Name: Stepan Bandera
Age: 50 years
Place of Birth: Stary Ugrinov village, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine
A place of death: Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Activity: politician, ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism
Family status: He was married to Yaroslav Oparovskaya
Stepan Bandera - biography
Stepan Bandera is a politician of Ukraine who went down in history as a theorist and ideologist of nationalism in Ukraine.
Childhood, the Bandera family
Despite the fact that many facts of his biography are unknown and shrouded in some mystery, but most of the fate of this man is known, since he himself wrote his autobiography. It is known from it that Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909. His homeland was the village of Stary Ugrinov, which is located in the kingdom of Galicia.
The father of the future politician was a clergyman. The family was large: eight children. In this family, Stepan was born the second child. But this large family did not have its own home, so they were forced to live in a house that made it possible for the position of the father. The house where they lived for a long time belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Parents have always tried to instill patriotism in their children, to instill in them love for their homeland. Religion was accepted in the family. Stepan has always been an obedient boy who loved and respected his parents. Even in his early years he always prayed. This always happened in the morning and in the evening, and every year these prayers became longer and longer.
Already in childhood, Stepan Bandera wanted to fight and defend his homeland. He always wanted Ukraine to be free, so already in his childhood he tried to accustom himself not to feel pain. So, he conducted tests on himself in order to temper himself and his body. Among such tests were not only dousing with cold and ice water, but also pricking with needles, as well as beating with heavy metal chains. Because of this, he soon developed rheumatism of the joints, the pains of which tormented him all his life.
Stepan Bandera - Education
Even in childhood, Stepan was greatly influenced by the books that were in their house, as well as by those prominent politicians of that time who visited this library. Among them were Yaroslav Veselovsky, and Pavel Glodzinsky, and others.
But at first the child did not go to school, but received primary education at home. Some sciences were taught by Ukrainian teachers who came to their homes, and some subjects were explained by Father Andrei Mikhailovich Bandera himself. But in 1919, when the First World War was already underway, and the boy's father participated in the liberation movement, the child was sent to a gymnasium. This educational institution was located in the city of Stryi. He spent eight years there.
Even though he was poor compared to other high school students, he was very active and went in for sports. In addition, he was fond of music, and even sang in the choir. Stepan Bandera tried to participate in all events that were held for young people.
After graduating from the gymnasium, he moved to Lviv, entering the Polytechnic Institute, choosing the Faculty of Agronomy. At the same time, he begins to develop rapidly and his secret activities in an underground organization.
Stepan Bandera's career
A new page in the biography of Stepan Andreevich Bander began in the gymnasium, where he not only was fond of sports and music, led circles and was responsible for the economic part, but at the same time secretly became a member of the military organization of Ukraine.
In Lviv, he is not only already a member of this organization, but also becomes a correspondent for a satire magazine. In 1932, an active participant Stepan Bandera began to move up the career ladder in a secret organization and took the post of deputy regional conductor, and a year later he was acting as the regional conductor himself.
During this time, Stepan Bandera was arrested five times for his underground activities, but each time he was released. In 1932, he organized a protest against the execution of militants of his secret organization. After that, in 1933, he was instructed to lead the operation to eliminate the consul of the USSR, who was in Lvov. In the same year, he used schoolchildren for his protest action.
But he also had a lot of murders related to politics on his conscience. He organized terrorist acts in which many people who had something to do with politics, as well as their families, died. For all the crimes that he had already committed, in July 1936 he was arrested. But even in prison, he was able to organize a hunger strike that lasted 16 days and which forced the government to make concessions to him.
After the German attack on Poland, Stepan Bandera is released. But already in 1941 he was arrested by the German authorities. First he was in prison, and then spent a year and a half in a concentration camp, where he was under constant surveillance. But still he did not agree to cooperate in Germany. After that, he lived in this country, although he closely followed all the events that took place in Ukraine. In 1945, he takes over the leadership of the underground society OUN.
Stepan Bandera was killed in October 1959 in Munich, where he then lived. His killer was a KGB agent Stashevsky.
Stepan Bandera - biography of personal life
He met his wife Yaroslava Vasilievna in Lvov when he studied at the Polytechnic Institute. This is a happy page in the biography of the Ukrainian nationalist.
In this marriage, the Ukrainian nationalist had three children: Natalya, Andrey and Lesya. Stepan Bandera loved his children very much, but they all followed in his footsteps. Although they learned their real surname only after the death of their father.
Stepan Bandera - documentary
story character
COLORS OF THE BANNER OF STEPAN BANDERA
A new look at the leader of Ukrainian nationalists
Until now, fierce disputes have been going on around the name of the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) Stepan Bandera - some consider him an accomplice of the Nazis and an accomplice in Nazi crimes, others call him a patriot and fighter for the independence of Ukraine.
We assume one of the versions of the activities of Stepan Bandera and his associates, based on previously unknown documents from the Ukrainian archives.
Viktor MARCHENKO
Stepan Andreevich Bandera ( "bandera" - translated into modern language means "banner") was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv, Stary Kalushsky district of Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk region), which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the family of a priest of the Greek Catholic rite. In the family, he was the second child. In addition to him, three brothers and three sisters grew up in the family.
My father had a university education - he graduated from the theological faculty of Lviv University. My father had a large library, business people, public figures, and the intelligentsia were frequent guests in the house. Among them, for example, a member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament J. Veselovsky, sculptor M. Gavrilko, businessman P. Glodzinsky.
S. Bandera wrote in his autobiography that he grew up in a house in which an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism, vibrant national-cultural, political and public interests reigned. Stepan's father took an active part in the revival of the Ukrainian State in 1918-1920, he was elected to the parliament of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. In the autumn of 1919, Stepan passed the entrance exams to the Ukrainian classical gymnasium in the city of Stry.
In 1920 Western Ukraine was occupied by Poland. In the spring of 1921, Miroslav Bandera's mother died of tuberculosis. Stepan himself suffered from rheumatism of the joints since childhood and spent a long time in the hospital. Starting from the fourth grade, Bandera gave lessons, earning money for his own expenses. Education in the gymnasium took place under the supervision of the Polish authorities. But some teachers were able to invest Ukrainian national content in the compulsory program. 
However, the main national-patriotic education of the gymnasium students received in school youth organizations. Along with legal organizations, there were illegal circles that raised funds to support Ukrainian periodicals and boycotted the events of the Polish authorities. Starting from the fourth grade, Bandera was a member of an illegal gymnasium organization.
In 1927, Bandera successfully passed the matriculation exams and the next year entered the Lviv Polytechnic School in the agronomic department. By 1934, he completed the full course as an agricultural engineer. However, he did not have time to defend his diploma, as he was arrested.
Various legal, semi-legal and illegal organizations operated on the territory of Galicia at different times, aiming to protect Ukrainian national interests. In 1920, in Prague, a group of officers founded the "Ukrainian Military Organization" (UVO), which set the goal of fighting the Polish occupation. Soon, the former commander of the "Sich Riflemen", an experienced organizer and authoritative politician Yevgen Konovalets, became the head of the UVO. The most famous action of the UVO is the failed assassination attempt on the head of the Polish state, Jozef Pilsudski, in 1921.
Patriotic youth organizations were under the patronage of the UVO. Stepan Bandera became a member of the UVO in 1928. In 1929, in Vienna, Ukrainian youth organizations, with the participation of the UVO, held a unifying congress, at which the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established, which included Bandera. Later in 1932, the OUN and the UVO merged.
Although Poland occupied Galicia, the legitimacy of its rule over the western Ukrainian lands remained problematic from the point of view of the Entente countries. This issue was the subject of claims against Poland by the Western powers, especially England and France.
The Ukrainian majority of Eastern Galicia refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Polish authorities over them. The population census of 1921 and the elections to the Polish Sejm in 1922 were boycotted. By 1930, the situation worsened. In response to the actions of disobedience of the Ukrainian population, the Polish government launched large-scale operations to "pacify" the population, in the current terminology - "cleansing" the territory of Eastern Galicia. In 1934, a concentration camp was formed in Bereza Kartuzskaya, in which there were about 2 thousand political prisoners, mostly Ukrainians. A year later, Poland abandoned its obligations to the League of Nations to respect the rights of national minorities. Mutual attempts were periodically made to find a compromise, but they did not lead to tangible results.
In 1934, members of the OUN made an attempt on the life of the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peracki, as a result of which he died. S. Bandera took part in the attack. For participation in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Peratsky, he was arrested and in early 1936, along with eleven other defendants, he was convicted by the Warsaw District Court. S. Bandera was sentenced to death. According to the amnesty announced earlier by the Polish Sejm, the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.
Stepan was kept in prison in strict isolation. After the German attack on Poland, the town in which the prison was located was bombed. On September 13, 1939, when the position of the Polish troops became critical, the prison guards fled. S. Bandera was released from the solitary cell by the released Ukrainian prisoners.
The OUN, with about 20 thousand members, had a great influence on the Ukrainian population. There were internal conflicts in the organization: between the young impatient and more experienced and reasonable, who went through the war and revolution, between the leadership of the OUN, living in comfortable conditions of emigration, and the bulk of the OUN members, who worked underground and police persecution.
OUN leader Evgen Konovalets, using his diplomatic and organizational talent, was able to extinguish contradictions, uniting the organization. The death of Konovalets at the hands of the Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov in 1938 in Rotterdam was a heavy loss for the nationalist movement in Ukraine. His successor was Colonel Andrei Melnik, a well-educated man, reserved and tolerant. The faction of his supporters, taking advantage of the fact that most of their opponents were in prison, in August 1939, at a conference in Rome, announced Colonel Melnik as the head of the OUN. Further events took a dramatic turn for the Ukrainian national liberation movement. 
Once free, Stepan Bandera arrived in Lviv. A few days before that, Lvov had been occupied by the Red Army. At first, it was relatively safe to be there. Soon, through a courier, he received an invitation to arrive in Krakow to coordinate the further plans of the OUN. Urgent treatment was also required for a joint disease that had worsened in prison. I had to illegally cross the Soviet-German demarcation line.
After meetings in Krakow and Vienna, Bandera was delegated to Rome for negotiations with Melnik. Events developed rapidly, and the central leadership showed slowness. The list of disagreements - organizational and political, which needed to be eliminated in negotiations with Melnik, was quite large. The dissatisfaction of OUN members from the underground with the leadership of the OUN was approaching a critical point. In addition, there was a suspicion of betrayal of Melnik's inner circle, since the mass arrests in Galicia and Volhynia concerned mainly Bandera's supporters.
The main difference was in the strategy of conducting the national liberation struggle. Bandera and his like-minded people considered it necessary to maintain contacts with the OUN both with the countries of the German coalition and with the Western allied countries, without getting close to any group. It is necessary to rely on one's own strength, since no one was interested in the independence of Ukraine. Miller's faction believed that relying on one's own strength was untenable. Western countries are not interested in the independence of Ukraine. This was already demonstrated by them in the 1920s. Germany then recognized the independence of Ukraine. Therefore, it is necessary to bet on Germany. The Melnikovites believed that it was impossible to create an armed underground, as this would irritate the German authorities and repress them, which would not bring political or military dividends.
Unable to reach a compromise as a result of the negotiations, both groups proclaimed themselves the only legitimate leadership of the OUN.
In February 1940, in Krakow, the Bandera faction, which consisted mainly of young people and made up the numerical majority of the OUN, held a conference at which they rejected the decisions of the Rome conference and chose Stepan Bandera as their leader. Thus, the OUN split into Bandera - OUN-B or OUN-R (revolutionary) and Melnikov - OUN-M. Subsequently, the antagonism between the factions reached such intensity that they often fought against each other with the same bitterness with which they fought against the enemies of independent Ukraine.
The attitude of the German leadership towards the OUN was contradictory: the Canaris service (Abwehr - military intelligence) considered it necessary to cooperate with Ukrainian nationalists, the Nazi party leadership, led by Bormann, did not consider the OUN a serious political factor, therefore, rejected any cooperation with it. Taking advantage of these contradictions, the OUN managed to form the Ukrainian military unit "Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists" numbering about 600 people, consisting of two battalions - "Nachtigal" and "Roland", staffed by Ukrainians of predominantly pro-Banderist orientation. The Germans planned to use them for subversive purposes, and Bandera hoped that they would become the core of the future Ukrainian army.
At the same time, mass repressions unfolded on the territory of Western Ukraine, which had ceded to the Soviet Union under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Leaders and activists of political parties and public organizations were arrested, many of them were executed. Four mass deportations of the Ukrainian population from the occupied territories were carried out. New prisons were opened, in which tens of thousands of detainees were kept.
Father Andrei Bandera with his two daughters Marta and Oksana were arrested at three in the morning on May 23, 1941. In the interrogation protocols, when asked by the investigator about his political views, Father Andriy replied: "For my convictions, I am a Ukrainian nationalist, but not a chauvinist. I consider a united, conciliar and independent Ukraine to be the only correct state system for Ukrainians." On the evening of July 8 in Kyiv, at a closed meeting of the military tribunal of the Kyiv military district, A. Bandera was sentenced to death. The verdict stated that it could be appealed within five days from the date of handing over a copy of the verdict. But Andrei Bandera was already shot on July 10th.
Marta and Oksana were sent without trial one by one to the Krasnoyarsk Territory for an eternal settlement, where they were driven from place to place every 2-3 months until 1953. The bitter cup did not pass even the third sister - Vladimira. She, the mother of five children, was arrested along with her husband Teodor Davidyuk in 1946. She was sentenced to 10 years hard labor. She worked in the camps of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Kazakhstan, including the Spassky death camp. She survived, having served her full term, they added a settlement in Karaganda, then she was allowed to return to her children in Ukraine.
The hasty retreat of the Red Army after the start of the war had tragic consequences for tens of thousands of those arrested. Not being able to take everyone to the east, the NKVD decided to urgently liquidate the prisoners, regardless of the verdicts. Often cellars filled with prisoners were simply thrown with grenades. In Galicia, 10 thousand people were killed, in Volhynia - 5 thousand. Relatives of the prisoners, who were looking for their loved ones, witnessed this hasty, senseless and inhuman massacre. All this was then demonstrated by the Germans to the International Red Cross.
With the support of the Nachtigal battalion, on June 30, 1941 in Lvov, at a rally of many thousands in the presence of several German generals, Bandera proclaimed the "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State." A Ukrainian government was also formed consisting of 15 ministers headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, S. Bandera's closest associate. In addition, following the front, which was rapidly moving east, OUN detachments of 7-12 people were sent, a total of about 2,000 people, who, seizing the initiative from the German occupation authorities, formed Ukrainian local governments. 
The reaction of the German authorities to the Bandera action in Lvov followed quickly: on July 5, S. Bandera was arrested in Krakow. and on the 9th - in Lvov, J. Stetsko. In Berlin, where they were taken for trial, S. Bandera was explained that the Germans came to Ukraine not as liberators, but as conquerors, and demanded the public cancellation of the Act of Revival. Not having obtained consent, Bandera was thrown into prison, and a year and a half later - to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was kept until August 27 (according to other sources - until December), 1944. Brothers Stepan Andrei and Vasily were beaten to death in Auschwitz in 1942.
In the autumn of 1941, the Melnikovites in Kyiv also attempted to form a Ukrainian government. But this attempt, too, was brutally suppressed. Over 40 leading figures of the OUN-M were arrested and shot at Babi Yar in early 1942, including the well-known Ukrainian poetess 35-year-old Elena Teliga, who headed the Writers' Union of Ukraine.
By the autumn of 1941, the disparate Ukrainian armed detachments of Polissya united in the partisan unit "Polesskaya Sich". As the mass Nazi terror unfolded in Ukraine, partisan detachments grew. In the autumn of 1942, at the initiative of the OUN-B, the partisan detachments of Bandera, Melnikov and the Polessky Sich united into the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), headed by one of the organizers of the OUN, the highest officer of the recently dissolved Nachtigal battalion, Roman Shukhevych (General Taras Chuprynka) . In 1943-44, the number of UPA reached 100 thousand fighters and it controlled Volyn, Polissya and Galicia. It included detachments of other nationalities - Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kazakhs and other nations, in total 15 such detachments. 
The UPA waged an armed struggle not only against the Nazi and Soviet troops, there was a constant war with the Red partisans, and on the territory of Volhynia, Polissya and Kholmshchyna, exceptionally fierce battles took place with the Polish Home Army. This armed conflict had a long history and was accompanied by ethnic cleansing in the most savage form on both sides.
OUN-UPA at the end of 1942 turned to the Soviet partisans with a proposal to coordinate military operations against the Germans, but failed to agree. Hostile relations turned into armed skirmishes. And already in October and November 1943, for example, the UPA fought 47 battles with German troops and 54 with Soviet partisans.
Until the spring of 1944, the command of the Soviet Army and the NKVD tried to portray sympathy for the Ukrainian nationalist movement. However, after the expulsion of German troops from the territory of Ukraine, Soviet propaganda began to identify the OUN with the Nazis. From that time on, the second stage of the struggle began for the OUN-UPA - the struggle against the Soviet Army. This war lasted for almost 10 years - until the mid-1950s. 
Regular troops of the Soviet Army fought against the UPA. So, in 1946 there were about 2 thousand battles and armed clashes, in 1948 - about 1.5 thousand. Near Moscow, several training bases were organized to combat the partisan movement in Western Ukraine. During these years, among the prisoners of the Gulag, every second was a Ukrainian. And only after the death of UPA commander Roman Shukhevych on March 5, 1950, organized resistance in Western Ukraine began to decline, although individual detachments and the remnants of the underground operated until the mid-50s.
After leaving the Nazi concentration camp, Stepan Bandera did not manage to get to Ukraine. He took up the affairs of the OUN. The central organs of the organization after the end of the war were in the territory of West Germany. At a meeting of the leadership council of the OUN, Bandera was elected to the leadership bureau, in which he oversaw the OUN's foreign units.
At a conference in 1947, Stepan Bandera was elected head of the entire Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. By this time, opposition to Bandera arises in the foreign parts, which reproaches him for dictatorial ambitions, and the OUN for turning into a neo-communist organization. After lengthy discussions, Bandera decides to resign and go to Ukraine. However, the resignation was not accepted. The OUN conferences in 1953 and 1955 with the participation of delegates from Ukraine again elected Bandera as the head of the leadership.
After the war, the family of S. Bandera ended up in the zone of Soviet occupation. Under false names, the relatives of the OUN leader were forced to hide from the Soviet occupation authorities and KGB agents. For some time the family lived in the forest in a secluded house, in a small room without electricity, in cramped conditions Six-year-old Natalya had to walk six kilometers through the forest to school. The family was malnourished, the children grew sickly. 
In 1948-1950 they lived under an assumed name in a refugee camp. Meetings with the father were so rare that the children even forgot him. Since the beginning of the 50s, the mother and children settled in the small village of Breitbrun. Here Stepan could visit more often, almost every day. Despite being busy, my father devoted time to teaching the Ukrainian language to his children. Brother and sister at the age of 4-5 already knew how to read and write in Ukrainian. With Natalka Bandera studied history, geography and literature. In 1954, the family moved to Munich, where Stepan already lived.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera let go of the guards and entered the entrance of the house in which he lived with his family. On the stairs he was met by a man whom Bandera had already seen earlier in the church. From a special pistol, he shot Stepan Bandera in the face with a jet of potassium cyanide solution. Bandera fell, shopping bags rolled down the stairs.
The killer turned out to be a KGB agent, 30-year-old Ukrainian Bogdan Stashinsky. Soon, the chairman of the KGB, Shelepin, personally presented him with the Order of the "Red Banner of Battle" in Moscow. In addition, Stashinsky received permission to marry a German woman from East Berlin. A month after the wedding, which took place in Berlin, Stashinsky was sent with his wife to Moscow to continue their studies. Listening to home conversations with his wife gave grounds to the authorities to suspect Stashinsky of insufficient loyalty to the Soviet regime. He was expelled from school and forbidden to leave Moscow.
Stashinsky's wife, in connection with the upcoming birth in the spring of 1961, was allowed to leave for East Berlin. In early 1962, news came of the unexpected death of a child. For the funeral of his son, Stashinsky was allowed a short trip to East Berlin. Steps were taken to monitor him. However, the day before the funeral (just on the eve of the day the Berlin Wall was erected), Stashinsky and his wife managed to break away from the escort, who followed in three cars, and escape to West Berlin. There he turned to the American representation, where he confessed to the murder of Stepan Bandera, as well as to the murder of OUN activist Professor L. Rebet two years earlier. 
An international scandal broke out, as at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 the USSR officially declared its rejection of the policy of international terrorism.
At the trial, Stashinsky testified that he acted on instructions from the leadership of the USSR. On October 19, 1962, the court of the city of Karlsruhe pronounced a sentence: 8 years in prison with a strict regime.
Stepan's daughter Natalya Bandera ended her speech at the trial with the words:
"My unforgettable father raised us in love for God and Ukraine. He was a deeply believing Christian and died for God and independent free Ukraine"
.
Dmitry Galkovsky
It so happened that Stepan Bandera became a key figure in the political history of Ukraine. This is the most mentioned figure in modern Ukrainian history. In the split Ukrainian society, there are two versions of his biography.
For the East (as well as for the Russian Federation), Bandera is the head of Ukrainian nationalists, a terrorist and a murderer who supports the occupation regime in the fascist Reichskommissariat Ukraine, who took refuge in the West after the war, and tried to conduct American espionage and terrorist-sabotage activities on the territory of the USSR. For which he was eliminated in 1959.
For the Lviv West, Bandera is again the head of the Ukrainian nationalists, a fiery fighter for independence - first with the Polish oppressors, then with the German invaders and finally with the Soviet (or, let's call a spade a spade, Russian) occupiers. For which these invaders vilely and killed.
In my opinion, both versions are far from the truth. Although both myths themselves have a right to exist, just as the peoples who gave birth to them have a similar right to exist.
Let's start with the fact that Bandera was never the head of an organization of Ukrainian nationalists. The head of the OUN (and before its establishment - UVO: Ukrainian Military Organization) was Yevgeny Konovalets, an ensign of the Austro-Hungarian army who went through the World War. After his assassination in 1938, the OUN was headed by Andrei Melnik, also an Austrian with experience in the First World War and then the Civil War. These people were almost 20 years older than Bandera; Bandera himself looked like a Komsomol activist against their background. He really was such an activist.
Andrey Melnik
The maximum position of Bandera in the OUN is the head of the Krakow organization, that is, entry not even into the second, but into the third echelon of management. And he did not stay long in this position.
There is no Bandera among the organs of independent Ukraine during the Nazi occupation.
On October 5, 1941, the Ukrainian National Council was established in Kyiv on the initiative of Melnyk and under the leadership of the Kyiv professor Mykola Velichkovsky. There was no place for Bandera in this Ukrainian proto-government.
A similar body was created in the district of Galicia - the Ukrainian part of the Polish governor-general. It was headed by Vladimir Kubiyovych, Associate Professor at the University of Krakow. Bandera was not there either.
Bandera was not a party ideologist, like the Bolshevik Bukharin, or at least a "golden pen", like the Bolshevik and Bandera's countryman Karl Radek.
On the contrary, the cultural level of Bandera is quite low. He went to school only at the age of 10, then he tried to study as an agronomist, but something did not work out.
Polish pioneers, that is, scouts. Far right - Bandera.
Maybe this is some kind of fiery chegevara, who left behind a lot of revolutionary "deeds"? Also no. While studying at school, he really liked secretary Komsomol work - meetings, lightning, reading scout literature. As a student, he was arrested several times, mostly for smuggling nationalist literature.
On the right is Bandera with scout badges. A well-recognized type of school "excellent student". It is always said that in childhood, for authority, Stepan Andreevich strangled cats in front of enthusiastic classmates. Oh, the brave stranglers do not remember this. They are told by hard-nosed brats who have suffered slaps on the back of the head from school hooligans.
Then he was arrested on someone else's case and hanged a life sentence. In June 1934, the Ukrainian nationalist Hryhoriy Matseyko assassinates the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronisław Poretsky. The killer manages to escape abroad, and the enraged Polish government hangs the organization of the murder on the OUN activists who turned up. 12 people are appointed responsible, including the one arrested the day before the murder of Bandera (in another trifling case - smuggling of Ukrainian literature across the Czechoslovak border). Terpila eventually “confesses” to everything, and two more murders are immediately blamed on him - a professor and a student of Lviv University, which took place 1.5 years after his arrest. Terpila agrees with this accusation, and receives a life sentence.
That's the whole "terrorist activity" of Bandera until 1939 - he transported books, wrote articles in the regional press, organized terrible boycotts: do not buy Polish vodka and cigarettes in local shops. And he signed up for three murders that he did not commit, and COULD NOT commit.
Where did Bandera come from, and why did his name become so popular?
At the time of the Stalin-Hitler partition of Poland, Bandera was imprisoned in the Brest Fortress and, consequently, fell into the Soviet zone of occupation. It is believed that he left the prison during the shift change, a few days before the arrival of Soviet troops. It is quite possible. But then ... further it is stated that Bandera manages to hide for some time, move to the Soviet Lvov, hold meetings with party comrades, and then safely cross the German-Soviet border. Along which combat divisions are stationed along the entire front, and special groups of the NKVD are operating in the rear. Moreover, this is also possible for his brother, who was previously held in a Polish concentration camp in Beryoza-Kartuzskaya. Although it is believed that this camp did not have a shift change at all, and Soviet troops occupied it.
It is easy to see that the miraculous liberation and crossing of the Bander brothers across the border is like two drops repeating the equally miraculous escape from the camp and crossing the border of the Solonevich brothers. True, then, while still in exile, his wife joined Solonevich. You will laugh, but in a few months the single Stepan Bandera will marry a girl who, in 1939, was also imprisoned in Lvov and also miraculously escaped. It should also be noted that both Solonevich and Bandera were imprisoned just for an unsuccessful border crossing. They couldn't cross the border from home. And from prison - it turned out. It turned out to be much easier.
On the blue eye
In April 1940, Bandera, for some reason, like Lenin in 1917, not in need of money, travels to Italy, where he meets with the head of the OUN, Melnik. Again, like Lenin, Bandera stuns the venerable head of the Ukrainian nationalists with the “April theses”: there is nothing to focus on Germany, it is necessary to create an armed underground in the territory occupied by the Wehrmacht and wait for the X-hour to raise an all-Ukrainian uprising. Let me remind you that this was said in a situation where there was no Ukrainian population at all in the occupation zone of Germany. Only individual emigrants in the amount of several thousand people. The situation was so delusional that Melnik ordered Yaroslav Baranovsky, head of the OUN counterintelligence, to take up the biography of the talented agronomist. To which Bandera said that Baranovsky was a proven Polish spy and he should be killed (and indeed, in 1943 he was killed by Bandera). Baranovsky (by the way, a doctor of law from the University of Prague) could well work for Polish intelligence. Why not? The question is how Bandera could know about this and where did he get the evidence of such an accusation.
In the official history of the OUN, it is generally accepted that the organization since that time, like the RSDLP, has split into the OUN (m) and OUN (b) (Menshevik-Melnikov and Bolshevik-Bandera). But this analogy is wrong. The OUN was before and remained after that under the leadership of Melnyk. And Bandera created a noisy and incomprehensibly financed organization that appropriated a different name for itself and included only people from one region of Ukraine.
Until June 22, 1941, Bandera led a split campaign against the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and, despite Melnik's warnings, sent underground groups to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Naturally, the groups were immediately identified and thrown into the prisons of the NKVD, but (oh, a miracle!) After June 22, some of Bandera's comrades-in-arms "fled" from Stalin's prisons and crossed the front line. A striking example is Dmitry Klyachkivsky. In September 1940, he was arrested by the NKVD as a German spy, but in July 1941 he "escaped" from Stalin's prison and then (attention!) headed the security service of the military organization OUN (b) - "Ukrainian Insurgent Army".
Now what happened after June 22nd. From the beginning of 1941, the Germans formed the Nachtigal special battalion from Ukrainians who had experience of serving in the Polish army. It was not a political, but a purely military (military sabotage) unit, designed to solve tactical tasks (mining behind enemy lines, destroying communications equipment, etc.). The staffing of "Nachtigal" by Bandera was carried out without permission, they simply signed up as Ukrainian volunteers. The Melnikovites had real support at the German top then, they formed several combat units on the Slovak border.
On June 29-30, Nachtigal ended up in Lvov, at the same time Bandera emissaries arrived there. They began to exterminate the Jews (deliberately pointless, in order to completely discredit the Germans in front of the United States - for example, professors of mathematics from Lviv University) and proclaimed the creation of an independent Ukrainian republic, as well as the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian armed forces (in order to seize the initiative from the Germans and present them with a fait accompli ). The Germans were stunned by such impudence, "Nachtigal" was taken out of Lvov (it's not at all clear how he got there) and soon disbanded. Already in early July, Bandera and his self-appointed government were arrested by the Germans. The Ukrainian state, as agreed with the venerable Melnyk, was proclaimed in Kyiv three months later.
The problem was that in other settlements Bandera acted with the same agility and they managed to form cells of activists on the wave of anti-Stalinist enthusiasm of the population. The Germans considered this and soon Bandera was released. But about positive work (in the understanding of the Germans), Bandera did not have a trace. Relying on armed groups of activists, he began the physical destruction of the Melnikovites.
Ukraine is great, but there is nowhere to retreat - on the back of Bandera.
On August 30, two members of the leadership of the Melnikov OUN were shot dead in Zhytomyr, then several dozen more people were killed in different cities, and in total, the Banderaites pronounced about 600 death sentences against the Melnikovites. Massive oppression of the Polish population also began. Already at this stage, the cause of creating an independent Ukraine under the auspices of Germany was hopelessly thwarted. Soon the Germans again imprisoned Bandera and sent him to a concentration camp, where his two brothers ended up (later killed by the camp administration from the Poles).
At the same time, it cannot be said that Bandera was guided by ... well, for example, Stalin, and Melnik - Hitler. In principle, Melnik had no disagreements with Bandera, it was about tactics and common sense. Melnyk wanted to strengthen himself with the help of the Germans, and if they lost, he would jump on the overhead and recreate an independent Ukrainian state. Therefore, in 1944, the Germans put him in prison.
Here I will allow myself a small digression.
As I already had the honor to explain in the Belarusian cycle, the history of partisan wars is the most deceitful area of historiography (after church history). You can safely forget what you have been told for 70 years about Kovpak and Ponomarenko. The real church history and the real history of the partisan movement (if it exists) with the so-called. the townsfolk should be absolute fiction.
It is believed that the partisan movement during the war years was carried out by a certain "Central partisan headquarters at the headquarters of the supreme command" under the leadership of the party bureaucrat and electrical engineer Ponomarenko. It was partly true, but the scheme did not work. Because in order to conduct a guerrilla war, you need to have the appropriate personnel and specialist leaders. They did not exist in the USSR, and you cannot master such a thing by trial and error. There is too much trial and error, and feedback is delayed by months or none at all.
Apparently, the current sector of sabotage and partisan work (and it, of course, was) was supervised by a group of foreign specialists, and the partisan movement itself unfolded against the backdrop of complex forms of cooperation with local oppositionists. So the backbone of Dmitry Medvedev's partisan group consisted of Spanish saboteurs trained by the British, dressed in the form of Melnikovites. In turn, the Melnikovites used the clothes of the Soviet army, etc.
Moreover, all this magnificence was covered by the German leadership of Ukraine.
I think everyone has heard about the fascist fanatic Gauleitor of Ukraine Koch, he was killed there by partisans or hanged in Nuremberg. So no.
Rosenberg in Kyiv. Far right - Erich Koch.
After the war, Erich Koch safely moved to the British zone of occupation and lived there until the summer of 1949. Although it seems that the chela had to search long and hard, and it was quite easy to do this - because of the pathologically short stature. Most likely, the British were well informed about his whereabouts, but after being advertised, they were forced to arrest him. However, they themselves did not judge him, but handed over the chief executioner of the USSR. What about the USSR? But nothing - he handed over the Gauleiter ... to Poland. It is very strange, but the NDP must have been pulled off to the fullest. No, at first his death sentence was suspended for 10 years, and then completely canceled. There was no pomp, at the trial Koch for some reason said that he loved the USSR, and did a lot of useful things. He lived in Poland until the age of 90, died in 1986, was actually kept under house arrest. This, I repeat, is one of the main fanatics even after the mass executions of the leaders of the Third Reich.
What, by the way, were the names of Soviet agitators of Ukrainian collaborators during the war? It turns out for the most part it doesn't. "Police". After the war, three names appeared: "Melnikovtsy", "Bandera" and "Bulbovtsy". Bulbovtsy - named "Taras Bulba", in the world - Taras Borovets, the head of the third group of Ukrainian nationalists, united in the "Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army". (Borovets was eventually sent to a German camp as well, while the Bandera people seized his wife and killed him after monstrous torture.)
"Taras Bulba" in the form of a civilized officer.
"Taras Bulba" in the image of the commander of the Russian partisan detachment (pay attention to the plywood birches).
And this is a home view, "in slippers." As far as I understand, the “bulbovtsy” were the real field commanders of the occupied Ukraine.
Gradually, in the 60-70s, the “Melnikovites” and “Bulbovites” were forgotten, in the Soviet propaganda literature, the name Bandera was firmly established behind all the independentists. Meanwhile, Bandera himself from September 1941 to September 1944 was in a concentration camp and could not lead operations and generally take part in the course of affairs. (For comparison, Melnik was imprisoned from February to September 1944, Bulba - from December 1943 to September 1944). In the absence of Bandera, the OUN (b) was led by Nikolai Lebed, who, unlike Melnik or Bulba, was IN ILLEGAL STATION, and the Germans put a reward on his head. The main activity of the OUN (b), - rather insignificant - was the destruction of the people of Melnik and Bulba, as well as terror against the Polish population (Volyn massacre of 1943).
Emigrant affairs.
After the war, Bandera's emigre activity naturally again came down to the surrender of the MGB to agents abandoned by the Americans, in addition, the OUN (b) itself split into two parts. The breakaway part was headed by Lev Rebet, who was soon killed by the Staro-Banderites. The answer followed two years later. Despite the fact that Bandera was highly encrypted (even his children did not know that he was Bandera, and thought that their dad was an ordinary Bandera member named Poppel), the Rebetovites tracked him down and killed him.
As is customary in such cases among Ukrainians, two years later another independent nationalist appeared on the horizon - Stashinsky, and stated that he personally killed both Rebet and Bandera ... on the instructions of the KGB. Further, with all the stops up to mysterious disappearances, plastic surgeries, polonium poisoning, etc. Recently, we all saw the Ukrainian performance on the example of Litvinenko-Lugovoy - also with the miraculous finding of lost parents, articles in the yellow press and a Polish zilch at the end.
On vacation in Switzerland. The scout net is sorely lacking.
As for the OUN(m), led by Melnyk, it finally merged with, so to speak, the indigenous Ukrainian national movement - the Petliurist government in exile, which, like the Poles, survived until the collapse of socialism and committed a symbolic act of transferring power to the legitimate government of Ukraine in the early 90s.
Shukhevych is a junior officer of the auxiliary German troops, who then went underground and removed Lebed from the military leadership of the OUN (b). Now the nationalists are fastened to Bender, because he did not take part in any action at all.
Why, after all, did the “Banderites” become a symbol of Ukrainian nationalism, and not the respectable (and, in the end, more or less legitimate) “Melnykovites”, and not the brave “Bulbovites”? From the point of view of Soviet propaganda, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, the point is a significant surname. "Bandera" from "gang", "Bandera" = "bandits".
Lenin is, Lenin is not. Happiness.
Well, as a teenager, I discovered the brochure of the publishing house of foreign literature "Korean Proverbs and Sayings." She always lay on the shelf, and then I take it and open it. The first thing I saw was the saying: "Spoiled air is the loudest indignant of the one who spoiled it." The next day, the whole "sixth be" was laughing, the brochure was read to the holes. And the state is a teenager.
On the first day of each new year, torchlight processions take place in the cities and towns of Western Ukraine. People take to the streets to honor the memory of Stepan Bandera, the most controversial figure in modern Ukrainian history. Many consider him a real hero who gave his life for the independence of the country, others - a criminal and a traitor, because of which thousands of people died. He himself did not have to kill people, but his supporters, blindly obeying orders, in the post-war years staged a genuine terror in the western regions of Ukraine.
Stepan Bandera was born in Stary Ugrinov in 1909. In the documents about the place of his birth, there is an entry about the already non-existent state ─ the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was then an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stepan Bandera is destined to absorb the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism from childhood. His father, the Greek Catholic priest Andriy Bandera, firmly believed in the realization of the then unrealizable dream ─ gaining independence by Ukraine.
During the First World War, Galicia became a gigantic battlefield. Father, being served by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, went to fight at the front. After the defeat of the Austrians in the war, he became a member of the parliament of the independent Western Ukrainian People's Republic and joined the Ukrainian militia - the Galician army, the predecessor of the future armed formations of Ukrainian nationalists. Stepan Bandera met the end of the war with relatives in the city of Stryi, not far from Lvov. Western Ukraine fell under the rule of Poland and my father, who served as a chaplain in the Galician army that fought against the Poles, had to hide from the occupation authorities for some time.
At the age of twelve, Stepan Bandera joined an underground organization of Ukrainian schoolchildren. Thus began his path into politics and the struggle for "independence", which lasted almost 40 years, most of which he would have to spend in captivity or in an illegal position. You can safely call him a fanatic or obsessed with an idea. Even as a child, he began to prepare himself for future difficult trials.
Stepan Bandera often went on long forest hikes with scouts, went in for sports, and in winter he hardened himself in the cold, pouring himself with water. He overdid it a little. From hypothermia, he will develop rheumatism of the legs, from which he will suffer greatly all his life. Poland in the post-war years began to pursue a policy of forced assimilation in the Ukrainian territories, supporting the resettlement of Poles in Western Ukraine. So the Polish authorities became the main enemy for Ukrainian nationalists.
In 1927, Stepan Bandera joined the Ukrainian military organization, and 2 years later he found himself in the newly organized Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). While studying at the Lviv Polytechnic as an agronomist, he devoted all his free time to underground activities. Throughout his life, Bandera had many nicknames ─ Fox, Gray, Kruk, Baba, Rykh. In those years, he wrote a lot for illegal newspapers, signing under the pseudonym Matvey Gordon.
The life of an underground worker is the same in all countries and at all times. Secret meetings, posting leaflets, distribution of illegal newspapers, propaganda among the masses, organizing strikes and boycotts of elections ─ he had to deal with all this. The active young nationalist was quickly noticed. In 1933, he was appointed a "regional conductor" ─ the head of the regional organization of the OUN.
Stepan Bandera nationality
The political struggle gradually became radicalized. Ukrainians began to take up arms. In 1932, Stepan Bandera was trained in the German intelligence school in Danzig in the methods of sabotage. Thus began his cooperation with the German authorities, in those years, trying to cultivate an internal enemy for the neighboring unfriendly Poland. In 1933, the OUN decided to liquidate the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronisław Peracki.
The organization of the operation was personally led by Stepan Bandera. In mid-June 1934, in Warsaw, a Polish minister was shot by a member of the OUN Grigory Matseyko. He managed to successfully leave both the crime scene itself and Poland, but the organizer of the action was not lucky. They were all arrested, including Stepan Bandera. A court in Warsaw found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. During the trial, Bandera was removed from the courtroom several times for shouting "Live Ukraine." The death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment. In prison, Stepan Bandera proved to be a very restless prisoner, constantly participating in protest hunger strikes. From there, he continued to lead the activities of the OUN in Western Ukraine.
In addition to Poland, the gaze of Ukrainian nationalists often turned to the east. In the early 1930s, famine broke out on the territory of Soviet Ukraine due to crop failures. Ukrainians often refer to those events as the "Holodomor", still considering it to be artificially inspired by Stalin's entourage. Stepan Bandera adhered to the same views. He decided to take revenge on the Soviet authorities for the "mockery" of the Ukrainian people.
In the autumn of 1933, Aleksey Maylov, secretary of the USSR consulate in Lvov, died at the hands of a sent man. From this event, the war of Bandera and the OUN against the USSR began. The outbreak of the Second World War helped the release of the prisoner. He met her in the Brest Fortress. The Poles had a maximum security prison within its walls. When the Soviet troops approached, moving west according to the Molotov-Ribbentropp plan, the prison guards fled. Stepan Bandera immediately went home to Lviv. It was a few months that he lived under Soviet rule, naturally, in an illegal position. If the NKVD had arrested him then, he would have rotted in the Kolyma or even been immediately shot in the basement, but Bandera managed to secretly cross the border and get into the territory occupied by Germany.
Bandera movement
Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. Western Ukraine was divided between Germany and the USSR. The enemy for Bandera has changed. Poland was replaced by Germany. While he was in prison, great changes took place in the OUN. The former leader, Evgen Konovalets, was blown up by a bomb in Rotterdam. Andrey Melnik claimed unconditional leadership. Their meeting took place in Italy. Stepan Bandera demanded that Melnik stop any contacts with Germany. He refused. The OUN split into two parts. Bandera headed the OUN (Bandera movement).
Actually, after a quarrel between the two leaders of the OUN, the term "Bandera" came into play. With Nazi Germany, he still had to start cooperation. He met the German attack on the USSR in Krakow, being under vigilant police supervision. He was strongly advised not to visit his native places. As part of the German troops at the end of June 1941, which entered Lvov, there were 2 battalions manned by his supporters. On the same day, one of the leaders of the OUN (b), Yaroslav Stetsko, read out in Lvov the “Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State”. The Germans absolutely did not need an independent Ukraine. They didn't have their own plans. They did not recognize any "independence", and all its guardians were quickly arrested.
Stepan Bandera with his wife and daughters were placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he soon met Andrey Melnik, who always staked on Germany. In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera had some privileges compared to other prisoners. He was fed a little better and was sometimes allowed to meet with his family. The Germans have always been very prudent.
Andrey Melnik in old age
Bandera was remembered in 1944, when the Soviet Army approached the lands of Western Ukraine. According to the calculations of the German command, Ukrainian nationalists were supposed to start a partisan war in the liberated areas. Bandera made the recognition by Germany of the “Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State” a prerequisite for further cooperation. He never managed to achieve this.
Back in 1942, in Galicia, without the participation of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the UPA began to form, which became the core of the resistance and received help from the Germans in the form of weapons. Stepan Bandera from Germany tried to lead the "out of band" formations of nationalists.
Opposition grew within the OUN, especially among its members hiding in the forests of Ukraine, accusing him of detachment from real life and dogmatism.
Stepan Bandera met the end of the war in the part of Germany occupied by the British. Very quickly, British intelligence agencies came to him. In turn, the Americans continued to look for Bandera as an accomplice of Nazi Germany, and for a couple of years he had to hide from them.
Since then, the Soviet Union has remained the only enemy for the Ukrainian nationalists. The guerrilla war in Western Ukraine continued until the mid-1950s.
Many years after the destruction of the main forces of the "Bandera" in the villages, they found hiding in the cellars of the relatives of the former UPA fighters. Such stubbornness was only demonstrated by Japanese soldiers who did not recognize surrender, who continued to be caught in the jungles of the Philippines until the 70s.
The murder of Stepan Bandera
The recognized leader of the nationalist movement inevitably became a target for the Soviet secret services. In 1947, an assassination attempt was made by Yaroslav Moroz, a year later by Vladimir Stelmashchuk. In 1952, German citizens Leguda and Leman were convicted of plotting an assassination. A year later, Stepan Liebgolts tried to get to Bandera. The OUN's own security service and the German police were on the alert, exposing the agents. The OUN leader lived with his family under the name Poppel in Munich. He conspired so reliably that his own children for a long time believed that Poppel was their real name.
In October 1959, Stepan Bandera and the address of his house were calculated by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky. 2 years before that, he successfully liquidated another OUN leader, Lev Rebet. For the new murder, Stashinsky used a special syringe pistol charged with potassium cyanide. He was waiting for Bandera at the entrance of the house with a bundle of newspaper in which weapons were hidden. Poppel-Bandera returned home for lunch. Stashinsky shot him in the face and fled. Only an autopsy determined the true cause of death. Initially, doctors assumed a heart attack.
Stepan Bandera, with a huge gathering of Ukrainian emigrants, was buried at the Waldfriedhof cemetery. Stashinsky will flee to the West in 1961 from the GDR with his German wife. He frankly confesses to the murders of Rebet and Bandera. After 6 years, he will be released early from prison and disappear. He will undergo plastic surgery, after which, under a fictitious name, Stashinsky will live in South Africa.
Almost half a century later, President Viktor Yushchenko will award Stepan Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine. The news will stir up the whole country and give rise to a new wave of controversy about his personality, dividing Ukrainians into 2 hostile camps. Literally after 3 months, the Donetsk District Court recognizes the presidential decree as illegal. The point will be put by the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine. Officially, he is never recognized as a hero. All disputes around the father's name from Canada will be closely watched by his youngest daughter, who is not destined to wait for the official recognition of Stepan Bandera's merits to the Ukrainian state. She will pass away in 2011.
Stepan Bandera- one of the most controversial figures in Ukrainian history. Hero of Ukraine or pathetic traitor? Patriot or Fascist? An ideologue of Ukrainian freedom or a ruthless killer and dictator? Even 55 years after his death, it was his name that for some became synonymous with freedom, and for others - the embodiment of the modern fascist movement. How did Bandera deserve such recognition?
It is absolutely meaningless to deny the colossal significance of the figure of Stepan Bandera in modern Ukrainian history and for the formation of the national self-identification of the young generation of “free” Ukrainians. No wonder this extremely controversial person in 2008, together with Yaroslav the Wise and Mykola Amosov, entered the top three "Great Ukrainians". So our fellow citizens themselves decided, at least that part of them that took part in the national interactive project of one of the domestic TV channels.
However, despite this, the “Bandera” discussions in Ukraine, and recently outside of it, have not subsided so far. The symbol of Ukrainian freedom for some and the real embodiment of fascism for others - Bandera - is today competently used, including by anti-Ukrainian forces, as a factor of discord between Ukrainians from different regions of the country. All this only confirms the assumption that his influence on the course of Ukrainian history, even half a century after his death, still retains its original power.
How to relate to the activities of Stepan Bandera and, in general, to the entire Ukrainian national liberation movement in Western Ukraine during the Second World War, today, given the situation, every Ukrainian must decide for himself. However, for this it is necessary, at a minimum, to know what kind of person he was, and how it happened that he became a symbol of the Ukrainian struggle for national independence.
The Life and Death of a Nationalist
The future leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Stary Ugriv (now it is the Kalush district of the Ivano-Frankivsk region) in the family of a Greek Catholic priest Andrei Bandera.
Stepan's childhood passed to the accompaniment of the horrors of the First World War: the territory of Western Ukraine of those times continually passed from one occupier to another, and in 1917 the line of the Austrian-Russian front passed through Stary Ugriv, because of which the village repeatedly fought long battles.
Against the backdrop of the war, a national movement of Western Ukrainians was also unfolding, in which Andriy Bandera also took an active part. It was he who was one of those who organized the Ukrainian coup in the Kalush Povet, and in 1918-1919 he was the latter's envoy in the Ukrainian National Council - the parliament of the newly created Western Ukrainian People's Republic. Also during the Ukrainian-Polish war, Andriy Bandera served as a chaplain in the Ukrainian Galician army, in which he fought in the Dnieper Ukraine.
Before the eyes of the young Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian statehood perished under the ruins of post-war Europe, he witnessed the failed offensive of the Galician army on the positions of the Polish Craiova Army armed by the Entente countries (the so-called Chertkovskaya offensive), and his father, after the final surrender of the Ukrainian army, was forced to hide from persecution for some time by the Polish authorities.
It is likely that the foundation for Stepan's nationalist worldview was laid precisely at that tragic time for the Ukrainian people.
In 1919, he began his studies at the Ukrainian gymnasium in the city of Stryi, where he subsequently successfully completed all eight classes.
In 1922, 12-year-old Stepan became a member of the Plast scout organization, at that time one of the main strongholds of the patriotic education of Ukrainian youth. Bandera tried to join the organization from the 1st grade, but a significant obstacle was rheumatism of the joints, due to which he sometimes could not even walk, and at the age of 11 he was in the hospital for two months with a water swelling of the knee.
However, in the end, this did not prevent young Stepan from becoming a scout, and later also a member of semi-legal patriotic circles, the purpose of which was to oppose the Polish authorities and support the Ukrainian Military Organization (hereinafter - UVO) banned by Warsaw. In the senior classes of the gymnasium, Bandera already had serious connections with representatives of the UVO and even carried out some assignments for them, and immediately after graduation he became a full member of the organization.
After graduating from high school in 1927, Stepan Bandera decided to enter the Ukrainian Academy of Economics, which was located in Podebrady, Czechoslovakia, but the Polish authorities refused to issue him a passport to travel abroad. He was forced to stay in his native Stary Ugriv, which only strengthened his connection with the UVO, in which he organized student circles with elements of military training in the villages of the Kalush region.
In 1928, Bandera moved to Lviv, where he entered the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School at the Lviv Secret Ukrainian University (it was created by the Ukrainian public in response to the closure of Ukrainian departments at Lviv universities). From that moment on, the activities of the future leader of Ukrainian nationalists intensified significantly: he continued to participate in projects of the UVO, where he dealt with intelligence and propaganda issues. Also at this time, Bandera became a member of the student cultural and national organization "Osnova", while being a member of the 2nd kuren of senior scouts "Zagin Chervona Kalina".
In 1929, when, as a result of the unification of the UVO and youth nationalist organizations in Western Ukraine (“Group of Ukrainian National Youth”, “League of Ukrainian Nationalists” and “Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth”), the national liberation movement of Ukrainians was headed by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), Bandera immediately became a member, which allowed him to become a member of its first congresses.
From that moment on, the career of a young nationalist rapidly went up. Bandera begins to deal with the printing and delivery of illegal materials (newspapers, leaflets, magazines), the organization of ideological and military training structures for young members of the movement, as well as the development of sabotage, sabotage and even terrorist acts against the Polish authorities or Ukrainian collaborators.
Already in 1931, the overactive and enterprising Bandera was assigned to oversee the entire propaganda department of the OUN. While in this position, he is among the organizers of several mass actions of disobedience of the Ukrainian population to the Polish authorities, the most famous of which is the civil boycott of tobacco and alcohol products of Polish monopolies.
In 1933, Stepan Bandera became the regional conductor of the OUN, and it was under his leadership that a number of sabotage and terrorist actions were carried out against the Polish invaders. The most famous of them, of course, is the murder of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Bronisław Pieracki, who was personally responsible for the mass repressions against Ukrainians in the framework of the so-called pacifications in relation to the national minorities of the Second Polish Republic.
OUN members killed Peratsky on June 16, 1934, and the day before Bandera had been arrested by the Polish police. Only a year and a half later, in January 1936, after a lengthy legal battle, Bandera and several of his associates were sentenced to death by a Polish court. Later, as part of a broad amnesty, the death penalty for OUN members was replaced by life imprisonment.
He was in the Polish Bandera prison until the very German invasion of Poland in 1939. During his imprisonment, along with other "political" he repeatedly carried out actions of disobedience, in particular hunger strikes. As a "particularly dangerous" criminal, Bandera was kept in isolation from the rest of the prisoners, which, however, did not prevent the nationalists from releasing him from the castle during the German bombardments. Then, under the onslaught of the Nazis, most of the Polish prisons were left without guards, who preferred to flee, so most Ukrainian political prisoners managed to get free.
After his release, Bandera immediately went to Lviv. In 1939, the implementation of the secret Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which implied, in particular, the division of Poland between Germany and the USSR, was in full swing. It became obvious that Western Ukraine would be occupied by the Soviet Union, which is why it was the Bolsheviks who were considered by Bandera and associates to be the main enemies of Ukrainian independence.
At this time, most of the OUN leaders moved to Krakow, where at that time almost the entire elite of the national liberation movement in Western Ukraine was located. In 1938, in Rotterdam, agents of the USSR killed the leader of the OUN of that time, Yevgeny Konovalets, which had a significant impact on the further activities of the OUN. The organization no longer had the former cohesion, there was no trust between its members.
In the conditions of the beginning war, many nationalists could not come to a common understanding of the further strategy of the OUN to achieve the ultimate goal of the organization - the independence of Ukraine.
In early 1940, Bandera went to Italy for negotiations with another OUN leader, Andrei Melnik. Melnyk was a representative of the old, more moderate guard of Ukrainian nationalists, but his strategy was based on an alliance of Ukrainian nationalists with Germany, which in no way suited Bandera and his associates. As a result, Bandera and Melnik never came to a unified decision, and the OUN split into Bandera and Melnik.
In 1941, just a few days after the proclamation of the “Act on the Revival of the Ukrainian State,” Stepan Bandera fell into the hands of the German police, who explained to him that there could be no question of any Ukrainian statehood during the Nazi occupation. Bandera decided not to publicly renounce the "Act", for which he was sent to the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen, where he remained until December 1944.
Oddly enough, after his release from the concentration camp, the OUN(b) leader did not return to Ukraine and instead settled in Munich. From there, he oversaw the activities of the foreign "legion" of Ukrainian nationalists, however, having no former influence on the organization, Bandera could no longer ignore the opinion of the opposition that had arisen, which accused him of authoritarianism and attempts to usurp power.
After the war, the activity of the OUN in Western Ukraine began to decline. The death of Shukhevych, mass purges of OUN members by Soviet troops, political persecution of Ukrainian nationalists. Western Ukraine was flooded with Soviet secret services, which launched an extremely wide campaign to exterminate even the slightest hint of the revival of the Ukrainian national idea.
Of course, most of the representatives of the top leadership of the OUN (both Bandera and Melnikov wing) after the massive flight of the Nazi army from the territory of Ukraine also immediately left their native land. The rest were either killed or arrested and sent to Soviet concentration camps. Therefore, the OUN in the post-war period continued to be active, but already in exile. All this still posed a threat to the domination of the USSR in Western Ukraine, therefore, at the end of the 50s, a decisive blow was dealt to the OUN: after a series of murders of other OUN leaders, in 1959, from a shot in the face with a solution of potassium cyanide in the entrance of his house, Stepan Bandera himself. His killer was KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.
Controversial issues about Bandera
It is extremely difficult to understand unequivocally what happened during the Second World War in Western Ukraine. In fact, five independent armies operated on this sector of the front at different times, each of which pursued its own goals. German formations of the Wehrmacht, the Soviet Red Army, the Ukrainian UPA, the Polish Craiova Army, as well as detachments of Soviet and Ukrainian partisans - all of them turned the territory of Western Ukraine into a real bloody meat grinder, in which civilians also suffered.
Of course, it is also impossible to idealize the figure of Bandera. His political position was far from liberal ideas, and the revolutionary struggle was based on the method of terror against the enemies of the Ukrainian nation, collaborators and simply political opponents. Such a worldview can be perceived only by radicals (or hypocrites who hate Hitler and revere Stalin), but by no means adherents of the peaceful and civilized development of nation-states.
There are clearly more questions about the activities of Stepan Bandera and his associates in the OUN than there are answers. All this is an excellent occasion for speculation of various scales, because there is simply no consensus on this matter and it is unlikely that this will ever happen. The history of Bandera and the UPA is exactly the case when the historical truth is doomed to fight for survival with numerous falsifications and even outright lies. Therefore, in the current situation in Ukraine, we will at least try to shed light on some of the most controversial issues regarding the OUN-UPA and its leader.
Question № 1 . Bandera and the Nazis
Perhaps the main and most powerful argument of Bandera's haters is his cooperation with Nazi Germany during the Great Patriotic War. Indeed, in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, very serious hopes were pinned on the help of the German army in the fight against the Bolshevik occupation. At the same time, the role of the Wehrmacht in the Ukrainian liberation movement was perceived differently by individual nationalists.
In particular, the leader of the OUN at the time of the outbreak of World War II, Andriy Melnyk, insisted that Ukrainian nationalists need to take advantage of Germany's help, joining forces with it in the war against the Bolsheviks. One of Melnyk's arguments was his own experience of the failure of the UNR and ZUNR, when of all the Western states, only Germany, not in word, but in deed, supported the Ukrainian statehood, which could have been strengthened if the Germans had not lost in the First World War.
Bandera was against this, because he believed that in the national liberation war, Ukraine should rely only on its own forces. At the same time, Bandera's like-minded people perceived the German army only as temporary occupiers, especially since in 1939 the territory of Western Ukraine, according to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, came under the protectorate of the USSR.
In 1941, Bandera was captured by the German police and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Three years later, in 1944, when the war was coming to an end, the Germans, realizing the inevitability of their defeat, frantically tried to find at least some way to delay the advance of Soviet troops on the eastern front of battles.
Such an opportunity was cooperation with the 100,000-strong UPA, which already fought desperately on three fronts throughout the war. However, Bandera unequivocally rejected the offer of cooperation between the OUN and the collapsing Nazi regime.
It remains unclear how it happened that, being an associate of Hitler, Bandera thundered into a Nazi concentration camp for three years? Why did he refuse to help them in 1944? If Bandera worked for the Wehrmacht, why then did the issue of German patronage become one of the main contradictions between Bandera and Melnik, which ultimately led to a split in the OUN?
Of course, one can find hundreds of statements to the contrary, but, unfortunately, there is no actual evidence of collaborationism on the part of the UPA and Bandera (except for the “testimony” obtained in the basements of the NKVD).
Question number 2 . OUN and terrorism
Soviet propaganda did not skimp on epithets when describing the character of Stepan Bandera: before the citizens of the USSR, he appeared in the form of a bloody killer, tough and inexorable by nature.
It got to the point that the story of how little Bandera loved to have fun, killing cats in front of his peers, became very popular. According to the "anti-fascists", Bandera's sadistic inclinations began to fully develop already in adulthood, when he reached the leadership of the OUN.
This whole story sounds very interesting, but there is no concrete evidence of its reality. All this is more like the purposeful formation of a negative image of Bandera in the eyes of the then Soviet, and now Ukrainian and Russian citizens.
At the same time, in the pre-war years, the OUN was really seriously engaged in terrorist and sabotage activities directed against the Polish authorities. However, it would be wrong to say that Bandera personally became the ideologist of such methods, since he was just one of the regional leaders of the OUN, who himself carried out the orders of the top leadership of the organization. Not without reason, before the murder of Peratsky, not only Bandera, but also several of his associates, ended up in the dock.
In general, the Polish authorities had plenty of reasons to be angry at the OUN, because Ukrainian nationalists used a whole arsenal of sabotage methods in their revolutionary activities. OUN members robbed banks, set fire to state institutions, blocked traffic on railways, and even organized the murders of political opponents.
All this seemed to be pursuing a good (for Ukrainians) goal: by loosening the situation in the region, to declare itself to the whole world and once again return the issue of Ukrainian statehood to the international agenda. But in reality, this only led to a further extremely harsh reaction from the Polish authorities, which resulted in a process of pacification in order to “pacify” the Ukrainian population. In 1934, in the city of Bereza-Kartuzskaya (modern Belarus), a concentration camp for political prisoners was even created, where Ukrainians were also kept.
Be that as it may, but the methods that the OUN adopted in the pre-war period do not paint this organization at all. Regardless of the ultimate goal of the movement, the killing of people, including their own compatriots, robbery and looting, cannot be called civilized and honest means of fighting for the national liberation of the people. And any justification for this looks extremely unconvincing.
Question number 3 . OUN against the USSR and Poland
Of course, Western Ukrainians had even more reasons to hate Poland: after the fall of the UNR, with the permission of the League of Nations, Western Ukrainian lands were once again occupied by the Poles, who undertook to ensure cultural and political autonomy for the Ukrainian population. However, the Polish authorities did not fulfill the promise and, on the contrary, tried in every possible way to increase pressure on the Ukrainian population of the so-called “Małopolska”.
It is not surprising that during the Second World War, the most bloody and massive battles of the OUN-UPA took place precisely with the Polish Home Army (AK). The goal of the Poles was to restore the Polish state within the pre-war borders, so significant forces of the AK were also located on the territory of Western Ukraine, which, naturally, only annoyed the Ukrainian nationalists.
At the same time, the extremely negative perception of the Soviet Union by the OUN is understandable: Bolshevism among Ukrainians was perceived as another imperialist undertaking by Moscow, and for the OUN it was much more important to knock out support from under the feet of this enemy than to resist the Germans, who fought against almost the whole world. Moreover, having gained control over the Western Ukrainian lands, the Soviet authorities immediately began to confirm their image of a real repressive monster: Western Ukrainians could feel what political arrests, deportations, executions, cultural infringements in the execution of the communist regime were on their own skin.
The Stalinist repressions of the 1930s are not even worth mentioning. Not without reason in Europe, the Stalinist regime was perceived as much more bloody and cruel than even the revanchist aggressive policy of Nazi Germany.
On July 30, 1941, a cooperation agreement was signed between the USSR and the Polish government in exile, as a result of which the forces of the Home Army united with Soviet partisans and often conducted large-scale military operations, including against the UPA. Numerous conflicts between the Polish and Ukrainian armies played into the hands of both the USSR and Germany, which often themselves acted as instigators of clashes between Ukrainians and Poles, which was also reflected in the so-called Volyn tragedy.
Question number 4 . OUN in World War II
The role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, formed on the basis of the OUN in the Great Patriotic War, is still the subject of the most fierce disputes and discussions not only among historians, but also in the circles of the inhabitants. The sources here diverge in the most radical way: some argue that the UPA was supported by Nazi Germany, while others refute this connection.
The split of the OUN into Melnikovites and Banderaites brought even more confusion into the military-political disposition of forces in Western Ukraine at that time. The Melnikovites supported the Germans and fought against the Soviet partisans from the first days of the war. Bandera at first also acted on the side of the Wehrmacht - their forces in 1941 formed two Ukrainian legions - "Nachtigal" and "Roland" - no more than 800 people each, but both of them did not last long. It was assumed that it was these formations that would become the basis for creating the army of an independent Ukrainian state. The commander of the Nachtigall was one of the leaders of the OUN revolutionaries Roman Shukhevych.
Together with the Germans, the Ukrainian rebels entered Lviv, where the “Act on the Revival of the Ukrainian State” was adopted, but the Nazis quickly made it clear that they were not interested in any nationalist games. In general, if the authorities of the Abwehr (the German military intelligence agency) allowed the possibility of cooperation with the OUN, then the party leadership of the NSDAP, headed by Bormann, did not consider Ukrainian nationalists worthy of their attention at all. Therefore, the reprisal against the state encroachments of the Ukrainians was instantaneous: within a few days after the proclamation of the “Act”, Stepan Bandera was hidden by the Germans in a concentration camp, both legions were dispersed, and many leaders of the UPA, like Bandera, were repressed.
By the way, after the proclamation of the “Act”, the government of the Ukrainian state was formed, headed by one of the closest associates of Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko, and Lev Rebet was appointed his deputy. The name and surname of the latter, obviously, testify that not only pure-blooded Ukrainians were allowed to lead the OUN, as is commonly thought.
However, it is important to understand that at that time the OUN-UPA was by no means acting as a united front. The consequences of the split were still felt in the organization, so the Melnikovites “worked” separately, and sometimes even in spite of the Banderaites and vice versa. So, in the fall of 1941, the OUN (m) in Kiev made an attempt to form its own government, but the Germans cut off this initiative in their usual manner, shooting about 40 members of the OUN in Babin Yar, including the famous Ukrainian poetess Elena Teliha.
In general, the anti-fascist movement in Western Ukraine began with the so-called "Polessky Sich" - several underground partisan detachments operating under the leadership of Taras Borovets. Despite the fact that already at that time he was in every possible way in contact with the OUN, there was no talk of uniting into a single army. In parallel with this, in the territory of the western regions of Ukraine, an armed struggle on three fronts was waged by many separate armed formations, which often engaged in looting, attacking the civilian population.
For the same reason, detachments existed in the areas bordering Belarus, the purpose of which was to counter the raids of Soviet partisans, who also did not miss the opportunity to profit from the civilian population.
The UPA itself, with a formally sole center of command, was formed only at the beginning of 1943, when, not without coercion, the Banderaites, who had a numerical advantage, also united with them the Melnikovites and the Polissya Sich.
In 1943-1944, the number of the UPA reached 100 thousand people. Formally, the Ukrainian rebels controlled most of the territory of Volhynia, Galicia and Polissya, but in reality the army did not conduct any clear and coordinated activity. All the UPA did was small local skirmishes, raids on cities or stations, sabotage, and very rarely large-scale and bloody military operations. Almost every village had its own armed detachment - all of them were considered part of the UPA, but they had practically no connection with the central command, headed by Roman Shukhevych, and therefore acted at their own discretion.
Hence the accusations of UPA fighters of mistreating civilians - anyone could do such things, from a gang of runaway bandits to Soviet partisans.
At the same time, there is an opinion that the central parts of the UPA - the basis of the Ukrainian army of that time - enjoyed serious support from the Nazis, who allegedly supplied Ukrainians with weapons and ammunition. However, there is no concrete evidence for this. The UPA had its own uniform, and Ukrainian soldiers used weapons, as a rule, captured, that is, both German and Soviet. At the same time, it is probably not worth denying the presence of collaborators in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, since there were definitely such. The question is only in the mass character of such a phenomenon. However, the assertion that the UPA was completely in the service of the Nazis does not have sufficient grounds.
It is also important to distinguish the UPA from the SS-Galicia division. The fact of the existence of this armed formation is often erroneously cited as irrefutable proof of the cooperation of the Ukrainian rebels with the Nazis. Indeed, the "SS-Galicia" fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, but this division was initially and deliberately created by the Germans from Ukrainian volunteers as an auxiliary force of the German army on the eastern front. Such divisions were created in all the countries occupied by Germany, and only the Germans commanded them. Ukraine was no exception in this regard, but SS-Galicia has practically nothing to do with the UPA.
At the end of the war, the clashes between the UPA and the Wehrmacht army almost completely stopped, but the struggle of the Ukrainian rebels against the Soviet occupation flared up with renewed vigor. At least, this is how the further advance of the Red Army to the west was perceived in the ranks of the OUN. To let the USSR troops through after the retreating Germans meant for the UPA to completely lose their positions, which was tantamount to losing any chance of reviving the Ukrainian state.
This was also understood in Moscow, where already since 1944 preparations were underway for a full-scale cleansing of the territory of Western Ukraine. A year later, in 1945, about 300 battalions and over 2,000 paramilitary groups were operating in Western Ukrainian lands, the main task of which was to neutralize the UPA forces in Ukraine.
The Soviet secret services won the final victory over the real national liberation movement in Ukraine on March 5, 1950, when Roman Shukhevych was killed. After that, mass resistance from the members of the OUN-UPA actually stopped.
Question number 5. Volyn massacre
The tragedy in Volhynia, which ended in massacres of civilians, is one of the main and most controversial moments in all the activities of the UPA during the Second World War. What happened in 1943, when the Polish and Ukrainian civilian population of Volyn became a victim of the confrontation between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists, how many people died and what caused such atrocities, is still not clearly known.
In 1943-1944, as a result of the actions of individual units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, as well as after the response of the Home Army, entire villages with Ukrainian and Polish populations were destroyed, due to which, according to various estimates, from 20 to 100 thousand people died, most of them Poles.
However, these figures cannot be called unambiguous: while Polish historians cite one statistics, blaming the OUN-UPA for everything, their Ukrainian colleagues operate with completely different facts, insisting that the atrocities were mutual.
In any case, regardless of the number of victims or their nationality, this tragedy cannot be justified by any noble motives. Both members of the OUN-UPA and representatives of the Polish army are to blame for this, and there can be no “facilitating” circumstances in this crime against humanity.
Looking for the truth
Obviously, there are more than enough dark spots and contradictory episodes in the activities of the OUN, as well as in the life of its longtime leader Stepan Bandera. However, given that there are very few reliable, accurate and reliable sources of information about those times, fans of fantasy have a great opportunity to supplement the existing data with their own variations on this topic.
Hence, hundreds of various myths, legends and interpretations, which for the most part represent Stepan Bandera as a real devil in the flesh, whose unscrupulousness even Hitler and Stalin could envy. The UPA in this coordinate system looks like a gang of cruel executioners, destroying everything on their own.
way.
Nevertheless, in the current political situation in Ukraine, when the propaganda machine is in full swing, and the country is divided into two camps, it is extremely important for every Ukrainian to separate truth from fiction and try to soberly and balancedly analyze everything that we know about Stepan Bandera and the OUN . Without this, establishing the truth, and therefore destroying another factor of discord between Ukrainians, is practically impossible.
