There is hardly another famous historical figure in Ukraine who would be as divisive for the Ukrainian society and provoke such hatred or adoration as Stepan Bandera. The attitude to this figure is, essentially, the attitude of the idea of the Ukrainian national (and not merely independent) state in its most extreme form and the idea of struggle for this state, which is “suprapersonal,” relentless, devoid of any sentimental (and sometimes, abstract ethical) considerations. (“You shall gain the independent unified Ukrainian state – or die fighting for it.” Either – or, Bandera did not leave room for a third option.)
Quite recently, Bandera took the third place among the top 10 “great Ukrainians,” but this fact does not in the least mean that his life and his true social and political beliefs are familiar to, and shared by, the broad Ukrainian public. For millions, Bandera still remains first and foremost a mystic banner of the national liberation movement, rather than a real person. No wonder: Bandera’s scholarly biography has not yet been written (and who knows if it ever will be); the huge bulk of documents casting light on his life has only been touched upon – the result of all the decades when it was a taboo.
This is the context which can help assess the motives and consequences of President Yushchenko’s Decree on awarding Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine for, as the document reads, “the steadfastness of spirit in the struggle for the national idea, and the heroism and self-sacrifice displayed while fighting for the independent Ukrainian state.”
The timeliness and appropriateness of issuing the decree in these days by the president, who is soon to leave office and is, figuratively speaking, pulling up stakes, is a separate question to discuss. In the author’s honest opinion, this decree, which doubtlessly shows Yushchenko’s deep convictions and his sheer respect for the leader of the OUN, ought to have been issued, let’s say, in the first half of 2005. Now it looks at least tardy, forced, and hasty, and it has caused utter annoyance among a considerable part of Ukrainian society. The treatment of Bandera nowadays is characterized by the prevalence of absolutely antagonistic feelings rather than accurate historical knowledge. It will take more than one year to change this situation, and it is rather doubtful that the president’s decree, issued on 22 January, The Day of Unification of Ukraine, should promote this process.
It is interesting to observe the reaction this document triggered in Ukraine and abroad. No comment is necessary to describe the attitude adopted by Russia and its fanatical adherents on our territory. Let us just note that a member of Lenin (!) district council in Sevastopol put up a cynical and pathetic political show as he burned his Ukrainian passport in public “in protest.”
However, the reaction from our Polish neighbors is revealing. Thus, Mariusz Gandzlik, minister of President Lech Kaczynski’s office, declared that “we in Poland had been hoping for a more delicate treatment on the part of our Ukrainian partners. Suffice it to say that for the Poles, Stepan Bandera is a figure that evokes extremely ambiguous feelings.” It is doubtlessly so, for one can hardly find a person who would have fought as consistently against the “pacification” and Polonization of Western Ukraine as Bandera did.
However, it’s time to turn to this man’s fate and show at least the most prominent landmarks in his life. (We just hope that a more systematic description will be given in Bandera’s future biography.)
He was born on Jan. 1, 1909, in the village of Stary Uhryniv (now in Ivano-Frankivsk oblast) into a family of intellectuals. His father, Andrii Bandera, was a Greek Catholic priest and came from a petty bourgeois family from Stryi. His mother, n?e Glodzinska, came from an ancient priestly family. The Banderas belonged to the local Ukrainian elite; their home boasted of an excellent library and was often visited by figures well-known in the liberation movement.
In his autobiography, My Biographical Data, Bandera recalls those years: “During the first world war I, then a pre-teen, witnessed the front pass through my native village four times: in 1914-15 and 1917, while in 1917 there were also two weeks of fierce battles. The Austro-Russian front passed through Uhryniv, and our house was partly destroyed by shells.”
There is one very eloquent detail: in the Romance languages, the surname Bandera means “flag” or “banner.” This is exactly the meaning in which it was used in Western Ukraine, too, while the name Stepan (Stephanos) means “a wreath” in Greek.
Bandera had taken part in the Ukrainian liberation movement ever since his young years. As a boy, he suffered from rheumatic joints and was so sick that at times he could not even walk. However, he trained his willpower to such an extent that later he was able to go through prisons and Polish and German concentration camps.
As early as in 1933, Bandera was one of the leaders of the regional command of the OUN in Western Ukrainian lands – and that only at the age of 24! Here are dry but eloquent facts: on Jan. 13, 1936, on the charge of masterminding the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronislaw Pieracki, who was an ardent “pacificator,” Bandera was sentenced to capital punishment (after two years of solitary confinement). The sentence was eventually commuted and replaced with life imprisonment. In the same year, 1936, there was another “Lviv trial” of Bandera, which sentenced him, on the basis of additional indictment, to seven (!) life terms in prison.
It was at this process that Bandera pronounced his famous words, making his political standing clearer to see:
“The OUN fights against Bolshevism, because Bolshevism is a system, by means of which Moscow has enslaved the Ukrainian nation via the destruction of the Ukrainian statehood. Because Bolsheviks resort to physical methods, so we also will use physical methods in fighting them. Bolshevism uses methods of physical extermination to fight against the Ukrainian nation in Eastern Ukrainian lands; namely, it uses mass shootings in the execution cellars of the GPU, starving millions of people to death, and ceaseless deportations to Siberia and the Solovets Islands.” Bandera was only able to get out of the Polish prison in 1939, with the outbreak of the war. Soon he stood at the helm of the strongest faction in the OUN, the OUN (revolutionary).
The fates of Bandera’s brothers and sisters are also striking. His two brothers, Oleksandr and Vasyl, were tortured to death by the Nazis in Oswincim in the summer of 1942. The first brother studied philosophy at the Roman Higher School of Economic-Political Sciences, became related to Count Ciano, the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, but left Italy for Ukraine in order to participate in the liberation movement. Bandera’s third brother, Bohdan, was killed by the Nazis in Kherson in 1943, as a member of a mobile OUN group.
His three sisters, Marta, Volodymyra, and Oksana, served terms of several decades in the Far North. Bandera himself, as everyone knows, was assassinated in Munich on Oct. 15, 1959, by the KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky, who shot at the OUN leader with a gun loaded with poisoned bullets. Later, a court in Karlsruhe, FRG, convicted Stashynsky.
There is a time for every event under heaven – a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones. A time to tear down and a time to build up. A time to love and a time to hate. This was written in Ecclesiastes a long, long time ago. There is a time to hate, but there is a time to gather stones. That is, to learn our own history without making Bandera into an idol or a monster. He fought against the Bolshevist barbarism – therefore his methods might have been barbaric at times. A part of Russians and their sympathizers here in Ukraine, who will not accept independent Ukraine per se, do not care about personalities. Bandera, or Shukhevych, or Petliura, or even Mazepa – they are all alike, all villains and traitors. The time to gather stones is coming for those who want to know the truth at last.
COMMENTS
Yurii SHAPOVAL, Ph.D. in History,
Director, Center of Historical Political Science, head of the Political Science Department, Institute for Political and Ethno-National Research, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine:
“I think this presidential decision is wrong. Firstly, Ukrainians do not know who Bandera is. In our consciousness, there are two images of him. On the one hand, there is all this apologetic literature depicting him as a hero fighter, while on the other, there is a flow of negative information: the Nazi accomplice, the man who (though from a distance) masterminded punitive campaigns. In other words, there is no scholarly biography of Bandera worth speaking of. And this is the first drawback of such a decision.
“The second is the lack of a public discussion concerning this decision. The situation here resembles the one with nomination of Shukhevych for the same title. If I were the president, I would not hurry with such things.
“However, my main message is that it is just necessary to abolish the title of the Hero of Ukraine. In developed nations such as Italy, France, or the USA, there are no such awards or decorations. It is a Stalinist atavism, a vestige of the communist regime which must be done away with. That is why I think there is no point in discussing the opportuneness or appropriateness of this decision.”
Ihor LOSIEV, Ph. D., Associate Professor of Philosophy:
“I approve of this decision, but Yushchenko should really have taken it some time back in 2005, or at least in 2009, when we marked Bandera’s birth centenary. Doing this now, when de-facto he is not even the president, does not look like a heroic deed. Besides, I was wondering how Bandera would react if he found himself in the company of such “heroes of our time” as Volodymyr Lytvyn, Tetiana Zasukha, Mykola Bahrov, Yukhym Zviahilsky, and others. It seems to me that he would resent such company.
“However, on the whole it was a correct decision. This question had long been ripe. It is necessary to pass a law on the status of veterans of national liberation movements, rather than award selected individuals. Of course, the public view of Bandera is very mixed. Everyone who values the independence of Ukraine will clearly approve of this step taken by President Yushchenko.
“As to those who are not very happy with Ukraine’s independence as a state, they cannot, of course, be enamored with the fighters for this independence. Concerning the displeasure in certain neighbor nations – it is just a projection of their displeasure at the very fact of Ukraine’s statehood. Such hysterics should be viewed calmly. If a nation cannot make decisions about its own heroes or traitors, it means that it is de-facto not free.”
Yurii LUKANOV, commentator, author of the documentary Three Loves of Stepan Bandera:
“I have always said that it doesn’t matter if the title of Hero of Ukraine will be conferred on Bandera or not. This character is truly established in our history and is actually a heroic figure as it is, regardless of all the discussions he has caused.
“On the other hand, once the president conferred the title of Hero of Ukraine on Roman Shukhevych, he ought to have done the same to Bandera. All things concerned, Bandera is a greater historical figure than Shukhevych.
“Please note that before, any historical discussion initiated by our president, not only the figure of Bandera, stirred up passions. They would provoke a public outcry – but now we only see response from Petro Symonenko and some clown in Sevastopol who burnt his Ukrainian passport... In fact, the reaction is very quiet. The same situation could be observed in connection with the court ruling on the man-made terror famine (Holodomor). Again, a very quiet reaction. Why is this so? Because these themes were perceived not as historical realities to be studied and learned, but rather as Yushchenko’s own political slogans. That is why they met with open political opposition. As soon as Yushchenko lost the presidential election, politicians lost any interest in his slogans.
“Yushchenko effectively combined two incompatible roles, that of a politician and a truth seeker. A politician cannot be a truth seeker. However, he certainly has to initiate public discussions and research to be done by professionals, who will then shape the public opinion. A politician can found his declarations on such research, on public opinion, but not vice versa. Yushchenko rushed and put the cart before the horse when he declared his own assessments to the society which, as we know, does not have a uniform view of Bandera as a historical figure.
“Consequently, his opponents started to declare just the opposite. In a word, a quest for truth turned into a conflict of fetishes. On one side, there is the idealized mythical image of Bandera promoted by Yushchenko, and on the other, Bandera the bandit promoted by the “Reds” and all those who feed on the Soviet propaganda. Neither of these images has anything to do with reality. The opponents keep thrashing each other with those fetishes, while on the public level there is no research being done into the real historical material.
“Although I filmed my documentary long before Yushchenko became president [Three Loves of Stepan Bandera was made in 1998. – The Day], and it was shown on a number of channels, no one ever accused me of splitting the society. The same is true of the researchers of the Holodomor, who maintained long ago that it was sheer genocide. However, once a politician made a statement and, moreover, as he ventured into unprepared territory... Yushchenko should have stimulated this discussion without providing his personal assessments. Instead, he ought to have acted as a supervisor.”
