‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’:
A Reply to Alexander J. Motyl’s
‘The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and the Jews:
Theoretical Reflections on Nationalism, Fascism, Rationality,
Primordialism, and History’
Marco Carynnyk
1. Fighting misrepresentation
Volume 26 of Polin, which appeared early this year, is devoted in large part to the
contentious question of Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Scholars have been writing about it
for a hundred years, but are still quarreling even about the broader issues.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and Antony Polonsky have assembled excellent essays
and written an informed introduction. The result is an admirable contribution to the
attainment of the goal that they have set themselves: ‘to move beyond strongly held
competing and incompatible narratives of the past and reach some consensus that will
be acceptable to all people of good will and that will bring about a degree of
normalization… in Ukrainian-Jewish relations’.
Although I am not qualified to review the entire volume, I feel compelled to respond
to Alexander J. Motyl’s ‘The Ukrainian Nationalist Movement and the Jews’.
I like Dr. Motyl’s references to Henry Abramson’s observations about the ways in
which Ukrainians and Jews have constructed competing narratives about suffering at
each others’ hands. I myself have quoted Dr. Abramson and wish that he would
develop his thoughts further.1
I cannot dispute Dr. Motyl’s assertion that Ukrainian nationalists found Fascism
only ‘conditionally attractive’. They lobbied London and Washington in the 1930s for
support, but met no interest and only then strengthened their ties with Berlin.
I agree with Dr. Motyl when he writes that ‘Ukrainian nationalists, like all political
actors, were not just dumb brutes responding to eliminationist urges’, and I understand
him when he talks about primordialism, the notion that ethnic groups have fixed
identities. I remember the words that the venerable Raul Hilberg allowed himself: ‘The
Ukrainians have never been considered pro-Jewish (the Ukraine had been the scene of
intermittent pogroms and oppressions for three hundred years)’.2 Why was he offering
such a simplistic view, I wondered, and how could events in the 1640s foreshadow
what happened in the 1940s? And I cannot forget the sting on my face when a woman
whose husband I was interviewing about the pogrom in his Galician town asked, ‘What
do you think about what your landsleit did?’
Yet Dr. Motyl ignores the equally powerful primordialism that shapes Ukrainian
views of Jews. The nationalist discourse about Jews in the 1930s, as I have tried to show,
was built on the conviction that their identity and behaviour were immutable. In 1943,
when the Holocaust had claimed the lives of most Ukrainian Jews, the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists announced, with astounding ignorance and lack of empathy,
that ‘the Ukrainian people does not want to let itself be slaughtered without resistance
in the Jewish manner’. And I can still feel the fury of the scholar who overheard me
voicing questions about his associate’s attempts to show that Ukrainians were always
friendly towards Jews.3
Dr. Motyl argues—‘convincingly’ in the opinion of the editors—that the OUN was
preoccupied with building a state and that, focusing on its Russian and Polish policies,
it considered Jewish issues to be at best tertiary. Yet to those whom the OUN attacked it
made no difference whether they were primary, secondary, or tertiary enemies. And a
state, even an empire, free of Jews and other minorities was an important goal for the
OUN.
Thus Dr. Motyl’s attempts to explain away the anti-Jewish views and actions of the
nationalist movement leave me uneasy, and I am perturbed by his references to me.
Fighting misrepresentation may be futile, but matters of substance are at stake.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 2
2. ‘I… support the destruction of the Jews’
In his first reference to me Dr. Motyl brings up Yaroslav Stetsko’s zhyttyepys, or
autobiography, which Karel Berkhoff and I published more than ten years ago and the
authenticity and genuineness of which some diehards are still questioning. Stetsko was
a prominent OUN member who declared a sovereign Ukrainian state in Lviv on 30 June
1941. In that autobiography he wrote:
Although I consider Moscow, which in fact held Ukraine in captivity, and not Jewry, to be
the main and decisive enemy, I nonetheless fully appreciate the undeniably harmful and
hostile role of the Jews, who are helping Moscow to enslave Ukraine. I therefore support the
destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating
Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and the like.4
Dr. Motyl admits that there is ‘ample evidence’ that Ukrainian nationalists did not
have ‘benign’ attitudes towards Jews, as he puts it, but he does not discuss any of it, and
he argues that Stetsko’s autobiography may not represent his ‘truthful views’ because
he composed it while the Gestapo was interrogating him.
The Gestapo had indeed taken Stetsko to Berlin in July 1941, placed him under
Ehrenhaft, or honorary arrest, and proceeded to question him, but he was free to move
about the city, to meet with other OUN members, and to assail German institutions
with pleas to cooperate with him. And we have other documentation, in addition to his
autobiography, concerning his views of Jews.
3. ‘A clique of international criminals led by Jews’
As early as 1933—when he was all of twenty-one years old, but had already attained the
rank of ideological officer in the OUN homeland executive—Stetsko argued that
Fascism, National Socialism, and the coming Ukrainian uprising were links in the chain
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 3
of a single world revolution. Ukrainian nationalism would bring down Russia and open
a new chapter in the history of Eastern Europe. ‘The tasks of Ukrainian nationalism’, he
wrote, ‘begin where the tasks of Fascism and National Socialism end’.5
As editor of the OUN journal Na sluzhbi natsiyi (‘In the Service of the Nation’) in the
later 1930s, Stetsko published several articles with antisemitic overtones. Using his
organizational pseudonym Zynovy Karbovych—he had probably borrowed the given
name from Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s middle name and the surname from karb, the word
for a notch or incision— he drafted an article that he may have been preparing for the
journal. Democracy, he declared, is a ‘corruption of morality, a deceit… a demoralizing
system. The rule of money is absolute, and the financial bourgeoisie, Masonry, and a
clique of international criminals led by Jews control governments’.6
4. ‘I shall not make the slightest reference to Masonry or Jewry’
In April 1938 Stetsko prepared a circular with an enumeration of topics for an OUN
journal. He did not name the periodical, but may have had Na sluzhbi in mind. The
subjects were referenced to a fuller list of the questions that the journal would consider.7
The twentieth topic on Stetsko’s list was ‘Demoliberalism, Masonry, Jewry (ethically,
ideologically, and culturally)’. A pencilled note beside the entry reads ‘Nits’. The
reference was to Mykola Nitskevych, who had been born in the Volhynia in 1906 and
had studied for a year at Warsaw University. In October 1927, after the police detained
him for making a public speech, he escaped to Czechoslovakia, enrolled at the
Ukrainian Husbandry Academy in Poděbrady, and joined the Legion of Ukrainian
Nationalists, which two years later became a part of the OUN.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 4
Figure 1: Page 1 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s draft article ‘Na shlyakhu rostu natsiyi’.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 5
Figure 2. Page 2 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s draft article ‘Na shlyakhu rostu natsiyi’.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 6
Figure 3. Page 1 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s circular, 23 April 1938.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 7
Figure 4. Page 2 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s circular, 23 April 1938.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 8
On 6 May 1938 Nitskevych wrote to Stetsko that he could not follow his guidelines.
The negative influences of Masonry and especially Jewry, he stated, were not an axiom,
but a theorem that had to be proven. He had often argued this point with leading OUN
members, and had even submitted an article to an OUN newspaper in Paris, but the
editors had rejected it.
Nitskevych then admitted that he did not see in Masonry ‘a serious factor’.
‘Masonry is one of those bugbears that are used to frighten people of little faith and one
of the slop-pails into which the dirt that is used to justify one’s own impotence is
poured’.
Masonry was not a matter of principle for him, Nitskevych continued, but relations
with Jews were important. ‘I am not a Judeophile, but at the same time refuse to be a
Judeophobe, precisely because Judeophobia goes against all our interests, has a negative
influence on the psychology of our people, and shuffles our cards in the international
propaganda of the Ukrainian liberation cause. Ukrainian Judeophobia, like all
Judeophobia, has grown out of a conviction about the extraordinary power of Jewry
and about its complete solidarity, and especially about the existence of a world Jewish
centre that aims to conquer the world’.
Nitskevych could not agree with this because he thought that Jews were divided
into ‘countless ideological directions and political groupings’. Not a single Zionist
congress had taken place without a scandal. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a
fable meant to explain the decline of Russia.
Four years earlier the OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets had chastised one of his
closest associates for marrying a Jewish woman. ‘If nationalism is waging war against
mixed marriages insofar as conquerors (especially Poles and Russians) are concerned’,
he had written to Mykola Stsiborsky, ‘then it cannot bypass the problem of mixed
marriages with Jews, who are indisputably if not greater, then at least comparable, foes
of our rebirth… Your action has greatly encumbered the organization’.8
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 9
Figure 5. Page 1 of Mykola Nitskevych’s letter to Yaroslav Stetsko, 6 May 1938.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 10
Figure 6. Page 2 of Mykola Nitskevych’s letter to Yaroslav Stetsko, 6 May 1938.
Now Nitskevych reproved Stetsko. The nationalists’ use of The Protocols was ‘a knife
in the back of our revolution’, he declared.9
‘I have written all this’, Nitskevych concluded, ‘to make clear what I think…
Elaborating on the question of democracy, I shall not make the slightest reference to
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 11
Masonry or Jewry… If you cannot [accept my view], please inform me so that I don’t
waste time on work that will be of no use’.10
A note at the end of the letter shows that Stetsko received it on 9 May 1938. There is
no evidence of a reply. The assassination of Yevhen Konovalets by a Soviet agent in
Rotterdam on 23 May threw the organization into turmoil, contributed to the split into
two rival factions, and amplified the anti-Jewish discourse within the nationalist
movement.
Smersh, the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, arrested Nitskevych when the Red
Army occupied Bulgaria in October 1944. Charged with providing aid to the
bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionary activities, he received the death sentence, but it
was commuted to twenty years of hard labour. He emerged from the Gulag in 1956,
settled in Lutsk, and died there in 1969.11
5. ‘The main present-day instrument of the Jewish danger’
In May 1939, long before the Germans arrested him, Stetsko published, once again as
Zynovy Karbovych, an article with the title ‘We and Jewry’. Jews, he wrote, were
‘nomads and parasites’, a nation of ‘swindlers, materialists, and egotists’, ‘devoid of
heroism, and lacking an idea that could inspire them to sacrifice’. They were only
interested in ‘personal profit’, found ‘pleasure in the satisfaction of the basest instincts’,
and were determined ‘to corrupt the heroic culture of warrior nations’.
‘Bolshevism, which Jews are now serving in Ukraine, is the creation of the Russian
Asiatic, and Ukraine’s chief enemy is Moscow, and not Jews, who are Moscow’s helpers
and as such are vanquished by us in accordance with their true importance’, Stetsko
declared.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 12
Figure 7. Yaroslav Stetsko’s article ‘We and Jewry’.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 13
The Ukrainian struggle is being waged against Moscow and Bolshevism along the first line
and against Jewry to the extent that they [sic] assist Ukraine’s enemies and strive to exploit
and corrupt the Ukrainian people.
Ukrainians, Stetsko continued, were ‘the first people in Europe to understand the
corrupting work of Jewry’ and had separated themselves from the Jews centuries ago,
thereby retaining ‘the purity of their spirituality and culture’. ‘The main enemies’,
Stetsko concluded,
are those who conquered the Ukrainian lands by force of arms and are holding them by
force. These are Moscow and its satellites Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Ukraine must
destroy Russia and Bolshevism, and in doing so we will also liquidate the main present-day
instrument of the Jewish danger to us and the world. 12
6. ‘How much those Jewish brats have cost us!’
When the OUN split into two factions in 1940, a minority of members remained loyal to
Andriy Melnyk, who had replaced Konovalets after his death, and a majority, especially
those OUN members who had been working underground in western Ukraine, sided
with Stepan Bandera. He had been serving a life sentence in a Polish prison and had
gained his freedom when Poland fell to the German-Soviet onslaught in September
1939. The two groups retained the same name, exchanged charges, and when the
German-Soviet war began, set about killing each other off. But their rhetoric regarding
Jews was similar.
Mykola Stsiborsky, who had sided with Melnyk, issued a ‘white book’ on the
conflict. The book was turgid and tedious, but it avoided ad hominem attacks and jibes
against Jews. Stetsko, who had thrown in his fortunes with Bandera, wrote a rebuttal
that was even longer and more laborious.13
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 14
Stsiborsky’s marriage to a Jewish woman had angered OUN leaders. Stetsko would
later deny that he harboured ill feelings against Jews, but the accusations that he hurled
against Stsiborsky show otherwise:
Until the spring of 1940 you not only did not deny, but yourself admitted that your third
living wife is Jewish. Not so long ago, at a bathing resort in Italy, you introduced your
wife’s three daughters to several of our acquaintances, and Mr. Onatsky said in a fit of
sincerity more or less as follows: ‘Oh! If only you knew how much those Jewish brats have
cost us since 1928!’ And then… you denied everything and declared that it was all a lie…
Forgive us for interfering in your family affairs, but we are doing so in order to expose
you as an unprincipled person who insinuates himself into eminent and responsible
positions in organized Ukrainian life. Just as the late Leader expelled you from the
Leadership, so now there is no room for you at the helm of national life.14
7. Jews ‘assist the occupiers’
Another transparent text that Stetsko issued, this time under his own name, is a wordy
article with the title ‘For the Content of State Life’. A reference in the undated document
to ‘the chaos and ruin… that Bolshevism will leave behind’ suggests that he wrote it in
the late spring of 1941.15
Primarily Ukrainians could own Ukrainian land, Stetsko wrote. Of other
nationalities those who would ‘actively and loyally cooperate and fight for a Ukrainian
state and [who would be] ethically and culturally similar to the Ukrainian type’ would
also have this right.16
And he made two references to Jews. In the first one he stipulated that ‘the foreign
press and all publishing activities, particularly Jewish ones, cannot be published in
Ukrainian’.17
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 15
Figures 8 and 9. Pages 12 and 13 of Yaroslav Stetsko's ‘For the Content of State Life'.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 16
Figure 10. Page 39 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s ‘For the Content of State Life’.
The second reference occurred in a section about minorities:
1. In respect to national minorities we shall not conduct an exterminatory policy [but will]
ensure their cultural and economic development within the limits of the integrity of the
Ukrainian State.
2. The national minorities will themselves determine the attitude of the Ukrainian State by
their behaviour during the national revolution and the period of strengthening of the
state. They are divided into: a. minorities of the peoples who enslave Ukraine today, b.
those who are fighting against the occupiers but are indifferent or hostile to the
Ukrainian State… c. assist the occupiers (for example, Jews), d. [those who are] well-
disposed towards Ukrainians…
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 17
5. …nationalism allows for assimilation only of those elements whose life was and is
heroic [and] whose culture is similar to the Ukrainian. The assimilated must create a
type equivalent in worth to the spiritual and cultural Ukrainian type.18
8. ‘Kill the enemies among you’
Bandera’s followers had declared that the Second Great Assembly of the OUN, which
had taken place in Rome in August 1939 and had elected Melnyk as leader, contravened
OUN statutes, and in April 1941 they held another assembly in Kraków. When it ended,
Bandera invited three of his closest associates—Stepan Lenkavsky, Roman Shukhevych,
and Yaroslav Stetsko—to work with him in preparing a master plan for the moment
when Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Bandera had already recruited several
confederates to draft a plan in December 1939, but much had changed since then.
According to Stetsko, he and Bandera wrote the political part of the new version,
Shukhevych the military part, and Lenkavsky the section on ideology and propaganda.
All four then vetted each other’s work.19
Entitled ‘The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime’, the new text ran to
seventy-four closely typed pages and bristled with references to ‘aliens’ in general and
to Russians, Poles, and Jews in particular. OUN veterans have mentioned the plan in
their memoirs; scholars have cited it in their studies; portions have appeared in print.
Yet we have still not used the document to construe what the OUN(B) was thinking and
doing in the summer of 1941.20
One section of the plan dealt with “insurrectionary units from the Red Army”:
In disarming a unit immediately divide it by nationality. Take Ukrainians in, peoples
subjugated by Moscow and friendly to us if they so desire as well. Better to set them (the
subjugated peoples) up as separate units. Give them (our people and our friends) all
possible assistance and care…
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 18
Figures 11 and 12. Pages 41 and 42 of Yaroslav Stetsko’s ‘For the Content of State Life’.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 19
With the rest of the disarmed soldiers do as follows: Russian peasants to be disarmed
and handed over as prisoners to the Germans, that is, to be liquidated. Other nationalities to
be permitted to go home. Political officers and known Communists and Russians to be
liquidated. The same (somewhat more harshly) with NKVD units.21
The plan foresaw the ‘cleansing of hostile elements from the field’: ‘At a time of
chaos and confusion it is permissible to liquidate undesirable Polish, Russian, and
Jewish activists, especially supporters of Bolshevik Russian imperialism’.22
The authors also established a policy for the treatment of minorities:
The national minorities are divided into a) those that are friendly to us, that is, members of
previously subjugated peoples, b) those that are hostile to us, Russians, Poles, Jews.
Re a. Have equal rights with Ukrainians; we help them return to their homelands.
Re b. Destruction in battle, particularly those who defend the regime: deportation to
their lands, principally destroy the intelligentsia, which cannot be allowed to assume any
official positions, and in general make it impossible to create an intelligentsia, that is, access
to schools and so forth. For example, so-called Polish peasants are to be assimilated, given
the explanation, especially at this heated and fanatical time, that they are Ukrainians of the
Latin rite who have been forcibly assimilated. The leaders to be destroyed. Jews to be
isolated, eliminated from official positions in order to avoid sabotage, Russians and Poles all
the more so. Should there be an insurmountable need to leave a Jew in the economic
administration, place one of our militiamen over him and liquidate him for the slightest
offense. Administrators of various branches can only be Ukrainians, never hostile aliens.
Assimilation of Jews is excluded.23
The plan provided ‘general reminders’:
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 20
Our power must be terrible for its opponents. Terror for hostile aliens and our own traitors,
creative freedom and the breath of new ideas from the Ukrainian who rules his own land
must be sensed in every action and at every step. Involve in work all honest and patriotic
Ukrainians, Ukrainian workers, by which we mean not only Ukrainian labourers, but all
creative Ukrainians. No social class criteria, only national ones.24
The plan included ‘security instructions’. The references to Communists, NKVD
agents, and informers in them were in part allusions to Jews:
11. Collect personal data on all prominent Poles, members of underground
organizations, who could try to organize an uprising at the appropriate time. Apply an
offensive tactic to the extent that this is necessary and possible.
12. Compile a ‘blacklist’ of all fervent Communists, NKVD agents, secret informers,
provocateurs, and other hirelings of the Communist regime. The ‘blacklist’ should above all
include leaders.
13. Compile a ‘blacklist’ of all prominent Ukrainians who might try to conduct their own
politics at the appropriate time, thus breaking up the unity of the Ukrainian people.
14. Compile a ‘blacklist’ of Poles according to the instructions in 11.25
Anti-Jewish topoi also appeared in a section on slogans that OUN(B) activists could
use to drum up support for the national revolution. Most were variations on the theme
of Judeo-communism: ‘Stalinist and Jewish commissars are the arch-enemies of the
people!’ ‘Workers in western Europe are afraid of the Jewish and Russian commune.
They see all the lies and fraud. They know that Marxism is a Jewish invention’.26
OUN(B) activists were to encourage Red Army soldiers to kill ‘Russians, Jews,
NKVD agents, commissars, and everyone who wants war and death for us. They are the
greatest enemies of the people’. Activists were to tell workers to defend their
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 21
workplaces: ‘Don’t allow the Red Army to destroy your factories while it is retreating.
Kill the enemies among you—Jews and secret informers. Make your factories into
bastions of the liberation revolution’.27
9. ‘We are establishing a militia that will help eliminate Jews’
The OUN(B) had set up three task forces or expeditionary groups in Kraków before 22
June 1941. A ‘special executive force’ headed by Stetsko had the assignment to reach
Lviv and declare sovereignty. On 24 June the force arrived in the village of Mlyny. The
next day Stetsko dashed off a letter to Bandera. In a village along the way a Jewish
sniper had killed a German soldier and a horse, Stetsko wrote. The Germans had
responded by executing two Ukrainian nationalists.
At midday that same day Jews killed a German soldier. Only Jews were arrested. Jews are
deliberately causing provocations. They say that they are doomed, and so they want to
destroy our people and our population. This is revenge by Jews against the population.
Have them intervene with the OKW. The population is well disposed towards the Germans
and is helping them.
‘Warm greetings Glory to Ukraine’ Stetsko concluded and then added a postscript:
We are establishing a militia that will help eliminate Jews and protect the population.
The dead men and the whole village welcomed the Germans with a procession, but now
[the village] is bitter… Have the OKW exert influence. The militia will help them establish
order.
Father Lev Sohor has already organized a militia and has a written mandate from the
OUN for this, and the village has accepted this. So have them come here to meet the militia,
and it will eliminate those Jews.28
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 22
The OKW was the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or German high command. Lev
Sohor was a twenty-eight-year-old parish priest. ‘They’ were probably the Kraków
office of Abwehr II, the branch of the German military intelligence agency that dealt
with sabotage and subversion. Bandera was in Kraków, and Stetsko wanted Abwehr II
to persuade the OKW to rein in the German troops because they were shooting
Ukrainians who were trying to help them.29
10. ‘Ukraine… is… hostile to international Jewry’
After the war Stetsko distanced himself from the German policies towards Jews and
denied that the OUN had taken part in violence against them, but his underlying views
had not changed. ‘As we travelled to Lviv’, he wrote about the advance of his task force
in June 1941, ‘we encountered everywhere a spontaneous attempt by the Ukrainian
community to become a self-confident and sovereign master in its own land’.
There were no attempts anywhere to seek retribution from the Polish or Jewish minorities, a
part of which had participated in hostile actions against Ukrainians. Ukrainians did not
carry out any pogroms, did not lynch anyone… This was never our style. The militia that
was being established maintained order and did not take revenge. Nazi anti-Jewish calls did
not find any response among Ukrainians.30
In an article from 1957 with the title ‘National and International Jewry’ Stetsko
argued that although some Jews had performed their duty ‘to the land where they had
been born and from which they lived with honour’, ‘out of opportunism and greed the
greater number of Jews served the occupiers of Ukraine and helped strengthen their
rule. Hence the distrust of Jews, and not racial hatred, by Ukrainians’.31
‘It would have been a mistake’, Stetsko went on, ‘to divert attention from Moscow
and to accuse Jews of the crimes of communism. This was Hitler’s false and mendacious
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 23
tactic. Moscow is primarily responsible for communism as the most modern form of
Russian imperialism, and only then those Jews who are helping it, and that to the extent
that they are helping… Some Jews, particularly their elites, have an internationalist
attitude. They long for a world empire under the aegis of international capital and a
world government’—note the echo of Stetsko’s previous remarks about Masons—
‘which Masonry also supports’.32
There was more. ‘Although Ukraine does not have antisemitic elements or
pogromists’, Stetsko wrote,
ideologically and spiritually it is hostile to international Jewry… The organic national idea
of a Christian Ukraine with its longing for liberty, truth, and justice is opposite to the idea of
international Jewry… The Ukrainian people has never opposed the Jewish minority in
Ukraine and has always been ready to ensure it equal rights… but it cannot agree to being a
minority in its lands… Jews will enjoy all the liberties in the Ukrainian state… if they do not
try to overturn it. We have no basis or intention to limit the civic rights of Jews, but we also
cannot give them special privileges. Equality for all.33
Stetsko continued denying that his faction of the OUN had been hostile to Jews in a
collection of his writings:
At a time when all of Nazi propaganda and all of Hitler’s speeches were blaming Jews for
the woes of the world, the Declaration [of the Ukrainian State Administration of 5 July 1941]
did not contain a single anti-Jewish reference. For [the Germans] communism was a purely
Jewish product and not a Russian one. By contrast, our declaration clearly and
unambiguously singles out the Russian element in Bolshevism and Russian imperialism,
and the official declaration of the Ukrainian State Administration neither offers a common
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 24
front with the Germans against Jewry nor argues for it, and blames only Russians, not Jews,
for Bolshevism in Ukraine.
This affirmation is significant because the Ukrainian State Administration dissociated
itself in this way from the anti-Jewish campaign and the Nazi genocide of the Jewish
population. What other government in… ‘the New Europe’, controlled at that time by
Germany, including Italy, had the courage to take such an independent and sovereign stand
in this matter as did our government when it opposed Berlin?
This is all the more important to note because I had the opportunity to see with horror
our murdered prisoners in the prisons who were victims of the NKVD, in which Jews
occupied second place after Russians. But political sense required that we accuse the
Russians, who were the real enemy, the chief culprit in the genocide in Ukraine, and not
their Jewish helpers who were serving the Russian master. Only unscrupulous pro-
Bolshevik elements can accuse our government and its important support, the OUN, of
carrying out pogroms against Jews. The facts and the official documents of the Ukrainian
State Administration speak a different language than the one these falsifiers of history and
slanderers of Ukraine are trying to show.34
11. ‘Germans carried out pogroms without the Ukrainian police’
Dr. Motyl thinks that at its Third Extraordinary Great Assembly in August 1943 the
OUN(B) renounced the ‘fascist elements’ that it had borrowed and ‘began acquiring
progressively more democratic and social-democratic characteristics’. Let’s look at this
evolution a little more closely.
A Soviet informer within the OUN(B)—both the nationalists and the Soviets had
their agents on the other side—took part in a conference in Lviv in October 1942. The
OUN(B), ‘Yaroslav’ reported, had begun thinking that Germany would lose the war in
the East. The Anglo-Americans or the Japanese would then attack Russia. The OUN(B)
would form a ‘Ukrainian Armed Forces’. Ukrainians who refused service could be shot.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 25
With the exception of volunteers who had been thoroughly checked, non-Ukrainians
could not be mobilized.35
‘Yaroslav’ also dealt in his report with internal security. As soon as the Ukrainian
forces started fighting for independence, local military commands would have to
resolve the question of minorities by liquidating them and enemies of the people.
Russians were to be left in peace. They had identified themselves with the Ukrainian
people and did not pose a threat. But Russian activists who were fighting with
Ukrainians had to be listed and killed. Jews had to be taken into consideration because
they had ‘great influence in England and America’ and were to be deported from
Ukraine and allowed ‘to take some of their property’ with them. Poles would be
expelled and permitted to take whatever they wanted of their property because
‘England and America will also protect them’. Those who refused to leave would be
killed. Local military commands would list ‘the most active enemies’ and the members
of anti-Ukrainian organizations, and the gendarmerie and the OUN(B) security service
would kill them a day before the announcement of expulsion. Other Soviet minorities
and Hungarians, Czechs, and Romanians would not be disturbed, but Armenians, who
were devoted to Russia, would be treated like Jews.36
By the summer of 1943, after the Red Army had repulsed the Wehrmacht first at
Stalingrad and then at Kursk, the OUN(B) was certain that the Soviet Union would
defeat Germany. London and Washington, possibly with Berlin as an ally, would then
declare war on Moscow. The OUN(B) wanted to be on whichever side was fighting
against Moscow. It also believed that Jews were influencing the Western allies.
At its Third Extraordinary Great Assembly in August 1943 (the same assembly at
which it declared that Ukrainians did not want to be slaughtered in ‘the Jewish
manner’), the OUN(B) therefore proclaimed that it was opposed to both Bolshevism and
National Socialism, muted its anti-Jewish rhetoric, called for an alliance of captive
nations against German and Soviet imperialism, and announced a number of
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 26
democratic principles. In 1939 the OUN had excluded Jews from Ukrainian citizenship.
Now the OUN(B) declared that all citizens of Ukraine, regardless of their ethnicity,
would have equal rights.37
As Roman Ilnytsky, a long-standing member of the OUN and secretary to Stetsko in
July 1941, pointed out, the OUN thought in terms of two programmes, one for internal
use and one for public consumption. The internal programme would be the unchanging
credo of the OUN. The public programme could vary according to circumstances. The
resolutions of the Great Assembly were clearly in the second category. The conviction
that Jews and Poles were aliens persisted, and killings continued.38
Three months after the assembly, the OUN issued a ‘strictly confidential’ order to
collect ‘exhaustive recorded data’:
a. Material about anti-Ukrainian actions staged by Poles.
b. Records, instructions, circulars, letters (Polish, Bolshevik, German) that would reveal the
hostile attitude of these agents to our struggle and their predatory colonial policy in
Ukraine.
c. Lists that would confirm that the Germans themselves carried out anti-Jewish pogroms
and liquidations without the participation or assistance of the Ukrainian police and
before the executions forced the Jewish committee or the delinquents to confirm with
their signatures the presence of the Ukrainian police and its involvement in the actions.
d. Material that would visibly confirm the initiation and participation by Poles in anti-
Jewish pogroms and also their servile intelligence work for the Germans in the fight
against Ukrainians.39
That, I suggest, is the beginning of the denial of involvement in the killing of Jews
and Poles that the OUN and its supporters perpetuate to this day.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 27
Figure 13. Page 17 of a report by ‘Yaroslav’ on an OUN(B) conference in October 1942.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 28
Figures 15.Page
Figure 14. Page18
18of
ofaareport
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1942.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 29
12. Four final thoughts
I was once called a ‘Ukrainian apologist’. Now Dr. Motyl has labelled me as a ‘radical
critic’ of the OUN who ‘has produced the equivalent of a “blacklist” consisting of
scholars with different degrees of presumed guilt’. He also implies that I intended my
list to end debate. That ‘blacklist’ was nothing of the sort. It was an attempt, no doubt
incomplete, to suggest further readings and encourage more discussion.
So I put forward four propositions.
By arguing that the involvement of the OUN in the Holocaust was minimal Dr.
Motyl is absolving it of its participation in the killing of Jews. When he affirms that the
OUN saw Jews as ‘secondary’ or even ‘tertiary’ enemies, he forgets that to those who
suffered at the hands of the nationalist hotheads—one young man confessed to
Metropolitan Sheptytsky that he had killed seventy-five people in one night; this
probably occurred in early July 1941, and the victims were likely Jews—it made no
difference into which category they had fallen. Does not the simple fact that nationalists
treated them as enemies suffice?40
When Dr. Motyl writes about what led the OUN to try to cooperate with the
Germans, he fails to make one essential point. The nationalists differed with Berlin—
their goal was an independent state and even an empire, in which Germany had no
interest—but some of them, whether they were ‘situational’ or ‘eliminationist’
antisemites, were willing to kill or expel Jews.
Dr. Motyl claims that the OUN began to adopt a more democratic position in 1943.
Whatever the declared programme, local leaders issued orders to cover up earlier
killings of Jews and Poles and continued calling for murder.41
And although he comes close to admitting that the OUN planned to carry out ethnic
cleansing, Dr. Motyl still clings to the stereotypes that Yaroslav Stetsko circulated and
the revisionism that the OUN began to practice in 1943.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 30
Figure 15. OUN order 2/43, 27 October 1943.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 31
I am grateful to Ray Brandon for his thoughtful reading of several drafts of this reply.
1 See H. Abramson, ‘The Scattering of Amalek: A Model for Understanding the Ukrainian-Jewish
Conflict’, East European Jewish Affairs, no. 24 (1994): 39–47.
2 R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New York, 1979), 330n94.
3 M. Carynnyk, ‘”Foes of our rebirth”: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947’,
Nationalities Papers, 39/3 (2011), 315–52. The statement about Jewish lack of resistance comes from the
resolutions of the Third Great Assembly of the OUN in August 1943. See the text in O. Veselova and
others, eds., OUN i UPA v 1943 rotsi: Dokumenty (Kiev, 2008), 219.
4 K. C. Berkhoff and M. Carynnyk, ‘The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude
toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets'ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys'’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 23/3–4
(1999), 152, 171.
5 ‘Ideological officer’: P. Mirchuk, Narys istoriyi OUN: 1920–1939 roky, ed. Volodymyr Moroz, 3d. ed.
(Kiev, 2007), 820. ‘Fascism, National Socialism, and the coming Ukrainian uprising’: S. O., ‘Viyna
stabilizuyet'sia (Ohlyad svitovykh podiy)’, Nash klych, 19 Mar. 1933. O. Yu. Zaytsev, ‘OUN i
avtorytarno-natsionalistychni rukhy mizhvoyennoyi Yevropy’, Ukrayins'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2012,
no. 1, 92n18, thinks that S. O. was Stetsko.
6 The OUN journal: Yu. Cherchenko, ‘Yevhen Konovalets' pro pidhotovku Druhoho konhresu OUN’,
Ukrayins'kyi vyzvol'nyi rukh 18 (2013), 18, says that at least three issues were published. I have found
only an issue dated 1938, which appears to be the second. Z. Karbovych, ‘Na shlyakhu rostu natsiyi’,
Konovaletz Evhen/Box 307, Folder 15/8, p. 2, Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre Archives,
Winnipeg (hereafter UCECA). I owe my discovery of several documents at the UCECA to O. T.
Martynowych, ‘Sympathy for the Devil: The Attitude of Ukrainian War Veterans in Canada to Nazi
Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939’, in Re-Imagining Ukrainian Canadians: History, Politics, and Identity,
eds. R. L. Hinther and J. Mochoruk (Toronto, 2010), [173]–220.
7 Z. Karbovych, ‘Zainteresovanym po spravakh zhurnalu, Obizhnyk ch: 3’, 23 Apr. 1938, Konovaletz
Evhen/Box 307, Folder 15, UCECA. I have not found that longer list.
8 Carynnyk, ‘“Foes of our rebirth”’, 325–6.
9 At least one Ukrainian translation of The Protocols was published in the 1930s: Protokoly zi zboriv
Uchenykh Starshyn Sionu, trans. Ia. N. K. (Winnipeg, 1934). The translator and publisher may have
been James Krett (Yakiv Kret). Nitskevych’s comment offers scholars a new line of research: were
there other editions, and was the OUN responsible for any of them?
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 32
10 M. Nitskevych, Letter to Yaroslav Stetsko, 6 May 1938, Konovaletz Evhen/Box 307, Folder 18/10,
UCECA.
11 A. Zhyviuk, ‘Mizh endekamy i bil'shovykamy: Mykola Nitskevych v ukrayins'komu
natsionalistychnomu rusi 1920–1940-kh rr.’, Z arkhiviv VUChK-HPU-NKVD-KHB, 2010, no. 2 (35):
233–4.
12 Z. Karbovych, ‘Zhydivstvo i my’, Novyi shlyakh, 8 May 1939, 3.
13 Stsiborsky’s white book: ‘Bila knyha OUN: Pro dyversiyu-bunt IaryBandera’, PR1985.0191/64/1,
Provincial Archives of Alberta, Edmonton (hereafter PAA); Biblioteka im. O. Ol’zhycha, Kiev.
Stetsko’s reply: ‘Chomu bula potribna chystka v O.U.N.’, PR1985.0191/64/2–4, PAA. See also the
copy of pt. 3 at MG 30-C167/vol. 147, file 35, Library and Archive Canada, Ottawa (hereafter LAC).
The publication is unsigned and undated. Lyubomyr Vynar, ‘Oleh Kandyba-Ol’zhych u lystuvanni
Leva Shankovs’koho’, Problemy istoriyi Ukrayiny 16 (2007): 156, writes that the author was ‘probably’
Stetsko. Mention of a conversation that took place on 16 February 1941 (3: 23) indicates that the
broadside was written after that date, and the statement ‘before the United States has joined the war’
(3: 19) suggests that it was written between June and December 1941.
14 ‘Chomu bula potribna chystka v O.U.N.’, 3:17, PR1985.0191/64/4, PAA; MG 30 C167/vol. 147, file 35,
pp. 17–18, LAC.
15 Stetsko, ‘Za zmist derzhavnoho zhyttia,’ 13/372/t. 12, 7/232, HDASBU.
16 Stetsko, ‘Za zmist derzhavnoho zhyttia,’ 13/372/t. 12, 7/225, 227–8, HDASBU.
17 Stetsko, ‘Za zmist derzhavnoho zhyttia,’ 13/372/t. 12, 7/260, HDASBU.
18 Stetsko, ‘Za zmist derzhavnoho zhyttia,’ 13/372/t. 12, 7/262–3, HDASBU.
19 ‘According to Stetsko’: Ya. Stetsko, 30 chervnya 1941: Proholoshennya vidnovlennya derzhavnosty
Ukrayiny, ed. I. Varanytsya and R. Malashchuk (Toronto, 1967), 50.
20 Mimeographed copies of ‘The Struggle and Activities’ and printed versions of individual sections are
located at several archives in Ukraine and the United States. Excerpts have appeared in Orhanizatsiya
ukrayins’kykh natsionalistiv, Zakordonni chastyny, OUN v svitli postanov Velykykh zboriv, Konferentsiy
ta inshykh dokumentiv z borot’by 1929–1955 r. ([Munich], 1955); 48–57; S. Mudryk-Mechnyk, OUN v
Ukrayini i za kordonom pid provodom S. Bandery: Prychynky do istoriyi, spohad (Lviv, 1997), 10–56; I.
Patrylyak, ‘Viys’kovi plany OUN(b) u taiemniy instruktsiyi Revolyutsiynoho provodu (traven’ 1941
r.)’, Ukrayins’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal 2 (2000): 127–37; I. Patrylyak, ‘Zavdannya ounivs’koyi
propahandy na chas viyny u svitli instruktsiyi Revolyutsiynoho provodu (traven’ 1941 roku)’, Moloda
natsiya 2 (2001):129–52; I. K. Patrylyak, ‘Derzhavne budivnytstvo v planakh OUN (traven’ 1941
roku)’, Kyyivs’ka starovyna 2 (2003): 90–113; O. Ie. Lysenko and I. K. Patryliak, eds. Materialy ta
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 33
dokumenty Sluzhby bezpeky OUN(B) u 1940-kh rr. (Kiev, 2003), 46–90; I. K. Patrylyak, Viys’kova
diyal’nist’ OUN(B) u 1940–1942 rokakh (Kiev, 2004), 426–596, and O. Veselova et al., comps., OUN v
1941 rotsi: Dokumenty (Kiev, 2006), pt. 1, 58–176.
21 3833/2/1/31, TsDAVOVU.
22 3833/2/1/32, TsDAVOVU.
23 3833/2/1/38, TsDAVOVU.
24 3833/2/1/39, TsDAVOVU.
25 3833/2/1/58, TsDAVOVU.
26 3833/2/1/77, TsDAVOVU.
27 3833/2/1/77, TsDAVOVU. To ensure that these instructions reached OUN(B) propagandists the
section was printed on bible paper: Orhanizatsiya ukrayins’kykh natsionalistiv, ‘Borot’ba i diyal’nist’
OUN pidchas viyny: Propahandyvni vkazivky na peredvoyennyi chas, na chas viyny i revoliutsiyi ta
na pochatkovi dni derzhavnoho budivnytstva’, 299/307-s/ and 299/543-s, Lvivska naukova
biblioteka im. V. Stefanyka, Lviv.
28 ‘Karb’ [Yaroslav Stetsko], Letter to ‘Stepan’ [Bandera], 25 June 1941, 3833/1/12/10, Tsentral’nyi
derzhavnyi arkhiv vyshchykh orhaniv vlady Ukrayiny (hereafter TsDAVOVU); rpt. in O. Dzyuban,
ed., Ukrayins’ke derzhavotvorennya: Zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv (Lviv, 2001), 77–8. The archival text
is a typewritten copy, probably prepared by the OUN(B) in Lviv in July 1941. Dzyuban fills in two
ellipses without explaining his source and changes spelling.
29 I owe the explanation of Stetsko’s request that ‘they’ intervene to Ray Brandon, e-mail message, 1
March 2014.
30 Stetsko, 30 chervnya 1941, 177.
31 Z. Karbovych, ‘Natsional'ne i internatsional'ne zhydivstvo’, Vyzvol'nyi shlyakh, May 1957, 487.
32 Ibid., 488.
33 Ibid.
34 Stetsko, 30 chervnya 1941, 239–40. The declaration is a letter in German from Stetsko to Adolf Hitler
informing him of the renewal of an ‘Independent United Ukrainian State’ and the formation of a
‘Ukrainian national government’ and wishing him and his ‘heroic army’ success in the war.
3833/3/7/28-9, TsDAVOVU, copy at 4620/3/378/22–3, TsDAVOVU; translated in Veselova et al.,
comps., OUN v 1941 rotsi, pt. 1, 282–3.
35 ‘Sbornik dokumentov o strukture i kharaktere antisovetskoi deiatel'nosti “Organizatsii ukrainskikh
natsionalistov–OUN” i “Ukrainskoi povstancheskoi armii–UPA”, o metodakh i priemakh agenturno-
operativnoi raboty organov gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti Ukrainy po likvidatsii organizovannogo
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 34
podpol'ia OUN i vooruzhennykh band UPA na territorii respubliki v period 1943–1954 gg.’,
13/372/5/27, 29, Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrayiny, Kiev.
36 Ibid., 37–8.
37 ‘Postanovy III Nadzvychaynoho Velykoho Zboru Orhanizatsiyi Ukrayins'kykh Natsionalistiv’, 3
Aug. 1943, 57/4/352/7–15v, Tsentral'nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads'kykh ob"yednan' Ukrayiny,
Kiev. I discuss the draft constitution that Mykola Stsiborsky wrote in September 1939, which
excluded Jews from citizenship, in ‘”Foes of our rebirth”’, 324.
38 R. Krychevsky [R. Ilnytsky], Orhanizatsiya ukrayins’kykh natsionalistiv v Ukrayini, Orhanizatsiya
ukrayins’kykh natsionalistiv zakordonom i ZCh OUN: Prychynok do istoriyi ukrayins’koho
natsionalistychnoho rukhu (New York, 1962), 26–7.
39 ‘Nakaz Ch. 2/43. Povitovym i rayonovym do vykonannya’, 27 Oct. 1943, 3833/1/43/9, TsDAVOVU.
40 Dr. Frédéric, ‘Memorandum’, 19 Sept. 1943, CXLVa-60, Centre de documentation juive
contemporaine, Paris. ‘Frédéric’ was the French historian René Martel, who went to Lviv for the
German Foreign Ministry in August 1943 to talk with Sheptytsky and other prominent Ukrainians.
41 On the plight of the Jews who were hiding in the forests see T. Snyder, ‘The Life and Death of
Western Volhynian Jewry, 1921–1945’, in The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization,
eds. R. Brandon and W. Lower, 77–113 (Bloomington, 2008). On Polish-Ukrainian relations at this
time see Snyder, ‘The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943’, Past and Present, no. 179
(May 2003): [197]–234.
Carynnyk, ‘A Knife in the Back of Our Revolution’ 35
