in kind, mercilessly destroying pro-Soviet elements. Support for the UPA was greatly undermined by collectivization, since collective farmers, being under strict control, could not supply provisions to the partisans.

The absorption of Western Ukraine by the Soviet Union had an important role in Eastern Europe. An end was put to the complex, centuries-old relationship between Poles and Ukrainians. Although Stalin was least interested in the problems of the Poles and Ukrainians, he did what they themselves were incapable of: Poland received lands in the west, and Ukrainian lands for the first time in many centuries were united within the borders of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which, although a puppet, was a unified Ukrainian state.

At least, during the collapse of the USSR, questions did not arise about where Ukraine was and where it was not. In addition, the Poles were expelled from Galicia and Volyn, ending 600 years of direct relations between Ukrainians and Poles. The relationship between our two nations was not only one of mutual hostility, but also one of deep mutual cultural and psychological influence. It seems that both Ukrainians and Poles lost a lot from this gap...

However, the last chord of Ukrainian-Polish hostility sounded on the territory of Poland and was called “Operation Vistula”. Stalin left part of the Ukrainian ethnic lands - Zasyanie, Kholmshchyna and Lemkovshchyna - as part of Poland... Although he could have taken it, and the Poles would not have been able to object to him. In 1944-47. Ukrainian nationalists enjoyed great support here. According to some estimates, up to 2 thousand UPA fighters and 3 thousand OUN members operated in the region. In April 1947, after the assassination of the Deputy Minister of Defense of Poland, General Karol Swierczewski, the new pro-Moscow authorities of Poland carried out the famous “Operation Vistula”, which had military and civilian components.

About 30 thousand Polish soldiers, with the support of Soviet and Czech troops, surrounded the territories of the OUN-UPA deployment. Many were captured and destroyed, some of the partisans moved to Soviet territory. Several hundred UPA fighters fought their way through Czechoslovakia into the zone of occupation of Germany by the Western allies. This is how information leaked to the West about the unequal, hopeless struggle of the Ukrainian underground against Stalinism. According to some estimates, 150 thousand civilians - ethnic Ukrainians - were evicted by the Poles from the land of their ancestors and dispersed throughout Poland to eradicate the national consciousness of Ukrainians.

In 1947-48, when it became clear that the American-Soviet war would not take place, by decision of the wire, the UPA detachments in Western Ukraine were disbanded. Many fighters joined the OUN civilian underground, which also suffered heavy losses due to repression. Towards the end of their activities, the UPA units and the OUN underground established weak and sporadic ties with the American and British intelligence services and focused on anti-Soviet propaganda, sabotage and terrorist acts.

Next came the depressing denouement of this social drama. In general, after the death of Roman Shukhevych, mass resistance began to decline, and the OUN and UPA ceased to exist as mass organizational structures, although small detachments continued to operate until the mid-1950s. A separate, but to this day little-known page of the national liberation war was the struggle of nationalists in Stalin’s camps in the Asian expanses of the former USSR. The united and conscientious “Banderaites” were often at the head of numerous uprisings in the camps. The prison guards were afraid of them. Criminals, bandits and other “urks” did not risk “getting involved” with them, who quickly realized that the “broad nationalists” who always stand up for each other are not interested in all sorts of “concepts” and “authorities”, but these are cruel fighters , with whom “jokes are bad.”

Thus ended the war, doomed to defeat. However, even some officials from the KGB admitted that they won the war in Western Ukraine, but they never won...

The Last of the Mohicans

The history of the UPA and the national movement in Western Ukraine would be incomplete if we did not talk about the last Commander-in-Chief of the UPA, Vasyl Kuk, who replaced the deceased Roman Shukhevych in this post. This section is based on material written by the author 2 years after writing the main text, in September 2009, when Vasyl Kuk passed away. The material was also published in the Svoboda newspaper.

Vasily Kuk was an extraordinary person. Having joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at the age of 16, he devoted 25 years to the armed struggle for the idea, of which 17 years were underground, and then there were another 6 years in prisons and camps. Obviously, this path of life did not improve his health at all, but Pan Vasily, until the last day of his life, carried out intense work in the press, at conferences and even on the Internet (at the age of 95!) to restore the historical memory of the OUN-UPA struggle. Yes, the current well-fed and pampered generation, after 30 years, is already beginning to suffer from cholesterol, obesity, cellulite and, sorry, hemorrhoids!

Vasily Kuk was born on January 11, 1913 in the village of Krasnoye in the Lviv region into a family of a worker and a peasant woman, where there were eight children, two of whom died in childhood. This “worker-peasant” origin, by the way, refutes the established myth about “bourgeois” nationalists. All the remaining six children later became members of the OUN, and two brothers were executed under the Poles.

His father managed to give Vasily an education. While still studying at the Zolochev Ukrainian (not Polish!) Gymnasium, he joined the youth organization “Plast”, and then the OUN. Since 1932, he studied at the Faculty of Law of the University of Lublin, organized an OUN cell there, and was a liaison officer for the “regional executive.” During 1933-1936. was repeatedly arrested by the Polish authorities for revolutionary activities. In 1937 he went underground, where he remained until his arrest by the KGB in 1954.

On August 30, 1941, Vasily Kuk participated in Lviv, occupied by the Nazis, in the proclamation of independent Ukraine together with Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko, which, however, had a very dubious effect. Cook then led the OUN marching group, which pursued the goal of doing the same in Kyiv. The Nazis arrested him near Kiev, but he managed to escape. He headed the Bandera underground in the southeast of Ukraine, in particular in the Dnepropetrovsk region (!).

It is believed that it was Cook who introduced the practice of issuing OUN leaflets in Russian and mass involvement of non-Ukrainians in the nationalist struggle. Communication with the internationalist and socialist-oriented population of the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine led Vasily Kuk to the idea of ​​​​the need to abandon the very primitive “social Darwinism” in the style of Dmitry Dontsov. Vasily Kuk leans toward left-liberal and social-democratic views.

In 1944 Cook returned to Galicia. He was the closest ally and military deputy of Roman Shukhevych, general secretary of the Ukrainian Main Vyzvolnaya Rada (UGVR) - the underground government of the OUN-UPA. Cook's pseudonyms were “Yurko Lemish”, “Bear”, “Colonel Koval”. After the death of Roman Shukhevych in March 1950, Vasily Kuk headed the OUN-UPA. On May 23, 1954, during the transition to Volyn, Vasily Kuk was captured by a KGB special unit.

Stalinism had already ended at that time, but Khrushchev initially demanded that the last UPA commander be subjected to an “exemplary” trial with a death sentence. There is a version that the leader of the USSR was dissuaded, citing negative consequences in the form of the mobilization of Ukrainian emigration and the reaction of the West. After serving “only” 6 years, during the next wave of Khrushchev’s “thaw” in 1960, Vasily Kuk was released, which is very surprising, because many even ordinary UPA fighters served in exile for 25 years.

There are two versions. According to one, the KGB decided to discredit Cook among the Ukrainian movement, especially emigration. In addition, the USSR at that time tried to lead the anti-colonial movement (it was at the turn of 1950-1960 that the collapse of the world colonial system began), so a demonstrative suppression of the national movement within the country would have dealt a blow to the image of the USSR.

According to another version, Cook allegedly betrayed the national struggle. It is believed that this is supported by a certain “open letter from Vasily Kuk to Yaroslav Stetsko, Mykola Lebed, Stepan Lenkavsky, Daria Rebet, Ivan Grinyokh and all Ukrainians living abroad,” published in 1960. In it, Kuk convinces, firstly turn, the listed representatives of the nationalist emigration in the advantages of the Soviet system, against which he allegedly fought without understanding it, but then “realized his mistake.” Cook convinces that in Ukraine there is no longer either an underground or the prerequisites for its existence, and the anti-Soviet activities of Ukrainian nationalists abroad are doomed to failure, since at that time there were no real forces in the USSR and abroad that could change its social system .

This is a “dark” matter, and at Lubyanka, in Cook’s name, they could have made up a “babe” even in the name of the Pope. Even the KGBists claimed that all their attempts to recruit Vasily Kuk were doomed to failure, and he remained a staunch fighter for the independence of Ukraine. However, Vasily Kuk did not refuse his authorship, and if you think carefully, he was absolutely right...

The beginning of the 1960s... The Soviet Union said goodbye to the horrors of Stalinism and post-war devastation, flew into space, raised the standard of living, production, science and culture, and healthcare. Although the regime remained a reactionary police regime, it became more or less liberal, especially in the wake of the “thaw”. The country has universal secondary education, free higher education and the highest level of education in the world at that time. True, there was the Cuban missile crisis, but it still takes a long time to figure out who is more to blame for it - the USSR or the USA.

If there were no American missiles in Turkey and stupid American idiocy in Cuba, then perhaps Khrushchev would not have dragged his missiles to Fidel Castro! Colonial wars were raging all over the globe, the Belgians were rampaging in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Americans were burning Vietnam. Against this background, the USSR looked almost like a model of social progress, and indeed there were no forces outside or inside it to change the social structure. As for the Ukrainian nationalist emigration in the West, it was very divorced from reality...

To this day, it is divorced from reality: when they come to us, representatives of the diaspora tell us something like this, teach them... It would be better if they lived here themselves! By the way, it was not for nothing that Roman Shukhevych did not emigrate to the West after the war, although he could have done so, but remained in Ukraine until the end. There is evidence that Shukhevych did not want to get involved with the West and its intelligence services, rightly believing that the Ukrainian national movement was needed by the West only for its own purposes, and Shukhevych did not want to be a puppet in the wrong hands and died heroically. Vasily Kuk also remained in Ukraine, although he could have gone abroad.

Vasily Kuk explained the reasons for his action in his last interview with Mirror of the Week (February 10, 2007) something like this. Realizing that the KGB would try in every possible way to use his name to crush the Ukrainian national movement abroad, he joined the intelligence service’s game in order to minimize the blow, because the murder of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera showed that the KGB does not like to joke. Maybe Vasily Kuk was right, it’s not for us to judge him now!

The funny thing is that after his release, Vasily Kuk managed to get an external diploma in history and even work at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR since 1969. In 1972, he was fired from there and banned from employment in scientific and educational institutions for his preface to the work “Marxism-Leninism on the National Question.” In fact, the views of Marx and Lenin on the national problem can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the instructions from above...

Before his retirement in 1986, Vasily Kuk worked as a supplier and economist in some “office” called “Bytkreklama”. Eyewitnesses recall that he was always neat, polite, reserved and the only one who spoke Ukrainian. He was respected, and behind his back they called him “Bandera.” In this “office”, like in any other, squabbles and squabbles reigned, but Vasily Kuk never interfered in them, being a man who had experienced a lot in his lifetime.

With his retirement and after Ukraine gained independence, Cook spent a lot of effort to ensure that the OUN-UPA was finally recognized as a belligerent party, but the country to this day is “grubbing” to pay the few “forest workers” at least a decent pension. Apparently, all the money went to Maybachs for the “elite”... Therefore, when in 2002 Kuchma wanted to award the veteran the title of Hero of Ukraine, Vasily Kuk categorically refused. Maybe that’s right, otherwise our “heroes” include various “elements”, including “catalans”, pimps and damn... sorry, ladies, bad behavior.

On September 9, 2007, he passed away, but some “political dances” continued around his personality. They expected that the nationally conscious President Viktor Yushchenko would arrive at the civil memorial service in the Teacher's House... But he never came, limiting himself to written condolences. Maybe he was afraid for the precious pre-election image of the pro-presidential, and “on board” national-patriotic party in the South-East of Ukraine, where the “Bandera bandits” are still much worse than the ordinary bandits entrenched in power?.. The Yulia Tymoshenko bloc too ignored the funeral, probably for the same reasons, although patriots in embroidered shirts constantly appear in BYuT with their “unique image”.

Having listened to the text of the leader of the Party of Regions, Viktor Yanukovych, on TV, it was completely difficult to understand what he wanted to say. Apparently, American technologists did not have time to prepare the “necessary piece of paper” in time. The author of these lines understood the general meaning of Yanukovych’s statement addressed to the deceased rebel commander something like this: they say, Cook fought for Ukraine, but one cannot build a country on such an ideology... Apparently, the ideology of trashing everything that was created by our ancestors at the cost of heroism and tragedies in the twentieth century, the ideology of the bandits who came to power is more suitable for the development of the country...

According to Vasily Kuk’s will, he was buried in a zinc coffin in the cemetery of his native village of Krasnoye in the Lviv region. He hoped that someday a pantheon of UPA fighters would be created, and his zinc coffin would take its place there.

The “Last of the Mohicans” are leaving - merciless fighters not for selfish interests, but for an idea, a terrible and fascinating creation of the 20th century! And instead of them - opportunists, thieves, careerists, swindlers...

The finale of the 100-year journey

This was the 100-year path of Ukrainian nationalism in Western Ukraine, which began in the mid-nineteenth century after the revolution of 1848, and ended in the mid-twentieth century on a cruel, tragic and heroic note. Ukrainian nationalism in the form in which the OUN-UPA represented it was destroyed and demoralized. After the murder of Stepan Bandera, the last, albeit far-fetched, but binding charismatic symbol disappeared. Emigrant circles are mired in traditional Ukrainian squabbles. The veterans' authoritarian heroism was discredited. The nationally conscious “sixties” in Ukraine, according to the author, were not essentially a continuation of the line of heroic fighters: rather, it was a Ukrainian national version of the theme of Soviet dissident intellectuals.

Now various careerist-conformists are trying to occupy the niche of Ukrainian nationalism in order to create their own bourgeois well-being and comfort. It even goes as far as an anecdote: some of the current “bourgeois nationalists” are so bourgeois that if the “Banderaites” rose from their graves, then first of all, they would probably hang this public on the first aspen tree in their partisan forest for betraying the Ukrainian idea and glorious heroes!

And although, we repeat, the author of these lines is not a “fan” of nationalism, he is still forced to conclude the following. It is a pity that a cohort of these cruel but selfless people passed into eternity, because they showed that Ukrainians can be not only an amorphous swamp in which all and sundry can trample... Ukrainians can be first-class fighters who accept an unequal battle and respond with a blow on strike, they destroy “strangers” and “our own” scum who strive to make us obedient fools and cheap workers!

The OUN-UPA problem is one of the controversial topics of Ukrainian society; the point of view throughout the years of independence fluctuates between positive (independence fighters, Heroes of Ukraine) and negative (German collaborators, traitors to Ukraine). Their assessment is often based on propaganda cliches from both sides. The issue of officially recognizing the UPA as a belligerent in World War II and providing benefits to veterans at the state level (several western regions made this decision at the regional level) still remain unresolved. The author does not set himself the goal of shedding light on the Upovskaya problem as much as possible, which is practically impossible for an ordinary article, but hopes that the material will allow the reader to form an approximate picture of one of the pages of the Ukrainian one.

general characteristics

Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA-OUN-B) is a partisan army of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of the Bandera Movement. Chief Commander of the UPA in 1943-1950. there was Roman Shukhevych, from 1950 to 1954. - Vasily Kuk.

Name. The abbreviation UPA stands for “Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” although the wording is much more precise as follows - Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of the Bandera Movement. There were several units with the name UPA. Initially, this term was carried by the renamed (formerly “Polesskaya Sich”) military partisan structure of Vasily Borovets (aka Taras Bulba, Bulba-Borovets), the embryo of which, under the guise of a local police force, which was de jure under the control of the Germans, was created by August 1941 Borovets was not associated with the OUN and was subordinate to the UPR government in exile. After the Nazi authorities disbanded the self-defense units, Bulba went underground. The armed formations of the OUN-B also received the name “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”; as a result, until July 1943, the two organizations had the same name. Not wanting to associate himself with the latter’s terror against the Poles, Bulba renamed the UPA-PS UNRA. In 1943, the Bulbovites were surrounded by the OUN and defeated them, which is logical, because scattered peasant detachments could not resist the rigid, clearly structured OUN.

Period of existence. The creation of the UPA was preceded by the activities of its underground predecessors UVO and OUN in 1920-1940. The official date of creation of the OUN UPA is considered to be October 14, 1942, although many historians consider it propaganda and move the founding period forward by about six months. Officially, the activities of headquarters and units ceased on September 3, 1949, but the anti-Soviet nationalist underground in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR functioned until the end of 1953, and individual small groups until the beginning of 1956.

Territory of military operations. UPA-OUN detachments operated in the Ukrainian SSR, BSSR, Poland, Romania, and Kuban, but achieved some results only in the territories that now constitute Western Ukraine. Particularly active since the spring of 1943, incl. Galicia - from the end of 1943, Kholmshchyna - from the autumn of 1943), Volyn - from the end of March 1943), Northern Bukovina - from the summer of 1944).

Structure. A common myth is that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is an ordinary gang that was only involved in robbery and terrorist acts. This is wrong. The UPA was divided into four General Military Districts: UPA-North (Volyn and Polesie), UPA-West (Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia and areas beyond the former Curzon line), UPA-South (Kamenets-Podolsk, Zhitomir, Vinnytsia, southern part of the Kiev regions ), UPA-Vostok practically did not exist. The UPA was a partisan army that had captured weapons (mainly German and Soviet), ammunition (including special uniforms in some departments), discipline, military tactics, Security Service (SB OUN), agents, intelligence, counterintelligence and etc.

Compound. The UPA was formed from many social strata of society. There were peasants present (they made up the largest stratum in the UPA, more than 60%), workers, and intellectuals. Basically, the rebel army consisted of poor and middle peasants, the third group - the rich - was almost absent. In addition to Ukrainians, who were the overwhelming majority, there were Russians, Jews and other national minorities. The attitude towards them was extremely cautious, therefore, at the slightest suspicion, they were liquidated by the OUN Security Council.

Number. The number of UPA-OUN is estimated differently by different sources. Russian and Polish are characterized by understatement (up to 10-20 thousand), while nationalist Ukrainians are characterized by exaggeration (from 200 to 500 thousand). The most optimal figure is the result of the NASU commission (1997-2004) - from 20 to 100 thousand people.

UPA and other armed formations

UPA and German troops

The surviving UPA documents contain references to small military clashes with the Germans, but there is no information about battles with large Wehrmacht forces. The final decision to move against the German occupiers was made by the OUN-B at the III Conference on February 17-21, 1943. By the second half of 1943, the armed detachments of the OUN-B and UPA took control of a significant part of the rural areas of the Volyn and Podolia districts of the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine. Wehrmacht losses from the Upovites are estimated at a maximum of 15 thousand people.

Clashes between the Nazis and Bandera are confirmed by Soviet partisans: in his diary S.V. Rudnev wrote on June 24, 1943: “The nationalists are our enemies, but they beat the Germans. Here you maneuver and think.” One of the reports of the Reichskommissar of Ukraine Erich Koch says: “The performances of national-Ukrainian gangs in the areas of Kremenets-Dubno-Kostopil-Rivne are especially dangerous. On the night of March 20-21, national Ukrainian gangs captured all regional agricultural centers in the Kremenets region and completely destroyed one service center. In this case, 12 German businessmen, foresters, soldiers and policemen died. Although police and Wehrmacht forces were immediately made available, only 2 areas have been recaptured to date...”

It should be noted that the main opponent of the OUN-UPA was the Soviet Union. By the end of 1943, the OUN-B set a course to minimize offensive actions against the Germans and began to accumulate forces to fight against the USSR. More precisely, the results of the German-UPA confrontation are reflected in one of the conclusions of the commission of the Institute of History of NASU: “The anti-German front of the OUN and UPA, which arose in early 1943 and lasted until mid-1944, played an extremely important role in the Ukrainian resistance movement during the Second World War. world war. An armed uprising against Nazi Germany, which categorically denied the possibility of the existence of an independent Ukraine, allowed the OUN-B to rally thousands of Ukrainian patriots in the ranks of the UPA and unite them around the idea of ​​fighting for a Ukrainian independent conciliar state. However, the struggle of the OUN and UPA on the anti-German front did not acquire priority in the strategy of the Ukrainian movement and was temporary, because Moscow imperialism was recognized as the main enemy of Ukrainian independence. This basic principle reduced the fighting of the rebel army against the Germans to forms of “self-defense of the people” and interpreted the Nazis as temporary occupiers of Ukraine. The armed actions of the UPA on the anti-German front had no strategic significance and did not influence the course of the struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, but only limited the activities of the German occupation administration regarding the economic exploitation of the territories of Volyn-Polesie, where the material base of the Ukrainian liberation movement was created. At the same time, the resistance of the OUN and UPA to German policy in the northwestern region of Ukraine to a certain extent limited the ability of the Nazis to fight the Soviet partisan movement in Volyn-Polesie and in the adjacent areas of Right Bank Ukraine. In general, the actions of the OUN and UPA on the anti-German front did not play a noticeable role in the liberation of the territory of Ukraine from the German occupiers.”

UPA and Soviet partisans

The relationship between the UPA and Soviet partisans occupies a special place in military history. The Soviet stage of organized partisan warfare dates back to September 5, 1942 - order No. 00189 “On the tasks of the partisan movement,” signed by I. Stalin. The first vague and inaccurate reports about the form of popular resistance on the territory of the Western Ukrainian regions began to arrive at the Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement from the end of 1942. Over time, information from Soviet intelligence about the creation of the so-called. The “Ukrainian Insurgent Army” arrived in Moscow.

The initial stage of the neighborhood between the partisans and the Upovites can be called a policy of mutual neutrality. But after ethnic cleansing against the Poles, hostilities began between them. Mutual losses are estimated at 5-10 thousand people. Both sides used scorched earth tactics. On August 18, 1944, the 1st Ukrainian Partisan Division named after. S.A. Kovpak, which then numbered over 3 thousand people. The unit was previously subordinate to the USHPD; on 08/18/44 it came under the control of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR.

UPA and the Red Army

The first minor clashes between the Red Army and the UPA began in Left Bank Ukraine. In the Western lands, the number and intensity of conflicts has increased dramatically.

Facts of transitions of Red Army Ukrainians to the UPA, armed clashes between Red Army soldiers and NKVD units over the Upovskaya problem, and direct meetings between rebels and Red Army soldiers were recorded. The counter- and propaganda activities of the UPA-OUN - leaflets, newspapers, brochures, disinformation - had a huge impact on the Red Army. distribution of underground literature, mass placement of slogans and appeals on the walls of houses, fences, and other structures.

And yet, the flaring up of the flames of the Upovsk-Red Army conflict was inevitable for many reasons. The military actions of the UPA and KA were initially partly caused by confusion in the conditions of combat operations, and partly by orders of the rebel commanders and Red Army soldiers. The active struggle of the Red Army against the rebel movement began after the death of General N. Vatutin, the constant destruction of military infrastructure by the rebels, and the disruption of population mobilizations (by the way, the method of violent mobilization was used by almost all parties represented during WWII).

But soon the Soviet government changed tactics. There were several reasons for this: firstly, the psychological impact of the Upovites on the Red Army soldiers, which contributed to the moral decay of the latter; secondly, the ineffectiveness of using Red Army soldiers against the nationalist movement; thirdly, the underestimation of the capabilities and forces of the OUN-UPA. Then the NKVD troops came into action.

UPA and NKD troops

The main opponents of the rebels in Western Ukraine in 1944-1949. There were the Internal and Border Troops of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR, the counterintelligence structure SMERSH, the NKVD-MVD and the NKGB-MGB of the Ukrainian SSR. Unlike the Red Army soldiers, they are more disciplined, better armed and trained. Various methods of struggle were used against the UPA: raids, blockades, special groups, and destruction battalions. Details of the terror carried out by the Soviet punitive authorities are depicted in rebel documents and party reports. During 1945, in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, the prosecutor's office recorded/discovered 1,109 violations of “socialist legality” by 274 employees of the NKVD-NKGB. These included 77 murders, 75 arson and destruction of property, 378 robberies, 213 cases of beatings, 46 illegal arrests. In 1946, according to party statistics, 1,602 cases of “violation of Soviet laws” were recorded. In the “Report on the most typical cases of violation of Soviet legality by employees of the UMGB of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR” dated July 1, 1946, one can find information about “illegal methods of interrogation” (torture), falsification of charges by security officers (entire anti-Soviet organizations were invented), unreasonably long terms of pre-trial detention, insults, beatings, robberies of suspects and witnesses.

The OUN terror was in no way inferior to the Soviet one: “The archives of the Security Service of Ukraine and regional departments contain thousands of criminal cases of past years about the terrorist actions of specific individuals, which reveal the brutal methods of torture and reprisals of OUN-UPA militants, who not only killed, but also tortured their victims: they cut off their arms, legs, heads, hung them and strangled them with ropes / “nooses” / or barbed wire, stabbed them with knives and threw them half-dead and alive into wells, under the ice of rivers and buried them in pits, burned them, and so on.”

It is curious that the archives record cases where violators were tried by their own comrades for exceeding military powers and committing crimes. This applies to both the SB OUN and UPA, and the NKVD-RKKA. The same can be said about the facts of dressing up in the uniform of the enemy/terrorist of the local population for the purpose of discrediting. The number of losses by the NKVD in 1943-1945. is about 10 thousand people, on the rebel side - about 15 thousand.

Cooperation

Cooperation between the OUN-UPA and the Third Reich is a proven fact. This is confirmed by both German/Soviet documents and OUN documents. It is enough to look at the report of SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Vitiska Zid dated 02/05/1944, sent to the command in Berlin and Krakow, the radiogram from the district leader Nering from Kamenka-Strumilova to the governor of Galicia dated 04/02/1944, the report dated 04/04/1944 “Cooperation with the UPA in the Rava-Russkaya area” or the testimony of 1946 at the preliminary investigation and in court of the assistant of the intelligence department of the “South” group, Lazarek Yu.F. to ensure the coordination of the joint struggle of the Wehrmacht and the UPA in some cases against the Red Army and Soviet partisans, mutual neutrality or the supply of ammunition from the Germans to the UPA.

Similar agreements were concluded with representatives of the military authorities of Romania and Hungary, allies of Germany. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, OUN leaders established contacts with the intelligence services of Great Britain and the United States.

In the so-called “The problem of collaboration” needs to focus on one essential detail: to be able to clearly distinguish between the tough leadership, the totalitarian OUN, the members who were the top of Bandera’s UPA, and the people’s rebels. This issue requires special additional investigation, because it is not clear whether cooperation with the German authorities was one-sided or, on the contrary, mutually beneficial. The same can be said about the crimes of the Upovites.

UPA and civilians

UPA and the Soviet population

Civilians have always suffered in the flames of war. The Ukrainian SSR was no exception. Its western regions, annexed to the Union in 1939, experienced all the “delights” of the Stalinist regime - deportations, forced deportations, and intimate investigations. arny OUN, which were the top Bandera UPA, from popular collectivization, repression, imposition of Soviet ideology. In less than two years, this had such an impact on the local population that already in 1941 the Germans were greeted with bread and salt as liberators. After about three years, the totalitarian regime returned to Western Ukrainian lands. The answer was not long in coming.

For 1945–1953 On the territory of the western regions of Ukraine, the rebels committed 14,424 acts of sabotage and terrorism. Over 10 years (1945–1955), they killed 17 thousand Soviet citizens. In 1948–1955 329 chairmen of village councils, 231 chairmen of collective farms, 436 workers of district party committees, employees of district organizations and activists, and 50 priests were killed. In total, UPA fighters destroyed from 30 to 40 thousand people. .

The terrorist activities of the OUN did not justify their goals, therefore, after 1946, the scale of its terror, like the Soviet one, began to decline. OUN accomplices were treated differently: in wartime they were shot, sent to the front, to the eastern regions of the Ukrainian SSR, to the Urals, in peacetime, they were limited to deportations or prison terms. According to official Soviet statistics, in 1944-1952. in the western regions of Ukraine, almost half a million people fell under repression in various forms of punitive structures, incl. More than 130 thousand were arrested, 200 thousand people were deported outside the Ukrainian SSR. On the other hand, the underground activities of the OUN-UPA for almost 15 years confirm the thesis of popular support in Western Ukraine, which is confirmed by modern social research.

UPA and the Polish population

Ukrainian-Polish relations have always been complex and contradictory. In the 20th century, they reached a new level and acquired the appearance of an ordinary meat grinder. The policy of Polish officials was extremely simple: Western Ukrainian lands should be under the control of the new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ukrainian nationalists thought differently. As a result of the clash of official points of view, the civilian population was drawn into the conflict. The OUN-B launched large-scale actions against the Poles in March 1943. In world history, the bloody tragedy was called the “Volyn Massacre.” The uncompromising positions of the Polish government and the leadership of the OUN on the territorial issue led to the death of at least 70-80 thousand Poles and 10-20 thousand Ukrainians: in 1943-1944. UPA detachments are responsible for ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Western Volyn, Eastern Galicia, and the Kholm region; The Regional Army is for terror against the Ukrainian.

UPA and the Jewish population

The resolutions of the Second Great Congress of the OUN-B recorded the organization’s negative attitude towards Jews: “The Jews in the USSR are the most devoted support of the Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism in Ukraine. The Moscow-Bolshevik government uses the anti-Jewish sentiment of the Ukrainian masses to divert their attention from the real culprit of the troubles and in order to direct them to pogroms of the Jews in the hour of uprising. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is fighting the Jews as the support of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime, while explaining to the masses that Moscow is the main enemy.” In May 1941, the OUN-B developed instructions “The struggle and activities of the OUN during the war.” It indicated that national minorities are divided into: a) friendly to us, that is, members of all enslaved peoples; b) hostile to us, Muscovites, Poles, Jews. It is noteworthy that the detail of the second point stated: “The Jews should be isolated, removed from government institutions in order to avoid sabotage, especially Muscovites and Poles. If there was an insurmountable need to leave a Jew in the economic apparatus, put our policeman over him and liquidate him for the slightest offense. The leaders of certain areas of life can only be Ukrainians, and not foreign enemies. The assimilation of Jews is excluded."

By February 1943, the UPA was created under the leadership of the OUN-B. Later, the first military conference was held, and a decision was made to focus on Great Britain and the United States. The anti-Jewish program of the OUN-B was softened: Jews living on Ukrainian territory must be deported, while at the same time captured Jewish political instructors and military personnel must be destroyed. In the spring of 1943, Jews, along with the Poles, came under attack from the UPA-OUN and SB OUN. The anti-Jewish course was finally curtailed by the OUN leadership in 1944. The exact number of victims is unknown; according to Israeli researcher Aron Weiss, about 28 thousand Jews were killed by the OUN in Western Ukraine.

UPA and modern Ukraine

History of the problem solution

Since the mid-1990s, the question of giving special status to OUN-UPA veterans has been raised in Ukraine. For a long time, no significant changes occurred. In September 1997, a government commission was created under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to study the activities of the OUN-UPA. On July 10, 2002, a decision was made, with the help of NASU, to create a working group of historians to conduct a scientific study of the activities of the UPA and, based on the data obtained, determine their official status. On January 29, 2010, Viktor Yushchenko by his decree recognized the members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

Social thought

44% of respondents negatively assessed the armed struggle of the OUN and UPA against Soviet power, 20% of respondents - positively, 14% - neutral, 18% - found it difficult to answer, 4% - had not heard of such an event (April-May 2011, Research & Branding Group).

23% of respondents support the idea of ​​recognizing the OUN-UPA as participants in the struggle for state Independence of Ukraine, 51% of respondents do not support, 26% are undecided on this issue (September-October 2012, Sociological group “Rating”).

conclusions

The Second World War is the bloodiest in the history of mankind. It acquired the character of a total massacre, with everyone and against everyone. Archival materials coldly testify to both the crimes and heroism of the OUN-UPA. The latter are also responsible for thousands of innocent victims among the civilian Polish, Soviet and Jewish populations. On the other hand, the Upovites fought against the German invaders, Soviet troops (including the Red Army, partisans, NKVD-MGB), the Regional Army, etc. The OUN terror was not inferior in size to the Soviet one, it was condemned by the Bulbovites and Melnykovites, and the principle of collective responsibility was applied by all parties without exception.

The mythologization of the UPA-OUN is one of the main problems of the modern stage of studying military history. Supporters of the absolute glorification of the Upovites argue that the latter fought almost a real battle with the Wehrmacht, did not collaborate with the Nazi regime, and did not kill civilians, which is not true. In this regard, the current topic is the “whitening” of the pages of the UPA-OUN, the spread of misinformation, be it quotes from Charles de Gaulle and Che Guevara, the death of Victor Lutze, the post-war purge of archives or exaggeration/embellishment of the scale of activity. A picture is created that during WWII there were only two enemies - the Third Reich and the OUN-UPA.

Opponents of the glorification of the OUN-UPA are stepping on the same rake as their adherents. The idealization of the Soviet Union automatically jeopardizes everything that does not fit within this framework and causes unfounded criticism. At the same time, the crimes of the Soviet regime, which in the first half of its existence was a cruel totalitarian machine, are forgotten, myths are repeated about Roman Shukhevych, whom Hitler himself allegedly awarded two Nazi crosses, the Ukrainian trace in Khatyn, that the Upovites did not kill the Germans and the OUN-UPA condemned Nuremberg.

The UPA-OUN problem is one of the most difficult in Ukrainian society. Due to the fact that there is direct and indirect evidence of military clashes between the OUN-UPA and the Red Army, the UPA-UNRA, the Regional Army, etc., against the peaceful Polish, Soviet (including Ukrainian), Jewish population, it is necessary:

1. Create an independent highly professional commission to investigate the activities of the OUN-UPA. The commission level should be at least at the CIS level. It should include historians, military historians, sociologists, half of whom are Ukrainians (50%), the rest are experts from other countries (Poland, Belarus, Russia, Germany, Moldova, USA; in other words, CIS and EU countries + those who directly or indirectly involved in this problem).

2. The responsibilities of the commission will include: collecting, processing information, sifting out false data, surveying the population, participation in the process of living participants of the OUN-UPA, KA, AK, Wehrmacht and their descendants, including a possible lie detector test, the use of archival materials of Ukraine and others powers, summing up. Each stage of the commission’s work is covered in the media, the population must be informed, cooperation must be carried out with the SBU and the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine (in case those who committed crimes against humanity are identified), public opinion must be taken into account (in the latter case, as long as it does not contradict truth of the process).

3. Statistics, figures and facts, limited numbers, a specific region of combat operations, low results in the OUN-UPA struggle allow us to currently assert their maximum regional heroic status. It will be clarified and adjusted by the commission. Regional status means additional payments to pensions for OUN-UPA veterans from regional/state budgets, however, resolving the issue of “subsidization” is possible only after the conclusions of the commission and the completion of the investigation. Remembrance events and their activities should take place at the regional/all-Ukrainian levels, taking into account the opinions of the local population. Individual members of the OUN-UPA can go beyond the regional level, equal in status to veterans of the Soviet army and receive all-Ukrainian veteran status, subject to confirmation by the commission (based on facts and irrefutable evidence) of their heroic activities during the Second World War.

The analytical material can be concluded with the thesis of the authors of the collection “The NKVD-MVD of the USSR in the fight against banditry and the armed nationalist underground in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Baltic states (1939-1956)”, to which the author of the article also joins: “The authors of this publication do not accept It is our responsibility to judge the participants in the brutal struggle of the 1940s−1950s, to determine who is right and who is wrong. We respect the right of all nations - large and small - to self-determination and the right of any person to have his own point of view on a national issue. The only thing that cannot be justified is violence, and from this point of view we condemn both the repression of the central government and the terror of the nationalists.”

Sources

Sergei Tkachenko, “Rebel Army. Fighting tactics."
A complete summary of Ukrainian and Polish historians in the bags of the IX-X international scientific seminars - Warsaw, November 5-11, 2001.
OUN i UPA, 2005, Division. 4.
Evidence about the activities of the OUN-UPA. Working group of security personnel of the Security Service of Ukraine. Date 30 linya 1993 r.
A. I. Kokurin, N. I. Vladimirtsev, “NKVD-MVD of the USSR in the fight against banditry and the armed nationalist underground in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Baltic states (1939-1956)
OUN in 1941. Documents. In 2 parts. Part 1.

UPA supporters

Many military organizations, in addition to German formations, collaborated with the UPA. First of all, it should probably be noted the so-called Self-Defense Bush Departments (SKO). These were people's self-defense units, which were organized by local residents of certain lands according to the bush principle. However, such groups often acted together with UPA departments. A fairly large formation was the UNS - otherwise - the Ukrainian People's Self-Defense, which fought mainly against Soviet partisans. This military group was formed in 1943 and already in August of the same year it defeated Kovpak’s troops. Since January 1944, the UNS became part of the UPA and on its basis the UPA-West military group was created. There was also a unit of the FUR - the Front of the Ukrainian Revolution, which appeared in Valyn in the summer of 1942. The FUR was commanded by Timosh Basyuk (his real name is Yavorenko), and he also commanded a hundred UPA. After his campaign in Central Ukraine ended in failure, Basyuk and eighty other fighters left the UPA camp and continued the war on their own. But the UPA considered him a traitor, sentenced him to death and soon carried out the sentence. The Bukovinian Ukrainian Self-Defense Army, otherwise BUSA, organized in 1944, also collaborated with the UPA and conducted more than a hundred battles and had 3 well-armed departments.

Opponents of the UPA

Multiple detachments of partisans fought against the UPA, and during the ataman period in Ukraine in 1941–1943, the UPA managed to destroy several dozen Cossack detachments. But some detachments, such as: “Free Cossacks”, “Polessye Lozovoye Cossacks”, as well as “Chernigov Sich”, formed in 1941 on the left bank of the Dnieper under the command of Yar Slavutich, a former lieutenant of the Red Army, were never defeated by military groups UPA. Among other things, the opponent of the UPA, of course, was the entire Soviet Army, which fought to liberate the land from the Nazi invaders.

Crimes and victims

The UPA 118th battalion under the command of V. Meleshko took part in the massacre of residents of the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943, when among the 149 dead civilians there were women and children. The Third Hundred of Lieutenant Sidor and the First Hundred of Roman Shukhevych in Belarus destroyed more than two thousand partisans. During 1943 and 1944 In Galicia and Volyn, UPA detachments exterminated more than one hundred thousand Poles. The Polish publication “Na Rubieїy” (number 35, 1999), which was published by the Volyn Foundation, provided a list that described 135 methods of torture and other savagery that UPA soldiers used against civilians. Here are some of them: sawing through the human body, which was lined with boards on both sides, using a carpenter's saw, women's breasts were cut off with a sickle and the wounds were sprinkled with salt, men's genitals were cut off, children were cut into pieces and pieces of the body were scattered around, nailed to the table with a knife by the tongue small children so that they would later hang on them, pierce the bellies of pregnant women with bayonets, impale children, cut open the bellies of adults and pull out the intestines through the cut, drive bayonets into the temples, remove scalps, carve an eagle on the forehead of the victims - the Polish coat of arms, inflict blows with an ax into the victims’ necks, cut off the skin from the victims’ faces with a blade, tore people in half with chains, and nailed the victims’ hands to the threshold of their homes. The victims of the UPA were not only Poles, but also Czechs, Jews, Russians, as well as Ukrainians who did not actively cooperate with the UPA.

Results

The essence of integral nationalism is the ideological principles according to which the very concept of “nation” is identified exclusively with the struggle for survival against other nations. Thus, war becomes natural, and hostility between nations is justified and at the same time endless. The first immutable rule of the OUN UPA was the principle according to which will must be the negation of reason, physical strength must be the negation of the strength of science, culture, economics, violence of the stronger over the weak and, finally, racism, according to which the best representative of the Ukrainian nation is the Nordic type, and only he is fit to govern the state.

The enemies of Ukraine are all non-Ukrainians, this is hatred of everything non-Ukrainian, everything foreign. The OUN is the leader who determines what exactly is good for the Ukrainian nation. All these ideological ideas led to the death of thousands and thousands of people, and still terrify not only with the memory of the activities of the UPA, but also provoke the fear of a revival of such radicalism. Without knowledge of the theory and ideology of the OUN, it is very difficult to fully appreciate all the activities of the UPA, understand its history, and understand the enormity of the crimes...

The attitude of contemporaries towards the UPA

Back in the mid-1990s, the question of granting UPA veterans a special status began to be raised in Ukraine. The decision “On the status of UPA veterans” and on guarantees of their social protection was first adopted by the Lviv Regional Council in 1995. In 1997, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine created a special commission to investigate the activities of the UPA. But the final decision was made not by the National Academy of Sciences, which created a group of historians, but by the people who came to power thanks to the Orange Revolution in 2005. Vyacheslav Kirilenko (Deputy Prime Minister), who headed the government commission, on October 14 (2005) decided to consider the activities of the OUN-UPA exclusively as a struggle for the independence of Ukraine.

In 2006, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko called on the Verkhovna Rada to vote for a law that would equate UPA veterans with veterans of the Great Patriotic War. In 2007, Roman Shukhevych was awarded the title of “Hero of Ukraine”. In 2010, by decree of Viktor Yushchenko dated January 29, all members of the UPA were recognized as fighters for the independence of Ukraine. And Yuriy Sergeev, the representative of Ukraine to the UN, on March 3, 2014, justified the activities of Stepan Bandera and stated that at the Nuremberg trials, which tried UPA criminals, all data and documents about the activities of the UPA were falsified.

Currently, the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine, like the whole world as a whole, consider the activities and the very existence of the UPA a crime against humanity, while the Western and Central parts of Ukraine, without a doubt, see the UPA soldiers as heroes who fought for independence own country.

To begin with, a short educational program based on materials from Wikipedia and slovari.yandex.ru:

Stepan Andreevich Bandera(Ukrainian Stepan Andriyovych Bandera) (January 1, 1909 - October 15, 1959) - one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Eastern Poland (Galicia), Hero of Ukraine (2010), in 1941-1959 head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN (b)) .

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)- a nationalist terrorist organization that operated in the western regions of Ukraine in the 20-50s. XX century It emerged in 1929 as the “Ukrainian Military Organization” (UVO), then changed its name. The founder and first leader of the OUN was Yevgen Konovalets, a former colonel of the Austro-Hungarian army. During the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War, he actively participated in the nationalist movement in Ukraine together with S. Petlyura. At one time he served as military commandant of Kyiv. The ideological platform of the OUN was the concept of radical Ukrainian nationalism, characterized by chauvinism and xenophobia, with a pronounced anti-Russian orientation and focused on the use of extremist means to achieve the goal - the creation of an “independent”, “independent” Ukraine.

After the Red Army entered the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in September 1939, the OUN, in collaboration with German intelligence agencies, began the fight against Soviet power. The preservation of the influence of nationalists was greatly facilitated by the methods by which the communist regime was imposed on Western Ukrainian lands. Ukrainian nationalists warmly welcomed the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR and from the first days of the war provided support to German troops and occupation authorities. Members of the OUN helped the German fascists in the “final solution to the Jewish question,” i.e., the extermination and deportation of Jews in the occupied territories, and served in the occupation administration and police. Even when it became completely clear that Hitler would not provide Ukraine with any semblance of “independence,” the nationalists did not stop collaborating with the Nazis. With their active support, the SS division "Galicia" was formed.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) is an armed formation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

It operated from the spring of 1943 in the territories that were part of the General Government (Galicia - from the end of 1943, Kholmshchyna - from the autumn of 1943), the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine (Volyn - from the end of March 1943), and Romanian Transnistria (Transnistria) (Northern Bukovina - from summer 1944), which until 1939-1940 were part of Poland and Romania.

In 1943-44. UPA detachments carried out ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Western Volyn, Kholm region and Eastern Galicia.

In 1943-1944, UPA units acted against Soviet partisans and units of the Polish underground (both communist and subordinate to the London government, i.e. the Home Army).

But about the crimes of the UPA.

The UPA was created on October 14, 1942 by decision of the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was headed by Roman Shukhevych, a holder of two knightly orders of Nazi Germany. President Yushchenko declared him a hero of Ukraine, and he is trying to present the UPA itself as a belligerent during the Second World War.

Meanwhile, there is not a single document indicating that UPA detachments fought with large Wehrmacht forces. But there are more than enough documents about the joint actions of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis. And even more documents tell about the fanaticism committed by the “national hero” Roman Shukhevych and his brothers in arms.

It is known for sure that the published newspaper “Surma”, bulletins and other nationalist literature were printed in Germany. Some nationalist literature was published illegally in Lviv and other cities of Western Ukraine. Recently, the Russian Foreign Ministry published documents. Here are some of them:

The head of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR, Pavel Sudoplatov, in a message dated December 5, 1942, testifies: “Ukrainian nationalists, who had previously been underground, met the Germans with bread and salt and provided them with all kinds of assistance. The German occupiers widely used nationalists to organize the so-called “new order” in the occupied regions of the Ukrainian SSR.

From the Protocol of interrogation of Ivan Tikhonovich Kutkovets, an active Bandera member. February 1, 1944:
“Despite the fact that, at the behest of the Germans, Bandera proclaimed an “independent” Ukraine, the Germans delayed the issue of creating a national Ukrainian government... It was not profitable for the Germans to create a Ukrainian national government, they “conquered” Ukraine and considered it an eastern colony of the “Third Empire” and power over They did not want to share Ukraine with Bandera and they removed this rival. In addition, at this time, the Ukrainian police, created by the OUN members, carried out active security service in the rear of the German army to fight partisans, detain Soviet paratroopers and look for Soviet party activists.”

The circular “On the treatment of members of the UPA”, issued on 12.2.44, by the so-called Prützmann combat group, also deserves attention. It makes it clear how the UPA “fought” the Germans a year and a half after its creation:

“Negotiations with the leaders of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army that began in the Derazhnya area are now also continuing in the Verba area. We agreed: members of the UPA will not attack German military units. The UPA currently sends scouts, mostly girls, into enemy-occupied territory and reports the results to a representative of the battle group's intelligence department. Captured Red Army soldiers, as well as captured persons belonging to Soviet gangs, will be delivered to a representative of the intelligence department for interrogation, and the newly arrived element will be transferred to the combat group for assignment to various works. In order not to interfere with this necessary cooperation for us, it is ordered:

1. UPA agents who have certificates signed by a certain “Captain Felix”, or who pose as members of the UPA, should be allowed through without hindrance, and weapons should be left with them. Upon request, agents are to be immediately brought to the 1st (Intelligence Branch Representative) Battle Group.

2. When UPA units meet German units for identification, they raise their left outstretched hand to their faces, in this case they will not be attacked, but this can happen if fire is opened from the opposite side...

Signed: Brenner, Major General and SS-Brigadefuehrer."

Another “heroic” stage in the history of Ukrainian nationalists and personally the UPA commander Roman Shukhevych was the fight against Belarusian partisans. Historian S.I. Drobyazko in his book “Under the Enemy’s Banners. Anti-Soviet formations within the German armed forces” writes that in 1941, on the territory of Belarus, the first Ukrainian police battalions were already formed from Red Army prisoners of war.
“Most of the Ukrainian auxiliary police battalions carried out security service on the territory of the Reichskommissariats, others were used in anti-partisan operations - mainly in Belarus, where, in addition to the battalions already created here, a number of units were sent from Ukraine, including 101, 102, 109, 115, 118 , 136th, 137th and 201st battalions.

Their actions, like the actions of other similar units involved in punitive actions, were associated with numerous war crimes against the civilian population. The most famous of which was the participation of a company of the 118th battalion under the command of the cornet V. Meleshko in the destruction of the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943, when 149 civilians died, half of whom were children,” he writes.

And now - a word for the Banderaites themselves. This is what was published in 1991 in No. 8 of the Vizvolny Shlyakh edition, which was published in London:
“In Belarus, the 201st Ukrainian battalion was not concentrated in one place. His soldiers, in numbers and hundreds, were scattered across different strongholds... After arriving in Belarus, the kuren received the task of guarding bridges on the Berezina and Western Dvina rivers. Departments stationed in populated areas were charged with protecting the German administration. In addition, they had to constantly comb forest areas, identify and destroy partisan bases and camps,” writes Bandera member M. Kalba in this publication.

“Each hundred guarded the square assigned to it. The 3rd hundred of Lieutenant Sidor were in the south of the zone of responsibility of the Ukrainian battalion, the 1st hundred of ROMAN SHUKHEVICH were in the center... Chasing the partisans in unfamiliar territory, the soldiers fell into an enemy ambush and were blown up by mines... The battalion spent nine months in the “partisan front" and gained invaluable combat experience in this struggle. According to approximate data, the legionnaires destroyed more than two thousand Soviet partisans,” he notes.

As they say, no comments. Even the Banderaites themselves directly indicate what the “national hero” Shukhevych was doing in Belarus. One can only guess what kind of Ukraine he fought for against the fraternal Belarusian people.

Finally, in 1943-1944. UPA detachments in Volyn and Galicia exterminated over 100 thousand Poles. The Polish publication “Na Rubieїy” (Nr 35, 1999), published by the Volyn Foundation, describes 135 methods of torture and atrocities that UPA soldiers applied to the Polish civilian population, including children.

Here are just a few of these extravagances:
001. Driving a large and thick nail into the skull of the head.
002. Ripping off hair and skin from the head (scalping).
003. Hitting the skull of the head with the butt of an ax...
005. Carving on the forehead “eagle” (Polish coat of arms)…
006. Driving a bayonet into the temple of the head. ..
012. Piercing children through with stakes.
016. Throat cutting….
022. Closing mouths with tow while transporting still living victims...
023. Cutting the neck with a knife or sickle… .
024. Hitting the neck with an ax...
039. Cutting off women's breasts with a sickle.
040. Cutting off women's breasts and sprinkling salt on the wounds.
041. Cutting off the genitals of male victims with a sickle.
042. Sawing the body in half with a carpenter's saw.
043. Causing puncture wounds to the abdomen with a knife or bayonet.
044. Piercing a pregnant woman's stomach with a bayonet.
045. Cutting open the abdomen and pulling out the intestines of adults...
069. Sawing the body, lined with boards on both sides, in half with a carpenter's saw...
070. Sawing the body in half with a special saw.
079. Nailing the tongue of a small child, who later hung on it, to the table with a knife….
080. Cutting a child into pieces with a knife and throwing them around...
090. Hanging a monk by his feet near the pulpit in a church.
091. Placing a child on a stake.
092. Hanging a woman upside down from a tree and mocking her - cutting off her breasts and tongue, cutting her stomach, gouging out her eyes, and also cutting off pieces of her body with knives...
109. Tearing the torso with chains...
126. Cutting off the skin from the face with blades...
133. Nailing hands to the threshold of a home...
135. Dragging a body along the ground by legs tied with a rope.
Let us only add that the list of UPA crimes is by no means limited to this. Their victims were Russians, Czechs, Jews, but most of all... the Ukrainians themselves, who did not actively cooperate with them.

11.05.2011

Who are they? Heroes or traitors? They operated from the spring of 1943 in the territories: Volyn - late March 1943, Galicia - late 1943, Kholmshchyna - autumn 1943, Northern Bukovina - summer 1944, which during the period between the two world wars were parts of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania. In 1939-1945. the bulk of these territories became part of the USSR. In 1941-44, the overwhelming majority of the population of Ukraine, except for the western region, considered Ukrainian nationalists to be allies of the fascists, which limited the region of actions of the OUN and UPA.

Propaganda publications of the OUN and UPA “Idea and Chin”, “Before the Battle”, “News from the Front of the UPA”, etc. contain descriptions of numerous “battles of the UPA with the German invaders”, starting in March 1943. In them, the enemy suffers numerous losses and rarely retreats; rebel losses in these “battles” amount to 1 in 16-50 “destroyed Germans.” It is noteworthy that among the “battles with the Germans” there is a record of an operation in Ivanova Dolina (the Polish village of Janova Dolina, defeated by the UPA at the end of April. Descriptions of “battles” similar in “effectiveness” and the number of “German losses” are published in OUN and UPA publications until until the summer of 1944.

Janova Dolina

Consequences…

And for many other Yans...

According to the publication of Yuri Tys-Krokhmalyuk (one of the coordinators of the creation and later an officer of the SS division “Galicia”) “Armed struggle UPA in Ukraine,” published in 1972 in New York by the UPA Veterans Association (which is still considered one of the most significant sources of information about the UPA among a number of Western historians, and primarily historians of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada), in early May 1943 the UPA leads victorious battles with several SS divisions for a little-known Ukrainian town, after which he defeats the troops under the command of SS generals Platle and later Hinzler.

Further, according to the same Krokhmalyuk, Himmler personally, seeing such a catastrophic situation in the fight against the UPA and after holding several meetings, sends to Ukraine the “chief of partisans” in the Reich - Erich Bach-Zalewski, who also suffers defeat in the fight against the UPA, after why he is recalled and a penalty is imposed on him. The work of Yuriy Tys-Krokhmalyuk describes in most detail the battle of 3 UPA battalions with three SS divisions (according to his information, only two divisions had 30,000 people) at the beginning of July 1944 - the latter suffer heavy losses and retreat without achieving the goal; the rebels lost a dozen people - and this was during the start of the Lvov-Sandomierz operation.

Lviv-Sandomierz operation - map

In actions against Soviet partisans, the OUN and UPA achieved significant success. They managed to complicate the combat activities of the partisans in many regions of Volyn-Polesie and interfere with sabotage operations on German communications. The UPA managed to largely thwart the plans of the Soviet command to introduce partisan formations into the territory of Galicia to operate on German communications in 1944.

The first mention of the activation of Ukrainian nationalists in actions against Soviet partisans dates back to the early spring of 1943, but even in 1942, nationalists tried to destroy small reconnaissance and sabotage groups dropped from airplanes onto the territory of Volyn. Since the formation of the UPA, in 1943-44, the destruction of Soviet sabotage groups by nationalist detachments has become a normal occurrence. At the same time, attempts to conduct actions against partisan detachments and attempts to send their agents into them to destroy the command staff ended unsuccessfully

At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the armed formations of the OUN(b) were actively involved in sabotage and disorganization of the rear of the Red Army, coordinated with German troops. At the end of 1943 - beginning of 1944, with the approach of Soviet troops (1st Ukrainian Front, 13th and 60th armies) to the UPA operating areas, individual UPA units offered armed resistance to them together with the Germans. As the UPA units found themselves in the rear of the Soviet troops, they either crossed the front line or continued attacks on small rear units and individual soldiers of the Red Army; Some members of the UPA, following orders, cordially welcomed the Red Army in order to dull the vigilance of Soviet counterintelligence, collected information about the reserves and movements of Soviet troops and transferred it to the 1c Department of the Army Group on the Southern Front.

Red Army units

According to the Polish historian Grzegorz Motyka, the actions of the OUN-B/UPA on the territory of Volyn in 1943 were part of the general plan of the OUN-B to “cleanse the territory” of “undesirable elements.” This information is also confirmed by sources of the UPR and OUN not of the Bandera direction, which also became the target of the activities of the Security Service and the gendarmerie of the OUN-B/UPA. According to the orders of Klim Savur (D. Klyachkivsky), in the areas controlled by the UPA, the “skhidnyaks” were destroyed - encirclement and escaped prisoners of war of the Red Army, hiding in remote forest farms. With the advent of Soviet power in Western Ukraine, the struggle of the OUN-B/UPA with the “sexts” intensified - who were recommended to be publicly hanged with a corresponding sign. The main social base of the “sexts” were considered to be teachers, employees of civil and financial institutions in the countryside and watchmen, railway workers, tram drivers and others in the city.

Thus, out of a group of 15 people sent to one of the regional centers of the Rivne region to restore the national economy, only one managed to escape - the remaining 14 were shot and the corpses were violated - one of the men had his head cut off, and a woman’s face and legs. By region, losses among Soviet citizens were: (including military personnel, employees of the NKVD-MGB-MVD and fighters of fighter battalions) - Volyn - 3500, Transcarpathian - 48, Ivano-Frankivsk - 10527, Drohobych and Lviv - 7968, Rivne - 3997, Ternopil - 3557, Chernivtsi - 796, Khmelnytsky - 133, Zhytomyr?150.

A house burned by the UPA in the city of Bukovsko (photo taken in 1946)

At the first stage of the liquidation of the nationalist underground, the main miscalculations were considered to be the underestimation of its prevalence and the readiness for action of the Soviet side, the insufficient number of forces involved and their technical equipment. As more forces were attracted (from the fall of 1944), the weakness of coordination between various structures and the weakness of the intelligence and reconnaissance movements were pointed out. After the liquidation of large and medium-sized formations (winter-spring 1945), the liquidation of small ones was not carried out properly; the forces involved in operations were often worse armed than their opponents (rifles versus machine guns and machine guns); the same poor coordination between different structures led to confusion and in many cases to friendly fire. After the liquidation of small units. The restructuring of the NKVD in the spring of 1946 and the transfer of the main part of the functions to the MGB had a bad impact on the quality of operational work. The reaction to the change in tactics of the nationalist underground was delayed. Poor leadership at the grassroots level and lack of sound initiative led to stagnation in operations.

In 1946, 1,619 shares were registered from outside OUN-UPA, of which 78 were attacks on employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security. 2,612 families of “bandits and bandits”—6,350 people—were deported. 1947 was the last year for the OUN and UPA on the territory of Poland - the resettlement of the Ukrainian population and the activity of Polish law enforcement agencies forced the remnants of the UPA and the OUN underground to move to the West in the safest way - through Czechoslovakia. Of the one and a half to two thousand people of the “Zakerzon” UPA, who traversed the route in several stages in detachments consisting of several hundred fighters, a little more than a hundred people were able to reach the target. On the territory of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, the total number of UPA members remaining at large was significantly lower than the number of the OUN underground. On May 30, 1947, Shukhevych issues a decree on the unification of the UPA and the armed underground of the OUN. On the same date, the UGVR issued a decree establishing the official day for celebrating the “founding” of the UPA - October 14, 1942. Officially, the UGVR “temporarily” stopped the activities of UPA structures on September 3, 1949.

Trying to eliminate the insurgent movement and undermine its social base, the party and state bodies of the Ukrainian SSR offered ordinary members of the OUN-UPA (including those who were simply hiding in the forests from mobilization) and their assistants amnesty in case of surrender. From February 1944 to July 1945, 41 thousand rebels took advantage of these offers, of whom 17 thousand were prosecuted, which subsequently reduced the effectiveness of this measure. After careful consideration by the party and Soviet authorities of the cases of the rebels who accepted the amnesty, many of them were resettled to the east, to the industrial regions of Ukraine. In total, in 1944-49, 6 amnesties were proclaimed for OUN-UPA participants. The last rebel called himself Ilya Obershin, who spent forty years in an illegal situation and left the forests only in 1991, after Ukraine gained independence.

Since the mid-1990s, the issue of giving special status to veterans has been raised in Ukraine. OUN-UPA. For a long time, however, no significant changes occurred in this regard.

October 12, 2007 By decree of the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko, Roman Shukhevych was awarded the title “Hero of Ukraine” “for his outstanding contribution to the national liberation struggle for freedom and independence of Ukraine and in connection with the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 65th anniversary of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent army"

On December 3, 2007, the Kharkov Regional Council, the majority of which was the Party of Regions, adopted a statement that “in the territory of the Kharkov region, the OUN-UPA fought on the side of fascist Germany,” and designated the UPA as “formations that were subordinate to the command of fascist Germany and were used by it during the Second World War against the Soviet Union and the states of the anti-Hitler coalition." The deputies criticized the actions of Viktor Yushchenko, assessing them “as a desire to impose on Ukrainian society a vision of events during the Great Patriotic War from the point of view of a limited group of people who were guilty of committing the most terrible crimes against peace and humanity,” and also stated that “attempts to rehabilitate collaborationism and betrayals lead to discord and threaten the future of Ukraine.” The Kharkov regional council called for “preventing the glorification of the OUN-UPA” and invited the authorities in the region to “dismantle, if any, any memorial signs installed in honor of the OUN-UPA or their militants.” The next day, the Ukrainian People's Party announced the need to disband the Kharkov Regional Council for “anti-state and anti-Ukrainian activities.”

March of OUN UPA Veterans

March of OUN UPA veterans.

Monuments to the victims of the OUN-UPA

Despite the formation in February and adoption in August 1943 of the “fight on two fronts” strategy, the main “enemy” of the OUN and UPA was the Soviet Union, and the fight against the Germans was supposed to take place in the form of “people’s self-defense.” M. Stepnyak’s proposals to start mass actions against the Germans were rejected by the Third OUN Conference in February 1943 and the Great Assembly of the OUN in August 1943. However, by the second half of 1943, the armed groups of the OUN(b) and UPA took control of most of the uncontrolled or weakly controlled by the German administration of rural areas of the General District of Volyn - Podolia. The German administration continued to control the main supply routes for large population centers...