Премествам спора тук кадето му е мястото, не в темата за войната в Украйна (останалите мнения ако някой модератор ги премести ще е добре)
Inventing a Comfortable Past
The outcome of the battle of Stalingrad had changed the geopolitical situation and
necessitated a reorientation. The OUN(b) now started to do away with its overtly fascist attributes. In February 1943 the Third Congress of the OUN(b) decided that raising the right
arm was no longer to be considered an obligatory party salute132 and began to remove any
references to it in their own documents.133 The leadership of the original UPA protested the
OUN(b)’s violent takeover of their organization and found their hijacking of the UPA brand
name cynical. Wheras the original UPA had indeed taken up arms against the Germans,
senior OUN(b) leaders, among them Roman Shukhevych, had repeatedly volunteered their
services to Nazi Germany and served in German uniforms until 1943.134 In an open letter
to the OUN(b) leaders, Bul’ba-Borovets’ reminded them that “when, in July of 1941 the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the ‘Polis’ka Sich,’ started its armed resistance, you took a negative position, which you maintained until the last minute.”135 His observation was prophetic:
the appropriation of the name UPA would indeed be used in post-1943 OUN(b) propaganda
to whitewash its activities in 1941–1942 by predating its 1943 “break” with Nazi Germany.
The manipulation of the OUN legacy forms an unbroken chain from 1943 until today. In
October 1943, the OUN(b) embarked upon a project to revise its history, manufacturing a
version more presentable to its new intended allies. In October 1943 the Homeland Leadership (Kraiovyi Provid) of the OUN in Western Ukraine ordered the preparation of
a special collection of documents which would affi rm that the anti-Jewish
pogroms and liquidations were carried out by the Germans themselves without
the help of the Ukrainian police, and that, on the contrary, before the shootings,
the Germans made the Judenrat . . . confi rm the cooperation of Ukrainian
police in the actions.
The OUN(b) leaders issued explicit instuctions on how to blame pogroms and antiJewish violence on the Germans and Poles, ordering the preparation of
c. Lists that would confi rm that the Germans carried out anti-Jewish
pogroms and liquidations by themselves, without the participation or help of
the Ukrainian police, and instead, before carrying out the executions, urged
the Jewish committee or the rogues themselves to confi rm with their signatures
the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.
d. Material that would clearly confi rm that Poles had infi ltrated and
taken part in anti-Jewish pogroms and at the same time that they had served
as the hirelings and agents of the Germans in their struggle with Ukrainians.137
One of these collections, “The Book of Facts” (Do pochatku knyha faktiv), was aimed
at defl ecting attention from OUN(b) and UPA participation in the Holocaust. Written in the
form of a chronicle, and made to appear to date from 1941, this was an attempt to create
a “convenient” set of documents, after it was clear that Germany was losing the war.138 It
claimed that the Germans asked the OUN(b) to take part in a three-day pogrom in early July
1941, but that the OUN(b) regarded it as a German provocation, and refused. “The OUN
leading activists informed themselves and informed the leading cadres that this was a German
provocation to compromise Ukrainians through pogroms in order to give the German police
a pretext to get involved and ‘enforce order,’ and, what is more serious, to divert the energy
of the Ukrainian community from the political problems of the struggle for independent
statehood, to the slippery road of anarchism, crimes, and violence.”139
On November 1, 1943, the central command of the UPA issued a directive “to emphasize that we tolerate all nationalities—also Jews, who work toward Ukrainian statehood.
They will remain Ukrainian citizens with full civic rights. Regarding this we need to talk
to Jewish doctors and other professionals, who are part of our effort.”140 Around the same
time, the UPA published propaganda leafl ets aimed at other ethnic minorities: Georgians,
Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Turkmans, Poles, Belarusians, Russians, Czechs, and others. 141 Pronationalist scholars often emphasize the UPA’s multinational, internationalist nature when its
murders of Poles, Jews, and other minorities are brought up. Whereas in 1942, OUN(b)
fl yers and posters commemorating the fi rst anniversary of the declaration of Ukrainian
“statehood” contained explicit anti-Semitic references, after 1943 the rhetoric changed. In
1947 and 1948, the OUN-UPA annual commemoration was presented as an oppositional,
anti-German step.142 At this time, the OUN’s denial of its own anti-Semitism was already
categorical. In 1947, the OUN issued an English-language propaganda leafl et in post-war
Poland, which maintained,
We have never edited nor spread nowhere . . . any anti-Jewish leafl ets. In all
our political literature, underground revolutionary papers and proclamations,
neither now, nor at the time of the German occupation you would seek in vain
if only one word [was] directed against the Jews. Like objections are nothing
other as a sterling invective and lie. As well as we have never taken part in
any anti-Jewish actions.143
Even though the OUN from 1943 denied its anti-Semitic legacy, its propaganda
material still contained anti-Semitic undertones.144 The foreign section of the OUN(b),
Zakordonna Chastyna OUN, or ZCh OUN, which could operate freely in the West, did not
seek cooperation with Jewish (and Russian) émigré groups, and its leadership continued to
embrace anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as the avant-garde of Bolshevism.145 Jews were
not a “truly” national people, since they lacked a defi nite ethnograhic territory. Jews rarely
fi gured in the post-war OUN material, as the organization regarded the Holocaust as having
“resolved” the “Jewish question.”146 In March 1950, the OUN-UPA published a pamphlet,
Jews—Citizens of Ukraine, declaring, in democratic, inclusive language that it regarded
Jews as citizens in the state for which it was fi ghting.147 The anonymous authors of this
one declaration aimed exclusively at the Ukrainian Jews, even refer to them by the Soviet
term evrei, not their customary zhyd. The declaration, issued immediately after the killing
of Shukhevych, at a time when the UPA was essentially defeated, is best understood as an
attempt to woo the Western world and to seek its support as their insurgency was defeated.
Yet, even this leafl et ends with a thinly veiled threat, based upon the same old stereotypes
of Jewish disloyalty and communist leanings.
We, the Ukrainian revolutionaries turn to you:
Remember, that You are on Ukrainian land and that it is in Your own interests
to live in agreement with its legitimate rulers—the Ukrainians. Stop being a
fi fth column in the hands of the Muscovite-Bolshevik imperialists. The moment
when the times of Khmel’ntyskyi will be repeated is not too far away. Yet this
time we would like it to take place without anti-Jewish pogroms. We do not
want a repetition of what Your poets described in the following words:
Bitter tears were pouring
Over the souls of good and honest men,
Whose bloody was fl owing
Like the water of mountain creeks.
Today, during the times of harsh struggle the Ukrainian people for its freedom,
for national independence, we turn to You, Jews—citizens of Ukraine:
Remind those brothers of your nationality, whose hands are helping the Kremlin
robbers crucify our people. Tell them to stop their criminal activities.148
Stepan Lenkavs’kyi was responsible for the propaganda activities of the Zakordonna
Chastyna OUN, a key task of which was clearing the past of the movement itself.149 The
Banderite narrative represented their own legacy as a “heroic Ukrainian resistance against
the Nazis and the Communists” which had been “misrepresented and maligned” by “Moscow propaganda”; the OUN(b) and the UPA were fi ghting “not only for Ukraine, but also
for all of Europe.”150
The OUN(b) regularly censored any documents that contradicted the image they wanted
to produce—such as Stets’ko’s 1941 declaration of loyalty to Hitler and Nazi Germany. The
whereabouts of the many UPA leaders, who like Shukhevych served in German uniform
in 1942, were omitted from their biographies, their break with the Nazis predated. By 1946
Shukhevych, who himself had actively opposed attacks on German interest, presented the
OUN’s activities in 1943 as “an armed insurgency, including the wide popular masses, in
other words the entire Ukrainian people, in that struggle against the German occupant.”151
In 1948 the OUN activist Petro Poltava (a pseudonym), claimed that “the OUN under the
leadership of Stepan Bandera conducted a massive struggle of the entire people [masovu
vsenarodnu borot’bu] against the Hitlerite occupants in 1941–1944.”152 Other nationalist
stories of OUN-UPA resistance against the Nazis, such as Kosyk and Stets’ko’s postwar
claims that the commander of the Nazi Stormtroopers, (the Sturmabteilung, SA) Viktor Lutze was killed by UPA unit in Volhynia in 1943, are entirely fi ctional.153 Nevertheless, these
claims, uncritically repeated by pro-UPA historians came to enter the nationalist canon.154
