Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

History

Background and formation

In 1919, with the end of the Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918 to 1919, the Second Polish Republic took over most of the territory claimed by the West Ukrainian People's Republic and the rest was absorbed by the Soviets. One year later, exiled Ukrainian officers, mostly former Sich Riflemen, founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (Ukrainian: Українська Військова Організація (УВО, romanized: Ukrainska Viiskova Orhanizatsiia (UVO)), an underground military organization with the goal of continuing armed struggle for an independent Ukraine. The UVO was strictly a military organization with a military command-structure. Originally the UVO operated under the authority of the exiled government of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic, but in 1925, following a power struggle, all the supporters of the exiled president Yevhen Petrushevych were expelled from the organization.

The UVO leader, Yevhen Konovalets, had formerly commanded the Sich Riflemen. West Ukrainian political parties secretly funded the organization. The UVO organized a wave of sabotage actions in the second half of 1922, attacking Polish settlers and destroying police-stations, railroad stations, telegraph poles and railroad tracks. An attempt to assassinate Poland's Chief of State Józef Piłsudski in September 1921 failed. In 1922, the UVO organized 17 attacks on Polish officials (killing five) and 15 attacks on Ukrainians (9 of whom died, among them Sydir Tverdokhlib).

The UVO continued this type of activity, albeit on a smaller scale later. When the League of Nations recognized Polish rule over western Ukraine in 1923, many members left the UVO. The Ukrainian legal parties turned against the UVO's militant actions, preferring to work within the Polish political system. As a result, the UVO turned to Germany and Lithuania for political and financial support. It established contact with militant anti-Polish student-organizations, such as the Group of Ukrainian National Youth, the League of Ukrainian Nationalists, and the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. After preliminary meetings in Berlin in 1927 and in Prague in 1928, at a founding congress in Vienna in 1929 the veterans of the UVO and the student militants met and united to form the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Although the members consisted mostly of Galician youths, Yevhen Konovalets served as its first leader and its leadership council, the Provid, comprised mostly veterans and was based abroad.

Pre-war activities

Prior to World War II, the OUN was smaller and less influential among the Ukrainian minority in Poland than the moderate Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance. The OUN sought to infiltrate legal political parties, universities, and other political structures and institutions. OUN ideology was influenced by several political theorists, such as Dmytro Dontsov, whose political thought was characterised by totalitarianism, national chauvinism, and antisemitism, as well as Mykola Stsiborskyi and Yevhen Onatsky, and Italian fascism and German Nazism. OUN nationalists were trained by Benito Mussolini in Sicily jointly with the Ustase, they also maintained offices in Berlin and Vienna. Before the war, the OUN regarded the Second Polish Republic as an immediate target, but viewed the Soviet Union, although not operating on its territory, as the main enemy and greatest oppressor of the Ukrainian people. Even before the war, impressed by the successes of fascism, OUN radicalised its stance, and it saw Nazi Germany as its main ally in the fight for independence.

In contrast to UNDO, the OUN accepted violence as a political tool against foreign and domestic enemies of their cause. Most of its activity was directed against Polish politicians and government representatives. Under the command of the Western Ukrainian Territorial Executive (established in February 1929), the OUN carried out hundreds of acts of sabotage in Galicia and Volhynia, including a campaign of arson against Polish landowners (which helped provoke the 1930 Pacification), boycotts of state schools and Polish tobacco and liquor monopolies, dozens of expropriation attacks on government institutions to obtain funds for its activities, and assassinations. From 1921 to 1939 UVO and OUN carried out 63 known assassinations: 36 Ukrainians (among them one communist), 25 Poles, 1 Russian and 1 Jew. This number is likely an underestimate because there were likely unrecorded killings in rural regions.

The OUN's victims during this period included Tadeusz Hołówko, a Polish promoter of Ukrainian-Polish compromise, Emilian Czechowski, Lwow's Polish police commissioner, Alexei Mailov, a Soviet consular official killed in retaliation for the Holodomor, and most notably Bronisław Pieracki, the Polish interior minister. The OUN also killed moderate Ukrainian figures such as the respected teacher (and former officer of the Ukrainian Galician Army) Ivan Babii. Most of these killings were organized locally and occurred without the authorization or knowledge of the OUN's emigre leaders abroad. In 1930 OUN members assaulted the head of the Shevchenko Scientific Society Kyryl Studynsky in his office. Such acts were condemned by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, who was particularly critical of the OUN's leadership in exile who inspired acts of youthful violence, writing that they were "using our children to kill their parents" and that "whoever demoralizes our youth is a criminal and an enemy of the people." OUN's terrorist methods, fascination with fascism, rejection of parliamentary democracy and acting against Poland on behalf of Germany did not find support among many other Ukrainian organizations, especially among the Petlurites, i.e. former activists of the Ukrainian People's Republic.

During World War II

In September 1939 Poland was invaded and split by Germany and the Soviet Union. On 1 November 1939, Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union (i.e. Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Initially, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland was met with limited support from the ethnic Ukrainian population. Repression was directed mainly against the ethnic Poles, and the Ukrainisation of education, land reform, and other changes were popular among the Ukrainians. The situation changed in the middle of 1940 when collectivisation began and repressions hit the Ukrainian population. There were 2,779 Ukrainians arrested in 1939, 15,024 in 1940 and 5,500 in 1941, until the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

The situation for ethnic Ukrainians under German occupation was much better. About 550,000 Ukrainians lived in the General Government in the German-occupied portion of Poland, and they were favoured at the expense of Poles. Approximately 20,000 Ukrainian activists escaped from the Soviet occupation to Warsaw or Kraków. In late 1939, Nazi Germany accommodated OUN leaders in the city of Kraków, the capital of the General Government and provided financial support for the OUN. The headquarters of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubiyovych, the legal representation of the Ukrainian community in the Nazi zone, were also located in Kraków.

Despite the differences, the OUN's leader Yevhen Konovalets was able to maintain unity within the organization. Konovalets was assassinated by a Soviet agent, Pavel Sudoplatov, in Rotterdam in May 1938. He was succeeded by Andriy Melnyk, a 48-year-old former colonel in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic and one of the founders of the UVO. He was chosen to lead the OUN despite not having been involved in activities throughout the 1930s. Melnyk was more friendly to the Church than any of his associates (the OUN was generally anti-clerical), and had even become the chairman of a Ukrainian Catholic youth organization that was regarded as anti-nationalist by many OUN members. His choice was seen as an attempt by the leadership to repair ties with the Church and to become more pragmatic and moderate. However, this direction was opposite to the trend within western Ukraine.

In Kraków on 10 February 1940 a revolutionary faction of the OUN emerged, called the OUN-R or, after its leader Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B (Banderites). This was opposed by the current leadership of the organization, so it split, and the old group was called OUN-M after the leader Andriy Melnyk (Melnykites). The OUN-M dominated Ukrainian emigration and the Bukovina, but in Ukraine itself, the Banderists gained a decisive advantage (60% of the agent network in Volhynia and 80% in Eastern Galicia). Political leader Transcarpathian Ukrainians Avgustyn Voloshyn praised Melnyk as a Christian of European culture, in contrast to many nationalists who placed the nation above God. OUN-M leadership was more experienced and had some limited contacts in Eastern Ukraine; it also maintained contact with German intelligence and the German army.

Early years of the war and activities in central and eastern Ukraine

On 25 February 1941, the head of Abwehr Wilhelm Franz Canaris sanctioned the creation of the "Ukrainian Legion". Ukrainian Nachtigall and Roland battalions were formed under German command and numbered about 800 men. OUN-B expected that it would become the core of the future Ukrainian army. The OUN-B already in 1940 began preparations for an anti-Soviet uprising. However, Soviet repression delayed these plans and more serious fighting did not occur until after the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941. According to OUN-B reports, they then had about 20,000 men grouped in 3,300 locations in Western Ukraine. The NKVD was determined to liquidate the Ukrainian underground. According to Soviet reports, 4435 members were arrested between October 1939 and December 1940. There were public trials and death sentences were carried out. In the first half of 1941, 3073 families (11329 people) of members of the Polish and Ukrainian underground were deported from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Soviet repression forced about a thousand members of the Ukrainian underground to take up partisan activities even before the German invasion.

After Germany's invasion of the USSR, on 30 June 1941, OUN seized about 213 villages and organized diversion in the rear of the Red Army. In the process, it lost 2,100 soldiers and 900 were wounded. The OUN-B formed Ukrainian militias that, displaying exceptional cruelty, carried out antisemitic pogroms and massacres of Jews. The largest pogroms in which Ukrainian nationalists were complicit took place in Lviv in two waves in June–July 1941, involving OUN-B activists, German military and paramilitary personnel, Ukrainian, and to a lesser extent Polish urban residents and peasants from the nearby countryside, and in the later wave the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. Estimates of Jewish deaths in these events range between 4,000 (Dieter Pohl), 5,000 (Richard Breitman), and 6,000 (Peter Longerich). The involvement of OUN-B is unclear, but certainly OUN-B propaganda fuelled antisemitism. The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.

Eight days after Germany's invasion of the USSR, on 30 June 1941, the OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of Ukrainian State in Lviv, with Yaroslav Stetsko as premier. In response to the declaration, OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo (circa 1500 persons). Many OUN-B members were killed outright or perished in jails and concentration camps (both of Bandera's brothers were eventually murdered at Auschwitz). On 18 September 1941, Bandera and Stetsko were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in "Zellenbau Bunker", where they were kept until September 1944. While imprisoned, Bandera received help from the financial assistance from the OUN-B. The Germans permitted the Ukrainian nationalists to leave the bunker for an important meeting with OUN representatives in Fridental Castle which was 200 meters from Sachsenhausen.

After the Second World War

After World War II ended in 1945, the OUN in eastern and southern Ukraine continued to struggle against the Soviets; 1958 marked the last arrest of an OUN member in Donetsk. Both branches of the OUN continued to have influence within the Ukrainian diaspora. In 1943 the OUN-B had formed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a group headed by Yaroslav Stetsko from 1943 to 1986. This organisation, created and headed by the OUN-B, would include at various times émigré organizations from almost every eastern-European country (with the exception of Poland): Croatia, the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, anti-communist émigré Cossacks, Hungary, Georgia, Bohemia-Moravia (the present-day Czech Republic), and Slovakia. In the 1970s, anti-communist Vietnamese and Cuban organizations joined the ABN. The Lithuanian partisans had particularly close ties with the OUN.

In the mid-1950s, the OUN-B split into two factions: the broadly social-democratic but short-lived OUN-z led by Lev Rebet and by Zinoviy Matla, and the Dontsovite authoritarian OUN-r led by Bandera.

Soon after the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 exiled members of the OUN established contacts with British intelligence. These contacts were facilitated by Gerhard von Mende, a German professor and supporter of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc. Great Britain also hosted the archives of OUN-B's foreign branch, which were transferred from Germany after the electoral victory of Willy Brandt's Social Democrats in 1970. During the Cold War, OUN agents provided British intelligence with data on Soviet military objects and other strategic locations — not only in Ukraine, but also in other parts of the USSR — and also informed them about military maneuvers, the mobilization process and the general mood of the population in the Soviet Union and its satellite states. British intelligence, in its turn, engaged in training OUN-B members.

More than 10 schools preparing Ukrainian émigrés for underground activities against the Soviet régime were organized in Bavaria, Lower Saxony and London. According to information provided to the KGB, training centres for OUN-B members remained active in the United Kingdom into the 1980s.

In May 1951, a group of OUN-B agents was airlifted to Ukraine from the British base in Malta. They landed in the Ternopil region and attempted to establish ties with the local anti-communist resistance. However, as a result of a provocation, they were captured by Soviet internal troops. During the same period United States intelligence set up a similar group of agents recruited from supporters of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR). The last group of OUN-B agents from abroad entered Ukraine in 1960, illegally crossing the Polish-Soviet border in the area between Przemyśl and Dobromyl. After the cessation of open resistance against the Soviet régime in Ukraine, starting from the mid-to-late 1960s numerous OUN-B agents would penetrate the border posing as tourists. After the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s the OUN openly supported anti-Soviet intelligentsia circles in Soviet Ukraine.

Organization

The OUN was led by a Vozhd or Supreme Leader. Originally the Vozhd was Yevhen Konovalets; after his assassination he was succeeded by Andriy Melnyk resulting in a split where the Galician youths followed their own Vozhd, Stepan Bandera. Underneath the Vozhd were the Provid, or directorate. At the start of the second world war the OUN's leadership consisted of the Vozhd, Andrii Melnyk, and eight members of the Provid. The Provid members were: Generals Kurmanovych and Kapustiansky (both generals from the times of Ukraine's revolution in 1918–1920); Yaroslav Baranovsky, a law student; Dmytro Andriievsky, a politically moderate former diplomat of the revolutionary government from eastern Ukraine; Richard Yary, a former officer of the Austrian and Galician militaries who served as a liaison with the German intelligence services, the Abwehr; colonel Roman Sushko, another former Austrian and Galician officer; Mykola Stsiborsky, the son of a tsarist military officer from Zhytomir, who served as the OUN's official theorist; and Omelian Senyk, a party organizer and veteran of the Austrian and Galician armies who by the 1940s was considered too moderate and too conservative by the youngest generation of Galician youths. Yary would be the only member of the original Provid to join Bandera after the OUN split.

Ideology

The primary goal of OUN was to establish an independent and ethnically pure Ukrainian state. The OUN's leadership felt that past attempts at securing independence failed due to democratic values in society, poor party discipline and a conciliatory attitude towards Ukraine's traditional enemies. Its ideology rejected the socialist ideas supported by Petliura, and the compromises of Galicia's traditional elite. Instead, the OUN, particularly its younger members, adopted the ideology of Dmytro Dontsov, an émigré from Eastern Ukraine.

The OUN was formed from the UVO and several extreme right-wing organizations, including the Ukrainian National Association, the Union of Ukrainian Fascists and the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine. Initially, it was led by war veterans who failed to establish a Ukrainian state in 1917–1920. According to Per Anders Rudling, the ideology of the organization was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche, German Nazism, and Italian fascism, combining extreme nationalism with terrorism, corporatism, and antisemitism. Heorhii Kasyanov wrote that it manifested typical anti-democratic features.

Chief principles of OUN's ideology were formulated by the Decalogue of a Ukrainian Nationalist published by Stepan Lenkavskyi in 1929.

Nationalism

The nationalists who emerged in Galicia following the First World War, much as in the rest of Europe, adopted the form of nationalism known as Integral nationalism. According to this ideology, the nation was held to be of the highest absolute value, more important than social class, regions, the individual, religion, etc. To this end, OUN members were urged to "force their way into all areas of national life" such as institutions, societies, villages and families. Politics was seen as a Darwinian struggle between nations for survival, rendering conflict unavoidable and justifying any means that would lead to the victory of one's nation over that of others. In this context willpower was seen as more important than reason, and warfare was glorified as an expression of national vitality.

Integral nationalism became a powerful force in much of Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. The OUN's conceptualization of this idea was particular in several ways. Because Ukraine was stateless and surrounded by more powerful neighbors, the emphasis on force and warfare was to be expressed in acts of terrorism rather than open warfare, and illegality was glorified. Because Ukrainians did not have a state to glorify or serve, the emphasis was placed on a "pure" national language and culture rather than a State. There was a strain of fantastic romanticism, in which the unsophisticated Ukrainian rejection of reason was more spontaneous and genuine than the cynical rejection of reason by German or Italian integral nationalists. The OUN viewed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as a rival and condemned Catholic leaders as police informers or potential informers; the Church rejected integral nationalism as incompatible with Christian ethics. The conflict between the OUN and the Church eased in the late 1930s.

Dmytro Dontsov claimed that the 20th century would witness the "twilight of the gods to whom the nineteenth century prayed" and that a new man must be created, with the "fire of fanatical commitment" and the "iron force of enthusiasm", and that the only way forward was through "the organization of a new violence." This new doctrine was the chynnyi natsionalizm – the "nationalism of the deed". To dramatize and spread such views, OUN literature mythologized the cult of struggle, sacrifice, and emphasized national heroes. The OUN, particularly Bandera, held a romantic view of the Ukrainian peasantry, glorified the peasants as carriers of Ukrainian culture and linked them with the deeds and exploits of the Ukrainian Cossacks from previous centuries. The OUN believed that a goal of professional revolutionaries was, through revolutionary acts, to awaken the masses. In this aspect the OUN had much in common with 19th-century Russian Narodniks.

Fascism

The classification of the ideology of interwar Ukrainian nationalism has been the subject of a long-running debate among historians. Political scientist Ivan Gomza notes that heated debates have arisen around fascist designations of various interwar nationalist organizations, politicians, and ideologies, writing that "Due to the conceptual hindrance, it is difficult to characterize the OUN's ideology as fascist since it remains unclear what fascism is." Gomza characterises the historiography as being divided between two polarized narratives that he terms the "invective" and the "heroic". According to Gomza, the 'invective' narrative presents the OUN as a chauvinist organization "willingly committing the most egregious crimes" while the 'heroic' narrative presents the OUN as a patriotic organization fighting to liberate the subjugated Ukrainian people.

Historian Per Anders Rudling described the OUN as having "the fascist attributes of anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, and anticommunism, an armed party, totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, 'Führerprinzip', and an adoption of fascist greetings. Its leaders eagerly emphasized to Hitler and Ribbentrop that they shared the Nazi 'Weltanschauung' and a commitment to a fascist New Europe." He described it as a "typical fascist movement" and wrote that it "cultivated close relations with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Spanish Falange and the Croatian Ustaše".

According to political scientist Ivan Gomza, the "morphological structure" of the OUN's ideology in the 1930s and early 1940s could be defined as fascist because it had the following principles: (1) rebirth of the national community; (2) the search for some new form of political and economic organization, which transcends liberal democracy and collectivistic communism; and (3) the use of threats and violence during its political struggle. Gomza wrote that OUN writers rejected both Soviet communism and liberal democracy and wished to instill a single-party state, living in the unrealized glory of battles past and an economic system that aimed to avoid class conflict. He also argued that violence was an "extensive, widespread and frequent" occurrence and was central in the group's ideology and policy; the group took advantage of wartime chaos to eliminate Polish, Muscovite and Jewish activist groups. However, he wrote that after 1943 some "peripheral concepts" came to substitute the fascist core, which led to a splinter within the OUN and subsequent democratization of one of its factions.

The political scientist Ivan Katchanovski described it as "a semi-totalitarian organization which combined elements of extreme nationalism and fascism". Historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe wrote that the OUN had "created its own form of fascism" and that it "attempted to become a mass movement and to establish an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state. It viewed and used mass violence as a political aim and killed civilians en masse." He also wrote that the members of the movement "claimed to be related to movements such as the Italian Fascists, the German Nazis, the Ustasa, and the Iron Guard". Marples has described how some writers in the OUN tradition, as well as some later Ukrainian writers, have been "self-deceptive" in emphasizing the absence of racism from OUN ideology, downplaying its connection to western European fascism, and suggesting that the Ukrainian brand of nationalism was a product of domestic development.

Authoritarianism

The nation was to be unified under a single party led by a hierarchy of proven fighters. At the top was to be a Supreme Leader or Vozhd. In some respects the OUN's creed was similar to that of other eastern European, radical right-wing agrarian movements, such as Romania's Legion of the Archangel Michael (more commonly known as the Iron Guard), Croatia's Ustashe, Hungary's Arrow Cross Party, and similar groups in Slovakia and Poland; however, there were significant differences within the OUN regarding its relationship to fascism. The more moderate leaders living in exile admired some facets of Benito Mussolini's Italian fascism but condemned Nazism, while the younger more radical members based within Ukraine admired the fascist ideas and methods as practised by the Nazis. The faction-based abroad supported rapprochement with the Ukrainian Catholic Church while the younger radicals were anti-clerical and felt that not considering the Nation to be the Absolute was a sign of weakness. The two factions of the OUN each had their own understanding of the nature of the leader. The Melnyk faction considered the leader to be the director of the Provid and in its writings emphasized a military subordination to the hierarchical superiors of the Provid. It was more autocratic than totalitarian. The Bandera faction, in contrast, emphasized complete submission to the will of the supreme leader.

At a party congress in August 1943, the OUN-B rejected much of its fascistic ideology in favor of a democratic model, while maintaining its hierarchical structure. This change could be attributed in part to the influence of the leadership of Roman Shukhevych, the new leader of UPA, who was more focused on military matters rather than on ideology and was more receptive to different ideological themes than were the fanatical OUN-B political leaders, and was interested in gaining and maintaining the support of deserters or others from Eastern Ukraine. During this party congress, the OUN-B backed off its commitment to private ownership of land, increased worker participation in the management of industry, equality for women, free health services and pensions for the elderly, and free education. Some points in the program referred to the rights of national minorities and guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press and rejected the official status of any doctrine. Nevertheless, the authoritarian elements were not discarded completely and were reflected in the continued insistence on the "heroic spirit" and "social solidarity, friendship and discipline." In exile, the OUN's ideology was focused on opposition to communism.

Treatment of non-Ukrainians

The OUN intended to create a Ukrainian state with widely understood Ukrainian territories, but inhabited by Ukrainian people narrowly understood, according to Timothy Snyder. Its first congress in 1929 resolved that "Only the complete removal of all occupiers from Ukrainian lands will allow for the general development of the Ukrainian Nation within its own state." OUN's "Ten Commandments" stated "Aspire to expand the strength, riches, and size of the Ukrainian State even by means of enslaving foreigners", or "Thou shalt struggle for the glory, greatness, power, and space of the Ukrainian state by enslaving the strangers". This formulation was modified by OUN's theoreticians in the 1950s and shortened to "Thou shalt struggle for the glory, greatness, power, and space of the Ukrainian state". According to Door Karel C. Berkhoff, due to the influence of Roman Shukhevych on the OUN the organization in October 1943, issued a communication (in Ukrainian only) that condemned the "mutual mass murders" of Ukrainians and Poles.

Antisemitism

Antisemitism was a common attribute of agrarian radical right-wing Eastern European organizations, such as the Croatian Ustashe, the Yugoslav Zbor and the Romanian Iron Guard. The OUN's ideology, on the other hand, did not initially emphasize antisemitism - despite the presence of antisemitic writings. During the OUN's early years, there were many prominent Jewish members of the OUN, and the OUN broadly condemned antisemitic violence. In the 1930s, the OUN publicly compared Jews to parasites and called for the violent removal of Jews from Ukrainian society. When the OUN allied with Nazi Germany in 1941 - the OUN-B called for the slaughter of Ukrainian Jewry, and the OUN praised the Germany for bringing their methods of segregating and executing Jews to Ukraine.

Three of its leaders, General Mykola Kapustiansky, Rico Yary (himself of Hungarian-Jewish descent), and Mykola Stsyborsky, who was the OUN's chief theorist, were married to Jewish women, and some Jews belonged to the OUN's underground movement. The OUN in the early 1930s considered Ukraine's primary enemies to be Poles and Russians, with Jews playing a secondary role as collaborators An article published in 1930 by OUN leader Mykola Stsyborsky denounced the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1918, stating that most of its victims were innocent rather than Bolsheviks. Stsyborsky wrote that Jewish rights should be respected, that the OUN ought to convince Jews that their organization was no threat to them and that Ukrainians ought to maintain close contacts with Jews nationally and internationally. Three years later, an article in the OUN journal Rozbudova Natsii ("Development of the Nation"), despite its focus on Jews' alleged exploitation of Ukrainian peasants, also stated that Jews, as well as Ukrainians, were victims of Soviet policies. Evhen Onatsky, writing in the OUN's official journal in 1934, condemned German Nazism as imperialist, racist and anti-Christian. In response to objections within the organisation to Stsyborsky's dynamic marital past and his relationship with a Jewish woman in 1934, Konovalets wrote:

"If nationalism is waging war against mixed marriages insofar as conquerors (especially Poles and Russians) are concerned, then it cannot bypass the problem of mixed marriages with Jews, who are indisputably if not greater, then at least comparable, foes of our rebirth.":325-6

Konovalets did however side with Stsyborsky when he complained about the particularly extreme antisemitic writings of theorist Oleksander Mytsiuk being published in the OUN newsletter Rozbudova natsiï, reprimanding the editor Volodymyr Martynets.:321

Economic program

OUN's ideologists underlined their adherence to the ideas of economic nationalism which emerged under the influence of German publicist Friedrich List. Unlike his compatriot Karl Marx, who considered class struggle to be the main factor of economic and social progress, List instead viewed nations as the most important actors in the development of human society. Both Marx and List supported state involvement in economic life, but their difference lay in their attitude to private property, with the former supporting its abolition and the latter seeing it as a basic element of social relations. List's ideas found support in Germany under the leadership of Bismarck and in the Russian Empire, where their main proponents were Sergei Witte and Dmitri Mendeleev. During the Interwar era economic nationalism was also employed by newly emerged European states such as Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia and Yugoslavia. Elements of economic nationalism were also present in contemporary government policies in Spain, United States and the United Kingdom.

OUN's economic platform was formed between 1927-1929 in advance to its First Congress. Among its authors were Yakiv Moralevych (1878-1961), Leonid Kostariv (1888-?) and Mykola Stsiborskyi (1897-1941), whose activities were connected with the Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in the Czechoslovak town of Poděbrady. All of them stemmed from Russian-ruled regions of Ukraine and supported pragmatic economic cooperation of Ukrainians with their neighbours in Russia and Poland.

Financial policies

In his report to the First Congress of the OUN in 1929, Moralevych promoted the introduction of a temporary Ukrainian currency, karbovanets, which would initially be tied to the Soviet ruble and later replaced with hryvnia, a proper national currency whose price would in its turn be tied to the currencies of the USA, UK and France (a similar scheme was eventually used during the 1996 Ukrainian monetary reform). He also concerned himself with the creation of a Ukrainian banking system and payment of government debts, supporting the foundation of a national bank, which would be independent from both businesses and other government institutions.

OUN's financial program foresaw an important role of state authorities in many branches of the financial sphere. Moralevych proposed the establishment of special control organs in order to supervise banking activities. According to his program, foreign debts of the Ukrainian People's Republic were to be recognized by the future independent Ukrainian government, and a special institution would be created for their repayment.

In the sphere of taxation Moralevych's plan included the introduction of taxes on income, land, gifts, movable and immovable property, exports and imports, as well as a value added tax. Most of the taxes were to be introduced according to a proportional system based on the total income and social status of separate citizens. Moralevych also supported the establishment of state monopoly on the production of alcohol and tobacco, or the introduction of excises for private companies. An important role in his program was attributed to foreign investment.

Economic policies

According to Yakiv Moralevych, the initial goal of OUN's economic policies was to be the reform of the agrarian sector, including provision of necessary technologies and equipment to agriculture. The next important direction of economic policies would be the sphere of energy. His program promoted the development of heavy industry, although it was argued that light industry would have a better potential for swift development in Ukraine. International credits were to cover the expenses for construction of railways, development of water transport and hydroenergetics; meanwhile the road system was to be financed from local budgets and concessions.

An important contribution to OUN's views on economy was made by Leonid Kostariv, whose program of industrial development of Ukraine was adopted at the First Congress of the OUN. It divided all industrial enterprises into three categories according to their level of strategic importance. The most significant enterprises, including mines, steel mills and part of chemical, machine and weapons producers, were to be owned and managed by the state. Less important branches were to be owned by joint-stock companies with part of their shares belonging to the state. Smaller enterprises were to remain in private ownership and engage in free competition. A special institution - Main Council of National Economy - was to be introduced for the management of state-owned shares, which would also observe service and production standards and provide labour protection. Nationalization was seen as a way of balancing private and state capitals and preventing foreign owners from exerting too much influence. According to OUN's views, the state had to create an environment in which own science and technologies could be developed.

Mykola Stsiborskyi took part in the development of OUN's agrarian and trade policies. He supported the transfer of grain trade to private farmers and opposed protectionism in that sphere, but promoted it for sugar trade. All industrial exports, in their turn, were to be subjected to state control. Stsiborskyi opposed the infiltration of private capital in large-scale industry. He viewed Russia as an important destination of Ukrainian exports of coal, ore and iron, and saw Germany, USA, Great Britain and Russia as important sources of imports in the sphere of light industry.

In the sphere of agriculture Stsiborskyi's program supported the involvement of both private and state property. Both minimum and maximum size of a personal land plot was to be regulated by law, and land inheritance was to be limited to only one offspring, with the rest receiving a monetary compensation instead. The division of lands established after 1917 was to be preserved, with the land of collective farms being distributed between their members. Stsiborskyi saw the base of Ukrainian agriculture in private middle class farmers united into cooperatives. Support of agrarians was to be provided through long-term credits issued both by the state and by private capital. Excess rural population was to be requalified.

Attempts at realization

Soon after the beginning of World War II, in 1940 the Provid of OUN established the Commission on State Planning (KDP - Ukrainian: Комісія державного планування, КДП) headed by Oleh Olzhych, which consisted of 15 subcommissions. Among its members were notable scientists and statesmen Borys Martos and Kostiantyn Matsiyevych. The commission prepared plans on the development of finances and trade, agriculture, industry and general economy. Its activities were based on the economic platform of the OUN. The commission created a number of projects of laws concerning trade, finances, state budget, taxation, credits, banking and other economic issues. An important point of those projects was the protection of Ukrainian private enterprise. Ethnic Ukrainians had to receive priority in the management of industrial enterprises, although representatives of other nations could also be appointed if needed.

The original KDP was dominated by Melnykites, as a result of which the Bandera wing of OUN created its own commission with an identical name. A decree issued by OUN-B before the outset of the German-Soviet War called for the preservation of existing social relations in Ukrainian lands. Opposition from German authorities, as well as the poor state of Ukraine's villages and lack of mechanization, forced the nationalists to postpone the introduction of certain measures from their program, such as the disbandment of collective farms, which were instead to be replaced by so-called "people's committees", whose representatives were to form the base of a future all-Ukrainian Constitutional Congress. The future redistribution of land was to prioritize war veterans and large working families. Following the adoption of the Act on the Reestablishment of the Ukrainian State on 30 June 1941, OUN promoted the gradual abolition of collective ownership on land, and in some cases threatened people leaving collectivized farms with punishment. Monetary policy also remained conservative, with the Soviet ruble remaining in use as currency. Permissions on private trade by OUN's authorities were combined with the introduction of price controls. Following the expulsion of Soviets from Lviv, Ukrainian cooperative organizations, such as the Maslosoyuz, resumed their activities in the city. Crediting was forbidden, and barter schemes were eventually outlawed in order to stop hyperinflation. On 13 July 1941 the Provid of OUN-B established an exchange rate for currencies. Taxation measures were introduced, with trade and banking enterprises gradually restoring their activities.

In August 1941 a project of the Statute of a Ukrainian Economic Bureau was published. The institution was to analyze the Ukrainian economy and adopt development programs. However, it was never created due to the crackdown on the Ukrainian nationalist movement by German authorities, who in September broke their relations with the OUN and started persecuting its members. German war planners saw Ukraine as a mere source of labour force and raw materials, and used economic measures in order to subdue the local population. In the sphere of banking the Germans introduced strict centralization and removed all non-Germans from management. In the environment of severe repression, OUN's activists were forced to turn to underground activities, abandoning the previous conservative line and exploiting the opposition of Ukrainian peasants to collectivization. In September 1941 the Provid of Southern Ukraine issued an instruction on the privatization of land through specially created peasant committees. In July 1943 the Chief Command of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army headed by Klym Savur issued a decree on the liquidation of collective farms and proclaimed the transfer of lands previously owned by Polish colonists to Ukrainian peasants.

Economic legacy

Despite its popularity in the Ukrainian nationalist movement, economic nationalism promoted by the OUN failed to take root in Ukraine due to the predominance of Marxist and, later, neoliberal ideas.

Legacy

A number of contemporary far-right Ukrainian political organizations claim to be inheritors of the OUN's political traditions, including Svoboda, Right Sector, the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defence, and the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. According to historian Per Anders Rudling, one of the reasons the role of the OUN remains contested in historiography is the fact that some of these later political inheritors developed literature justifying or denying the organization's fascist political heritage and collaboration with Nazi Germany.

On 1 October 2023, during the Defenders Day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed honorary titles, insignia and battle flags to military units, including a ribbon of honorary name to the 131st separate reconnaissance battalion of the Ground Forces, named in honor of OUN founder Yevhen Konovalets.

Symbols

The organization's symbols were established in 1932 and were published in a magazine 'Building a Nation' (Ukrainian: Розбудова Нації, Rozbudova Natsii). The author of the OUN emblem with a stylized trident (tryzub) was Robert Lisovskyi. The organization's anthem "We were born in a great hour" (Ukrainian: Зродились ми великої години) was finalized in 1934 and also was published in the same magazine. Its lyrics were written by Oles Babiy, and it music by composer Omelian Nyzhankivsky.

For a long time OUN did not officially have its own flag. However, during the Hungarian campaign against the Republic of Carpathian Ukraine in 1939, Carpathian Sich, a militarized wing of OUN, adopted its flag from the OUN's emblem – a golden trident on a blue background. The flag was finalized and officially adopted by the organization only in 1964 at the 5th Assembly of Ukrainian Nationalists. The blue and yellow colours have a strong association with Ukrainian nationalism, including the 1917 Ukrainian People's Republic.

When the organisation split in 1941, OUN-B refused to adopt the trident as a symbol and came up with its own heraldry. Lisovskyi created the organizational emblem for OUN-B as well. The central element of the new emblem was a stylized cross within a triangle. The flag and emblem consist of two colors: red and black. According to Bohdan Hoshovsky, the color combination of red and black was based on a concept of the OUN ideologue and veteran of the Ukrainian Galician Army Yulian Varanasi. According to some sources, the black color symbolizes the black earth ("Chornozem") that Ukraine is synonymous for, and the red color represents blood spilled for Ukraine. Rudling summarises this as symoblsing blood and soil. Others, such as Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, director of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (and scholar of Ukrainian folklore), say the red is traditionally synonymous with "life" rather than with violence. "Blood as life, as blossom, and not as blood lost in battles." Jars Balan, head of the Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre at the University of Alberta, says "The red is for love and the black is for sorrow and how they are intertwined", with references to those colours occurring in Slavic songs and poetry since the 12th century.

Veteran status of OUN members

In late March 2019 former OUN combatants (and other living former members of irregular Ukrainian nationalist armed groups that were active during World War II and the first decade after the war) were officially granted the status of veterans. This meant that for the first time they could receive veteran benefits, including free public transport, subsidized medical services, annual monetary aid, and public utilities discounts (and will enjoy the same social benefits as former Ukrainian soldiers Red Army of the Soviet Union). There had been several previous attempts to provide former Ukrainian nationalist fighters with official veteran status, especially during the 2005–2009 administration of President Viktor Yushchenko, but all failed.

Leaders

OUN (Melnyk)

Andriy Melnyk (1940–1964)

Oleh Shtul (1964–1977)

Denys Kvitkovskyi (1977–1979)

Mykola Plaviuk (1979–2012)

Bohdan Chervak (2012–present)

OUN (Bandera)

Stepan Bandera (1940–1959)

acting: Mykola Lebed (September 1941 – May 1943)

acting: Roman Shukhevych (May 1943 – 1944)

Stepan Lenkavskyi (1959–1968)

Yaroslav Stetsko (1968–1986)

Vasyl Oleskiv (1986–1991)

Slava Stetsko (1991–2001)

Andriy Haidamakha (2001–2009)

Stefan Romaniw (2009–2022)

Oleh Medunytsia (2022–present)

OUN (abroad)

Zenon Matla (1954–1956)

Lev Rebet (1956–1957)

Roman Ilnytskyi (1957–?)

Bohdan Kordyuk (?–1979)

Daria Rebet (1979–1991)

Anatol Kaminskyi (1991–present)

Notable members and supporters

This is a list of notable members and supporters of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Volodymyr Bahaziy

Ivan Bahrianyi

Stepan Bandera

Volodymyr Horbovy

Ivan Hrynokh

Olha Ilkiv

Mykola Kapustiansky

Yevhen Konovalets

Zenon Kossak

Vasyl Kuk

Viktor Kurmanovych

Yuriy Lopatynsky

Oleh Medunytsia

Andriy Melnyk

Oleksander Ohloblyn

Oleh Olzhych

Mykola Plaviuk

Stefan Romaniw

Lev Shankovsky

Volodymyr Stakhiv

Yevhen Stakhiv

Mykola Stasyuk

Slava Stetsko

Yaroslav Stetsko

Mykola Stsiborskyi

Vasyl Sydor