Ukraine between the Armies

On June 21, 1941, Nazi Germany denounced her treaty with the Soviets and her armies invaded the Soviet Union. They pushed ahead rapidly and soon the Communists were in full retreat from all the territories which they had acquired during their friendship with Hitler.

The next few days were to be decisive. As the Soviet forces withdrew, they indulged in another orgy of murder and deportation. As if doubting that they would ever return, they ruined or destroyed everything they could carry away with them and in their haste did as much harm as possible to the local population, including the massacre of those political prisoners whom they could not remove.⁠1

On June 30, as the Germans were approaching Lviv, a Ukrainian National Assembly proclaimed a Ukrainian National Government in the West with Yaroslav Stetsko as prime minister; a few later a Ukrainian National Rada was formed with Dr. K. Levytsky, a veteran of the old Republic, as prime minister.⁠2 The Ukrainians in Lviv called for the restoration of an independent Ukraine. They acted quickly to forestall any possible decisions by the Germans and set to work to prepare armed forces to join in the campaign against the Bolsheviks. Similar action was taken by the Lithuanians in Kaunas, the p139 Latvians in Riga, and the Estonians in Tallinn.⁠3 The way was open for the resurrection of the governments which had been overthrown during the alliance of Hitler and Stalin.

The Germans at once made it clear that they had no intention of recognizing or co‑operating with any of the newly formed governments. In accordance with Hitler's theories the lands which the German army was recovering from the Communists were not intended for use and development by their own population. They were intended to furnish supplies and men for the ruling and superior Germans. Thus in the very first weeks after the advance to the east started, it was certain that the Germans were not coming as liberators but as conquerors. All leaders of the new governments who fell into their hands were imprisoned in concentration camps.

The Nazis soon played another card. Under Soviet law the land and all industrial establishments had been confiscated from the original owners and possessed by the state. The Germans (and we must remember that in Western Ukraine and the Baltic states, Soviet control had lasted under two years, so that it might have been possible to find a considerable number of the original owners) calmly announced that since the property had belonged to the Soviet Union, it was legitimate spoils. The Soviet collective farms, etc. were maintained intact. The Soviet masters were replaced by Germans, who were ordered to extract from the helpless population the greatest possible returns at any cost. Corrupt, degenerate and brutal Nazis took the place of the old corrupt, degenerate and brutal commissars. This removed the last possibility of any active co‑operation between the Germans and the citizens, who would have welcomed almost any government that would free them from Communist tyranny. The Germans acquired easy title to all the property in Ukraine and elsewhere, but they paid for it with the antagonism of the entire population, Communist and anti-Communist alike.⁠4

The Nazis went much further than had the imperial German officials at the time of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. p140 These, in their search for supplies, had granted favors to the landowning class. The current crop of war lords turned against this class as resolutely as had the Communists during their occupation. They made certain that in their war against Communism, they would have the open hostility of everybody and by their defiance of any form of self-determination, they made it clear that they intended to rule by terror exactly as the Communists had done. It may have been flattering to German self-esteem but it was to prove costly during the next four years, for it entirely changed the nature of the struggle and deprived the Nazis of any peaceful source of supply. The Gestapo was to be the pillar of German domination of Ukraine, and as the armies swept eastward, they extended this system wherever they went.

There seems little doubt that in the beginning the leaders who proclaimed at Lviv the independence of Ukraine were confident that they would receive the support of the Nazis as avowed anti-Communists. In the first stages there was apparently little more secrecy made about it than in the corresponding movement in 1917. The leaders acted in Western Ukraine before the Germans reached Kiev so as to prevent a gap in the administration of the country and give an excuse for some other solution of the problem than Ukrainian independence. They set to work to create a government and incidentally an army which could be thrown into the struggle against the Communists.

For this they already had some scattered forces. Among these were such groups as the Luh (Meadow) which had offered some military training to the Ukrainians during the Polish occupation of the country. There were the Kamenyary (Stone-Crushers), who had played a similar role but were under the control of the Socialist Radical Party. There were similar groups under the Ukrainian Nationalists, and it was these specifically that were led by Borovets, better known under his pseudonym of Taras Bulba, the Kozak hero of Gogol's novel of that name. Such groups could be used either p141 as the nucleus of an army or for police purposes, until an army could be formed.⁠5

The Germans planned differently. They showed their hand on August 11, when they formally annexed Eastern Galicia to the Polish Government-General, the truncated body of the Polish state which was left after they had taken away the areas that they had decided to annex to Germany. Then they restored Bukovina and Bessarabia to Romania and they added to the Romanian share a large slice of Ukrainian territory on the left bank of the Dnieper River and the city of Odessa. The rest of Ukraine was formed into the Reichskommissariat of Ukraine under the supervision of Erich Koch and some of the eastern districts were placed under open military rule. This of course showed clearly that for Hitler, Ukraine did not exist in any form.⁠6

Soon after, the Germans issued their first order for the transportation of physically fit Ukrainians of the Germany for compulsory labor. They followed this up on September 15 with an order for the arrest of all officers of the new Ukrainian government and the internment of all known nationalists.⁠7 This was not done until the Germans were sure that that were going to be the masters of all Ukraine and had taken not only Lviv but Kiev, which they reached early in September.

During the summer the new Ukrainian movement spread behind the German lines to include the old Ukrainian capital. In the first rush of the German forces the Ukrainian nationalists were able with relative impunity to spread their cause on the heels of the retreating Communists, who carried off with them everything that was movable. The Reds destroyed all available food supplies and seized as many prominent individuals as they could for transportation to Central Asia. The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences was moved to the east to Ufa with part of its scientific institutes. Other sections were wantonly destroyed. Old churches and other historical monuments were blown up and everything was done to ruin the city before the Nazi arrival. Later on the responsibility for all this p142 was placed on German shoulders despite the inconsistency with the Soviet boasts of the "scorched earth" policy.

This devastation by the retreating Communists proved fertile soil for the advancing representatives of the revived Ukrainian independence movement. They made such headway that it became obvious to the Germans that the call for an independent Ukraine was answering a popular demand. Hence the sudden swooping down upon the group and the mass arrests.

The German terror continued and soon the new masters were imprisoning or shooting well-known Ukrainian patriots. The writer Olena Teliha was executed in Kiev in 1942.

From this moment there could be no talk of any compromise with the Nazi invaders. The various groups that had been looking forward to a war on Communism saw their energies diverted to a struggle with the present enemy, the Hitler forces. It was obviously impossible to construct a regular Ukrainian army in the face of the German military control, but it was easy to organize a large number of small, independent bands of guerilla fighters.

These same tactics were adopted in all the countries that were overrun by the Nazis and the Fascists. Small bands numbering from fifty to one thousand men, largely from the same village, town or region, maintained themselves in the woods and swamps, and from these they would sally forth to harass German supply trains, cut off small columns of troops, and commit acts of sabotage on a consistent scale. Their tactics were those of the Greeks, of the Serbs under Mihaylovich, of the Norwegians, and of other peoples. There had been the rudiments of similar opposition in Western Ukraine to the Communist rule in 1940 and 1941.

These bands illustrate the difference between guerilla warfare of the present and of the not too distant past. Not many centuries ago, before the development of the modern rifle and machine gun, the bands came directly out of the village. The revolt of Khmelnytsky in 1648 and of the Haydamaki during the eighteenth century were outpourings of villagers armed p143 with their scythes and axes to assist some little nucleus of devoted lovers of liberty who were preying on the tyrants of the day. Then the crudely armed peasants were almost a match for even the heavy cavalry and on many a field of battle they were able to to give a good account of themselves.

Under modern conditions, once guerilla bands were organized under men who preferably had some military training, their first job was to secure an adequate supply of powerful weapons, build secret ammunition dumps and gird themselves with as many of the accoutrements of modern warfare as they could secure. This was not easy and in some areas for weeks at a time the guerilla forces were hardly able to operate.

German tactics during the winter of 1941‑42 facilitated guerilla work. In their desire to push on and reach the oil fields of the Caucasus, the Germans trusted to the motorized equipment to force supplies through any given area with little trouble. They did not try to keep open their main supply routes but rather despatched flying columns to outlying regions while holding their grip upon the populated or strategic areas. This gave guerilla partisans a chance to dominate almost continuously large sections of the country away from the main arteries of communication and permitted them under terrible odds to take the first steps in perfecting their organizations on a large scale.

It was no easy task to bring together the scattered bands. Now and then two or more, operating in the same neighborhood, would combine for a joint enterprise, but more often the leaders were jealous of one another. Isolated detachments meeting unexpectedly would not recognize each other and would engage in bloody conflict.

The situation was made worse when the Communists, particularly after the checking of the German advance, and in Eastern Ukraine, outfitted similar detachments which were equally ready to fight both Germans and non-Communist groups. Many of the Ukrainian leaders lost their lives in these early attempts to create some form of liaison between the different p144 groups, especially in the autumn and winter of 1941 and the summer of 1942.

Very little information about this movement reached the outside world. It was not to the German interest to let it be known that they were meeting with opposition. They much preferred to emphasize their successes and lay the blame for any partisan activities on the Communists.

For their part the Soviets were enjoying the sympathy of the entire anti-Nazi world, which was shipping all possible supplies to the Soviet Union. To encourage this, Stalin issued grandiose statements that the Soviets alone were not bothered with a fifth column but that all citizens of the Soviet Union were united against the Nazi invaders. He had expediently relaxed the vigorous fight against nationalism and even tolerated the appearance of stories and novels that stressed the heroism and devotion of non-Communists. It would never do for him to admit that he was confronted with an uprising of peoples who wished democratic and independent governments. Later he stated that the basis of the Soviet defense was the Great Russian population and the truth leaked out only when it was officially announced that several of the smaller autonomous republics had been liquidated because of their aid to the invaders. He might have said with more truth that it was because of their unwillingness to remain Soviet citizens, when they saw even a desperate chance to recover some of their human rights. According to Soviet theory all clashes of the Red army with hostile forces were exclusively with German-supported guerillas, exactly as the Germans admitted the existence of only Soviet-supported groups.

By the end of 1942 the more serious guerilla leaders had been brought together in a loose military organization called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). This possessed a general staff and, especially in the swamps of Polissya and the forests of Volyn, was able to develop a well-defined military base where it could gather supplies and train officers and men. The individual leaders still needed a considerable p145 amount of independence but they paid more than nominal respect to the central authority. Those who did not and who swung too far in concentration on one or the other of the enemies, i.e., the German occupying forces or the Soviet partisan bands which were sent into the area, were often disarmed or rendered powerless to do harm to the general cause.⁠8

As an aid to their operations, the Ukrainians paid particular attention to the lower German administrative organs in the areas where they were in the greatest strength. The Nazis had retained the former administrative divisions of the country. They did not have the necessary men and equipment to maintain strong guards around these lesser centers and the Ukrainians were able to wipe them out in considerable numbers and install informal administrations which would meet the minimum needs of the population and incidentally collect supplies for the fighting men.⁠9

The guerilla units were able in many cases to protect themselves against strong punitive expeditions which were sent to burn entire villages and massacre the local population. When these were too strong, the bands scattered or took refuge in the woods and swamps together with the villagers and reappeared when the invaders moved on.

We must not think of this movement as merely the spasms of some hopeless and feeble men. When need be, they were able to execute difficult assignments and even do away with high Nazi officials. Thus in May, 1943, they waylaid along the line of the Kovel-Brest Railroad no less a person than Victor Lutze, a chief of the Nazi SS forces and one of Himmler's most trusted aides. The official Nazi excuse was death in an automobile accident.⁠10 A year later, when the Soviets were entering the same area, they surprised and mortally wounded Marshal Vatutin, perhaps one of the highest Red army officers to be killed during the war and this time the explanation was assault by bandits.⁠11 There was a long series of attacks on German trains deporting Ukrainians to Germany for slavery, when the guards were overpowered and the prisoners released to find p146 places in the ranks of the UPA or return to their families and continue activities in other fields.

In the spring of 1942 Marshal Timoshenko attempted to recover Kharkov by an attack from Great Russian territory and failed. The Germans did not renew their attacks on Moscow that year when the spring thaws made army movements possible but they pushed past through Ukraine to Stalingrad on the Volga in Great Russian territory and to the southeast into the Caucasus. Their defeat at Stalingrad, with the capture of their entire army, was fatal to their hopes and from then on the Soviet armies advanced westward.

This soon brought the Soviets back into Ukrainian territory. There were new and bitterer clashes with the UPA. The Red army advance was as ruthless toward the Ukrainians as toward the Germans.⁠12 To cover up, the army was now reorganized into Ukrainian and Byelorussian armies to give the impression that it was the natives of those Soviet republics who were doing the fighting for the Kremlin. The move was accompanied by a pseudo-reform of the Soviet constitution, granting to each Soviet republic its own commissar for foreign affairs and serving to make plausible the Soviet demand that each of the republics should be represented in the United Nations organization which was being planned to come into being after the ending of the war.

Thus in 1945 at Yalta, Stalin won the consent of both President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to the admission of Ukraine and Byelorussia into the United Nations. In the height of pro-Soviet enthusiasm no one bothered to ask whether the representatives of those countries would speak for Moscow or for the people. It is of interest that the Ukrainian representative hand-picked by the Russian Communists was the same Dmytro Manuilsky who had acted as the Russian Soviet agent in Kiev during the regime of Hetman Skoropadsky about twenty-five years before. He had improved his Communist techniques in the meantime by acting as co-ordinator for Communist interests in Germany. His appointment was a p147 guarantee that the spokesmen of Ukraine in the new organization would be men absolutely and exclusively loyal to the interests of Moscow. Apparently Stalin had won this concession from Churchill and Roosevelt by vague allusions to some sort of difficulties that the Soviet regime was facing. At Yalta he was not prepared to say that these difficulties were being caused by nationalist groups that would have none of the Kremlin but his companions apparently were too polite to pin him down on this question and allowed him to secure their approval of his farce by comparisons with the British Commonwealth of Nations, etc.

The Ukrainians were not alone in their struggle. The Soviet seizure of the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and the German refusal to recognize the newly constituted democratic republics after their attack on the Soviets had made a common cause for the peoples extending between the two dictatorships. The Byelorussians, while they were less nationally conscious than the other groups, soon felt their kinship with the movement. They all developed the same type of guerilla warfare against the two invading armies and it was only natural that the various leaders established contact to carry on their operations along their ethnographical boundaries. It was then but a short step to a joint consideration of their general problems.

Furthermore, even during 1942, the UPA found that it could enroll as reliable members not only citizens of the countries that had been recently seized by the Soviet Union but many Red army deserters belonging to the other nationalities which had passed under Soviet domination at the same time as Ukraine, the period around 1920. The Stalinists were intent on destroying the essence not only of Ukrainian culture but that of the whole galaxy of nations within the Iron Curtain. The Germans tried to form units out of their prisoners of war from these same nationalities but in many cases the new recruits were susceptible to the propaganda of the UPA and passed over almost as units to the Ukrainian camp. There they p148 found leaflets on the efforts of their own nations to obtain liberty, prepared by men who had already joined the Ukrainian army. In a short time units were formed of Georgians, Tatars, Azerbaijanians and Uzbeks.⁠13

So widespread were these reactions that in November, 1943, there was held in one of of the UPA strongholds between Western Ukraine and the Dnieper a conference to set up the United Liberation Struggle of the Oppressed Nations. This was attended by thirty-nine delegates from thirteen peoples that had been caught in the Soviet net, including men from Ukraine and from Azerbaijan, Bashkirs, Kabardins, Kazakhs, Byelorussians, Armenians, Ossetes, Cherkassians and Chuvash. They issued an appeal to the Oppressed Peoples of Eastern Europe and Asia to join in the creation of national democracies.⁠14

It was similar in scope to the conference called in Kiev in 1917 to lay plans for the creation of a federalized Russian state. This had met just as the Bolsheviks were taking over power. It had aided in the disruptive movements within the Russian Empire and had served as an inspiration for the various national states which had developed on the imperial ruins and then been overthrown by Communist infiltration and military conquest.⁠15 The tendency had been kept alive by the governments-in‑exile of those republics and by other patriots through the Promethean League which published in Paris a journal devoted to the cause of the free peoples that had been overwhelmed by Communism. This movement had naturally been opposed by the Soviet Union but it had also incurred throughout its entire history the enmity of the Germans, who saw in it a weapon which might bar their expansion to the vital East.⁠16

Although the UPA extended its activities throughout all Ukraine, its headquarters were in the West, where it was at first able to concentrate against the Nazis. Later as the Red army began to push westward, the Germans made strenuous efforts to enlist its members in the army of General Vlasov which they were forming out of prisoners of war and Red p149 army deserters. Few of the members yielded to the temptation and the UPA continued its fight against both aggressors.

It passed from Volyn and Polissya into the region of the Carpathians. It expanded its work in Galicia, where the Germans became more and more terroristic as they saw their hopes of victory evaporate. In these regions the advance of the Red army from the Balkans and Hungary again brought it up against the UPA, which in the meantime had had trouble with the Polish underground forces. The UPA had been able to establish contacts with these, especially during the Warsaw uprising of 1944, but many of the Polish bands were so strongly nationalistic that they declined to co‑operate with other groups which might have a justifiable claim on territory that the Poles affected to own. Naturally the UPA could have no relation with the groups that were connected with the Communist-inspired center at Lublin.⁠17

Finally in June, 1944, another important step was taken. This was the organization of the Supreme Ukrainian Council of Liberation, formed just before the Soviet troops entered Western Ukraine. It aimed to consolidate politically all parties and it issued a Universal proclaiming its position as the supreme organ of the Ukrainian people in their fight for liberation. It adopted the following declaration of principles:

"It will fight to make you the sole master of your soil;

For a just social order without oppression and exploitation;

For the destruction of serfdom.

For free enterprise of the peasant on his own land;

For free enterprise for the worker;

For wide initiative of the working people in all branches of the economic order;

For the widest possible development of the Ukrainian national culture.⁠18

These were the goals that were outlined in the comparative quiet of 1917‑18 and they are still held behind the Iron Curtain by all Ukrainians worthy of the name.

The UPA endeavored to create a definite military force p150 and a definite political body under the most adverse circumstances. It was unfortunate that the response was not unanimous because of a split in the leadership of the Ukrainian Nationalists. Nevertheless, the various groups of the UPA, north, east, south and west, have acquired a real military discipline.

Thus during the entire period of Nazi occupation and Soviet reoccupation the population strove to bring back those democratic principles and rights which the Ukrainian National Republic had proclaimed in 1918. It was a desperate struggle that offered little hope of final success but it showed that the Ukrainian national spirit was not dead, even after twenty years of Communist misrule, and it suggested the possibilities for Ukrainian assistance to the free nations of the world whenever they were ready to accept it.

The Author's Notes:

4 See Lebed, op. cit., pp16 f. Compare Chase, op. cit., pp304 f. Deutsche Zeitung im Ostland, October 19, 1941 (quoted in Bilmanis, op. cit., p115 f.)

5 Lebed, op. cit., Nicholas D. Czubatyj, "The Ukrainian Underground," The Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. II, p161 f.

7 Nicholas D. Chubatyj, "The Ukrainian Underground," The Ukrainian Quarterly, Vol. II, p157.

15 Roman Smal Stocky, "The Promethean Movement," The Ukrainian Quarterly, III, 330.

p138 XVI Ukraine between the Armies

The Author's Notes:

p138 XVI

Ukraine between the Armies