Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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СКАЧАТЬ split from the rest of OUN to foreign intrigue. Fearful of the power of OUN, both the Germans and the Soviets had engineered the rift, preying on the Bandera group’s “political blindness, ambition, primitiveness, moral indifference.”29 He condemned the rebellion they led: “provoked by the enemy, they pushed the masses on the path of a negative, in every respect unprepared, and therefore needlessly bloody ‘insurgency.’“30 Herasymenko quoted many OUN documents critical of Nazi Germany and made no mention of pro-German attitudes or cooperation with Nazi Germany on the part of OUN. He made an exception, of course, for the Banderites, who, he wrote, were both ignorant of Germany’s plans for Ukraine and ready to help the Germans by supplying them with hundreds of interpreters. The many interpreters from the Melnyk faction working for the Germans were passed over in silence. There was also no mention at all of the Melnykites’ support for the Waffen-SS Division Galizien. The Ukrainian police in German service, with whom both factions of OUN were deeply involved, were almost completely absent from Herasymenko’s account; there was a single passing mention in a wartime document calling upon Ukrainians in all stations of life to remember that they were members of the “Ukrainian Nation, once free, glorious, and powerful, but today enslaved and marked by blood and ruin.”31 Jews and the Holocaust were completely missing from Herasymenko’s book.

Another veteran of the movement who wrote about OUN during World War II was Lev Shankovsky. Shankovsky had, as an adolescent, served in the armed forces fighting for an independent Ukraine during the revolutionary period that followed World War I. His military experience later proved useful both for his activity in OUN and UPA during World War II and for his postwar work as a military historian of Ukraine. He was associated with the Bandera wing of OUN during the war, but after the war he joined a faction that broke with Bandera, the UHVR group32 or so-called dviikari. Led by Mykola Lebed and Lev Rebet, the dviikari adopted a more democratic program than either the Banderites or Melnykites and benefited from generous funding by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.33 Shankovsky’s book on OUN-B’s expeditionary groups (pokhidni hrupy) in southern Ukraine34 and Romanian-occuped Transnistria created a picture of the past that fit well with the postwar ideology of the UHVR. Shankovsky had fine narrative skills and wrote with some verve, although his prose was not free of jargon. I will spend more time analyzing this work, since it presented a narrative that has been very influential in the postwar Ukrainian diaspora, especially among historians and other intellectuals. It also offered a full enough account to serve here as a prominent example of a more general trend in OUN and UPA historiography.

      The expeditionary groups were small OUN units that fanned out from Kraków and then across Ukraine, following the German advance. They were instrumental in establishing local civil administrations and militias wherever they went. In his account of them, Shankovsky emphasized that they fought against two enemies, both the Soviets and the Germans. He also described fierce persecution of members of OUN, especially OUN-B (the Bandera faction), by the Germans. While writing at length about the conflict between OUN and the Germans, Shankovsky completely omitted to mention moments of cooperation.

The main point of Shankovsky’s book was to show that the more tolerant and democratic position adopted by the UHVR had its basis in the encounter between the Western Ukrainian nationalists and the population of Soviet Ukraine in its pre-1939 borders. His story is that the Western Ukrainian activists came into the rest of the Ukraine and discovered that the ideological baggage they had brought with them was unacceptable to the population there. The inhabitants of central, southern, and eastern Ukraine rejected the OUN’s Führerprinzip and its intended single-party rule and wanted a democratic parliamentary system instead. They did not like OUN’s voluntarism, amorality, exclusivity, and hunger for power, preferring ethical politics, toleration, and humaneness. They were not satisfied with the slogan of an independent Ukraine: they wanted to know the content of the envisaged state, its political structure and social policies. They were against imperialism and exploitation and wanted national minorities to have the rights of other citizens of the Ukrainian state. They did not accept OUN’s slogan of “Ukraine above all.” The Western Ukrainian activists, challenged by this encounter with the majority of Ukrainians, had to rethink their program, resulting in the more liberal OUN program of August 1943 and the establishment of the UHVR.35 Here is how Shankovsky put it in his conclusions:

...I set myself a clearly defined goal that my work was supposed to achieve. I wanted—as extensively as possible—to present the ideological and political evolution that the pro-independence OUN underwent as a result of the direct encounter of the mass of its membership with the Ukrainian mainland and Ukrainian population in the Central Eastern Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands. The epic tale of the expeditionary groups in central and eastern Ukraine, the discussion of ideas conducted by the members of the expeditionary groups with the Ukrainian people of the Central Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands, and the integration (usobornennia) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists through the mass entrance into it of Ukrainians from the Central Ukrainian Lands and the Eastern Ukrainian Lands were the reasons that much was thrown out from the political-programmatic decisions and directives of OUN, [the elimination of] which had been considered taboo in the conditions of Polish occupation. In particular, very decisively thrown out were all sorts of “isms” introduced onto Ukrainian soil from a foreign field: authoritarianism, elitism, totalitarianism, dogmatism, exclusivism, voluntaristic nationalism, and so on. Socioeconomic and political issues decisively took precedence over issues of worldview and philosophy; mysticism had to make way for a realistic strategy and tactics of liberation, and the despised leader system capitulated before democracy and parliamentarism, with its accompanying human freedoms.36

In addition to arguing for a fundamental shift in perspective within the OUN expeditionary groups as a result of the encounter with the east and south, Shankovsky also contended that under the impact of the encounter OUN began to shed its ethnocentrism and to develop a new openness to the national minority populations in Ukraine. He stated that the national minorities of southern Ukraine—“Russians, Greeks, Moldavians, and Tatars”37—warmed to the idea of an independent Ukraine, with equal rights for the minorities.38 “The broad masses of the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands most decisively rejected any possibility of an exterminatory or even discriminatory policy with regard to any national minority in Ukraine. Non-Ukrainians who live in Ukraine and are Ukrainian citizens should enjoy all the rights of Ukrainian citizens. It has to be recognized and emphasized that the leaders of the frontline expeditionary groups quickly oriented themselves in the situation and were able to conduct their propaganda in the direction of winning over non-Ukrainians for the Ukrainian liberation movement.”39 In Shankovsky’s narrative, OUN in the Donbas reached out to Russians as full-fledged Ukrainian citizens.40

As to OUN’s relations with the national minority with which this monograph is particularly concerned, i.e., the Jews, Shankovsky explained: “In this place we wish to underline that neither the Ukrainian population nor the members of the Ukrainian underground who came to the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands were in any way involved in anti-Jewish actions.”41 By contrast, Shankovsky wrote that the White Russian emigrés, who also came to Transnistria, were rabid antisemites who killed Jews on their own initiative, without prodding from the Romanian authorities.42 СКАЧАТЬ