Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists
Організація українських націоналістів
LeaderYevhen Konovalets (first)
Andriy Melnyk (conservative)[1]
Stepan Bandera (militant)
Foundation1929 (1929)
Ideology
Ethnocracy[7][8]
  • Anti-Polish sentiment[5]
  • Anti-Hungarian sentiment
  • Anti-Romanian sentiment
  • Anti-Russian sentiment[6]
  • Antisemitism[6]
Political positionFar-right[9][nb 1]
SloganSlava Ukraini! Heroiam slava!
(transl. "Glory to Ukraine!")[11]
Anthem"March of Ukrainian Nationalists"
[full songⓘ]
Major actionsMassacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
Notable attacksKilling of Bronisław Pieracki
Size20,000 (1939 est.)[12][13]
Part ofAnti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (1943–45)
Allies Kingdom of Romania (1940-1941, alleged by the USSR)[nb 2][14]
Nazi Germany (1941, 1944-1945) [nb 3]
Opponents Republic of Poland
Kingdom of Romania[17][18]
Soviet Union
Nazi Germany (1942-1943) [nb 4]
Battles and warsInvasion of Carpatho-Ukraine
Eastern Front (World War II)
OUN Uprising of 1939
UPA anti-Soviet resistance

The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN; Ukrainian: Організація українських націоналістів, romanized: Orhanizatsiia ukrainskykh natsionalistiv) was a Ukrainian nationalist organization established on February 2, 1929[20] in Vienna, uniting the Ukrainian Military Organization with smaller, mainly youth, radical nationalist right-wing groups. The OUN was the largest and one of the most important far-right Ukrainian organizations operating in the interwar period on the territory of the Second Polish Republic.[9][21] The OUN was mostly active preceding, during, and immediately after the Second World War. The ideology held by the OUN has been characterized by scholars as a Ukrainian form of fascism[22][23] and[24]/or integral nationalism,[25][26] itself sometimes characterized as proto-fascist,[27] or more broadly as extreme or radical nationalism influenced by fascist movements.[28] Its ideology was influenced by the writings of Dmytro Dontsov, from 1929 by Italian fascism, and from 1930 by German Nazism.[29][30][31][32][33][34] The OUN pursued a strategy of violence, terrorism, and assassinations with the goal of creating an ethnically homogeneous and totalitarian Ukrainian state.[33]

During the Second World War, in 1940, the OUN split into two parts. The older, more moderate members supported Andriy Melnyk's OUN-M, while the younger and more radical members supported Stepan Bandera's OUN-B. On 30 June 1941 OUN-B declared an independent Ukrainian state in Lviv, which had just come under Nazi Germany's control in the early stages of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.[35] OUN-B pledged to work closely with Germany, which was described as freeing the Ukrainians from Soviet oppression, and OUN-B members subsequently took part in the Lviv pogroms.[36] In response to the OUN-B declaration of independence, the Nazi authorities suppressed the OUN leadership. Members of the OUN took an active part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland. In October 1942, OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).[nb 5] In 1943–1944, in an effort to prevent Polish efforts to re-establish prewar borders,[43] UPA units carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia.[35]

In the course of the war, with the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the OUN-B changed its political image, exchanging fascism for democratic slogans.[44] After World War II, the UPA fought Soviet and Polish government forces. In 1947, in Operation Vistula, the Polish government deported 140,000 Ukrainians as part of the population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine.[45] Soviet forces killed 153,000, arrested 134,000, and deported 203,000 UPA members, relatives, and supporters.[35][nb 6] During the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, covertly supported the OUN.[46] A contemporary organization that claims to be the same Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is still active in Ukraine.

  1. ^ Kuzio, Taras; D'Anieri, Paul J. (2002). Dilemmas of State-led Nation Building in Ukraine. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 166. ISBN 978-0-275-97786-3. The OUN divided in 1940 into a radical wing under Bandera and a more conservative one under Melnyk ...
  2. ^ Trevor Erlacher (2014). "The birth of Ukrainian 'active nationalism': Dmytro Dontsov and heterodox marxism before World war I, 1883–1914". Modern Intellectual History. 11 (3): 519–548. doi:10.1017/S1479244314000171. S2CID 144888682.
  3. ^ Myroslav Shkandrij (2015). "National democracy, the OUN, and Dontsovism: Three ideological currents in Ukrainian Nationalism of the 1930s–40s and their shared myth-system". Communist and Post-Communist Studies. 48 (2–3): 209–216. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2015.06.002.
  4. ^ John A. Armstrong (1968). "Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in Eastern Europe". The Journal of Modern History. 40 (3): 396–410. doi:10.1086/240210. JSTOR 1878147. S2CID 144135929.
  5. ^ Snyder, Timothy (1999). "'To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All'". Journal of Cold War Studies. 1 (2): 86–120. doi:10.1162/15203979952559531. JSTOR 26925017. S2CID 57564179.
  6. ^ a b Carynnyk, Marco (2011). "Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947". Nationalities Papers. 39 (3): 315–352. doi:10.1080/00905992.2011.570327. S2CID 159894460.
  7. ^ "Ethnocratic Concepts. Ukrainian Statehood in the 20th Century".
  8. ^ "Identity and Nation-Building in UkraineDefining the 'Other'".
  9. ^ a b Rudling, Per Anders (2016). "The Cult of Roman Shukhevych in Ukraine: Myth Making with Complications". Fascism. 5 (1): 31. doi:10.1163/22116257-00501003. ISSN 2211-6249. Founded in 1929, the OUN was the largest and most important Ukrainian far-right organization. Explicitly totalitarian, the movement embraced the Führerprinzip, a cult of political violence, racism, and an aggressive anti Semitism. It sought the establishment of Ukrainian statehood at any price..
  10. ^ Marples 2007, p. 196.
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Rossolinski was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Yurkevich, Myroslav (1993). "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists". Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Retrieved 9 December 2022.
  13. ^ Potocki, Robert (2003). Polityka państwa polskiego wobec zagadnienia ukraińskiego w latach 1930–1939 (in Polish). Instytut Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej. p. 105. ISBN 978-83-917615-4-0.
  14. ^ Cite error: The named reference auto1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  15. ^ a b Piotrowski, Tadeusz (1998). Poland's Holocaust. McFarland. pp. 224, 233, 234. ISBN 978-0-7864-0371-4 – via Internet Archive. ... after the massive exodus of the Polish people created a hiatus in the flow of requisitions, the Germans decided to stop the UPA terrorist attacks against civilians ... These anti-Jewish actions were carried out by the members of the Ukrainian police who eventually joined the UPA ... By October (1944), all of Eastern Poland lay in Soviet hands. As the German army began its withdrawal, the UPA began to attack its rearguard and seize its equipment. The Germans reacted with raids on UPA positions. On July 15, 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, or UHVR, an OUN-B outfit) was formed and, at the end of that month, signed an agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet threat. This ended the UPA attacks as well as the German countermeasures. In exchange for diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front, Germans began providing the Ukrainian underground with supplies, arms, and training materials.
  16. ^ Rossoliński-Liebe 2014, pp. 165–245.
  17. ^ "Керівник ПУН, від компрометації якого відмовилися органи КҐБ | Історична правда". www.istpravda.com.ua. Retrieved 24 July 2025.
  18. ^ "Адвокат із Чернівців, який очолив ПУН | Збруч". zbruc.eu. February 2016. Retrieved 24 July 2025.
  19. ^ Rossoliński-Liebe 2014, pp. 224–250.
  20. ^ Посівнич, Микола (2008). СТЕПАН БАНДЕРА – життя, присвячене своб [Stepan Bandera – Life Dedicated to Freedom] (in Ukrainian). Toronto – Lviv: Видавництво “Літопис УПА. p. 22. ISBN 978-966-2105-10-0.
  21. ^ Bellant, Russ (1991). Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party. South End Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-89608-418-6. During the rise of European fascism after World War I, some Ukrainian nationalist groups tied their hopes to fascism as an ideology and then collaborated with Hitler and nazism in World War II. One Ukrainian nationalist group was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) which split into two organizations: a less militant wing, led by Andrew Melnyk and known as OUN-M, and the extremist group of Stepan Bandera, known as OUN-B.
  22. ^ Rossoliński-Liebe 2011, pp. 85–90.
  23. ^ Gomza 2015, p. 5 (99).
  24. ^ Rudling 2011, pp. 2–4: "The term integral nationalism was applied to the OUN by the American historian John Armstrong.3 The term has stuck, and many pronationalist historians find it preferable to the term fascism, which today carries strong negative connotations and is used colloquially as a term of abuse. There is no contradiction between fascism and integralism, which is a variety within the fascist tradition... Belonging to a tradition of European generic fascism, the OUN emerged out of an amalgamation between the Ukrainian Military Organization and a number of other extreme right-wing organizations".
  25. ^ Armstrong 1963, pp. 19–21.
  26. ^ Zaitsev 2015, p. 184.
  27. ^ Zaitsev 2021, p. 137: "During the 1930s, Ukrainian integral nationalism experienced an intense "fascistisation," which resulted in a hybrid ideology with a mixture of national-liberationist and fascist elements. The most appropriate designation for such an ideological movement is proto-fascist integral nationalism in the absence of nation-state."
  28. ^ Heretica (16 October 2022). "Stanley Payne: Fascism is not relevant nowadays, neither Putin nor Meloni are fascists". Heretica. Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  29. ^ Cite error: The named reference LE was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  30. ^ Albanese, David C. S. (2015). In Search of a Lesser Evil Anti Soviet Nationalism and the Cold War (PDF). Boston: Northeastern University. p. 188. OUN leaders emulated the Nazi's organizational structure and portions of its political ideology. Both wings of the OUN had an affinity for Nazi-style organization, based on the dictatorial fiihrerprinzip that placed a single leader above the law itself.
  31. ^ Marples, David (2013). "The OUN, 1929–43". Heroes and Villains. Central European University Press. pp. 79–123. ISBN 9789637326981. Most writers concur that the UVO was one of the principal foundation stones for the creation of OUN, which—Kost' Bondarenko maintains—"was a classical, radical rightist terrorist organization," ideologically close to Fascism of the Italian type, which was believed to be the "avant-garde European ideology" of that time
  32. ^ Himka, John-Paul (2021). Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust. BoD – Books on Demand. ISBN 978-3-8382-1548-8. The question of whether OUN was fascist has exercised a number of scholars, particularly since the rehabilitation of the nationalists in independent Ukraine. OUN certainly looked fascist. At the trials of the OUN leaders in 1935-36, OUN defendants and witnesses shocked the courtroom by giving what a Polish newspaper called "the Hitlerite greeting. … "The organizational greeting has the form of raising the extended right arm to the right, higher than the crown of the head. The mandatory words of the full greeting: 'Glory to Ukraine!' with the answer 'Glory to the heroes.'" The same document stipulated that the (Banderite) OUN was to have its own flag, in red and black which alluded to the German nationalist and national socialist concept of blood and soil.
  33. ^ a b Wodak, Ruth; Richardson, John E. (2013). Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text. Routledge. p. 229. ISBN 978-0-415-89919-2. OUN relied on terrorism, violence and assassinations, not least against other Ukrainians, to achieve its goal of a totalitarian and ethnically homogenous Ukrainian nation-state...The former Marxist Dmytro Dontsov created an indigenous Ukrainian fascism based upon Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras and translated the works of Hitler and Mussolini into Ukrainian
  34. ^ Bresciani, Marco (2021). Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-22516-2. The ideology, organisational foundations and political style of the OUN were markedly influenced by fascism, especially Italian, and from 1929 to 1939 this influence steadily increased... The German version of fascism – National Socialism – attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Nationalists in the autumn of 1930, when the NSDAP achieved its first major success in the Reichstag elections.
  35. ^ a b c d Cite error: The named reference rudling2013wr was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  36. ^ "Державний архів Львівської області". Archived from the original on 5 January 2017. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  37. ^ Snyder, Timothy (2004). The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999. Yale University Press. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-300-10586-5. The OUN was an illegal, conspirational, and terrorist organization bound to destroy the status quo. The OUN counted on German help ... Germany was the only possible ally.
  38. ^ Katchanovski, Ivan (2013). "The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and the Nazi Genocide in Ukraine". Paper Presented at the "Collaboration in Eastern Europe During World War II and the Holocaust" Conference, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum & Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. The OUN and the UPA can both be classified as terrorist organizations because their actions correspond to academic definitions of terrorism as the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors in order to intimidate and to achieve political goals.
  39. ^ Delphine, Bechtel (2013). The Holocaust in Ukraine – New Sources and Perspectives – The 1941 pogroms as represented in Western Ukrainian historiography and memorial culture (PDF). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. pp. 3, 6. Some Ukrainian immigrant circles in Canada, the United States, and Germany had been active for decades in trying to suppress the topic and reacted to any testimony about Ukrainian anti-Jewish violence with virulent diatribes against what they dismissed as 'Jewish propaganda' ... the Ukrainian Insurrectional Army (UPA), which was responsible for ethnic "cleansing" actions against Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Galicia.
  40. ^ Plokhy, Serhii (2015). The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books. p. 320. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had close to 100,000 soldiers at its height in the summer of 1944, was fighting behind the Soviet lines, disrupting Red Army communications and attacking units farther from the front ... Among the UPA's major successes was the killing of a leading Soviet commander, General Nikolai Vatutin. On 29 February 1944, UPA fighters ambushed and wounded Vatutin as he was returning from a meeting with subordinates in Rivne, the former capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He died in Kyiv in mid-April. Khrushchev, who attended Vatutin's funeral, buried his friend in the government center of Kyiv ... not all the UPA fighters shared the nationalist ideology or belonged to the OUN.
  41. ^ Friedman, Philip; Friedman, Ada June (1980). Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust. New York: Conference on Jewish Social Studies: Jewish Publication Society of America. p. 179. ISBN 978-0-8276-0170-3 – via Internet Archive. After the outbreak of World War II, the Germans constantly favored the OUN, at the expense of more moderate Ukrainian groups. The extremist Ukrainian nationalist groups then launched a campaign of vilification against moderate leaders, accusing them of various misdeeds ... As early as the spring of 1940, a central Ukrainian committee was organized in Cracow under the chairmanship of Volodimir Kubiovitch ... Shortly before the outbreak of Russo-German hostilities, the Germans, through Colonel Erwin Stolze, of the Abwehr, conducted negotiations with both OUN leaders, Melnyk and Bandera, requesting that they engage in underground activities in the rear of the Soviet armies in the Ukraine.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  42. ^ Katchanovski, Ivan (2015). "Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine". Communist and Post-Communist Studies – Paper Prepared for Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Canadian Political Science Association, Montreal, June 1–3, 2010. 48 (2–3): 15. doi:10.1016/j.postcomstud.2015.06.006. ISSN 0967-067X. However, historical studies and archival documents show that the OUN relied on terrorism and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the beginning of World War II. The OUN-B (Stepan Bandera faction) by means of its control over the UPA masterminded a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Poles in Volhynia during the war and mounted an anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine after the war. These nationalist organizations, based mostly in Western Ukraine, primarily, in Galicia, were also involved in mass murder of Jews during World War II. The 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey shows that only minorities of the residents of Ukraine have favorable views of the OUN-B and the UPA and deny involvement of these organizations in mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews in the 1940s.
  43. ^ Timothy Snyder. (2004) The Reconstruction of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press: p. 168
  44. ^ Motyka 2006, p. 124.
  45. ^ "Poland's president expresses regret over 1947 Akcja Wisla Archived 6 August 2020 at the Wayback Machine", The Ukrainian Weekly
  46. ^ Rudling, Per Anders (2013). "The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda". In Wodak and Richardson (ed.). Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text. New York: Routledge. pp. 229–235. During the Cold War, US, West German, and British intelligence utilized various OUN wings in ideological warfare and covert actions against the Soviet Union (Breitman and Goda, 2010: 73–98; Breitman, Goda, Naftali and Wolfe, 2005). Funded by the CIA, which sponsored Lebed's immigration to the United States and protected him from prosecution for war crimes, OUN(z) activists formed the core of the Proloh Research and Publishing Association, a pro-nationalist semi academic publisher.


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