Thoughts on Ukraine

In trying to discredit Ukrainian nationalism recently, Russia has cited ostensible fascists and neo-Nazis in the overthrow of the now defunct pro-Russian government. Part of the evidence Russians like Vladimir Putin have cited is the veneration by some Ukrainians for Stepan Bandera, who lead the Organization for Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during World War II. Thousands of Ukrainians marched to honor his birthday in January. In 2010 the then Ukrainian president had declared him a Hero of the Ukraine, which was revoked under the subsequent regime. He even appeared on a Ukrainian postage stamp.

Bandera’s OUN tried to organize an independent Ukraine after the Germans invaded in 1941 and the Soviets had retreated. The Germans arrested Bandera and his cohorts but later released them, hoping they would fight the by then advancing Soviets, which they did. To what extent the OUN collaborated with Germany is debated. The Soviets had killed millions of Ukrainians during the Terror Famine of the 1930s. Many Ukrainians, as in other Soviet republics, initially welcomed the German invasion as a liberation from Joseph Stalin. The celebration was short-lived, as the Germans of course were brutal, viewing Slavic peoples as subhuman.

In Nazi ideology, the Slavs would be initially enslaved by their German masters and later exterminated to facilitate German colonization. Horribly, the Germans began their extermination of the Jews more quickly, with some locals complicit in the crimes. Critics of Bandera allege he was complicit. His defenders stoutly deny it.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Russians and others volunteered to fight with the Germans against their former Soviet occupiers, many of them eventually formed into an army group under Russian General Andrei Vlasov, who agreed to work with the Germans after his capture by them. At the war’s end, Vlasov’s Army turned against the Germans and attempted to negotiate surrender with the Americans. But America and Britain had agreed at Yalta to repatriate all captured Soviet citizens who had fought alongside the Germans back to the Soviet Union, where they faced likely execution. Many committed suicide rather than go.

Vlasov was executed by the Soviets but Stepan Bandera evaded capture. Ukrainian anti-Soviet insurgents continued operations well into the late 1940s. Afterwards Bandera lived in West Germany, where he was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1959. His successor as OAU chief in exile was Yaroslav Stetsko, who had served Bandera as self-declared premier of an independent Ukraine in 1941 before he was arrested with Bandera by the Germans. Until his death in 1986 Stetsko was head of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, a coalition of anti-Soviet emigres.

I once met an elderly Stetsko in about 1985, when I was a college student, interning for High Frontier, a group backing President Reagan’s anti-missile defense shield idea. Stetsko knew High Frontier’s chief, retired U.S. Army Lt. General Daniel Graham. “Do you recognize Ukrainian,” the woman with him, possibly his wife, asked me on the elevator after I had evidently starred at them. I replied that I thought it was Russian, provoking her brief frown. According to Wikipedia, the wife helped found a political party in Ukraine in the 1990s before her death in 2003.

Coincidentally, the man under whom I worked at High Frontier was an old retired U.S. Army colonel who had been charged with returning captured members of Vlasov’s Army to the Soviets at the war’s end. Knowing their likely fate, he recalled his terrible anguish, even meeting directly with General George Patton, who replied with sympathy but declared he too was under orders.

Stetsko was Catholic, and Bandera was Eastern rite Catholic. They both came from parts of the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire that became part of western Ukraine. Ukraine is today divided between its west, much of which is Catholic and Western oriented, and the eastern regions, which are historically Orthodox and more Russian oriented. Today’s troubles are the latest episode in centuries of strife.

John Lukacs, the Hungarian-American historian and Catholic, recalls in his memoir the despair he felt in Hungary as a boy and young man, living first under the Germans, and later under the Soviets. He looked with longing on what he described as the Protestant democratic monarchies of northwest Europe, who seemed from a distance to embody decency and order while the rest of Europe fell to chaos and evil. Lukacs admired Britain’s Winston Churchill particularly, but also the Dutch, Danes and Norwegians who, even after falling to German occupation, continued their struggle, either underground, or in exile.

It’s hard for most Americans to fathom the chaos and bloodletting in so much of the world, having ourselves lived in relative stability and peace for so long. Such tranquility is historically aberrant and we should be grateful to God for however long it lasts.