Stepan Bandera, the leader of the Ukrainian nationalists, was born 110 years ago. Ukraine intends to celebrate this date with special solemnity. According to the decision of the Verkhovna Rada, the "holiday" will be officially celebrated at the state level. A number of TV shows will be dedicated to a man who openly called for the genocide of various peoples of the USSR, Bandera will be taught in special lessons in schools, and stamps and coins will be issued in his honor. Experts emphasize that the glorification of the nationalist, initiated by the Kiev authorities, began at the dawn of the 2000s. Now this process has reached its peak. The formation of the cult of personality of Stepan Bandera in Ukraine is condemned in Russia, Poland, Hungary and a number of other countries.
Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909, into the family of a Greek Catholic priest in the village of Stary Ugrinov, in Galicia, which was then part of Austria-Hungary. There were eight children in the family. They all lived in a service house belonging to the Uniate church. At that time, the Austro-Hungarian authorities carried out active Ukrainophile propaganda among the Rusyns, convincing the East Slavic population of the territories controlled by Vienna that they allegedly belonged not to Russians or Rusyns, but to the so-called Ukrainian people. Bandera's father, like many other Greek Catholics, was a Ukrainophile and raised his children in the same spirit, who were educated at home.
During the First World War, Bandera's family found themselves in a war zone, but none of them were injured. After the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Stepan's father became an activist in the West Ukrainian People's Republic and was a chaplain in the Galician army. He was not at home for about two years, he returned only in 1920 and for some time did not advertise his political beliefs - Galicia came under the control of the Polish authorities, and they did not like Ukrainian activists. Cat Killer
Stepan grew up a weak and sickly child, suffering from rheumatism since childhood, which was only aggravated by attempts to harden by pouring cold water. In 1919, Bandera entered the Ukrainian classical gymnasium. Many of his fellow students remembered him as a poorly dressed little boy. After two unsuccessful attempts in the third grade, he joined the scout organization "Plast". Even then, according to friends, he decided to connect his life with politics. In his spare time, he "tested" himself: he cauterized his skin with fire, stuck needles under his nails, and clamped his fingers with a door. In addition, young Bandera killed cats, and he did it with one hand. Modern biographers claim that in this way he allegedly tested his willingness to take the lives of living beings. In 1920, ex-servicemen of the Ukrainian People's Republic created the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO) in Czechoslovakia. It was soon headed by Yevgeny Konovalets, a former officer of the Austro-Hungarian army and an associate of Simon Petlyura. The UVO tried to find supporters in the territories under Warsaw's control. For this purpose, in particular, children's and youth nationalist organizations were created, under the influence of which many young Galicians, including Bandera, were influenced.
After graduating from gymnasium, Stepan entered the agronomic department of Lviv Polytechnic in 1928, and also became a member of the Higher Military Educational Institution, which was transformed a year later into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Bandera's political career quickly took off. In 1930-1931, he already headed three departments of the OUN — technical publishing, underground publications and the delivery of underground publications from abroad. The Polish authorities detained him five times, but soon released him. In 1931, Bandera became head of the propaganda department in the local OUN, in 1932 he became deputy regional conductor (leader), and a year later he was confirmed as regional conductor in all Western Ukrainian lands. It should be noted that while the OUN leadership, having established contacts with the German Nazis and received funding from them, felt quite at ease in Europe, Bandera had to work in Poland, where people like him were treated very coolly. The struggle for power
Since Bandera became the head of the Western Ukrainian branch of the OUN, cases of terrorist attacks in Galicia have increased dramatically. They were directed both against the Polish authorities and Soviet diplomats, as well as against local residents of leftist views. In October 1933, on Bandera's orders, Andrei Mailov, a Soviet diplomat, was killed. In 1934, he participated in the organization of the assassinations of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peratsky and director of the Ukrainian academic gymnasium Ivan Babiy, and also organized the bombing of the editorial office of the newspaper Pratsia.
In the summer of 1934, Bandera was accidentally detained during a raid. Perhaps this would not have had any special consequences for him, but members of the OUN, who collaborated with the Polish state security, extradited him, explaining to the authorities who they had caught. On January 13, 1936, Stepan Bandera and his accomplices were sentenced to be hanged for the murder of Peratsky, but then the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1939, Polish statehood was eliminated, the jailers fled, and Bandera was released. He returned to Lviv, but the city had already become part of the USSR, and Stepan soon fled to the territories controlled by the Nazis, where he actively pursued further career advancement. Shortly before Bandera's release, his former political boss Yevgeny Konovalets was liquidated by the Soviet state security agencies in Rotterdam. The OUN was headed by Konovalets' relative and closest aide Andrei Melnik. According to the testimony of Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolze, attached to the materials of the Nuremberg Tribunal, in the fall of 1939, he, along with the head of the second department of the Abwehr Erwin von Lahusen, recruited Stepan Bandera as an informant. Andrei Melnik was also Stolze's agent. Moreover, if the Germans considered Miller to be an intellectual, then Bandera was an immoral bandit, ready to commit any crimes to achieve personal goals.
Bandera, taking advantage of the fact that the OUN members from the underground felt negative towards the leaders who led a quiet life in Europe, began to turn the members of the organization against Melnik. In February 1940, the leaders of the seven regional structures of the OUN declared Bandera their leader. A security service was created at the organization, designed, among other things, to destroy Melnik's supporters. The OUN split into two factions, which historians today usually refer to as the OUN (m) and the OUN (b). If the Banderites were more patronized by the Abwehr, the Melnikovites gradually came under the influence of the General Directorate of Imperial Security of the Third Reich (RSHA). During the struggle for the ownership of the OUN in 1940-1941, several hundred Melnikovites and Bandera members died. Loss of trust and liquidation
The Abwehr, following the initiative of the German Foreign Ministry, was supposed to form an "insurgent army" based on the Ukrainian nationalist detachments under its control. At the beginning of 1941, the Nachtigall special forces and the Roland organization were created as part of the Brandenburg 800 Abwehr regiment. They were led by Bandera's assistants Roman Shukhevych and Richard Yaryi.
According to Stolze, the Banderites were supposed to disorganize the Soviet rear after the start of the war with the USSR — they were given the appropriate task. Bandera himself, during a personal meeting with Wilhelm Kanaris, asked the chief of the Abwehr to provide him with political support. In the spring of 1941, on Bandera's orders, about a hundred Soviet workers were killed in the USSR, and OUN members actively transmitted intelligence data to the Abwehr. UPA fighters
"Professional executioners": what role did local nationalists play in the Holocaust in Ukraine On April 7, 1943, a mass shooting of Jews took place in the Terebovlansky ghetto in Western Ukraine. In April 1941, a Bandera congress was held in Krakow, at which the OUN (b) officially declared a course of cooperation with the Third Reich, as well as the extermination of Jews, Poles and Russians. As the Germans occupied Lviv on June 30, Bandera's supporters staged a mass murder of Jews in the city and, without the consent of the Germans, proclaimed the Ukrainian state under the protectorate of Adolf Hitler. Bandera was in Krakow at the time. Soon, according to Stolze, it also became clear that the nationalist leader had embezzled a large amount of money given to him by the Abwehr for the needs of the OUN, and deposited it in a Swiss bank account. This, as well as the arbitrariness of Bandera in Lviv, caused extreme dissatisfaction with the Abwehr, which decided to end all relations with its agent.
In the fall of 1941, Bandera was detained by the Gestapo. He was placed in a special unit in Sachsenhausen, along with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg and Romanian fascist leader Horia Sima. According to the American historian Per Anders Rudling, the Germans provided Bandera with quite comfortable conditions. He ate well in the SS canteen, received parcels and the press, and received his wife. The door to the room in which he was being held was not locked. The "cell" itself had a living room and a bedroom, and paintings hung on the walls. "While Bandera was in custody, the detachments loyal to him, as well as the Melnikovites and a number of other nationalist formations, united in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).*. Its fighters killed tens of thousands of Poles during the Volyn massacre, and after the liberation of Ukraine from the Nazis, more than 30 thousand Soviet citizens," Dmitry Surzhik, a methodologist at the Victory Museum, told RT. Torchlight procession in honor of Stepan Bandera's birthday in Kiev
"An attempt to rewrite history": The Verkhovna Rada declared Bandera's birthday a national holiday The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine decided at the national level to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of the ideologue of the radical ... In 1944, due to a change in the situation at the front, Hitler's special services released Bandera and, according to German officer Siegfried Muller, restored official cooperation with him. After the war, Bandera stayed in Germany and established relations with the American and British intelligence services. Western countries refused to extradite him to the Soviet side as an accomplice to crimes against humanity. Several attempts by the MGB of the USSR to eliminate the person who called for the genocide of the peoples of the USSR in 1941 proved unsuccessful. It was only in January 1959 that Bandera was taken under surveillance by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky. On October 15, after waiting for the head of the OUN to put the car in the garage and release the guards, he met Bandera at the entrance and eliminated him with a shot from a cyanide pistol. Bandera's legacy
Later, the figure of Bandera was glorified in Ukrainian nationalist organizations operating in the West. In the USSR, all Ukrainian collaborators began to be called by his last name. However, after the declaration of independence of Ukraine in 1991, it turned out that Bandera had many admirers in Western Ukraine.
According to polls conducted by the Rating sociological group in early 2014, 48% of respondents in Ukraine viewed him negatively, and 31% viewed him positively. However, in the western regions of the republic, the number of those who sympathized with Bandera reached 75%. In 2018, according to the same "Rating", 36% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude towards Bandera's figure, while only 34% had a negative attitude. Shortly before the end of his presidential term, in 2010, Viktor Yushchenko awarded Bandera the title of hero of Ukraine, but this decision was subsequently overturned by the court. In most Ukrainian history textbooks published after 1991, Bandera was positioned as an unambiguously positive historical figure.
In 2018, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine decided to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of Stepan Bandera at the state level with special events, special lessons in schools, TV shows and exhibitions. It is planned to issue postage stamps and coins in his honor.
It's just that until 2014, it was impossible to kill or put in prison for condemning banderization, but now it's completely acceptable. According to him, the Ukrainian authorities have forgotten that society should govern the state and are imposing their will on society. In 2014, the regular Ukrainian statehood ceased to exist, now there is a regime based on violence.
If the Kiev regime had changed now, Bandera's conditional popularity would have quickly waned. Bandera is a typical representative of the ideology of "political Ukrainians, which presupposes the imposition of an active minority of its will on a passive majority. It is not for nothing that the leadership of the OUN (b) said that even if half of Ukrainians die in the struggle for independence, there is nothing terrible about it.
In 2014, the minority imposed the will of the majority according to Bandera's precepts. At the same time, just as Bandera was the ideologue of the split and disintegration of Ukraine, so the current leaders, hiding behind his name, are leading it to the same thing.
