Turning the pages back... June 30, 1941 (06/27/99)

Turning the pages back...

June 30, 1941

Shortly after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union and Soviet-controlled territories on June 22, 1941, several members of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) unexpectedly issued a declaration in Lviv on June 30 proclaiming Ukrainian statehood despite the fact that the Germans had just entered the city. Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera's associate, who had been living in exile in Krakow during the period of Soviet occupation of Ukraine, announced the declaration at a hastily convened meeting the evening of June 30. The Act of June 30, as the proclamation was called, claimed that the "OUN, under the direction of Stepan Bandera" and acting on behalf of the Ukrainian people, was declaring a Ukrainian state, and that Stetsko, with Bandera's authorization, was its premier.

The declaration was initially met with skepticism and confusion by much of the population of western Ukraine, who, while living under Soviet occupation since September 1939, knew very little about Stetsko or the Bandera faction that had gained political strength under exile. Caught off-guard, the German military command in Lviv, which was hostile to the proclamation, did not act immediately and this hesitancy gave the proclamation legitimacy. However, political authorities in Berlin were not as uncertain. On July 12, Stetsko was "escorted" to Berlin for "meetings." In fact, he had been arrested. He and other OUN leaders were sent to German concentration camps, where they remained until September 1944. In the fall of 1941, German occupation authorities continued their arrest of OUN leaders and activists.

Since the Germans had just begun a major assault on the Soviet Union, the OUN leaders who made the declaration were betting that German authorities would not want to wrangle with Ukrainian political issues and would be more concerned with their military advance. However, they misjudged the Germans' plans for the Ukrainians and completely misunderstood that the Germans were harshly opposed, as were the Soviets, to expressions of Ukrainian national consciousness.

Sources: "Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood, 1941" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Orest Subtelny, "Ukraine: A History" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, second edition, 1994); Paul Robert Magocsi "A History of Ukraine" (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).

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