PERSPECTIVES: For liberty and truth (10/22/00)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

For liberty and truth

In one of his most political poems, Taras Shevchenko lashed out at Russians who condemned the leaders of 18th century serf uprisings as brigands and outlaws.

"Murderers," he wrote, "You lie! A bandit would never rise up for sacred liberty and truth."

Today, after centuries of subjugation, Ukraine is independent and free. Within living memory, though, tens of millions of Ukrainians were subjected to a kind of slavery that was very much like serfdom. Under the latter, people were bound to the land. The masters enjoyed the fruits of the serfs' labor and controlled every aspect of their lives, even to the point of imposing death. Under Stalin, people also had no title to their land, working instead on huge collective farms. The state took the fruits of their labor, controlled every aspect of their lives and killed millions of them in a deliberately induced famine.

Cut off from the rest of the world and aware only of their misery and bitterness, masses of Ukrainians and others welcomed Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, seeing in him a liberator. In June 1941 no one knew about the concentration camps the Nazis were planning. They only knew the Gulag. And so, entire armies laid down their arms. By December, the Germans had captured nearly 3.4 million Soviet soldiers.

Very soon, people discovered that Hitler was anything but a liberator. Instead, he imposed a slavery of his own and matched Stalin in the level of his criminality. The atrocities the Nazis perpetrated against European Jewry - including a million Ukrainian Jews - have been well-documented and are widely known. Their policy toward Ukrainian Gentiles is less familiar. It was not genocidal as it was toward Jews, but it was still appallingly brutal. For Hitler, Ukrainians and other Slavs were "untermenschen (subhumans). Typically, Nazi leaders referred to Ukrainians as "natives," "half-monkeys," "dirty and lazy," "colonials."

Attitude dictated policy. Two million young people were forcibly recruited as slaves; murder became commonplace. As the reichskommissar for Ukraine put it: "If I find a Ukrainian worthy of sitting at the same table with me, I must have him shot."

Just as their ancestors had done in the 17th and 18th centuries, Ukrainians rose up in justified rebellion. Shrewdly, Stalin appealed to Ukrainian and Russian patriotism. Minor concessions to Ukrainian and other national sensibilities, coupled with Nazi brutality, allowed the Red Army to regroup. With heroic sacrifice, along with massive assistance under the American Lend-Lease program, the Soviets turned the tide.

In western Ukraine, though, the vast majority would have nothing to do with Stalin. Subjected to Poland before World War II and Austria-Hungary before that, western Ukraine had never been part of the Soviet Union or indeed Russia. Since 1918, revolutionaries in Galicia and other western Ukrainian regions had been fighting for independence and by 1941 had an elaborate underground in place.

Caught between two totalitarian systems and refusing to serve either, revolutionary leaders in western Ukraine decided to fight back on their own terms. It started small in the spring of 1942, with a few guerrilla units that called themselves the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia UPA). By the spring of 1943, the UPA was conducting wide-ranging defensive operations against the Germans and staging raids to capture weapons and supplies. As for the approaching Red Army, the UPA viewed it to be as much an occupying force as the Nazis.

By the time Berlin fell in May 1945, the UPA and the Soviets were locked in bitter combat. The struggle continued into the mid-1950s before the Soviets ultimately won. To do so, they had to employ tanks, aircraft, heavy artillery and deportations of entire populations. "We lost thousands of men in a bitter struggle between Ukrainian nationalists and the forces of Soviet power," Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs.

The official Soviet assessment of the UPA, of course, is anything but kind. There is no listing in the Soviet Encyclopedia for the UPA. Instead, you have to look up "Ukrainian Bourgeois Nationalism." There, UPA leaders are condemned as Nazi collaborators "who perpetrated terror against the workers." A cross-reference to "Banditism" is provided. (In their memos to Berlin, the Nazis used the same word - "bandits" - to describe the UPA.)

The bloodless revolution of August 1991, of course, vindicated the UPA's role. The trident and blue-and-yellow flag the UPA fought under are now the national symbols of an independent Ukraine. The hammer and sickle and red flag have been discredited and discarded. Die-hard Communists and the large continent of Red Army veterans in Ukraine, however, remain unconvinced about the UPA. By and large, they still accept the official Soviet version. Not surprisingly, other Ukrainians disagree. They see the UPA as a heroic formation that paved the way for Ukraine's eventual independence.

To sort this all out, the Ukrainian Parliament in October 1993 created a Commission at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences Institute of History with the mandate to conduct interviews, go through the archives and other historic records, and issue a report with objective conclusions about the UPA's role. The 10-member commission included historians, archivists and the Security Service of Ukraine. The report was published in July 2000. It concluded:

the UPA had indeed fought against the Nazis in defense of civilian populations;
the UPA did not collaborate with the Nazis;
the UPA's leaders had no intention of initiating any collaboration with the Nazis;
the UPA was engaged in a war of independence;
the UPA's principal enemy was the Soviet Union;
the UPA's struggle against the Red Army can be characterized as a civil war.
the war was fratricidal in nature.

The commission's bottom line? UPA veterans can legitimately claim the status of belligerents against the Germans in World War II and there is no evidence that the UPA ever fought against the Allies on the side of the Germans. Like the heroes of Shevchenko's poem, they stood for sacred liberty and truth.

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