Andriy Melnyk (officer)

Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk^[a] (Ukrainian: Андрій Атанасович Мельник; 12 December 1890 – 1 November 1964) was a Ukrainian military and political leader best known for leading the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists from 1939 onwards and later the Melnykites (OUN-M) following a split with the more radical Banderite faction (OUN-B) in 1940.

Andriy Melnyk
Official portrait, c. 1940
Native name	Андрій Мельник
Born	(1890-12-12)12 December 1890 Volya Yakubova [uk], Austrian Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died	1 November 1964(1964-11-01) (aged 73) Cologne, West Germany
Buried	Bonnevoie, Luxembourg
Allegiance	Austria-Hungary Ukraine
Branch	Austro-Hungarian Army Ukrainian People's Army
Years of service	1914–1916 1917–1919
Rank	General Commandant Chief of Staff
Unit	Sich Riflemen
Commands	Sich Riflemen
Battles / wars	World War I Ukrainian War of Independence Anti-Hetman Uprising Ukrainian–Soviet War
Other work	Politician, co-creator of the UVO and OUN

Early life and education

Melnyk was born near Drohobych, Galicia, to Maria Koval (d.1897) and Atanas Melnyk (d.1904/5), a well-known public figure who at a relatively young age became village head and set up a local branch of the Prosvita society.^[1] Both his parents died prematurely of tuberculosis, leaving him to be raised by his remarried father's widow who paid for two surgeries relating to his own struggle with the disease, removing two ribs.^[1] Between 1912 and 1914 he studied forestry at the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna, though his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.^[2][3]

First World War (1914-1917)

In 1914, Melnyk volunteered as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army commanding a company of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Due to his kind demeanor, he was referred to affectionately as "Lord Melnyk" by fellow Ukrainian and Austrian officers, who felt that he embodied the English concept of a gentleman, which at that time had been an ideal in Central Europe.^[4]

Fighting on the Austro-Russian front in the Carpathian Mountains in the battles of Makivka and Lysonia, he was awarded a Medal for Bravery during a visit to the front by Archduke Karl.^[3][1] In September 1916, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians, along with most of the Sich Riflemen unit, towards the end of the Brusilov Offensive.^[5][1][3] In captivity, Melnyk became a close associate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian second lieutenant captured in 1915, subsequently joining the Ukrainian independence movement and escaping with Konovalets and his fellow prisoners of war to Kyiv in late 1917 amid the chaos of the Russian Civil War.^[2][3][1][b]

Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1919)

In the midst of the Ukrainian War of Independence of 1917–1921 and together with Konovalets, who commanded the unit, Melnyk, his chief of staff, organised the Sich Riflemen and assumed the rank of colonel under the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR), playing a key role in quelling the 1918 Kyiv Arsenal January Uprising before the city was captured in February by the Bolsheviks, themselves dislocated by the German army in March, following the collapse of the frontlines and aided by the Sich Riflemen per the Bread Peace.^[2] The German military authorities dissolved the Central Rada in April and installed the Ukrainian State in its place, with the Sich Riflemen forced to disband after refusing to recognise Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi's authority.^[2][6] Having been anticipated since the failure of the Ludendorff offensive and the Battle of Amiens, the German military started to withdraw from Ukraine in the midst of the German revolution and the impending signing of the armistice, thus leaving the new government in a precarious position.^[2] Melnyk had participated in the formation of a new Sich Riflemen unit in Bila Tserkva from August under the authority of the Hetman.^[2]

Melnyk during his service in Ukrainian Legion, 1914

Members of the last supreme command of the Sich Riflemen following disbandment, c.1920. Melnyk is seated, second from the left.

Melnyk subsequently supported Symon Petliura's Directorate in the November 1918 Anti-Hetman Uprising incited by a proposed federal union with White Russia with the aim of appeasing the Entente powers that in turn initially wanted to restore the Russian Empire to its pre-treaty borders, being awarded the position of otaman of the Ukrainian People's Army (UNA).^[2] With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that same month, the Polish-Ukrainian War simultaneously broke out for control of Western Ukraine while Hetman Skoropadskyi was successfully ousted and the UPR re-established in Kyiv in December. Amid the intensification of anti-Jewish pogroms in January 1919, Melnyk, briefly acting as commander of the siege corps, issued an order to court martial anyone caught agitating for or spreading rumours about the possibility of pogroms, though historians generally agree that such orders typically achieved little in the way of restoring discipline among Petliura's forces.^[2][7][c] Days later, Petliura, Konovalets, and Melnyk put forward a proposal that they reform the government into a 'Triumvirate' military dictatorship to unify command, though this was rejected by the Directorate and the Sich Riflemen subsequently withdrew their political representation, the Rifle Council, with Melnyk becoming chief of staff of the UNA until July. Amid a bleak strategic position, the regular army was liquidated in December 1919 upon the switch to partisan warfare.^[2] That month, Melnyk fell ill from a typhus epidemic at the start of the guerilla-fought First Winter Campaign, whereby he was taken to a hospital in Rivne and ended up in a Polish internment camp in Lutsk.^[2] Melnyk was released in the spring of 1920 with the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw that ceded most of Western Ukraine to Poland in return for Polish recognition of the UPR and was appointed military attaché of the UNA in Czechoslovakia, based in Prague, intending to assist Konovalets in setting up a new unit to aid the Kyiv offensive, though this failed to materialise and became irrelevant with the subsequent collapse of the Polish-Ukrainian lines.^[8]

Following a Red Army counteroffensive and the Battle of Warsaw in August, the polyfactional conflict, that had also seen Ukraine contested by the Whites, Greens, and Anarchists among others, culminated in the 1921 Peace of Riga that partitioned Ukrainian territory, placing much of Ukraine in the hands of the Bolsheviks, who would go on to effectively repress Ukrainian nationalist and cultural movements, and the west under Polish control, with Transcarpathia and Bukovina annexed by Czechoslovakia and Romania respectively.^[9][4]

Early political activities (1919-1938)

Konovalets and Melnyk, Vienna suburbs, 1921.

Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen in August 1920, Melnyk was a founding member and co-leader of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), an underground militant group that engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations, becoming primarily centered around preventing a rapprochement between Polish and Ukrainian authorities with Melnyk assuming home command of the organisation in 1922, having completed his forestry studies in Vienna.^[10][3] Between 1924 and 1928, Melnyk was imprisoned in Lviv for terrorist activities against the Polish state.^[2]

Following his release from prison, Melnyk largely stepped back from active engagement in UVO operations and married Sofiya Fedak in February 1929 (the daughter of lawyer Stepan Fedak, one of the wealthiest men in Galicia, whose sister had married Konovalets and whose brother had attempted to assassinate Polish Chief of State Marshal Piłsudski in 1921), with the organisation going on to merge with several far-right nationalist student movements to form the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists later that month with Yevhen Konovalets at its head.^[11] For much of the 1930s, Melnyk chaired the OUN Senate, an ancillary consultative body within the organisation that sought to provide ideological guidance.^[2][4] During this time, he worked as the director of forests on the large estates of the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He went on to become chairman of Orly ('Eagles') in 1933, a Galician Catholic youth organisation that was considered to be anti-nationalist by much of the OUN youth in the area.^[4][2][3]

Leader of the OUN (1938-1940)

Melnyk (left) visiting the grave of Konovalets

In the aftermath of Konovalets's assassination by the NKVD outside a Rotterdam cafe in May 1938, the leadership council (hereon the Provid) of the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (the OUN's executive command in exile and hereon the PUN) could not agree on a leader from amongst themselves and therefore asked Melnyk to become leader of the OUN, who had claimed to have received a letter from Konovalets naming him as his preferred successor.^[9][12] He was chosen by the Provid in part because of the hope for more moderate and pragmatic leadership and due to a desire to repair strained ties with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the head of which had sharply denounced the OUN for inciting acts of violence against Ukrainians that disapproved of its methods and its radical nationalism and had charged the organisation with morally corrupting the youth.^[4]

Melnyk took over the leadership in the midst of the Sudetenland Crisis and the OUN's opportunistic support of Carpatho-Ukraine with the organisation initially directing, in his own words, "all [their] forces and means at [their] disposal" to aid them, later refining this to experienced military specialists on the request of Avgustyn Voloshyn who had become aware that a number of nationalists, some of whom he derided in his correspondence as "revolutionary shouters", were planning a coup d'état.^[13] Following on from the November 1938 First Vienna Award, itself part of the broader partition of Czechoslovakia, the autonomous region declared its independence from the Second Czechoslovak Republic in March 1939, though Nazi Germany failed to respond to appeals for recognition and the short-lived state was thus invaded and annexed by the Kingdom of Hungary a day later.^[14] Melnyk was present in Venice in July for the formalisation of cooperation and recognition between the OUN and the government of Carpathian Ukraine, with the events of the past months dealing an initial blow to Ukrainian nationalists' hopes that Hitler's Germany would support their ambitions in the event of an anticipated conflict against the USSR, compounded by the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact a month later.^[15][14]

At the Second General Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Rome on 27 August 1939, Melnyk was formally ratified as leader of the OUN and reaffirmed its ideology as continuing in the vein of natsiokratiia (literally translating to 'natiocracy' or 'nationalocracy'), characterised by many scholars as a 'Ukrainian fascism' and largely shaped by integral nationalism.^[2][9][16] In a May 1938 letter to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Melnyk claimed that the OUN was "ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy".^[17] Melnyk sought to avoid the mistakes of the independence war and, in May 1939, took steps to transfer part of the OUN leadership apparatus from Mussolini's Italy to an expectedly neutral country— initially moving them to Spain and later securing their settlement in Portugal.^[4]

Melnyk and his supporters within the OUN were generally more conservative and less inclined towards the radical anti-clericalism and violence against non-conforming Ukrainians that had characterised the organisation prior, favouring the ideology of Vyacheslav Lypynsky while publicly distancing themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's contemporary works and generally favouring a more cautious and diplomatic approach to securing Ukrainian independence with the semi-totalitarian OUN at the helm of an ethnocratic state.^{[4][17][18][19]} The elevation of Melnyk to the position of leader exacerbated a generational divide within the organisation between an older, more cautious generation, many of whom had fought in the conflicts surrounding the First World War, and a younger, more bellicose generation heavily inspired by the works of Dontsov and the rise of Nazism that demanded a more charismatic and radical leader and which began to coalesce around Stepan Bandera, who had attained notoriety following his role in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and the publicity that arose from the 1935 Warsaw and 1936 Lviv trials.^[17][19]

From 1938 onwards, Melnyk and Bandera were recruited into the Nazi Germany military intelligence Abwehr for espionage, counter-espionage and sabotage, a relationship that had its roots as far back as 1923 pertaining to the UVO, in return for providing the organisation with financial support.^[20] The Abwehr's goal was to run diversion activities after Germany's planned attacks on Poland and the Soviet Union whereby Melnyk assisted in planning the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 and was assigned the codename 'Consul I'.^[21][22][d] In a Vienna meeting in late 1939, Melnyk was directed by Wilhelm Canaris to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a Ukrainian state which was completed by Mykola Stsiborskyi, the OUN's chief theorist who had at one time advocated for the assimilation of Ukrainian Jews, and encompassed the establishment of a totalitarian state under a Vozhd (to be Col. Melnyk) with the Ukrainian-Jewish population singled out for distinct and ambiguous citizenship laws.^[23]

Split with Bandera and the OUN(m) (1940-1945)

In January 1940, and following his release from prison during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland that unified Ukrainian lands under the Soviet Union, Bandera travelled to Rome to present Melnyk with a series of demands, among them the replacement of certain members of the Provid with members of the younger generation, though this was rejected by Melnyk and Bandera subsequently made a challenge to the PUN on 10 February by establishing a 'revolutionary' Provid in Nazi-occupied Kraków, turning down Melnyk's offer to make him head of the home command in Soviet-controlled Galicia.^[23][4][e] On 5 April, Melnyk and Bandera met in Rome in a final unsuccessful attempt to resolve the growing divide between the two emerging factions with Melnyk declaring the Revolutionary Leadership illegal on 7 April and appealing on 8 April to OUN members not to join the 'saboteurs'.^[4][9][24] The OUN subsequently fractured into two rival organisations: the Melnykites (Melnykivtsi or the OUN-M) and the Banderites (Banderivtsi or the OUN-B), with Melnyk continuing efforts in vain to try to repair the schism.^{[2][3][9][25]}

In March 1941, the Banderite faction held the Second Grand Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Nazi-occupied Kraków where Bandera was proclaimed providnyk of the OUN (technically the OUN-B), having declared the original 1939 Second Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists that had officially ratified Melnyk as leader to have been arear of internal laws.^[4] Though Melnyk received widespread support among Ukrainian émigrés abroad, Bandera's position on the ground in Western Ukraine and the demographics of his base meant that he gained control of the vast majority of the local aparatus in the region.^[26][27] Effective Soviet repression in Central and Eastern Ukraine meant that most of the Ukrainians living in these regions were unaware of the split in the OUN, benefitting the more active Banderites in their battle for legitimacy.^[9][4]

Initial Second World War collaboration with the Nazis (early to mid-1941)

Map of the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine, the 1941-1942 Axis advance into the Soviet Union, and the initial 1941 OUN(m) expeditionary groups.^[28][4]:78

Working from their bases in Berlin and Kraków (with Melnyk and his wife living in a Berlin apartment rented from German general Hermann Niehoff), both factions of the OUN formed marching groups and planned to follow the Wehrmacht into Ukraine during the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in order to recruit supporters and set up local governments.^[25][29] As soon as the collaborationalist Nachtigall Battalion entered Lviv on June 30, the group of Banderites, directed by Bandera from Kraków, proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state, though the German military authorities caught wind of this and cracked down upon the OUN-B, arresting Bandera on the eve of the proclamation, and later expanding this crackdown on the organisation after the assassination of two Melnykite Provid members in Zhytomyr in August.^[4][9] On 6 July, Melnyk and his fellow former officers of the UNA submitted an appeal addressed to Adolf Hitler through the Abewehr that reads thus:

"The Ukrainian people, whose century-old struggle for freedom has scarcely been matched by any other people, espouses from the depths of its soul the ideals of the New Europe. The entire Ukrainian people yearns to take part in the realisation of these ideals. We, old fighters for freedom in 1918-1921, request that we, together with our Ukrainian youth, be permitted the honor of taking part in the crusade against Bolshevik barbarism. In twenty-one years of a defensive struggle, we have suffered bloody sacrifices, and we suffer especially at present through the frightful slaughter of so many of our compatriots. We request that we be allowed to march shoulder to shoulder with the legions of Europe and with our liberator, the German Wehrmacht, and therefore we ask to be permitted to create a Ukrainian military formation."^[f][4]:87

On 28 July, Melnyk sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler protesting the annexation of Galicia into the territory of the General Government.^[30] The OUN-M formed the Bukovinian Battalion under the Abewehr in August which, alongside OUN-M members in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, would go on to be implicated in the implementation of the Holocaust— Melnyk's own reaction and proximity to this is underesearched in the scholarship.^{[31][32][33][34]} In contrast to the OUN-B, Melnyk and his supporters meanwhile avoided making any unilateral proclamations, competing with Bandera's supporters for influence in Western Ukraine and intent on cooperating and gaining favour with the SS and the Wehrmacht in pursuit of a military-political arrangement similar to that of the Croatian Ustashe, thereby seeking to secure a place for a Ukrainian state in the fascist New European Order.^[1][9] Melnyk based the OUN-M's Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv with the founding of the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) on 5 October, styled off of its namesake under the West Ukrainian People's Republic and intended to serve as the basis for a future Ukrainian state, as well as maintaining a significant presence in Rivne due to it being the de facto capital of the Reich Commissariate of Ukraine under Erich Koch.^[35][36]

Detention, incarceration, and release (mid-1941 to 1945)

Initially, Melnyk's more conservative and moderate supporters enjoyed support against Bandera's radicals both from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and from the German military authorities, with some Melnykites informing on OUN-B members.^[37] However, alarmed at the OUN-M's growing strength in Eastern and Central Ukraine and taken together with the incompatibility of Ukrainian statehood with Nazi designs on the region, the SS and government officials overruled the Wehrmacht and ordered a crackdown on the organisation with the UNRada dissolved in November 1941, the Melnykite newspaper Ukrainian Word puppeted in December, and many OUN-M members arrested or executed by the SD from November onwards.^[2][3][29] After travelling several times between Kraków, Melnyk had had his movements restricted to Berlin in mid-1941 under house arrest and Gestapo surveillance from where he sent letters to Nazi officials protesting the change in policy and attempting to secure the release of arrested and persecuted members,^[g] periodically receiving information of further crackdowns upon OUN-M members in Ukraine.^{[2][3][38][29]}

Melnyk declared in a 1 January, 1942 pamphlet:

"In the German soldiers, we see those who, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, drove the Bolsheviks out of Ukraine; we are obliged to consciously and organisedly assist them in the crusade against Moscow, regardless of any difficulties... We are living at the time of the birth of a new order in Europe. In a Europe that is renewed and consolidated under the leadership of National Socialist Germany, Ukraine must take its place side-by-side with other nations. It is tasked with responsibilities dictated by its geopolitical position and its historical traditions."^[39]

With their letters going unanswered, the OUN-M leadership resolved to write an appeal to Adolf Hitler in December 1941 'on behalf of all Ukrainians' in which they expressed dissatisfaction at the state of German-Ukrainian cooperation, framing their criticisms of German policy as being intended to notify Hitler "about the real state of affairs in Ukraine". The memorandum was sent on 14 January 1942, bearing the signatures of Melnyk, chairman of the dissolved UNRada Mykola Velychkivsky, Catholic Metropolitan of Lviv Andrey Sheptytsky, President of the UPR in exile Andriy Livytskyi, and chairman of the UNA émigré veterans' General Council of Combatants Mykhailo Omelianovych-Pavlenko.^[39][40] In a letter to Sheptytsky dated 7 July, 1942, Melnyk wrote:

"As always before, I am now ready to meet as far as possible in carrying out the initiatives of Your Excellency to eliminate disagreements within our people, which especially at this time needs the greatest possible unity to achieve the ideal of the Nation under the single current political factor in Ukraine— the OUN…

In my experience so far, when I have given so much evidence of my best will and understanding for both human weaknesses and ambitions, and for the peculiar situations and demands of the wave, including the disposition of my own person, I have an unshakable conviction of the right path: not to indulge the disaster, but to fight the disaster. My only regret is that all our citizens did not follow this path at once."^[18]

A conservative Catholic who maintained the officer's personal code of honor, Melnyk was reluctant to assert dominance or to engage in a ruthless pursuit of power which disadvantaged him versus his younger and more violent rivals in the Bandera camp.^[4] Many of Melnyk's close associates were killed by the OUN-B and the Banderite Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) between 1941 and 1944 and Bandera's movement came to dominate the Ukrainian nationalist political milieu in most of Western Ukraine.^[2]

Melnyk maintained semi-official contacts with OUN-M activists in Ukraine, intermittently being able to dispatch directives, though his proximity to decision-making on the ground in the context of the Galicia-Volhynian massacres of Polish civilians, principally perpetrated by the UPA while the OUN-M was practically marginalised, and pertaining to the Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense is less clear with historian Yuri Radchenko asserting that "the PUN did not have clear centralised control over its rank-and-file members".^[29][39] Timothy Snyder asserts that the OUN-M were "in principle committed to the same ideas" as the OUN-B with regards to an ethnically homogenous state while Ukrainian historian Yuriy Shapoval cites Polish intelligence sources from 1927 to 1934 that characterise Melnyk as holding hostile views towards "[the]^[h] Poles".^[41][1] Grzegorz Motyka asserts that the OUN-M leadership and individual activists generally opposed the ethnic cleansing of Poles with historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach suggesting that this may have been concentrated around Melnyk's second-in-command Oleh Olzhych.^[42][33]

In late 1943, and amid Allied bombing raids, Melnyk moved with his wife to Vienna in an attempt to restore contact with OUN-M members in occupied Ukraine, though, following a brief trip to Berlin where he likely tried to re-establish connections with Nazi officials, he and his wife were arrested by the Vienna Gestapo in late January 1944 and taken back to the capital.^[29] The following day, Melnyk was moved to a dacha in Wannsee where he was frequently interrogated by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller though permitted to meet OUN-M member Yevhen Onatsky, the spokesman for the OUN in Italy and one of its ideologists who had been arrested by the German police in September for having written an article after Mussolini's overthrow criticising fascism as a form of government, at a dinner where they were joined by Gestapo agents and obligated to speak German.^[29][4]:178 Melnyk was subsequently moved on the turn of March to the alpine settlement of Hirschegg where he was held as a Sonderhaftling (special prisoner) at the Ifen Hotel.^[29] Fellow political prisoner André François-Poncet, with whom he would attend the local church service on Sundays,^[29] wrote of him in his diary:

[Friday 3rd March] "This Melnyk is a man of refined culture, very polite and well-mannered. His wife – a small brunette, with lively eyes, delicate facial features, and uses a lorgnette. Both seem indignant at the deprivation of freedom they must endure. They might become pleasant companions in suffering."^[1][43]

A November 1944 report of Pressburg SD to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, informing him about the creation of the Ukrainian National Committee

In July 1944, Melnyk was moved first to Berlin where he was accused of holding political conversations with fellow arrested persons and trying to establish contact with the OUN-M in occupied-Ukraine.^[29] Subsequently he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and later moved on 4 September to a Zellenbau isolation cell, near where Bandera was also being held and from whom he learnt of the death of Oleh Olzhych, the acting head of the OUN-M, before the Ukrainian political leadership were taken to Berlin in October to negotiate support for the Nazi authorities, who at this point were suffering from manpower shortages, whereby they sought political concessions pertaining to Ukrainian independence under the auspices of the Ukrainian National Committee.^[2][14][29] Melnyk and his supporters however were dissatisfied with the progress and value of these negotiations and instead organised a meeting in Berlin in January 1945 whereupon it was decided that OUN-M members would meet the Allied advance and seek to familiarise the Western Allies with the Ukrainian independence movement.^[30][2] Melnyk left for Bad Kissingen in February, with the town occupied by American troops on April 7.^[2] Melnyk subsequently sent congratulatory telegrams to President Truman, General Eisenhower, and Prime Minister Churchill.^[30] According to the Cultural Bureau of the OUN-M (founded by Olzhych) and its archives, a group of senior Melnykites, in coordination with Melnyk, submitted a memorandum to the U.S. military administration whereby it was understood that displaced Ukrainians were to be afforded the right to be separated from Poles and Russians and allowed to display the blue-and yellow flag, which was later the case and general policy for displaced persons.^[44][45][i]

Post-WW2

After the war, Melnyk remained in the West and lived with his wife in Clervaux, Luxembourg, having become acquainted with Prince Félix when he was director of forests for the Lviv Metropol, as well as later living in West Germany and Canada.^[2][1]

Melnyk remained politically active, authoring several historical articles on the Ukrainian independence movement and was instrumental in the founding of the Ukrainian Coordinating Committee in 1946.^[2][3] Joined in the effort by President of the UPR in exile Andriy Livytskyi, Melnyk played an instrumental role in reconstituting the Ukrainian National Council in July 1948 which thereon served as the legislative body of the UPR in exile and sought to unify Ukrainian émigré organisations in Europe for further consolidation with the Pan-American Ukrainian Conference that had been formed in November 1947, although the Union of Hetman Statesmen objected to associations with the UPR and the OUN-B left in 1950 after demanding a more central role.^[46][47] Following an address to the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada in May 1957, Melnyk began to actively lobby the Ukrainian diaspora for the establishment of a pan-Ukrainian umbrella organisation capable of accommodating the fragmented landscape of diaspora organisations, later realised after Melnyk's death with the founding of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians in 1967.^[46][47] The OUN-M withdrew from the UNRada in October 1957, rejoining in 1961.^[48]

Stetsko, Bandera, and Melnyk (centred) at Konovalets's grave in Rotterdam, 1958.

Letters between Melnyk and Bandera in the post-war years indicate that they had reconciled, with Bandera referring to Melnyk as head of the OUN's official governing body.^[2] The exiled OUN leadership, including Melnyk, Bandera, and Yaroslav Stetsko, attended a ceremony at Konovalets's grave in Rotterdam on 27 May, 1958 to mark the 20th anniversary of his assassination.^[2]

According to CIA reports from 1952 and 1977, the less intellectual and "radically outmoded" Banderite émigré organisations struggled to build influence on the ground in the Ukrainian SSR whereas Melnykite organisations would go on to establish contacts with Ukrainian dissidents and publish dissident works such as the 1968 Chornovil Papers and five volumes of The Ukrainian Herald.^[27][49]

Death

Andriy Melnyk's grave in Bonnevoie

Melnyk died in Cologne, West Germany, on November 1, 1964 at the age of 73, and was buried at Bonnevoie cemetery, Luxembourg.^[3]

In late 2006, the Lviv city administration announced the future transfer of the tombs of Andriy Melnyk, Yevhen Konovalets, Stepan Bandera and other key leaders of the OUN and UPA to a new area of Lychakivskiy Cemetery specifically dedicated to the Ukrainian national-liberation struggle.^[50] However this was not implemented.

See also

• History of Ukraine
• Yevhen Konovalets
• Ukrainian War of Independence
• Ukrainian Military Organisation
• Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
• Stepan Bandera

Notes

1. Also Andrii and Andrij
2. Online sources vary in their depiction of these events— Konovalets is understood to have escaped in an earlier group (either in mid-1917 or September) with a later group composed of Melnyk, Roman Sushko, and other officers escaping in either December or early January.
3. This information comes from the OUN-M's archives, though it is validated by historian Yuri Radchenko who states in this overview of an upcoming book chapter that is set to include a discussion on Melnyk and his views in the context of the 1941 Lviv pogroms: "Andriy Mel'nyk was against pogroms during the Revolution of 1917-1921 and was trying to stop them."
4. This information is part of the testimony that Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolze gave on 25 December 1945 and submitted to the Nuremberg trials, with a request that it be admitted as evidence.
5. Accounts of the remaining demands, written postwar, vary.
6. This would lead to the formation of the Bukovinian Battalion in August— see Melnykites.
7. Historian Yuri Radchenko describes the language in Melnyk's letters as consistently restrained and diplomatic.
8. The ambiguity of the original language used does not conventionally translate into English.
9. Though the Western Allies didn't officially recognise a Ukrainian nationality for fear of agitating the USSR, historian Jan-Hinnerk Antons asserts that they created purely Ukrainian DP camps due to the number of conflicts arising between Ukrainians and Poles and the fear that remaining mixed would hurt general repatriation efforts.