Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. John-Paul Himka

And the picture of OUN being so open to non-Ukrainians, particularly Russians, is—at best—overdrawn. This is clear from a volume of documents published much later, in 2013, on OUN in the Donbas. The collection is decidedly pro-OUN; in fact, its editor conceived it as literature first and foremost for “radical youth and participants of Ukrainian paramilitary organizations.”46 The documents do show that some ethnic Russians participated in the nationalist movement, particularly a woman from Kramatorsk, Donetsk oblast, by the name of Serafima Petrovna Kutieva, who also figured in Shankovsky’s book.47 By Kutieva’s own account to her NKGB interrogator in 1944, at first her Russian nationality did cause her OUN recruiter a moment’s hesitation, but then she was accepted into the movement. It turned out that her Russian nationality worked out well for the OUN underground; her home could more effectively serve as a safe house for the movement. “...My apartment for them was above all suspicions since I am a Russian....”48 In the course of her recruitment she discovered that not all OUN members were open to Russian ethnicity. One of her former husbands was her first recruiter, and he described the goal of the nationalist movement as the establishment of “an independent Ukrainian state which would be run exclusively by Ukrainians.”49 She described a fellow OUN activist from Vinnytsia as “stridently chauvinistically...inclined.”50 OUN members in the civil administration in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk oblast, advocated the replacement of ethnic Russians by ethnic Ukrainians.51 OUN also promoted restrictions on the use of the Russian language in administration, the courts, signage, and education.52

      The documentary collection also shows that OUN in the Donbas consistently propagated antisemitism while the Holocaust was proceeding. Several OUN proclamations are included as photoreproductions at the back of the book. The newspaper Ukrains’kyi Donbas, which was under OUN control, wrote in a front-page editorial on 18 December 1941:

Under the powerful blows of the victorious German and Allied armies the bonds with which for twenty-three years day and night the Jewish-Bolshevik henchmen bound the freedom-loving Ukrainian people have burst asunder....[As the German and Italian forces approached,] for fifteen whole days Jewish commissars, Asiatic barbarians...destroyed the national property built by the sweat and blood of the Ukrainian people....We must accept the slogan “Ukraine for Ukrainians” as the fundamental principle in the work of a newly constructed state apparatus and take it as the starting point for orientation in solving all problems which every day of work on the construction of a new life brings.53

      On the next page of the same issue appeared a proclamation to Ukrainian youth issued by OUN:

The Jews forced us to call our dearest people enemies. They forced us to love alien Moscow and not our native Ukraine. In our country those who married Jewesses, and thereby contributed to the degeneration of the Ukrainian nation, were held in esteem. Jewboys were called Ukrainian musicians—all those Buses, Goldsteins, Davids, Oistrakhs. They gave them prizes, titled them Stalin laureates, but the truly talented Ukrainian youth was trampled and then withered on the vine. The institutes and schools swarmed with Jews because they had money....In the Komsomol and Pioneers the Jewish-Muscovite politicians tried to raise janissaries, champions of Red Moscow, haters of the Ukrainian people....Ukraine for Ukrainians!54

      And on the next page was yet another OUN proclamation, this one addressed to teachers:

They forced us to poison the minds of children with Jewish internationalism....Jews wrote the grammar of the Ukrainian language....In the theaters and cinema they showed us performances and films directed by Jews, in which the best sons of the Ukrainian land were reviled and ridiculed....Schools for Ukrainians! Down with lying Jewish-communist education. In a Ukrainian school—Ukrainian children....Let us welcome the German army, the most cultured army in the world, which is driving from our lands the Jewish-communist scum. Let us help the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Stepan Bandera build a great Independent Ukrainian State. Ukraine for Ukrainians!55

OUN members in the civil administration also promoted antisemitism. OUN member Anton Yastremsky was raion head in Olhynka, Donetsk oblast. On 17 September 1942 he issued an order to introduce the OUN greeting “Glory to Ukraine” in his raion. This was intended to restore polite and respectful behavior after years of “hostile Jewish-Bolshevik” interpersonal relations, of “Bolshevik-Jewish barbarity.”56 The OUN-controlled city administration of Mariupol in Donetsk oblast ordered that civil servants take Ukrainian language courses since “as a consequence of Muscovite-Jewish rule in Ukraine our people lost their language, customs, and so on.”57

The works on the history of OUN and UPA produced by veterans of the movement, such as those by Mirchuk, Herasymenko, and Shankovsky, but also by others (e.g., Mykola Lebed, Borys Lewytzkyj58), were marked by partisan perspectives. Their writings not only defended the positions of OUN but of their particular faction of OUN. They emphasized OUN’s persecution at the hands of the German occupiers but downplayed the extent to which OUN collaborated with Germany. All of them avoided disclosure about the extent to which OUN and UPA were involved in ethnic cleansing, including participation in the Holocaust. Already in 1946, a prominent Ukrainian émigré from eastern Ukraine, Ivan Bahriany, accurately diagnosed the problem with the self-presentation of the emigrés associated with OUN: the nationalist camp, he wrote, was trying to repudiate its heritage of xenophobia, antisemitism, voluntarism, leaderism [vozhdyzm], and antidemocratism, but “not by overcoming these things, but by assuring us that they had not existed.”59

In addition to the veterans’ writings, a scholarly study of OUN and UPA appeared already in 1955 and went through three editions, the last appearing in 1990. John Armstrong’s Ukrainian Nationalism relied primarily on three kinds of sources: German documentation, the wartime Ukrainian press, and interviews. The interviews were conducted almost exclusively with prominent Ukrainian activists and politicians, and not just from the OUN camp. He had great sympathy for these men, although he was not uncritical in his admiration.60 He did not interview Polish or Jewish survivors of OUN-UPA violence nor consult their testimonies and memoirs. The only book on the Holocaust listed in the bibliography of the 1990 edition is Hilberg’s classic, in which, as we have seen, there was no room for a discussion of OUN. No works in Polish were cited. The result was a study that had very little to say about OUN operations against Poles and Jews.61 The ethnic cleansing of the Poles was given cursory treatment, based entirely on German sources, on a few pages.62 The question of OUN involvement in the pogroms of 1941 was discussed in one paragraph.63 Like most scholars at that time, Armstrong did not understand the distinction between the militias organized by OUN and the later Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. He did, however, make mention of some anti-Jewish rhetoric employed by OUN.64

Armstrong wrote a rather sympathetic narrative of the nationalists, emphasizing their valor in fighting against two such powerful enemies as the