Anti-Soviet Resistance By The Ukrainian Insurgent Army

The Anti-Soviet resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, ( UPA - the initials of the Ukrainska Povstanska Armiya) was a guerrilla war waged by Ukrainian nationalist partisan formations against the Soviet Union in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and southwestern regions of the Byelorussian SSR, during and after World War II.

With the Red Army forces successful counteroffensive against the Nazi Germany and their move into western Ukraine in July 1944, UPA resisted the Red Army's advancement with full-scale guerrilla war, holding up 200,000 Soviet soldiers, particularly in the countryside, and was supplying intelligence to the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service.

OUN-UPA was a terrorist organization, relying on terrorist tactics and collaboration with Nazi Germany that favoured the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at the expense of more moderate Ukrainian organizations but not all UPA soldiers were members of the OUN or shared OUN's ideology. UPA is also responsible for the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Poles, the mass murder of Jews as well as Ukrainians during the World War II and post-war anti-Soviet terror campaign in Western Ukraine.

One major UPA victory against the Soviet Union was the killing of a high ranking Soviet General Nikolai Vatutin.

According to Soviet documents during the conflict a total of 153,000 people were killed, 134,000 arrested and 203,000 deported by the Soviet authorities, mostly in the years 1944–45. At the same time, OUN-UPA killed 30,676 people (in the years 1944–1953), and 8,340 of them were soldiers.

Background

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established in 1929 by radical nationalists and holding a prominent role fascists, that advocated for an independent, ethnically cleansed, homogenous totalitarian state with all other political parties banned. Prior to World War II, the extreme OUN was smaller and less influential among the minority Ukrainians in Poland than the moderate UNDO party. The OUN, that emulated the Nazi's organizational system, closely collaborated with other fascist states and movements, particularly in Germany, but also in Italy, Japan, Romania and Spain, many were Nazi agents. Ukrainian nationalism was formed under the influence of such political theorists as Dmytro Dontsov’s political thought, characterised by a need for totalitarianism, national chauvinism also antisemitism, Mykola Stsiborskyi and Yevhen Onatsky as well as Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Before the war, the OUN regarded the Second Polish Republic as an immediate target, but even then it viewed the Soviet Union, although not operating on its territory, as the main enemy and greatest oppressor of the Ukrainian people. Even before the war, impressed by the successes of fascism, OUN radicalised its stance, and it saw Nazi Germany as its main ally in the fight for independence.

From the very beginning there was a strong division within the OUN between the "young" and "old" groups. The group of older activists was born around 1890 and experienced the service of fighting during WWI and later for Ukrainian independence, they were also active in the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), while the younger activists were born later and grew up in independent Poland. The young were much more radical, calling for the use of terror in political struggle, but both groups were united by national radicalism and advocacy of a totalitarian system. The leader of the "old" group Andriy Melnyk claimed in a letter sent to the German minister of foreign affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop on 2 May 1938 that the OUN was ''ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy''.

OUN's terrorist methods, fascination with fascism, rejection of parliamentary democracy and acting against Poland on behalf of Germany did not find support among many other Ukrainian organizations, especially among the so-called Petlurites, i.e. former activists of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In the course of the war, with the approaching defeat of Nazi Germany, the OUN-B changed, at least in official statements, its political image. It moved away from fascist symbolism and totalitarianism toward democratic slogans. OUN's denials of its role in the Holocaust began in 1943 after it became obvious that Germany would lose the war. The whitewashing continued after the war, with OUN's propaganda describing its legacy as a "heroic Ukrainian resistance against the Nazis and the Communists".

Outbreak of the war

Before 1939, Ukrainian territories were split between Poland, the Soviet Union, Romania and Czechoslovakia. The Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, followed by the Soviet invasion on September 17 that captured the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic. On 1 November 1939, Polish territories annexed by the Soviet Union (i.e. Volhynia and Eastern Galicia) were incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Initially, the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland was met with limited support from the ethnic Ukrainian population. Repression was directed mainly against the ethnic Poles, and the Ukrainisation of education, land reform, and other changes were popular among the Ukrainians. The situation changed in the middle of 1940 when collectivisation began and repressions hit the Ukrainian population. There were 2,779 Ukrainians arrested in 1939, 15,024 in 1940 and 5,500 in 1941, until the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

The situation for ethnic Ukrainians under German occupation was much better. About 550,000 Ukrainians lived in the General Government in the German-occupied portion of Poland, and they were favoured at the expense of Poles. Approximately 20 thousand Ukrainian activists escaped from the Soviet occupation to Warsaw or Kraków. In late 1939, Nazi Germany accommodated OUN leaders in the city of Kraków, the capital of the General Government and provided a financial support for the OUN. The headquarters of the Ukrainian Central Committee headed by Volodymyr Kubiyovych, the legal representation of the Ukrainian community in the Nazi zone, were also located in Kraków.

Creation of OUN-B, pogroms and anti-Soviet uprising

In Kraków on 10 February 1940 a revolutionary faction of the OUN emerged, called the OUN-R or, after its leader Stepan Bandera, the OUN-B ( Banderites). This was opposed by the current leadership of the organization, so it split, and the old group was called OUN-M after the leader Andriy Melnyk (Melnykites). The OUN-M dominated Ukrainian emigration and the Bukovina, but in Ukraine itself, the Banderists gained a decisive advantage (60% of the agent network in Volhynia and 80% in Eastern Galicia).

The OUN-B was more radical and already in 1940 began preparations for an anti-Soviet uprising. However, Soviet repression delayed these plans and more serious fighting did not occur until after the German invasion of the USSR in July 1941. According to OUN-B reports, they then had

about 20,000 men grouped in 3,300 locations in Western Ukraine. In addition, Ukrainian Nachtigall and Roland battalions were formed under German command and numbered about 800 men. The NKVD was determined to liquidate the Ukrainian underground, according to Soviet reports 4435 members were arrested between October 1939 and December 1940. There were public trials and death sentences were carried out. In the first half of 1941, 3073 families (11329 people) of members of the Polish and Ukrainian underground were deported from Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Soviet repression forced about a thousand members of the Ukrainian underground to take up partisan activities even before the German invasion.

The OUN seized about 213 villages and organized diversion in the rear of the Red Army. In the process, it lost 2,100 soldiers and 900 were wounded.

OUN's anti-Semitism was influenced by Nazi Germany but the organization also had its own, independent anti-Semitic tradition. The OUN-B formed Ukrainian militias that, displaying exceptional cruelty, carried out at least 58 documented antisemitic pogroms and massacres of Jews that claimed between 13,000 and 35,000 lives. The biggest pogroms carried out by the Ukrainian nationalists took place in Lviv resulting in the massacre of 6,000 Polish Jews. The involvement of OUN-B is unclear, but certainly OUN-B propaganda fuelled antisemitism. The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia.

After the German capture of Lwów (Lviv) in 1941, the OUN leadership announced the creation of a Ukrainian state. Hitler, however, was opposed to Ukrainian statehood, having set his sights on the ruthless economic exploitation of the newly acquired colonial territories. OUN was banned, on 5 July Bandera was arrested and placed under house arrest in Berlin. The OUN-B went underground and encouraged its members and supporters to join the German administration and especially the auxiliary police.

Following the German army, they managed to extend their network also into eastern Ukraine, but their slogans did not find support among the local population. The OUN-M on the other hand acted openly and took over local governments in the eastern part of occupied Poland, including Lwów ( Lviv). OUN-B fought OUN-M, going so far as to murder its members. At the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the Germans started to fight the influence of OUN-M by arresting its members, so they also went underground. Another group was the so-called Polissian Sich formed by Taras Bulba Borovets, who referred to the traditions of the Ukrainian People's Republic. After the German attack he occupied and controlled Sarny and Olevsk, formed an alliance with the Germans and fought the Soviet remnants as police chief. In November 1941 he was forced to disband his unit (which at that time numbered about 2,000–3,000 people) after the Germans wanted to limit his independence and he refused to participate in the liquidation of the Jews. However, even after that, the power of the occupation administration over the territory of Polesia was mostly limited to cities, railway stations and roads. The countryside turned into an arena of brutal confrontation between several guerrillas armies.

Mass executions of Jews began in the autumn of 1941 on German-occupied territories and continued in the second half of 1942 when the Germans began liquidating Jewish ghettos. Members of the Ukrainian auxiliary police took part in these executions. From 1942, the local non-Jewish population also became targets of repression. The Germans began to deport the population en masse to the Reich for work and to demand large supplies from the farmers. For their refusal, the Germans began to punish the population with executions and pacifications of Ukrainian and Polish villages. The Ukrainian auxiliary police also took part in the pacification actions, but the mood of rebellion was growing in their ranks.

As a result, partisan units reappeared in Western Ukraine, including Soviet ones and the first Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) formed by Taras Bulba-Borovets. Bulba-Borovets went into active combat in April 1942, mainly against the Germans; the group entered into a neutrality agreement with the Soviet partisans. In December 1942 he proposed to the Melnykites and Banderites to join forces with him as commander-in-chief. The OUN-B rejected the proposal, but the OUN-M, who had already begun to form their own units, accepted the offer.

Creation of UPA, anti-German uprising and extermination of Poles

In October 1942 OUN-B decided to form its own partisans, called OUN Military Detachments. Individual units entered active combat in February 1943 (first was sotnia of Hryhoriy Perehinyak attack on German police station in Volodymyrets on 7 February). At the third OUN-B conference (17-23 February 1943) it was decided to launch an anti-German uprising in order to liberate as much territory as possible before the arrival of the Red Army. The uprising was to break out first in Volhynia, for which purpose the formation of a partisan army called the Ukrainian Liberation Army began there. The uprising broke out in mid-March, with Dmytro Klyachkivsky and Vasyl Ivakhiv leading it, and Klyachkivsky alone after Ivakhiv death in May that year. It was also at that time that the name given to it was abandoned and the name Ukrainian Insurgent Army, taken over from Bulba-Borovets, began to be used, thus impersonating it. The new army basis were Ukrainian policemen, who deserted en masse (about 5 000) between March and April 1943. By July 1943 the UPA had twenty thousand soldiers. Even before the anti-German uprising started, OUN-B units started to attack Polish villages and murder Polish people. This soon turned into a full-scale extermination campaign, aimed at killing off or driving out the Polish population from areas considered by OUN-B to be Ukrainian. The main target of UPA's ethnic cleansing were Poles, mainly women and children, but they also killed other ethnic minorities such as Jews, Czechs, Hungarians, Armenians and even many Ukrainians. UPA fighters used mainly farm tools such as scythes, knives and pitchforks to commit their murders of civilians.

Attacks on Poles were the reason why Taras Bulba-Borowets rejected the proposal of cooperation and he also criticised the idea of a premature uprising against the Germans. To distinguish himself from the OUN-B army, he adopted the name Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army (UNRA). The maximum number of UNRA soldiers was approximately 3,000-4,000. Most OUN-M units had no such resistance and joined the UPA. Those that resisted as well as the UNRA and Ukrainian Revolutionary Front units were mostly broken up or forcibly forced to cooperate in the summer of 1943. In July–August 1943, the UPA ruled over a large territory of Volhynia, cleared of Germans and Polish population. OUN-B units in eastern Galicia, bearing the name Ukrainian National Self-Defence (UNS) joined the fight later, only in the late summer of 1943, and only in a limited capacity. From January 1944, the incorporation of UNS units in Eastern Galicia into the UPA began. This also became the beginning of the extermination of Polish people in Eastern Galicia, which started in April of that year.

At the Third Congress of the OUN (21-25 August 1943) it was decided to make preparations for an open fight against the Red Army, with plans to extend it to other parts of the Soviet Union, involving other oppressed nations. Decisions were also taken to move away from extreme nationalist rhetoric and adopt a more pro-democratic one. It was also around that time when acting OUN leader Mykola Lebed was replaced with a three-person ''Provid'' Office in which Roman Shukhevych played a major role. Shukhevych also soon assumed the role of UPA commander-in-chief in place of Klyachkivsky.

With Nazi Germany's and German gradual withdrawal from western Ukraine, UPA started to strike German rear units capturing their equipment. These actions provoked the German raids on UPA positions. By the end of July 1944, the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, an OUN-B outfit, reached a signed agreement with the Germans for a unified front against the Soviet Union and for UPA diversionary activities in the rear of the Soviet front. The signed deal ended UPA raids on the German rear positions and opened door to the flow of arms and training materials from the Germans. UPA-German cooperation ended in early 1945 when it ceased to be beneficial to the OUN-B.

In 1944 UPA reached a peak membership of 25-30 thousand guerrillas. Together with the militias of the Sluzhba Bezpeky, Self-defense Kushch Units and the field network of agents, the number of people linked to the underground reached about 100,000 people. In April 1943, the Germans began forming the Ukrainian SS "Galizien" division. The OUN-B leadership was initially negative to the idea but later began to support the enlistment of members in the formation as a good opportunity to receive military training. The division was broken up in June 1944, only 3,000 soldiers managed to avoid death or capture, and several hundred of them joined the UPA. The OUN leadership and the UPA command were convinced that the Russians were prepared to destroy all Ukrainians, basing this on the experience of the Great Famine of the 1930s, when five million people or more Soviet citizens starved to death between 1931 and 1934, 3.9 million of them Ukrainian.

At the beginning of 1944, the Red Army came to the areas of UPA's activity. In January–February 1944, it occupied a large part of Volhynia. The troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front, with the forces of the 13th and 60th armies, carried out the Rivne-Lutsk offensive, capturing these two regional centers on February 2. In the occupied territories, the Soviet authorities seized food, conscripted local Ukrainians en masse into the Red Army, and after a few days of training threw them on the front. The majority of party and state cadres were foreigners from the USSR, who often behaved like conquerors in a conquered country, and treated the local Ukrainian population with contempt. There were also numerous examples of fraud, theft, and rape committed by Soviet soldiers.^:10

Armed resistance during the war (1944–1945)

Fights in Volhynia and Podolia (the first half of 1944)

The UPA tried to undermine Soviet authorities and block the mobilisation of the local population into Soviet units. They attacked recruitment committees and conducted agitation among the local population. They changed their tactics in September 1944, when they encouraged some of their followers to join the army in order to disintegrate it from within and propagate nationalist content. This effort was quite successful, as by September 1, 1944, the 1st Ukrainian Front had only managed to call up 56% of the planned number of recruits.The majority of the UPA guerrillas viewed Stepan Bandera as their leader. They were ordinary Ukrainian Baderists, but the ranks of UPA also contained Ukrainians from the former 14th Grenadier Waffen-SS (Galicia), German SS men, including a German SS officer Anton Eichner and Slovak Hlinka Guards.

The approach of the Red Army forced UPA's to develop further strategy and tactics of war with occupiers. The group was ordered to leave the Vinnytsia and Kamianets-Podilskyi regions, where there were few forests, and retreat to Volhynia together with two parts of the army group. In the second half of January 1944, units of the UPA crossed the front in the Volhynia forest belt along with the Sluch and Horyn

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