Who is Stepan Bandera biography. Who is Stepan Bandera? New facts from the biography of the Ukrainian nationalist. A political failure that resulted in a new arrest

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COLORS OF STEPAN BANDERA BANNER

A new look at the leader of Ukrainian nationalists

Stepan Andreevich Bandera ( "Bandera" - translated into modern language means "banner") was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary Kalushsky district of Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk region), which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time, in the family of a priest of the Greek Catholic rite. He was the second child in the family. In addition to him, three brothers and three sisters grew up in the family.
My father had a university education - he graduated from the theological faculty of Lviv University. My father had a large library; business people, public figures, and intellectuals were frequent guests in the house. Among them, for example, is the member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament J. Veselovsky, the sculptor M. Gavrilko, and the businessman P. Glodzinsky.
S. Bandera wrote in his autobiography that he grew up in a house in which an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism and living national-cultural, political and social interests reigned. Stepan's father took an active part in the revival of the Ukrainian State in 1918-1920; he was elected as a deputy of the parliament of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic. In the fall of 1919, Stepan passed the entrance exams to the Ukrainian classical gymnasium in the city of Stry.
In 1920, Western Ukraine was occupied by Poland. In the spring of 1921, Miroslav Bander's mother died of tuberculosis. Stepan himself suffered from rheumatism of the joints since childhood and spent a long time in the hospital. Starting from the fourth grade, Bandera gave lessons, earning money for his own expenses. Education at the gymnasium took place under the supervision of the Polish authorities. But some teachers were able to incorporate Ukrainian national content into the compulsory curriculum.
However, gymnasium students received their main national-patriotic education in school youth organizations. Along with legal organizations, there were illegal circles involved in raising funds to support Ukrainian periodicals and boycotting events of the Polish authorities. Starting from the fourth grade, Bandera was part of an illegal organization at the gymnasium.
In 1927, Bandera successfully passed the matriculation exams and the next year he entered the Lviv Polytechnic School in the agronomy department. By 1934, he completed a full course as an agronomist engineer. However, he did not have time to defend his diploma because he was arrested.
At different times, various legal, semi-legal and illegal organizations operated on the territory of Galicia, whose goal was to protect Ukrainian national interests. In 1920, in Prague, a group of officers founded the “Ukrainian Military Organization” (UVO), which set the goal of fighting the Polish occupation. Soon, the former commander of the Sich Riflemen, an experienced organizer and authoritative politician, Evgen Konovalets, became the head of the UVO. The most famous action of the UVO is the failed attempt on the life of the head of the Polish state, Józef Pilsudski, in 1921.
Patriotic youth organizations were under the patronage of the UVO. Stepan Bandera became a member of the UVO in 1928. In 1929, in Vienna, Ukrainian youth organizations, with the participation of the Ukrainian Military District, held a unification congress, at which the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established, which included Bandera. Later in 1932, the OUN and UVO merged.
Although Poland occupied Galicia, the legitimacy of its rule over Western Ukrainian lands remained problematic from the point of view of the Entente countries. This issue was the subject of complaints against Poland from the Western powers, especially England and France.
The Ukrainian majority of Eastern Galicia refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Polish authorities over them. The 1921 census and elections to the Polish Sejm in 1922 were boycotted. By 1930 the situation had worsened. In response to acts of disobedience by the Ukrainian population, the Polish government launched large-scale operations to “pacify” the population, in current terminology – “cleaning up” the territory of Eastern Galicia. In 1934, a concentration camp was established in Bereza Kartuzskaya, in which there were about 2 thousand political prisoners, mostly Ukrainians. A year later, Poland abandoned its commitment to the League of Nations to respect the rights of national minorities. Mutual attempts were made from time to time to find a compromise, but they did not lead to tangible results.
In 1934, members of the OUN made an attempt on the life of Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Peratsky, as a result of which he died. S. Bandera took part in the terrorist attack. For his participation in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Peracki, he was arrested and at the beginning of 1936, along with eleven other defendants, he was convicted by the Warsaw District Court. S. Bandera was sentenced to death. According to the amnesty announced earlier by the Polish Sejm, the death penalty was replaced by life imprisonment.
Stepan was kept in prison in conditions of strict isolation. After the German attack on Poland, the town in which the prison was located was bombed. On September 13, 1939, when the situation of the Polish troops became critical, the prison guards fled. S. Bandera was released from solitary confinement by released Ukrainian prisoners.
The OUN, with about 20 thousand members, had a great influence on the Ukrainian population. There were internal conflicts in the organization: between young, impatient and more experienced and sensible people who had gone through war and revolution, between the OUN leadership, living in comfortable conditions of emigration, and the bulk of OUN members, working in conditions of underground and police persecution.
OUN leader Yevgen Konovalets, using his diplomatic and organizational talent, knew how to extinguish contradictions, uniting the organization. The death of Konovalets at the hands of Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov in 1938 in Rotterdam was a heavy loss for the Ukrainian nationalist movement. His successor was his closest ally, Colonel Andrei Melnik, a well-educated man, reserved and tolerant. The faction of his supporters, taking advantage of the fact that most of their opponents were in prison, in August 1939, at a conference in Rome, announced Colonel Melnik as the head of the OUN. Subsequent events took a dramatic turn for the Ukrainian national liberation movement.
Once free, Stepan Bandera arrived in Lviv. A few days before, Lvov was occupied by the Red Army. At first it was relatively safe to be there. Soon, through a courier, he received an invitation to come to Krakow to coordinate the further plans of the OUN. Urgent treatment was also required for a joint disease that had worsened in prison. I had to illegally cross the Soviet-German demarcation line.
After meetings in Krakow and Vienna, Bandera was delegated to Rome for negotiations with Melnik. Events were developing rapidly, and the central leadership was slow. The list of disagreements - organizational and political - that needed to be resolved in negotiations with Melnik was quite long. The dissatisfaction of underground OUN members with the OUN leadership was approaching a critical point. In addition, there was suspicion of betrayal by Melnik’s inner circle, since mass arrests in Galicia and Volyn affected mainly Bandera supporters.
The main difference was in the strategy of conducting the national liberation struggle. Bandera and his like-minded people considered it necessary to maintain OUN contacts both with the countries of the German coalition and with the Western allied countries, without getting closer to any group. It is necessary to rely on one’s own strength, since no one was interested in the independence of Ukraine. The Melnik faction believed that relying on one’s own forces was untenable. Western countries are not interested in Ukrainian independence. This was already demonstrated by them back in the 20s. Germany then recognized the independence of Ukraine. Therefore, it is necessary to bet on Germany. Melnikov's followers believed that it was impossible to create an armed underground, since this would irritate the German authorities and cause repression on their part, which would not bring either political or military dividends.
Unable to reach a compromise as a result of negotiations, both groups proclaimed themselves the only legitimate leadership of the OUN.
In February 1940, in Krakow, the Bandera faction, which included mainly youth and constituted the numerical majority of the OUN, held a conference at which it rejected the decisions of the Rome conference and chose Stepan Bandera as its leader. Thus, a split of the OUN took shape into the Banderaites - OUN-B or OUN-R (revolutionary) and into the Melnikites - OUN-M. Subsequently, the antagonism between the factions reached such intensity that they often fought against each other with the same ferocity with which they fought against the enemies of independent Ukraine.
The attitude of the German leadership towards the OUN was contradictory: the Canaris service (Abwehr - military intelligence) considered it necessary to cooperate with Ukrainian nationalists, the Nazi party leadership led by Bormann did not consider the OUN a serious political factor, and therefore rejected any cooperation with it. Taking advantage of these contradictions, the OUN managed to form a Ukrainian military unit, the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists, numbering about 600 people, consisting of two battalions - Nachtigal and Roland, staffed by Ukrainians of predominantly pro-Banderist orientation. The Germans planned to use them for subversive purposes, and Bandera hoped that they would become the core of the future Ukrainian army.
At the same time, mass repressions unfolded on the territory of Western Ukraine, which was ceded to the Soviet Union under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. Leaders and activists of political parties and public organizations were arrested, many of them were executed. Four mass deportations of the Ukrainian population from occupied territories were carried out. New prisons were opened, housing tens of thousands of prisoners.
Father Andrei Bandera and his two daughters Marta and Oksana were arrested at three in the morning on May 23, 1941. In the interrogation protocols, when asked by the investigator about his political views, Father Andrei replied: “In my convictions, I am a Ukrainian nationalist, but not a chauvinist. I consider a united, conciliar and independent Ukraine to be the only correct state structure for Ukrainians.” On the evening of July 8 in Kyiv, at a closed meeting of the military tribunal of the Kyiv Military District, A. Bandera was sentenced to death. The verdict stated that it could be appealed within five days from the date of delivery of a copy of the verdict. But Andrei Bandera was shot on July 10th.
Marta and Oksana were sent without trial to the Krasnoyarsk Territory for eternal settlement, where they were moved from place to place every 2 - 3 months until 1953. The third sister, Vladimir, did not escape the bitter cup either. She, a mother of five children, was arrested along with her husband Teodor Davidyuk in 1946. She was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. She worked in the camps of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Kazakhstan, including the Spassky death camp. She survived, having served her full sentence, they added a settlement in Karaganda, and then she was allowed to return to her children in Ukraine.
The hasty retreat of the Red Army after the outbreak of war had tragic consequences for tens of thousands of those arrested. Unable to take everyone to the east, the NKVD decided to urgently liquidate the prisoners, regardless of the sentences. Often, basements filled with prisoners were simply bombarded with grenades. In Galicia, 10 thousand people were killed, in Volyn - 5 thousand. Relatives of the prisoners, looking for their loved ones, witnessed this hasty, senseless and inhumane reprisal. The Germans then demonstrated all this to the International Red Cross.
Using the support of the Nachtigal battalion, on June 30, 1941 in Lvov, at a rally of thousands in the presence of several German generals, Bandera proclaimed the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State.” A Ukrainian government was also formed, consisting of 15 ministers, headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, S. Bandera’s closest ally. In addition, following the front, which was quickly moving to the east, OUN detachments of 7-12 people were sent, about 2,000 people in total, who, seizing the initiative from the German occupation authorities, formed Ukrainian local governments.
The reaction of the German authorities to the action of Bandera’s supporters in Lvov followed quickly: on July 5, S. Bandera was arrested in Krakow. and on the 9th - in Lvov, Y. Stetsko. In Berlin, where they were taken for trial, S. Bandera was explained that the Germans came to Ukraine not as liberators, but as conquerors, and demanded the public repeal of the Act of Revival. Without obtaining consent, Bandera was thrown into prison, and a year and a half later - into the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was kept until August 27 (according to other sources - until December) 1944. Brothers Stepan Andrei and Vasily were beaten to death in Auschwitz in 1942.
In the fall of 1941, Melnikites in Kyiv also tried to form a Ukrainian government. But this attempt was also brutally suppressed. More than 40 leading figures of the OUN-M were arrested and shot at Babi Yar at the beginning of 1942, including the famous Ukrainian poetess 35-year-old Elena Teliga, who headed the Writers' Union of Ukraine.
By the fall of 1941, the scattered Ukrainian armed detachments of Polesie united into the Polesie Sich partisan unit. As mass Nazi terror unfolded in Ukraine, partisan detachments grew. In the fall of 1942, on the initiative of the OUN-B, the partisan detachments of Bandera, Melnik and the Polesie Sich were united into the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) led by one of the organizers of the OUN, the highest officer of the recently disbanded Nachtigall battalion, Roman Shukhevych (General Taras Chuprinka) . In 1943-44, the number of UPA reached 100 thousand fighters and it controlled Volyn, Polesie and Galicia. It included detachments of other nationalities - Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kazakhs and other nations, a total of 15 such detachments.
The UPA waged an armed struggle not only with Nazi and Soviet troops, there was a constant war with the Red partisans, and in the territory of Volyn, Polesie and Kholm region, exceptionally brutal battles took place with the Polish Home Army. This armed conflict had a long history and was accompanied by ethnic cleansing in the most savage form on both sides.
At the end of 1942, the OUN-UPA approached the Soviet partisans with a proposal to coordinate military operations against the Germans, but no agreement was reached. Hostile relations turned into armed clashes. And already in October and November 1943, for example, the UPA fought 47 battles with German troops and 54 with Soviet partisans.
Until the spring of 1944, the command of the Soviet Army and the NKVD tried to feign sympathy towards the Ukrainian nationalist movement. However, after the expulsion of German troops from the territory of Ukraine, Soviet propaganda began to identify the OUN members with the Nazis. From this time on, the second stage of the struggle began for the OUN-UPA - the struggle against the Soviet Army. This war lasted almost 10 years - until the mid-50s.
Regular troops of the Soviet Army fought against the UPA. So, in 1946, about 2 thousand battles and armed skirmishes took place, in 1948 - about 1.5 thousand. Several training bases were organized near Moscow to combat the partisan movement in Western Ukraine. During these years, every second of the Gulag prisoners was Ukrainian. And only after the death of UPA commander Roman Shukhevych on March 5, 1950, organized resistance in Western Ukraine began to decline, although individual detachments and remnants of the underground operated until the mid-50s.
After leaving the Nazi concentration camp, Stepan Bandera was no longer able to get into Ukraine. He took up the affairs of the OUN. After the end of the war, the central organs of the organization were located in West Germany. At a meeting of the OUN leadership council, Bandera was elected to the leadership bureau, in which he oversaw the foreign parts of the OUN.
At a conference in 1947, Stepan Bandera was elected head of the entire Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. By this time, opposition to Bandera had arisen in the foreign units, reproaching him for dictatorial ambitions, and the OUN for turning into a neo-communist organization. After lengthy discussions, Bandera decides to resign and go to Ukraine. However, the resignation was not accepted. OUN conferences in 1953 and 1955, with the participation of delegates from Ukraine, again elected Bandera as head of the leadership.
After the war, S. Bandera’s family found themselves in the zone of Soviet occupation. Under fictitious names, the relatives of the OUN leader were forced to hide from the Soviet occupation authorities and KGB agents. For some time, the family lived in the forest in a secluded house, in a small room without electricity, in cramped conditions. Six-year-old Natalya had to walk six kilometers through the forest to school. The family was malnourished, the children grew sickly.
In 1948-1950, they lived in a refugee camp under an assumed name. Meetings with their father were so rare that the children even forgot him. Since the early 50s, the mother and children settled in the small village of Breitbrunn. Stepan could be here more often, almost every day. Despite his busy schedule, the father spent time teaching the Ukrainian language to his children. Brother and sister at the age of 4-5 already knew how to read and write in Ukrainian. With Natalka Bandera he studied history, geography and literature. In 1954, the family moved to Munich, where Stepan already lived.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera released the guards and entered the entrance of the house in which he lived with his family. On the stairs he was met by a man whom Bandera had already seen earlier in the church. From a special pistol, he shot Stepan Bandera in the face with a stream of potassium cyanide solution. Bandera fell, shopping bags rolled down the stairs.
The killer turned out to be a KGB agent, 30-year-old Ukrainian Bogdan Stashinsky. Soon, KGB Chairman Shelepin personally presented him with the Order of the Red Banner of Battle in Moscow. In addition, Stashinsky received permission to marry a German woman from East Berlin. A month after the wedding, which took place in Berlin, Stashinsky was sent with his wife to Moscow to continue his studies. Listening to conversations at home with his wife gave his superiors reason to suspect Stashinsky of insufficient loyalty to the Soviet regime. He was expelled from school and forbidden to leave Moscow.
In connection with the upcoming birth, Stashinsky’s wife was allowed to travel to East Berlin in the spring of 1961. At the beginning of 1962, news arrived of the unexpected death of a child. For the funeral of his son, Stashinsky was allowed a short trip to East Berlin. Intensified measures were taken to monitor him. However, the day before the funeral (just before the construction of the Berlin Wall), Stashinsky and his wife managed to break away from the escort, which was traveling in three cars, and escape to West Berlin. There he turned to the American mission, where he confessed to the murder of Stepan Bandera, as well as to the murder of OUN activist Professor L. Rebet two years earlier. An international scandal erupted, since at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, the USSR officially proclaimed its renunciation of the policy of international terrorism.
At the trial, Stashinsky testified that he acted on the instructions of the USSR leadership. On October 19, 1962, the court of the city of Karlsruhe pronounced a sentence: 8 years of maximum security prison.
Stepan’s daughter Natalya Bandera ended her speech at the trial with the words:
“My unforgettable father raised us in love for God and Ukraine. He was a deeply religious Christian and died for God and an independent, free Ukraine.” .

Recent events in Ukraine have given us a reason to call a number of Ukrainians Banderaites. Who was Stepan Bandera and why is he loved in western Ukraine? Well, here's some historical background for you.

Stepan Andreevich Bandera was born in 1909 in the village of Stary Ugrinov, which at the time of his birth was located on the land of the kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which, in turn, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a Greek Catholic clergyman, and his mother (irony of fate) was the daughter of exactly the same priest. From a very young age, Stepan Bandera was raised by his father in the spirit of Ukrainian patriotism (his father was an ardent Ukrainian nationalist).

The First World War had a huge impact on the child - the boy was five years old in 1914. The front line, as luck would have it, passed through his native village several times; in one of the battles, Bander’s house received serious damage.

After the defeat of Austria-Hungary and the collapse of the empire, Stepan’s father took an active part in the Ukrainian national liberation movement, even becoming a chaplain in the Ukrainian Galician Army. However, the dreams of Bandera Sr. did not come true: the army was defeated, in 1919 Galicia was occupied by Poland, which, of course, promised the Entente respect for the Ukrainians and their autonomy. Of course, it goes without saying that having made such a serious promise, the Poles began to seriously engage in the strict assimilation of Ukrainians - no status as an official language, leadership positions - only for Poles, a flow of Polish immigrants, whose houses the Ukrainians regularly burned. They were, accordingly, regularly arrested for this. It was under such conditions that Bandera entered the gymnasium in the city of Stryi, where he became even more deeply imbued with the ideas of nationalism.

In 1928, Bandera became a member of the UVO - Ukrainian Military Organization, having been assigned first to the intelligence and then to the propaganda department. In 1929, the OUN - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - was created, one of the first members of which was Stepan Bandera. Soon he becomes one of the leaders of the OUN.

In 1932, the OUN begins a formal war against the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, and we are, of course, not talking about leaflets or propaganda at all - on the instructions of Bandera, a number of assassination attempts are made, including on the life of the Soviet consul in Lvov (the action, however, failed, and its performer, Nikolai Lemik, was sentenced to life imprisonment). In 1933, Bandera was entrusted with leadership of military actions, and the UVO became the military wing of the OUN. In the same year, at the OUN conference, a decision was made to kill Bronislaw Peratsky, the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, who was considered the initiator and inspirer of the policy of pacification of Ukraine. As part of this policy, the Poles responded to the speeches of Ukrainian nationalists with mass arrests, murders, beatings and burning of houses. The murder was carried out by Grigory Matseiko, who after execution managed to escape abroad. Bandera and his comrade Pidgain were unlucky - the day before the murder they were arrested while attempting to illegally cross the Polish-Czech border. The police suspected Bandera's connection with the murder of Peratsky and he spent the next year and a half in prison.

On January 13, 1936, Bandera was sentenced to death. The Ukrainians were saved from the gallows by the amnesty decree adopted during the trial. The execution was replaced with life imprisonment. During the trial in Lviv, OUN militants killed Lviv University philology professor Ivan Babiy and his student Yakov Bachinsky. Bandera was unlucky: they were shot with the same revolver as Peratsky, which gave rise to Bandera also being brought to trial in the case of the Lvov murder. Bandera’s quote owes its origin to the Lviv process: “Bolshevism is a system with the help of which Moscow enslaved the Ukrainian nation, destroying Ukrainian statehood.”

While in custody, Bandera, who was being held in a Warsaw prison, was tried to be released, but the plans became known to the authorities. Bandera was transferred to the prison of the Brest Fortress, from where he would be released on September 13, 1939 - the administration would leave the fortress and the city. Bandera and the rest of the prisoners were freed. The USSR and the Soviet government automatically become the new enemy of the OUN, and it was decided to extend the structure of the OUN to the entire territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1939, a split occurred in the OUN: after the assassination of Yevgeny Konovalets, the leader of the OUN, Andrei Melnik became his successor. However, some OUN members want to see Bandera as their leader, not Melnyk. As a result, the OUN splits into two factions - OUN(b) and OUN(m). Bandera and Melnikites, if anything, and not Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at all :) Bandera feels that a conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is inevitable and begins to prepare his organization for war. With the support of the Germans, two battalions are created - "Nachtigall" and "Roland", consisting mainly of Ukrainian Banderaites.

On June 30, German units occupied Lviv. Following them is the Nachtigall battalion, led by Shukhevych. In Lvov, the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State” is read out. Bandera's supporters form the National Assembly and government. One can imagine the surprise of the Germans who discover a new state under their noses - Bandera did not particularly inform them about his plans. Germany was not delighted with such initiatives and politely asked Bandera to curtail all these strange ideas with an independent Ukraine. He did not agree to the kind offer, which extremely upset the Germans. The upset Germans, as a return courtesy, sent Bandera to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near the German city of Oranienburg. In 1942, the Germans began to form the Ukrainian Insurgent Army - UPA. Bandera would probably be happy to participate in this formation, but the Germans are not interested in his opinion, and they are also in no hurry to release him from the concentration camp, so the UPA and OUN are headed by Shukhevych in Bandera’s absence, but Bandera’s popularity remains very high. The UPA is gradually turning into one of the most combat-ready units, so the Germans decide to stop being upset with Bandera and release him from Sachsenhausen. In Berlin, Bandera sets a condition for cooperation: German recognition of the independence of Ukraine. This time Bandera was lucky and was not returned to the concentration camp. Shukhevych, having learned about Bandera’s release, returns leadership of the OUN to him.

After the war, Bandera finds himself in exile. The USSR demands his extradition, but to no avail. As a result, Bandera settled in Munich.

On October 15, 1959, Bandera was preparing to come home for lunch. He released the bodyguards at the entrance. Rising to the third floor, he saw a man whose face was familiar to Bandera - he had seen him in church in the morning. To the question "What are you doing here?" the stranger, whose name was Bogdan Stashinsky, pointed a rolled-up newspaper at Bandera. This newspaper contained a pistol-syringe containing potassium cyanide. By the time the neighbors looked out into the stairwell, Stashinsky had already left the building. On October 20, 1959, Bandera was buried at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich. Stashinsky was arrested by German law enforcement agencies and on October 8, 1962, the KGB agent was sentenced to eight years in prison. After serving his sentence, he disappeared in an unknown direction.

Here is such a biography.

BANDERA, STEPAN ANDREEVICH(1909–1959) – leader of the Ukrainian national liberation movement in the first half and mid-20th century.

Born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary in Galicia (modern Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father received a theological education at Lviv University and served as a priest in the Greek Catholic Church. According to the recollections of Stepan Bandera himself, an atmosphere of national patriotism and the revival of Ukrainian culture reigned in their house. Representatives of the intelligentsia, Ukrainian business circles, and public figures often gathered at my father’s place. In 1918–1920, Andrei Bandera was a deputy of the Rada of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic.

In 1919, Stepan Bandera entered a gymnasium in the city of Striy near Lvov. In 1920 Poland occupied Western Ukraine, and training took place under the supervision of Polish authorities.

In 1921, Stepan’s mother, Miroslava Bandera, died of tuberculosis.

In 1922, Bandera became a member of the Nationalist Youth Union of Ukraine, and in 1928 he entered the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School with a degree in agronomist.

The situation in western Ukraine was aggravated by repression and terror on the part of the Polish authorities, caused by the disobedience of the Ukrainian population of Galicia and other regions. Thousands of Ukrainians were thrown into prisons and a concentration camp in the Kartuz region (the village of Bereza). In the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded by Yevgeny Konovalets back in 1920, they naturally could not help but notice Stepan Bandera, who was deeply outraged by the actions of pan-Poland, and since 1929 he has led the radical wing of the OUN youth organization. In the early 1930s, Bandera became deputy head of the regional leadership of the OUN. His name is associated with attacks on postal trains, expropriations and robberies of post offices and banks, murders of political opponents and enemies of the national movement of Ukraine.

Stepan Bandera was never able to defend his thesis at Lvov University - in 1934, for the organization, preparation, assassination attempt and liquidation of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland Bronislaw Peratsky, he, along with other organizers of the terrorist attack, was sentenced to capital punishment at the Warsaw trial in 1936. However, the death penalty is subsequently replaced by life imprisonment.

In 1938, the head of the OUN, Yevgeny Konovalets, died at the hands of a Soviet intelligence officer, future Minister of State Security Pavel Sudoplatov. At a congress in Rome in August 1939, one of the leaders of the national movement of Ukraine, Colonel Andrei Melnik, was elected his successor in the OUN.

Meanwhile, Bandera was imprisoned until the beginning of World War II, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 13, 1939, thanks to the retreat of parts of the Polish army and the escape of prison guards, he was released and first went to Lvov, which by that time it was already occupied by Soviet troops, and then, illegally crossing the Soviet-German border, to Krakow, Vienna and Rome to coordinate further plans of the OUN. But during the negotiations, serious disagreements arose between Bandera and Melnik.

At the same time, widespread arrests of supporters of Stepan Bender were taking place in Volyn and Galicia. Suspicions of betrayal fall on Melnik and his people. Bandera returned to Krakow, and in February 1940 his supporters at a conference accused Melnik and his faction of complicity with Nazi Germany, which, in fact, was in no way going to recognize the sovereignty of Ukraine. The decisions of the Rome conference of 1939 are annulled, and Stepan Bandera is proclaimed the leader of the OUN. Thus, there was a split into Bandera and Melnik. Soon the factional confrontation escalated into a fierce armed struggle between the two factions.

Bandera formed armed groups from his supporters and on June 30, 1941, at a rally of thousands in Lvov, he proclaimed the act of independence of Ukraine. Bandera's closest ally Yaroslav Stetsko becomes the head of government of the newly created national Ukrainian cabinet of ministers.

Following this, in early July, in the zone of Soviet occupation, the NKVD shoots Stepan's father Andrei Bandera. Almost all of Bandera's close relatives were transferred to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

However, the reaction from the fascist authorities followed immediately - already in early July, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Berlin, where they were asked to publicly renounce the ideas of a national Ukrainian state and annul the act of independence of Ukraine of June 30.

In the fall of 1941, the Melnikites also tried to proclaim Ukraine independent, but they suffered the same fate as the Banderaites. Most of their leaders were shot by the Gestapo in early 1942.

The atrocities of the fascist invaders on the territory of Ukraine led to more and more people joining partisan detachments to fight the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera’s supporters called for the unification of the scattered armed detachments of Melnik’s followers and other partisan associations of Ukraine under the command of Roman Shukhevych, the former leader of the OUN Nachtigal battalion. On the basis of the OUN, a new paramilitary organization is formed - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The national composition of the UPA was quite heterogeneous (representatives of the Transcaucasian peoples, Kazakhs, Tatars, etc., who found themselves in the German-occupied territories of Ukraine, joined the rebels), and the number of the UPA reached, according to various estimates, up to 100 thousand people. A fierce armed struggle took place between the UPA and the fascist occupiers, red partisans and units of the Polish Home Army in Galicia, Volyn, Kholmshchyna, Polesie.

After the expulsion of the German invaders from the territory of Ukraine by Soviet troops in 1944, the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists entered a new phase - the war against the Soviet Army, which lasted until the mid-50s. The years 1946–1948 were especially fierce, when, according to information from various sources, in total over these years there were more than four thousand bloody battles between Ukrainian rebels and the Soviet Army on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.

All this time, from the autumn of 1941 to the middle of the second half of 1944, Stepan Bandera was in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen. At the end of 1944, the fascist leadership changed its policy towards Ukrainian nationalists and released Bandera and some OUN members from prison. In 1945 and until the end of the war, Bandera collaborated with the Abwehr intelligence department in training OUN sabotage groups.

Stepan Bandera continued his activities in the OUN, whose centralized administration after the end of the Great Patriotic War was located in West Germany. In 1947, at the next meeting of the OUN, Bandera was appointed head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and was re-elected to this position twice in 1953 and 1955.

In the last years of his life, Bandera lived in Munich with his family, who had been taken from Soviet-occupied East Germany. On October 15, 1959, Stepan Andreevich Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.

After the collapse of the USSR, for modern Ukrainian nationalists the name of Stepan Bandera became a symbol of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine against Polish oppression, fascist Nazism and Soviet totalitarianism. In 2005, the Ukrainian government declared Bandera a national hero, and in 2007 a bronze monument was erected to him in Lviv. In 2005, the Ukrainian government declared Bandera a national hero, and in 2007 a bronze monument was erected to him in Lviv, but in January 2011 the court invalidated the decree of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko of January 20, 2010 conferring the title “Hero of Ukraine” on S. Bandera.

On the first day of each new year, torchlight processions take place in the cities and towns of Western Ukraine. People take to the streets to honor the memory of Stepan Bandera, the most controversial figure in modern Ukrainian history. Many consider him a real hero who gave his life for the independence of the country, others consider him a criminal and traitor, because of whom thousands of people died. He himself did not have to kill people, but his supporters, blindly obeying orders, carried out genuine terror in the western regions of Ukraine in the post-war years.

Stepan Bandera was born in Stary Ugrinov in 1909. In the documents about the place of his birth there is a record of a no longer existing state ─ the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was then an integral part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stepan Bandera is destined to absorb the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism from childhood. His father, Greek Catholic priest Andrei Bandera, firmly believed in the realization of the then unrealizable dream of Ukraine gaining independence.

During the First World War, Galicia became a gigantic battlefield. My father, having been submitted to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, went to fight at the front. After the defeat of the Austrians in the war, he became a member of the parliament of the independent Western Ukrainian People's Republic and joined the Ukrainian militia ─ the Galician Army, the predecessor of future armed formations of Ukrainian nationalists. Stepan Bandera met the end of the war with relatives in the city of Stryi near Lvov. Western Ukraine came under Polish rule and my father, who served as a chaplain in the Galician army that fought against the Poles, had to hide from the occupation authorities for some time.

At the age of twelve, Stepan Bandera joined an underground organization of Ukrainian schoolchildren. Thus began his journey into politics and the struggle for independence, which lasted almost 40 years, most of which he would have to spend in captivity or in an illegal position. He can safely be called a fanatic or obsessed with an idea. Even as a child, he began to prepare himself for future difficult trials.

Stepan Bandera often went with scouts on long forest hikes, played sports, and in winter he hardened himself in the cold by dousing himself with water. He overdid it a little. From hypothermia he will develop rheumatism in his legs, from which he will suffer greatly throughout his life. In the post-war years, Poland began to pursue a policy of forced assimilation in Ukrainian territories, supporting the resettlement of Poles in Western Ukraine. So the Polish authorities became the main enemy for Ukrainian nationalists.

In 1927, Stepan Bandera joined the Ukrainian Military Organization, and 2 years later he found himself in the newly organized Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). While studying at the Lviv Polytechnic to become an agronomist, he devoted all his free time to underground activities. Throughout his life, Bandera had many nicknames ─ Fox, Gray, Kruk, Baba, Rykh. In those years, he wrote a lot for illegal newspapers, signing the pseudonym Matvey Gordon.

The life of an underground worker is the same in all countries and at any time. Secret meetings, posting leaflets, distributing illegal newspapers, propaganda among the masses, organizing strikes and boycotts of elections - he had to do all this. The active young nationalist was quickly noticed. In 1933, he was appointed “regional guide” ─ head of the regional organization of the OUN.

Stepan Bandera nationality

The political struggle gradually became radicalized. Ukrainians began to take up arms. In 1932, Stepan Bandera was trained in sabotage methods at a German intelligence school in Danzig. Thus began his collaboration with the German authorities, who in those years were trying to cultivate an internal enemy for neighboring unfriendly Poland. In 1933, the OUN decided to eliminate the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky.

The organization of the operation was personally led by Stepan Bandera. In mid-June 1934, in Warsaw, the Polish minister was shot by OUN member Grigory Matseyko. He managed to successfully leave both the crime scene and Poland, but the organizer of the action was unlucky. They were all arrested, including Stepan Bandera. A court in Warsaw found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. During the trial, Bandera was removed from the courtroom several times for shouting “Long live Ukraine.” The death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment. In prison, Stepan Bandera showed himself to be a very restless prisoner, constantly participating in protest hunger strikes. From there, he continued to lead the activities of the OUN in Western Ukraine.

In addition to Poland, the gaze of Ukrainian nationalists often turned to the east. In the early 1930s, famine broke out in Soviet Ukraine due to crop failures. Ukrainians often call those events the “Holodomor,” still considering it artificially inspired by Stalin’s entourage. Stepan Bandera shared the same views. He decided to take revenge on the Soviet authorities for the “mockery” of the Ukrainian people.

In the fall of 1933, the secretary of the USSR Consulate in Lvov, Alexey Mailov, died at the hands of a sent one. With this event, the war of Bandera and the OUN against the USSR began. The release of the prisoner was helped by the outbreak of World War II. He met her at the Brest Fortress. The Poles housed a maximum security prison within its walls. As Soviet troops approached, moving to the West according to the Molotov-Ribbentropp plan, the prison guards fled. Stepan Bandera immediately headed home to Lviv. These were several months that he lived under Soviet rule, naturally, in an illegal situation. If the NKVD had arrested him then, he would have rotted in Kolyma or even been immediately shot in the basement, but Bandera managed to secretly cross the border and get out into the territory occupied by Germany.

Bandera movement

Poland disappeared from the map of Europe. Western Ukraine was divided between Germany and the USSR. The enemy for Bandera has changed. Germany took Poland's place. While he was in prison, big changes took place in the OUN. The former leader, Evgen Konovalets, was blown up by a bomb in Rotterdam. Andrey Melnik laid claim to unconditional leadership. Their meeting took place in Italy. Stepan Bandera demanded that Melnik stop all contacts with Germany. He refused. The OUN split into two parts. Bandera headed the OUN (Bandera movement).

Actually, after a quarrel between the two OUN leaders, the definition of “Bandera” came into play. He still had to begin cooperation with Nazi Germany. He met the German attack on the USSR in Krakow, while under vigilant police surveillance. He was strongly discouraged from visiting his native places. The German troops that entered Lvov at the end of June 1941 included 2 battalions staffed by his supporters. On the same day, one of the leaders of the OUN (b) Yaroslav Stetsko read out the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State” in Lvov. The Germans had absolutely no need for an independent Ukraine. They had plans that were not their own. They did not recognize any “independence”, and all its guardians were quickly arrested.

Stepan Bandera with his wife and daughters were placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he soon met Andrei Melnik, who always relied on Germany. In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera had some privileges compared to other prisoners. He was fed a little better and was sometimes allowed to meet his family. The Germans have always been very calculating.

Andrey Melnik in old age

Bandera was remembered in 1944, when the Soviet Army approached the lands of Western Ukraine. According to the calculations of the German command, Ukrainian nationalists were supposed to start a partisan war in the liberated areas. Bandera made Germany’s recognition of the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State” a mandatory condition for further cooperation. He never managed to achieve this.

Back in 1942, in Galicia, without the participation of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the UPA began to form, which became the core of the resistance and received help from the Germans in the form of weapons. Stepan Bandera from Germany tried to lead the “abroad” nationalist formations.

Within the OUN, especially among its members hiding in the forests of Ukraine, opposition grew, accusing it of being out of touch with real life and dogmatism.

Stepan Bandera met the end of the war in the part of Germany occupied by the British. The British intelligence services quickly found him. In turn, the Americans continued to look for Bandera as an accomplice of Nazi Germany and he had to hide from them for a couple of years.

Since then, the only enemy for Ukrainian nationalists has been the Soviet Union. The guerrilla war in Western Ukraine continued until the mid-50s.

Many years after the destruction of the main forces of “Bandera”, former UPA fighters were found in villages hiding in the cellars of relatives. Such tenacity was only demonstrated by Japanese soldiers who did not recognize surrender, and who continued to be captured in the jungles of the Philippines until the 70s.

Murder of Stepan Bandera

The recognized leader of the nationalist movement inevitably became a target for the Soviet intelligence services. In 1947, an assassination attempt was made by Yaroslav Moroz, and a year later by Vladimir Stelmashchuk. In 1952, German citizens Leguda and Lehmann were convicted of preparing a murder. A year later, Stepan Libgolts tried to get to Bandera. The OUN's own security service and the German police were on alert, exposing the agents. The OUN leader lived with his family under the surname Poppel in Munich. He was so reliably hidden that his own children for a long time believed that Poppel was their real name.

In October 1959, KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky found out Stepan Bandera and the address of his house. 2 years earlier, he successfully eliminated another OUN leader, Lev Rebet. For the new murder, Stashinsky used a special syringe pistol loaded with potassium cyanide. He was waiting for Bandera at the entrance of the house with a newspaper bundle in which a weapon was hidden. Poppel-Bandera returned home for lunch. Stashinsky fired a shot in his face and disappeared. The true cause of death was determined only by an autopsy. Initially, doctors suspected a heart attack.

Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof cemetery in front of a huge crowd of Ukrainian emigrants. Stashinsky would flee to the West in 1961 from the GDR with his German wife. He frankly admits to the murders of Rebet and Bandera. After 6 years, he will be released early from prison and disappear. He will undergo plastic surgery, after which Stashinsky will live in South Africa under an assumed name.

Almost half a century later, President Viktor Yushchenko will award Stepan Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine. The news will stir up the whole country and give rise to a new wave of controversy about his personality, dividing Ukrainians into 2 hostile camps. Literally 3 months later, the Donetsk District Court declared the presidential decree illegal. The Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine will put an end to it. He is never officially recognized as a hero. All the controversy surrounding the name of the father from Canada will be closely watched by his youngest daughter, who will not wait for official recognition of Stepan Bandera’s services to the Ukrainian state. She will pass away in 2011.

On January 1, 2019, torchlight processions were held in many cities of Ukraine in honor of the most controversial historical figure of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Stepan Bandera. Exactly 110 years have passed since the birth of the leader of the OUN (b).

Stepan Andreevich Bandera, according to the birth registration book - Stefan, was born in 1909 in Stary Ugrinov. A small Carpathian village at that time was under the rule of Austria-Hungary. Stepan's father was a clergyman, a Greek Catholic by religion, and an active nationalist. At one time, he took part in the formation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic and strived in every possible way to create an independent Ukrainian statehood. He did not accept the guardianship of either the Germans or the Poles. The family was large, the children were brought up in the national spirit, so it is not surprising that at the age of 13 Stepan became a member of an underground youth organization.

The young man did not complete his studies at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, as he joined the Ukrainian Military Organization, which was formed on the territory of Western Ukraine from the collapsed political associations of the UPR and WUNR. Representatives of these formations preached radical nationalism. In 1929, Stepan Andreevich Bandera became one of the founders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), which was an underground political force that opposed Polish oppression in Ukrainian lands. The fact is that after the First World War, part of the Carpathian territory and Galicia belonged to Poland, which led to the dominance of Ukrainian lands by Polish settlers. All this caused protest among the local population, young people rebelled. Such actions ended in arrests and even greater conflicts with the Polish government. Members of the OUN (in which Bandera became the head of the regional branch) carried out bombings of road communications, sabotage, and the murder of Polish nobility and political figures. Young Bandera also took part in similar operations, for which he was arrested in 1934 and served in prison until the outbreak of World War II.

Did Bandera collaborate with the Germans?

After the liberation, Stepan Bandera refused to cooperate with the German occupiers and assembled a special detachment of the OUN (b) - Bandera, which was supposed to fight for the independence of Ukrainian territories. This plan did not suit the German military commanders, and the nationalist was again convicted - from the end of 1941 he stayed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until the end of 1944.

The release of Stepan Bandera occurred only after he made concessions and signed an agreement with the Germans on the creation and leadership of OUN sabotage groups that would fight the Red Army.

Until the end of his days, Stepan Bandera lived in Germany and died in Munich at the hands of the KGB. Although there is also a mystery over this version, as well as over the amazing confession of B. Stashinsky, Bandera’s killer, and over the further fate of the KGB officer.

The brutal crimes of Bandera and the OUN UPA

Stepan Bandera distinguished himself with particular cruelty during the formation of his national movement. His charges accounted for hundreds of lives of Poles, Ukrainians and other citizens. The beginning of his political and military career is associated with a series of sabotage and brutal murders of Polish politicians. Thus, Bandera was involved in organizing the murder of a member of the Polish Foreign Ministry B. Peratsky, the director of the Lviv gymnasium I. Babiya and many others.

In the 40s It was from the OUN army, led by Bandera, that the OUN UPA unit was organized, after the Germans refused to sign the Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukrainian Lands. These national partisan detachments were particularly brutal because they opposed everyone, even the German military. This is evidenced by many documentary facts and descriptions, for example, it is known that Bandera’s followers tied prisoners to bent trees and executed them by tearing their bodies. They are also credited with the execution of more than 100 thousand people at Babi Yar.

Also, Stepan Bandera was one of the founders of radical nationalists in the last months of World War II, his followers until the 60s. In the 20th century they fought against communists in Western Ukraine.