Читать книгу Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Fascist - Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe - Страница 17

The investigation of Bandera’s life, his cult, and the history of the OUN and UPA are highly contingent upon the study of archival documents and original publications. Because of the extremist nature of the OUN and its involvement in the Holocaust and other kinds of ethnic and political mass violence during and after the Second World War, OUN émigrés and UPA veterans began producing forged or manipulated documents during the Cold War, by means of which they whitewashed their own history. They removed undesirable and inconvenient phrases from republished documents, especially those relating to fascism, the Holocaust, and other atrocities. In 1955, for example, in a new edition of documents entitled The OUN in the Light of the Resolutions of Great Congresses, the OUN reprinted the resolutions of the Second Great Congress of the OUN in Cracow in April 1941. According to the original resolutions, the OUN adopted a fascist salute, consisting of raising the right arm “slightly to the right, slightly above the peak of the head,” while saying “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraїni!), and answering “Glory to the Heroes!”(Heroiam Slava!). The 1955 edition left out this particular part of the text.[83]

Such an approach to history resembles the Soviet approach, and to the question of how to represent Bandera and the OUN. For example, the Cultural Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine (Komunistychna Partiia Ukraїny, or KPU) advised the producers of the film The Killer Is Known to show Bandera only at the moment when he metamorphoses into a swastika.[84] But not only OUN or Soviet publications related to the Bandera discourse contain striking misrepresentations. The book Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide contains a picture of Archbishop Andrei Sheptyts’kyi with a swastika and suggests that the head of the Greek Catholic Church carried it during the Second World War because he sympathized with Nazi Germany. The picture, however, must have been taken in the 1920s. It shows Sheptyts’kyi with two men in the uniforms of Plast, the Ukrainian scouting organization. Plast used the swastika as a symbol in the 1920s but the organization was outlawed in 1930. Moreover, Sheptyts’kyi is shown standing on his own two feet, whereas he was already confined to a wheelchair before the Second World War.[85]

Other indications of this process can be found in post-war memoirs. Mykola Klymyshyn, a close companion of Stepan Bandera, was the author of several important historical and autobiographical publications related to the Providnyk, and an important progenitor of his cult. Klymyshyn was honest enough to admit that dark spots in his publications had been whitewashed at the personal request of Stepan Bandera. He admitted this with the object of warning future generations, who would question the omission of certain aspects in his descriptions.[86] Ievhen Stakhiv, another OUN member and the author of important autobiographical publications, admits that Mykola Lebed’, another important OUN leader, asked him to forget and not to mention uncomfortable elements of the past, such as Bandera’s direction to the movement in late 1941 to repair relations with Nazi Germany and to attempt further collaboration with the Nazis.[87] To review the different kinds of “forgotten” or instrumentalized history, it is necessary to study the original documents. Some of them, and their locations, are briefly introduced here.

The Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych, AAN) holds collections of documents concerning the history of the UVO and OUN in the inter-war period. Documents relating to the investigation of OUN members involved in Bronisław Pieracki’s assassination, and to the Warsaw and Lviv trials, can be found in the Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Lviv (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv, TDIA) and in the State Archives of Lviv Oblast (Derzhavnyi arkhiv L’vivs’koї oblasti, DALO). A number of documents—including the twenty-four volumes of the investigation records prepared for the Warsaw trial—could not be found. In all probability, they were lost during the Second World War.

Many important documents relating to Bandera and the OUN-UPA during the Second World War are located in two Kiev archives: the Central State Archives of the Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady ta upravlinnia Ukrainy, TsDAVOV) and the Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads’kykh obiednan’ Ukrainy, TsDAHO). The State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kiev (Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, HDA SBU) holds collections of NKVD interrogation files, which also contain some information on the Ukrainian nationalists. Because NKVD interrogations were coercive, and in some cases torture was applied, such documents should be used carefully and checked against other sources. The Provincial Archives of Alberta, in Edmonton, also hold essential documents on the “Ukrainian National Revolution” and the conduct of the OUN and UPA during the Second World War.[88]

Other crucial documents relating to Bandera, the OUN-UPA, and the German occupation of Ukraine are located in the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv, BA) in Berlin and Koblenz, in the Military Archives (Militärarchiv, MA) in Freiburg, and in the Political Archives of the Foreign Office in Berlin (Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, PAAA). In the Provincial Archives of Nordrhein-Westfalen (Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, LN-W), one can study documents from the preliminary proceedings against Theodor Oberländer. The Oberländer records are important for the study of the Lviv pogrom in 1941 and of the campaign against the Adenauer government’s Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees, and War Victims.

In Moscow, the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-poiliticheskoi istorii, RGASOI) are two further important sources of document collections relating to Ukraine during the Second World War. The Archives of the Jewish Historical Museum in Warsaw (Archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego, AŻIH) hold a huge collection of Jewish survivor testimonies, mainly collected between 1944 and 1947 in Poland by the Central Jewish Historical Commission (Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna, CŻKH).[89] Two other important collections of survivor testimonies are located in the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and in the archives of Yad Vashem. The Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, which was founded in 1994, also collected a huge number of survivor testimonies. The early documents collected by the AŻIH are especially important for this study.[90]

The Bavarian Main State Archives (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, BayHStA) and the Munich State Archives (Staatsarchiv München, StM) mainly hold police documents relating to Bandera and the OUN after the Second World War. Documents in the possession of the intelligence services are another important source for the study of Bandera and the OUN during the Cold War, but not all intelligence services have made them accessible. Some documents on Bandera during the Cold War may be found in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. A number of important interrogation records of OUN members and UPA partisans, and other documents relating to the Cold War are located in the HAD SBU. The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiiskoi Federatsii, FSB) has informed me that its archives do not contain any documents concerning Bandera’s assassination. The Federal Intelligence Service of Germany (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) has not made most of the relevant documents available to researchers who are interested in its collaboration with the OUN.

The archives of the Stepan Bandera Museum in London hold some documents relating to Bandera’s assassination and about OUN émigrés in the Cold War period. During the last two decades, several important editions of documents relating to Stepan Bandera and the OUN-UPA have appeared in Ukraine. Some of these, such as the three volumes of Stepan Bandera in the Documents of the Soviet Organs of the State Security, together with documents from the State Archives of the Security Service of Ukraine, were an important source of information for this study.[91]