aaus-list @ ukrainianstudies.org -- [aaus-list] UPA REHABILITATION

[Taras Kuzio <t.kuzio@utoronto.ca>]

RADIO FREE EUROPE/RADIO LIBERTY, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
________________________________________________________
RFE/RL Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine Report
Vol. 4, No. 27, 23 July 2002


REHABILITATION OF UKRAINIAN NATIONALIST GROUPS STIRS FURTHER
CONTROVERSY.

By Taras Kuzio


 The announcement on 12 July that the Ukrainian
government had prepared a draft bill on honoring the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its partisan force, the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (UPA), as "fighters for freedom and independence of
Ukraine" has stirred another controversy within both Ukraine and
Russia. The government commission, which is chaired by Russophile
Deputy Prime Minister Volodymyr Semynozhenko, now believes that from
1939 to the mid-1950s, the OUN and UPA organized a "resistance
movement" "for the purpose of uniting and creating a unified
[independent] Ukraine."
    The main academic research that has led to this conclusion
was undertaken by the Institute of History, National Academy of
Sciences, under its prolific head, Stanislav Kulchytskyy. The
institute recommended, and the commission accepted, that OUN and UPA
veterans should finally be classified as having been subjected to
repression and therefore should fall under the law on the
rehabilitation of victims of political repression in Ukraine. This
would then allow them to obtain social and other privileges accorded
to other Soviet veterans.
    At the same time, only OUN-UPA veterans will be scrutinized
under this law to see if they committed "crimes against humanity."
This one-sided application of the law to only nationalist forces is
in line with post-Soviet and international custom since the Nuremberg
trials of Nazis where the victor, e.g. the USSR, has never been
investigated for "crimes against humanity." After 1939, NKVD units in
western Ukraine committed wholesale atrocities against civilians (a
mass grave containing 130 NKVD victims, including children, was
uncovered in a western Ukrainian monastery this month). Investigation
of Soviet archives by Ukrainian historians in the 1990s found
evidence that the NKVD dressed in UPA uniforms and committed
atrocities against civilians in order to turn the local population
against nationalist groups. The commission headed by Kulchytskyy
found evidence of unpleasant actions undertaken by both nationalist
and "chekist," i.e. NKVD, forces, but only veterans of the former
will be investigated.
    The reaction of the Russian authorities was swift. As with
the rehabilitation of nationalist partisans in the three Baltic
states, Moscow has adopted Soviet-era rhetoric in attacking the
OUN-UPA. The Russian media charged Ukrainian nationalist groups with
fighting alongside Chechens against Russian forces in the 1990s in
Chechnya. In the March parliamentary elections in Ukraine, Russia
deliberately stoked an antinationalist campaign, with the support of
the Ukrainian executive, to blacken Viktor Yushchenko's Our
Ukraine among eastern Ukrainian voters (see "RFE/RL Poland, Belarus,
and Ukraine Report," 9 April 2002).
    The seriousness with which the Russian Foreign Ministry looks
at this question can be seen from its immediate and angry response to
the draft government bill. The ministry demanded that the Ukrainian
government condemn the activities of the "so-called UPA" and not
rehabilitate its members. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Anatoliy Zlenko
replied that this was "Ukraine's internal matter."
    This move by the Ukrainian government is in many ways not
surprising. It is taking place immediately after parliamentary
elections, a period when western Ukrainian voters are traditionally
courted by Kuchma. (The more numerous eastern Ukrainian voters are
traditionally passive between elections and are only courted during
elections.) The government move came after the city of Lviv wrote to
Kuchma demanding that the OUN-UPA be rehabilitated. The newly elected
parliament is also the least leftist of any elected since March 1990
and therefore opposition to the rehabilitation of Ukrainian
nationalist groups is likely to be less difficult. In addition,
Kuchma has little to lose in the rehabilitation of the OUN-UPA
because he will not be standing again for re-election and may want to
end his second term on a populist note. These reasons also allowed
Kuchma to adopt the radical step of declaring Ukraine's goal of
working toward NATO membership.
    In late March, the then-head of the presidential
administration and currently parliamentary speaker, Volodymyr Lytvyn,
called for a "balanced approach" to the UPA. "We understand how
painful this issue is not just for Russia, but also for part of
Ukrainian society. We must study all aspects of the matter," Lytvyn
said. Then parliamentary speaker Ivan Plyushch also announced his
support for moves to rehabilitate OUN-UPA.
    Within Ukraine, the government's draft bill has arrived
after a decade of gradual public rehabilitation. School textbooks and
the military media have not had the luxury of waiting a decade to
research this question and they have included the OUN, and
particularly the UPA, alongside other forces that fought for Ukraine
on different military fronts. They therefore have placed them on an
equal footing with Soviet (as well as Polish and Canadian) veterans.
Rehabilitation of the Galicia Division has not taken place, and is
far less likely to. The UPA has therefore long been described in
textbooks and newspapers such as "Narodna Armiya," an organ of the
Defense Ministry, as fighting on a "second front" in World War II.
    Among the oligarchic Social Democratic Party-united (SDPU-o)
and the former pro-presidential For a United Ukraine (ZYU), now
divided into six factions, there is no opposition to the
government's move. One major reason is that centrist groups lack
any ideology and this is therefore simply not an issue for them.
SDPU-o Chairman Viktor Medvedchuk, now head of the presidential
administration, claimed to be the author of the draft government
bill, which he had hoped would attract western Ukrainian voters in
the March elections.
    The malleability of the ideologically amorphous SDPU-o was
seen when Medvedchuk denied to Crimean voters that his party
supported the rehabilitation of OUN-UPA, and SDPU-o-controlled Inter
Television fanned the antinationalist campaign against Yushchenko.
The irony is that Medvedchuk also at the same time played up the
claim that his family was expelled to Siberia because his father was
a member of OUN in Zhytomir Oblast. A book published during the
election campaign titled "Nartsys" (Narcissus) by Our Ukraine member
Dmytro Chobit told a different story. It unearthed controversial
documents that Medvedchuk's father had actually served in the
German police, not the OUN.
    The only opposition to the government draft bill within
Ukraine has come from the Communist Party and the nationalist Russian
Bloc. These groups continue to use the same Soviet-era rhetoric
denouncing the OUN-UPA as still used in Russia. The Socialists (SPU)
have evolved toward accepting that the OUN-UPA can be rehabilitated
and that the struggle against them was a Ukrainian "civil war."
Nevertheless, the SPU rejects any equality between Soviet veterans
and the OUN-UPA and maintains that those who allegedly committed
"crimes" should be weeded out.

 Dr. Taras Kuzio,  resident fellow and adjunct professor, Centre for Russian
and East European Studies, University of Toronto.