Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

I. His military experience later proved useful both for his activity in OUN and UPA during World War II and for his postwar work as a military historian of Ukraine. He was associated with the Bandera wing of OUN during the war, but after the war he joined a faction that broke with Bandera, the UHVR group32 or so-called dviikari. Led by Mykola Lebed and Lev Rebet, the dviikari adopted a more democratic program than either the Banderites or Melnykites and benefited from generous funding by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency.33 Shankovsky’s book on OUN-B’s expeditionary groups (pokhidni hrupy) in southern Ukraine34 and Romanian-occuped Transnistria created a picture of the past that fit well with the postwar ideology of the UHVR. Shankovsky had fine narrative skills and wrote with some verve, although his prose was not free of jargon. I will spend more time analyzing this work, since it presented a narrative that has been very influential in the postwar Ukrainian diaspora, especially among historians and other intellectuals. It also offered a full enough account to serve here as a prominent example of a more general trend in OUN and UPA historiography.

      The expeditionary groups were small OUN units that fanned out from Kraków and then across Ukraine, following the German advance. They were instrumental in establishing local civil administrations and militias wherever they went. In his account of them, Shankovsky emphasized that they fought against two enemies, both the Soviets and the Germans. He also described fierce persecution of members of OUN, especially OUN-B (the Bandera faction), by the Germans. While writing at length about the conflict between OUN and the Germans, Shankovsky completely omitted to mention moments of cooperation.

The main point of Shankovsky’s book was to show that the more tolerant and democratic position adopted by the UHVR had its basis in the encounter between the Western Ukrainian nationalists and the population of Soviet Ukraine in its pre-1939 borders. His story is that the Western Ukrainian activists came into the rest of the Ukraine and discovered that the ideological baggage they had brought with them was unacceptable to the population there. The inhabitants of central, southern, and eastern Ukraine rejected the OUN’s Führerprinzip and its intended single-party rule and wanted a democratic parliamentary system instead. They did not like OUN’s voluntarism, amorality, exclusivity, and hunger for power, preferring ethical politics, toleration, and humaneness. They were not satisfied with the slogan of an independent Ukraine: they wanted to know the content of the envisaged state, its political structure and social policies. They were against imperialism and exploitation and wanted national minorities to have the rights of other citizens of the Ukrainian state. They did not accept OUN’s slogan of “Ukraine above all.” The Western Ukrainian activists, challenged by this encounter with the majority of Ukrainians, had to rethink their program, resulting in the more liberal OUN program of August 1943 and the establishment of the UHVR.35 Here is how Shankovsky put it in his conclusions:

...I set myself a clearly defined goal that my work was supposed to achieve. I wanted—as extensively as possible—to present the ideological and political evolution that the pro-independence OUN underwent as a result of the direct encounter of the mass of its membership with the Ukrainian mainland and Ukrainian population in the Central Eastern Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands. The epic tale of the expeditionary groups in central and eastern Ukraine, the discussion of ideas conducted by the members of the expeditionary groups with the Ukrainian people of the Central Ukrainian Lands and Eastern Ukrainian Lands, and the integration (usobornennia) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists through the mass entrance into it of Ukrainians from the Central Ukrainian Lands and the Eastern Ukrainian Lands were the reasons that much was thrown out from the political-programmatic decisions and directives of OUN, [the elimination of] which had been considered taboo in the conditions of Polish occupation. In particular, very decisively thrown out were all sorts of “isms” introduced onto Ukrainian soil from a foreign field: authoritarianism, elitism, totalitarianism, dogmatism, exclusivism, voluntaristic nationalism, and so on. Socioeconomic and political issues decisively took precedence over issues of worldview and philosophy; mysticism had to make way for a realistic strategy and tactics of liberation, and the despised leader system capitulated before democracy and parliamentarism, with its accompanying human freedoms.36

In addition to arguing for a fundamental shift in perspective within the OUN expeditionary groups as a result of the encounter with the east and south, Shankovsky also contended that under the impact of the encounter OUN began to shed its ethnocentrism and to develop a new openness to the national minority populations in Ukraine. He stated that the national minorities of southern Ukraine—“Russians, Greeks, Moldavians, and Tatars”37—warmed to the idea of an independent Ukraine, with equal rights for the minorities.38 “The broad masses of the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands most decisively rejected any possibility of an exterminatory or even discriminatory policy with regard to any national minority in Ukraine. Non-Ukrainians who live in Ukraine and are Ukrainian citizens should enjoy all the rights of Ukrainian citizens. It has to be recognized and emphasized that the leaders of the frontline expeditionary groups quickly oriented themselves in the situation and were able to conduct their propaganda in the direction of winning over non-Ukrainians for the Ukrainian liberation movement.”39 In Shankovsky’s narrative, OUN in the Donbas reached out to Russians as full-fledged Ukrainian citizens.40

As to OUN’s relations with the national minority with which this monograph is particularly concerned, i.e., the Jews, Shankovsky explained: “In this place we wish to underline that neither the Ukrainian population nor the members of the Ukrainian underground who came to the Central and Eastern Ukrainian Lands were in any way involved in anti-Jewish actions.”41 By contrast, Shankovsky wrote that the White Russian emigrés, who also came to Transnistria, were rabid antisemites who killed Jews on their own initiative, without prodding from the Romanian authorities.42 Shankovsky also noted that the Jews in Transnistria were pro-Bolshevik.43

      The heroic tale of OUN’s transformation under the impact of this encounter could well contain some grains of truth, but to determine how many requires new and in-depth research. For the purposes of this monograph, though, it is necessary to point out some dubious claims, half-truths, and falsehoods in Shankovsky’s narrative.

To begin with, I wonder how true is the claim that the young workers of the Donbas and indeed the general population of the south were insisting on parliamentary democracy. Where would their knowledge of this political system have originated? Surely not from any personal experience, nor from anything they read in Soviet publications. And many years later, after parliamentary democracy was finally introduced in independent Ukraine, the Donbas stood out as the region of origin and the primary political base of the most authoritarian president and politicians in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history (President Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions). Thus I am skeptical of the assertion that a population molded by tsarism and Stalinism and later subject to Nazi occupation would have had a clear enough picture of representative democracy to summon it up as an ideal with which to challenge OUN. Much recent research in the history of Stalinism has shown that it was exceedingly difficult for Soviet citizens to think outside the communist box.44 This is borne out by some of the original slogans the Donbas workers came up with during the German occupation, such as “Ukrainian Soviet power without the Bolsheviks” and “Soviet Ukraine without the Bolsheviks and without the dictatorship of the Communist party.”45