Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist

The Beginnings of Ukrainian “Heroic Modernity”

Ukrainian heroic modernity found expression for the first time in the writings of the nationalist extremist Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi (1873–1924), although it derives from the thoughts of such activists as Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Ivan Franko. The most influential of these was Hrushevs’kyi, a historian and politician. In the nineteenth century, thinkers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Engels elaborated on the popular problem of “historical” and “non-historical” nations, to which Hrushevs’kyi responded. Starting from ancient times, Hrushevs’kyi rewrote the history of the Eastern Slavs, displaying bias in favor of the Ukrainian national movement and regarding the Russian and Polish national movements with disfavor. In his voluminous History of Ukraine-Rus’, he separated Ukrainian history from Russian history, claiming that the Ukrainian people had ancient origins. He thereby “resolved” the problem of the “non-historical” Ukrainian people, making it as historical and as rich in tradition as the Polish and Russian peoples. This was one of the most significant late nineteenth-century “academic” contributions to the creation of a national Ukrainian identity.[141]

In his historical writings, Hrushevs’kyi did not insist that the Slavs or Ukrainians were a pure race or had to be viewed as a race. Nevertheless he used the term “race” in the context of anthropology. Writing about the ancient peoples living in the territory of contemporary Ukraine, he mentioned “dolichocephalic” (long-headed) and “brachycephalic” (short-headed) types of people inhabiting the Ukrainian territories in ancient times. He argued that “the Slavs of today are predominantly short-headed” but racially not uniform. The brachycephalic type “is still the dominant type among Ukrainians, but among the Poles and Russians this type vies with the mesaticephalic [medium headed], with a significant admixture of the dolichocephalic.”[142] Looking for the origins of the Ukrainian people among ancient peoples, Hrushevs’kyi concluded that the “Ukrainian tribes” originated from the Antes: “The Antes were almost certainly the ancestors of the Ukrainian tribes.”[143] While analyzing ancient and medieval descriptions of people living at that time in the Ukrainian territories, he pondered about the ideal type of a historical Ukrainian and wrote that Ukrainians were “blond-haired, ruddy-skinned, and tall” and “very dirty” people.[144]

Mikhnovs’kyi, much more radical than Hrushevs’kyi, was the pioneer of extreme Ukrainian nationalism. He lived in Russian Ukraine, mainly in Kharkiv. Because he died in 1924 he did not come into contact with the radical Ukrainian nationalists from the UVO or OUN, but his writings inspired the younger generation.[145] Mikhnovs’kyi politicized the ethnicity of Ukrainians and demanded a “Ukraine for Ukrainians” (Ukraїna dlia ukraїntsiv). He might have been inspired by Hrushevs’kyi’s historization of contemporary Ukrainians and by contemporary European discourses that combined nationalism with racism. Although Mikhnovs’kyi’s concept of ethnicity was based on language, his main aim was a biological and racial marking of the Ukrainian territories or the “living space” of the Ukrainians. He claimed the territory “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus” for a Ukrainian state without foes. By “foes” Mikhnovs’kyi meant “Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews … as long as they rule over us and exploit us.”[146]

Mikhnovs’kyi went so far in his ethno-biological concept as to demand, in one of “The Ten Commandments of the UNP,” which he wrote for the Ukrainian National Party (Ukraїns’ka Narodna Partia, UNP), cofounded by him in 1904: “Do not marry a foreign woman because your children will be your enemies, do not be on friendly terms with the enemies of our nation, because you make them stronger and braver, do not deal with our oppressors, because you will be a traitor.”[147]

Mikhnovs’kyi’s concept of Ukraine was directed not only against people who might be considered to be foreigners but also against the majority of Ukrainians, who spoke Russian or a dialect that was neither Russian nor Ukrainian, or who were contaminated through marriage or friendship with a non-Ukrainian. This was the case of many Ukrainians after centuries of coexistence with Poles, Russians, Jews, and other ethnic groups. It was also not a political or cultural program with which the nationally non-conscious Ukrainians could have been transformed through education into nationally conscious Ukrainians. It was rather a social Darwinist concept based on the assumption that there exists a Ukrainian race, which must struggle for its survival against Russians, Poles, Jews, and other non-Ukrainian inhabitants of Ukrainian territories. Mikhnovs’kyi understood this concept as the historical destiny of the Ukrainian people and stressed that there was no alternative: “Either we will win in the fight or we will die.”[148] This early Ukrainian extremist also demanded: “Ukraine for Ukrainians, and as long as even one alien enemy remains on our territory, we are not allowed to lay down our arms. And we should remember that glory and victory are the destiny of fighters for the national cause.”[149]

The Lost Struggle for Ukrainian Statehood

The changes to the map of Europe after the First World War served as a very convenient opportunity for the establishment of several new national states on the ruins of the Russian and Habsburg empires. However, this scenario did not work in the case of the Ukrainians and some other nations, such as the Croats and Slovaks. The war revealed how heterogeneous were the Ukrainian people and how ambiguous was the concept of a Ukrainian state at this time. Like many other East Central European nationalities, Ukrainians fought on both sides of the Eastern Front and, like some other peoples, established their own armies to struggle for a nation state. Yet in the case of Ukraine, they struggled rather for two different states than for one and the same.

On 20 November 1917 in Kiev, an assembly of various political parties, known as the Tsentral’na Rada, or Central Council, proclaimed the Ukrainian People’s Republic (Ukraïns’ka Narodna Respublika, UNR). On 25 January 1918, the same political body declared the UNR to be a “Free Sovereign State of the Ukrainian People.” The UNR thereby declared its independence from the Bolsheviks, who had in November 1917 taken over power in the Russian Empire, but it was still dependent on the Germans who were occupying Kiev. On 9 February 1918, representatives of the Tsentral’na Rada signed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, as a result of which the UNR was officially recognized by the Central Powers (the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman empires, and Kingdom of Bulgaria) and by the Bolshevik government of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR), but not by the Western Allies (United Kingdom, France, and so forth).[150]

Between 1918 and 1921, power changed hands in Kiev several times. The first new authority, the Tsentral’na Rada, was unsure whether a Ukrainian state could exist outside the Russian Federation without the help of the Central Powers. The second authority, established on 29 April 1918 around Hetman Pavlo Skoropads’kyi, was a puppet government installed and controlled by the Germans. Skoropads’kyi left Kiev with the German army in December 1918 and at the same time, a group of Austrian and Ukrainian politicians tried and failed to establish the Austrian Ukrainophile Wilhelm von Habsburg as a replacement for Skoropads’kyi. The Directorate, a provisional state committee of the UNR, which replaced Skoropads’kyi in late 1918, was soon forced by the Soviet army to withdraw from Kiev. Most territories claimed by the Ukrainian authorities in Kiev to be part of their state were not under their control.[151]

On 1 November 1918 in Lviv—capital of eastern Galicia—the West Ukrainian National Republic (Zakhidno-Ukraïns’ka Narodna Respublika, ZUNR) was proclaimed. After a few weeks, the leaders of the ZUNR were forced to leave Lviv by the local Poles and by units of the Polish army under the command of Michał Karaszewicz-Tokarzewski. The ZUNR continued its existence in Stanyslaviv (Stanisławów), a provincial city of Galicia. On 22 January 1919, the ZUNR united with the UNR, which had been forced by the Bolsheviks to leave Kiev for the west. However, this unification of the two Ukrainian states was mainly symbolic.[152]

The military forces of the UNR: the Ukrainian People’s Army (Armia Ukraїns’koї Narodnoї Respubliky, AUNR), and of the ZUNR: the Ukrainian Galician Army (Ukraїns’ka Halyts’ka Armiia, UHA) consisted of many different military formations. The most disciplined and best trained among them were the Sich Riflemen (Sichovi Stril’tsi), whose soldiers were recruited from Ukrainians in the Austro-Hungarian army. The armies of the ZUNR and UNR were too weak to resist the Polish and Bolshevik armies. As the result of the various complicated alliances, each Ukrainian force found itself in the camp of its enemies and felt betrayed accordingly. By 2 December 1919, while threatened by the Bolshevik army, the UNR had signed an agreement with Poland. The UNR politicians agreed to allow Poland to incorporate the territory of the ZUNR, if Poland would help to protect their state against the Bolsheviks. Ievhen Petrushevych, head of the ZUNR, on the other hand, had already decided on 17 November 1919 that the UHA would join the White Army of Anton Denikin, which was at odds with the UNR. In February 1920, the majority of the UHA soldiers deserted from the Whites and allied themselves with the Bolsheviks because the latter were at war with both the Poles and the AUNR. In these circumstances it was hardly surprising that some Ukrainian politicians, for example Osyp Nazaruk, voiced the opinion that the Galician Ukrainians were a different nation from the eastern Ukrainians.[153]

Although a group of Ukrainian politicians visited the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, they were too inexperienced and too badly prepared to successfully represent the Ukrainian cause at such a gathering, where the new geopolitical shape of Europe was being determined. They also bore the stigma of having supported the Central Powers, who were blamed for the war by the victorious Allies. The Polish Endecja politician Roman Dmowski portrayed the Ukrainians in Paris as anarchistic “bandits,” the Ukrainian state as a German intrigue, and the Ruthenians from the Habsburg Empire as Ruthenians who had nothing in common with Ukrainians. Other Polish politicians at the conference, such as Stanisław Grabski and Ignacy Paderewski, characterized Ukrainians in a similar manner and thereby weakened the chances of a Ukrainian state.[154]

Other participants at the conference were also reluctant to support the idea of a Ukrainian state, partially because of the Ukrainian alliance with the Central Powers, and partially because they did not know much about Ukraine and Ukrainians. They were confused as to whether the Greek Catholic Ruthenians from the Habsburg Empire, as portrayed by the Polish delegates, were the same people as the Orthodox Ukrainians from the Russian Empire. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, stated: “I only saw a Ukrainian once. It is the last Ukrainian I have seen, and I am not sure that I want to see any more.”[155] By the Treaty of Riga on 18 March 1921, the borders of the Ukrainian territories were settled between Poland, Soviet Russia, and Soviet Ukraine, to the disadvantage of the UNR and ZUNR. The Allied Powers and many other states recognized this state of affairs, thereby confirming the nonexistence of the various Ukrainian states for which many Ukrainians had struggled between 1917 and 1921.[156]

During the revolutionary struggles, many pogroms took place in central and eastern Ukraine, especially in the provinces of Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia, which were controlled by the Directorate, the Whites, and anarchist peasant bands. The troops of the Directorate and the Whites not only permitted the anti-Jewish violence but also participated in it. The pogroms only ceased with the coming of the Red Army. Nakhum Gergel, a former deputy minister of Jewish affairs in the Ukrainian government, recorded 1,182 pogroms and 50,000 to 60,000 victims. This scale of anti-Jewish violence was much greater than that of the pogroms of 1881‒1884 and 1903‒1907. Only during the Khmel’nyts’kyi Uprising in 1648 did anti-Jewish violence at a comparable level take place in the Ukrainian territories: according to Antony Polonsky, at least 13,000 Jews were killed by the Cossacks commanded by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi.[157]

During the 1920s the Ukrainians in Soviet Ukraine were exposed to the policy of Ukrainization, which strengthened the use of the Ukrainian language and promoted Ukrainian culture in public life. With the beginning of Sovietization in the early 1930s, this policy changed entirely. The collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union was the major cause of an artificial famine, resulting in the deaths of 2.5–3.9 million people in Soviet Ukraine in 1932–1933. In terms of national consciousness, the Soviet authorities tried to turn Ukrainians into loyal Soviet citizens, causing the unformed Ukrainian identity of the former Russian Ukrainians to blur further with Russian and Soviet identity.[159] Of all the states where Ukrainians lived, it was in Czechoslovakia that the small Ukrainian minority enjoyed the most liberal treatment. The authorities there allowed various Ukrainian schools, and three postsecondary colleges: the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy and the Ukrainian Technical and Husbandry Institute in Poděbrady, and the Ukrainian Free University in Prague. This was an unusually liberal policy toward a minority in Eastern Europe at this time. In Romania and Poland, Ukrainians were exposed to a policy of assimilation—a common phenomenon in the new, unstable, and predominantly authoritarian Eastern European states.[160]

Because the political myth of Stepan Bandera first manifested itself in the Second Polish Republic, it is imperative to elaborate on the political circumstances in this state, in particular on the complicated relationship between Poles and Ukrainians. It is also crucial to describe the role played by the OUN in Polish-Ukrainian relations, particularly when it was led by Stepan Bandera, who thereby became the symbol of the Ukrainian struggle for independence.

In 1918 Poland was established as the Second Polish Republic. Its founders regarded this state as a successor to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), which they referred to as the First Polish Republic. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a premodern and very heterogeneous state ruled by the Polish nobility. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, it was partitioned by the Habsburg Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, consequently disappearing from the map of Europe. The territory of the Second Republic was smaller than that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but its population was still very heterogeneous. Ethnic Poles constituted up to 65 percent of the population of the Second Republic, and the remainder consisted of national minorities, including Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Russians. Both the Little Treaty of Versailles—signed between minor powers and the League of Nations in 1919—and the constitutions adopted in Poland in 1921 and 1935, guaranteed all citizens of Poland the same rights and treated them as equal before the law. In reality, however, the national minorities in the Second Republic were frequently discriminated against, at political, social, educational, administrative, and cultural levels, or were even treated as second class citizens.[161]

The Ukrainian nationalists and their illegal organizations were not the only Ukrainian political bodies in the Second Republic, but they gained increasing support during the interwar period. The major Ukrainian political party in Poland was the Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (Ukraїns’ke Natsional’no-Demokratychne Ob”iednannia, UNDO), which was founded in 1925. The UNDO considered Polish rule over western Ukraine to be illegitimate, but it participated in the parliamentary elections, respected the rules of democracy, and its leader Vasyl’ Mudryi was the deputy speaker of the Polish Sejm between 1935 and 1939. The UNDO wanted to establish a Ukrainian state but rejected terror and illegal subversive activities for that purpose. It supported the Ukrainian cooperative movement and wanted to improve the cultural, political, and social situation of Ukrainians in Poland. In terms of ideology it combined democracy with nationalism and cooperated with the political parties of other national minorities. Its main Ukrainian rival was the Ukrainian Socialist Radical Party (Ukraїns’ka Sotsialistychno-Radykalna Partiia, USRP).[162]

Poland was a predominantly rural country, whose political situation was unstable. Parliamentary democracy was endangered by various populist and authoritarian parties, such as the nationalist and antisemitic Endecja. Because of the threat of this movement, Józef Piłsudski—one of the main founding fathers of the state, and leader of the Sanacja (sanation) movement—seized power in May 1926 by means of a coup d’état. He introduced a military dictatorship, combining socialism with romantic traditions and the type of moderate nationalism known in Poland as patriotism. Piłsudski stayed in power until his death in 1935, after which the regime moved to the right.[163]

Polish officials and politicians frequently treated the national minorities in Poland as inferior citizens or even as enemies. This only strengthened the nationalism of the Ukrainians and other national minorities in the Second Republic and exacerbated the political situation and interethnic relations.[164] As the Ministry of Foreign Affairs put it in an analytical paper, the Ukrainians were perceived as a huge problem to the Polish state: “The Ukrainian question is not as difficult to solve as the Jewish one, it is not as dangerous as the German one, but it is the oldest one, and it is the most important one because the Ukrainian population is the largest national minority in the state.”[165]

With about 5 million people, constituting about 16 percent of the entire population, the Ukrainians were the largest minority in the Second Republic. In the south-eastern part of the country, the Ukrainians constituted the majority, with about 3.5 million in the formerly Habsburg eastern Galicia, and about 1.5 million in the formerly Russian Volhynia. Some 90 percent of Ukrainians lived in villages and small towns. Cities in south-eastern Poland were mainly inhabited by Jews and Poles.[166]

The Sanacja and Endecja movements developed two separate policies toward the Ukrainians and other minorities in the Second Republic. The Sanacja followed the principle of state assimilation (asymilacja państwowa); and the Endecja, national assimilation (asymilacja narodowa). National assimilation required the minorities to become Polish and to give up their language and culture. State assimilation did not expect such cultural surrender but required loyalty to the Polish state. Such loyalty was against the interests of Galician and Volhynian Ukrainians, who neither wanted to become Polish nor to be loyal to the Polish state. As a result, even liberal and left-wing Polish politicians of the Sanacja movement, who tried to improve Polish-Ukrainian relations, never gave up the notion of teaching Ukrainians loyalty to the Polish state, in order to maintain the status quo of the Second Republic.[167]

The Little Treaty of Versailles, which obliged the Polish authorities to guarantee all its citizens equal treatment, was perceived by the majority of Polish society as an unjust interference in the affairs of the Polish state and an affront to Poland’s sovereignty. The treaty was eventually renounced by Józef Beck, the Polish minister of foreign affairs, on 13 September 1934 before the League of Nations.[168] On the return of Beck from the meeting of the League in Geneva, a “triumphal greeting ceremony” took place. Musicians played the Polish anthem “Poland Is Not Yet Lost” and children handed flowers to Beck, while a crowd celebrated his “triumphal act in Geneva.”[169]

Because of the comparatively liberal atmosphere of the former Habsburg Empire, the Ukrainians in Galicia had become more nationalist and rebellious than the Volhynian Ukrainians of the former Russian Empire. The Polish authorities therefore tried to isolate eastern Galicia from Volhynia. The governor of Volhynia in 1928–1938, Henryk Józewski, was sympathetic toward Ukrainian culture. He tried to win the loyalty of the Ukrainians by introducing policies that were liberal in respect of Ukrainian culture, allowing Ukrainians to celebrate Ukrainian national holidays and to Ukrainize the Orthodox Church, which the Russian Empire had used in the nineteenth century as a tool of Russification. Simultaneously, Józewski was combating all individuals and movements that were not loyal to the Polish authorities. Such policies had the unwanted effect of arousing Ukrainian awareness among Volhynian Ukrainians and stimulated the growth of hidden hatred against the Polish state. The policy of teaching Ukrainians loyalty to the Polish state, while allowing Ukrainian patriotism, strengthened the collective wish to live in a Ukrainian state without Polish paternalism. Unlike the nationalists in Galicia, the radical Ukrainian elements in Volhynia during the interwar period were united by communism and organized in the Communist Party of Western Ukraine (Komunistychna partiia Zakhidnoї Ukraїny, or KPZU).[170]

Ukrainians regarded the Polish state as an occupier, rather than as a legitimate authority. They not only withdrew their loyalty but also developed feelings of hatred toward Poland and Poles. Polish politicians frequently tried to induce loyalty to Poland by repressing Ukrainian national aspirations. Polish schools and the teaching of Polish patriotism were intended as important tools for the enforcement of loyalty to the Polish state among the national minorities. The “Lex Grabski,” an educational act of 1924, which was named after the Polish education minister Stanisław Grabski, dissolved many Ukrainian schools and transformed some of them into bilingual Polish-Ukrainian schools (szkoły utrakwistyczne). The number of Ukrainian secondary schools in eastern Galicia was reduced from 2,426 in 1912, to 352 in 1927, and to 144 in 1939. In eastern Galicia there was only one high school (gymnasium) for every 16,000 Poles; but at the same time, there was only one for every 230,000 Ukrainians. The number of bilingual schools—with which neither side was content—grew from 1,926 to 2,710.[171]

In 1923 Stanisław Sobiński, chief education officer for the Lviv, Stanyslaviv, and Ternopil’ (Tarnopol) voivodeships, which covered the territory of eastern Galicia, introduced a regulation forbidding the use of the term “Ukrainian,” and allowing only the use of “Ruthenian” (ruski) even in private Ukrainian high schools. Ukrainians regarded this regulation as a serious insult. On 19 October 1926 Sobiński was shot by UVO members Roman Shukhevych and Bohdan Pidhainyi.[172]

Between 1918 and 1919, the Ukrainian language was abandoned at Lviv University as a language of instruction, and all Ukrainian chairs were suspended. After 14 August 1919, only applicants who declared that they were Polish citizens could enroll at the university. For this and other reasons, many Ukrainian students boycotted Lviv University. The Polish authorities would have allowed a Ukrainian university but not in Lviv, the main city of western Ukraine. In July 1921, a secret Ukrainian university was founded. It existed until 1925 and was financed by Ukrainian organizations and the Ukrainian diaspora. Between 1922 and 1923, the secret Ukrainian university had 1,014 students and sixty-five chairs. A Ukrainian Scientific Institute (Ukraiński Instytut Naukowy) was opened in 1930 in Warsaw. It was only in 1936 that a chair in the Ukrainian language was established at Lviv University.[173]