Who is Stepan Bandera. Stepan Bandera - biography, photo, personal life of a Ukrainian nationalist

story character

COLORS OF THE BANNER OF STEPAN BANDERA

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 at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the family of a priest of the Greek Catholic rite. In the family, he was the second child. 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 the intelligentsia were frequent guests in the house. Among them, for example, a member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament J. Veselovsky, sculptor M. Gavrilko, businessman P. Glodzinsky.
S. Bandera wrote in his autobiography that he grew up in a house in which an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism, vibrant national-cultural, political and public interests reigned. Stepan's father took an active part in the revival of the Ukrainian State in 1918-1920, he was elected to the parliament of the West Ukrainian People's Republic. In the autumn 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 Bandera'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 in the gymnasium took place under the supervision of the Polish authorities. But some teachers were able to invest Ukrainian national content in the compulsory program.
However, the main national-patriotic education of the gymnasium students received in school youth organizations. Along with legal organizations, there were illegal circles that raised funds to support Ukrainian periodicals and boycotted the events of the Polish authorities. Starting from the fourth grade, Bandera was a member of an illegal gymnasium organization.
In 1927, Bandera successfully passed the matriculation exams and the next year entered the Lviv Polytechnic School in the agronomic department. By 1934, he completed the full course as an agricultural engineer. However, he did not have time to defend his diploma, as he was arrested.
Various legal, semi-legal and illegal organizations operated on the territory of Galicia at different times, aiming 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 Yevgen Konovalets, became the head of the UVO. The most famous action of the UVO is the failed assassination attempt on the head of the Polish state, Jozef 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 UVO, held a unifying congress, at which the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was established, which included Bandera. Later in 1932, the OUN and the UVO merged.
Although Poland occupied Galicia, the legitimacy of its rule over the western Ukrainian lands remained problematic from the point of view of the Entente countries. This issue was the subject of claims against Poland by 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 population census of 1921 and the elections to the Polish Sejm in 1922 were boycotted. By 1930, the situation worsened. In response to the actions of disobedience of the Ukrainian population, the Polish government launched large-scale operations to "pacify" the population, in the current terminology - "cleansing" the territory of Eastern Galicia. In 1934, a concentration camp was formed in Bereza Kartuzskaya, in which there were about 2 thousand political prisoners, mostly Ukrainians. A year later, Poland abandoned its obligations to the League of Nations to respect the rights of national minorities. Mutual attempts were periodically made 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 the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peracki, as a result of which he died. S. Bandera took part in the attack. For participation in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Peratsky, he was arrested and in early 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 commuted to life imprisonment.
Stepan was kept in prison in strict isolation. After the German attack on Poland, the town in which the prison was located was bombed. On September 13, 1939, when the position of the Polish troops became critical, the prison guards fled. S. Bandera was released from the solitary cell by the 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 the young impatient and more experienced and reasonable, who went through the war and revolution, between the leadership of the OUN, living in comfortable conditions of emigration, and the bulk of the OUN members, who worked underground and police persecution.
OUN leader Evgen Konovalets, using his diplomatic and organizational talent, was able to extinguish contradictions, uniting the organization. The death of Konovalets at the hands of the Soviet agent Pavel Sudoplatov in 1938 in Rotterdam was a heavy loss for the nationalist movement in Ukraine. His successor was 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. Further events took a dramatic turn for the Ukrainian national liberation movement.
Once free, Stepan Bandera arrived in Lviv. A few days before that, Lvov had been occupied by the Red Army. At first, it was relatively safe to be there. Soon, through a courier, he received an invitation to arrive in 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 developed rapidly, and the central leadership showed slowness. The list of disagreements - organizational and political, which needed to be eliminated in negotiations with Melnik, was quite large. The dissatisfaction of OUN members from the underground with the leadership of the OUN was approaching a critical point. In addition, there was a suspicion of betrayal of Melnik's inner circle, since the mass arrests in Galicia and Volhynia concerned mainly Bandera's 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 contacts with the OUN both with the countries of the German coalition and with the Western allied countries, without getting close to any group. It is necessary to rely on one's own strength, since no one was interested in the independence of Ukraine. Miller's faction believed that relying on one's own strength was untenable. Western countries are not interested in the independence of Ukraine. This was already demonstrated by them in the 1920s. Germany then recognized the independence of Ukraine. Therefore, it is necessary to bet on Germany. The Melnikovites believed that it was impossible to create an armed underground, as this would irritate the German authorities and repress them, which would not bring political or military dividends.
Unable to reach a compromise as a result of the negotiations, both groups proclaimed themselves the only legitimate leadership of the OUN.
In February 1940, in Krakow, the Bandera faction, which consisted mainly of young people and made up the numerical majority of the OUN, held a conference at which they rejected the decisions of the Rome conference and chose Stepan Bandera as their leader. Thus, the OUN split into Bandera - OUN-B or OUN-R (revolutionary) and Melnikov - OUN-M. Subsequently, the antagonism between the factions reached such intensity that they often fought against each other with the same bitterness 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, therefore, rejected any cooperation with it. Taking advantage of these contradictions, the OUN managed to form the Ukrainian military unit "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 had 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 the occupied territories were carried out. New prisons were opened, in which tens of thousands of detainees were kept.
Father Andrei Bandera with 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 Andriy replied: "For 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 system 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 handing over a copy of the verdict. But Andrei Bandera was already shot on July 10th.
Marta and Oksana were sent without trial one by one to the Krasnoyarsk Territory for an eternal settlement, where they were driven from place to place every 2-3 months until 1953. The bitter cup did not pass even the third sister - Vladimira. She, the mother of five children, was arrested along with her husband Teodor Davidyuk in 1946. She was sentenced to 10 years hard labor. She worked in the camps of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Kazakhstan, including the Spassky death camp. She survived, having served her full term, they added a settlement in Karaganda, then she was allowed to return to her children in Ukraine.
The hasty retreat of the Red Army after the start of the war had tragic consequences for tens of thousands of those arrested. Not being able to take everyone to the east, the NKVD decided to urgently liquidate the prisoners, regardless of the verdicts. Often cellars filled with prisoners were simply thrown with grenades. In Galicia, 10 thousand people were killed, in Volhynia - 5 thousand. Relatives of the prisoners, who were looking for their loved ones, witnessed this hasty, senseless and inhuman massacre. All this was then demonstrated by the Germans to the International Red Cross.
With the support of the Nachtigal battalion, on June 30, 1941 in Lvov, at a rally of many thousands in the presence of several German generals, Bandera proclaimed the "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State." A Ukrainian government was also formed consisting of 15 ministers headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, S. Bandera's closest associate. In addition, following the front, which was rapidly moving east, OUN detachments of 7-12 people were sent, a total of about 2,000 people, who, seizing the initiative from the German occupation authorities, formed Ukrainian local governments.
The reaction of the German authorities to the Bandera action in Lvov followed quickly: on July 5, S. Bandera was arrested in Krakow. and on the 9th - in Lvov, J. 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 cancellation of the Act of Revival. Not having obtained consent, Bandera was thrown into prison, and a year and a half later - to 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 autumn of 1941, the Melnikovites in Kyiv also attempted to form a Ukrainian government. But this attempt, too, was brutally suppressed. Over 40 leading figures of the OUN-M were arrested and shot at Babi Yar in early 1942, including the well-known Ukrainian poetess 35-year-old Elena Teliga, who headed the Writers' Union of Ukraine.
By the autumn of 1941, the disparate Ukrainian armed detachments of Polissya united in the partisan unit "Polesskaya Sich". As the mass Nazi terror unfolded in Ukraine, partisan detachments grew. In the autumn of 1942, at the initiative of the OUN-B, the partisan detachments of Bandera, Melnikov and the Polessky Sich united into the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), headed by one of the organizers of the OUN, the highest officer of the recently dissolved Nachtigal battalion, Roman Shukhevych (General Taras Chuprynka) . In 1943-44, the number of UPA reached 100 thousand fighters and it controlled Volyn, Polissya and Galicia. It included detachments of other nationalities - Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Kazakhs and other nations, in total 15 such detachments.
The UPA waged an armed struggle not only against the Nazi and Soviet troops, there was a constant war with the Red partisans, and on the territory of Volhynia, Polissya and Kholmshchyna, exceptionally fierce 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.
OUN-UPA at the end of 1942 turned to the Soviet partisans with a proposal to coordinate military operations against the Germans, but failed to agree. Hostile relations turned into armed skirmishes. 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 portray sympathy for the Ukrainian nationalist movement. However, after the expulsion of German troops from the territory of Ukraine, Soviet propaganda began to identify the OUN with the Nazis. From that time on, the second stage of the struggle began for the OUN-UPA - the struggle against the Soviet Army. This war lasted for almost 10 years - until the mid-1950s.
Regular troops of the Soviet Army fought against the UPA. So, in 1946 there were about 2 thousand battles and armed clashes, in 1948 - about 1.5 thousand. Near Moscow, several training bases were organized to combat the partisan movement in Western Ukraine. During these years, among the prisoners of the Gulag, every second was a 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 the remnants of the underground operated until the mid-50s.
After leaving the Nazi concentration camp, Stepan Bandera did not manage to get to Ukraine. He took up the affairs of the OUN. The central organs of the organization after the end of the war were in the territory of West Germany. At a meeting of the leadership council of the OUN, Bandera was elected to the leadership bureau, in which he oversaw the OUN's foreign units.
At a conference in 1947, Stepan Bandera was elected head of the entire Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. By this time, opposition to Bandera arises in the foreign parts, which reproaches 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. The OUN conferences in 1953 and 1955 with the participation of delegates from Ukraine again elected Bandera as the head of the leadership.
After the war, the family of S. Bandera ended up in the zone of Soviet occupation. Under false 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 under an assumed name in a refugee camp. Meetings with the father were so rare that the children even forgot him. Since the beginning of the 50s, the mother and children settled in the small village of Breitbrun. Here Stepan could visit more often, almost every day. Despite being busy, my father devoted time to 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 studied history, geography and literature. In 1954, the family moved to Munich, where Stepan already lived.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera let go of 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 jet 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, the chairman of the KGB, 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 their studies. Listening to home conversations with his wife gave grounds to the authorities to suspect Stashinsky of insufficient loyalty to the Soviet regime. He was expelled from school and forbidden to leave Moscow.
Stashinsky's wife, in connection with the upcoming birth in the spring of 1961, was allowed to leave for East Berlin. In early 1962, news came of the unexpected death of a child. For the funeral of his son, Stashinsky was allowed a short trip to East Berlin. Steps were taken to monitor him. However, the day before the funeral (just on the eve of the day the Berlin Wall was erected), Stashinsky and his wife managed to break away from the escort, who followed in three cars, and escape to West Berlin. There he turned to the American representation, 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 broke out, as at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 the USSR officially declared its rejection of the policy of international terrorism.
At the trial, Stashinsky testified that he acted on instructions from the leadership of the USSR. On October 19, 1962, the court of the city of Karlsruhe pronounced a sentence: 8 years in prison with a strict regime.
Stepan's daughter Natalia 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 believing Christian and died for God and independent free Ukraine" .

In the summer of 2007, my wife and I took a trip to the city of Lvov. We were returning home from the Crimea, and decided to pass through Lvov, and further, to Brest, Minsk...

It is interesting to see - what kind of Western Ukraine is this?

Behind Ternopil, on the slopes overgrown with thick grass and large trees, villages are scattered, solid, prosperous. Every village has an obligatory church, or even two. On the slopes there are herds of cows, sheep, very large herds. On one slope they saw a cemetery: a chapel and long neat rows of low white stone crosses. Stopped. I decided that this was a burial place from the First World War, it turned out that soldiers of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, from the division "Galicia" were buried here, who died in the battle near Brody already in the Second World War ...
History ... our history says different things about the participants in these events: traitors, Bandera, nationalists ... Here, among these graves, you understand something else: these people, no matter how you treat them, fought for the freedom of Ukraine. Freedom, as they understood it... My mother's brother, my uncle Grigory, a tank driver, died near the city of Stanislav, now Ivano-Frankivsk, perhaps in battles with these very "Bandera", but my hand does not rise they have a stone in them. They fought for Ukraine, and in this war they gave the most precious thing - their lives. "The fighters are sleeping, they said their own, and they are right forever!"

Stepan Bandera... This person has been slandered in history, like Symon Petliura - vilely, unfairly and undeservedly. Bandera is always spoken of with the prefix "traitor", although he never betrayed anyone. Opposed to Soviet power? Yes, he performed! But after all, he did not swear allegiance to her, she was as alien to him as the German fascist was to any Soviet person of those years. Once, the author of these lines argued with a Kyiv editor, and when asked who Bandera betrayed, the opponent, not in the least embarrassed, said: he betrayed Melnik. (Melnik is one of the leaders of the OUN.) Even such an insignificant episode was adopted by the falsifiers of history!

Some authors put Stepan Bandera on the same level with such an odious person as General Vlasov. But Vlasov, we note, was favored by the Soviet government, had considerable privileges, and most importantly, he swore allegiance to this authority. Nevertheless, when a threat to his life was created, he easily broke his oath and went over to the side of the enemy. In the Novgorod forests, when his army was surrounded, and the starving soldiers ate the bark of trees and fought for a piece of fallen horse meat - they kept a cow at the headquarters for Vlasov so that his Soviet lordship could eat milk and eat meatballs. This fact from the TV show about Vlasov, I did not remember the names, did not write down, did not take screenshots. Believe the reader, so believe, no - so no.

Stepan Bandera was sentenced to death by a Polish court, spent many days on death row, but did not bow to the enemy. What happened to him to experience "with a noose around his neck", what psychological and mental anguish to go through - only God knows. He did not make a hero out of himself, he was not proud of his prison past, he did not boast of suffering, and he was meanly killed from around the corner by the Russian executioner from the NKVD, Stashinsky. Bandera was a real, unbending fighter for the independence of Ukraine. Suffice it to say that the OUN and UPA armed formations he led fought against the Polish oppressors, against the Nazis, and against the Red Army. The valiant army of General Vlasov, we note between the lines, never came out against the Wehrmacht. Today, by the way, those Ukrainians are still alive who experienced in their own skin the merciless, truly bestial, inhuman cruelty of the Soviet Army and especially the NKVD troops in the western regions of Ukraine. The Red Guards used truly savage methods in the fight against the Ukrainian insurgent movement: detachments of thugs from the NKVD dressed in the uniform of UPA fighters and committed atrocities in Western Ukraine. Which then the Soviet propaganda attributed to the "Banderites" It is not surprising that the struggle against the invaders continued until the mid-fifties. The occupiers were all those who came without an invitation to these lands: Poles, Germans, and Russians. Alas, it is! And why was this people and its heroes so defamed? Only because they wanted to live on their own land according to their own laws?.. “In your own house, you have your own truth!” said the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko a hundred years before these events.

Stepan Bandera, like Petlyura, is accused of anti-Semitism - and there is no worse crime in the world. Was Bandera an anti-Semite?

“One of the heaviest accusations against Bandera is connected with the so-called massacre in Lvov. It happened in the same 1941 on June 30, when Bandera proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian state. Information about this event is conflicting. The number of victims is estimated from 3 to 10 thousand. The vast majority of them were Jews, as well as communists. “Exactly the same thing happened there as in the Baltic and in the eastern part of Poland, which the Red Army occupied in September 1939. Now in Poland they often try to forget this, but in the early days of the German occupation, Poles joined the police in large numbers. The reason was the impression left by almost two years of Soviet occupation,” says historian Jekabsons. It is difficult to say to what extent the massacre was the Ukrainians' own initiative, and to what extent it was a German-inspired event. It must be remembered that the week before the KGB killed 4,000 political prisoners in Lvov, mainly Ukrainian nationalists. When the corpses of the victims were exhumed, the picture was similar to the one that was in the courtyard of the Riga Central Prison in the July days of 1941. In addition, the Germans spread rumors that it was the “Jewish Bolsheviks” who committed the atrocities against the prisoners. This provoked loved ones to a thirst for revenge. The consequences were Jewish pogroms. Obviously, the OUN also took part in them. However, anti-Semitism, which is sometimes mentioned, was not the basis of the ideology of the OUN and UPA. And Bandera himself did not directly take part in the Lviv massacre, and there is no information that he gave any orders there. “If in some way he was guilty of the Lviv events, it was only because he propagated Ukrainian national ideas, to a certain extent setting people up to take revenge,” explains Jekabsons. There is no unanimity among historians in assessing the attitude of Bandera towards Jews. But the fact is that the Jews later fought in the ranks of the UPA, both as fighters, and as commanders, and especially as medical personnel. It is noteworthy that in the early 1950s, when Israel and the Zionists were declared enemies of the USSR, Soviet propaganda broadcast that the UPA and the Zionists were going hand in hand.”

Stepan Bandera was 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, in the family of a priest. In 1919 Stepan Bandera entered the gymnasium in the town of Stry not far from Lvov. In 1920, Poland occupied Western Ukraine, and the training took place under the supervision of the Polish authorities. In 1922, Bandera became a member of the Union of Nationalist Youth of Ukraine, and in 1928 he entered the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School with a degree in agronomy.

The situation in western Ukraine was aggravated by repression and terror by 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 Konovalts back in 1920, Stepan Bandera, who was deeply indignant at the actions of Pan Poland, could not fail to notice, and since 1929 he has been leading the radical wing of the OUN youth organization. In the early 1930s, Bandera became deputy head of the regional leadership of the OUN. Attacks on mail trains, expropriations and robberies of post offices and banks, murders of political opponents and enemies of the national movement of Ukraine are associated with his name.

For organizing, preparing, attempting and liquidating the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky, he, along with other organizers of the terrorist attack, was sentenced to capital punishment in the Warsaw process in 1936. However, the death penalty is subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.

Bandera is in prison 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 the Polish army and the flight of the prison guards, he is released and sent first to Lvov, which by that time was already occupied by Soviet troops, and then, illegally crossing the Soviet-German border, to Krakow, Vienna and Rome to coordinate further plans for the OUN. But during the negotiations between Bandera and Melnik, serious disagreements arose.

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

Following this, in early July, in the zone of Soviet occupation, the NKVD shot 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 abandon the ideas of a national Ukrainian state and annul the act of independence of Ukraine of June 30.

In the autumn of 1941, the Melnikovites also tried to proclaim Ukraine independent, but they were followed by 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 the fact that more and more people went to partisan detachments to fight the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera called for the unification of the disparate armed detachments of the Melnikovites and other partisan associations of Ukraine under the command of Roman Shukhevych, the former head of the OUN battalion "Nachtigal". On the basis of the OUN, a new paramilitary organization is being formed - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The ethnic composition of the UPA was quite diverse (the rebels were joined by representatives of the Transcaucasian peoples, Kazakhs, Tatars, etc., who ended up in the territories of Ukraine occupied by the Germans), 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 invaders, red partisans and units of the Polish Home Army in Galicia, Volhynia, Kholmshchyna, Polissya

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

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-1950s.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Andreevich Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.

Our time reveals many secrets, many yesterday's heroes become demons, and vice versa: recent enemies become the pride and conscience of the nation, the heroes of Russia. Like, for example, Emperor Nicholas the Bloody, it is not clear for what merits he became a saint overnight, or General Denikin, whose hands are up to the elbows in the blood of the Russian people, or Kolchak, a traitor, a traitor recruited by the British General Staff. And only Simon Petlyura and Stepan Bandera, defamed by "historians", slandered by history, remained implacable enemies for Russia. Because they are Ukrainians, and for a Russian there is no more irreconcilable enemy than a Ukrainian, whom they hypocritically call a brother.

This is especially evident today, in the light of the aggression unleashed by the Russian "brothers" in the eastern regions of Ukraine.

November 2014

Stepan Andreyevich Bandera - the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism, one of the main initiators of the creation in 1942 of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose goal was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. He was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Stary Ugryniv, Kalush district (now Ivano-Frankivsk region) in the family of a Greek Catholic priest. After the end of the civil war, this part of Ukraine became part of Poland.

In 1922, Stepan Bandera joined the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. In 1928 he entered the agronomic faculty of the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School, which he never graduated from.

In the summer of 1941, after the arrival of the Nazis, Bandera called on "the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to smash Moscow and Bolshevism."

On the same day, Stepan Bandera, without any agreement with the German command, solemnly proclaimed the restoration of the great Ukrainian state. The "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State", an order on the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the creation of a national government was read out.

The proclamation of Ukraine's independence was not part of Germany's plans, so Bandera was arrested, and fifteen leaders of Ukrainian nationalists were shot.

The Ukrainian Legion, whose ranks began to ferment after the arrest of political leaders, was soon recalled from the front and subsequently performed police functions in the occupied territories.

Stepan Bandera spent a year and a half in prison, after which he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was kept along with other Ukrainian nationalists in privileged conditions. Bandera was allowed to meet with each other, they also received food and money from relatives and the OUN. Often they left the camp in order to contact the "secret" OUN, as well as the Friedental castle (200 meters from the Zelenbau bunker), which housed the OUN's intelligence and sabotage personnel school.

Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942. The goal of the UPA was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. In 1943, an agreement was reached between representatives of the German authorities and the OUN that the UPA would protect railways and bridges from Soviet partisans and support the activities of the German occupation authorities. In return, Germany promised to supply UPA units with weapons and ammunition, and in the event of a victory of the Nazis over the USSR, to allow the creation of a Ukrainian state under the protectorate of Germany. UPA fighters actively participated in the punitive operations of the Nazi troops, destroying, among other things, civilians who sympathized with the Soviet army.

In September 1944, Bandera was released. Until the end of the war, he collaborated with the intelligence department of the Abwehr in the preparation of OUN sabotage groups.

After the war, Bandera continued his activities in the OUN, whose centralized administration was in West Germany. In 1947, at a regular meeting of the OUN, Bandera was appointed its leader and was re-elected to this position twice in 1953 and 1955. He led the terrorist activities of the OUN and UPA on the territory of the USSR. During the Cold War, Ukrainian nationalists were actively used by the secret services of Western countries in the fight against the Soviet Union.

It is alleged that Bandera was poisoned by a KGB agent on October 15, 1959 in Munich. He was buried on October 20, 1959 at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich.

In 1992, for the first time in Ukraine, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was celebrated, and attempts began to give its participants the status of war veterans. And in 1997-2000, a special government commission was created (with a permanent working group) in order to develop an official position regarding the OUN-UPA. The result of her work was the removal from the OUN of responsibility for cooperation with Nazi Germany and the recognition of the UPA as a "third force" and a national liberation movement that fought for the "genuine" independence of Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko on January 22, 2010 announced the posthumous award to Stepan Bandera.

On January 29, 2010, Yushchenko by his decree recognized the members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

Monuments to the leader of Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera have been erected in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. Streets in the cities and villages of Western Ukraine are named after him.

The glorification of UPA leader Stepan Bandera is criticized by many veterans of the Great Patriotic War and politicians who accuse Bandera of collaborating with the Nazis. At the same time, part of the Ukrainian society, living mainly in the west of the country, considers Bandera and Shukhevych to be national heroes.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

Igor Nabytovich

Stepan Bandera. Life and activity.

On October 12, 1957, Dr. Lev Rebet, editor of the Ukrainian Samostiynik, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Abroad (OUN(3)), a longtime political opponent of Bandera and OUN (revolutionary).

A medical examination conducted 48 hours after death determined that death was due to cardiac arrest. On Thursday, October 15, 1959, on the landing of the first floor on Kraitmayr Street, 7, in Munich at 13.05, Stepan Bandera, the conductor (leader) of the OUN, was found still alive, covered in blood. He lived in this house with his family. He was immediately taken to the hospital. The doctor, when examining the already dead Bandera, found a holster with a revolver tied to him, and therefore this incident was immediately reported to the criminal police. The examination found that "death was due to violence by poisoning with potassium cyanide."

The German criminal police immediately took a false trail and throughout the investigation could not establish anything. The Wire (Leadership) of the Foreign Parts of the OUN (ZCH OUN) immediately on the day of the death of its leader made a statement that this murder was political and that it was a continuation of a series of assassination attempts begun by Moscow in 1926 with the murder of Simon Petliura in Paris, and in 1938 - Yevgeny Konovalets in Rotterdam.

In parallel with the investigation conducted by the West German police, the ZCH OUN Provod created its own commission to investigate the murder of the conductor, which consisted of five OUN members from England, Austria, Holland, Canada and West Germany.

... The last dots on the "i" in the death of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera were put only at the end of 1961 at the world-famous trial in Karlsruhe.

The day before the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall, on August 12, 1961, a young couple of fugitives from the eastern zone turned to the American West Berlin police: Soviet citizen Bogdan Stashinsky and his wife, German Inge Pohl. Stashinsky said that he was a KGB officer and, on the orders of this organization, became the killer of politicians in exile, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera ...

A few months before his tragic death, Stepan Bandera wrote “My Biographical Data”, in which he reported some facts from his childhood and youth.

Born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary near Kalush during the Austro-Hungarian rule in Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk region).

His father, Andrei Bandera (“bandera” means “banner” in modern language), was a Greek Catholic priest in the same village and came from Stryi, where he was born into a petty-bourgeois family of Mikhail and Rosalia (maiden name - Beletskaya) Bander . Mother, Miroslava, was the daughter of a priest from Ugryniv Stary - Vladimir Glodzinsky and Catherine (before marriage - Kushlyk). Stepan was the second child after his older sister Marta. In addition to him, three brothers and three sisters grew up in the family.

Childhood years in his native village passed in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism. My father had a large library. Often active participants in the national and political life of Galicia visited the house. Mother's brothers were well-known politicians in Galicia. Pavlo

Glodzinsky was one of the founders of the Ukrainian organizations “Maslosoyuz” and “Silsky Gospodar”, and Yaroslav Veselovsky was a member of the Vienna Parliament.

In October-November 1918, Stepan, as he himself writes, "experienced the exciting events of the revival and building of the Ukrainian state."

During the Ukrainian-Polish war, his father, Andrei Bandera, volunteered for the Ukrainian Galician Army, becoming a military chaplain. As part of the UGA, he was in the Naddnipryansk region, fought with the Bolsheviks and the White Guards. He returned to Galicia in the summer of 1920. In the fall of 1919, Stepan Bandera entered the Ukrainian gymnasium in Stryi, from which he graduated in 1927.

Polish teachers tried to introduce the “Polish spirit” into the gymnasium environment, and these intentions caused serious resistance from the students.

The defeat of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen led to the self-dissolution of the Streltsy Rada (July 1920, Prague), and in September of the same year, the Ukrainian Military Organization was created in Vienna, headed by Yevgeny Konovalets. Under the leadership of the UVO, student resistance groups were created in the Polonized Ukrainian gymnasiums. Although students of the seventh and eighth grades usually became members of these groups, Stepan Bandera took an active part in them already in the fifth grade. In addition, he was a member of the 5th Kuren of Ukrainian Scouts (scouts), and after graduating from the gymnasium he moved to the Kuren of Senior Scouts “Chervona Kalina”.

In 1927, Bandera intended to go to study at the Ukrainian Academy of Economics in Podebrady (Czecho-Slovakia), but could not get a passport to travel abroad. Therefore, he stayed at home, “engaged in housekeeping and cultural and educational activities in his native village (he worked in the Prosvita reading room, led the amateur theatrical circle and choir, founded the Lug sports association, participated in organizing a cooperative). At the same time, he carried out organizational and educational work through the underground UVO in neighboring villages” (“My biographical data”).

In September 1928, Bandera moved to Lviv and entered the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School. He continued his studies until 1934 (from the autumn of 1928 to the middle of 1930 he lived in Dublyany, where there was a branch of the Lviv Polytechnic). He spent his holidays in the village with his father (his mother died in the spring of 1922).

He never received a degree in agricultural engineering: political activities and arrest prevented him.

In 1929, the process of unification of all nationalist organizations that acted separately into a single Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was completed. Yevgeny Konovalets was elected as the leader of the OUN, who at the same time continued to lead the UVO. The leadership of the two organizations made it possible to gradually and painlessly turn the UVO into one of the referents of the OUN, although due to the fact that the UVO was very popular among the people, its nominal independence was preserved.

Bandera became a member of the OUN from the beginning of its existence. Having already experience of revolutionary activity, he began to direct the distribution of underground literature, which was printed outside of Poland, in particular, the press organs Rozbudova Nazi, Surma, Nationalist, banned by the Polish authorities, and also published underground in Galicia, Bulletin of Craiova Ekzekutivi OUN”, “Yunatsvo”, “Yunak”. In 1931, after the tragic death of centurion Julian Golovinsky, whom

Konovalets sent to Western Ukraine to complete the difficult process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, Stepan Okhrimovich became the regional conductor of the OUN in the Ukrainian lands occupied by Poland. Okhrimovich knew Bandera from the time of his studies at the gymnasium. He introduced him to the Regional Executive (executive body) of the OUN, entrusting him with the leadership of the entire OUN propaganda referent in Western Ukraine.

Okhrimovich believed that Bandera, despite his youth, would cope with this task. Stepan Bandera really raised the propaganda work of the OUN to a high level. He put the need to spread the ideas of the OUN not only among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, student youth, but also among the broadest masses of the Ukrainian people as the basis for the propaganda activities of the OUN.

Mass actions began, which pursued the goal of awakening the national and political activity of the people. Requiem services, festive demonstrations during the construction of symbolic graves for the fighters for the freedom of Ukraine, honoring the fallen heroes on national holidays, antimonopoly and school actions intensified the national liberation struggle in Western Ukraine. The antimonopoly action was a refusal of Ukrainians to buy vodka and tobacco, the production of which was a state monopoly. The OUN called: “Get vodka and tobacco out of Ukrainian villages and cities, because every penny spent on them increases the funds of the Polish occupiers who use them against the Ukrainian people.” The school action, which was prepared by Bandera as a referent of the OUN EC, was held in 1933, when he was already the regional conductor of the OUN. The action consisted in the fact that schoolchildren threw Polish state emblems out of school premises, mocked the Polish flag, refused to answer teachers in Polish, demanded that Polish teachers leave for Poland. On November 30, 1932, there was an attack on the post office in Jagiellonian Township. At the same time, Vasyl Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn were arrested and then hanged in the courtyard of the Lvov prison. Under the leadership of Bandera, a mass publication of OUN literature about this process was organized. During the execution of Bilas and Danylyshyn, mournful bells rang in all the villages of Western Ukraine, saluting the heroes. In 1932, Bandera became the deputy regional conductor, and from January 1933 he began to act as the regional conductor of the OUN. The Conference of the OUN Wire in Prague at the beginning of June of the same 1933 formally approved Stepan Bandera at the age of 24 as a regional conductor.

Serious work began to eliminate the long-standing conflict that arose in the process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, expanding the organizational structure of the OUN, and organizing underground training of personnel.

Under the leadership of Bandera, the OUN moves away from expropriation actions and begins a series of punitive actions against representatives of the Polish occupation authorities.

The three most famous political assassinations of that time received wide publicity around the world, once again made it possible to put the Ukrainian problem in the center of attention of the world community. On October 21 of the same year, 18-year-old student of Lviv University Mykola Lemyk entered the USSR consulate, killed a KGB officer A. Maylov, saying that he had come to avenge the artificial famine that the Russian Bolsheviks staged in Ukraine.

This political assassination was personally directed by Stepan Bandera. OUN combat assistant Roman Shukhevych (“Dzvin”) drew up a plan for the embassy and developed a plan for the assassination.

Lemyk voluntarily surrendered to the police, and the trial of him made it possible for the whole world to declare that the famine in Ukraine is a real fact that the Soviet and Polish press and official authorities are hushing up.

Another political assassination was committed by Grigory Matseyko (“Gonta”) on June 16, 1934. The Minister of the Interior of Poland, Peracki, became his victim. The decision to kill Peratsky was adopted at a special OUN conference in April 1933 in Berlin, in which Andrei Melnyk and others took part from the Wire of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Stepan Bandera, acting regional conductor, from the OUN CE. This murder was an act of revenge for the “pacification” in Galicia in 1930. Then the Polish authorities pacified the Galicians with mass beatings, destroying and burning Ukrainian reading rooms and economic institutions. On October 30, the centurion Yulian Golovinsky, chairman of the OUN EC and the regional commandant of the UVO, who was betrayed by the provocateur Roman Baranovsky, was brutally tortured. The leader of the "pacification" was Vice Minister of the Interior Peratsky. He also led similar “pacification” operations in Polissya and Volhynia in 1932, and was the author of the plan for the “destruction of Rus'”4.

The assassination plan was developed by Roman Shukhevych, put into action by Mykola Lebed (“Marko”), the general leadership was carried out by Stepan Bandera (“Baba”, “Fox”).

On December 20, 1933, the Polish magazine “Revolt of the Young” wrote in the article “Five to twelve”: “... The mysterious OUN - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - is stronger than all legal Ukrainian parties combined. It dominates the youth, it forms public opinion, it acts at a terrible pace to draw the masses into the cycle of revolution ... Today it is already clear that time is working against us. Every headman in Lesser Poland and even in Volhynia can name several villages that until recently were completely passive, but today they are striving for a fight, ready for anti-state actions. And this means that the strength of the enemy has increased, and the Polish state has lost a lot.” This powerful and mysterious OUN was led by a little-known young intelligent student, Stepan Bandera.

On June 14, the day before the assassination of General Peratsky, the Polish police arrested Bandera along with his comrade, engineer Bogdan Pidgain (“Bull”), the second (together with Shukhevych) combat assistant of the OUN CE, when they tried to cross the Czech-Polish border. After the death of Peratsky, the arrest of Yaroslav Karpinets, a chemistry student at the Jagiellonian University, and a search of his apartment in Krakow, when a number of items were found that confirmed his involvement in the manufacture of a bomb left by Matseyko at the scene of the assassination, an investigation began: the police recorded the contacts of Bandera and Pidgayny with Karpinets in Krakow. Several other members of the organization who were involved in the murder of the minister were arrested, including Lebed and his fiancee, future wife, Daria Gnatkivska.

The investigation dragged on for a long time, and perhaps the suspects could not have been brought to trial, but about two thousand OUN documents fell into the hands of the police - the so-called “Senyk archive”, which was located in Czechoslovakia. These documents enabled the Polish police to identify a large number of members and leaders of the OUN. Two years of interrogations, physical and mental torture. Bandera was kept in solitary confinement, shackled. But even under these conditions, he was looking for opportunities to contact friends, support them, tried to find out the reasons for the failure. During the meal, his hands were unchained, and during this time he managed to write notes to friends on the bottom of the plate.

From November 18, 1935 to January 13, 1936, a trial took place in Warsaw of twelve members of the OUN, accused of complicity in the murder of the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky. Together with Bandera, Daria Gnatkivskaya, Yaroslav Karpinets, Yakov Chorniy, Evgeny Kachmarsky, Roman Mygal, Ekaterina Zaritskaya, Yaroslav Rak, Mykola Lebed were judged. The indictment consisted of 102 typewritten pages. The accused refused to speak Polish, greeted them with a greeting: “Glory to Ukraine!”, turned the trial hall into a platform for propagating OUN ideas. On January 13, 1936, the verdict was announced: Bandera, Lebed, Karpinets were sentenced to death, the rest - from 7 to 15 years in prison.

The process caused a worldwide outcry, the Polish government did not dare to carry out the sentence and began negotiations with legal Ukrainian political parties on the “normalization” of Ukrainian-Polish relations. Bandera and his friends the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.

This made it possible to organize another trial against Bandera and members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, this time in Lvov, in the case of several terrorist acts committed by the OUN. At the Lvov trial, which began on May 25, 1936, there were already 21 defendants in the dock. Here Bandera openly acted as a regional conductor of the OUN.

At the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced together to seven life sentences. Several attempts to prepare his escape from prison were unsuccessful. Bandera stayed behind bars until 1939 - until the occupation of Poland by the Germans.

Already at this time, the NKVD was interested in the OUN, in particular Bandera. On June 26, 1936, when Bandera testified at the Lvov trial, the Moscow diplomat Svetnyala listened attentively to his words in the hall. Bandera, explaining the purpose and methods of the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists against Russian Bolshevism, said: “The OUN opposes Bolshevism because Bolshevism is a system with which Moscow enslaved the Ukrainian nation, destroying Ukrainian statehood ...

Bolshevism is fighting the Ukrainian people in the Eastern Ukrainian lands with the methods of physical destruction, namely, mass executions in the dungeons of the GPU, the destruction of millions of people by starvation and constant exile to Siberia, to Solovki ... The Bolsheviks use physical methods, therefore we use physical methods in the fight against them ... ”

After the capture of Poland by the Germans, new invaders came to Western Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners have been released from Polish prisons, among them Stepan Bandera.

At the end of September 1939, he clandestinely arrived in Lviv, where for several weeks he worked on developing a strategy for the future struggle.

The main thing is the creation of a dense OUN network throughout Ukraine, the establishment of its large-scale activities. A plan of action was thought out in case of mass repressions and deportations by the Soviet invaders of the population of Western Ukraine.

By order of the OUN Wire, Bandera crossed the border, to Krakow. Here he married Yaroslav Oparivskaya. The “revolutionaries” in the OUN, whose leader was Stepan Bandera, believed that Ukraine should, on its own, not relying on anyone's mercy, not being an obedient tool in the hands of others, to win independence in the struggle.

The events that took place in the summer of 1941, before and after the Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, showed that Bandera was completely right in that Ukraine should not expect mercy from Hitler.

In preparation for the fight against the Moscow-Bolshevik invaders, the OUN-revolutionary decided to use internal disagreements between some military circles of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party to organize Ukrainian training groups under the German army. The northern Ukrainian legion “Nachtigal” (“Nightingale”) was created under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych and the southern legion “Roland”. The preconditions for their creation were that these formations were intended only to fight against the Bolsheviks and were not considered integral parts of the German army; on their uniforms, the warriors of these legions had to wear a trident and go into battle under blue and yellow banners.

The leadership of the OUN (r) planned that with the arrival in Ukraine, these legions should become the embryo of an independent national army. On June 30, 1941, immediately after the flight of the Bolsheviks, the National Assembly in Lvov proclaimed the Act of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood. Chairman of the National Assembly Yaroslav Stetsko was authorized to create a Provisional Government to organize the Ukrainian power structures.

Hitler instructed Himmler to urgently eliminate the "Bandera sabotage", the creation of an independent Ukrainian state was by no means part of the Nazis' plans.

An SD team and a special group of the Gestapo immediately arrived in Lvov to “eliminate the conspiracy of Ukrainian separatists”. An ultimatum was presented to Prime Minister Stetsko: to invalidate the Act of the Renewal of the Ukrainian State. After a decisive refusal, Stetsko and several other members of the government were arrested. OUN conductor Bandera was arrested in Krakow.

Hundreds of Ukrainian patriots were thrown into concentration camps and prisons by the Nazis. Mass terror began. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, the brothers of Stepan Bandera, Oleksa and Vasyl, were brutally tortured.

When the arrests began, both Ukrainian legions, “Nachtigal” and “Roland”, refused to obey the German military command and were disbanded, their commanders were arrested.

Bandera stayed in the concentration camp until the end of 1944.

Feeling the power of the UPA in their own skin, the Germans began to look for an ally against Moscow in the OUN-UPA. In December 1944, Bandera and several other members of the revolutionary OUN were released. They were offered negotiations on possible cooperation. Bandera's first condition for the negotiations was the recognition of the Act of the Resumption of Ukrainian Statehood and the creation of the Ukrainian army as separate, independent from the German, armed forces of an independent state. The Nazis did not agree to recognize the independence of Ukraine and sought to create a pro-German puppet government and Ukrainian military formations as part of the German army.

Bandera resolutely rejected these proposals.

All subsequent years of S. Bandera's life up to the tragic death - the time of struggle and great work outside Ukraine for its benefit in the semi-legal conditions of a foreign environment.

After August 1943, from the III Extraordinary Great Gathering of the OUN, at which the leadership passed to the OUN Lead Bureau, and until the February 1945 conference, Roman Shukhevych (“Tour”) was the chairman of the Organization. The February conference elected a new Bureau of the Wire (Bandera, Shukhevych, Stetsko). Stepan Bandera again became the head of the OUN (r), and Roman Shukhevych became his deputy and chairman of the Provod in Ukraine. The OUN conductor decided that due to the Moscow-Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine and the unfavorable international situation, the OUN conductor should constantly stay abroad. Bandera, after whom the national liberation movement against the occupation of Ukraine was named, was dangerous for Moscow. A powerful ideological and punitive machine was set in motion. In February 1946, speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian SSR at a session of the UN General Assembly in London, the poet Mykola Bazhan demanded that Western states extradite a large number of Ukrainian politicians in exile, and primarily Stepan Bandera.

During 1946-1947, the American military police hunted for Bandera in the American occupation zone of Germany. In the last 15 years of his life, Stepan Bandera (“Veslyar”) published a large number of theoretical works that analyzed the political situation in the world, in the USSR, in Ukraine, and determined the paths for further struggle. These articles have not lost their significance in our time. As a warning to the current builders of “independent” Ukraine, in the close embrace of the northern neighbor, the words of S. Bandera from the article “Word to the Ukrainian Nationalist Revolutionaries Abroad” (“Vizvolniy Shlyakh” .- London .- 1948 .- NoNo 10, 11, 12) : “The main goal and the main principle of all Ukrainian politics is and should be the restoration of the Ukrainian Independent Consolidated State through the elimination of the Bolshevik occupation and the dismemberment of the Russian empire into independent national states. Only then can these independent national states unite into blocs or unions based on the principle of geopolitical, economic, defense and cultural interests on the grounds presented above. The concepts of evolutionary restructuring or the transformation of the USSR into a union of free states, but also united, in the same composition, with a predominant or central position of Russia - such concepts contradict the idea of ​​the liberation of Ukraine, they must be completely eliminated from Ukrainian politics.

The Ukrainian people will be able to achieve an independent state only through struggle and labor. A favorable development of the international situation can greatly help the expansion and success of our liberation struggle, but it can only play an auxiliary, albeit very useful, role. Without the active struggle of the Ukrainian people, the most favorable situations will never give us state independence, but only the replacement of one enslavement by another. Russia, with its deeply rooted, and in the modern era, the most red-hot predatory imperialism, in every situation, in every state, with all its might, with all its fierceness, will rush to Ukraine in order to keep it within its empire or enslave it again. Both the liberation and the defense of the independence of Ukraine can basically rely only on their own Ukrainian forces, on their own struggle and constant readiness for self-defense.

The murder of S. Bandera was the final link in a 15-year chain of permanent hunting for the leader of Ukrainian nationalists.

In 1965, a 700-page book was published in Munich - “Moscow Bandera's Killers Before Trial”, which collected a large number of facts and documents about the political assassination of Bandera, the responses of the world community about the trial of Stashinsky in Karlsruhe, a detailed description of the process itself. The book describes a number of attempts to assassinate Bandera. And how many of them remained unknown?

In 1947, the assassination attempt on Bandera was prepared by order of the MGB Yaroslav Moroz, who had the task of committing the murder in such a way that it looked like an emigrant settling of scores. The assassination attempt was uncovered by the OUN Security Service.

At the beginning of 1948, MGB agent Vladimir Stelmashchuk (“Zhabski”, “Kowalchuk”), the captain of the underground Polish Home Army, arrived in West Germany from Poland. Stelmashchuk managed to get to Bandera's place of residence, but realizing that the OUN had become aware of his intelligence activities, he disappeared from the FRG.

In 1950, the Security Council of the OUN found out that the KGB base in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, was preparing an assassination attempt on Bandera.

The next year, information about Bandera began to collect an agent of the MGB, a German from Volhynia Stepan Liebgolts. Later, the KGB used it in a provocation related to the escape of Bandera's killer, Stashinsky, to the West. In March 1959, in Munich, a certain Vintsik was arrested by the German criminal police, allegedly an employee of some Czech company, who was intensively looking for the address of the school where Stepan Bandera's son Andrei studied. ZCH OUN had information that in the same year, the KGB, using the experience of the destruction of Petlyura, was preparing to assassinate a young Pole, whose relatives were allegedly destroyed by Bandera in Galicia. And, finally, Bogdan Stashinsky, a native of the village of Borshovychi near Lvov. Even before the murder of Rebet, Stashinsky met a German woman, Inge Pohl, whom he married in early 1960. Inge Pohl obviously played a big role in opening Stashinsky's eyes to the communist Soviet reality. Realizing that the KGB, covering their tracks, would destroy him, Stashinsky, the day before the funeral of his little son, fled with his wife to the American zone of West Berlin.

After his engagement to Inge Pohl in April 1959, Stashinsky was summoned to Moscow and ordered to kill Bandera at the “highest authority”. But then, in May, having left for Munich and tracked down the OUN guide, at the last minute Stashinsky could not control himself and ran away.

On October 2, 1959, 13 days before Bandera's death, the Security Council of the OUN abroad became aware of Moscow's decision to kill the conductor. But they didn’t save him ... When Bandera was returning home at one in the afternoon on October 15, Stashinsky approached him on the steps of the stairs and shot him in the face with hydrocyanic acid from a two-channel “pistol” wrapped in newspaper ...

Once upon a time, Ukrainian lads captured by the Tatars, turned into Janissaries, exterminated their brothers. Now the Ukrainian Stashinsky, lackey of the Moscow-Bolshevik occupiers, destroyed the Ukrainian guide with his own hands...

The news of Stashinsky's escape to the West was a bombshell of great political power. The trial of him in Karlsruhe showed that the orders for political assassinations were issued by the first leaders of the USSR, members of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

... On a quiet fashionable street, Liverpool Road, 200, almost in the center of London, the Stepan Bandera Museum stores personal belongings of the OUN conductor, clothes with traces of his blood, a death mask. The museum is designed in such a way that it can only be entered from inside the premises. The time will come - and the exhibits of this museum will be transferred to Ukraine, for which he fought all his life and for which her great son died.

Life story
On October 12, 1957, Dr. Lev Rebet, editor of the Ukrainian Samostiynik, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Abroad (OUN(3)), a longtime political opponent of Bandera and OUN (revolutionary).
A medical examination conducted 48 hours after death determined that death was due to cardiac arrest. On Thursday, October 15, 1959, on the landing of the first floor on Kraitmayr Street, 7, in Munich at 13.05, Stepan Bandera, the conductor (leader) of the OUN, was found still alive, covered in blood. He lived in this house with his family. He was immediately taken to the hospital. The doctor, when examining the already dead Bandera, found a holster with a revolver tied to him, and therefore this incident was immediately reported to the criminal police. The examination found that "death was due to violence by poisoning with potassium cyanide."
The German criminal police immediately took a false trail and throughout the investigation could not establish anything. The Wire (Leadership) of the Foreign Parts of the OUN (ZCH OUN) immediately on the day of the death of its leader made a statement that this murder was political and that it was a continuation of a series of assassination attempts begun by Moscow in 1926 with the murder of Simon Petliura in Paris, and in 1938 - Yevgeny Konovalets in Rotterdam.
Stepan Bandera was buried on October 20 at the large Munich cemetery Waldfriedhof.
In parallel with the investigation conducted by the West German police, the ZCH OUN Provod created its own commission to investigate the murder of the conductor, which consisted of five OUN members from England, Austria, Holland, Canada and West Germany.
... The last dots on the "i" in the death of Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera were put only at the end of 1961 at the world-famous trial in Karlsruhe.
The day before the start of the construction of the Berlin Wall, on August 12, 1961, a young couple of fugitives from the eastern zone turned to the American West Berlin police: Soviet citizen Bogdan Stashinsky and his wife, German Inge Pohl. Stashinsky said that he was a KGB officer and, on the orders of this organization, became the murderer of politicians in exile, Lev Rebet and Stepan Bandera ...
A few months before his tragic death, Stepan Bandera wrote "My Biographical Data", in which he reported some facts from his childhood and youth.
Born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary near Kalush during the Austro-Hungarian rule in Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk region).
His father, Andrei Bandera ("bandera" - translated into modern language means "banner"), was a Greek Catholic priest in the same village and came from Stryi, where he was born into a petty-bourgeois family of Mikhail and Rosalia (maiden name - Beletskaya) Bander . Mother, Miroslava, was the daughter of a priest from Ugryniv Stary - Vladimir Glodzinsky and Catherine (before marriage - Kushlyk). Stepan was the second child after his older sister Marta. In addition to him, three brothers and three sisters grew up in the family.
Childhood years in his native village passed in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism. My father had a large library. Often active participants in the national and political life of Galicia visited the house. Mother's brothers were well-known politicians in Galicia. Pavlo
Glodzinsky was one of the founders of the Ukrainian organizations Maslosoyuz and Strong Gospodar, and Yaroslav Veselovsky was a member of the Vienna Parliament.
In October-November 1918, Stepan, as he himself writes, "experienced the exciting events of the revival and building of the Ukrainian state."
During the Ukrainian-Polish war, his father, Andrei Bandera, volunteered for the Ukrainian Galician Army, becoming a military chaplain. As part of the UGA, he was in the Naddnipryansk region, fought with the Bolsheviks and the White Guards. He returned to Galicia in the summer of 1920. In the fall of 1919, Stepan Bandera entered the Ukrainian gymnasium in Stryi, from which he graduated in 1927.
Polish teachers tried to introduce the "Polish spirit" into the gymnasium environment, and these intentions caused serious resistance on the part of the gymnasium students.
The defeat of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen led to the self-dissolution of the Streltsy Rada (July 1920, Prague), and in September of the same year, the Ukrainian Military Organization was created in Vienna, headed by Yevgeny Konovalets. Under the leadership of the UVO, student resistance groups were created in the Polonized Ukrainian gymnasiums. Although students of the seventh and eighth grades usually became members of these groups, Stepan Bandera took an active part in them already in the fifth grade. In addition, he was a member of the 5th Kuren of Ukrainian Scouts (scouts), and after graduating from the gymnasium he moved to the Kuren of Senior Scouts "Chervona Kalina".
In 1927, Bandera intended to go to study at the Ukrainian Academy of Economics in Podebrady (Czecho-Slovakia), but could not get a passport to travel abroad. Therefore, he stayed at home, "engaged in housekeeping and cultural and educational activities in his native village (he worked in the Prosvita reading room, led the amateur theatrical circle and choir, founded the Lug sports association, participated in organizing a cooperative). At the same time, he conducted organizational and educational work through the underground UVO in neighboring villages" ("My biographical data").
In September 1928, Bandera moved to Lviv and entered the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School. He continued his studies until 1934 (from the autumn of 1928 to the middle of 1930 he lived in Dublyany, where there was a branch of the Lviv Polytechnic). He spent his holidays in the village with his father (his mother died in the spring of 1922).
He never received a degree in agricultural engineering: political activities and arrest prevented him.
In 1929, the process of unification of all nationalist organizations that acted separately into a single Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was completed. Yevgeny Konovalets was elected as the leader of the OUN, who at the same time continued to lead the UVO. The leadership of the two organizations made it possible to gradually and painlessly turn the UVO into one of the referents of the OUN, although due to the fact that the UVO was very popular among the people, its nominal independence was preserved.
Bandera became a member of the OUN from the beginning of its existence. Having already experience of revolutionary activity, he began to direct the distribution of underground literature, which was printed outside of Poland, in particular, the press organs "Rozbudova Nazi", "Surma", "Nationalist", banned by the Polish authorities, and also published underground in Galicia "Bulletin of Craiova Executive OUN", "Yunatsvo", "Yunak". In 1931, after the tragic death of centurion Julian Golovinsky, whom
Konovalets sent to Western Ukraine to complete the difficult process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, Stepan Okhrimovich became the regional conductor of the OUN in the Ukrainian lands occupied by Poland. Okhrimovich knew Bandera from the time of his studies at the gymnasium. He introduced him to the Regional Executive (executive body) of the OUN, entrusting him with the leadership of the entire OUN propaganda referent in Western Ukraine.
Okhrimovich believed that Bandera, despite his youth, would cope with this task. Stepan Bandera really raised the propaganda work of the OUN to a high level. He put the need to spread the ideas of the OUN not only among the Ukrainian intelligentsia, student youth, but also among the broadest masses of the Ukrainian people as the basis for the propaganda activities of the OUN.
Mass actions began, which pursued the goal of awakening the national and political activity of the people. Requiem services, festive demonstrations during the construction of symbolic graves for the fighters for the freedom of Ukraine, honoring the fallen heroes on national holidays, antimonopoly and school actions intensified the national liberation struggle in Western Ukraine. The antimonopoly action was a refusal of Ukrainians to buy vodka and tobacco, the production of which was a state monopoly. The OUN called: "Get vodka and tobacco out of Ukrainian villages and cities, because every penny spent on them increases the funds of the Polish occupiers, who use them against the Ukrainian people." The school action, which was prepared by Bandera as a referent of the OUN EC, was held in 1933, when he was already the regional conductor of the OUN. The action consisted in the fact that schoolchildren threw Polish state emblems out of school premises, mocked the Polish flag, refused to answer teachers in Polish, demanded that Polish teachers leave for Poland. On November 30, 1932, there was an attack on the post office in Jagiellonian Township. At the same time, Vasyl Bilas and Dmytro Danylyshyn were arrested and then hanged in the courtyard of the Lvov prison. Under the leadership of Bandera, a mass publication of OUN literature about this process was organized. During the execution of Bilas and Danylyshyn, mournful bells rang in all the villages of Western Ukraine, saluting the heroes. In 1932, Bandera became the deputy regional conductor, and from January 1933 he began to act as the regional conductor of the OUN. The Conference of the OUN Wire in Prague at the beginning of June of the same 1933 formally approved Stepan Bandera at the age of 24 as a regional conductor.
Serious work began to eliminate the long-standing conflict that arose in the process of uniting the OUN and the UVO, expanding the organizational structure of the OUN, and organizing underground training of personnel.
Under the leadership of Bandera, the OUN moves away from expropriation actions and begins a series of punitive actions against representatives of the Polish occupation authorities.
The three most famous political assassinations of that time received wide publicity around the world, once again made it possible to put the Ukrainian problem in the center of attention of the world community. On October 21 of the same year, 18-year-old student of Lviv University Mykola Lemyk entered the USSR consulate, killed a KGB officer A. Maylov, saying that he had come to avenge the artificial famine that the Russian Bolsheviks staged in Ukraine.
This political assassination was personally directed by Stepan Bandera. OUN combat assistant Roman Shukhevych ("Dzvin") drew a plan for the embassy and developed a plan for the assassination.
Lemyk voluntarily surrendered to the police, and his trial made it possible for the whole world to declare that the famine in Ukraine is a real fact that the Soviet and Polish press and official authorities are hushing up.
Another political assassination was committed by Grigory Matseyko ("Gonta") on June 16, 1934. The Minister of the Interior of Poland, Peracki, became his victim. The resolution on the murder of Peratsky was adopted at a special OUN conference in April 1933 in Berlin, in which Andrei Melnyk and others took part from the Wire of Ukrainian Nationalists, and Stepan Bandera, acting regional conductor, from the OUN CE. This murder was an act of revenge for the "pacification" in Galicia in 1930. Then the Polish authorities pacified the Galicians with mass beatings, destroying and burning Ukrainian reading rooms and economic institutions. On October 30, the centurion Yulian Golovinsky, chairman of the OUN EC and the regional commandant of the UVO, who was betrayed by the provocateur Roman Baranovsky, was brutally tortured. The head of "pacification" was Vice Minister of Internal Affairs Peratsky. He also led similar "pacification" operations in Polissya and Volhynia in 1932, and was the author of the plan for the "destruction of Rus'"4.
The assassination plan was developed by Roman Shukhevych, put into action by Mykola Lebed ("Marko"), the general leadership was carried out by Stepan Bandera ("Baba", "Fox").
On December 20, 1933, the Polish magazine "Revolt of the Young" wrote in the article "Five to twelve": "... The mysterious OUN - the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - is stronger than all legal Ukrainian parties combined. It dominates the youth, it forms public opinion, it acts at a terrible pace, in order to draw the masses into the cycle of revolution ... Today it is already clear that time is working against us. Every headman in Lesser Poland and even in Volhynia can name several villages that until recently were completely passive, but today they are striving to fight are ready for anti-state actions. And this means that the strength of the enemy has increased, and the Polish state has lost a lot." This powerful and mysterious OUN was led by a little-known young intelligent student, Stepan Bandera.
On June 14, the day before the assassination of General Peratsky, the Polish police arrested Bandera along with his comrade, engineer Bogdan Pidgain ("Bull"), the second (together with Shukhevych) combat assistant of the OUN CE, when they tried to cross the Czech-Polish border. After the death of Peratsky, the arrest of Yaroslav Karpinets, a chemistry student at the Jagiellonian University, and a search of his apartment in Krakow, when a number of items were found that confirmed his involvement in the manufacture of a bomb left by Matseyko at the scene of the assassination, an investigation began: the police recorded the contacts of Bandera and Pidgayny with Karpinets in Krakow. Several other members of the organization who were involved in the murder of the minister were arrested, including Lebed and his fiancee, future wife, Daria Gnatkivska.
The investigation dragged on for a long time, and perhaps the suspects could not have been brought to justice, but about two thousand OUN documents fell into the hands of the police - the so-called "Senyk archive", which was located in Czechoslovakia. These documents enabled the Polish police to identify a large number of members and leaders of the OUN. Two years of interrogations, physical and mental torture. Bandera was kept in solitary confinement, shackled. But even under these conditions, he was looking for opportunities to contact friends, support them, tried to find out the reasons for the failure. During the meal, his hands were unchained, and during this time he managed to write notes to friends on the bottom of the plate.
From November 18, 1935 to January 13, 1936, a trial took place in Warsaw of twelve members of the OUN, accused of complicity in the murder of the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky. Together with Bandera, Daria Gnatkivskaya, Yaroslav Karpinets, Yakov Chorniy, Evgeny Kachmarsky, Roman Mygal, Ekaterina Zaritskaya, Yaroslav Rak, Mykola Lebed were judged. The indictment consisted of 102 typewritten pages. The accused refused to speak Polish, greeted them with a greeting: "Glory to Ukraine!", turned the trial hall into a platform for propagating OUN ideas. On January 13, 1936, the verdict was announced: Bandera, Lebed, Karpinets were sentenced to death, the rest - from 7 to 15 years in prison.
The process caused a worldwide outcry, the Polish government did not dare to carry out the sentence and began negotiations with legal Ukrainian political parties on the "normalization" of Ukrainian-Polish relations. Bandera and his friends the death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment.
This made it possible to organize another trial against Bandera and members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, this time in Lvov, in the case of several terrorist acts committed by the OUN. At the Lvov trial, which began on May 25, 1936, there were already 21 defendants in the dock. Here Bandera openly acted as a regional conductor of the OUN.
At the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced together to seven life sentences. Several attempts to prepare his escape from prison were unsuccessful. Bandera stayed behind bars until 1939 - until the occupation of Poland by the Germans.
Already at this time, the NKVD was interested in the OUN, in particular Bandera. On June 26, 1936, when Bandera testified at the Lvov trial, the Moscow diplomat Svetnyala listened attentively to his words in the hall. Bandera, explaining the purpose and methods of the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists against Russian Bolshevism, said: "The OUN opposes Bolshevism because Bolshevism is a system by which Moscow enslaved the Ukrainian nation, destroying Ukrainian statehood...
Bolshevism is fighting the Ukrainian people in the Eastern Ukrainian lands by methods of physical destruction, namely, mass executions in the dungeons of the GPU, the destruction of millions of people by starvation and constant exile to Siberia, to Solovki ... The Bolsheviks use physical methods, therefore we also use physical methods in the fight against them. methods..."
After the capture of Poland by the Germans, new invaders came to Western Ukraine. Thousands of Ukrainian political prisoners have been released from Polish prisons, among them Stepan Bandera.
At the end of September 1939, he clandestinely arrived in Lviv, where for several weeks he worked on developing a strategy for the future struggle.
The main thing is the creation of a dense network of the OUN throughout Ukraine, the establishment of its large-scale activities. A plan of action was thought out in case of mass repressions and deportations by the Soviet invaders of the population of Western Ukraine.
By order of the OUN Wire, Bandera crossed the border, to Krakow. Here he married Yaroslav Oparivskaya. The "revolutionaries" in the OUN, led by Stepan Bandera, believed that Ukraine should, on its own, not relying on anyone's mercy, not being an obedient instrument in the wrong hands, to win independence in the struggle.
The events that took place in the summer of 1941, before and after the Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, showed that Bandera was completely right in that Ukraine should not expect mercy from Hitler.
In preparation for the fight against the Moscow-Bolshevik invaders, the OUN-revolutionary decided to use internal disagreements between some military circles of the Wehrmacht and the Nazi party to organize Ukrainian training groups under the German army. The northern Ukrainian legion "Nachtigal" ("Nightingale") under the leadership of Roman Shukhevych and the southern legion "Roland" were created. The preconditions for their creation were that these formations were intended only to fight against the Bolsheviks and were not considered integral parts of the German army; on their uniforms, the warriors of these legions had to wear a trident and go into battle under blue and yellow banners.
The leadership of the OUN (r) planned that with the arrival in Ukraine, these legions should become the embryo of an independent national army. On June 30, 1941, immediately after the flight of the Bolsheviks, the National Assembly in Lvov proclaimed the Act of the Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood. Chairman of the National Assembly Yaroslav Stetsko was authorized to create a Provisional Government to organize the Ukrainian power structures.
Hitler instructed Himmler to urgently eliminate the "Bandera sabotage", the creation of an independent Ukrainian state was by no means part of the Nazis' plans.
An SD team and a special group of the Gestapo immediately arrived in Lvov to "eliminate the conspiracy of Ukrainian separatists." An ultimatum was presented to Prime Minister Stetsko: to invalidate the Act of the Renewal of the Ukrainian State. After a decisive refusal, Stetsko and several other members of the government were arrested. OUN conductor Bandera was arrested in Krakow.
Hundreds of Ukrainian patriots were thrown into concentration camps and prisons by the Nazis. Mass terror began. In the Auschwitz concentration camp, the brothers of Stepan Bandera, Oleksa and Vasyl, were brutally tortured.
When the arrests began, both Ukrainian legions, "Nachtigal" and "Roland", refused to obey the German military command and were disbanded, their commanders were arrested.
Bandera stayed in the concentration camp until the end of 1944.
Feeling the power of the UPA in their own skin, the Germans began to look for an ally against Moscow in the OUN-UPA. In December 1944, Bandera and several other members of the revolutionary OUN were released. They were offered negotiations on possible cooperation. Bandera's first condition for the negotiations was the recognition of the Act of the Resumption of Ukrainian Statehood and the creation of the Ukrainian army as separate, independent from the German, armed forces of an independent state. The Nazis did not agree to recognize the independence of Ukraine and sought to create a pro-German puppet government and Ukrainian military formations as part of the German army.
Bandera resolutely rejected these proposals.
All subsequent years of S. Bandera's life up to the tragic death - the time of struggle and great work outside Ukraine for its benefit in the semi-legal conditions of a foreign environment.
After August 1943, from the III Extraordinary Great Gathering of the OUN, at which the leadership passed to the OUN Lead Bureau, and until the February 1945 conference, the chairman of the Organization was Roman Shukhevych ("Tour"). The February conference elected a new Bureau of the Wire (Bandera, Shukhevych, Stetsko). Stepan Bandera again became the head of the OUN(r), and Roman Shukhevych became his deputy and chairman of the Provod in Ukraine. The OUN conductor decided that due to the Moscow-Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine and the unfavorable international situation, the OUN conductor should constantly stay abroad. Bandera, after whom the national liberation movement against the occupation of Ukraine was named, was dangerous for Moscow. A powerful ideological and punitive machine was set in motion. In February 1946, speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian SSR at a session of the UN General Assembly in London, the poet Mykola Bazhan demanded that Western states extradite a large number of Ukrainian politicians in exile, and primarily Stepan Bandera.
During 1946-1947, the American military police hunted for Bandera in the American occupation zone of Germany. In the last 15 years of his life, Stepan Bandera ("Veslyar") published a large number of theoretical works that analyzed the political situation in the world, in the USSR, in Ukraine, and determined the paths for further struggle. These articles have not lost their significance in our time. As a warning to the current builders of "independent" Ukraine, in the close embrace of the northern neighbor, the words of S. Bandera from the article "Word to Ukrainian Nationalist Revolutionaries Abroad" ("Vizvolniy Shlyah" ("Vizvolniy Shlyah"). - London. - 1948. - NoNo 10, 11, 12) : "The main goal and the main principle of all Ukrainian politics is and should be the restoration of the Ukrainian Independent Consolidated State by eliminating the Bolshevik occupation and dismembering the Russian empire into independent national states. Only then can these independent national states unite into blocs or unions on the principle of geopolitical, economic, defense and cultural interests on the grounds presented above.The concepts of evolutionary restructuring or the transformation of the USSR into a union of free states, but also united, in the same composition, with a predominant or central position of Russia - such concepts contradict the idea of ​​the liberation of Ukraine, they must be completely removed from Ukrainian politics.
The Ukrainian people will be able to achieve an independent state only through struggle and labor. A favorable development of the international situation can greatly help the expansion and success of our liberation struggle, but it can only play an auxiliary, albeit very useful, role. Without the active struggle of the Ukrainian people, the most favorable situations will never give us state independence, but only the replacement of one enslavement by another. Russia, with its deeply rooted, and in the modern era, the most red-hot predatory imperialism, in every situation, in every state, with all its might, with all its fierceness, will rush to Ukraine in order to keep it within its empire or enslave it again. Both the liberation and the defense of the independence of Ukraine can basically rely only on their own Ukrainian forces, on their own struggle and constant readiness for self-defense.
The murder of S. Bandera was the final link in a 15-year chain of permanent hunting for the leader of Ukrainian nationalists.
In 1965, a 700-page book was published in Munich - "Moscow's murderers of Bandera before the trial", which collected a large number of facts and documents about the political assassination of Bandera, the responses of the world community about the trial of Stashinsky in Karlsruhe, a detailed description of the process itself. The book describes a number of attempts to assassinate Bandera. And how many of them remained unknown?
In 1947, the assassination attempt on Bandera was prepared by order of the MGB Yaroslav Moroz, who had the task of committing the murder in such a way that it looked like an emigrant settling of scores. The assassination attempt was uncovered by the OUN Security Service.
At the beginning of 1948, MGB agent Vladimir Stelmashchuk ("Zhabsky", "Kovalchuk"), the captain of the underground Polish Home Army, arrived from Poland in West Germany. Stelmashchuk managed to get to Bandera's place of residence, but realizing that the OUN had become aware of his intelligence activities, he disappeared from the FRG.
In 1950, the Security Council of the OUN found out that the KGB base in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, was preparing an assassination attempt on Bandera.
The next year, information about Bandera began to collect an agent of the MGB, a German from Volhynia Stepan Liebgolts. Later, the KGB used it in a provocation related to the escape of Bandera's killer, Stashinsky, to the West. In March 1959, in Munich, a certain Vintsik was arrested by the German criminal police, allegedly an employee of some Czech company, who was intensively looking for the address of the school where Stepan Bandera's son Andrei studied. ZCH OUN had information that in the same year, the KGB, using the experience of the destruction of Petlyura, was preparing to assassinate a young Pole, whose relatives were allegedly destroyed by Bandera in Galicia. And, finally, Bogdan Stashinsky, a native of the village of Borshovychi near Lvov. Even before the murder of Rebet, Stashinsky met a German woman, Inge Pohl, whom he married in early 1960. Inge Pohl obviously played a big role in opening Stashinsky's eyes to the communist Soviet reality. Realizing that the KGB, covering their tracks, would destroy him, Stashinsky, the day before the funeral of his little son, fled with his wife to the American zone of West Berlin.
After his engagement to Inge Pohl in April 1959, Stashinsky was summoned to Moscow and ordered to kill Bandera at the "highest authority". But then, in May, having left for Munich and tracked down the OUN guide, at the last minute Stashinsky could not control himself and ran away.
On October 2, 1959, 13 days before Bandera's death, the Security Council of the OUN abroad became aware of Moscow's decision to kill the conductor. But they didn’t save him ... When Bandera was returning home at one in the afternoon on October 15, Stashinsky approached him on the steps of the stairs and shot him in the face with hydrocyanic acid from a two-channel "pistol" wrapped in newspaper ...
Once upon a time, Ukrainian lads captured by the Tatars, turned into Janissaries, exterminated their brothers. Now the Ukrainian Stashinsky, lackey of the Moscow-Bolshevik occupiers, destroyed the Ukrainian guide with his own hands...
The news of Stashinsky's escape to the West was a bombshell of great political power. The trial of him in Karlsruhe showed that the orders for political assassinations were issued by the first leaders of the USSR, members of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
...On a quiet fashionable 200 Liverpool Road, almost in the center of London, the Stepan Bandera Museum keeps personal belongings of the OUN conductor, clothes with traces of his blood, and a death mask. The museum is designed in such a way that it can only be entered from inside the premises. The time will come - and the exhibits of this museum will be transferred to Ukraine, for which he fought all his life and for which her great son died.
Website: CHRONOS
Article: Stepan Bandera. Life and activity.