Repatriating An Edifying Past: The Diaspora Ukrainian Authoritarian Right and Power Over Memory, 1991–2021

Abstract

The recent history of the Ukrainian authoritarian far right is one of paradoxes. If one looks at the polls, it has performed poorly; its modest successes have been regional and short-lived. On the other hand, it has been highly successful in terms of shaping memory politics in the country. It has had a disproportional influence on history writing, having invested significant efforts into building an effective structure in the field of memory management. Radical nationalists have also come to staff senior positions as deans and vice chancellors at Ukraine’s top universities, the ministry of education, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINP), and the archives of the Ukrainian Security Service (HDA SBU). The hard right has gained a disproportionate influence on “soft issues” of identity and the shaping of “national memory” – not only by running the governmental memory institutes, but also by hands-on drafting of memory laws outlawing “disrespect” for the OUN, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and other historical far-right groups. This study seeks to trace and contextualize the repatriation of the ethnonationalist hard right from emigration and its role in shaping an infrastructure of memory production – in particular, under presidents Yushchenko (2005–2010) and Poroshenko (2014–2019).

Introduction

Since the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005, false allegations of fascism have been used instrumentally by the Russian Federation in its hybrid warfare against Ukraine. The 2014 popular uprising against the corrupt but democratically elected Viktor Yanukovych has been systematically misrepresented as a Nazi coup d’état – and the Russian proxy war in the Donbas falsely presented as a local resistance against a supposed genocide of the Russian-speaking majority population in eastern Ukraine (Davydiuk 2021, 55–81; Rácz 2017; Schneider-Detlef 2021b, 383–399). In connection with the full-scale Russian assault on Ukraine in February 2022, the barrage of systematic misrepresentation has reached unprecedented heights. To the false claims of genocide and Nazism were added allegations of satanism, and the Ukrainian leaders were de-humanized as Neanderthals. More than merely an attack on Ukraine, the Russian assault is aimed against the entire international legal order. Russia denies not only Ukraine the right to self-determination, but does so to all states who have chosen to join NATO since 1997.

Some may argue that a topic, already deeply infected before the Russian aggression started, becomes impossible as an object of inquiry at a time of full-blown war – let alone one legitimized by systematic falsehoods. Scholars ought not, at this time, subject this matter to critical scrutiny. No doubt, Russia’s deliberate distortions aim at derailing critical inquiry – its distortions of the past are intimately linked to its lies about the present. The aggressor has chosen to spin its web of lies around a legacy of historical controversy, which has not been subjected to deeper, critical engagement – what in German is referred to as Aufarbeitung. Regretfully, it is exactly the absence of critical engagement with its own history that has allowed Russia to weaponize an undigested past, as a leitmotif of its systematic assault on the international legal and security order. The Polish-Ukrainian borderlands are haunted by the ghosts of the past; in the absence of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, issues such as local collaboration in the Holocaust, the OUN(b)-UPA’s anti-Polish massacres, and Stalinist terror and mass violence will continue to be exploited by malevolent political actors. ¹

This article argues that these issues are too important to be left in the hands of politically engaged actors. The constant barrage of Russian disinformation complicates a more systematic scholarly engagement with this past. It also underlines why a candid engagement with this history is critically important. Against this backdrop, it is particularly troubling that so much of the historiography on Ukrainian Nationalism remains substandard. A host of issues remain avoided, distorted, or outright misrepresented. There are several reasons as to why a number of problems in modern Ukrainian history remain understudied and obfuscated – some structural or conjunctural, others as a result of deliberate ideological choices. Sorting out facts from fiction in the fog of war is not an easy task; yet Russia’s aggression underlines the urgent need for more, not less, critical inquiry.

DPs, Cold War, and Instrumentalized History

During the Cold War, Ukrainian studies in North America was dominated by Galician Ukrainian émigrés, not least those of the post-war “third wave” of Ukrainian immigrants to North America. In this group, most of whom were Displaced Persons (DPs), radical Nationalist positions were well represented. ² US intelligence estimated in 1948 that up to 80% were loyal to the most radical wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), known as the OUN(b) (Breitman and Goda 2010, 78). This intensely political community contained several highly educated people, many of whom came to form a social elite within the community. The echo of this Cold War migration still reverberates in the field of Ukrainian studies today. One group of wartime OUN(b) activists, organized around Mykola Lebed’ (1909–1998), referred to themselves as the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (zpUHVR). Through a network in New York, Munich, Frankfurt, and London, it administered from 1952 to 1991 the Prolog Research and Publishing Corporation, Inc., a façade for a CIA-funded program codenamed AERODYNAMIC, QRDYNAMIC, PDDYNAMIC, and QRPLUMB. The Lebed’ circle consisted mainly of revisionist former OUN(b) members who had split off from the organization in 1948/1954. This outfit trained a generation of activists active in the grey zone straddling analytics, scholarship, and covert political activism. Its associates would come to be very prominently represented in the field of Ukrainian studies, which started to enter the academic mainstream in the 1970s. Older émigré activists were accompanied by the new generation of baby boomers, born in the West, who were coming of age in the final decades of the Soviet Union. Another important role was played by veterans of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, known euphemistically as the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army (1UD UNA), or dyviziinyki – and their children. These men were not DPs but “surrendered enemy personnel” and POWs (Khromeychuk 2013, 137; Savaryn 2007: 372–386; Kubijovyč 1982–83). They were but one of several compromised groups, who, with “the complicity of Canadian officials” were brought to, or “dumped” in, Canada (Troper and Weinfeld 1989, 307; Rodal 1986, 456). Many of the émigrés and their children were acculturated in the youth league of OUN(b), the Ukrainian Youth Association (Spil’ka ukrains’koi molodi, SUM), or the nationalist scouting organization Plast (Maciw and Momryk 1988). In Canada, the center of Ukrainian diaspora memory activism, a central role is played by the OUN(b)’s main front organization. Set up as the League for the Liberation of Ukraine (Liga vyzvalennie Ukrainy; LVU) in Canada in 1949, colloquially referred to as the Liga (league), it was renamed the League of Ukrainian Canadians, LUC (Liga ukrains’kykh kanadiitsiv; LUK) in 1993. For decades, the OUN(b) has played a central role in the leadership of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC).

The OUN and Academic Networks

The attitude of the OUN(b) to academic inquiry was and remains contradictory. It always had the most members and financial resources. Yet, according to political scientist Taras Kuzio (b. 1958), himself raised in the Banderite diasporan environment in Britain, the OUN(b) has “always been extremely antagonistic toward becoming involved in the academic world, probably because they don’t trust those academics, they think they can’t control them, can’t control the output that they produce”(Kuzio 2015b; Kuzio 2020: 7, 93, 101). The OUN(b), much like their Soviet adversaries, were highly secretive and conspiratorial, and their archives remain inaccessible. ³

While Kuzio is correct that OUN(b)-affiliated academics play a modest role in historiography and scholarship, they were all the more active in setting up institutional frameworks, in which its activists played central roles shaping academic networks in the field of Ukrainian studies. The legacy of these networks reach far beyond the immediate field of Ukrainian studies; they extend to related fields such as nationalities, diaspora, and ethnic studies. The genealogy of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and Nationalities Papers founder Stepan M. Horak (1920–1986) illustrates well this intersection between ideology, political activism, and covert action during the Cold War. ⁴ Marta Bogachewski-Chomiak (b. 1938) stresses Horak’s central role and “his founding of nationality studies, which was initially funded by the rightmost group of the OUN” (Bogachewski-Chomiak 2016). ⁵ Horak’s colleague Leonid Rudnytzky (b. 1935) argues that “the Father of the Association for the Study of Nationalities was Stepan Horak; its Godfather was the Shevchenko Scientific Society, USA” (Rudnytzky 2012, 831). Horak was not alone; other OUN(b) activists played key roles in setting up Ukrainian studies in North America. ⁶ The role of political operators such as Horak and of the OUN(b) in shaping the organizational frameworks, including the ASN and Nationalities Papers, awaits its historian.

Cold War realities strongly influenced the lines of inquiry pursued by these scholarly networks. While the focus was on ethnicity and nationalism in Eastern Europe, inquiry into the Holocaust, and, in particular, Ukrainian political violence were less than a priority during the first three decades of the ASN’s existence. ⁷ Much of its historiography – particularly that which emerged out of the OUN tradition – employs peculiar, selective, and self-serving definitions of fascism, precluding the very existence of Ukrainian fascism and collaboration during World War II (Laruelle 2021, 16–17; Himka 2021, 149–151; Rudling 2021; Umland 2008b). In recent years, archives have opened at the same time as a generational shift has brought changes in inquiry, something reflected in the programs of the ASN conventions as well on the pages of Nationalities Papers over the past twenty years. Yet why was this field so late to integrate these topics of inquiry? And why do the topics of the OUN and local collaboration in the Holocaust continue to generate so much resistance and opposition? Institutional and conjunctural factors of the Cold War strongly influenced the political culture of the community, which precluded critical engagement with the legacy of the Ukrainian far right, let alone agency in the Holocaust (Himka 2006).

Policing Ukrainian History

North American Ukrainian studies centers still administer a wealth of funds and fellowships by Waffen-SS and OUN(b) veterans, with a value of well over a million dollars. ⁸ The enthusiasm of organized Ukrainian studies to address Ukrainian agency in wartime political violence has been limited. Researchers pursuing undesirable lines of inquiry have to reckon with authoritarian ultranationalist community organizations interfering in academic appointments, censoring and ostracizing dissenting voices. This has taken the form of “task forces” carrying out coordinated campaigns of approaching universities with the purpose of discrediting, silencing, and de-platforming critical scholars (Himka 2012; Magocsi 2018, 35–55; Marples 2020, 148–155; Rudling 2022, 42–60). Making the engagement of difficult historical matters socially costly remains a considerable disincentive for many young, non-tenured academics to pursue certain lines of inquiry.

There are several reasons as to why the émigré Ukrainian hard right has not been the object of serious studies. The relatively limited scholarship that does exist tends to focus on the immediate post-war years; little attention has been given to the émigré ultranationalist networks after 1956. ⁹ As a result, the sizable Galician Ukrainian diaspora’s impact on shaping memory cultures in the homeland has been less scrutinized than that of the other comparable central European communities (Hockenos 2003).

Ukrainian diaspora scholarship strongly prioritizes episodes in which Ukrainians figured in the role of victims. A central role in its memory culture is occupied by the narration of the 1932–1933 Soviet famine as Holodomor – the genocide of the Ukrainian nation. The diaspora organizations’ narrative of the famine diverges strongly from scholarly consensus. Grossly inflated tallies of 10,000,000 genocide victims in the Ukrainian SSR has been a staple in the UCC’s rhetoric; a threefold inflation of the numbers ascertained by dispassionate academic inquiry. ¹⁰ Regretfully, these inflated numbers have become naturalized in the rhetoric of five Ukrainian presidents, from Kravchuk to Poroshenko. They were used in tandem with veneration of the legacy of the OUN(b)/UPA under Presidents Viktor Yushchenko (2005–2010) and Petro Poroshenko (2014–2019). The dearth of scholarly studies has opened for the weaponization of the past, in which the OUN(b) has had a disproportionate impact on the shaping on the memory landscape in Ukraine after 1990.

This article aims at opening this topic as an object of more systematic inquiry, taking particular interest in how diaspora memory activists have actively injected themselves into Ukrainian memory politics. These diaspora organizations have been bankrolling and actively promoting a set of actors across the fields of historical inquiry, memory activism, and ethnonationalist political activism. Studies by political scientists tend to be more theoretical, systematic, and quantitative in nature, and some key aspects of this activism tend to fall outside the scope of their analysis. With the exception of a short period from 2012 to 2014, the role of the far right – in terms of mandates and direct, political influence on Ukrainian politics – has been modest: it has not fared well in the polls after 2014 (Umland 2020). Ukraine indeed remains an anomaly in that it, unlike most of its neighbors, lacks a strong far-right faction in parliament.

Is the Ukrainian ethnonationalist right a matter of concern to which scholars ought to divert attention? This article argues that it is, and it further seeks to widen the lens beyond that which is often used by political scientists, to include the arena of “soft power” such as memory and identity. In these arenas, its influence and impact has been significant and indeed disproportional in relation to its limited formal political representation. This manifests itself physically in the Ukrainian public space, not least through the mushrooming of hundreds of monuments to OUN(b) and UPA leaders such as Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), Dmytro Kliachkivs’kyi (1911–1945), Yaroslav Stets’ko (1912–1986), and other radical Nationalists in the Ukrainian public space. ¹¹ Their legacy is venerated by the state through the re-designing of the uniforms of the Ukrainian army after the (largely fictional) uniforms of the UPA, as well as the adoption of the OUN(b) verbal salutation by the Ukrainian armed forces. ¹² Partially as a result of the Russian aggression, levels of popular approval of the historical far right are soaring. Legal measures have been introduced to police the writing of history; since 2015, Ukrainian law outlaws “disrespect” for a number of World War II-era far-right groups (Marples 2018; Kasianov 2022, 110–111).

At the center of the analysis stands the ultranationalist ethnonationalist right-wing tradition of the diaspora; particular attention is given to its networks, strategy, and impact on historical memory. Central here are the networks of the émigré OUN(b), centered in Toronto, Canada, its subsidiaries and partners in Ukraine, and their memory production, not least the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement (Tsentr doslidzhen’ vyzvol’noho rukhu; TsDVR), an OUN(b) “front organization” tasked with the instrumentalization of history (Homziak and Kovalyk 2018: 175–176; Lypovets’kyi, 2010: 84). From 2006, but in particular after 2014, its affiliates came to occupy key positions in state agencies tasked with shaping collective memory. TsDVR activists headed the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory and the former archives of the Ukrainian KGB. They were found in senior academic positions as dean and rector at Ukraine’s top universities, and one of its affilates served as Minister of Education. This article approaches these developments from the vantage point of the field of humanities – in particular, history and memory studies.

Long-Distance Ultranationalism

The history of the Ukrainian far right is sectarian and complex, as the OUN went through a number of violent splits. In 1940, its mainly émigré-based, more conservative, founding generation of World War I veterans faced a rebellion from the more radical Galician leadership, which was organized around Bandera, Stets’ko, Shukhevych, and Lebed’, people too young to have participated in the Great War. Rather, they were shaped by authoritarian Poland in the late 1920s and 1930s. The radical splinter group became known as OUN(b) after Bandera; whereas the original group is known as OUN(m) after its leader Andrei Mel’nyk (1890–1964). The OUN(b) reorganized itself in the West after the war and remained committed to a totalitarian, voluntarist ideology throughout the Cold War period. A smaller, revisionist splinter group, known as the OUN(z) or zakordonnyi (abroad), split off from the OUN(b) in 1948/1954 (Burds 2001, 16–18; Panchenko 2003, 71–90). Funded by the CIA, the OUN(z) paid lip service to the idea of democracy, yet – similarly to the OUN(b) – remained deeply conspiratorial and non-transparent. OUN(z) veteran and scholar Vasyl Markus (1922–2012) explained how

Membership in the two nationalist groups was conspiratorial. Members had pseudonyms internally and sometimes belonged only to small primary units (zveno), which had up to five members…. The OUN-B also operated through special functional departments, for example, contacts with Ukraine (KZ), security services (SB) and party militia (ad hoc boivky). Right-wing parties (Nationalists and Hetmanites) had sophisticated admission procedures, including a membership oath…. Evidence of this sort supports D[mytro] Dontsov’s idea that the organization constituted more of an elite order than a “party.” (Markus 1992, 118).

The concept of vanguardism is intimately associated with Leninism. Vanguardism is a strategy, according to which the most conscious and “advanced” elements should take the lead. Leninist vanguardism inspired other groups across ideological lines (McAdams 2022). The line between the far left and far right was not always firm; historically, there has been movement between the two. Not unlike how Mussolini began as a radical socialist, the “spiritual father” of the OUN, Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), had a background as an orthodox Marxist: “following a path of intellectual development similar to that of Mussolini or Lenin, Dontsov came to believe that only a disciplined vanguard of professional revolutionaries – an initiative minority – could inspire the masses to carry out their historic mission,” his biographer notes (Erlacher 2021, 95). Similarly, in his youth, Stepan Bandera was an admirer of Lenin and Leninist organizational principles. The concept of a vanguard party is also found among fascist parties (Eatwell 1997, 215). Today, the LUC comports itself as “at the vanguard of the Ukrainian issue” (Liga Ukraintsiv Kanady 2021).

Franco, Chang Kai-Shek, and the ABN

Abroad, the OUN(b) was centered in Toronto, Munich, and London. It networked with remnants of the junior partners of the Axis powers, including the Ustaša, the Iron Guard, and the Tiso regime within the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) (1946–1996/2000). From 1946 until his death in 1986, it was led by Yaroslav Stets’ko, thereafter by his widow Yaroslava, or Slava, Stets’ko (1920–2003) (Birkholz 2017; Rossoliński-Liebe 2014, 323–330). ¹³ In the late 1940s, it trained its paramilitaries in Germany, the UK, and Spain in preparation for the outbreak of a World War III, but, after the Ukrainian nationalist underground had been defeated around 1947, it worked for a few years with Western intelligence services to infiltrate the USSR. OUN attempts at sending emissaries into Ukraine ended in disaster, following which, in the 1950s, Western intelligence services severed their relations with the OUN(b) (Ruffner 1998, 30; Breitman and Goda 2010, 80–84). Bandera’s totalitarian aims at monopolizing control over the movement split the organization twice. During the remainder of the Cold War, the US instead underwrote the more moderate offshoots of zpUHVR and OUN(z) – whereas the OUN(b) and Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations were supported by Chang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan and Franco’s Spain (Birkholz 2017; Dorril 2000).

Until 1988, the OUN(b)’s connections with the homeland were all but severed. The MVD/MGB/KGB penetrated the organization and brutally assassinated the leaders of the OUN(z) – Lev Rebet (1912–1957) – and of the OUN(b) – Stepan Bandera (Staschinski, 2024). Recurring attempts to infiltrate the Ukrainian SSR were often disastrous. These included the so-called Dobosh case in 1972 in which Yaroslav Dobosh (1947–2015), a young OUN(b) emissary from Belgium, was detained and forced to expose the OUN(b)’s operations to the media (Antoniuk 2019; Bobkov 1987; Vedeneev and Bystriukhin 2006, 69–70). It was followed by similar KGB schemes, such as operations Kaskad (1973–1983) and Boomerang (1976–1988) in which Soviet security organs managed with considerable success to compromise the OUN(b) émigré leadership (Antoniuk 2019; Bobkov 1987, 6; Vedeneev and Bystriukhin 2006, 69–70).

Normative Multiculturalism and Separatism

The OUN(b) would be considerably more successful in the field of memory production – not least in the manufacturing of a heroic narration of the organization’s own past. In Canada, the introduction of official, normative multiculturalism in 1971 was a boon to the OUN(b). To Stets’ko’s followers in the Liga, normative multiculturalism meant funding for its activities, book and paper publishing, right down to the erection of monuments to their heroes. Whereas the children of previous waves of Ukrainian immigrants to Canada had assimilated into Canadian mainstream culture, many of the post-war Ukrainian immigrants proudly refused (Himka 2006, 21). They were not able, however, to prevent the assimilation of the second and third generations into the fabric of the Canadian mainstream. Despite – or perhaps because of – their best efforts to resist assimilation (since the LVU did not recruit from previous waves of Ukrainian immigrants), their numbers have declined since the peak of multiculturalism in the 1970s and the “Second Cold War” of the early 1980s. Through their dominant role in the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Liga has strong, direct contacts to Canadian political elites – Liberals and Conservatives alike. Its relations with Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (b. 1959, PM 2006–2015) were particularly strong. In the current Liberal government, the Liga maintains especially close ties with Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland (b. 1968), who is frequent guest at their events, and refers to its leadership as “friends”(Rudling 2022, 48). Through their community organizations, credit unions, prime real estate, and continuous federal and provincial funding, the Liga and UCC have considerable financial muscle.

In addition to Leninist vanguardism, the émigré OUN(b) relied on entryism – that is, the political strategy to join and take over other organizations, a strategy often associated with Trotskyist groups (Alexander 1991, 340–355). Perhaps the most successful such OUN(b) operation was carried out in 1980, when the OUN(b) took control of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) in the US (Kuropas 2015). OUN(b) cadres serve as heads of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress as well as the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (1967–1993) (Svitovyi Kongres Vil’nykh Ukraintsiv, SKVU), since 1993 the Ukrainian World Congress.

Repatriating the Far Right

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of an independent Ukraine in 1991 meant fundamentally changed political conditions. In the diaspora, the political changes following the end of the Cold War necessitated changes also to the émigré OUN(b). Ranking Melnykite Pavlo Dorozhyns’kyi (1926–2015) had returned to Ukraine from the US in 1990. The same year, OUN(b) leaders Vasyl’ Oles’kiv (1924–2016) and Slava Stets’ko visited Ukraine for the first time since World War II, returning there permanently in 1991. The leader of the OUN(z), Anatol’ Kamins’kyi (1925–2019) and the editor of its affiliated journal Suchasnist’ Taras Hunchak [Hunczak] (1932–2024) returned to Ukraine for lecture tours of Ukrainian universities (Panchenko 2003: 175–176; Riabenko 2006, 93). Relatively few émigrés returned to the post-Soviet homeland to live their Ukrainian dream; the overwhelming majority stayed in North America, from which they worked to influence the development of their ancestral homeland from afar. These included Stets’ko’s nephew Oleh Romanyshyn [Romanyschyn] (b. 1941), long-term editor of their main organ, Homin Ukrainy, and head of the LUC. In emigration, the Banderites continued fundraising, lobbying politicians, and seeking to influence the writing of Ukrainian history. The rivalling OUN wings diverged politically as well as organizationally; when the Organization could finally return to Ukraine, it was more fractioned than ever before: in addition to the OUN(b), OUN(m), and OUN(z), a new group led by Mykola Slyvka and Ivan Kandyba (1930–2002) set up the OUN in Ukraine (OUNvU) in L’viv in 1993, consisting mainly of old OUN members, who worked in Ukraine only. “The OUNvU was the result of the merger of State Independence of Ukraine, Derzhavna Samostiinist’ Ukrainy (DSU) with dissenting KUN sympathizers, objecting to the dominance of representatives of the diaspora,” who regarded the OUN(b) as too conciliatory toward the government and as betraying revolutionary nationalist principles (Osvita 2011; Riabenko 2006, 93).

By 1991, the OUN(z), the influence of which greatly diminished after CIA funding dried up that year, could not qualify as “far right” in any reasonable definition of that word. The OUN(m), whose leader in 1939 assured Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) that he shared the tenants of National Socialist ideology and whose members were involved in very significant political violence during WW II, mellowed considerably after 1947, merging with the more moderate followers of the Rada of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR Rada) – that is, the remnants of the exiled government set up in 1918 (Rudling 2011, 43n52; Radchenko and Usach 2020). Though its leader Mykola Plav”iuk (1927–2012) served in German uniform during the final stages of World War II, by the 1990s, his group could rather be characterized as a conservative ethno-national cultural association, preoccupied with identity and memory rather than electoral politics (Duda, 2012). In August 1992, on the first anniversary of Ukrainian independence, Plav”iuk, in a solemn ceremony, handed over the credentials of the UNR Rada to Leonid Kravchuk (1934–2022), the first president of independent Ukraine (Kaltenbrunner 2017, 464–473; Kuzio 2015a, 177).

OUN(b) and KUN

By comparison, the OUN(b) started a frantic campaign to reestablish itself as a political force in Ukraine. Slava Stets’ko returned to L’viv in 1991 in time for the semicentennial of her husband’s June 30, 1941, declaration of statehood. Some of the cult following of her late husband was carried over to her. If her late husband had been referred to as “a father of the nation,” Slava Stets’ko’s followers described her as “Mother of Ukraine” (Häggman 2020). In March 1992, she led the Conference of Ukrainian Nationalists, which laid the ground for the preparation for the establishment of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (Konhres Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv; KUN), its local party in Ukraine. The Conference formalized the connections between the diaspora and local adherents, among them MP Stepan Khmara (1937–2024) and historian Yaroslav Dashkevych (1926–2010) (ABN Correspondence 1992a; ABN Correspondence 1992b). In October 1992, the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists was established as a political party, and was officially registered as such the following year (Den’ 2012). For the founding congress of KUN, Zaporizhzhia historian Eduard Andriushchenko lists the leading representatives of the global clandestine OUN(b) that arrived to Ukraine; Roman Zvarych [Zwarycz] (b. 1953) from the US, Omelian Kushpeta (1924–2005) from the Netherlands, Omelian Koval’ (1920–2019) from Belgium, Orest Steciw (b. 1947) from Canada, the above-mentioned Vasyl’ Oles’kiv from England, and Ivan Ravliuk (1921–2013), known as “Serbyn,” from Scotland (Andriushchenko 2015, 229). KUN worked to incorporate a number of groups into an umbrella structure – among them the ABN and the all-Ukrainian Brotherhood of the OUN-UPA.

In the 1980s, the ABN had enthusiastically embraced the Afghan Mujaheddin. In the 1990s, researcher Serhii Zhyzhko’s claims the OUN(b) and KUN cooperated closely with Chechen separatist leaders Dzokhdar Dudaev (1944–1996), Aslan Maskhadov (1951–2005), Zelimkhan Yandarbiiev (1952–2004), Shamil Basaev (1965–2006), and other militants (Zhyzhko 2014). Whereas KUN strongly opposed Ukraine’s giving up its nuclear weapons (Kulyk 1993, 164), it differed from other far-right groups in that it did not support anti-American positions. On the contrary – and in accordance with the ABN doctrine of being “the West’s most faithful allies” – Slava Stets’ko continued to argue the line, laid down by her late husband, that the US ought to be Ukraine’s most important ally in the struggle against Bolshevism (Birkholz 2017; Andriushchenko 2015, 106).

The overseas OUN(b) bankrolled extensive reprints of the works of Dontsov and continued to work through front organizations, teaming up with other ultra-nationalist parties, such as the Ukrainian National Party (UNP), DSU, and the Ukrainian Inter-party Assembly (Ukrains’ka mizhpartiina asambleia; UMA) (Wilson 1997, 79). Using the considerable financial muscle of the overseas organization, KUN actively reached out to nationalistically minded academics. Historians, in particular, played important roles in these processes, as control over memory was a key priority of the repatriated organization. Dashkevych was soon accompanied by Serhiy Kvit (b. 1965), who, at the time, was pursuing his PhD at the small émigré Ukrainian Free University in Munich, loosely affiliated with the OUN(b) (KUN-UKRP-URP Nationali’nyi Front 1998). Together, they set out to write an ethnocentric narration of Ukrainian history (Burakovs’kyi 2015, 113).

The OUN(b)’s own publications describe their organization as “a global clandestine structure [with] the bulk of its activities carried out through various OUN(b) façade structures” (Lypovets’kyi 2010, 84). In addition to the above-mentioned DSU, UMA, and KUN, it runs a set of scholarly associations, such as the M. Mikhnovs’kyi Scientific Society, established in 1995, and the H. Vashchenko All-Ukrainian Pedagogical Society, established on the initiative of KUN. In terms of influence and impact, the most impressive is the TsDVR, accompanied by “a number of patriotic and charity organizations operating in Ukraine” (Lypovets’kyi 2010, 84; Andriushchenko 2015, 230). Upon repatriation, the OUN(b) secretariate was relocated to “a large building on 9, Yaroslaviv val, housing the Center for National Rebirth, the editorial board of its official paper Shliakh peremohy, its ideological journal Vyzvol’nyi shliakh, the Ukrainian Information Agency, the Yury Lypa Publishing Association, the Kyiv Brotherhood of the soldiers of OUN-UPA, and other organizations” (Lypovets’kyi 2010, 84). Further organizations were established over the 1990s, including the Stepan Bandera Trident Civic Patriotic Sporting Organization (Hromad’ka sportyvno-patriotychna orhanizatsiia ‘Tryzub imeni Stepana Bandery’) a paramilitary organization set up to counteract actions by its opponents and to defend the activities of the KUN. According to Andriushchenko, the militants of the Stepan Bandera Trident are subordinated directly to the OUN(b) rather than to KUN (Andriushchenko 2015, 58–59).

Zvarych and Stets’ko

Roman Zvarych had been Yaroslav Stets’ko’s personal secretary at the headquarter of the Foreign Section of the OUN(b) (ZCh OUN) headquarter on Zeppelinerstrasse 67 in Munich (Obozrevatel’ 2005). Zvarych moved to Ukraine in 1992, renounced his US citizenship one year later, and was naturalized as a Ukrainian citizen in 1995 (Kuzio 2005). In September 1994, Zvarych, though deputy head of KUN, left it for Narodnyi Rukh Ukrainy (Andrishchenko, 58; Burakovs’kyi 2007, 153–202).

After Slava Stets’ko obtained Ukrainian citizenship, she was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in March 1997 (Zhyzhko 2014; Andriushchenko 2015, 83–84). As she took the oath of office, she stated:

I am grateful to the constituents who voted for me and I am aware of the fact that it was not I who won this election. This victory belongs to Stepan Bandera, General Roman Shukhevych, Yaroslav Stets’ko, thousands of unknown OUN members, UPA soldiers and the ideals of Ukrainian Nationalism. Millions have died, yet we are alive. The blue eyes of the nation are looking at us and asking ‘when will you deliver us from this economic, political, and social crisis?… When will organizations that sanction anti-Ukrainian and anti-state activities be banned? When will there be historical justice for those who fought for Ukrainian statehood – members of the OUN and UPA? When will they be honored by the Ukrainian State for which they sacrificed their blood? …. It is necessary for us to awaken the patriotism that lies deep within the soul of every Ukrainian. I believe that the Ukrainian nation will become the keeper of its castle. I believe in the strength of Ukrainian nationalism, I believe in the Ukrainian nation! Glory to Ukraine! (Stetsko 1998, 17–18)

Her speech triggered intense reactions; the chamber erupted with booing and catcalls, reflecting the sharp polarization – not only in the chamber but in the country at large. “Half the Audience Flourishing, the Other Half Fading,” one newspaper reported, somewhat dramatically (Den’ 2012). Beyond Galicia, in 1998, Ukraine was not yet ready for the Dontsovite message. The OUN(b) sections repatriated to Ukraine as KUN cautiously moderated its positions and showed increasing willingness to compromise with the government as well as its opponents. Slava Stets’ko, who passed away in Munich in 2003, did not live to see the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005, the closest KUN ever got to a political breakthrough. Under Yushchenko, Zvarych came to serve briefly as minister of Justice (though he was soon forced to resign after having falsely claimed to hold a PhD from Columbia University) (Kuzio 2005).

To the right of KUN, the Ukrainian National Assembly – Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) (1990–2014), led by Roman Shukhevych’s son Yurii (1933–2022) – retained a commitment to more radical positions, including uncompromising Dontsovite natsiokratsiia or authoritarian ethno-nationalism (Wilson 1997, 77; Rudling 2014, 258). Among these groups, we also find the DSU: open only to ethnic Ukrainians, which, according to political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov, propagated the “establishing of a national dictatorship and adhered to the fascist legacy of the OUN’s ideologists Dontsov, Stsibors’kyi and Bandera” (Shekhovtsov 2011, 210). “Compared to the épater la bourgeoisie UNA or DSU, the congress had a reputation of ‘respectability,’ and a ‘solid’ organization (though that respectability was relative),” one study concludes (Andriushchenko 2015, 58).

Training Memory Managers

The years in North America had exposed and prepared the diaspora for culture wars. Upon independence in 1991, many were convinced that the battle over Ukrainian identity would take place within the field of memory. They came well-prepared for this struggle and went about it rather systematically. Volodymyr Kosyk (1924–2017), a senior ABN and OUN(b) functionary in France, became something of the organization’s “court historian.” From 1992, he was a regular visitor to Ukraine, teaching special courses at universities in Ivano-Frankivs’k, Drohobych, Ternopil, and Kyiv. Appointed professor at the Ivan Franko University in L’viv in 2000, Kosyk became one of the co-organizers of the TsDVR. The initiative to set up a façade organization tasked with the instrumentalization of history came from the very top of the OUN(b). In 2006, Slava Stets’ko’s successor Andrii Haidamakha (b. 1945) explained how his organization had “called the ‘Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement’ into life,” envisioning what Lypovets’kyi calls its “facade organization” to “become the most authoritative institution for scientific research and academic elucidation of our history of state building,” stressing how it “actively supports the realization of the President’s plans for a Ukrainian ‘Institute of National Memory’” (Homziak and Kovalyk 2018, 175–176; Lypovets’kyi 2010, 84).

The TsDVR describes itself as “a non-government research institution, which studies the history of state creation (UNR and ZUNR), civic-political movements (UVO, OUN, UNDO, the dissident movement, and others); military formations (the Legions of the USS, UHA, UPA, and others); and the punitive-repressive politics of the occupation regimes of the Ukrainian lands in the XX century” (V”iatrovych 2003). As honorary chairman of the TsDVR, Kosyk was joined on its Board of Directors by other émigré OUN(b) veterans such as Romanyshyn (UCC 2019). The journal Ukrains’kyi Vyzvol’nyi Rukh (The Ukrainian Liberation Movement) was set up in 2001 as a forum linking the émigré organization to pro-Nationalist historians in Ukraine, such as Dashkevych and Volodymyr Serhiichuk (b. 1950), and young radical student activists, among them Volodymyr V”iatrovych (b. 1977) and Mykola Posivnych (b. 1980) (Ukrains’kyi Vyzvol’nyi rukh 2003, 2).

The tone was set in the first article of Ukrains’kyi Vyzvol’nyi Rukh:

A part of Ukrainian society, in particular its governmental elite, is unable to objectively evaluate the activities of the Ukrainian insurgents and appreciate the fighters for the freedom of our people. As a result, Ukrainians have still not seen an official recognition of the national-liberation character of the struggle of the OUN and UPA. (V”iatrovych 2003, 5)

V”iatrovych, the most prominent of these memory activists, was born and raised in L’viv. He matriculated at the Ivan Franko University in 1994, specializing in Ukrainian history (112.ua 2018). In April 1997, his first works – on the raids of the UPA into Czechoslovakia – saw the light of day. He debuted in the OUN(b)’s main paper Shliakh peremohy (The Path to Victory) in February 1998. Articles on historical topics followed in various nationalist and far-right papers, such as the OUN(b)’s ideological journal Vyzvol’nyi shliakh (The Path of Liberation), Natsiia i derzhava (Nation and State), and Volia i batkivshchyna (Freedom and Fatherland) (V”iatrovych 2001, 18, 154). Typically, his opuses carried patriotically edifying titles such as “The Heroic Raid of an UPA Company”(V”iatrovych 1998, 5). The discourse was and is structured around a template of Ukrainian suffering at the hands of the Soviet genocidal occupant, juxtaposed with the nobility of the liberation cause and the self-sacrifice and heroic exploits of the National Liberation Movement.

In the summer of 1999, V”iatrovych co-organized youth camps with the mostly diaspora-based SUM in celebration of the 55th anniversary of the UHVR. The adolescent camp participants were dressed in T-shirts with Bandera’s portraits and the text “1999: With Bandera into the Future.” This institutional framework linked together aging wartime OUN(b) militants, such as the last commander of the UPA, Vasyl Kuk (1913–2007) with the young memory activists. ¹⁴

From his base at the Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the charismatic and tireless V”iatrovych skillfully merged memory activism with spectacular political stunts. In April 2001, he led a hunger strike against the dismissal of the Yushchenko government (Maidan 2001a). According to Maidan.org, other than V”iatrovych himself, the group included his wife Yaryna Yasynevych (b. 1980), Andrii Kohut (b. 1980), and Ihor Derev”ianyi (b. 1977) (Maidan 2001b).

In 2004, V’iatrovvych defended his kandidat nauk thesis, entitled “The Foreign Raids of the UPA in the Context of the Realization of the Anti-Totalitarian National-Democratic Revolution of the Peoples of Central-Eastern Europe” at the Kryp”iatkevych Institute for Ukrainian Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (112.ua 2018).

The TsDVR identified a number of priorities, including “popularizing the theme of the national liberation struggle, in particular the OUN and UPA, and creating a corresponding positive image of it in society.” The TsDVR was explicitly set up to “aid young academics” (V”iatrovych 2001, 5–6). This included the very young; V”iatrovych’s circle showed considerable skill in targeting teenagers and adolescents with a very good feel for the interests, taste, and preference of millennials. They were highly active on social media, working with Ukrainian media platforms – including Western-funded media venues, such as the Ukrainian versions of BBC and Radio Liberty – and arranging youth discos where UPA weapons and uniforms were reverently displayed, as well as social events and youth camps; they also used age-appropriate pedagogical tools such as UPA board games and stacks of playing cards where the kings and queens were replaced with Shukhevych, Bandera, and Stets’ko, as well as key rings, T-shirts, and other ultranationalist paraphernalia. The memory activism dovetailed neatly with sports clubs and commercial interests; the cult of Bandera and Shukhevych was popularized by soccer supporters and OUN(b)/UPA theme restaurants (Rudling 2013a, 232–235).

If one leg of the memory activities was to popularize the far right, another was to confront and challenge a rapidly expanding body of scholarly literature on the OUN(b)/UPA massacres, not least by Polish researchers: ¹⁵

Today we observe attacks by anti-Ukrainian forces, which by all means try to portray the Ukrainian national liberation movement as banditry. In particular [we aim] to stand up to Polish pseudo-historians, who have published much ‘research’ about Polish losses at the hands of Banderites. Unfortunately, to date there has not been an adequate reaction to those publications from Ukrainian scholars. (V”iatrovych 2001, 7)

Therefore, “the Center regards as important for the purpose of popularizing these the establishment of a museum to the OUN and UPA… For the purpose of propaganda activities among the general citizenry it will organize meetings, in particular for the youth, with living participants of the national liberation struggle” (V”iatrovych 2001, 7).

Soviet in Form, Nationalist in Content

V”iatrovych’s memory activism is characterized by a certain inconsistency in standards: he laments the “tabloidization” of history in Poland, expressing “concern” about the politization of the term “genocide” in Poland, while relying on social media and tabloids for his own politicization of the famine and the veneration of the OUN(b) and UPA. He takes Polish authors to task for inflating the victims of the OUN(b)-UPA’s anti-Polish massacres while himself disseminating significantly inflated victim tallies of the 1932–1933 famine. Claiming to speak “as a historian,” he has sharply criticized Poland for recognizing the Volhynian massacres as genocide, called upon it to desist from politicizing history (V”iatrovych 2016). Key features of the TsDVR’s mnemonic activism, regarded as indispensable for Ukraine, are denounced as inadmissible when pursued by analogous memory activists in Poland.

Being both partisan and objective at the same time is a feature we recognize from Soviet history writing, which, seemingly unproblematically, combined what was referred to as partiinist’ (literally: partisanship, toeing the party line) with neo-positivist truth claims. “Despite all his objectivity, which is documented in a multitude of historical truths of every country, the Ukrainian historian has to be an advocate of his people,” OUN(b)-affiliated historian Hennadii Ivanushchenko wrote in Kosyk’s obituary (Ivanushchenko 2017; TsDVR 2017). Also in this regard, Dontsovian and Leninist epistemological foundations overlap. From the vantage point of V”iatrovych and the TsDVR, it appears to be the lack of objectivity that has prevented Ukrainian society from embracing the partisan legacy of Bandera and Stets’ko. From this perspective, state promotion of the legacy of the OUN(b) and UPA would offer a corrective, a step towards objective analysis. Analysts have struggled to come up with adequate terms to describe these memory activists, with their peculiar combination of Soviet neo-positivist truth claims and post-modernist approaches to the past. Many terms have been suggested for this phenomenon: “mnemonic warriors,” “dogmatic intellectuals,” “memorians,” “memory managers,” “information managers,” or “memory commissars” (Bolin, Jordan, and Ståhlberg 2016, 6; Narvselius 2015, 2, 4; McBride 2015; Rudling 2011, 27; Sklokin 2014).

The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory

Modelled on Polish and Baltic precedents, the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (Ukrains’kyi instytut national’noi pam’iati; UINP) was largely a brainchild of Viktor Yushchenko. At the head of the UINP was placed an octogenarian former deputy prime minister, Ihor Yukhnovs’kyi (1925–2024). A member of the Ukrainian CP since 1956, in the 1990s, Yukhnovs’kyi became a sympathizer of the Social-National Party of Ukraine, which would later evolve into VO Svoboda (Rudling 2011, 26). A strong proponent of the Holodomor-OUN-UPA narration, Yukhnovs’kyi presided over an intensive campaign to instrumentalize the past. In 2006, V”iatrovych was appointed head of the archives of the former KGB of the Ukrainian SSR (the Sectoral State Archive of the Security Services of Ukraine; Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy, HDA SBU). In this position, he played a key role in the rehabilitation of Shukhevych and Bandera as official heroes of Ukraine in 2007 and 2010. Yushchenko’s Geschichtspolitik reached a discordant crescendo in 2009–2010, as the SBU claimed to have identified an “exact” Holodomor-genocide tally of 10,063,000 people, a precise 91.2 % of which, the agency knew to inform, were ethnic Ukrainians. Soon thereafter, the Kyiv Court of Appeals posthumously found Stalin, Kaganovich, and four other long-dead Soviet leaders guilty of “genocide of the Ukrainian national group,” followed by the outgoing president designating Stepan Bandera a Ukrainian national hero (Kasianov 2022, 114; Rudling 2013b, 242).

After Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, V”iatrovych was dismissed. By now a radical Nationalist memory infrastructure was firmly in place. V”iatrovych resumed his position of head of the TsDVR but was also appointed in March 2012 by Serhii Kvit, now chancellor of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, as director for the Center for the Study of the Ukrainian State-Building in the 20th Century (Tsentr istorii derzhavotvorennia Ukrainy XX stolittia u Natsional’nomu universitetu ‘Kyivo-Mohylians’ka akademiia’). His Canadian sponsors also stepped up their promotion of V”iatrovych’s persona. Throughout the 2010s, the LUC arranged annual lecture tours for V”iatrovych to university campuses across Canada and the US where diaspora donors carried significant weight. ¹⁶ In the chronically underfunded humanities, preferences by substantial donors are a factor to be reckoned with. Ukrainian studies institutions at the Universities of Toronto, Alberta, Ottawa, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in Canada, as well as at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) in the US, opened their doors for what soon developed into a new tradition of annual LUC-arranged lecture tours for the activists associated with what Lypovets’kyi calls their “facade” structures (Lypovets’kyi 2010, 84). Though V”iatrovych did not speak English, he was, courtesy of anonymous sponsors in the Ukrainian diaspora, working as “Mykola Lebed Archive Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute” ¹⁷ according to the HURI website.

Conflicts over memory were exacerbated by the mismanagement by Viktor Yanukovych’s (b. 1950) corrupt rule, which deepened interregional tensions in the country. While Yanukovych took considerably less interest in the instrumentalization of history than his predecessor, his minister of Education Dmytro Tabachnyk (b. 1963) continued to use history as an instrument to polarize, stoke resentment, and mobilize his electoral base. As a result of several interrelated factors, Svoboda saw a breakthrough in the elections of October 2012, reaching 10.4% of the national vote (Polyakova 2014; Umland 2012).

In the fall of 2013, Yanukovych’s sudden refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU and instead orienting Ukraine toward the Russian-led Eurasian Customs Union triggered peaceful protest in Kyiv. Yanukovych responded by sharply curtailing civil liberties through the “emergency laws” of January 16, 2014, triggering mass unrest in the country (Schneider-Deters 2021a, 273–303). Following the toppling of Yanukovych in February 2014, a new, temporary government was formed. VO Svoboda, the most active collective agent in the protests, became one of the three parties that formed a government (Arel and Driscoll 2023, 75–80; Ishchenko 2016, 453). The party held four cabinet posts in the post-revolutionary government; Ihor Teniukh (b. 1958) briefly served as acting Minister of Defense, Oleh Makhnitskyi (b. 1970) as acting Prosecutor General, while another three ministers, including the deputy Prime Minster Oleksandr Sych (b. 1964), occupied posts in the government of Arsenyi Yatseniuk (b. 1974) until November 2014 (Umland 2020, 255).

The far right’s role in the government was, however, short-lived. It did not perform well, neither in the presidential election of May 24, 2014, nor in the parliamentary elections of October 24 of that year. Ukrainian voters robustly rejected the far right: the presidential candidate of Svoboda, Oleh Tiahnybok (b. 1968) received 1.16%, whereas Right Sector leader Dmytro Yarosh (b. 1971) polled 0.7% of the votes cast. In the parliamentary elections, the far right was split. With 4.7% and less than 2% of the popular vote, respectively, Svoboda and Right Sector both failed to reach the 5% hurdle (Schneider-Deters 2021a, 468). Sectarianism and divisions both split and weakened the hard right. In regards to “historical memory,” however, memory actors associated with the clandestine networks set up and funded by the OUN have had a significant and lasting impact.

Legislating History

After the overthrow of the Yanukovych regime, V”iatrovych was appointed head of the UINP in 2014. Kvit and other associates insistently cited his recurrent lecture tours to prestigious North American universities, referring to the activist as “Volodymyr V”iatrovych at Harvard” to advance their candidate to head the UINP. Under Poroshenko, Geschichtspolitik now returned with a vengeance. V”iatrovych now staffed the leadership of the UINP with his TsDVR team. In addition, Andrii Kohut was designated director of the HDA SBU. His TsDVR affiliate Ivan Patryliak (b. 1976) ¹⁸ was elevated to Dean of the Faculty of History at the State Taras Shevchenko University whereas his benefactor Serhii Kvit (b. 1965) was appointed Minister of Education (Istorychna Pravda 2017). Important support came from another former associate, now speaker of the Rada, Andrii Parubyi (b. 1971), a co-founder of the Stepan Bandera Trident, who was active in the 1990s in the Social-National Party of Ukraine. In 2014, he self-styled as a kommendant at the Euromaidan and thereafter served as Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.

“The whole staff of the Center [for Research of the Liberation Movement] is [now] at the top of the Institute of National Memory, and in [the] national archives,” historian Heorhii Kas’ianov noted in 2018 (Kasianov 2018, quote at 24:58–29:01; Kasianov 2022, 161). Once in power, the team lost no time remolding “national memory.” In April 2015, following a discussion lasting a grand total of 42 minutes, the Rada passed four laws of “decommunization.” Of these laws, one in particular, no. 2538-1, proved to be the most controversial, criminalizing “disrespect” toward, among others, the OUN(b) and the ABN. “V’iatrovych himself explained this scandalous hurry in which he passed the laws by political utility – that, in the spring of 2015 the Rada was led by a parliamentary coalition ready to adopt it quickly,” Kasianov muses (Kasianov 2019). The laws have been sharply criticized by the community of historians, the USHMM, and the Council of Europe (CDL_AD 2015; USHMM 2015; Marples et al. 2015). V”iatrovych seized the moment to maximize the impact of his TsDVR circle on the country. Subsequently, the years following the Euromaidan revolution were a period of frantic “decommunization” of Ukraine: Soviet monuments were toppled, and streets, buildings, squares, villages, and cities were renamed by decree by the UINP. Carried out in a heavy-handed fashion, the campaign prompted reactions, not least in Poland, as Soviet-era names were replaced by Bandera and Shukhevych. The radicalism was not received well by the voters. Poroshenko was roundly defeated in 2019 with his opponent Volodymyr Zelens’kyi receiving a record 73% of the votes cast (Umland 2019). A Russophone Ukrainian of Jewish background, Zelens’kyi’s enthusiasm for Blut-und-Boden ethnonationalism of the OUN(b) tradition was limited. Under the new president, state promotion of the Banderite heritage was sharply curtailed.

Statistics Set You Free

When the Assembly of the TsDVR met in Kyiv in June 2019, weeks after Zelens’kyi’s inauguration, a satisfied Yaryna Yasynevych could list a number of significant achievements of her center. V”iatrovyvch from the UINP, Dean Ivan Patryliak of the Historical faculty of the Shevchenko National University, and Serhii Kvit welcomed the participants, after which greetings from the Head of the Provid of the OUN(b), the Australian-born Stefan Romaniw (1955–2024), followed. Stepan Bandera Jr. (b. 1970), a grandson of the late founder of the Organization delivered greetings from the Leadership (Uprava) of Ucrainica in Toronto, led by Stets’ko’s nephew Romanyshyn. After five years in charge of the UINP, a triumphant TsDVR team summarized how they had impacted Ukrainian memory. Yasynevych noted how

there has been a change in thinking in regards to the Holodomor – 80% of the people polled recognize the Holodomor as a genocide… Already 50% of Ukrainians recognize soldiers of UPA fighters for the independence of Ukraine, they have received legal recognition, the anthem of the OUN-UPA has become a hymn of the army. (Karmeliuk 2019)

During his December 2021 annual North American grand tour, V”iatrovych informed his Liga sponsors in Etobicoke, Ontario, of the significant impact their joint efforts have had on Ukraine. Delivering his lecture between the red-and-black banner of the OUN(b) and an oversized portrait of Stepan Bandera, V”iatrovych stressed:

After 2005, the state took upon itself [the promotion of the Holodomor] on the state level, including the-then president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, who did a lot to honor the victims of the Holodomor, and to have the world recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. Today 18 countries recognize the Holodomor the genocide. (V”iatrovych 2021, quote at 54:45–55:00)

Popular internalization of the genocidal narration of the famine, V”iatrovych stressed, was particularly important:

thus we see how in 2010 61% of Ukrainians regarded the Holodomor as a genocide… After the state in 2014 resumed its work [of instrumentalizing history], in 2020 sociologists could show how 82% of Ukrainians regarded the Holodomor a genocide. A poll that appeared in 2021… showed 85% of Ukrainians regard the Holodomor a genocide. (V”iatrovych 2021, quote at 55:27–56:30) ¹⁹

Listing his achievements to his Canadian OUN(b) sponsors, V”iatrovych, though claiming to speak as a historian and scholar, struck a triumphant chord combining truth claims and faith: “‘Know the truth, and the truth will set you free’: the more people who know the truth about the Holodomor, the weaker Soviet power in Ukraine becomes” (V”iatrovych 2021, quote at 54:15–54:26).

The numbers were similarly up for the UPA, he reported. V”iatrovych emphasized how, “in 2010, 20 per cent supported the Ukrainian Insurgent Army as fighters for independence. In 2021, already 46 per cent [do].” The person of Stepan Bandera, he let his sponsors understand, has been tougher to sell than Holodomor and UPA. Yet here also, he could deliver good news: “Similarly, we see how the attitudes to Stepan Bandera is starting to change.… The numbers of people positively disposed to Stepan Bandera have increased from 20 per cent in 2010 to 36 per cent [today]. More importantly, those who were negatively disposed to the person of Stepan Bandera has fallen from 60% to 33%” (V”iatrovych 2021, quote at 1:01:30–1:01:45 and 1:02:02–1:02:45). ²⁰

Matters of Funding

Significant amounts of money from the diaspora have been invested into building up the TsDVR activists. V”iatrovych and his team of memory managers have successfully straddled the spheres of academia, government agencies of memory production, party politics, and legislation. In their view, matters of historical controversy are settled through memory management, state propaganda, opinion polls, and legislation. They hold that whether the famine of 1932–1933 constituted genocide or not is something determined by opinion polls. They treat popular opinion as a political commodity to be shaped by government agencies of memory management, NGOs, and GONGOs. The extent to which the Ukrainian public internalizes an identity as genocide victims, in turn, becomes a measurement of the success of their project. “Holodomor made us a nation,” he bluntly stated (V”iatrovych n.d.). V”iarovych and his sponsors are, of course, correct that victimization can indeed be an effective vehicle for national mobilization. Yet it is not so much the political instrumentalization of the famine that is most problematic here. More dissonance ensues when faith in our genocide is coupled with faith in our OUN, our UPA, and our Bandera – which in turn necessitates not only denial of the role of the OUN in the 1941 pogroms and the Holocaust, but also disavowal of Polish genocide claims regarding Volhynia 1943.

* * *

Ukraine is, as Andreas Umland (b. 1967) and others have pointed out, an anomaly (Umland 2008a). Poverty, corruption, and economic mismanagement – combined with a long-lasting Russian hybrid warfare – would normally provide fertile ground for far-right movements. And yet, the far right has, by and large, performed poorly at the polls. VO Svoboda’s 2012 surge was short-lived and soon fizzled out. Yet, the paramilitary formations fighting Russian proxies in the puppet “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk included some very radical groups, such as the Azov and Aidar battalions, using outright neo-Nazi symbolism and attracting far-right volunteers into their ranks (Schneider-Deters 2021b, 406–411). All the relevant ultra-nationalist groups organized irregular or semi-regular militias that went to the front lines in 2014, where they “quickly gained more or less legitimate access to firearms and ammunition. Some, like Azov, also obtained armed vehicles and artillery” (Umland 2020, 258–259). Having said that, these groups have since been reigned in and curtailed while, on the whole, the political impact of the far right must be said to have been limited (Umland 2020, 255–256). Rather, the presence of the authoritarian right is much stronger felt in the field of memory culture. Here, the legacy of the OUN(b) and other far-right groups were embraced by the state, promoted by government agencies of memory management. “Disrespect” of the OUN(b) and ABN was explicitly outlawed through laws that were rushed through parliament. A “national memory” structured around the genocide of the Ukrainian nation combined with a cult of the OUN(b) and UPA has gained significant popular traction. A radicalization of positions followed the Russian invasion in 2014. A historiography organized around competitive victimhood (Jilge 2006) and an uncritical cult around war-time Nationalists complicates Ukraine’s relations with its neighbors and Western partners. Ukraine is, of course, not unique in its selective instrumentalization of the term “genocide”; from the 1940s, Belarusian, and Baltic émigré groups actively instrumentalized accusations of genocide against the Soviet regime (Budrytė 2004; Goujon 1999; Isaksson 2010, 154–155). ²² Yet, the ever-expanding definition of genocide comes, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt (b. 1973) has noted, with a liability: “when everything is genocide, nothing is genocide” (Weiss-Wendt 2005, 556).

The prevalent use of the OUN(b) red-and-black symbolism, the introduction of the OUN(b) slogan as an official salutation in the Ukrainian armed forces, and the mushrooming of monuments to Bandera and other OUN(b) leaders has provided the Nationalist narration considerable traction in Ukrainian society. Knowledge of the Volhynian massacres and of the OUN’s involvement in the Holocaust remains low. Umland points at the far right’s “growing embeddedness”: “Despite being electorally impotent, Ukraine’s far-right activist community has remained numerically, organizationally, and tactically potent sine the Euromaidan and is still present on Ukraine’s streets,” and “many ultra-nationalists have taken up projects within Ukraine’s ‘uncivil society’” (Umland 2020, 262).

“National memory” constitutes one such field, with cultural and social aspects beyond the poll station that ought to be taken into consideration when assessing the strength and influence of the far right. That these “soft” cultural aspects of far-right influence have received less attention in the scholarship is unsurprising, as historical culture falls more within the field of humanities rather than traditional political science. More elusive and difficult to measure than election results and political representation in elected bodies, the memory managers and their networks are no less proper objects of inquiry. As steps toward reconciliation and democratization, Ukrainian society would benefit from a proper Aufarbeitung – that is, a critical engagement with the past. This will necessitate engaging the “difficult” aspects of the legacy of the Ukrainian far right, including the influence of authoritarian ultranationalist émigrés on shaping collective memory.

Post-script: May 2022, December 2022, October 2023, and April 2024

Since I received the invitation to contribute to this special issue of Nationalities Papers in December 2020, and writing it in the spring of 2021, much has happened. During three rounds of revisions, the situation on the ground has undergone dramatic changes. The Russian Federation’s full-scale assault on Ukraine fundamentally altered the geopolitical situation in Europe. This has also brought changes in Polish-Ukrainian relations; Poland has welcomed very substantial numbers of Ukrainian refugees, and appears once again as one of the main promoters of Ukraine. Notably, the brutal Russian war of aggression has not translated into increased support of the far right. In the face of unprecedented aggression, Ukrainian society has demonstrated considerable restraint. Unlike 2014, red-and-black flags and other OUN symbols are all but absent; the Zelens’kyi government has largely disengaged from the Bandera cult pursued by his predecessors. At the same time, the Russian onslaught has led to a reaction in the form of further soaring approval ratings of Bandera and the OUN. Inquiry into the difficult topics of the past are complicated by the Russian Federation’s systematic abuse of the terms “fascism,” “Nazism,” and “genocide” to dehumanize its victims, stir up hatred, and justify its war crimes. While Zelens’kyi has handled issues of identity with considerable skill, difficult issues of historical memory, however, are likely to play a central role in post-war Ukraine, and their importance as objects of inquiry are bound to increase as a democratic, post-war Ukraine integrates into the Euro-Atlantic community. For that to happen, a prerequisite is that Ukraine prevails in this war – and that it receives the heavy arms and support from the West that its democratically elected government requests.