Banderite

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was a Ukrainian nationalist organisation founded in 1929 in Vienna. Bandera joined it that year, and quickly climbed through the ranks, becoming the second in command of OUN in Galicia in 1932–1933,^[14]^: 18 and the head of the OUN national executive in Galicia in June 1933.^[2]^: 99

The OUN carried out the June 1934 assassination of Bronisław Pieracki, Poland's Minister of the Interior. The then 25-year-old Bandera provided the assassin with the murder weapon, a 7.65 mm calibre pistol.^[15] His subsequent arrest and conviction turned Bandera into an instant legend among the militant Ukrainian nationalists of the Second Polish Republic.^[16] During his five years in prison, Bandera was "to some extent detached from OUN discourses" but not completely isolated from the global political debates of the late 1930s thanks to Ukrainian and other newspaper subscriptions delivered to his cell.^[17]^: 112

Bandera escaped from prison after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and moved to Kraków, the capital of Germany's General Government in the German-occupied zone of Poland, where he established close connections with the German military.^[1]^[17] Since August 1939, the OUN had been led by Andriy Melnyk, a founding member. He had been chosen for his more moderate and pragmatic stance with his supporters favouring Vyacheslav Lypynsky's conservatism and admiring Mussolini's fascism but publicly distancing themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's contemporary writings, which were by the late 1930s significantly influenced by Nazism.^[18] However, a younger and more radical faction of the OUN heavily influenced by Dontsov's works were dissatisfied, leading Bandera to make a challenge to Melnyk in February 1940 by setting up a 'Revolutionary Leadership' (OUN-R) in Kraków.^[18]^[19]^[2] At a congress of the OUN-R leadership in Kraków on 10 February 1941, the radical contingent refused to accept Melnyk's leadership and named Bandera as providnyk (leader) of the OUN, finalizing the fracturing of the organization in the spring of that year into two groups: OUN-B (Banderites or Banderivtsi), who were more militant, younger and supported Bandera, and OUN-M (Melnykites), who were generally older and more ideological.^[1]^[19]^[16]

After the start of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), Yaroslav Stetsko, an OUN-B leader in occupied Lviv, declared an independent Ukrainian state on 30 June 1941, although the region was under the control of Nazi Germany,^[20] pledging to work closely with Germany, which was presented as freeing Ukrainians from Russian oppression.^[21] In response to Stetsko‘s declaration, the Nazi authorities suppressed the OUN leadership. In July 1941, Bandera himself was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany. He was imprisoned there until 1944.

The vast majority of anti-Jewish pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, but also in Bukovina.^[2]^: 237 The most deadly of them was perpetrated in the city of Lviv by the people's militia formed by OUN at the moment of the German arrival in the Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.^[22] There were two Lviv pogroms, carried out in a one-month span, both lasting for several days; the first one from 30 June to 2 July 1941, and the second one from 25 to 29 July 1941.^[23] The first pogrom took the lives of at least 4,000 Jews.^[24]

In October 1942, during Bandera's imprisonment, the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).^[25]^[6]^[1] The OUN-B formed Ukrainian militias that carried out pogroms and massacres, both independently and with support from the Germans.^[2]^[1] The OUN-B spread antisemitic and racist propaganda among the ordinary peasants and other Ukrainians.^[2]^: 236

In late 1944, Bandera was released by the German authorities and allowed to return to Ukraine in the hope that his partisans would unite with OUN-M and harass the Soviet troops, which by that time had handed the Germans major defeats. Germany sought to cooperate with the OUN and other Ukrainian leaders. According to Richard Breitman and Norman Goda in Hitler's Shadow, Bandera and Stetsko refused to do this, and in December 1944 they fled Berlin, heading south.^[10]^[a]

In February 1945, at a conference of the OUN-B in Vienna, Bandera was made the representative of the leadership of the Foreign Units of the OUN (Zakordonni Chastyny OUN or ZCh OUN). At a February meeting of the OUN in Ukraine, Bandera was re-elected as leader of the whole OUN. It was decided by the leadership that Bandera would not come back to Ukraine, but remain abroad and make propaganda for the cause of the OUN. Roman Shukhevych resigned as the leader of the OUN, and became the leader of OUN in Ukraine.^[26]^: 288

In the aftermath of the war, the OUN-B joined the Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration in Germany (TsPUEN), a pluralistic grouping of Ukrainian nationalist movements that included the OUN-M, the Hetmanate movement, and the UNDO, though the OUN-B was the largest of these with 5,000 members in west Germany.^[27] The TsPUEN sought to gain recognition from the Western Allies of a Ukrainian nationality, though the OUN-B subsequently engaged in an uncompromising exclusivist effort whereby it gained power in the self-administration of most of the Ukrainian displaced persons (DP) camps, especially those in the British occupation zone.^[27]^[b] Until the practice was halted in 1946, OUN-B networks assisted Ukrainian displaced persons in evading forced repatriation to the Soviet Union.^[27] As well as holding official positions, the Banderites ruled the DP communities they held influence in with a strategy of clandestine intimidation, violence, and coercive taxation, which the head of an anti-Banderite DP organisation characterised in an appeal to British military officials as a 'terror regime', and regularly honoured its prewar martyrs.^[27]^[c]

Historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that, during perestroika in the late 1980s, nationalist émigré groups exported a cultural memory to Soviet Ukraine of the OUN as 'freedom fighters against two totalitarian regimes' whereby activists advocated for the rehabilitation and enobling of Bandera, the OUN-B, and the UPA, leading to the proliferation of so-called 'memory politics' in independent Ukraine.^[28] Myroslav Yurkevich, of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, wrote in the third volume of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine published in 1993: "The power and influence of the OUN factions have been declining steadily, because of assimilatory pressures, ideological incompatibility with the Western liberal-democratic ethos, and the increasing tendency of political groups in Ukraine to move away from integral nationalism."^[29] After Ukraine's independence in 1991, the OUN-B created 'façade structures' such as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists party (KUN), the Youth Nationalist Congress (YNC), and the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (TsDVR).^[28]^[30]

Set up in 2002, the TsDVR became one of the most prominent proponents of 'memory activism' with director of the TsDVR (2002-2010) Volodymyr Viatrovych becoming the head of the archival department of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in 2008, before being dimissed in 2010.^[28] In 2014, Viatrovych was appointed director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP) by the first Yatsenyuk government.^[28] When asked by historian Alexander J. Motyl whether he identified as a Banderite, Viatrovych noted the Soviet propaganda use of the term and stressed that he did not identify with interwar Ukrainian nationalism.^[31] Amid growing controversy around his work and protestations from Western and Ukrainian historians,^[d] Viatrovych was dismissed in 2019 by the Cabinet of Ministers shortly after the inauguration of Volodymyr Zelensky as president.^[32]^[31] His replacement, Anton Drobovych, asserted the need to restore balance to the UINP's memory policy and prevent it from "being perceived as a mouthpiece for agitation, ideological struggle, or propaganda".^[33] Kasianov argues that this episode and others, seized upon by Russian propaganda, contributed to the cynical pretext that Vladimir Putin used to justify his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 in spite of the lack of popularity of these forces.^[30]^[28] In November 2018, the KUN, together with Right Sector, C14, and the OUN-M under Bohdan Chervak, endorsed Svoboda deputy leader Ruslan Koshulynskyi in the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election.^[34]^[35] Koshulynskyi later received 1.6% of the votes.^[28]

In Soviet secret records, the word "Banderites" for the first time emerged in late 1940 and began to be used in Soviet propaganda starting in late 1942.^[2]^[10] The term became a crucial element of the Soviet propaganda discourse and was used as a pejorative description of Ukrainians, sometimes all western Ukrainians in the most negative way.^[10]^[11] Historian Andrii Portnov noted that "The common noun "Banderivtsi" ("Banderites") emerged around the time of ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Volhynia, and it was used to designate all Ukrainian nationalists, but also, on occasion, western Ukrainians or even any person who spoke Ukrainian."^[12]

The term has been used by Russian state media against Euromaidan activists to associate a separate Ukrainian national identity with the most radical nationalists.^[13]^[36]^[12] Today, in Russian propaganda, the word is used to refer to all in Ukraine who back the idea of sovereignty from Russia; Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazi Germany is also emphasized.^[10]

Judeo-Banderite

Jewish Ukrainians who support Ukrainian sovereignty sometimes satirically refer to themselves as Judeo-Banderites (Ukrainian: жидобандерівець or жидобандера).^[e] This is oxymoronic, given Bandera's and the OUN-B's antisemitism.^[37] The term is used to mock people who accuse the Ukrainian government of antisemitism, by pointing out how many Ukrainian Jews support it.^[38]

In July 2023, a digitally-altered image went viral of Jewish Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi wearing a T-shirt in the UPA's red and black colours with the phrase "Judeo-Banderite" below a Ukrainian tryzub altered to have 4 additional prongs (making it resemble a Jewish menorah).^[39]^[38]

OUN-B

As an insult

Judeo-Banderite

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

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