writers as O. Teliha and Dr. Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych, who were accused
of plotting against the new masters. Soon there began extensive
deportations of Ukrainians to Germany for slave labor and the number of
victims from the ranks of the cooperatives rapidly grew.
These German actions naturally roused the Ukrainians to a more vigorous
opposition and resulted in the formation of numerous armed bands which,
from secure hiding places in the forests and swamps, raided German
convoys and at times extended their open control over large areas of
the country. Among the first of these bands to appear was that of
the Polyssian Sich under the command of Taras Bulba--Borovets which
operated in Polissya and Volynia. Other significant and important
movements were started by the followers of Bandera (the so-called
Banderivtsy) and of Melnyk. Yet these groups were not alone for almost
spontaneously there sprang up many other local units, all interested
in the same goal of Ukrainian independence. Some of these units were
organized primarily to fight against Soviet irregulars. Others had seen
from the beginning their most dangerous foe as the Germans but whatever
their origin, the overbearing brutality of the Germans swung these
groups to a determined warfare against them.
This process continued during most of 1942 with the Ukrainian forces
taking over more and more control from the Germans, menacing their
lines of communication and rescuing young Ukrainians who were being
deported for labor service in Germany. It was during this year that the
leaders came to feel the need for closer cooperation and a unification
of their efforts. This was hard to achieve and there were even
clashes between different groups of Ukrainian patriots. Yet, toward
the beginning of 1943 the more important groups had effected a rough
union in the U. P. A., the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which took on the
characteristics of an organized military force.
By the middle of 1943 this army had acquired considerable strength and
it was able to deal shattering blows to isolated German detachments and
to drive out both the local German administration and any Red partisans
that tried to operate in the area around the Pripet marshes. In May,
1943, they were even strong enough to ambush and kill the head of the
Nazi S. A., Viktor Lutze, in the neighborhood of Kowel-Brest Litovsk.
The policy of the U. P. A. was to destroy the local German
administrations which were scattered in the smaller communities and
to avoid battle with the greater concentration of forces in some of
the leading centres. In this way the Ukrainians were able to take over
the practical administration of large parts of the Ukraine and to
restore a considerable amount of normal life, while they checked the
deportation of thousands or released them from the slave trains. The U.
P. A. during these years had its own training schools, it set up on a
small scale its own factories for arms and some of the most necessary
manufactures, and it governed with the approval of the Ukrainian
population.
At this period it had its own printing presses and put out a large
number of journals and books of various kinds. These were not only in
Ukrainian but, as the U. P. A. grew in size and strength, it attracted
the attention and won the sympathies of all the other nations oppressed
by the Russians. It formed units of Byelorussians, Azerbaijanians,
Uzbeks, etc. and finally on November 21, 1944, it called the First
Conference of the Oppressed Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia, which
was attended by some thirty-nine delegates representing thirteen
peoples. The Germans tried to break this up but they were unsuccessful
and the police battalion which was assigned to the operation was
destroyed. Out of this Conference developed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of
Nations which adopted as its program, “Freedom to peoples, freedom to
the individual.”
It would take too long to describe the actual nature of the military
operations which the U. P. A. carried on. At the height of its power it
controlled more than 200,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory and
numbered some 220,000 soldiers divided into four main bands: the U. P.
A.-North, operating in Polissya and northern Volynia; the U. P. A.-West
in Eastern Galicia and Kholmshchyna; the U. P. A.-South in northern
Bukovyna and the provinces of Kamyanets Podilsky and Vinnytsya; and
the U. P. A.-East north of Kiev and Zhytomyr. There were separate
detachments in most of the cities and important towns.
To oppose its operations, the Germans resorted to mass executions and
on more than one occasion detached forces of one or two divisions to
try to destroy its centres. These attempts failed and the U. P. A. by
its constant efforts played an important part in isolating the German
forces, upsetting their communications and sapping their strength. All
this was very costly, for after every major blow the Germans executed
large numbers of innocent Ukrainians as their one weapon against the
movement.
At first there was relative peace in Galicia, but in the summer of 1943
a Soviet partisan detachment entered the province. The Germans took
little action and the U. P. A. came to the support of the population
and soon had established strong centres in the Carpathian Mountains,
where the difficult terrain facilitated their maintenance of strong
positions.
The Germans in the beginning did not want to admit that their policy
toward the Ukrainians had evoked such a strong response. Koch and his
associates were only too willing to believe that the Ukrainians were an
inferior race, undeserving of education or of consideration and they
went out of their way to label the U. P. A. the product of Communist
intrigue and a movement of support for the Jews, etc.
In general, the military unification of the armed groups proceeded
more rapidly and favorably than did the political concentration. Here
the followers of Bandera established in March, 1944, a temporary
committee and at a general assembly in June appointed a Supreme
Council of Ukrainian Liberation (the UHVR) which assumed the
functions of a government. At the same time, through the agreement
of the representatives of the Ukrainian National Council in Kiev,
the Ukrainian National Council in Lviv and the National Council
of Carpatho-Ukraine, there was formed in September in Kiev the
All-Ukrainian National Council (rada) which appointed as its president
Prof. Mykola Velychkivsky, the Rector of the Kiev Polytechnic. This was
rather under the control of the Melnykivtsy, and was opposed to the
UHVR. Yet these differences tended to become academic, in view of the
strengthened position of General Taras Chuprynka, the commander of the
U. P. A.
The opposition of the U. P. A. to the German forces was therefore in
a sense an opposition behind the lines. It had been facilitated by
the German tendency to base their hold on the country through various
strong points, while their main forces were advancing to the east and
fighting against the Red Army. With the German defeat at Stalingrad in
the RSFSR, they began a new retreat and this brought the Soviet forces
back into the picture and placed new burdens upon the U. P. A.
In Galicia there had been formed with German toleration a regular
Ukrainian division, the Galician Division, on the condition that it
would only be employed against the Bolsheviks and would be maintained
as a distinct unit. Yet the Germans had no intention of allowing this
division to gather strength. They soon replaced the higher officers
with Germans and officially called it the 14 Waffen Grenadier Division
der Waffen SS., even though in no other case were Slavs of any kind
assigned to the SS. This division took part in some battles with
the Bolsheviks in the Carpathians. With the breaking of the German
front, the German military men made renewed efforts to enroll this
division and to create other units in a regular Ukrainian army under
General Shandruk but it was already too late. There had been too much
bad blood created during the earlier years when the Nazi commanders
expressed their contempt for everything Ukrainian to accomplish
anything in the hour of German defeat. Germany had lost her chance and
in the last days of the war, the Galician Division made its way to the
west, surrendered, and was interned in Italy.
The development of the U. P. A., with its constant warfare against the
Germans, was a clear result of the German fantastic attitude, with
all of its arrogance. Had they been willing to cooperate in the first
days of 1941, they might easily have secured considerable resources
in men and supplies from these people who had been suffering under
the Bolsheviks. They avoided any such action and it was their own
stubbornness that kept them from receiving the help which they might
have had. For years they did not want any assistance from the Slavs and
by the time that they had learned their lesson the war was so nearly
over that they could not profit.
Yet the German defeat did not produce peace. No one of the Ukrainians
doubted that the receding of the German wave would produce a new Soviet
invasion and as the Germans retired to the west, the U. P. A. and its
associated organs prepared for a new struggle.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Return of the Communists
The struggle of the U. P. A. against the returning Communists was no
less bitter than the struggle with the Nazis but it was under very
different conditions and the forces involved were more unequal. In the
first place, the bulk of the fighting came after the conclusion of the
hostilities of World War II and at a time when the Sovietophilism of
the Western democratic powers was at its height.
The Nazis were during the entire period engaged with the Soviet forces
beyond the borders of the Ukraine and while they attempted to maintain
their position in the Ukraine, they frequently counted upon their
ability to hold the chief road junctions and communities and exerted
less effort to keep their garrisons in every separate village. The
Soviet policy was to master the entire country and subject every aspect
of Ukrainian life to their own power and control. They could therefore
the more easily rely upon the use of overwhelming forces and endeavor
to maintain a steady and never-ending pressure, while at the same time
they could invoke every weapon in their propaganda arsenal to blacken
their opponents in the mind of the democratic world.
Then, too, with the ending of formal hostilities there was no longer
the possibility that the U. P. A. by its attacks upon one of its
enemies could secure the weapons that would serve it in good stead
against the other. This had been a marked feature of the earlier
campaigns, for the Soviets had reconquered Kharkiv in the late fall of
1942, only to lose it in early 1943 and to recover it again later in
the year. The Red Army recovered Kiev on November 6. In the spring of
1944 the Germans were forced to evacuate Lviv but they recovered the
city and held it until the end of July. Thus, during this period of
German retreat, the U. P. A. had been able to acquire large stores of
munitions, which they could not hope easily to replace, once the major
hostilities were over.
It was very soon evident that the efforts of the U. P. A. against the
Soviet forces would take quite a different shape from their attacks
on the Nazis. In the last stages of the war Stalin had organized many
of the mobilized Ukrainians into various Ukrainian armies, so as to
give the Western powers the idea that the Ukrainians were loyal to the
Soviet Union. This added elements of a civil war to the struggle and
the members of the U. P. A. decided to reduce their efforts against
these Ukrainian forces of the Red Army and to substitute propaganda for
a free Ukraine. In this respect they met with considerable success and
through their masses of printed material and through personal contact,
they more or less neutralized the Ukrainian divisions of the Red Army.
Instead, they concentrated their efforts against the NKVD detachments
which were brought in from remote parts of the Soviet Union and in
which the Russians formed the predominant personnel. It was the NKVD
and the staffs of the Motor Tractor Stations who were now the chief
part of the Soviet bureaucratic apparatus in the country and so the
U. P. A. devoted its chief interest to working against these and
to encouraging discontent on the collective farms, for the war was
scarcely over when it was made clear that conditions were to be even
stiffer and harder than they had been in the past.
The war in the Ukraine had reduced the population to still worse depths
of poverty than had been the case after 1918. Nevertheless, almost at
once the villages were expected to make liberal gifts of grain to their
beloved Stalin and the elder brothers, the Great Russians, who had, in
the words of Stalin, won the victory over the Nazis and who would still
protect them from the capitalists and warmongers of the West.
The events of the last months of fighting had shifted many of the
organized forces of the U. P. A. to the Carpathian areas and this
section which had struggled for its freedom against Hungary in 1939,
now received a new master. As soon as the Soviet forces entered the
region in the autumn of 1944, they immediately began a campaign to
liberate this area from Czecho-Slovakia and reunite it to the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic. It was the same old story carried on in the
same way as in 1939. There was a mass of petitions apparently prepared
by the native population asking for liberation, but these were in
reality the work of a handful of carefully selected Communists.
They speedily reached their goal and on June 29, 1945, President Benes
of Czechoslovakia recognized the justice of their claims and by an
agreement handed over the entire province which was duly reunited with
their brothers in Moscow. This brought together under the Ukrainian
Soviet Socialist Republic nearly all the Ukrainians, except a few who
were still living in Poland and in a small stretch of territory which
the UkSSR voluntarily ceded to Poland to satisfy the increasing claims
of the Polish Communists and their needs in their efforts to cement
their power in that state.
At the same time the realization by the Soviet authorities of the
seriousness of the situation offered by the U. P. A. and the unrest
among the Ukrainians led them to act on both the foreign and the
domestic front. On the former they mobilized all of their friends and
dupes abroad to stress the connection of the U. P. A., the “Bandera
bandits,” and the Nazi criminals and they achieved considerable success
in closing the eyes of the west until they had won considerable
victories over the various U. P. A. groups, for too many Western
leaders failed to see the inconsistency that they preached. At one
and the same time the Soviet authorities boasted of their complete
control of the territory of Western Ukraine, thanks to the love of
the population for the Red Army and in almost the same breath they
declaimed against these armed forces which were holding up the advance
of the Red Army and the NKVD in the very areas where the people were
thirsting for liberation.
On the domestic front in the autumn of 1945 they sent a large force
of men into the Carpathian area under the command of Khrushchov as
Premier of the UkSSR and General Ryasny, the Minister of War, to
endeavor to suppress these bands. Despite unprecedented torture of the
population, the Soviets found that their progress was not so great as
they had expected, for few of the Ukrainian units in their forces were
enthusiastic about the campaign, when they saw the measures that the
government was taking against their own families.
In the spring of 1946, they made another attempt, this time using
some fifteen divisions of NKVD troops from the Far East, Siberia and
Leningrad under the direct control of General Colonel Moskalenko. The
authorities had been goaded to this renewed demonstration of force by
the fact that the town of Stanislav in the Carpathian area had been
seized by five battalions of the U. P. A. on October 31, 1945 as a
discouragement to the Ukrainians to participate in the Soviet elections
called for February 10, 1946. Despite the efforts of the Soviet guards,
a considerable portion of the population failed to vote and when the
attacks upon them were pressed, a detachment of the U. P. A. succeeded
on May 3, 1946, in ambushing Moskalenko and killing him and his chief
aids. This ended another campaign and still left the U. P. A. in
control of parts of the Carpathian area.
In addition to these operations on purely Ukrainian territory, the U.
P. A. undertook several raids across the borders in order to encourage
dissatisfaction with Soviet rule among some of the neighboring peoples.
Thus they established contact with similar groups in Slovakia,
Byelorussia and Lithuania, while others cut their way across Hungary
into Yugoslavia to join forces with the opponents of Communism in that
area.
The raids into Slovakia were especially successful throughout 1945
and 1946 and were continued on a smaller scale during the next years.
They served as an encouragement for the anti-Communist elements of
the population and, of far more importance in the long run, they
attracted the attention of Western journalists who for the first time
began to realize the extent of the discontent that prevailed in the
Soviet Union. More than that, with every step to the West, they were
brought closer to the Western Zones of Germany and Austria and several
well-armed detachments have during the past years fought their way
into the American Zone, laid down their arms and surrendered. These
brought the first really definite information to the West and while
they have not received the attention that they deserved, they have
undoubtedly encouraged the almost frantic desires of the Great Russian
emigrés to pretend that they have an efficient underground operating at
home.
The result of these raids produced an impression even upon the Czechs.
Before the Communist coup d’état which placed the Communists in
control of that country, the Czech Minister of War under Dr. Benes was
approached by the Soviet authorities and asked for joint action with
the Soviets and the Communist Poles to check the opposition to Soviet
rule and to project joint operations on a large scale.
On March 29, 1947, General W. Swierszczewski, the Communist Polish
Vice Minister of War, was killed near the town of Baligrod. This
again was too startling a revelation of the discontent and on May
12th of the same year, the three governments of the USSR, Poland and
Czecho-Slovakia concluded a treaty of mutual assistance against this
movement.
Faced by the increasingly organized power of the Communist regimes,
the U. P. A. has been obliged to proceed with more caution and it has
largely replaced mass movements with operations on a smaller scale
with the idea of keeping alive a spirit of resistance within the
country. It is becoming increasingly difficult for it to publish and
circulate pamphlets but it is still able, in case of necessity, to
impede seriously the Soviet attempts at deportation of the Ukrainian
population and again and again it is able to damage severely the Motor
Tractor Stations.
On March 5, 1950, General Chuprynka, the commander of the U. P. A.,
was tracked down and killed in the village of Bilohorska in the very
neighborhood of Lviv. He had proved himself a more than competent
leader and had been the soul of the U. P. A. since its foundation in
1943. His parents, his wife and his children had all perished in the
struggle but he had never wavered in his belief in a final victory and
he had become an almost legendary figure.
His death did not end the fighting, for he was succeeded in command
by Colonel Vasyl Koval. Even operations were not suspended, for it is
known that late in September of the same year, a detachment of the
forces seized the town of Mukachiv in the Carpathians and retired
to the mountains with the records of the MVD office there and two
prisoners who had made themselves particularly obnoxious by their
cruelty and their abuse of the local population.
Thus under the present circumstances the primary task of the U. P. A.
is to maintain itself in being as an armed underground, to encourage
the population, both of the Ukraine and the other groups oppressed by
the Russian Communists, and to carry on certain types of propaganda and
of terroristic work which will serve to keep on the anxious seat the
masters of the Kremlin. At the moment it does not have the possibility
of undertaking by itself those extensive operations that it has done
in the past but it is not idle and in the well-hidden bunkers and the
forests, it is fostering those traditions which can be again galvanized
into activity, if the moment for action arrives.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Soviet Ukraine During World War II
In the preceding chapters we have briefly traced the efforts of the
Ukrainians to profit by the clash between the two totalitarian powers
of Germany and the USSR and the Ukrainian hopes of being recognized
as an independent state. These hopes had been thwarted by the Nazi
refusal to treat the Ukraine as anything except a field for German
expansion and the Western refusal to recognize the Ukrainian struggle
for independence.
This, of course, does not tell the entire story. From the earliest
days of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, many of the leading
Ukrainian patriots, writers, artists and scholars, including a large
part of the staff of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, had
seized the opportunity to retire to the west into the Polish Government
General but there were many more who were picked up in the early
deportations and deposited along with the Poles in Central Asia. Some
of these, during the brief period of friendship between the Poles and
the Soviets, were again able to make their way to the west along with
General Anders and found themselves again at freedom, while those who
had retired to the west were forced to undergo increasing persecution
at the hands of the Nazis as these became more desperate.
On the other hand, when the break finally came in 1941 and the
Ukrainians, including those mobilized in the Red Army, began to
surrender in masses, the Soviets began to deport to the east all of
the outstanding people on whom they could lay their hands and whom
at the first moment they did not wish to exterminate. In this number
there were such Ukrainian writers as Tychyna, Rylsky and others who had
showed their loyalty to the regime by their tasteless flattery of the
regime in Moscow.
In the same way, the authorities gathered up in frenzied haste
machinery, finished products, and records and started them likewise to
the east with the hope of setting them up somewhere in a safe place and
using them to increase the Soviet war potential. All this was a hurried
and confused process, for it was contradicted by the Soviet orders to
reduce the Ukraine to a heap of ruins and to leave nothing available
for the invaders.
The clash between these two ideas was vividly reflected in the
destruction of Kiev. Some sections of the Academy of Sciences of the
UkSSR were hurriedly packed on trains and moved to Ufa. Other sections
for little better reasons were abandoned in the general confusion or
were mined for immediate destruction. Priceless books and records,
no less than boilers and lathes, shared the two fates, while Kiev,
thoroughly mined, was exploded and set on fire without regard for the
needs of the people. The Soviet authorities, well aware that they
could not evacuate the entire population, destroyed the food supplies
of those who were left behind while other detachments massacred the
helpless population indiscriminately.
The situation at Kharkiv and Odesa was far better and far more logical
for the Soviets had a few days longer to sort out what they wished to
remove and what they wanted to destroy, but even in these places there
was the same wanton destruction which conflicted with the avowed aims
of the Soviet authorities.