Myroslav Shkandrij has written a magnificent book about Ukrainian nationalism, one that is rich in information, breadth and illumination. By “Ukrainian nationalism” Shkandrij means the organized movements that identified themselves as “nationalist” before, during and after World War II, namely, organizations or movements that are known by their English acronyms as UVO (Ukrainian Military Organization), the multiple OUNs (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army and UHVR (Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council), and various writers whose works expressed, reflected or influenced Ukrainian Nationalism. So for purposes of this book, the author differentiates between “Nationalists” and, for example, democratic nationalists such as those that belonged to UNDO (Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance).
Myroslav Shkandrij is a long time professor of Slavic studies at the University of Manitoba and is the author of numerous books and articles.
Prof. Shkandrij’s “Ukrainian Nationalism” is divided into four parts. The first, titled “Politics,” contains two chapters that expertly and concisely describe the political context in which Galician Ukrainians found themselves beginning with the end of World War I and the various tactics different Ukrainian movements adopted in response to that context with an emphasis on the actions and positions taken by the Nationalists. The first chapter covers the period 1922-1938, and the second chapter covers the period 1939-1956.
The second part of the book is titled “Ideology” and the third “Myth.” The four chapters in these two parts present and analyze the published and non-published views and positions of individuals such as Dmytro Dontsov, who although considered to have been very influential in the interwar period was nevertheless never a member of any of the OUNs, and OUN’s official ideologists such as Mykola Stsiborsky, Yevhen Onatsky and others.
The last part of the book is titled “Literature” and contains five chapters devoted to the main Ukrainian writers who were either members of a Nationalist faction or were fellow travelers, writers such as Olena Teliha, Leonid Mosendz, Oleh Olzhych, Yuri Lypa, Ulas Samchuk and others, plus a chapter devoted to a critic of the OUN’s radically authoritarian phase, the Kyiv novelist Dokia Humenna.
There is much that is fascinating about the information that Prof. Shkandrij has gathered and presented. To cite but a few examples, I was surprised by the diversity of opinions within the OUN, by the relatively non-ideological and tolerant politics of Yevhen Konovalets – the UVO and then OUN leader for most of the interwar period until his assassination by a Soviet agent in 1938 – and intrigued by the debates about which ideals of Ukrainian patriotic womanhood should be adopted. Some of these debates help explain how it came to be that there was a remarkable generation of Ukrainian women who could stand shoulder to shoulder with their male colleagues and match them in strength and intelligence, and yet be fiercely devoted to their children and families and more than capable of being excellent homemakers in the traditional sense, something that at that time was taken for granted.
Prof. Shkandrij informs that an estimated 80 percent of the OUN-B leadership was jailed or killed in the years 1941-1943 (by the Germans). If one adds those who were killed or deported to Siberia by the Soviets in 1939-1941, it becomes clear that, as has been suggested by anecdotal evidence, the membership of OUN-B and then UPA was almost altogether different from that which constituted OUN in the 1930s. As Ukrainian representatives had done at the end of World War I, so likewise did the OUN make overtures to Western democracies prior to World War II, but as before they were rebuffed. And, as OUN’s main ideologist, Stsiborsky wrote in 1940, the OUN’s favorable disposition toward Germany was tactical and based on its anti-Russian orientation. Prof. Shkandrij quotes Stsiborsky to have written that “ ‘Had this anti-Russian front been initiated not by Germany, Italy and Japan, but by England, France and the United States, Ukrainian nationalists would have supported these countries. …’ ”
Despite never having been a member, Dontsov was a major influence on OUN. He extolled action over reflection and was an admirer of Mussolini’s fascism, which in the late 1920s and then the 1930s was widely viewed both inside and outside of Italy as a model for national re-generation. Dontsov later extolled Hitler’s leadership and one of Dontsov’s followers, a man named Rostyslav Yendyk, even concocted a zany theory of racism that imagined that Ukrainians had similarities to the “Nordic race.” But the OUN ideologist Volodymyr Martynets took the view that racism was silly and that Ukrainians are not a blood group but rather a group created by a shared past. Martynets also pointed out that the then (pre-war) leadership of the OUN itself contained persons of Polish, Czech-German, Polish-Russian-Moldavian, German, Tatar and Russian origins. One of many things that becomes clear from reading “Ukrainian Nationalism” is that Stsiborsky, Martynets and the other OUN ideologists expressed a substantial variety of views whether about Dontsov, Italian fascism, German Nazism or relations between Ukrainians and Jews.
It is a bit ironic that it should be a literary scholar who illuminates the context for much of what was going on between the two world wars as well as during and after World War II, but, gratefully, Prof. Shkandrij has succeeded in doing just that. For example, the author explains how the West had basically abandoned western Ukrainians to the Poles despite the fact that interwar Poland had reneged on the promises about Ukrainian autonomy it had made both to Western democracies and to the democratic Ukrainian opposition. He notes how the Poles had carried out mass arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals in 1922, 1930, 1934 and 1939. How several hundred thousand Polish colonists were resettled in Volyn and the Ukrainian part of Galicia (Halychyna); how the Polish government tried to de-nationalize Ukrainians; and how in November 1938 Polish students at Lviv University resolved to ban Ukrainians from the university altogether (there had always been a quota system restricting their number) and how they then set out on a pogrom against Ukrainian shops and institutions in the city.
One more example of contextual illumination that deserves mention is the statement that Prof. Shkandrij found in something that one of the founders and leaders of Rukh, and, thus, one of Ukraine’s founding fathers, Mykhailo Horyn, wrote in 1991. Horyn, as had a number of other leaders of Rukh, had spent time in Soviet concentration camps as a dissident and there he met some old-time members of OUN still serving their sentences. Horyn wrote: “To this day I cannot fathom how we succeeded in educating those kamikazis – not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands of people who were ready to die for the Ukrainian idea. …The thirties developed the idea of a state as the primary value in the system of values. No one asked what kind of state it should be; no one delved into economics, the social structure that had to emerge in that state. Everyone simply agreed: we will win a state, and then everything will fall into its required place.”
One of many things that some of the recent historians of Ukrainian nationalism miss or refuse to acknowledge is the connection between Ukrainian nationalism’s devotion and preservation of the idea of Ukrainian statehood and the emergence of a group of people in the late 1980s and early 1990s who, contrary to the expectations of most, began to advance that same idea.
Prof. Shkandrij presents a multi-dimensional account of Ukrainian nationalism. He writes about the heroic courage and sacrifices of many of its members, and he writes about the movement’s violence, such as, for example, the violence against Polish civilians in Volyn in 1943.
He describes by providing multiple quotations the various ideological attempts to address and try to resolve the conditions of subjugation, oppression and foreign domination in which Ukrainians found themselves. These ranged from Dontsov’s pro-fascist exhortations to the quasi-democratic views simultaneously espoused by some OUN ideologists; from OUN’s complete surrender to radical authoritarianism between approximately 1938 and 1941 to its democratic evolution that took hold in approximately 1942-1943 as a result of the OUN expeditionary groups’ many encounters with Soviet Ukrainians who were vociferously opposed to any kind of authoritarianism, including that of the nationalist variety.
This is a book that is balanced, thoughtful, well-researched and very interesting for anyone with an interest in learning about and understanding not only 20th century Ukraine but contemporary Ukraine as well.
The publisher of “Ukrainian Nationalism” is Yale University Press. The book may be found or ordered in bookstores, as well as obtained through the usual electronic outlets such as Amazon.