A text by Andreas Faludi
He who wants to form an opinion on Putin’s avowed aim of purging Ukraine from Nazis might read Riabchuk (2010) writing at a time when the European Parliament complained against then Ukrainian President Yuchchenko naming one Stephan Bandera posthumously a ‘National Hero of Ukraine.’ The allegation was Bandera having had Nazi sympathies. But his real role has been in Ukraine’s struggle between – Riabchuk’s terms – ‘aboriginals’ and ‘settlers’ and their ‘creole’ supporters.
So, before World War II, Bandera opposed, not Russian but Polish rule in Western Ukraine at the time, perhaps the reason why Polish MEPs supported the resolution above. But the 1939 Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact gave what was then Eastern Poland to a UdSSR proceeding to murdering captured Polish officers. If not this, then at least chasing their former Polish masters was popular with Ukrainians. But in 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, invading amongst others Ukraine. Which is when Bandera wanted to set up his state, obviously under the tutelage of the Nazis. As other client states, it might very well have become involved in the Holocaust, but this is speculation. The Germans after all wanted, not another vassal state but to colonise Europe’s bread basket. So, they packed Bandera away in a concentration camp. What remained of Bandera nationalists went underground, fighting the Germans and upon their return the Soviets, too.
Indeed, as in Poland and in Lithuania, until about the early 1950s, there seems to have been serious resistance against Soviet – Russian – rule. So, ‘Bandera’ and ‘Banderites’ became synonyms with any self-conscious, non-Russified and non-Sovietized Ukrainians, writes Riabchuk. Branding any resistance as Nazis – which, as with Monsignor Jozef Tiso in Slovakia and Ante Pavelić in Croatia, Banderites might once again have become, had the true Nazis accepted them as allies – is just shorthand for branding them as evil. Their eternal sin is not being Nazi but being against Russian dominance.
Riabchuk, A. (2010) ‘Bandera’s controversy and Ukraine’s future’, Academy of Science of Ukraine, Nr. 1. Available at: http://www.russkiivopros.com/ruskii_vopros.php?pag=one&id=315&kat=9&csl=46