Agentura: Soviet Informants' Networks & the Ukrainian Underground in Galicia, 1944-48

Abstract

“We do not fear the open enemies, but rather the ones who with a friendly word on their lips come to us in order to tear our soul to pieces, to sow the seed of dissension in our hearts.” Iu. Klen, The Cursed Years

Ethnic Conflict and Minority Refugee Flight from Post-Soviet Ukraine, 1991–2001

“…18 The account left me breathless, not just because of the abhorrent violence directed against this man and his family, but also because of the close parallels of this violence with the highly ritualised Ukrainian nationalist brutalities of the 1940s I had described in detail in a scholarly article I had just sent for publication. 19 Similarly, the Moskalka phenomenon, where an ethnic Ukrainian woman could, like Nikolai B. 's wife, abrogate her membership in the Ukrainian community by suspected collaboration with the 'Moskals'-the Soviets, the Russians-was exactly parallel to another phenomenon I had uncovered in my survey of classified Soviet police files from the late 1940s.…”

An Epidemic Model of Violence and Public Support in Civil War

“…24 In an environment of constant terror, the Soviets had great difficulty raising local cadres. Some rayon-level administrations operated with less than half of essential personnel, with no courts or prosecutors and an understaffed district NKVD office (Burds, 1997: 113–114). The resulting inability to collect reliable intelligence nullified Soviet advantages in firepower and excluded the types of selective violence that could eradicate the OUN’s network of small cells.…”

“…As the scale of Soviet punishment rose to unprecedented heights, authorities were careful not to provoke a new backlash among the population. Excesses and cases of civilian casualties were promptly blamed on inept local officials and the nationalist underground (Burds, 1997: 128–129). In some cases, security forces sought to exploit the population’s balancing tendencies by conducting raids on villages while dressed as UPA insurgents.…”

Choosing Violence in Irregular Wars

“…One historical account attributes the defeat of insurgency to a wide intelligence network that the Soviets managed to build within the UPA. 8 While the intensity and outreach of the Soviet intelligence operations were exceptional, their effectiveness remained a matter of serious dispute even at the time of the conflict, particularly after 1947. Numerous party reports and internal oversight memos point to major flaws in intelligence gathering and recruitment of agents in Western Ukraine.…”