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CHAPTER 3 THE OUN, 1929–43 Introduction This chapter analyzes discourse and writings on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded in 1929 in the territories of Ukraine that were included in Poland as a result of the Paris Peace treaties that followed the First World War. The OUN offered an extreme nationalist perspective somewhat similar to parties in various East European states in the interwar period, though it is compared most frequently with Mussolini’s version of Fascism in Italy. Through the writings of Dmytro Dontsov, a mentor rather than a member, the theory it embraced is known as “integral nationalism.” Though forced into an illegal existence, the OUN became popular in the ethnically Ukrainian territories of Galicia, particularly in the 1930s. In 1940, and following the 1938 assassination of its original leader Yevhen Konovalets’, the OUN split into two bitterly opposed factions: an older group led by Andrii Mel’nyk and a more militant youthful faction under Stepan Bandera. After the war ended, further factions appeared in the emigration. The OUN represented a particularly contentious issue in the Soviet period because of its alleged collaboration with the Germans, as well as its association with the military organization of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) after 1943. In the Soviet period, the OUN’s members were regarded as traitors to the motherland, who preferred to side with the enemy during the greatest crisis in Soviet history. Most OUN publications appeared either in underground form or in the Diaspora , where the World War II generation constituted a highly politicized group in their new homelands in Europe, North America, and Australia. Why is the OUN important in the development of a national history of Ukraine? It is precisely because it constituted the closest approximation to a national army on one hand, and through its consistent advocacy of an independent Ukraine on the other. For exactly this same reason, the group was always anathema to the Soviet authorities, and referred to by the derogatory, all-encompassing names of “Banderites” or “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists .” Soviet propaganda never made much effort to distinguish between the 80 HEROES AND VILLAINS various factions of the OUN and generally linked the OUN and the UPA together as one organization, even when describing periods of history prior to the formation of UPA. Entire generations grew up in the central and eastern parts of Ukraine believing that OUN-UPA was a treacherous organization that collaborated with the enemy throughout the course of the war, and then continued to resist Soviet rule long afterward with the assistance of US and British intelligence. On the other hand, generations deriving from the World War II group of émigrés that had moved to western countries were raised to believe that the OUN represented the interests of a substantial group of Ukrainians— perhaps even a majority in Western Ukraine—who boldly resisted not one, but two occupation forces in their homeland: Nazi Germany and totalitarian USSR under an equally malevolent dictator, Stalin. In the next three chapters we will trace the history of the OUN and the UPA through Soviet and post-Soviet writings and examine the changing perspectives , and how the government of Ukraine under Viktor Yushchenko sought to elevate the OUN-UPA to the rank of official war veterans and heroes of the Second World War. Perhaps more than any other aspect of recent history, the subject of OUN-UPA continues to divide residents of Ukraine. On the occasion of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Second World War, Red Army and UPA veterans were witnessed fighting in the streets of Kyiv. In addition to the confrontation with Soviet forces and the question of OUN-UPA’s relationship with the occupation forces, which is dealt with in detail below, there are also two very thorny issues: the attitude of the OUN in its early phases to the Jewish population of Ukraine; and the mass slaughter by the OUN-UPA of the Polish population—the former ruling group—of Volhynia in 1943. As with the Famine, it is too early to state that a consensus has been reached on any of these subjects, but it is possible to discern a radical change of perspective, particularly during the start of the second decade of Ukraine’s independence. Though the opening of the Ukrainian archives has added appreciably to the picture of the OUN-UPA since the late 1980s, most of the articles that appear in newspapers and journals could be termed propagandistic...

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