Introduction
Ukraine has always been a crossroads in Europe between Western Europe, Central Europe, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Many regions and cities have been disputed between different state entities, from the Polish-Lithuanian Confederation to Austria-Hungary. During the various dominations of the key territories of Ukrainian national identity, Transcarpathia and Galicia, tensions with the local population were never lacking, especially in the face of various attempts at cultural and linguistic imposition.
Since the dissolution of the Rus of Kiev, in the Middle Ages, there was no longer any state entity with Kiev as its capital until the period immediately preceding the October Revolution of 1917, when some Ukrainian autonomist instances were accepted by the reformist and socialist government, which through some missions between Petrograd and Kiev, began to define, albeit in a federal perspective with Russia, the boundaries of modern Ukraine. The concessions made to the Ukraine however led to tensions within the local reformist government, which embraced quite different political and social sensibilities.[1] The Ukrainian Rada supported the Bolsheviks during the Revolution but within the territory controlled by the Kiev Rada tensions began to arise between the Ukrainian socialist government and the Bolsheviks of the Donbass, who in 1917 had organised a semi-independent republic in the region, which was considered an integral part of Russia[2]. 2] Lenin, however, chose to force the Donbass to belong to the Ukraine and together with Stalin, planned a military intervention in the Ukraine against the socialist government in support of the workers’ uprisings in Kiev, eager to see control of the revolutionary Bolshevik government extended to Ukrainian territory.
The First World War was still in progress, however, and taking advantage of the enormous military weakness of revolutionary Russia, which was rapidly heading for civil war, the German Empire decided to quickly close down operations on the Eastern Front by advancing eastwards at great speed with virtually no resistance. In March 1918 Soviet Russia was forced to sign a peace treaty with the German Empire, to whom it had to cede huge swathes of territory, including the Ukraine, which was set up as a puppet state under German protection. The German Empire used the Ukraine to take all the resources and raw materials it needed to continue its war effort on the Western Front. The defeat of the Central Empires led to the fall of the pro-German government and to political and social chaos in Ukraine, which only ended with the Peace of Riga at the end of the Russo-Polish War. The Riga Peace established new borders between Poland and the Soviet Union, which were maintained until 1939 and once again affected one of the key regions of Ukrainian nationalism, which passed to Poland: Galicia.
Stepan Bandera and collaborationism
Stepan Bandera represents one of the leading figures of Ukrainian nationalism. Bandera came from a Ukrainian nationalist family and was born and educated in western Ukraine. During his high school studies he became interested in politics and joined the Union of Young Ukrainian Nationalists. He continued to do so while studying at the Polytechnic in Lviv, then a Polish city, and was more interested in politics than in studying.
The Union of Young Nationalists was based on a fascist-like decalogue which all members were required to adhere to:
“You will realise the Ukrainian state or die in battle for it; you will not allow anyone to undermine the glory and honour of your nation; remember the great days of our struggle; be hero to be an heir to the struggle for Volodymyr’s trident; avenge the death of the great knights; do not talk about important things with anyone, report only what is necessary; you will not hesitate to take the most dangerous actions if this is required by our cause; you will treat the enemies of your nation with hatred and without any regard; neither pleading, nor threatening, nor torture, nor death will prevent you from keeping a secret; you will aspire to expand the strength, wealth and size of the Ukrainian state, even by subduing foreigners. “[3]
In 1929 the ultranationalist activists united into a single movement: the Organisation of Nationalist Ukrainians. Bandera was part of the organisation’s leadership and under his leadership the OUN began a campaign of terrorism in Poland, killing KGB agents and, in 1934, even the Polish Interior Minister Pieracki. Following this murder, the Polish authorities managed to arrest Bandera, the trial that followed the arrest resulting in a life sentence.
In 1939, after the German occupation of Poland, Stepan Bandera was released and immediately resumed his political and military activities. During his years of imprisonment, he had continued to maintain relations with elements of the OUN, and had become increasingly oriented towards a fanatical and extreme nationalism. The OUN was perceived by Bandera as too moderate, which led to a split between the moderate wing, which continued to call itself OUN, and Bandera’s wing, OUN-B. The Abwehr, the German secret service, collaborated with both organisations, but Bandera’s organisation proved to be the one most suited to the Germans’ plans. The Abwehr’s original plan was to recruit former Polish soldiers as saboteurs and interpreters, but Ukrainian nationalists proved potentially useful for future operations on Soviet territory.
The banderistas were eager to enlist in these units, framed by the “Brandenburg” special operations regiment, were provided with Ukrainian uniforms dating back to the Soviet-Polish war and swore allegiance to the Ukrainian state considered to be occupied by Soviet forces[4]. 4] At the start of Operation “Barbarossa”, Ukrainian nationalists participated in the front line of the German invasion, infiltrating Soviet lines to carry out sabotage and encirclement operations.
At the beginning of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Bandera sent a memorandum to Hitler in which he recommended granting independence to the Ukraine after the Soviet retreat. Regardless of Hitler’s decisions, however, Bandera and his organisation had already planned a coup d’état to declare Ukrainian independence at the earliest opportunity. On 29 June 1941, Ukrainian units and the German army were at the gates of Lviv. Without complying with orders the Ukrainians launched their own assault, took over the city and occupied the radio station, from which they broadcast a declaration of Ukrainian independence. The action was not approved in Berlin, Bandera and the other nationalist leaders were arrested and ordered to retract the declaration.
The suppression of the Ukrainian government opened the way for the German military administration, which, however, soon found it convenient to recruit local police units. Former members of the Ukrainian military units, who aimed to have the best possible military training for a future uprising, were the first to volunteer.
In the course of the war, as the partisan movement in Ukraine intensified, Bandera’s nationalists gradually began to take control of it and to transform the partisan movement into a Ukrainian army, the Ukrainian rebel army. Not all nationalists, however, joined the partisan movement, many of them in fact went to feed units dependent on the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht, such as the ‘Kaminski Brigade’, Vlasov’s ‘liberation army’ and various police units that also went to make up the Einsatzgruppen, responsible for the massacres of Jewish civilians. With the need to deploy more troops, it was decided to enrol the Ukrainian volunteers in Waffen-SS units: the “30. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS” was one of the first units and was later followed by the more famous “14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS Galizien’.
Unlike the Ukrainian police and army units, the Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen-SS units also received “political education” during their training, which served to develop the volunteers’ sense of political belonging and to reaffirm the certainty of the final German victory. At the same time the OUN also tried to maintain political control over the volunteers who could be used after the German victory to rise up and claim Ukrainian independence. The Germans, however, although officially pursuing the Ukrainian nationalists, maintained unofficial relations with them through at least “ambiguous” channels.
After the Battle of Brody, where the division was surrounded by the Red Army but managed to break through the encirclement, the division was reorganised and later sent to Slovakia to suppress an anti-German uprising. The pro-German population on more than one occasion greeted [the division] with jubilation as it stood up to the communists”[6].
When Germany capitulated on 8 May 1945, like practically all other foreign Waffen-SS units, the “Galizien” division also tried to move westwards, so as to surrender to the Allied forces. Furthermore, in order to avoid any transfer to the USSR as prisoners of war, they declared themselves to be Polish upon surrender. The Ukrainians of the “Galizien” were transferred to a prison camp near Bellaria where, at the end of 1945, they were met by a Soviet military commission, whose task was to establish the nationality of the prisoners and question them about their activities with the Waffen-SS and the Ukrainian rebel army.
However, the Allies, not respecting the agreements on the transfer of Soviet citizens to the USSR, refused to hand over the Ukrainian prisoners and in 1948, when the doors of the camp were opened, they took advantage of the political climate to seek asylum in various Allied countries, especially the British Commonwealth. Stepan Bandera himself asked for and was granted asylum in the Federal Republic of Germany. Many former volunteers of the “Galizien” found refuge in Canada, where there was a large Ukrainian community. The veterans were welcomed as heroes and in several cases even managed to become persons of some prominence in their communities.
Revisionism and denialism
Contrary to what one may commonly think, attempts at rehabilitation, revisionism and denial of the role of Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen-SS and police units during World War II began well before 2014. As early as 1993, President Kuchma signed a law “On the status and social security guarantee of war veterans”, a law that included members of the Ukrainian rebel army in the category of veterans. In 2003, a parliamentarian of the Ukrainian Rada, Andrii Shkil, demanded the transfer of Stepan Bandera’s body from Germany. At the same time, Bandera’s grandson stated that “even 44 years after his murder, the name ‘Bandera’ is still used to scare people, especially in eastern Ukraine. It is therefore necessary to conduct a public education campaign in the country that will convey to the population the whole history of the OUN and the rebel army, not only the “myths””[8].
As happened in Europe in similar situations, the political and cultural debate on the rehabilitation of Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen-SS has been strongly supported by far-right movements, such as the Svoboda party, a party that called itself the “Ukrainian national-social party” until 2004. In 2012, the Lviv regional council introduced a 20,000 hryvnia ‘Stepan Bandera National Hero Award’ for significant merits in the Ukrainian state-building process.
Veterans’ organisations also stopped publicly demonstrating their support for the fighters of the “Galizien” and in Lviv, near the site of the Battle of Brody, erected a memorial for the Ukrainian division of the Waffen-SS.
In 2001, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education adopted a programme for teaching Ukrainian history in high school, which included among its topics the OUN, the rebel army and the relations of nationalist partisans with the Armia Krajowa,[9] the Polish insurgent army in occupied Poland, known for its visceral anti-Semitism. Since the adoption of the programme, the name “Great Patriotic War”, considered a Soviet legacy, began to be abandoned in favour of referring to the Second World War. In a 2009 interview, the former vice-president of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance stated:
“The cooperation of the “Galicia” division is debated. The majority of Ukrainian academics are almost subconsciously ready to find some reasons not to consider the division as collaborationist. France had a state and citizens who fought with Nazi Germany as collaborationists, in Ukraine the situation was different. There was a form of cooperation but not the classic form of collaborationism”[10].
10] There were also many other similar statements from the extreme right, such as Iurii Mykhal’chyshyn, since 2012 a member of the Rada, who in 2009 declared during a commemoration for the “Galizien” division that he refused to consider the experience of Ukrainians in the Waffen-SS as collaborationism, according to his view of things Ukrainians had taken part in World War II as a separate party. Iurii Antoniak, director of the “Stepan Bandera” Centre for National Revival, even declared that the question of Ukrainian collaborationism during World War II was of an artificial nature “imposed on us by Moscow and the Jews”. 11] Bandera himself was rehabilitated by the Ukrainian government for the first time in 2010, when President Yanukovich awarded Bandera the title of “national hero”, a decision that was even criticised by the European Parliament. The title was withdrawn by the Ukrainian government the following year, after a legal battle initiated by the Donezk administrative court.
Only the Ukrainian Communist Party and some anti-fascist committees strongly opposed these positions. Oleksandr Kalyniuk, first secretary of the Lviv regional committee of the Communist Party, declared in 2009: “Who are the collaborationists? All those who helped the Germans and fought on their side. It is called Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and here it is called ‘Ukrainian nationalism'”[13]. It should be noted that the Communist Party was outlawed in 2015, right after the Euromaidan events and the declaration of the so-called “anti-terrorist operation” against the Donbass territories.
In 2011, during an academic conference attended by well-known Ukrainian historians, most of the participants agreed that “Nazi Germany and the USSR collaborated and caused a lot of suffering to Ukraine and its people. Any discussion of Ukrainian collaborationism received aggressive criticism”[14].
The far-right movements already mentioned, such as Svoboda or Pravy Sektor, became very popular during the Euromaidan events in 2014, where their militias monopolised the violence of the demonstrations. After the protests dubbed Antimaidan, in many cities of eastern Ukraine, these militias first acted on their own by even occupying police stations in search of commanders who had not, in their opinion, sufficiently decisively suppressed demonstrations against the government in Kiev and were later institutionalised within the Ukrainian armed forces. In particular, the Battalion, later the ‘Azov’ Regiment, began to use a symbolism that openly recalled the experience of the ‘Galizien’ division. When the unit began to recruit volunteers, targeting neo-fascist movements across Europe, it even used the same propaganda: European volunteers (neo-fascists) opposing the advance of Russia.
What has been said so far shows that the revisionist desire in relation to the history of Ukraine after the Second World War does not concern, as the Italian and European press has insistently repeated in recent weeks, a small part of Ukrainian politics, but on the contrary involves many political and cultural sectors of Ukrainian politics and has a particularly strong hold in the western regions. It is certainly no coincidence that most of the commemorations, nationalist institutes and academic circles involved in the revisionist debate are located in the Lviv region. To the writer it does not seem causal that outside Ukraine a very important part of this debate has for years involved Canadian universities and academia, with the participation of Canadian scholars of Ukrainian origin. After all, when the Ukrainian government needed to train the new units of the national guard, it was Canada itself, with the support of Sweden and NATO, that from September 2015 set up Operation Unifier, a military mission, the duration of which was extended several times, with the aim of training the Ukrainian armed forces, in particular those units of the national guard engaged against the Doneck and Lugansk People’s Republics.
[1] A. Graziosi, L’URSS di Lenin e Stalin, storia dell’Unione Sovietica, Il Mulino, Bologna 2010, pp. 86-87.
[2] Ivi, p. 102.
[3] D. Marples, Stepan Bandera: the resurrection of a Ukrainian nationa hero, in Europe-Asia Studies, volume 58, 2006.
[4] C. Caballero Jurado, Spezzando le catene. La divisione ucraina delle Waffen-SS, Pinerolo, Novantica Editrice, 2015, p. 72.
[5] A. Mlynarczyk, L. Rein, A. Bolianovskyi, O. Romanko, Eastern Europe. Belarusian auxiliaries, Ukrainian Waffen-SS soldiers and the special case of the Polish “Blue Police”, in Böhler Jochen, Gerwarth Robert, (a cura di.) The Waffen-SS. A European History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, p. 201.
[6] C. C. Jurado, op. cit., 2015, p. 204.
[7] A. Mlynarczyk, L. Rein, A. Bolianovskyi, O. Romanko, op. cit., 2017, p. 206.
[8] D. Marples, op. cit., p. 2.
[9] O. Khromeychuk, The Shaping of “Historical Truth”: Construction and Reconstruction of the Memory and Narrative of the Waffen SS “Galicia” Division, in Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol. 54, Taylor & Francis, 2012, p. 457.
[10] Ivi, p. 459.
[11] Ivi, p. 160.
[12] https://www.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/europeanparliament-hopes-new-ukraines-leadership-60430.html consultato il 2 aprile 2022
[13] O. Khromeychuk, op. cit., p. 461.
[14] Ivi, p. 462.
Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini