KGB Lies & Ukrainian Resistance

Alik Gomelsky confronts KGB Lies & Uncomfortable questions about Ukrainian Resistance organizations

Taken from the Summer 2024 edition of The Dorchester Review, pp. 60-67.

ARCHIVES ARE DEAD and silent until talented researchers delve in and publish their findings, which often become genuine sensations. Records of the secret services are the crème de la crème — the Klondike, El Dorado, and Fort Knox for history researchers. The KGB archives of the former Soviet Union stand out in this list. Officially, the State Security Committee ceased to exist after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, but in reality the secrets of the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti are still closely guarded. Presidential decrees have repeatedly postponed declassification.¹ In contrast, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) and the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine (SVRU) have declassified an immense number of KGB documents. The archives dealing with resistance and underground organizations, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the faction thereof led by Stepan Bandera, known as OUN(B), as well as by partisan formations like the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), are a rich trove.

The OUN, as a national liberation movement, was created at the first Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Vienna between Jan. 27 and Feb. 3, 1929, in a merger of several organizations. Its goal was to create and strengthen an independent, united Ukrainian state. The first leader of the OUN was Yevhen Konovalets, a former ensign (2nd lieutenant) of the Austro-Hungarian army and a colonel of the army of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR).² He would be assassinated in Rotterdam by an NKVD officer,³ Pavel Sudoplatov, in May 1938, with a bomb disguised as a box of chocolates. After Konovalets’s death, the OUN was led by his relative, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and also a colonel of the UNR army, Andriy Melnyk.

In Feb. 1940, a split occurred in the OUN which witnessed the emergence of the OUN(B), a faction of radical youth led by Bandera who broke with the conservative approach of the OUN leadership. Being located outside of Ukraine, and inclined to less radical methods of resistance, the OUN(M) subsequently refused to endorse the Act of Proclamation of Independence of Ukraine, announced in Lviv on Jun. 30, 1941. The subsequent Nazi repression of the OUN(B) led to a broad popular uprising against the occupiers.

The UPA was a partisan army, the militarized wing of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, conducting combat operations against all occupying forces in Ukraine, although most particularly against the Soviet and Nazi occupations. The first armed units were created in the late summer of 1941, although they were neither subordinate to nor part of the OUN(B) at that time. Toward the end of 1942, the OUN(B) decided to form a partisan army, bringing most of the existing armed groups under a single command. UPA, as the military wing of OUN(B), was officially formed in the spring and summer of 1943. Initially, the leadership of UPA was a triumvirate, but by the end of summer a charismatic leader, Roman Shukhevych, became the commander. Under his leadership UPA units fought on three fronts: against the U.S.S.R., against Germany, and against Polish underground formations. However, under the influence of Shukhevych, the Polish front was dissolved, focusing the efforts of Ukrainian nationalists on the fight for Ukraine’s independence against Stalin’s Communists and Hitler’s National Socialists.

THE CO-AUTHORS of this collection are both under Russian sanctions, prohibited from entering the territory of the Russian Federation by order of Sergey Lavrov’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.⁴ Dr. Luciuk, a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College (RMC), Kingston, has spent decades investigating, writing, and advocating on the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and past and present Soviet-Russian propaganda against Ukrainians. On Mar. 21, 2024, appearing before the Standing Committee on Procedures and House Affairs of the House of Commons in Ottawa,⁵ Luciuk described for MPs the discord provoked by such calculated misinformation.

Dr. Viatrovych, a historian and former director of the archive of the Security Service of Ukraine and of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, has long been involved in the declassification and publication of archives of the KGB of the U.S.S.R., and in the popularization of knowledge about Ukrainian insurgent movements of the 20th century. Viatrovych has been sanctioned by Russia since Nov. 1, 2018.⁶ In 2019, the Russian Federation opened a criminal case against him for so-called “rehabilitation of Nazism” and in May 2024 branded him a “wanted man.”⁷ 

Enemy Archives is a huge, unparalleled project that brings to light previously unknown archival files of the KGB, the OUN/OUN(B) and the UPA. As someone who is a native-speaker of both Ukrainian and Russian, I am obliged to express my deepest respect for the talent of the translator, Marta Daria Olynyk. The Ukrainian-language documents often contain words and expressions from local dialects while KGB documents are typically written in an illiterate mixture of the Soviet-clerical form of Russian. Translating all of this into English must have been onerous.

Two-thirds of Enemy Archives — over 1,000 pages — consists of resistance documents from the OUN, OUN(B), and UPA. Among the rarest are the UPA materials, a large number of which were destroyed by the fighters to prevent papers and photographs from falling into the hands of Soviet punitive organs. The available UPA records can be divided into three categories. The first includes KGB archives collected with a view to studying and defeating the underground such as Chekists⁸ who tracked the UPA, trained and embedded agents among Ukraine’s insurgents, and created provokatsii to besmirch the UPA. The second category consists of materials preserved by UPA fighters to secure the memory of who they were and what they had done; to pass on their hard-won experience, principles of conspiracy, methods, and skill in fighting the U.S.S.R. to subsequent generations.⁹ Finally, the third category includes KGB documents intended to slander the Ukrainian diaspora in the West, which after the Second World War included veterans of the OUN and UPA. After Ukraine gained independence in 1991, all three categories were periodically declassified.

The authors present their discoveries in three main sections: the OUN gets two dedicated chapters and 26 documents; the UPA eight chapters and 98 documents; and Soviet counterinsurgency efforts one chapter and 37 documents. In total, the volume contains 161 unique documents. In turn, the three sections are divided into the following topics: OUN ideology, political resolutions and decisions, creation of the UPA, directives on organization and propaganda, the OUN Security Service, the German occupation, the Polish-Ukrainian conflict, Soviet occupation, and opposing the KGB. The timeline is extensive, from the resolutions of the first OUN congress in 1929 to the daily training schedule for UPA militants in 1946, until a final KGB report on the fight against Ukrainian nationalists in the period of 1944-55, which completes the work.

Enemy Archives contains 80 illustrations and maps of the territorial structures of the OUN(B) and UPA and its raids in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, photographs of OUN(B) and UPA members (both leaders and soldiers), engravings by UPA staff artist Nil Khasevych, and UPA orders, leaflets, appeals, and cash bonds. It also contains diagrams of UPA bunkers compiled by the MGB, and photographs of NKVD-MGB-KGB agents in the anti-partisan repression. 

Especially striking are five “trophy” photographs of fighters killed by Soviet operatives. There are many such snuff images in the archives in which the Soviet “humanists” and “internationalists” loved to create peculiarly cynical post-mortem keepsakes by placing weapons or typewriters on the bodies of those they had killed.¹⁰ Why this obsession? Because the U.S.S.R., its leadership, and supportive citizens, have always treated with disdain both human life in general and the lives of their own compatriots viewed essentially as slaves. 

In part, this explains the Soviet “meat assaults” during the war,¹¹ the subject of conversation between Marshal Zhukov and General Eisenhower.¹² The same goes for the experiment led by Zhukov at the Totsky (or Totskoye) training ground in Sep. 1954.¹³ Currently Russia uses similar tactics in its war against independent Ukraine — the same “meat assaults” and the creation of environmental disasters such as blowing up the Dnieper hydroelectric dam. To this we can add sadistic violence against captured personnel and civilians in Ukrainian territories.

Studying Soviet archives, the researcher cannot help but be indignant at their double standards, cynicism, and hypocrisy. For decades, the Soviet Union provided training and weapons to all kinds of partisan groups in Africa, Asia, and America all the while accusing the West of colonialist or neo-colonialist exploitation of the developing world. Meanwhile the Soviets always suppressed with particular cruelty any attempt by any of the nations within the U.S.S.R. to secure their independence.

THE SOVIET UNION throughout its history fought and destroyed all national liberation movements in its occupied territories and satellite states. Ukrainian nationalists posed a particular danger, having excellent skills in underground political work and armed guerrilla opposition to Communist rule. In the 1940s, faced with the realities of genocide in Nazi-occupied territories, Jewish nationalists also exercised their resistance against Soviet tyranny: the cooperation of the Ukrainian and Jewish activists for the purposes of uprisings, strikes, and other activities posed an even greater danger to Soviet rule. Hence the priority of keeping them divided.

There is much material relating to inter-ethnic relations of Ukrainians with Poles and Jews. It is often alleged that Ukrainian fighters, and UPA militants in particular, were guilty of war crimes against Poles and Jews. While there was assuredly some friction, to this day the inter-ethnic triangle is actively exploited by Russian propagandists to wage an information war against all three. One of the counter-arguments to these accusations can be found in Document #90, “Report on a Meeting Between the UPA and the AK in the Kholm Region,” dated Oct. 31, 1945. It describes a friendly meeting between representatives of the UPA and the resistance Polish Home Army during which a mutual understanding was established to jointly oppose Soviet occupation.¹⁴

It was with the aim of sowing inter-ethnic discord and enmity that the Soviets disseminated false information asserting that the Ukrainian nationalists deliberately exterminated Jews during the Shoah. Of course there was active Ukrainian collaboration in German atrocities, but as Timothy Snyder has pointed out, “Something that is never said, because it’s inconvenient for precisely everyone, is that more Ukrainian communists collaborated with the Germans than did Ukrainian nationalists” and, moreover “very many of the people who collaborated with the German occupation had collaborated with the Soviet policies in the 1930s.” 

At the same time, and making matters worse, Moscow manipulatively and actively involved Jews in the Sovietization and Russification of Ukraine, thereby fostering the impression that Jews were the driving force of Communist imperialism and sowing more division. Hence, the testimony about Ukrainian nationalism given by the Zionist, Avraam Shifrin,¹⁶ who spent 10 years in the Gulag, are vitally important: 

With Horbovy,¹⁷ Soroka, Shukhevych¹⁸ at times we talked at length about the heroic resistance shown by Ukraine to forced Russification. And I realized that the Ukrainian national idea is now moving from the western regions of Ukraine to the eastern, and this is what worries the Soviet government most of all. That is why Ukrainian leaders were often taken to Kyiv and lured with all the benefits, promising immediate freedom if they signed a pre-made brochure.¹⁹ 

In his previous works, and in the interest of reconciliation, co-author Viatrovych repeatedly cited documents confirming not only the positive attitude of Ukrainians towards Jews but also that Ukrainians of Jewish origin bravely fought within the ranks of the insurgent movement against Nazi and Soviet rule and for Ukraine’s independence. He has thus made efforts to discredit the myth of systemic and rampant anti-Semitism in this Ukrainian nationalist movement.²⁰ For his part, Luciuk has made significant efforts to perpetuate in North America and Ukraine the memory of Dr. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish law professor known as “father of the UN Genocide Convention” (and for having coined the term “genocide”) who has been declared an extremist by Putin’s Russia.²¹

One of the most widespread accusations was the alleged anti-Semitism and the supposed complicity of the OUN(B), UPA, and other Ukrainians in the Shoah. Document #121, “Leaflet: Jews — citizens of Ukraine,” dated Mar. 1950, presents an important counterargument. It reads: 

For more than two thousand years the Jewish people were forced to bear on their shoulders all the consequences of life in slavery. And the fact that today you have your own State must be credited not to those Jews who marched in the hundreds of thousands against the red-hot barrels of the Gestapo’s machine guns and submachine guns, but to those Jewish revolutionaries who, with weapons in hands, fought at the walls of the Warsaw ghetto against the German plunderers, those who within the organizations Irgun Zvai Leumi or Stern prepared bombs in order to blow up English or Arab fortresses with them. After two thousand years of heavy slavery the Jews built their own State of Israel and appeared in the international arena as free people with a state. And today, when it is clear to all who should be credited with the creation of the State of Israel, those are the people who should understand the Ukrainian people’s struggle. And just like the Jewish revolutionaries, with weapons in their hands, rose to the defence of the Jewish people’s human rights and achieved those rights, so too we, Ukrainian revolutionary Banderites, have set out on the path of national liberation struggle. We clearly declare in our programmatic resolutions: we are struggling ‘for the equality of all citizens of Ukraine, regardless of their nationality, in state and civic rights and duties, for equal right to work, livelihood, and rest.’ But the lesson of history, the current hostile stance on the part of a great number of Jews and, to a certain extent, the measures of the Muscovite-Bolshevik imperialists, cannot remain without a single trace. In order to secure a proper place for yourselves in the Ukrainian Independent United State, in order to acquire respect for yourselves in Ukrainian society, you, Jewish citizens of Ukraine, should begin applying efforts in this regard already today. Stop being a tool in the hands of the Muscovite-Bolshevik imperialists. Today, during the period of the Ukrainian people’s cruel struggle for their freedom, for national independence, we appeal to you Jews, citizens of Ukraine: Help the Ukrainian revolutionaries because they are also fighting for a better future for you. Join the anti-Bolshevik struggle, and thus you will achieve respect for yourselves and a fitting place in the Ukrainian Independent United State. Death to Stalin and his lackeys! Death to the Muscovite-Bolshevik imperialists! … Long live the state of Israel and friendship between Jewish and Ukrainian peoples! Long live the Ukrainian Independent United State! 

—The Ukrainian Insurgents (Mar. 1950)

Regarding the attitude of Ukrainian nationalists towards Jews, Yaroslav Stetsko wrote in his book: “Not only did the OUN not take part in the anti-Jewish extermination actions taken by the Germans, but the Ukrainian militia (as long as the Ukrainian state authority and OUN had a directorial relationship over it — and before its original form was liquidated as its ranks were filled with riff-raffs [sic], Bolshevik provocateurs, and criminal elements recruited by the Germans) stood on the basis of respecting the rule of law and Christian moral laws.”²² 

Stetsko had the opportunity to explain these complexities before the International Commission in The Hague in 1959. There he provided documentary evidence to expose the falsehood and the slanderous nature of Bolshevik and leftist propaganda. He wrote: “There, the Bolshevik defamation made against our liberation movement at that time and the alleged crimes of the OUN and Ukrainian militia against Jewish and Polish populations — particularly their intellectual elite — were rejected.”

Document #121 indicates that in 1943, the UPA produced leaflets in Russian with calls to Red Army troops of various ethnic (primarily Ukrainian) origins, to join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against both the Nazis and the Soviets. Such leaflets were also addressed to Poles. Of special interest in this section is the response letter from Yaroslav Starukh to Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech delivered on Mar. 5, 1946 at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, which made the term a household phrase.²³ Starukh wrote: 

Mr. Churchill entirely correctly cautions against the unbridled, limitless, aggressive policies of Bolshevik Russia … the voice of warning issued by Mr. Churchill is extraordinarily current. The whole world should be grateful to him for this … The second reason behind the growth of Bolshevik influences in the world is that other nations that live outside the borders of the Bolshevik ‘iron curtain’ do not know the truth about Bolshevik Russia, they do not know how the many nations enslaved in that huge prison of nations are living and suffering in great poverty. They do not know that the Bolshevik regime is a typical totalistic and terroristic regime, in many respects completely similar to the Hitlerite one. They do not know how many people are arrested and shot every day in our country. They do not know how many concentration camps are in our country.

Enemy Archives also provides a profound context for what is happening in the current Russian war against Ukraine: why Ukrainians are so staunchly and persistently fighting today against the aggression of Russia’s homoncule à la soviétique and how the Russia of today is employing some of the same criminal methods used to suppress the Ukrainian national movement as were used by the Soviets between the 1930s and 1950s.

Early in 2024 the Best Historical Materials Committee of the Reference and User Services Association, an affiliate of the American Library Association, selected Enemy Archives as one of the Best Historical Materials published in 2022 and 2023. This was well-deserved. 

However the distinction caused indignation amongst those who, it seemed without reading the book, began to accuse the Association of “whitewashing the history of Ukrainian Nazis” by “honoring a book depicting Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen SS as heroes and patriots,” as reported in The Nation, a “progressive” American monthly.²⁴ 

A reader of Enemy Archives will not find any whitewashing of Nazis. Referring to German and Ukrainian resistance recruitment in western Ukraine and southeastern Poland, Viatrovych and Luciuk emphasize in the preface that the “OUN(B) began preparing armed units in this region as well, in part because of German efforts to mobilize the ‘Galicia Division,’ whose recruitment would, it was thought, seriously reduce the pool of potential candidates for the insurgency.”

Whatever the private opinion of a journalist (such as the writer at The Nation), the same uninformed opinion coming from an official in a respected organization must be addressed: Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director for policy and advocacy at Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote: “This book got a platform it never deserved given the outright misinformation it contains, and we are glad to see this problem being rectified as institutions take a closer look at the book and its dangerous and outrageous claims.”²⁵ It is hard to comprehend what Kirzner-Roberts perceives as the “misinformation” or “danger” in a collection of archival documents. Coming from an organization that promotes Holocaust education in Canada, such comments risk discrediting a leading human rights and social advocacy organization.

Similarly, it comes as no surprise that Dr. Per Anders Rudling, a professor at Lund University in Sweden who has made great efforts to document Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust, would denigrate Enemy Archives: “I am frankly surprised McGill Queen’s Press [would] lend itself to this form of memory activism,” he told the Ottawa Citizen’s defence reporter, David Pugliese. 

Rudling’s remark strikes me as an attack on the free press — as if it is the job of a university press to suppress certain types of documentation and research because of the political interpretation of a professor or journalist. It is also an attack on the importance of translating declassified archives. Does Rudling believe KGB documents should remain secret, and why would that be? Notorious for indulging in memory propaganda and suppression, Russia keeps precisely this sort of exculpatory information about its opponents secret. Do Rudling and Pugliese support Russia’s stance?

Indeed it must be noted that this activist-journalism has caught some attention in Ukraine that has ricocheted in this country: 

Referring to Pugliese as an ‘activist,’ a Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Post that he ‘is known to Ukraine because of his public anti-Ukrainian rhetoric,’ which ‘coincides with Russian propagandist narratives,’ adding that Ukraine would consider him to be, writing in all capital letters, ‘an undesirable person.’ A former senior Canadian government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, echoed this view, telling the Kyiv Post that in his many years ‘of having watched how Pugliese works — Pugliese has all the marks of a “grey zone” media operator,’ who could be ‘incentivized and tasked to carry messages and to focus on issues as per Kremlin direction.’

It is notable that the Russian Embassy in Canada actively promotes Pugliese’s writings via social media.²⁶

Enemy Archives helps break down the false or exaggerated Soviet claims that the Ukrainian underground promoted fascism and collaborated with the Nazis. It will be helpful to scholars lacking proficiency in Ukrainian and Russian who in the past might have accepted KGB forgeries as authentic.

Luciuk and Viatrovych set themselves the task of answering uncomfortable questions about the OUN, OUN(B), and UPA. With this significant volume the authors have accomplished their task. The knowledge it contains stands as a powerful weapon in countering attempts to demonize wartime Ukrainians, something the Soviets, their successors in the Russian Federation, and fellow travellers in the West, have attempted to do over decades of hot and cold war.

Alik Gomelsky’s most recent book, Jewish-Ukrainian Relations: 20th Century, was a finalist for the International Peterson Literary Fund Prize. His forthcoming work, Avraam Shifrin: Noble Fighter for Freedom, was commissioned by the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Notes

1. [in Russian] “On extending the period of classification of information constituting state secrets classified by the Cheka-KGB in 1917-91.” “In 2014, the classification period for the vast majority of documents from the archives of Soviet state security agencies was extended by 30 years — until 2044.” Roi.ru (Russian public initiative), no date.
2. UNR— Ukrainian People’s Republic.
3. NKVD—People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the USSR, successor of the GUGB and predecessor of the MGB, in turn predecessor of the KGB.
4. “Canadian citizens subject to personal sanctions, including a ban on entry into the Russian Federation”, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Aug. 22, 2022.
5. Meeting No. 110 PROC, Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs, Mar. 21, 2024.
6. “Firtash’s tomatoes, Yarosh and Poroshenko’s son: against whom Russia imposed sanctions,” BBC Ukraine, Nov. 1, 2018.
7. “The Russian Investigative Committee suspects the head of the Institute of National Memory of Ukraine of rehabilitating Nazism,” Tass, Mar. 14, 2019; “One of the ideologists of Nazism in Ukraine, Vladimir Vyatrovich, has been put on the wanted list in Russia,” Tass, May 15, 2024.
8. Members of the Cheka, the first in the succession of Soviet secret police agencies.
9. “The unique archive of the UPA, found in a forest in the Lviv region, has been made public,” Unian news, Jan. 15, 2021.
10. Post-mortem photography is the practice of photographing the recently deceased.
11. “Meat assault” refers to the tactic of storming enemy fortifications head-on no matter the cost.
12. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe, Johns Hopkins, 1997 (1st ed. 1948), p. 468-470.
13. Military exercises of the Soviet army, conducted Sep. 14, 1954 in the Orenburg region using atomic weapons. Of the 45,000 military personnel who participated in the Totsky exercises, by 2013 only 2,000 remained alive. Half were officially recognized as disabled. During the exercise, about 10,000 civilians from nearby settlements were also injured. Information about these exercises is still classified in Russia. Source: Vladimir Sokolov. Encyclopedia of Military Art, Minsk, Lit-ra, 1997.
14. The Home Army (Polish: Armia Krajowa; abbreviated AK) was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in Feb. 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej (Armed Resistance) established in the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasions in Sep. 1939. 
15. Timothy Snyder, “Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine — for their own sake, Eurozine online, Jul. 7, 2017.
16. Avraam Shifrin, veteran of the Second World War, officer of the Red Army (a war that he, at the tender age of 22, finished with the rank of captain, recognized as an invalid); senior investigator assigned to criminal cases; legal consultant to the Ministry of Armaments of the USSR; an American and Israeli intelligence agent who had access in the USSR to top secret documents signed by Stalin himself; prisoner of the Gulag for ten years; Zionist; journalist; human rights defender; writer; translator; Israeli civic and political figure; expert on the Soviet penitentiary system; and the “number-one enemy of the USSR,” according to the Soviet press.
17. Volodymyr Horbovy, Ukrainian lawyer, political and military figure. Member of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Veteran of the First World War, Polish-Ukrainian (1918-19) and Civil War (1917-21). Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Prague. He acted as a defender of Ukrainian activists in political trials, in particular Stepan Bandera in two cases. After the adoption of the Act of Proclamation of Independence of Ukraine (Jun. 30, 1941), on Jul. 5, 1941, he was imprisoned by the security police of Nazi Germany (Sicherheitspolizei, SiPo). In 1942 he was released due to health reasons. He took an active part in negotiations between the Polish and Ukrainian underground. In 1947, he was arrested by the Czechoslovak police in Prague and transferred to Poland. In 1948, he was transferred by Poland to the USSR, where he was sentenced to 25 years in a concentration camp. The term was served in full. He was released in 1972 and until the end of his life (1984) was under police supervision.
18. Yuri-Bogdan Shukhevych, a Ukrainian political figure, Soviet dissident, and political prisoner; first arrested at age 11; spent a total of 30 years in Soviet prisons and concentration camps; son of UPA leader Roman Shukhevych.
19. A. Shifrin, The Fourth Dimension. Posev, 1973.
20. Vladimir Viatrovych. The attitude of the OUN towards Jews: the formation of a position against the backdrop of a catastrophe. Ms [publisher], Lvov, 2006.
21. Lubomyr Luciuk. Operation Payback: Soviet Disinformation and Alleged Nazi War Criminals in North America. Kashtan Press, 2022.
22. Yaroslav Stetsko, Ukrainian political and military figure, active member of the OUN, one of the ideologists and leaders of Ukrainian nationalism, the first chairman of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) from its founding in 1946 to his death in 1986. From 1941, the first deputy leader of the OUN(b). With Bandera he authored the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State of Jun. 30, 1941, after which he became the chairman of the board of the restored Ukrainian State. Arrested by the Gestapo in Jul. 1941 immediately after proclaiming independence. In 1942–44 he was in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Cf. Yaroslav Stetsko, Proclamation of the renewal of the independence of Ukraine. League for the Liberation of Ukraine, Toronto, 1967.
23. Yaroslav Starukh, figure of the wartime Ukrainian nationalist movement during, State Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Propaganda of the Ukrainian State Administration, regional leader of the OUN in Zakerzonia, the informal name for Polish territories west of the Curzon Line which used to have sizeable Ukrainian populations.
24. Lev Golinkin, “Why Is the American Library Association Whitewashing the History of Ukrainian Nazis?” The Nation, Apr. 10, 2024.
25. David Pugliese, “Library Association pulls award for RMC professor’s book,” Ottawa Citizen, Apr. 25, 2024.
26. “Canadian Journalist Branded ‘Undesirable Person’ in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, Apr. 3, 2023.