Stepan Bandera and the OUN
Why they matter today
Nazism in Ukraine has become a controversy even though it has been well documented. The western news media has all but stopped covering the issue since February 2022. I highly recommend everyone listen to all three parts of Crawdads and Taters’ coverage of Ukraine for more background on the conflict.
This is the first of several articles where I will be focusing on specifics of the Nazi problem and debunking common talking points used by Nazi defenders.
Stepan Bandera and the OUN
In order to understand the Nazi problem in Ukraine, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of history. The figure of Stepan Bandera comes up often, but who was he? Was he a Ukrainian hero or a murderous Nazi collaborator?
Stepan Bandera was a member of the Order of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and would become a leader of the OUN-B faction. The OUN was founded in 1929 with Yevhen Konovalets as its first leader. The OUN was a merger of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) and several nationalist student associations. The OUN split in 1939 between the old leadership (Andriy Melnyk - OUN-M) and the followers of Bandera (OUN-B). During World War II, both factions of OUN aligned with Hitler’s Germany and their leaders collaborated with German Abwehr military intelligence.
Bandera’s OUN-B created two battalions that served in the German armed forces. One of these was the Nachtigall Battalion, while the other became the Roland Battalion. The Nachitgall Battalion, led in part by Roman Shukhevych, participated in pogroms against Jews in Lviv. According to the Wiesenthal Center, “The soldiers of the battalion participated, with the Germans and the Ukrainian mob in the city, in the riots and the killing of Jews that took place between June 30 and July 3. During those days, Jews were kidnapped in the streets of the city, brought to concentration centers in several prisons, and brutally killed. Four thousand of them were murdered during the four days of rioting.” Bandera had knowledge of this pogrom, as John-Paul Himka describes:
On June 25, Yaroslav Stetsko wrote to Stepan Bandera that OUN had “formed a militia to remove the Jews” (usuvaty zhydiv). A week later, on July 1, the pogrom took place.
Even if he did not take part in this pogrom personally, it was clear that Bandera had no problem with massacring the Jewish people. However, OUN-B fell afoul of the Germans after declaring an independent Ukrainian State on June 30, 1941. Stepan Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp on September 18, 1941. He would remain there until September 1944, although he was allowed enough freedom of movement to maintain contact with OUN-B which was still actively collaborating with the Nazis.
The pogroms in Lviv were terrible, but the worst from OUN was yet to come. The military arm of the OUN-B, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943. These massacres were so atrocious that in 2013, the President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Łukasz Kamiński, declared them to have been a genocide. It is estimated that the OUN/UPA fighters massacred between 50,000 and 100,000 people.
These were just the greatest of the atrocities carried out by OUN-B during the war. OUN-B remained a fascist organization throughout and after the war. As John-Paul Himka tells us:
OUN was indeed a typical fascist organization as shown by many of its features: its leader principle (Führerprinzip), its aspiration to ban all other political parties and movements, its fascist-style slogan (Slava Ukraini! Heroiam slava!), its red and black flag, its raised-arm salute, its xenophobia and anti-Semitism, its cult of violence, and its admiration of Hitler, Mussolini, and other leaders of fascist Europe.
Why does this matter today?
It would seem that all of this is old history, but it is entirely relevant in today’s Ukraine. In 2004, with the backing of the US, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine resulted in the election of Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko awarded Roman Shukhevych of the Nachitall battalion with the Hero of Ukraine Order in 2007. On January 22, 2010, he awarded the same honor to Stepan Bandera, just before leaving office.
Yale Professor of History Timothy Snyder, who now fully supports the war in Ukraine, wrote at the time:
By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews.
After defeating Yushchenko in the 2010 election, Viktor Yanukovych rescinded this award from Bandera. But this was not the end of the glorification of OUN-B, Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, and the UPA. Yanukovych was illegally removed from office after the US backed Maidan coup in 2014. His successor, Petro Poroshenko, signed several laws that began whitewashing the history of Ukraine. This included Law no. 2538-1 "On the Legal Status and Honoring of the Memory of the Fighters for the Independence of Ukraine in the 20th Century" as well as several decommunization laws. Among other things, “The laws banned publicly expressing any ‘wrong’ opinions about the Communist era, communist leaders, or certain individuals and organizations who were ‘fighters for Ukraine’s independence,’ such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).” It was now illegal to criticize the OUN and UPA or to admit their participation in genocide during World War II.
One result of these new laws was renaming of numerous towns and streets in Ukraine. In 2016, Kyiv renamed the avenue called Moscow Prospect, it is now Bandera Prospect. There are numerous other monuments to him and other members of the OUN-B that have been detailed here by Forward.com.
Current Ukrainian President Zelensky defended these laws in an interview in 2019 saying, “In general, I'm okay with decommunization. Society has chosen, and it's fine. There are undeniable heroes. Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and this is normal and cool. This is one of those people who defended the freedom of Ukraine. But I think that when we call so many streets and bridges by the same name, this is not entirely correct.” So Zelensky has no problem with Bandera being considered a hero, in spite of his fascist history, but draws the line at there being too many streets named after him. This was not a renunciation of a known Nazi collaborator.
And if streets and monuments were not bad enough, in 2018, Ukrainian parliament declared January 1st, Bandera’s birthday, to be a national holiday in his honor. The same time, Lvov regional council announced that 2019 would be the year of Stepan Bandera. Zelensky made no attempt to rescind these declarations.
In 2021, according to EuroNews, “Seventy-eight Ukrainian lawmakers from all sides of the parliament have proposed to give the title ‘Hero of Ukraine’ to controversial figures such as Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych.” Yviatoslav Yurash, a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, is one of the members who supported this proposal.
“They are controversial; I agree with that,” Yurash says, “(But) they said that we don’t want to be a puppet or an instrument. We want to be an independent state. The story here should be remembered, but we should also not forget all the problems. However, their goal was very clear - an independent Ukraine. And it is worthy of giving stamps and coins for.”
To his credit, Zelensky did not designate him as a Hero of Ukraine, though since then he has awarded members of Nazi battalion Azov with that honor.
In 2022, the Ukrainian ambassador to Poland denied that the massacres of Poles and Jews happened. This is holocaust denial and historical revisionism. Ukraine’s official stance on the OUN and UPA is that they are heroes and did not participate in genocide.
This campaign to rehabilitate Stepan Bandera and OUN-B and rewrite history has been quite successful in influencing the opinions of Ukrainian citizens. This can be seen from the results of a number of polls. In May 2014, shortly after Maidan, the Kyiv Post published an article entitled: Poll: Almost half of Ukrainians have negative attitude to Bandera. This poll found that:
Thirty-one percent of those polled said their opinion of Bandera was absolutely negative, 17% said it was negative rather than positive, 18% that it was positive rather than negative and 13 were absolutely positive about this figure.
These are not terrible numbers though 31% positive support for a Nazi collaborator is still quite bad. But then the poll gets into the geographical distribution:
Seventy-six percent of those who live in western Ukraine have a positive opinion towards Bandera, the poll indicates. Twelve percent of residents of western Ukraine have a negative attitude to Bandera and 12% are undecided.
This is not a good sign at all. It turns out the negative view of Bandera was overwhelmingly coming from eastern Ukraine. And shortly after the poll was taken, Donetsk and Luhansk both voted for independence and leaving Ukraine.
In Donbass, 79% of those polled have a negative attitude to Bandera, 3% positive and 2% are undecided.
North and central Ukraine were more mixed.
In the north of Ukraine Bandera is seen in a positive light by only 39% of respondents, with 40% with a negative attitude to Bandera and 20% being undecided. The figures characteristic of central Ukraine are: 28% are positive and 39% are negative about this figure, and 28% are undecided.
This was 2014 shortly after the US backed Maidan coup help give numerous Banderites political and military power. As would be expected, things did not improve over the next eight years of right wing rule.
The Tenth National Survey, released April 27, 2022, found that:
Support for recognizing the OUN-UPA as participants in the struggle for the state independence of Ukraine has increased significantly: 81% support it, only 10% are against it. Since 2010, the support rate has increased 4 times, since 2015 - twice.
This is not good at all. The OUN-UPA, who carried out genocides with Nazis, have now been legitimized as freedom fighters in the eyes of the Ukrainian public. And what of Stepan Bandera? He has gone from a 20% positive rating in 2012 to 74% in 2022.
This is a very significant shift for a decade. And an October poll in 2022 found that Stepan Bandera was considered the 5th most outstanding Ukrainian of all time!
A country that has an overall 76% favorability rating for a known Nazi collaborator and considers him one of their top five people of all time has a Nazi problem. When Nazi defenders claim that Nazis are only a small portion of Ukraine, this ignores the elephant in the room - that the OUN-UPA and Stepan Bandera have been turned into heroes for the majority of the population of Ukraine. This is not a fringe issue. Glorification of Nazis has entered the mainstream in Ukraine and the US public has been propagandized into supporting their slogan - Slava Ukraini.
In 2021, the Ukraine and the US were the only two countries to vote against a United Nations resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism. One hundred thirty countries voted in favor and 49 abstained. This year, 55 countries voted against the same resolution! The sickness is spreading. For anyone with any knowledge of the history of Nazism, combating it should be the default position.
For further reading, I recommend:
The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths
See also my previous post:
Thank you. An excellent look at Nazism and Ukraine. Yes, Ukraine definitely has a Nazi problem. There is simply no question about it.