Capsule Sheds Images of “Just War”

By Lubomyr Luciuk

Their cache was exhumed June 24, 1999 near the Hutsul village of Yavoriv, in Western Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountains. The Kishchuk Family was restoring some outbuildings on a hilltop farm, formerly the property of Palii Mytskaniuk. He disappeared after the Soviets discovered he supported the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Later, his wife was deported. Neither of them returned.

As Hanna removed remnants of a drying shed, levelling the surrounding turf, her hoe snagged two glass jars. The contents of one were decayed. The second held 216 celluloid negatives. Her son, Petro, seeing the Ukrainian tryzub, a trident, on the cap badges of soldiers visible on this developed film, identified them as members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. He had grown up hearing stories about the Ukrains’ka Povstans’ka Armija (UPA). Until 1991, those tales may have been whispered, but they were told and retold, nonetheless.

What is even more remarkable than their discovery, after fifty years in the ground, was that these photographs were ever taken. UPA regulations generally prohibited photography, which needlessly exposed soldiers and supporters to grave risk should their likenesses be captured. While we will never know why these pictures were made, it seems certain that by the time they were buried, those secreting them knew full well that their struggle was drawing to an end. So, before they were finally undone, the last of Company No. 67’s men consigned their negatives to the shelter of their native soil, willfully preserving relics they hoped would someday be found, to provide evidence of who they were and what they fought for. “Fascist collaborators,” “bandits,” and “war criminals” – terms used to brand these partisans – do not usually seek to secure their record for posterity. UPA soldiers did because they understood their struggle for Ukraine’s independence differently than their enemies did - then, and since.

Above all, they saw themselves engaged in a national liberation movement. They took up arms only after the state in which they lived, Poland, was violently dismembered by Nazi Germany (1 September 1, 1939) aided by the Soviet Union (September 17, 1939). Then they witnessed their homeland incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic through a staged plebiscite, even as the organs of Soviet repression continued a relentless persecution of anyone – Ukrainian, Pole or Jew – deemed inimical to the Stalinist regime. Deportations and mass murder continued even as Hitler’s legions attacked their Soviet ally, on June 22, 1941.

The arrival of new overlords brought little respite, for the Nazis proved no more sympathetic to Ukrainian aspirations than the Soviets. For Hitler and his satraps, Ukrainians were sub-humans (untermenschen), their land a future living space, or lebensraum, to be emptied and then resettled, by the Aryan master race. Toward that end, they herded Ukrainian patriots into concentration camps, despoiled the country’s resources, and press-ganged millions into slave labour in the Third Reich. Ukraine suffered greater losses than any nation in Nazi-occupied Europe, a fact still obfuscated by those who refer to “20 million Soviet dead” in the “Great Patriotic War.” Tellingly, Moscow’s rendition of when the War began dates only from the date their perfidious partners attacked, by which time Western Europe had been overrun, the Battle of Britain joined in, and the gates of hell had opened at Auschwitz.

Confronted by two rogue states, Nazi Germany and the USSR, whose contending ideologies barely masked rapacious colonial designs on Ukraine, and having no government to protect them, the Ukrainian nation exercised its inherent right of self-defence. UPA coalesced in late autumn 1942. Necessary, measured, and proportional military actions were taken against the German and later against the Soviet occupations. This legitimate struggle continued even after all of Ukraine fell under Soviet hegemony. The resistance was finally reduced, but only after the Communist secret police and internal security forces brutally depopulated the Western Ukrainian countryside, liquidating the insurgents’ civilian support networks, then hunted down the last surviving warriors. This counter-insurgency campaign lasted more than a decade after the War’s end.

Whether the guerillas had any serious prospect of success can be debated. Certainly, many believed Soviet Imperialism would be contained, perhaps even rolled back by the West. For what proved to be a very mistaken intelligence, they would suffer betrayal, disillusionment, and what must have seemed like the greatest indignity, being all but forgotten, spoken of in their homeland only out of earshot of the regime’s minions. 

In 1991, Ukraine re-emerged as a sovereign and internationally recognized state in Europe. Yet the memory of who these nationalists were remains contested. Those who served the Soviets, ferreting out insurgents, receive state pensions. No such benefits are afforded OUN and UPA veterans. This travesty persists because, as long as the USSR existed, nationalists were portrayed as villains, a bias indoctrinated deeply. And just as there are still insurgents alive in Ukraine today so too there are those who continue reciting the propaganda of the past, for doing so masks their complicity in crimes against humanity. Ironically, these enablers, and their fellow travelers in the West, remain more influential than those who fought for Ukraine’s independence.

This situation will not last because, for over a decade, the people have taken it upon themselves to honour their partisans. Those best placed to know what the insurgency represented – family members, neighbours and descendents – have erected dozens of plaques and memorials to hallow the victims of Nazi and Soviet oppression and to laud all who resisted foreign domination. This reshaping of the cultural landscape has sapped Soviet-era fabrications of much of their meaning, giving strong evidence of how the people understand Ukraine’s 20^th century history, and of how, someday, it will be written.

Until that day comes, stories will be told about UPA heroes. One was Dmytro Bilinchuk, nom de guerre, Khmara. When the Soviets deported his family to Siberia, in 1941, he took up arms. After the Germans invaded, he remained in the underground, offering the Nazis no welcome. Captured by the Gestapo, he was rescued while being transported to a Kolomyia prison. Returning to the forests, Khmara would not be taken again until he was betrayed, in 1952. After interrogation in Kyiv’s Lukianivka prison, he was shot on June 24, 1953.

On the exact anniversary of his execution the cached photographs of Company No. 67 were pulled from the very ground into which the insurgents entombed themselves every winter and from which they emerged each spring to take up their quarrel with the foe. They kept doing that until the last of them fell, faithful to their oath: “Attain a Ukrainian state or die in battle for it.”

Having spent the better part of a decade eradicating OUN and UPA, Khmara’s executioners probably believed they had erased the Ukrainian liberation movement from history. By consigning their images to Ukraine’s earth, UPA Company No. 67’s insurgents proved them wrong and so, in the end, won their “Just War.”

A professor at the Royal Military College, Lubomyr Luciuk is co-author, with Dr. Vasyl Humeniuk, of the recently published book, Their Just War: Images of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Kashtan Press, 22 Gretna Green, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, K7M 3J2, $45)