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“Our father is Bandera, Ukraine is our mother, we will fight for her!” In a video posted on social media in early May by Mariupol defenders, a young woman in camouflage clothes sang a song with the lyrics, and male voices sang to her. Everyone was sitting on the ground in the dark, apparently in the dungeons of Azovstal, the last bastion of Ukrainian resistance in the occupied port city. The defense of Mariupol is composed mainly of fighters from the Azov Regiment, which is part of the National Guard. It is a well-known fact that it was founded by radical nationalists, Deutsche Welle reports.
Stepan Bandera, who was assassinated by Soviet special services in Germany more than 50 years ago, is the most famous Ukrainian nationalist. His name became a symbol long before the start of the Russian war in Ukraine. For some Ukrainians, Bandera is a hero and an example, for Russian propaganda – he is an enemy. For the Russian army, it is a sign that Ukrainians are literally being persecuted in the occupied territories. Ukrainian media quoted a number of eyewitnesses as saying that Russian soldiers were purposefully searching for “Bandera” among the Ukrainians they captured. In an attempt to justify the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it an inevitable clash with “neo-Nazis and Bandera.”
Bandera – life and death
Bandera’s biography is closely connected with Western Ukraine, which until 1939 was part of Austria-Hungary and Poland. He was born in 1909 in the family of a local priest in the village of Stari Ugrinov. He studied in Lviv, where he became part of the underworld and joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In the 1930s, Bandera was one of the organizers of the political assassinations he was convicted of in Poland and released from prison at the beginning of World War II. Soon after, the OUN split into a moderate and a radical unit. The second is headed by Bandera. As Nazi Germany prepares to invade the Soviet Union, Bandera and his supporters cooperate with Berlin.
August 30, 1941 marked the turning point in Bandera’s life: in Nazi-occupied Lviv, his supporters proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian state he was to lead. Bandera was in Poland at the time, and German authorities did not allow him to return to Ukraine. Hitler did not like the idea of an independent Ukraine, and Bandera was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained most of the time until the end of the war. The OUN continues to fight for Ukraine’s independence. But the Germans gradually began to persecute and kill Ukrainian nationalists. Bandera himself lived in Munich after the war. He was shot dead in 1959 by a KGB agent.
The cult of Bandera in modern Ukraine
Even after his death, Stepan Bandera remains revered among some Ukrainians. After the collapse of the USSR, a real cult of personality emerged in western Ukraine: museums, monuments, and streets reminded him of it. However, the people of Central and Southern Ukraine continue to take it as a Soviet example – negatively. Under Viktor Yushchenko, who became president of Ukraine in 2005, Bandera was declared a hero of Ukraine. President Viktor Yanukovych later overturned the decision.
And how popular is Bandera in Ukraine today? Every year on his birthday, his supporters organize a torchlight procession in the capital. After the annexation of Crimea, Moscow Street in Kyiv was renamed Bandera Street. Over the years, the attitude of Ukrainians towards Bandera became more and more positive, but immediately before the war the people were divided on the issue. According to a survey from April 2021, 32% of Ukrainians view Bandera positively and just as negatively.
“Worship of Bandera is a manifestation of selective memory”
Andres Umland, an expert at the Stockholm Institute for Eastern European Studies, said the Bandera cult was a “manifestation of selective historical memory”. According to him, Bandera is best remembered in Ukraine as a radical independence fighter who was imprisoned in a Polish prison and a German concentration camp and killed by the KGB. “At the same time, they are turning a blind eye to the fact that both at the beginning and at the end of World War II, the Bandera-led movement (OUN) cooperated with the Nazis,” Umland told Deutsche Welle. The expert also says that among historians there are two views on the reasons for this cooperation: some consider it coercive, others note the ideological closeness.
Grzegorz Rosolinski-Libe, a German-Polish historian at the Free University of Berlin, believes both are true. “Of course, Bandera wanted to create a Ukrainian state, but he wanted an authoritarian fascist government led by him,” Rosolinski-Libe told Deutsche Welle.
Both experts note that people in Ukraine prefer not to remember a dark page in Ukrainian history in which the Bandera movement plays a major role: the Volyn tragedy – the mass killings of Poles and Jews in Volyn. However, Rosolinski-Libe and Umland point out that Bandera himself was not directly involved in the crimes, as he was in a concentration camp at the time. “However, it is important to note that OUN members identify with him,” Rosolinski-Libe said.
Umland does not think Bandera is a Nazi. He called him a “Ukrainian ultra-nationalist” and clarified that Bandera-era Ukrainian nationalism was not a copy of German Nazism. Rosolinski-Libe has a different point of view. “Bandera can be called a radical nationalist, a fascist,” said the historian. He disagrees that Bandera’s supporters fought on an equal footing with the German Nazis and the Soviet government: “The Soviet Union is the OUN’s greatest enemy.” At the same time, he noted that NKVD troops were brutally suppressing the resistance of Ukrainian nationalists, killing about 150,000 people in western Ukraine and sending more than 200,000 to camps.
Commenting on the “selective memory” of Ukrainians about Bandera, Umland noted that a similar phenomenon exists in other countries. He cites the example of Germany, where a Protestant church, streets and squares are named after the Christian reformer Martin Luther, although he is known for “hating Jews.”
According to Umland, the cult of Bandera is problematic for Ukrainians, at least because it complicates their country’s relations with Poland and Israel. The expert believes that Israel’s restrained reactions to the war in Ukraine are due not least to the cult of Bandera. At the same time, however, since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression, the attitude of Ukrainians towards the chairman of the OUN has changed radically: in April 2022 in a survey by the rating agency 74% of respondents expressed a positive attitude towards Bandera.
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