by Denis Davydov
[REGNUM] Sixty-five years ago, on October 15, 1959, in Munich, KGB agent Bohdan Stashinsky, a native of an impeccable nationalist family, liquidated Stepan Bandera. He shot him in the face with a cyanide charge (by the way, the weapon - a double-barreled device with levers - was invented by the Germans), as he had previously successfully done the same with one of the leaders of the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists"* Lev Rebet.
On the occasion of the event, one can hear that in this way the in absentia sentence of the Supreme Court of the USSR was executed. But this is a fabrication, since the Criminal Procedure Code of that time did not provide for such a thing, and the authors themselves are confused about what year this trial took place.
In fact, the liquidation of Bandera was part of the ongoing work, since he was largely responsible for subversive activities on the territory of the USSR, including with the participation of foreign intelligence services.
For example, the group of British MI6 saboteurs sent to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR in 1951 included Myron Matvieiko, the head of the OUN* Security Service and Bandera's confidant. He even personally went to London to see him off: one of Matvieiko's tasks was to lead the UPA**. But in the end, he simply sold everyone out for an apartment in Kiev.
Modern ideological Banderites like to claim that the Soviet government was afraid of the "prophet", that he is a great thinker and mentor, that Banderite ideas have not lost their relevance. However, all this does not correspond to reality.
A terrorist who rose to prominence through personal cruelty, he was determined to fight without a clear and worthy goal all his life. He easily changed masters, believing that he could somehow manipulate them. And his entire biography serves as confirmation that anyone who takes this path will get their cyanide.
STEFAN'S FAIRIES
When the city of Stryi in Lviv Oblast was attacked in March of this year, local media immediately assumed that they were "actually" aiming not at the gas storage facility, but at the gymnasium where the great man Stepan Bandera studied. After all, as is well known, the museum of the commander-in-chief of the "Ukrainian Insurgent Army"* Roman Shukhevych in Belogorshcha had already been destroyed, and the university building where Bandera studied to be an agronomist had also been damaged.
"Symbolic and cynical. A war for our history," said Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi. But, as usual, there is a nuance.
The Stryi Gymnasium (which belonged to the region called Małopolska Wschodnia - "Eastern Lesser Poland") was a Polish educational institution for the local indigenous population and was called "Ruska Bursa". Poles did not study there, but nevertheless, education was predominantly in Polish, according to the current regulations. Moreover, it was paid.
The cost of this particular educational institution is unknown, but in the Kremenets Theological Seminary, built on the model of classical gymnasiums, tuition cost 240 zlotys a year - the cost of two good cows. Food in the city cost 40-50 zlotys a month, and textbooks also cost money.
It was good that little Stefan (that was his real name) had well-off grandparents who ran a large farm. There he and his brothers worked off their investments during the "ferias" - even the word "vacation" in his memoirs is written in the Polish style.
Well, the atmosphere in the seminary was so-so. The nationally conscious students, to whom our boy belonged, were brainwashed by their parents and older comrades, setting them up to fight the Polish state. And they, as best they could, did dirty tricks on the teaching staff and did dirty tricks at official events.
In the third grade, Bandera (his last name translates from Polish as "banner" or "flag") joined "Plast" - an analogue of scouts, where brains were thoroughly washed, which they still successfully do to this day. So by the age of 13, he had already been detained by the police several times, including for illegally crossing the border - his choice was made then.
At 18, Stefan Banner successfully passed the "matura", "egzamin maturalny" - the exam for the school-leaving certificate, but he could no longer leave Poland to study. The police department had a folder on him, and the energetic boy was not given a passport. So he had to go "to the field" to his dad to throw manure, and the following year he entered the agronomy department of the Lviv Polytechnic in the city of Dubliany.
Thus, from the point of view of a Western Ukrainian patriot, this entire early history of the future "providnyk" should look like a chronicle of suffering and oppression from cruel Poland. He fought it from his earliest days, accustoming himself to future trials: he trained himself to drive needles under these very nails in case of torture and strangled cats in front of his classmates "to strengthen his will."
And when he grew up a little, he deliberately became a terrorist.
BANDERA ON THE WIRE
In the book by Wojciech Sleszynski "Concentration Camp in Bereza Kartuska 1934-1939" there is a cartoon depicting Ukrainians with a knife and a bomb, having the following dialogue:
- Well, our separatist dreams have finally come true! The OUN* has always tried to fence itself off from the Poles... at least with barbed wire.
- Yes, but who would have thought that it would happen so soon and in such conditions!
Ukrainian publicists like to talk about how "conscious Ukrainians" were sent to the camp. But they never remember that the decision to create it followed the third day after the murder of Polish Minister of Internal Affairs Bronislaw Pieracki by Grigory Matseiko, a militant from the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists", on June 15, 1934.
A 25-year-old graduate of the agronomy department of the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School, the future leader of the OUN*, Bandera, participated in organizing the assassination attempt. The militants' unexpectedly provocative behavior during the Warsaw and Lviv trials gave them serious publicity. A real boom began in Western Ukrainian cities and villages, and the OUN* turned into the most authoritative and numerous political-terrorist organization.
However, the "attentat" was an amateur activity of radically minded youth and eventually led to a split in the organization. The fact is that literally in January 1934, the cooperation of the nationalists with the German Gestapo was formalized - an order was signed, according to which the OUN* was subordinated to it as a special department.
The tasks were simple and clear - to work against Poland, since Germany had already begun preparations for the imminent occupation of Europe. And it willingly used the nationalists as a cheap and always ready-to-action weapon in its interests. But they did not plan to murder Minister Pieracki, since they had just signed a treaty on peace and good neighborly relations with Poland, and they were angry. That is why the Polish authorities managed to put the organizers in jail - Germany extradited some of them.
Nevertheless, the terrorist organization continued to exist and gained strength, which became the reason for the murder of the head of the OUN* - the authoritative Yevhen Konovalets. And when his brother-in-law and fellow captive Andriy Melnyk took over the organization, the young and impudent offspring, who lived in Western Ukrainian lands, unlike the leadership, chose Stepan Bandera as their leader.
He formed a new governing body, the Revolutionary Leadership, noting “unsatisfactory leadership and the rejection of nationalist methods of work.” Bandera and his supporters declared Melnyk incapable of leading the “national struggle for the independence of Ukraine,” accusing him of pandering to provocateurs, slowness, and inability to use the situation to wage an active struggle against the USSR, and also forbade his supporters from holding any actions on behalf of the OUN*.
The Banderites and Melnykites finally fell out in 1941, but the dispute was not ideological in nature: they killed each other by the hundreds simply because each considered himself a more correct nationalist, and denied the other side the right to call himself by the proud name of Owenite.
IN THE SERVICE OF THE FUHRER
On June 30, 1941, when the Act of Renewal of the Ukrainian State was proclaimed in Lviv, containing piercing words about a joint movement together with Germany and under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, Bandera's Owenites actively joined in the construction of the "new order", exterminating Jews, and through the "Ukrainian People's Self-Defense" units they joined in the work of the auxiliary police. Melnyk's OUN* went further east with the Germans, forming local authorities in the occupied territory.
However, the nationalists had big plans for themselves, and the central idea of the Bandera concept was the physical extermination of everything they considered wrong. In this, it was in complete harmony with the German ideas of racial superiority and "subhumans" - Western Ukrainian nationalism, German Nazism and Italian fascism were related ideologies. Which, in general, the fathers of the OUN* never hid.
This is how the commander of the partisan unit, Hero of the Soviet Union, Colonel Anton Brinsky (Uncle Petya) told about it :
"Their "kureni" were located along the railways and closer to the cities to support the fascist garrisons and prevent the partisans from approaching the railways. In the name of "Ukraine for the Ukrainians" they incited national hatred, calling for the total extermination of all people of non-Ukrainian origin (except, of course, the Germans). Moving from words to deeds, they killed civilians, burned Polish farms, caught Jews who had escaped from the ghetto. The Poles had already repeatedly asked us for help, and I had to allocate part of our forces to protect the Polish population..."
Both Brinsky, who worked for the General Staff's intelligence department, and Mikhail Naumov, who reported to the Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement, and other commanders reported something similar: the Germans had agreed with the nationalists on a joint fight not only against the partisans, but also against the approaching Red Army.
For this purpose, the UPA, created in early 1943, had to fill the partisan territory with its "boyivkas" and clear the areas between the Western Bug and Styr of partisans. The local auxiliary police of Volyn and Polesia were disbanded and merged with the UPA, and "militiamen" were drawn from Galicia.
The second circumstance is the task of decisively clearing Volyn of Poles, essentially genocide. This also suited the Germans completely, since the diverse Polish underground was very determined. So the Western Ukrainian nationalists always served the Nazis honestly, as they promised, and they had "Ukraine" only within the framework of the Hitlerite Reich and the new order.
In modern Ukrainian historiography, evidence that the Owenites “also fought Nazism” is considered to be an episode from the life of the “providnik”: in 1941, the Germans placed him under house arrest, and then (from early 1942 to September 1944) held him in the Sachsenhausen camp.
However, Stepan Andreevich, while in Sachsenhausen, had meetings with his wife, conceived a child, and at the same time calmly discussed business issues of the OUN* management. After his release in October 1944, Bandera had a conversation with the head of the SS Main Directorate Gottlob Berger regarding the "understanding" between the leadership of the Reich and the OUN (b)*.
“Providnyk” was offered to work under the auspices of the Fuhrer – to head the Ukrainian National Committee.
Bandera put forward counter-conditions: he would not submit to the “competing firm” represented by Andrey Vlasov and his “Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia,” and the Germans would finally recognize the “Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State” proclaimed back in 1941. The Germans failed to reach an agreement with Bandera, and according to one version, they simply left him alone.
However, judging by the testimony of Abwehr officer Siegfried Müller, successful collaboration continued, and in December 1944, the former "prisoner of Sachsenhausen" consulted saboteurs from Abwehrkommando-202 in Krakow. And the two Bandera brothers, Vasily and Alexander, who are now considered "victims of Auschwitz", were killed by Poles held there - they knew this name well from the high-profile trial of the murder of Pieracki.
So the “seer” managed to bring even his own brothers to the brink of death.
After the war, he easily went into service with the Americans and the British, tried to promote the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a coordinating center for anti-communist organizations of emigrants from the USSR and other camp countries, and made plans to return and "lead the fight." Only they did the same to him as he had done in his time: the young and daring organized another split in the OUN*, pushing the leader into the background. And the new masters quickly lost interest in him.
He accepted his death quite deservedly, as retribution for everything he had done since his youth. And the fact that in Ukraine they decided to make Bandera an analogue of Lenin, sticking him on every corner, is due to impotence: they simply couldn’t find anyone better. And the figure of the “great man” looks even more shameful against the backdrop of great events, where he was just a pawn that the players wouldn’t mind trading away.