Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

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In addition to the veterans’ writings, a scholarly study of OUN and UPA appeared already in 1955 and went through three editions, the last appearing in 1990. John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism relied primarily on three kinds of sources: German documentation, the wartime Ukrainian press, and interviews. The interviews were conducted almost exclusively with prominent Ukrainian activists and politicians, and not just from the OUN camp. He had great sympathy for these men, although he was not uncritical in his admiration.60 He did not interview Polish or Jewish survivors of OUN-UPA violence nor consult their testimonies and memoirs. The only book on the Holocaust listed in the bibliography of the 1990 edition is Hilberg’s classic, in which, as we have seen, there was no room for a discussion of OUN. No works in Polish were cited. The result was a study that had very little to say about OUN operations against Poles and Jews.61 The ethnic cleansing of the Poles was given cursory treatment, based entirely on German sources, on a few pages.62 The question of OUN involvement in the pogroms of 1941 was discussed in one paragraph.63 Like most scholars at that time, Armstrong did not understand the distinction between the militias organized by OUN and the later Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. He did, however, make mention of some anti-Jewish rhetoric employed by OUN.64

Armstrong wrote a rather sympathetic narrative of the nationalists, emphasizing their valor in fighting against two such powerful enemies as the Germans and the Soviets. He did not go far enough to please all the nationalist veterans, who felt, particularly, that he underestimated their success outside Western Ukrainian lands. Yevhen Stakhiv, a leading figure in the OUN-B expeditionary movement in the south and one of the major proponents of the UHVR, made this objection,65 as did Shankovsky in his history of the expeditionary groups. In fact, Shankovsky decided to write his history in the first place as a corrective to Armstrong’s narrative.66

      Another noteworthy study of Ukrainian nationalism from this period was Alexander J. Motyl’s The Turn to the Right. It only covered the story up through the founding of OUN in 1929, so it was more of a prehistory than a history in relation to the theme of my own book. But it was important for its exploration of the ideological sources of Ukrainian nationalism and its interpretation of where Ukrainian nationalism stood in relation to the fascist movements emerging in Europe at that time. Turn to the Right was based on wide-ranging consultation of contemporary Ukrainian-language press and brochures as well as scholarly works on Ukrainian history and on right-wing and fascist ideology outside Ukraine. Its appearance in 1980, at a time when academic Ukrainian studies were just taking off in North America, meant that it gained considerable attention. Although later in life Motyl became an apologist for OUN, this first work was quite balanced.

Polish scholars contributed well informed works on OUN in wartime. In 1972 Ryszard Torzecki wrote a monograph on the Ukrainian policy of the Third Reich which, of course, devoted considerable attention to Ukrainian nationalism. Antoni Szcześniak and Wiesław Szota’s Droga do nikąd (The Road to Nowhere) of 1973, which covered OUN and UPA from the 1920s into the postwar period, had an interesting, and rather sad, history. It was primarily based on Szcześniak’s doctoral dissertation, but Szota wrote the introductory section on the interwar period. The text tried to work within the constraints of what could be said and what could not be said when Poland was a communist country within the Soviet orbit.67 The reason this was tricky is that parts of what used to be Poland were now in the Ukrainian SSR, and the text had to avoid any suggestion that these territories were in some sense Polish. Thus, the events of 1939 were presented from a Soviet perspective: the alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was glossed over and the population of western Ukraine was depicted as fervently desiring to be joined with Soviet Ukraine. But try as they did, the authors were unable to construct a narrative of OUN and UPA that the Soviets found acceptable. After the direct intervention of the Soviet embassy, the book was withdrawn from circulation as “harmful for current party propaganda”; the Soviets feared that “the book can be used propagandistically by the Ukrainian emigration in its fight against the Soviet system.” The authors suffered for their mistakes, being pushed to the margins of the Polish scholarly establishment.68 (Not many years later I heard that Szota committed suicide, but I cannot confirm this.) Aside from its ideological contortions, which of course included a less than even-handed and objective treatment of OUN and UPA, the work had value. It made use of abundant materials in Polish archives, materials that at that time Western scholars had no access to. The Ukrainian journalist and memoirist Ivan Kedryn Rudnytsky characterized the volume thus: “Although the tendency of this book is bad because—as the authors themselves declare in the introduction—they examined the problem ‘through the prism of Marxism-Leninism,’ nonetheless in it was gathered a mass of factual documentary-informational material—more than can be found in all the nationalist literature.”69 Kedryn did not explicitly mention it, but Szcześniak and Szota were very well aware of how Poles and Jews suffered at the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists and wrote about these matters in some detail.

As is clear from the case of Droga do nikąd, the Soviets had many sensitivities around the history of OUN and UPA, and it is not surprising that no real scholarship on the nationalists appeared in the Soviet Union. Aside from other considerations, the Soviets did not want to disturb the myth of a united Soviet people in struggle against the fascist occupiers by writing about collaboration with the Germans and about a powerful anti-Soviet movement. The Soviets cloaked OUN and UPA under the term “Ukrainian-German fascists” and were silent about their influence on the Ukrainian population during the war. And in addition, the Soviet authorities did not permit scholarship on the Holocaust. In fact, the subject of the Holocaust made them uncomfortable.70 It singled out the suffering of the Jews instead of the whole Soviet people, and this particular narrative of suffering could feed into Jewish nationalism, i.e., Zionism. In the postwar period Soviet anti-Zionism could be quite shrill and antisemitic.

But there was an exception to the Soviet reticence on our topic. Beginning in the 1970s, the Soviets published tracts on Ukrainian nationalist participation in the Holocaust and other war crimes. Several were published under the name Valerii Styrkul in the 1980s, after the airing of the influential television miniseries, Holocaust (NBC, 1978), which heightened American interest in Nazi atrocities.71 Styrkul concentrated on the Waffen-SS Division Galizien rather than on OUN. But the earliest and most influential of these tracts was Lest We Forget, signed by the Ukrainian-American communist Michael Hanusiak (first edition 1973).72 Lest We Forget did publish documentary evidence of OUN antisemitism, notably extracts from the autobiography of OUN leader Yaroslav Stetsko from July 1941, in which Stetsko endorsed German methods of annihilating Jews.73 The book also contained documents and testimony on crimes committed by both OUN and Ukrainian police units in German service with OUN connections. However, these documents were unverifiable by scholars, since the archives they were housed in were closed to researchers. And the presentation was so heavy-handed and one-sided that scholars treated his revelations with scepticism or outright rejection.74

      In fact, the brochure Lest We Forget was the product of a KGB operation. The head of the Ukrainian KGB, Vitalii Fedorchuk, wrote about it to the first secretary СКАЧАТЬ