The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths

Abstract

During the past decade, particularly under the presidency of the third Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005 there have been repeated attempts to turn the leading fi gures of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) into national heroes. As these fascist organizations collaborated with the Nazi Germany, carried out ethnic cleansing and mass murder on a massive scale, they are problematic symbols for an aspiring democracy with the stated ambition to join the European Union. Under Yushchenko, several institutes of memory management and myth making were organized, a key function of which was to deny or downplay OUN-UPA atrocities. Unlike many other former Soviet republics, the Ukrainian government did not need to develop new national myths from scratch, but imported ready concepts developed in the Ukrainian diaspora. Yushchenko's legitimizing historians presented the OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fi ght shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN's own post-war forgeries, aimed at cover up the organization's problematic past. As employees of the Ukrainian security services, working out of the offi ces of the old KGB, the legitimizing historians ironically dismissed scholarly criticism as Soviet myths. The present study deals with the myth-making around the OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust, tracing their diaspora roots and following their migration back and forth across the Atlantic. 2Brought to power by the so-called Orange Revolution, the administration of Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko (2005Yushchenko ( -2010 expressed a clear ambition to orient Ukraine away from Russia and toward the EU, NATO, and the Western world. One step in this direction was the reassessment of modern Ukrainian history. Old Soviet heroes were reexamined, and the anti-Soviet nationalist resistance to Soviet rule reinterpreted in heroic terms. This is all part of a long and painful process of nation building and national consolidation, as Ukraine moves away from Soviet historiography into nation-based history writing.1 Following independence, and particularly after the Orange Revolution, nationalist and diaspora historical interpretations were adopted as the basis for new national myths. This essay addresses one particularly sensitive and delicate part of this mythology, the relation of Ukrainian nationalists-the Bandera wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the OUN(b), and its armed forces, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA-to the Jews, a polarizing topic which has come to have important political connotations. The purpose here is not to restore one single historical "truth." Rather, it is to study the political use of history, the manipulations of the historical record, by tracing the genealogy of a set of historical myths, circling key mythmakers, their choice of material, and ...

Challenges and promises of comparative research into post-Soviet fascism: Methodological and conceptual issues in the study of the contemporary East European extreme right

“…For instance, in post-Soviet Russia there have emerged a wide range of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary radically nationalist and often revolutionary groups (Shenfield, 2001), leading numerous observers to compare post-Soviet Russia with the Weimar Republic (Ianov, 1995;Hanson and Kopstein, 1997;Luks, 2008;Kailitz and Umland, 2010). This is in stark contrast to the post-Soviet Ukrainian ultranationalist scene which quickly emerged (Rudling, 2006b(Rudling, , 2012b(Rudling, , 2013), yet has suffered from organizational underdevelopment as well as non-representation in the national parliament except in 2012e2014 (Umland, 2008c(Umland, , 2013bShekhovtsov and Umland, 2013;Shekhovtsov, 2011bShekhovtsov, , 2013Shekhovtsov, , 2014Likhachev, 2013a,b,c;Polyakova, 2014aPolyakova, , 2015c. Why did Russian neo-Nazi skinheads kill, on average, more than one person per week in 2009 (Kozhevnikova, 2010) while their Ukrainian comrades, if we believe the relevant monitoring organizations, did not murder a single person, during the same year (Likhachev, 2010)?…”

Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine

“…This monoethnic state, which was similar in many ways to Ustashi Croatia, was supposed to include parts of modern day Russia, Poland, and Belarus. The OUN regarded as hostile such minorities in Ukraine, as Jews, Poles, and Russians (Berkhoff and Carynnyk, 1999;Rudling, 2006Rudling, , 2011Rossolinski-Liebe, 2011. Although its official ideology abandoned many of its extreme elements since 1943, the OUN-B's actual policies did not change to the same extent.…”

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The far right, the Euromaidan, and the Maidan massacre in Ukraine

“…It was modeled on similar greetings accompanied by hand salutes of other fascist and semi‐fascist parties, including the Nazi Party in Germany. There is no reliable and corroborated evidence of the use of the greeting in a form of the greeting before it was adopted by the OUN in slightly different form and then in its current form by the Bandera faction of the OUN (Katchanovski, ; Rudling, ).…”