Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist

Fascism, Genocide, and Cult

Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

• Publisher: Ibidem Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783838266848
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Chapter 1:
Heterogeneity, Modernity, and the Turn to the Right

“Longue Durée” Perspective and
the Heterogeneity of Ukrainian History

Stepan Bandera was born on 1 January 1909 in the village of Staryi Uhryniv, located in the eastern part of Galicia, the easternmost province of the Habsburg Empire. Galicia, officially known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (Regnum Galiciae et Lodomeriae), was created in 1772 by the bureaucrats of the House of Habsburg at the first partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Res Publica Utriusque Nationis). The province was an economically backward region with a heterogeneous population: according to statistics from 1910, 47 percent of the population were Polish, 42 percent Ukrainian, and 11 percent Jewish. The eastern part of Galicia, which the Ukrainian national movement claimed as a part of the Ukrainian nation state, and where the political cult of Stepan Bandera was born, was no less heterogeneous: 62 percent of the population were Ukrainian, 25 percent Polish, and 12 percent Jewish (Maps 1 and 2).[123]

At the time of Bandera’s birth, close to 20 percent of “Ukrainians,” or people who began to perceive themselves as Ukrainians as a result of the invention of Ukrainian national identity, lived in the Habsburg Empire (in Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia). At the same time, 80 percent of Ukrainians lived in the Russian Empire (in eastern Ukraine, also known as “Russian Ukraine”).[124] This division and other political, religious, and cultural differences caused Galician Ukrainians to become a quite different people from the Ukrainians in Russian Ukraine. The division posed a difficult challenge, both for activists of the moderate, socialist-influenced, nineteenth-century national movement, such as Mykhailo Drahomanov (1841–1895), Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866–1934), and Ivan Franko (1856–1916), and later for the extreme, violent, and revolutionary twentieth-century nationalists such as Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), Ievhen Konovalets’ (1891–1938), and Stepan
Bandera (1909–1959). These political figures tried to establish a single Ukrainian nation that would live in one Ukrainian state.[125]

To some extent, the dual and heterogeneous state of affairs was a continuation of earlier pre-modern political and cultural divisions of the territories that the Ukrainian national movement claimed as its own. In the twentieth century, the East-West division and the separate development of the two Ukrainian identities did not narrow and, due to new geopolitical circumstances, even widened. One of the most important factors that contributed to the increase of cultural and religious differences between western and eastern Ukrainians was the military conflict between the OUN-UPA and the Soviet regime during the 1940s and early 1950s....