THE MOST HATED MAN WHO EVER LIVED

Dateline: Rome—

Bandera centennial commemorative stamp issued by Ukraine.

Some people seem to just fade away into the gossamer past. Some persons who once made history gradually come to have little significance more and sink into oblivion. The name Stepan Bandera was like that until recent years. Bandera? Who was that? Yet the name of Stepan Bandera (b, 1909 in West Ukraine, d. Munich 1959) is today the symbol of Ukrainian Nazism, the ideology and practice of the big and new-old nation of Ukraine, a former Republic of the Soviet Union. In the Ukraine capital of Kyiv—better known as Kiev—once one of Russia’s major cities, the name Bandera lives again. To his memory are dedicated streets, squares, monuments in Ukraine, especially in his native West Ukraine. Today, Nazis of all nationalities pay homage to his memory.

In his lifetime however, the little—Bandera stood 5 feet and 2 inches—Russian-hating, West Ukrainian Nazi was hated by literally everybody. His political opponents within the Ukrainian independence movement hated him, as did many of his own allies and followers. Jews and ethnic Russians hated him for his crimes against them. Even his German Nazi masters considered him despicable because he was a traitor and murderer of his own people. The masses of displaced Ukrainians living in West Germany after World War II hated him for his crimes against his own people. Elements of the post-war German government and many of Germany’s American occupiers hated him… even those he served. Poles hated him for his crimes against the Polish people. Russians hated him in a special way because Bandera, in his German SS uniform, was responsible for the elimination of hundreds of thousands of Russians, soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians alike. Today his figure is hated today by nearly all Russians because of everything he stood for. Ukrainian immigrants in Russia hate him and dislike being called Banderites simply because they are Ukrainian.

Yet, today, especially among many nationalists in western Ukraine, he is revered as a patriotic freedom-fighter, a martyr who led the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union, while in the pro-Russian east of the country he is widely reviled as a fascist traitor and terrorist who collaborated with the Nazis and whose followers murdered thousands of Poles and Jews. Then with the passing of time Bandera has become a hero in the eyes of the growing number of extreme rightists and Nazis in today’s extremely nationalist, jingoistic Ukraine, among Ukrainian nationalists abroad and right-wing extremists in general.

Statue to Bandera in Lviv (Western Ukraine). About 33% of the inhabitants admire Bandera to this day.

In 2010, Stepan Bandera was named “Hero of Ukraine” by then President Yushchenko and his image honored on a postage stamp, after which his memory assumed founder-of-Ukrainian-nationalism proportions. Moscow Avenue in the Ukraine capital, Kyiv (Kiev), was changed to Bandera Avenue in 1916, alienating even more Russia from the former Republic of the USSR. Meanwhile articles galore have emerged in the international press of the life of an ugly and justifiably hated man, especially in Polish, German and to a certain degree English writings which can be seen on Internet … to the chagrin of the Nazi-inspired government in Kiev. In today’s Ukraine the far-right of President Poroshenko (Ukraine’s richest person) and his many foreign ministers form the new political center, while the Nazi- Banderite Svoboda (Freedom) and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) parties run things from their non-disguised Nazi-Fascist position much to the joy of multiple reflowering Nazi-Fascist organizations and parties across Europe.

Rally by Banderistas in the new Ukraine.

[dropcap]B[/dropcap]andera, a noxious personality of the hellish 1930s and ’40s, was the son of a nationalist-minded Greek Catholic priest. Stepan was a self-punishing fanatic who stuck pins under his fingernails to prepare himself for torture at the hands of enemies. As a university student in Lviv (Lvov), he is said to have whipped himself with a belt. “Admit, Stepan!” he would cry out. “No, I don’t admit!” Yet a follower said Bandera “could hypnotize a man …  you couldn’t stop listening to him.”

Stepan Bandera enlisted in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at age twenty where he used his quickly growing influence to steer an already-violent group into more extreme directions. In 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet consul in Lviv, killing an office secretary. A year later, he directed the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister. He ordered the execution of two alleged informers and was responsible for other deaths as well when the OUN took to robbing banks, post offices, police stations, and private households in search of funds.

A study by the German writer Rossoliński-Liebe of what drove Bandera’s violence takes us through the times and the politics that captured Bandera’s imagination. Galicia, Western Ukraine today, had been part of Austro-Hungary prior to WWI. But whereas the Polish-controlled western half of Galicia was incorporated into the newly established Republic of Poland in 1918, the Ukrainian-dominated eastern portion (of West Ukraine), where Bandera was born in 1909, was only absorbed by Poland in 1921, following the Polish–Soviet War and a brief period of independence. Bitter at being deprived of a state of their own, Ukrainian nationalists refused to recognize the takeover and, in 1922, responded with arson attacks on some 2,200 Polish-owned farms. The government in Warsaw replied with repression and cultural warfare. It brought in Polish farmers, many of them war veterans, to settle the district and radically change the demographics of the countryside. It closed down Ukrainian schools and tried to ban the term “Ukrainian,” insisting that students employ the more vague “Ruthenian” instead.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the OUN launched another sabotage campaign in summer 1930, Warsaw resorted to mass arrest. By late 1938, as many as 30,000 Ukrainians languished in Polish jails. Polish politicians spoke of the “extermination” of the Ukrainians while a German journalist who traveled through eastern Galicia in early 1939 reported that local Ukrainians were calling for the German Führer to intervene and impose a solution of his own on the Poles.

The conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands of mixed peoples, languages and cultures exemplified the ethnic wars that erupted throughout eastern Europe as WWII approached. A number of factors carried Bandera in the extremist direction: his father’s position in the church, the fact that Galicia was an ex-Habsburg province and oriented toward Austria and Germany, and Soviet collectivization policies, which had damaged the small farmers of Soviet Ukraine.

Consequently, Bandera moved ever farther to the right. In high school, he read the works of militant nationalists who dreamed of a united Ukraine stretching “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus, a Ukraine free of  Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews. Entry into the OUN a few years later exposed him to the teachings of Dmytro Dontsov, the group’s ultra-rightist spiritual father who translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Mussolini’s La Dottrina Del Fascismo and taught that ethics should be subordinate to the national struggle.

Soccer fans in Lviv displaying a Bandera flag.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was marked by extreme antisemitism. Anti-Jewish hatred had branded Ukrainian nationhood since the seventeenth century when Ukrainian peasants, maddened by the exactions of the Polish landlords and their Jewish estate managers, engaged in vicious pogroms. Gruesome pogroms during the Russian Civil War resulted in wave after wave of Jewish emigration to Israel and accelerated the acquisition of Palestinian lands by legal Jewish emigrants, so well described in a Spanish novel I just read,  Dispara, yo ya estoy Muerto, by Julia Navarro, in which the early conflicts over land between Palestinians and Jewish emigrants are shown. Of particular interest in the novelist’s presentation was that many of the early Jewish settlers who bought legally their lands near Jerusalem were Socialists/Communists and their small farms and orchards were organized as communist collectives.

In the Ukraine however antisemitic passions rose further in 1926 when a Jewish anarchist named Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated the exiled right-wing extremist Ukrainian political leader, Symon Petliura, in Paris. Such events continued to accelerate the Jewish flight from East Europe to Palestine in the years following the Balfour Declaration in 1917 pertaining to the British commitment to the creation of a state of Israel in Palestine.

UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN-POLISH RELATIONS

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]olish-Russian relations remain  one of the most contentious political issues in Eastern Europe today. Stretching back centuries, the memory of the past still influences the policies of the present. The era beginning from World War II provides a useful starting point in better understanding the current state of political affairs between Ukraine and Poland and consequently between Russia and Poland. Those relations reflect in turn the complexity of also Polish-Ukrainian-Russian relations in general and US/NATO post-WWII policies of encirclement of Russia.

Western Ukraine, particularly the city of Lviv-Lvov, occupies a special part of the Polish psyche—something like Kosovo for Serbs—and its separation from the Polish state after WWII was therefore hard for Poles to accept even in accordance to the new socialist ideology of that part of East Europe, nationalism and borders were not supposed to take on the emotional significance that they came to have. Socialist solidarity between peoples counted more than nationalism in identity construction.  Society’s emphasis was on economics, not nationality. Nonetheless, the border changes proved to be a strategic miscalculation caused by blindness to the ever-present nationalism. At the time there was little that Poland could do to protest what it felt was the unfair dislocation of its eastern provinces from the state. Today contemporary Poland believes the influence of the EU can re-establish its cultural and historical hegemony in its eastern regions. Poland believes/hopes it can rival Russia in terms of influence in different regions of Ukraine. Whereas Russia holds important influence over East Ukraine, the EU, via Poland, occupies influence in West Ukraine. Such positioning and hopes create confusion over both Polish and Ukrainian state identity, as much among the peoples themselves residing in the opposite parts of the country. Poland quite often brings up what it views to be the plight of ethnic Poles in Belarus and supports the Belarusian opposition, as Warsaw continues to play its ethnic and historical cards, albeit in a different fashion, in an attempt to affect the domestic affairs of yet another neighboring state.

Poles have dreams of their former great state. A kind of Polish Exceptionalism emerged out of the influence of Pope John Paul II and Solidarity’s historical victory over the communist government in the 1989 elections. Being directly aided by God (via Pope John Paul II) and having successfully defied Soviet  Communism (with abundant subterranean aid from the west via the CIA and other intel agencies) Poles must feel empowered about their future historical role, translated into the concept of Polish Exceptionalism. Poles believe that Poland’s historical legacy entitles it to an assertive presence in Eastern Europe,  a belief which places the country into direct opposition with Russia and its own historical legacy. In order to pursue this destiny, Poland decided on its pro-Western course of political and military development after the Cold War. Poland is developing and exploiting the concepts of its Exceptionalism as opposed to Russian guilt within the institutions of the EU and NATO (it holds the Presidency of the European Union Executive today)  in order to advance its national interests at Russia’s expense. Poland is using what it subjectively considers Russian Guilt to justify Polish Exceptionalism in international opinion, thereby damaging Russia’s soft power potential. (See: Russian Guilt and Polish Exceptionalism by Andrew Korybko, August 1, 2017 for more on the above)

Stepan Bandera In the Post-War

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he remainder of the 40s and early 50s, Stepan Bandera as an immigrant in West Germany worked for the BND, the German Intelligence Service and its forerunner, The Gehlen Org, a top secret organization established in the Munich suburb of Pullach under Hitler’s former intelligence chief in East Europe, General Reinhard Gehlen. Financed by the USA, the Gehlen Org was specialized in espionage and training for spies to be infiltrated into the Soviet Union. Bandera and his wife, Yaroslava, and their three children had also settled in Munich. The Germans and Americans used Bandera only sparingly and for many he seemed forgotten. But the Soviet Union had not forgotten Bandera. True or false, repeated attempts were reportedly made on his life over the years. Yet Bandera remained in Munich, living under the name of Stepan Popel, still a thorn in the side of his many enemies.

On October 15th, 1959, Bandera was killed at his apartment on Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in downtown Munich, allegedly by the KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky. According to the police report Bandera had let his bodyguards off that day. As Stashinsky produced his cyanide gun inside a rolled-up newspaper, Bandera didn’t even produce his own gun. Shot in the face, the fifty year-old Bandera died on a third-floor landing before the ambulance arrived. A medical examination established that the cause of his death was poison by cyanide gas. On 20 October 1959, Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich. His grave was desecrated on 17 August 2014 by unknown vandals, who toppled the 1.8 meter cross.

[dropcap]I [/dropcap]arrived in Munich and Germany long after the press coverage of the murder of just another Slavic émigré had ended and, surprisingly, I had heard little about the political assassination until the sensational trial of the alleged assassin Bogdan Stashinsky began in 1962 in the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) in the city of Karlsruhe. The 30-year old Stashinsky had defected to Germany together with his wife in 1961 and after spilling the beans to the CIA was handed over to German authorities. The Karlsruhe trial was spectacular, concerning the most publicized assassination of the Cold War in which Stashinsky, a self-declared Soviet citizen, was both defendant as well as star witness about the “nefarious” KGB and its political murders in Germany: he also confessed to having assassinated another Ukrainian emigré in Germany in the 1950s.

Some reports claim that the Bandera faction of the OUN had been backed by the British MI6 since the 1930s, although it was associated with the CIA in the post-war for purposes of espionage in the Soviet Union. Other American intelligence organizations described Bandera as “extremely dangerous”, traveling around in disguise, suspected of many crimes including many murders, counterfeiting and kidnappings. When the Bavaria government cracked down, Bandera offered his services to the German BND intelligence despite CIA’s alleged mistrust of him.

After days and weeks of testimony, Stashinsky was condemned to eight years prison. Eight years only! For at least two assassinations!

The whole affair stank. It seemed more like a show trial. An early false flag operation. I fictionalized the story in my political novel, The Trojan Spy, (Punto Press, New York, 2010), some excerpts from which follow:

Truth is elusive, many-sided. In any case, a young Ukrainian KGB agent by the name of Stashinsky was later tried in Karlsruhe and convicted for the murder of Bandera with a poison spray concocted in Moscow. They said he was an agent of Smersh”.… A Russian acronym for Death To Spies. Once a top secret NKVD organization for its wet work. For the assassination of enemies. Killers all. Maybe they wanted to enlist him. But I seriously doubt it. One said that during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, Stashinsky learned enough German to pass for a German and that he was hired by the KGB already at the age of nineteen after he was caught on a train without a ticket. All unlikely. Not KGB style. He admitted he worked in Germany…. He traveled around Germany…. He had a supervisor in Berlin…. But it’s a long jump from that to Smersh. I’ve always suspected Ukrainian émigré political opponents of Bandera’s murder. Western Ukrainian émigrés were always killing Eastern Ukrainians. With German and American help. That is, if Bandera was even murdered. He might have had a heart attack. As in a fairytale the cold-blooded assassin Stashinsky allegedly repented after he saw a newsreel in an East Berlin theater of poor Bandera lying in his coffin and his wife and children weeping. Can you imagine that touching scene? Oh, the soft heart of a KGB killer! ….Unimaginable…..It’s a ridiculous story from beginning to end. Not even the stuff of mythology. Who knows what really happened? Once he got back to East Berlin the handsome young Ukrainian fell head over heels in love with a German woman … who hated the Soviet Union….When  she learned Stashinsky was a KGB agent, she convinced him of the perfidy of Communism and they escaped to West Germany the day before the Wall was built. Soap opera stuff. An American story, the whole Stashinsky affair. A Reader’s Digest story. The naiveté is disgusting….

Western journalists covering the Euromaidan riots and murders in Kiev in 2013 encountered a historical figure few recognized. The black-and-white image of Stepan Bandera was plastered everywhere in the Ukraine capital— on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev’s city hall, and on the placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the elected but Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. Bandera, they thought, had evidently been a nationalist, though controversial. But why? The Russians said he was a fascist and an antisemite, but according to Western media that was only Moscow propaganda. So foreign journalists hedged in their reports from Maidan Kiev. The Washington Post informed that Bandera had only a “tactical relationship’ with Nazi Germany and that his followers “were accused of committing atrocities against Poles and Jews.” According to the New York Times he had been vilified by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor. Foreign Policy simply dismissed Bandera as “Moscow’s favorite bogeyman and metonym for all bad Ukrainian things.” (Google) Whoever Bandera was, he couldn’t have been as nasty as Putin claimed.

Headquarters of the Euromaidan, Kiev, January 2014. At the front entrance there is a portrait of Bandera. (Wikicommons)

But those terrible Russians were right again. For the vast majority of Russians today, the term Banderovtsy or Banderite is even worse than Liberal applied to that small minority who worship Western things, yearn for America, the European Union and NATO and detest Putin and Russian nationalists.

Two feature films have been made about Stepan Bandera – Assassination: An October Murder in Munich (1995) and The Undefeated (2000), both directed by Oles Yanchuk—plus a number of documentary films.