Stepan Bandera: the myth about the hero, the truth about the executioner. Stepan Bandera - biography, photo, personal life of the Ukrainian nationalist

Photo vfl.ru: “SS Captain” (SS-Hauptsturmführer)
Stepan Bendera (middle) in Nazi-occupied Poland before the attack on the Ukrainian SSR.

In 1943, events called the Volyn tragedy began. According to Polish official sources, in 1943-44 more than sixty thousand Poles and twenty thousand Ukrainians died in Volyn; the main blame for this lies with Ukrainian nationalists operating under the leadership of Stepan Bendera (Bandera and other nicknames).

After the Second World War, Gauleiter of Ukraine Erich Koch, the death penalty was replaced by life imprisonment on the initiative of Stalin (Died at 90 years old (1986). Mokotow prison (Polish: Wizienie mokotowskie) is an active prison located in Warsaw, Poland.) as “a carrier of valuable information."
In fact, the order to Kuznetsov to liquidate Koch at the height of the war was also canceled by Stalin. Information about the recruitment of Koch by USSR counterintelligence was recently declassified. Stalin guaranteed Koch’s life and fulfilled his promise...
After Stalin’s death, Koch admitted that “I saved Stalin by warning him about assassination attempts, and he saved me... By informing the leader of the USSR about Hitler’s plans, I saved millions of lives of soldiers and civilians on both sides of the front... I was forced to carry out orders from the Nazi elite. I did not share the ideology of the NSDLP...”
Next there are inserts (translated from English) from Koch’s memoirs regarding Bendery.

In the spring of 1943, the Germans began the formation of the 14th SS Division from Ukrainian volunteers from the Galicia district and the “Ukrainian Liberation Army” - (Ukrainian UVV) from “eastern Ukrainians”, mainly prisoners of war.
In 1944, the OUN and UPA created the Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (Ukrainian Golovna Vizvolna Rada, UGVR), which, according to the creators, was supposed to become a supra-party superstructure and the basis of the power institutions of “independent Ukraine” under the leadership of Stepan Bendera.
By the fall of 1944, the Germans released S. Bendera and Y. Stetsko with a group of previously detained OUN figures. The German press published numerous articles about the UPA's successes in the fight against the Bolsheviks, calling UPA members "Ukrainian freedom fighters."

In the post-war period, OUN(b) members tried to deny their involvement in the massacres and collaboration with the Germans; some documents were even falsified.

In terms of their cruelty, Bender/Bander can be placed on a par with the most bloodthirsty tyrants. If, by the ill will of fate or an absurd accident, Stepan Bandera came to power in Ukraine instead of Koch, or God forbid, after the Great Patriotic War, the subversive terrorist activities of Bandera gangs would have been successful, the purpose of which was to spread their influence deep into Soviet territories - conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and mobilization into its ranks of a population dissatisfied or agitated against the Soviet regime by order of the Western masters and, as a result, the creation of a real military force capable of crushing the Soviet Union, then rivers of blood would flood the entire Eurasian continent. Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary Kalush district in the Stanislav region (Galicia), which was part of Austria-Hungary (now the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), in the family of the Greek Catholic parish priest Andrei Bandera, who received a theological education at Lviv University. His mother, Miroslava, also came from the family of a Greek Catholic priest. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “I spent my childhood ... in the house of my parents and grandfathers, grew up in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism and living national-cultural, political and social interests. There was a large library at home, and active participants in the Ukrainian national life of Galicia often came together”...

Stepan Bandera began his “revolutionary” path in 1922, joining the Ukrainian scout organization “Plast”, and in 1928 – the revolutionary Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO). In 1929, he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) created by Yevgeny Konovalets and soon headed the most radical “youth” group. On his instructions, the village blacksmith Mikhail Beletsky, professor of philology at the Lviv Ukrainian Gymnasium Ivan Babiy, university student Yakov Bachinsky and many others were killed.

At this time, the OUN established close contacts with German foreign intelligence; the organization’s headquarters were located in Berlin, at Hauptstrasse 11, under the guise of the “Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany.” BANDERA HIMSELF WAS TRAINED AT AN INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL IN DANZIG.

From 1932 to 1933, Bandera was the deputy head of the regional executive (leadership) of the OUN, and was involved in organizing robberies of postal trains and post offices, as well as the murders of political opponents. In 1934, on the orders of Stepan Bandera, an employee of the Soviet consulate, Alexey Mailov, was killed in Lvov. It is interesting that shortly before this, the former resident of German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, showed up at the OUN. According to Polish intelligence, on the eve of the murder, the OUN received 40 thousand Reichsmarks from the Abwehr (the military intelligence and counterintelligence body of Nazi Germany).

With Hitler coming to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was included in the Gestapo headquarters. In the suburbs of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - barracks were built with funds from German intelligence, where OUN militants were trained. That same year, the Polish Minister of the Interior, General Bronislaw Peracki, strongly condemned German plans to seize Danzig, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, had been declared a “free city” under the administration of the League of Nations. Hitler himself instructed Richard Yarom, a German intelligence agent in charge of the OUN, to eliminate Peratsky. On June 15, 1934, Peratsky was killed by the people of Stepan Bandera, but this time luck did not smile on them and the nationalists were captured and convicted. For the murder of Bronislaw Peratsky, Stepan Bandera, Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets were sentenced to death by the Warsaw District Court, the rest, including Roman Shukhevych, received from 7 to 15 years in prison. However, under pressure from the German leadership, the death penalty was replaced with life imprisonment.

In the summer of 1936, Stepan Bandera, along with other members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, appeared in court in Lvov on charges of leading the terrorist activities of the OUN-UVO. In particular, the court considered the circumstances of the murder by members of the OUN of the gymnasium director Ivan Babii and student Yakov Bachinsky, accused by nationalists of having connections with the Polish police. At this trial, Bandera already openly acted as a regional leader of the OUN. In total, at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment seven times.

In September 1939, when Germany occupied Poland, Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Abwehr, was released. Irrefutable proof of Stepan Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis is the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945):

“... after the end of the war with Poland, Germany was intensively preparing for a war against the Soviet Union and therefore measures were being taken through the Abwehr to intensify subversive activities, since those activities that were carried out through MELNIK and other agents seemed insufficient. For these purposes, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Bandera Stepan, was recruited, who during the war was released from prison, where he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in a terrorist act against the leaders of the Polish government. The last one in touch was with me.”

After the murder of Yevgeny Konovalets in Italy in 1938 by NKVD officers, OUN meetings took place, at which Yevgeny Konovalets’ successor Andrei Melnik was proclaimed (his supporters declared him the head of PUN - Seeing Ukrainian Nationalists). Stepan Bandera did not agree with this decision. After the Nazis released Stepan Bandera from prison, a split in the OUN became inevitable. Having read the works of the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism Dmitry Dontsov in a Polish prison, Stepan Bandera believed that the OUN was not “revolutionary” enough in its essence and only he, Stepan Bandera, was able to correct the situation.

In February 1940, Stepan Bandera convened an OUN conference in Krakow, at which a tribunal was created that handed down death sentences to Melnik's supporters. The confrontation with the Melnikovites took the form of an armed struggle: Bandera killed several members of the “Melnikovsky” OUN Provod: Nikolai Stsiborsky and Yemelyan Senik, as well as a prominent “Melnikovsky” member, Yevgeny Shulga.

As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yary, shortly before the war secretly met with Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. During the meeting, Stepan Bandera, according to Yaroslav Stetsko, “very clearly and clearly presented the Ukrainian positions, finding a certain understanding from the admiral, who promised support for the Ukrainian political concept, believing that only with its implementation is a German victory over Russia possible.” Stepan Bandera himself indicated that at the meeting with Canaris, the conditions for training Ukrainian volunteer units under the Wehrmacht were mainly discussed.

Three months before the attack on the USSR, Stepan Bandera created the Ukrainian Legion named after Konovalets from members of the OUN; a little later the legion became part of the Brandenburg-800 regiment and became known as “Nachtigal”. The Brandenburg-800 regiment was created as part of the Wehrmacht - it was special forces designed to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines.

Negotiations with the Nazis were conducted not only by Stepan Bandera himself, but also by persons authorized by him. For example, in the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) documents have been preserved confirming that Bandera’s supporters themselves offered their services to the Nazis. In the protocol of interrogation of Abwehr officer Yu.D. Lazarek says that he was a witness and participant in negotiations between Abwehr representative Eichern and Bandera’s assistant Nikolai Lebed: “Lebed said that Bandera’s followers would provide the necessary personnel for schools of saboteurs, and would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volyn for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes in territory of the USSR."

To carry out subversive activities and intelligence activities on the territory of the USSR, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million Reichsmarks from Nazi Germany.

On March 10, 1940, Bandera’s OUN headquarters decided to transfer leading personnel to Volyn and Galicia to organize a rebellion. According to Soviet counterintelligence, the rebellion was planned for the spring of 1941. Why spring? The leadership of the OUN had to understand that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes naturally if we remember that the original date of Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer some troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. At the same time, the OUN leadership gave an order: all OUN members who served in the army or police of Yugoslavia should go over to the side of the Croatian Nazis.

In April 1941, the revolutionary Wire of the OUN convened a Great Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko was elected his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the actions of OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine intensified even more. In April alone, they killed 38 Soviet party workers and carried out dozens of acts of sabotage in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.

After the last Gathering, the OUN finally split into OUN-(M) (Melnik’s supporters) and OUN-(B) (Bandera’s supporters), which was also called OUN-(R) (OUN-revolutionaries). Here is what the Nazis thought about this (from the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945)): “Despite the fact that during my meeting with Melnik and Bandera, both of them promised to take all measures to reconciliation. I have personally come to the conclusion that this reconciliation will not take place due to the significant differences between them:
“If Melnik is a calm, intelligent person, then Bandera is a careerist, a fanatic and a bandit.”

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans pinned greater hopes on the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists of Bandera OUN-(B) than on the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists Melnik OUM-(M) and the Polesie Sich of Bulba Borovets, who also sought to gain power in Ukraine under a German protectorate. Stepan Bandera sought to become the head of the Ukrainian state as soon as possible and, having abused the trust of his masters from Nazi Germany, decided to proclaim the “independence” of the Ukrainian state from the Moscow occupation, independently creating a government and appointing Yaroslav Stetsko as prime minister.

The Volyn massacre is the bestial essence of the OUN-UPA.

Bandera’s trick of establishing Ukraine as an independent state was necessary in order to show the population his importance; there were personal ambitions here. On June 30, 1941, Bandera’s ally Yaroslav Stetsko from the city hall in Lviv announced the decision of the leadership of the OUN (B) Provod on the “revival of the Ukrainian state.”

Residents of Lvov reacted sluggishly to information about the revival of Ukrainian statehood. According to the Lvov priest, Doctor of Theology Father Gavril Kotelnik, about a hundred people from the intelligentsia and clergy were rounded up. The city residents themselves did not dare to take to the streets and support the proclamation of the revival of the Ukrainian state. The decision to revive the Ukrainian state was approved by a group of people who were forcibly rounded up to participate in this event.

“The newly reborn Ukrainian State will closely interact with the National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world and helping the Ukrainian people to free themselves from Moscow occupation.

The Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army, which is being created on Ukrainian soil, will continue to fight together with the ALLIED GERMAN ARMY against the Moscow occupation for a Sovereign Council Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.

Let the Ukrainian Sovereign Conciliar Power live! Let the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists live! May the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian People STEPAN BANDERA live! GLORY TO UKRAINE!

Among Ukrainian nationalists and a number of officials at the head of modern Ukraine, this document is considered the Act of Independence of Ukraine, and Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko are considered Heroes of Ukraine.

Simultaneously with the proclamation of the Act, supporters of Stepan Bandera staged a pogrom in Lvov. Ukrainian nationalists acted according to blacklists compiled before the war. As a result, 7 thousand people were killed in the city in 6 days. Saul Friedman wrote about the massacre carried out by Bandera’s followers in Lvov in his book “The Pogromist,” published in New York: “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion destroyed seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Before execution, Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the staircases of four-story buildings and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to walk through a line of warriors with yellow-blakite armbands, they were bayoneted.”

However, Germany had its own plans for Ukraine; it was interested in free living space: territory and cheap labor. It would be reckless for Germany to give power in the territory that was captured by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists just because, although they took part in hostilities, they mainly did the dirty work of punitive forces and policemen. Therefore, from the point of view of the German leadership, there could be no talk of any revival and granting Ukraine state status, even under the patronage of Nazi Germany.

Having been bypassed by a younger competitor, Andrei Melnik wrote a letter to Hitler and Governor-General Frank that “Bandera’s people are behaving unworthily and have created their own government without the knowledge of the Fuhrer.” After which Hitler ordered the arrest of Stepan Bandera and his “government”. At the beginning of July 1941, Stepan Bandera was arrested in Krakow and, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his comrades, was sent to Berlin at the disposal of the Abwehr - to Colonel Erwin Stolze. After Stepan Bandera arrived in Berlin, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded that he renounce the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State.” Stepan Bandera agreed and called on “the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to defeat Moscow and Bolshevism.” On July 15, 1941, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko were released from arrest. Yaroslav Stetsko in his memoirs described what was happening as an “honorable arrest.” Yes, it’s really an honor: “From the wilderness to the court,” to the “supposed capital of the world.” After his release from arrest in Berlin, Stepan Bandera lived in a dacha owned by the Abwehr.

During their stay in Berlin, Bandera’s followers repeatedly met with representatives of various departments, assuring that without their help the German army could not defeat Moscow. An endless stream of messages, explanations, dispatches, “declarations” and “memoranda” with justifications and requests for assistance and support were sent to Hitler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and other leaders of Nazi Germany. In his letters, Stepan Bandera proved his loyalty to the Fuhrer and the German army and tried to convince him of the urgent need for the OUN-B for Germany.

Stepan Bandera’s labors were not in vain, and the German leadership took the next step: Andrei Melnik was allowed to continue to openly curry favor with Berlin, and Stepan Bandera was ordered to portray an enemy of the Germans so that he could, hiding behind anti-Nazi slogans, restrain the Ukrainian masses from a real, irreconcilable fight against Nazi invaders, from the struggle for the freedom of Ukraine.

With the emergence of new plans, Stepan Bandera is transported from the Abwehr dacha to a privileged block of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the massacre carried out by Bandera’s supporters in June 1941 in Lvov, Stepan Bandera could have been killed by his own people, and Nazi Germany still needed him. This gave rise to the legend that Bandera did not collaborate with the Germans and even fought with them, but documents say otherwise.

In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and another 300 Banderaites were kept separately in the Cellenbau bunker, where they were kept in good conditions. Bandera's members were allowed to meet, they received food and money from relatives and the OUN-B. They often left the camp in order to contact “conspiratorial” OUN-UPA fighters, and also visited Friedenthal Castle (200 meters from the Cellenbau bunker), which housed a school for OUN intelligence and sabotage personnel. The instructor at this school was a former officer of the Nachtigal special battalion, Yuri Lopatinsky, through whom Stepan Bandera communicated with the OUN-UPA. Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942, and he also achieved the replacement of its main commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.

In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of fascists. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops. The hatred of the residents of Volyn and Galicia for the OUN-UPA was so great that they handed them over to Soviet troops or killed them themselves. In order to activate the OUN members and support their spirit, the Nazis decided to release Stepan Bandera and his supporters from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This happened on September 25, 1944. After leaving the camp, Stepan Bandera immediately joined the 202nd “Schutzmannschaft” Abwehr team in Krakow and began training OUN-UPA sabotage detachments. Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of a former Gestapo and Abwehr employee, Lieutenant Siegfried Müller, given during the investigation on September 19, 1945: “On December 27, 1944, I prepared a group of saboteurs to transfer it to the rear of the Red Army with special assignments. Stepan Bandera, in my presence, personally instructed these agents and through them conveyed to the UPA headquarters an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with Abwehrkommando-202.

Stepan Bandera himself did not participate in practical work in the rear of the Red Army; his task was to organize activities. However, the ABWER was repeatedly deployed “to control reconnaissance and sabotage groups and coordinate their actions on the spot.”

The following fact is interesting. Anyone who fell into the clutches of Hitler's punitive machine, even if the Nazis later became convinced of his innocence, never returned to freedom. This was common Nazi practice. The unprecedented attitude of the Nazis towards Bandera is proven by their direct mutual cooperation.

When Soviet troops approached Berlin, Bandera was instructed to form detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis for its defense. Bandera created the detachments, but he himself escaped. After the end of the war, he lived in Munich and collaborated with the British intelligence services. At the OUN conference in 1947, he was elected head of the Wire of the entire OUN, which actually meant the unification of the OUN-(B) and OUN-(M). Quite a happy ending for the former “prisoner” of Sachsenhausen. Being in absolute safety and leading the OUN and UPA organizations, Stepan Bandera shed a lot of human blood with the hands of his perpetrators.

On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bendera was killed in the entrance of his house. He was met on the stairs by a man who shot him in the face from a special pistol with a stream of soluble poison (potassium cyanide). It was only in this century that the details of the liquidation were made public. This was one of the last operations of this kind by the USSR KGB.

During the Great Patriotic War, more than 3 million civilians were brutally tortured and killed by the hands of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Open source materials.
Bender/Bandera was never a citizen of Ukraine.
His dream was to become the Gauleiter of Ukraine like Erich Koch or any other country occupied by the Nazis...

Dmitry Galkovsky

It so happened that Stepan Bandera became a key figure in the political history of Ukraine. This is the most mentioned figure in modern Ukrainian history. In the split Ukrainian society there are two versions of his biography.

For the East (as well as for the Russian Federation), Bandera is the head of Ukrainian nationalists, a terrorist and murderer, supporting the occupation regime in the fascist Reichskommissariat of Ukraine, who after the war took refuge in the West, and tried to conduct American espionage and terrorist-sabotage activities on the territory of the USSR. For which he was eliminated in 1959.

For the Lvov West, Bandera is again the head of Ukrainian nationalists, a fiery fighter for independence - first against the Polish oppressors, then against the German invaders and finally against the Soviet (or, let's call a spade a spade, Russian) occupiers. For which he was vilely killed by these occupiers.

In my opinion, both versions are far from the truth. Although both myths themselves have a right to exist, just as the peoples themselves who gave birth to them have a similar right to exist.

Let's start with the fact that Bandera was never the head of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists. The head of the OUN (and before its establishment - the UVO: Ukrainian Military Organization) was Yevgeny Konovalets, an ensign in the Austro-Hungarian army who served in the World War. After his assassination in 1938, the OUN was headed by Andrei Melnik, also an Austrian with experience of the First World War and then the Civil War. These people were almost 20 years older than Bandera; compared to them, Bandera himself looked like a Komsomol activist. He really was such an activist.

Andrey Melnik

Bandera’s maximum position in the OUN is the head of the Krakow organization, that is, entering not even the second, but the third echelon of management. And he did not stay in this position for long.

There is no Bandera among the bodies of independent Ukraine during the Nazi occupation.

On October 5, 1941, the Ukrainian National Council was created in Kyiv on the initiative of Melnik and under the leadership of Kyiv professor Nikolai Velichkovsky. There was no place for Bandera in this Ukrainian proto-government.

A similar body was created in the district of Galicia - the Ukrainian part of the Polish General Government. It was headed by Vladimir Kubiyovych, associate professor at the University of Krakow. Bandera was not there either.

Bandera was not a party ideologist, like the Bolshevik Bukharin, or even a “golden pen”, like the Bolshevik and Bandera’s fellow countryman Karl Radek.

On the contrary, Bandera's cultural level is quite low. He went to school only at the age of 10, then he tried to study to become an agronomist, but something didn’t work out.

Polish pioneers, that is, scouts. Far right - Bandera.

Maybe this is some kind of fiery Chegevara who left behind many revolutionary “deeds”? Also no. While studying at school, he really liked Komsomol secretarial work - meetings, lightning, reading scout literature. As a student, he was arrested several times, mainly for smuggling nationalist literature.

On the right is Bandera with scout badges. A well-recognized type of school “excellent” student. It is always said that in childhood, for the sake of authority, Stepan Andreevich strangled cats in front of his enthusiastic classmates. Oh, the brave stranglers don’t remember this. The story is told by tired nerds who suffered slaps on the head from school bullies.

Then he was arrested on someone else’s case and given a life sentence. In June 1934, Ukrainian nationalist Grigory Matseiko assassinates Polish Interior Minister Bronislaw Poretsky. The killer manages to escape abroad, and the enraged Polish government blames the OUN activists for organizing the murder. 12 people are appointed responsible, including Bandera, who was arrested the day before the murder (on another trivial case - smuggling of Ukrainian literature across the Czechoslovak border). In the end, Terpila “confesses” to everything, and two more murders are immediately pinned on him - a professor and a student at Lvov University, which occurred A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER HIS ARREST. Terpila agrees with this charge and receives life imprisonment.

That’s all of Bandera’s “terrorist activities” until 1939 - he transported books, wrote articles in the regional press, organized terrible boycotts: not to buy Polish vodka and cigarettes in local shops. And he signed up for three murders that he did not commit and COULD NOT commit.

Where did Bandera come from, and why did his name become so popular?

At the time of the Stalin-Hitler partition of Poland, Bandera sits in the prison of the Brest Fortress and, therefore, ends up in the Soviet zone of occupation. It is believed that he left the prison during a shift change, a few days before the arrival of Soviet troops. It is quite possible. But further... further it is stated that Bandera manages to hide for some time, move to Soviet Lvov, hold meetings with party comrades, and then safely cross the German-Soviet border. Along which there are combat divisions along the entire front, and special groups of the NKVD operate in the rear. Moreover, his brother, who was previously held in the Polish concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya, succeeds in doing the same. Although it is believed that there was no shift change at this camp at all, and it was occupied by Soviet troops.

It is not difficult to notice that the miraculous liberation and crossing of the border of the Bandera brothers closely repeats the equally miraculous escape from the camp and crossing of the border of the Solonevich brothers. True, his wife later joined Solonevich while in exile. You will laugh, but in a few months the single Stepan Bandera will marry a girl who was also imprisoned in Lvov in 1939 and who also miraculously escaped. It should also be noted that both Solonevich and Bandera were imprisoned precisely for unsuccessful border crossing. They were unable to cross the border from home. And it worked out from prison. It turned out that it was much easier.

On a blue eye.

In April 1940, Bandera, for some reason, like Lenin in 1917, not in need of money, went to Italy, where he met with the head of the OUN, Melnik. Again, like Lenin, Bandera stuns the venerable head of Ukrainian nationalists with his “April theses”: there is no point in focusing on Germany, it is necessary to create an armed underground in the territory occupied by the Wehrmacht and wait for the X hour to raise an all-Ukrainian uprising. Let me remind you that this was said in a situation where there was no Ukrainian population at all in the German occupation zone. Only individual emigrants numbering several thousand people. The situation was so crazy that Melnik ordered the head of the OUN counterintelligence Yaroslav Baranovsky to study the biography of the talented agronomist. To which Bandera stated that Baranovsky was a proven Polish spy and should be killed (and indeed, in 1943 he was killed by Bandera’s followers). Baranovsky (by the way, a doctor of law from the University of Prague) could well have worked for Polish intelligence. Why not? The question is how Bandera could have known about this and where did he get the evidence for such an accusation.

In the official history of the OUN, it is generally accepted that from that time on, the organization, like the RSDLP, split into OUN(m) and OUN(b) (Menshevik-Melnikovites and Bolsheviks-Bandera). But this analogy is wrong. The OUN was before and remained after that under the leadership of Melnyk. And Bandera created a noisy and unclearly who-funded organization, which appropriated someone else’s name and included exclusively people from one region of Ukraine.

Until June 22, 1941, Bandera waged schismatic agitation against the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and, despite Melnik’s warnings, sent underground groups to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. Naturally, groups were immediately identified and thrown into NKVD prisons, but (lo and behold!) after June 22, some of Bandera’s comrades “escaped” from Stalin’s prisons and crossed the front line. A striking example is Dmitry Klyachkivsky. In September 1940, he was arrested by the NKVD as a German spy, but in July 1941 he “escaped” from Stalin’s prison and then (attention!) headed the security service of the military organization OUN (b) - the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”.

Now what happened after June 22. From the beginning of 1941, the Germans formed the Nachtigal special battalion from Ukrainians who had experience serving in the Polish army. It was not a political, but a purely military (military sabotage) unit, designed to solve tactical problems (mining behind enemy lines, destroying communications, etc.). The recruitment of Nachtigall by Bandera's men took place in person; they simply signed up as Ukrainian volunteers. The Melnikites had real support at the German top at that time; they formed several combat units on the Slovak border.

On June 29-30, “Nachtigal” ended up in Lvov, at the same time Bandera emissaries arrived there. They began to exterminate Jews (deliberately senselessly, in order to completely discredit the Germans in front of the United States - for example, mathematics professors from the Lvov University) and proclaimed the creation of an independent Ukrainian republic, as well as the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian armed forces (in order to seize the initiative from the Germans and present them with a fait accompli ). The Germans were stunned by such impudence, Nachtigal was taken out of Lvov (it’s not entirely clear how it ended up there) and was soon disbanded. Already in early July, the Germans arrested Bandera and his self-proclaimed government. The Ukrainian state, as agreed with the venerable Melnik, was proclaimed in Kyiv three months later.

The problem was that in other populated areas Bandera’s followers acted with the same agility and, in the wake of the anti-Stalinist enthusiasm of the population, they managed to form activist cells. The Germans took this into account and soon Bandera was released. But Bandera had no mention of positive work (as understood by the Germans). Relying on armed groups of activists, he began the physical destruction of the Melnikites.

Ukraine is great, but there is nowhere to retreat - on Bandera’s back.

On August 30, two members of the leadership of the Melnikov OUN were shot dead in Zhitomir, then several dozen more people were killed in different cities, and in total Bandera’s members handed down about 600 death sentences to the Melnikovites. Massive oppression of the Polish population also began. Already at this stage, the creation of an independent Ukraine under the auspices of Germany was hopelessly frustrated. Soon the Germans imprisoned Bandera again and sent him to a concentration camp, where his two brothers ended up (later killed by the camp administration from Poles).

At the same time, it cannot be said that Bandera was guided by... well, for example, Stalin, and Melnik by Hitler. In principle, Melnik had no disagreements with Bandera; it was a matter of tactics and common sense. Melnik wanted to strengthen himself with the help of the Germans, and if they lost, jump to the crossroads and recreate an independent Ukrainian state. Therefore, in 1944, the Germans put him in prison.

Here I will allow myself a small digression.

As I already had the honor of explaining in the Belarusian series, the history of partisan wars is the most deceitful area of ​​historiography (after church history). You can safely forget what they have been telling you for 70 years about Kovpak and Ponomarenko. The real church history and the real history of the partisan movement (if there is one) from the point of view. ordinary people should be an absolute fantasy.

It is believed that the partisan movement during the war was carried out by a certain “Central Partisan Headquarters at the Headquarters of the Supreme High Command” under the leadership of the party bureaucrat and electrical engineer Ponomarenko. This was partly true, but the scheme did not work. Because in order to wage a guerrilla war you need to have appropriate personnel and specialist leaders. There weren’t any in the USSR, and you can’t master such a thing by trial and error. There is too much trial and error involved, and feedback is months late or non-existent.

Apparently, the active sector of sabotage and guerrilla work (and, of course, there was one) was supervised by a group of foreign specialists, and the partisan movement itself unfolded against the backdrop of complex forms of cooperation with local oppositionists. Thus, the backbone of Dmitry Medvedev’s partisan group consisted of Spanish saboteurs trained by the British, dressed in the uniform of Melnik’s men. In turn, Melnik’s people used clothes from the Soviet army, etc.

Moreover, all this splendor was covered up by the German leadership of Ukraine.

I think everyone has heard about the fascist fanatic Gauleiter of Ukraine Koch, it seems that partisans killed him there or hanged him in Nuremberg. So no.

Rosenberg in Kyiv. Far right - Erich Koch.

After the war, Erich Koch safely moved to the British zone of occupation and lived there until the summer of 1949. Although it seems that the chelas had to search long and hard, and it was quite easy to do this - due to their pathologically short stature. Most likely, the British were well informed about his whereabouts, but after advertising they were forced to arrest him. However, they themselves did not try him, but handed him over to the chief executioner of the USSR. What about the USSR? But nothing - he handed over the Gauleiter... to Poland. It’s very strange, but the People’s Republic probably had a blast. No, first his death sentence was postponed for 10 years, and then completely canceled. There was no fanfare; during the trial, Koch for some reason said that he loved the USSR, and did a lot of useful things. He lived in Poland until he was 90 years old, died in 1986, and was essentially kept under house arrest. This, I repeat, is one of the main fanatics even after the mass executions of the leaders of the Third Reich.

By the way, what was the name of the Soviet agitators of the Ukrainian collaborators during the war? It turns out, for the most part, nothing. "Policemen." After the war, three names appeared: “Melnikovites”, “Bandera” and “Bulbovtsy”. Bulbovitsy - named “Taras Bulba”, in the world - Taras Borovets, the head of the third group of Ukrainian nationalists united in the “Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army”. (Borovets was also eventually put in a German camp, and Bandera’s men captured his wife and killed him after monstrous torture.)

"Taras Bulba" in the image of a civilized officer.

"Taras Bulba" in the image of the commander of a Russian partisan detachment (note the plywood birch trees).

And this is a homely look, “in slippers.” As far as I understand, the “Bulbovites” were the real field commanders of occupied Ukraine.

Gradually, in the 60-70s, the “Melnikovites” and “Bulbovites” were forgotten; in Soviet propaganda literature, the name Banderaites was firmly established for all independentists. Meanwhile, Bandera himself was in a concentration camp from September 1941 to September 1944 and could not direct operations or generally take part in the course of affairs. (For comparison, Melnik was imprisoned from February to September 1944, Bulba - from December 1943 to September 1944). In the absence of Bandera, the OUN(b) was led by Nikolai Lebed, who, unlike Melnik or Bulba, was IN AN ILLEGAL POSITION, and the Germans placed a reward on his head. The main activity of the OUN(b), quite insignificant, was the extermination of the people of Melnik and Bulba, as well as terror against the Polish population (Volyn massacre of 1943).

Emigrant affairs.

After the war, Bandera’s emigrant activities naturally again boiled down to the surrender of the agents sent by the Americans to the MGB; in addition, the OUN(b) itself split into two parts. The breakaway part was led by Lev Rebet, who was soon killed by the Star Banderaites. The answer came two years later. Despite the fact that Bandera was heavily encrypted (even his children did not know that he was Bandera, and thought that their dad was an ordinary Bandera member named Poppel), Rebet’s men tracked him down and killed him.

As is customary in such cases among Ukrainians, two years later another independent nationalist, Stashinsky, appeared on the horizon and declared that he personally killed both Rebet and Bandera... on instructions from the KGB. Further with all stops up to mysterious disappearances, plastic surgeries, polonium poisoning, etc. Recently, we all saw a Ukrainian performance using the example of Litvinenko-Lugovoy - also with miraculous discoveries of lost parents, articles in the tabloid press and a Polish zilch at the end.

On holiday in Switzerland. The scout net is seriously lacking.

As for the OUN(M), led by Melnik, it finally merged with, so to speak, the indigenous Ukrainian national movement - the Petliura government in exile, like the Poles who lived to see the collapse of socialism and performed a symbolic act of transferring power to the legitimate government of Ukraine in the early 90s.

Shukhevych is a junior officer of the German auxiliary troops, who then went into hiding and removed Lebed from the military leadership of the OUN(b). Now the nationalists are fastening their attention on Bender, because he did not take part in any action at all.

Why, after all, did the “Banderaites” become the symbol of Ukrainian nationalism, and not the respectable (and, in the end, more or less legitimate) “Melnikovites”, and not the brave “Bulbovites”? From the point of view of Soviet propaganda, no matter how funny it may seem, it’s a matter of a significant surname. “Bandera” from “gang”, “Bandera” = “bandits”.

There is Lenin, there is no Lenin. Happiness.

Well... As a teenager, I discovered a brochure from a foreign literature publishing house, “Korean Proverbs and Sayings.” It was always lying on the shelf, but now I take it and open it. The first thing I saw was the saying: “When the air is spoiled, the loudest indignation is the one who spoiled it.” The next day the whole “sixth bee” laughed, the brochure was read to the gills. And the state is the teenager.

Vladimir Khanelis, Bat Yam

After the events on the Kiev Maidan, both old and young in different ways - from left to right and from right to left - are scratching their tongues about the name of Stepan Bandera. Even those who do not speak this language. They often pronounce “Bendera”, “Bendera people”, apparently mistaking Stepan Bandera for a native of Bessarabian Bendery or a descendant of Ostap Bendera.

... The name of the Ukrainian political figure, ideologist and theorist of Ukrainian nationalism has become for the majority of those who eat “noodles” from Russian television plates a “horror story”, “Barmaley”, a kind of bloody cannibal worse than Hitler, Himmler, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky combined.

A few days ago, at some celebration, my table neighbor said that during the war, Bandera himself, together with the Nazis, killed Jews. When I asked how he, sitting in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could do this, the man pouted offendedly and turned away...

An article by BBC Moscow correspondent Anton Krechetnikov, “Four Myths about Stepan Bandera,” has been published on the Internet. The article is very objective and “cold-blooded”. Let me give you a few quotes. In general, hundreds of different books, thousands of magazine and newspaper publications, and dozens of documentaries have been shot about Stepan Bandera.

“As for Bandera himself, truth, half-truths and myths are closely intertwined in the image of him.”

“On July 5 (1941 - V.Kh.) Bandera was arrested in Krakow and placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he spent more than three years in solitary confinement - however, in a special section for “political persons”.

“In their propaganda leaflets, the Germans called Bandera an agent of Stalin.”

“On September 25, 1944... the German authorities released Bandera, brought him to Berlin and offered cooperation, but he put forward the recognition of the “Act of Revival” (of Ukraine as an independent state - V.Kh.) as an indispensable condition. The agreement was not concluded and until the end of the war, Bandera remained on German territory in an uncertain status.”

“According to the findings of the government commission to study the activities of the OUN and UPA, created in 1997 by order of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, the murder of Jews, Polish intelligentsia and supporters of the Soviet regime in the first days of the occupation of Lviv, known as the “massacre of Lviv professors,” was the work of the SD and a nationalistically minded unorganized crowd.”

“The Galicia division, formed in April 1943 by the German occupation authorities from local volunteers, had nothing to do with the OUN-UPA. Attempts to bring Bandera and his supporters under the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal regarding the SS are designed for ignorant people.”

“According to the “Certificate on the number of Soviet citizens killed at the hands of OUN bandits for the period 1944-1953.” dated April 17, 1973, signed by the Chairman of the KGB of Ukraine Vitaly Fedorchuk, the number of people killed by Bandera was 30,676 people, including 8,250 military and security officials.

As follows from the closed resolution of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee “Issues of the Western Regions of the Ukrainian SSR” dated May 26, 1953, the authorities during the same time killed 153,000 people, sent 134,000 to the Gulag, and deported 203,000. Every third or fourth family suffered. Both sides showed extreme cruelty.

Cases have been recorded when OUN members executed prisoners by tying their legs to bent trees and tearing their bodies into pieces...

... The authorities hanged partisans and underground fighters in the squares and left the corpses in plain sight in order to capture those who would try to bury them.

According to independent historians, Bandera was a radical nationalist by conviction and a terrorist by methods. If he had managed to create and lead the Ukrainian state, it certainly would not have been liberal and democratic. Bandera is not a figure who should be raised on the shield if Ukraine dreams of a European future.

On the other hand, Stalin or Dzerzhinsky were even greater criminals - at least in terms of the number of victims. If some Russians openly praise them and do not meet resistance from society and the state, then why shouldn’t some Ukrainians justify Bandera?”

After such a protracted, but, in my opinion, necessary introduction, I offer MZ readers an interview with Stepan Bandera, the grandson of Stepan Bandera. I took it in Kyiv in June 2000. Stepan Bandera Jr. lived in Ukraine at that time and was engaged in journalism (he now lives in Canada).

He is young (30 years old), short, well-fed, friendly, open, smiling. Well educated – journalist, public relations and civil law specialist. Single, Canadian citizen, lives in Kyiv... The grandson of a man whose name is pronounced in Ukraine, and not only in Ukraine, with delight or hatred.

– How does a person with that name live and work in Ukraine?

- Interesting! Not long ago I was supposed to give a lecture at Donetsk University. I ran through the corridors there and couldn’t find the right audience. He opened the door of one of the offices and turned to the man sitting there. He asked, “Who are you, what is your last name?” I answered - Stepan Bandera. The man twirled his finger at his temple and said: “And I am Simon Petliura!” I had to show my documents... This man was in shock...

The name helps me open many doors in Ukraine. When I ask you to tell so-and-so that Stepan Bandera called, there has never been a case where the person did not call back...

But sometimes people believe that a grandson must, by inheritance, genetically, have the qualities of his grandfather - a leader, a leader...

– Have you ever wanted to be a leader, a leader?

- Of course, I wanted to. When they are young, everyone wants to be a leader. I saw how much respect people had for me, and I considered myself an important person. But over the years, life experience comes and you begin to understand everything a little differently...

- Where were you born? Who are your parents?

– I was born in 1970 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is the heart of Canada, just as Poltava is the heart of Ukraine. Then my parents moved to Toronto. There, after the murder of my grandfather and the trial of his killer Stashinsky (1), my grandmother lived. My father, Andrey, worked in Toronto.

– Son of Stepan Bandera?

- Yes. My grandfather had three children. The eldest daughter, Natalya, was born in 1941, my father was born in 1947, and the third child, Lesya, was born in 1949 (2). Natalya died in 1985, her father died a year earlier...

In Ukraine, in Stryi, my grandfather’s sisters, Vladimir and Oksana (3), live.
They spent many years in Soviet prisons, camps, and were exiled to Siberia
and returned home only after the declaration of independence of Ukraine.

– Who was your father, Andrei Bandera?

– He was a very interesting person, a public figure, a journalist, he published the newspaper “Gomin Ukrainy” (“Gomin Ukrainy”) in English in Toronto. My father used his name and his authority to unite Ukrainians and awaken national feelings in them.

– Did he talk about his father?

- Very little…

- Why?

– Firstly, my father was a very busy man, he traveled a lot and was not at home much. Secondly, and this is the main thing, he was only twelve years old when Stepan Bandera was killed. But even when the grandfather was alive, the family lived in conditions of strict secrecy. Their communication was limited. My father lived under someone else’s name – Poppel. He came to Canada under the same surname. As a child, my father did not know whose son he was...

– As an adult, you probably read the works of your grandfather, memories of him. How do you feel today about his personality, his ideas, his struggle?

– My grandfather is a symbol of his generation, a symbol of his time, a symbol of the struggle for the independence of his country. The same as Nelson Mandela in South Africa. I regard my grandfather as a representative of a very idealistic, romantic generation of fighters who gave their lives for the freedom of Ukraine.

They fought against Germany and the USSR, a handful of people against giants, against huge military monsters... I respect their idealism, their sacrifice, their idea - no one will come from Washington, nor from Moscow, nor from Berlin to build an independent Ukrainian state. You need to rely only on your own strength.

- Stepan, but you know well that for many people the name of your grandfather has become another symbol - a symbol of the cruelty of a bandit who shed a sea of ​​blood...

– Every totalitarian regime needs the image of a cruel enemy who wants to destroy the state by any means and does not disdain violence and murder. Moscow propaganda created such an image - the image of Bandera, Bandera’s followers, Hitler’s - the image of a Jew...

– Since the word “Jew” was mentioned in our conversation, let’s talk about this topic. I often read and heard that your grandfather was to blame for the bloody massacres of Jews by Ukrainian nationalists during the war and after it. How do you feel about such statements and what was the attitude towards Jews in your family?

“My grandfather spent most of the war in a German concentration camp. So he can in no way be guilty of the extermination of the Jews. You will not find anti-Semitic statements in any of his works or in any of the documents of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). My grandfather's two brothers, Alexander and Vasily, died in Auschwitz (4). Their blood mixed with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews who died there - this is very important to me. At the same time, I do not rule out that different things could and did happen during the war.

My father and mother raised me in the spirit of tolerance and respect for people of any nationality. There was not even a hint of racism or anti-Semitism in our family. In the camps, in the schools of Ukrainian nationalists, in the USA and Canada, everywhere we were told: there were Jewish medical workers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This is also written about in the Chronicle of the UPA.

But I would like to say something else. A rather famous person, the Jew Sol Lipman, came to our house in Toronto. He talked and argued with my father. And when my father died, he spoke before the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and stated that all Banderaites were anti-Semites, that they slaughtered and killed Jews... I want to say again - I do not rule out anything. Among the Banderaites, as in all other armies, there were different people. But to say that they all slaughtered and killed Jews is a lie. My mother and I came to Ottawa and protested. A Jewish lawyer, Alex Epstein, helped us a lot with this.

I was very angry with Saul Lipman, but then I realized that you cannot judge an entire nation by the actions of one person.

- Tell me about your mother.

– My mother, Marusya Fedorii, was born in Belgium, in a camp for Ost-Arbeiters. Her father is my grandfather Mykola, lives in Winnipeg, is retired. He was born in Western Ukraine, and his grandmother (she died) was born in what is now Russia. She is the only one from a large family who did not die of hunger during collectivization.

Mom works in Toronto, at the Department of Immigrant Affairs. Sisters - Bogdana and Olenka - live in Montreal.

– Besides you and your sisters, are there any other grandchildren and granddaughters of Stepan Bandera?

– Natalia’s children live in Munich – Sofia and Orest.

– Why did you come to Ukraine? What are you doing here?

– Moving to Ukraine is a logical act, arising from my upbringing, my worldview, my outlook on life. Now I work in the Kiev branch of the Canadian investment firm Romier. More accurately, I have my own company that cooperates with Romier. I am trying to attract foreign investors to Ukraine.

- It turns out?

- With difficulties. But we are trying to change the image of Ukraine in the eyes of businessmen. Otherwise, everything is Chernobyl, corruption... By the way, my first partners in Ukraine were local, Ukrainian Jews.

- Let's go back to the beginning of our conversation. And yet, it’s strange to me that Stepan Bandera’s grandson is engaged in business in Ukraine, and not politics...

– I don’t only do business in Ukraine. I'm also a journalist. I have my own column in the Kyiv Vedomosti newspaper, and I often publish in the popular, serious magazine Pik. As for politics... It is very important for me not to discredit the name of my grandfather. So I'm very careful. And I also know that politics is made by economics. So what I am doing now is a good contribution to the politics of independent Ukraine. For now I am not going to join any party...

– Stepan, how did your family react to the identity of your grandfather’s killer – Stashinsky??

– Stashinsky himself, voluntarily surrendered to the Americans, repented... People close to our family offered to find him and take revenge. Simply put, kill. But the family was always against this. It’s a paradox - if Stashinsky himself had not confessed to the murder to the Americans, then everyone would have believed that Stepan Bandera was killed by Ukrainians from other organizations - the “Melnikovites” or someone else, but the whole world learned that he was killed by a KGB agent. I would like to meet him and talk - to restore the historical truth. But no one knows where Stashinsky is now and whether he is even alive... Maybe he also has a grandson...

– If you, Stepan Bandera’s grandson, met Stashinsky’s grandson, would you give him your hand?

- Well, I don’t know... I don’t know... Probably, when we met, I probably wouldn’t give in right away... But I wouldn’t get into a fight either... I would like to talk to him, to understand what kind of person he is... There is a lot that is unclear in the Stashinsky case. Maybe someday the KGB archive will be opened and we will find out the whole truth.

– We are talking in your office, on Proriznaya Street, and the archives of the KGB (now this agency is called the SBU) are nearby, two steps away, on Vladimirskaya. Didn’t you go there and find out?

– I was told that these archives are now in Moscow. It is very important for me that the Ukrainian state recognizes the OUN-UPA as a side at war during the Second World War. So that the surviving old people are recognized as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

– How do members of Stepan Bandera’s family feel about the proposal to transfer his ashes from Munich to Kyiv?

- In different ways... I think it’s cold for grandfather to lie in German soil...

Notes:
1) Stashinsky Bogdan (1931) – KGB agent, killer of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet (1957) and Stepan Bandera (1959). On August 12, 1961, he and his wife defected to West Berlin and confessed to the crimes they had committed. Sentenced to eight years in prison. After release, his fate and place of residence are unknown.
2) According to reference data: Andrei Stepanovich (1946–1984); Lesya Stepanovna (1947–2011).
3) Sisters of Stepan Bandera: Martha-Maria (1907–1982); Vladimir (1913–2001); Oksana (1917–2008).
4) Stepan Bandera's brothers Alexander (1911–1942) and Vasily (1915–1942) died in Auschwitz under unclear circumstances. Presumably - killed by Volksdeutsche Poles, members of the camp staff; Bogdan (1921–194?), date and place of death are not reliably known. Presumably killed by the Germans in Kherson in 1943.

Every year on January 1, on the territory of now independent Ukraine, Ukrainian nationalists organize a Sabbath, in the form of a torchlight procession along the central streets of Kiev, dedicated to the birthday of Stepan Bandera. Ukrainian nationalists conduct a torchlight procession in the same way as once in Nazi Germany the Nazis held torchlight processions along the central streets of Berlin.

In 2005, on December 25, the Verkhovna Rada adopted a decree according to which the centenary of the birth of Stepan Bandera will be celebrated on January 1. A number of events were dedicated to the solemn date in Ukraine, in particular the release of a coin with his image, as well as the construction of a memorial complex in Ivano-Frankivsk. Deputies of the legislative council of Ternopil (western Ukraine), in turn, proposed to the country's leadership to award the OUN leader the title of Hero of Ukraine...

But who is Stepan Bandera?

Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary, Kalush district in the Stanislav region (Galicia), part of Austria-Hungary (now the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), in the family of the Greek Catholic parish priest Andrei Bandera, who received theological education at Lviv University . His mother, Miroslava, also came from the family of a Greek Catholic priest. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “I spent my childhood ... in the house of my parents and grandfathers, grew up in an atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism and living national-cultural, political and social interests. There was a large library at home, and active participants in the Ukrainian national life of Galicia often came together”...

Stepan Bandera began his revolutionary path in 1922 by joining the Ukrainian scout organization “PLAST”, and in 1928 the revolutionary Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO).

In 1929, he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) created by Yevgeny Konovalets and soon headed the most radical “youth” group. On his instructions, the village blacksmith Mikhail Beletsky, professor of philology at the Lviv Ukrainian Gymnasium Ivan Babiy, university student Yakov Bachinsky and many others were killed.

At that time, the OUN established close contacts with Germany; its headquarters were located in Berlin, at Hauptstrasse 11, under the guise of the “Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany.” Bandera himself was trained in Danzig, at an intelligence school.

From 1932 to 1933 - deputy head of the regional executive (leadership) of the OUN. He organized robberies of postal trains and post offices, as well as the murder of opponents.

In 1934, on the orders of Stepan Bandera, an employee of the Soviet consulate, Alexei Mailov, was killed in Lvov. The facts become interesting that shortly before this murder was committed, the former resident of German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, appeared in the OUN and, according to Polish intelligence, on the eve of the murder the OUN received 40 (forty) thousand marks from the Abwehr.

With Hitler coming to power in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was included in the Gestapo headquarters. In the suburbs of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - barracks were also built with funds from German intelligence, where OUN militants and their officers were trained. Meanwhile, the Polish Minister of the Interior - General Bronislaw Peracki - sharply condemned Germany's plans to capture Danzig, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was declared a "free city" under the administration of the League of Nations. Hitler himself instructed Richard Yarom, a German intelligence agent who oversaw the OUN, to eliminate Peratsky. On June 15, 1934, Peratsky was killed by the people of Stepan Bandera, but this time luck did not smile on them and the nationalists were captured and convicted. For the murder of Bronislav Peratsky, Stepan Bandera, Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets were sentenced to death by the Warsaw District Court, the rest, including Roman Shukhevych, were sentenced to 7-15 years in prison, but under pressure from Germany this penalty was replaced by life imprisonment .

In the summer of 1936, Stepan Bandera, along with other members of the Regional Executive of the OUN, appeared in court in Lvov on charges of leading the terrorist activities of the OUN-UVO - in particular, the court considered the circumstances of the murder by members of the OUN of the gymnasium director Ivan Babii and student Yakov Bachinsky, accused by nationalists in connection with Polish police. At this trial, Bandera already openly acted as a regional leader of the OUN. In total, at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment seven times.

After the murder of Yevgeny Konovalets in 1938 by NKVD officers, OUN meetings took place in Italy, at which Yevgeny Konovalets’ successor Andrei Melnik was proclaimed (his supporters declared him the head of PUN - Seeing Off Ukrainian Nationalists), with which Stepan Bandera did not agree.

When Germany occupied Poland in September 1939 and Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Abwehr, was released.

Irrefutable proof of Stepan Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis is the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945).

"... after the end of the war with Poland, Germany was intensively preparing for a war against the Soviet Union and therefore measures were being taken through the Abwehr to intensify subversive activities, since those activities that were carried out through MELNIK and other agents seemed insufficient. For these purposes, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist Bandera Stepan, who during the war was released from prison, where he was imprisoned by the Polish authorities for participating in a terrorist act against the leaders of the Polish government. The last one was in touch with me". .

After the Nazis released Stepan Bandera from prison, a split in the OUN became inevitable. Having read the works of the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism Dmitry Dontsov in a Polish prison, Stepan Bandera believed that the OUN was not “revolutionary” enough in its essence, and only he, Stepan Bandera, was able to correct the situation.

In February 1940, Stepan Bandera convened an OUN conference in Krakow, at which a tribunal was created that handed down death sentences to Melnik’s supporters; the confrontation with Melnik’s supporters took the form of an armed struggle. Bandera’s members kill members of the “Melnikovsky” line of the OUN - Nikolai Stsiborsky and Yemelyan Senik, as well as a prominent “Melnikovsky” member Yevgeny Shulga.

As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsk, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yary, shortly before the war, secretly met with Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. During the meeting, Stepan Bandera, according to Yaroslav Stetsko, “very clearly and clearly presented the Ukrainian positions, finding a certain understanding... with the admiral, who promised support for the Ukrainian political concept, believing that only with its implementation is a German victory over Russia possible.” Stepan Bandera himself indicated that at the meeting with Canaris, the conditions for training Ukrainian volunteer units under the Wehrmacht were mainly discussed.

Three months before the attack on the USSR, Stepan Bandera created the Ukrainian Legion named after Konovalets from members of the OUN, a little later the legion will become part of the Brandenburg-800 regiment and will be called “Nachtigal”, in Ukrainian “nightingale”. The Brandenburg-800 regiment was created as part of the Wehrmacht - it was special forces, the regiment was intended to conduct sabotage operations behind enemy lines.

Not only Stepan Bandera negotiated with the Nazis, but also persons authorized by him, for example, in the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine documents were preserved that Bandera themselves offered their services to the Nazis, in the interrogation report of Abwehr employee Lazarek Yu.D. it is said that he was a witness and participant in negotiations between Abwehr representative Eichern and Bandera's assistant Nikolai Lebed.

“Lebed said that Bandera’s followers would provide the necessary personnel for saboteur schools and would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volyn for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes on the territory of the USSR.”

To carry out subversive activities on the territory of the USSR, as well as conduct intelligence activities, Stepan Bandera received two and a half million marks from Nazi Germany.

On March 10, 1940, Bandera's OUN headquarters decided to transfer leading personnel to Volyn and Galicia to organize a rebellion.

According to Soviet counterintelligence, the mutiny was planned for the spring of 1941. Why spring? After all, the leadership of the OUN had to understand that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes naturally if we remember that the original date of Nazi Germany’s attack on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer some troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. Interestingly, at the same time, the OUN gave the order to all OUN members who served in the army or police of Yugoslavia to go over to the side of the Croatian Nazis.

In April 1941, the Revolutionary Conduct of the OUN convened a Great Gathering of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko was elected his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the actions of OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine intensified even more. In April alone, 38 Soviet party workers died at their hands, and dozens of sabotage were carried out in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.

After a meeting in April 1941 organized by Stepan Bandera, the OUN finally split into OUN-(m) (Melnik’s supporters) and OUN-(b) (Bandera’s supporters), which was also called OUN-(r) (OUN-revolutionaries).

Here's what the Nazis thought about this: from the transcript of the interrogation of the head of the Abwehr department of the Berlin district, Colonel Erwin Stolze (May 29, 1945)

“Despite the fact that during my meeting with Melnik and Bandera, both of them promised to take all measures for reconciliation. I have personally come to the conclusion that this reconciliation will not take place due to the significant differences between them.

If Melnik is a calm, intelligent person, then Bandera is a careerist, a fanatic and a bandit.” (Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine f.57. Op.4. D.338. L.280-288)

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans pinned their greatest hopes on the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - Bandera OUN-(b) in comparison with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - Melnik OUM-(m) and the "Polesskaya Sich" of Bulba Borovets, also striving for power under a German protectorate. Ukraine. Stepan Bandera was impatient to feel like the head of an independent Ukrainian state, and he, abusing the trust of his masters from Nazi Germany, without asking them much, decided to proclaim the “independence” of the Ukrainian state from the Moscow occupation, independently creating a government and appointing Yaroslav Stetsk as prime minister. But Germany had its own plans regarding Ukraine; it was interested in free living space, i.e. territories and cheap labor.

The trick of establishing Ukraine as a state was necessary in order to show the population its importance; personal ambitions came into play here. On June 30, 1941, Stepan Bandera publicly decided to announce the “rebirth of the Ukrainian state,” assigning the role of proclaimer to his comrade-in-arms Yaroslav Stetsk. On this day, Yaroslav Stetsko voiced the will of Stepan Bandera and the entire OUN line from the city hall in Lviv.

Residents of Lvov reacted sluggishly to information about the upcoming event regarding the revival of Ukrainian statehood. According to the words of the Lvov priest, doctor of theology Father Gavril Kotelnik, about a hundred people from the intelligentsia and clergy were brought to this gathering as extras. The city residents themselves did not dare to take to the streets and support the proclamation of the revival of the Ukrainian state. The statement about the revival of the Ukrainian state was accepted by the group of forcibly rounded up listeners who gathered that day.

The Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State” of June 30, 1941, paradoxically, went down in history. The Germans, as mentioned above regarding Ukraine, had their own selfish interest and there could be no revival and granting of state status to Ukraine even under the patronage of Nazi Germany out of the question.

It would be reckless for Germany to give power in the territory that was captured by regular German military formations to Ukrainian nationalists just because they, too, in small numbers, took part in the hostilities, but mostly did the dirty work of punishing civilians and policemen. Which of the Ukrainian nationalists asked the population of Ukraine whether the people want their power? Moreover, as it turns out, it is not an independent government, but under the patronage of Nazi Germany. This is evidenced by the main text of the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State” dated June 30, 1941:

“The newly reborn Ukrainian State will closely interact with the National Socialist Greater Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, is creating a new order in Europe and the world and helping the Ukrainian people to free themselves from Moscow occupation.

The Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army, which is being created on Ukrainian soil, will continue to fight together with the ALLIED GERMAN ARMY against the Moscow occupation for a Sovereign Council Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.

Let the Ukrainian Sovereign Conciliar Power live! Let the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists live! May the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian People STEPAN BANDERA live! GLORY TO UKRAINE!

Thus, the OUN members, not authorized by anyone, themselves proclaimed their own state.

Having carefully analyzed the actions of the OUN members during the Second World War and the text of the Act, we can confidently say that the so-called independent state of Ukraine, proclaimed on June 30, 1941, by Bandera, Shukhevych and Stetsko, was an ally of Hitler in the Second World War.

An interesting fact is that among Ukrainian nationalists and many officials at the head of the state of modern Ukraine, the Act of June 30, 1941 is considered the Act of Independence of Ukraine, and Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko are considered Heroes of Ukraine.

Simultaneously with the proclamation of the Act, supporters of Stepan Bandera staged a pogrom in Lvov. Ukrainian Nazis acted according to blacklists compiled before the war. As a result, 7 thousand people were killed in the city in 6 days.

Here is what Saul Friedman wrote about the massacre carried out by Bandera’s followers in Lvov in his book “Pogromist”, published in New York: “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion destroyed seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Before execution, Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the staircases of four-story buildings and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to walk through a line of soldiers with yellow-blakite armbands, they were bayoneted."

Bypassed by a younger competitor, Andrei Melnik was offended and immediately wrote a letter to Hitler and Governor General Frank saying that “Bandera’s people are behaving unworthily and have created their own government without the Fuhrer’s knowledge.” After which Hitler ordered the arrest of Stepan Bandera and his “government”.

At the beginning of July 1941, Stepan Bandera was arrested in Krakow and, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his comrades, was sent to Berlin at the disposal of Abwehr 2 to Colonel Erwin Stolze.

After Stepan Bandera’s arrival in Berlin, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded that he abandon the Act of “Revival of the Ukrainian State” of June 30, 1941. Stepan Bandera agreed and called on “the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to defeat Moscow and Bolshevism.” After which, on July 15, 1941, in Berlin, Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsk were released from arrest. Yaroslav Stetsko in his memoirs described what was happening as an “honorable arrest.” Yes, it’s truly an honor: “From the wilderness to the court,” to “the supposed capital of the world.”

It is also an amazing fact that after his release from arrest in Berlin, Stepan Bandera lives at the Abwehr dacha.

During their stay in Berlin, numerous meetings began with representatives of various departments, at which Bandera’s supporters insistently assured that without their help the German army would not be able to defeat Muscovy. There was a numerous stream of messages, explanations, dispatches, “declarations” and “memoranda” addressed to Hitler, Riebentrop, Rosenberg and other Fuhrers of Nazi Germany, constantly making excuses and asking for assistance and support. In his letters, Stepan Bandera proved his loyalty to the Fuhrer and the German army and tried to convince of the urgent need for the OUN-b for Germany.

Stepan Bandera’s labors were not in vain, thanks to him, the Germans took the next step: Andrei Melnik was allowed to continue to openly curry favor with Berlin, and Stepan Bandera was ordered to portray an enemy of the Germans so that he could, hiding behind anti-German phrases, restrain the Ukrainian masses from a real, irreconcilable struggle with the Nazi invaders, from the struggle for the freedom of Ukraine.

With the emergence of new plans of the Nazis, Stepan Bandera is transported from the Abwehr dacha to the privileged block of Sachsenhausen, out of harm's way. After the massacre that Bandera’s followers carried out in June 1941 in Lvov, Stepan Bandera could have been killed by his own people, but Nazi Germany still needed him. This gave rise to the legend that Bandera did not cooperate with the Germans and even fought with them, but documents say otherwise.

In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and another 300 Banderaites were kept separately in the Cellenbau bunker, where they were kept in good conditions. Bandera's members were allowed to meet with each other, and they also received food and money from relatives and the OUN-b. Not infrequently, they left the camp for the purpose of contacts with the “conspiracy” OUN-UPA, as well as with the Friedenthal castle (200 meters from the Tselenbau bunker), which housed a school for OUN agent and sabotage personnel.

The instructor at this school was a recent officer of the Nachtigal special battalion, Yuri Lopatinsky, through whom Stepan Bandera made contact with the OUN-UPA.

Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942; he also achieved the replacement of its main commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.

In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of fascists. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops, plus the hatred of local residents for the OUN-UPA in Volyn and Galicia was so high that they themselves handed them over and killed them. In order to activate the OUN members and support their spirit, the Nazis decide to release Stepan Bandera and 300 of his supporters from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. This happened on September 25, 1944, after leaving the camp, Stepan Bandera immediately went to work as part of the 202nd Abwehr team in Krakow and began training OUN-UPA sabotage detachments.

Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of former Gestapo and Abwehr officer Lieutenant Siegfried Müller, given during the investigation on September 19, 1945.

“On December 27, 1944, I prepared a group of saboteurs to transfer them to the rear of the Red Army on special missions. Stepan Bandera, in my presence, personally instructed these agents and through them conveyed to the UPA headquarters an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with Abwehrkommando-202. (Central State Archive of Public Associations of Ukraine f.57. Op.4. D.338. L.268-279)

Stepan Bandera himself did not participate in practical work in the rear of the Red Army, his task was to organize, he was generally a good organizer.

An interesting fact is that those who fell into the clutches of Hitler’s punitive machine, even if the Nazis later became convinced of the person’s innocence, did not return to freedom. This was common Nazi practice. The unprecedented behavior of the Nazis against Bandera indicates their most direct mutual cooperation.

When the war approached Berlin, Bandera was tasked with forming detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis and defending Berlin. Bandera created the detachments, but he himself escaped.

After the end of the war, he lived in Munich and collaborated with British intelligence services. At the OUN conference in 1947, he was elected head of the conduct of the entire OUN (which actually meant the unification of the OUN-(b) and OUN-(m)).

As we see, there is a completely happy ending for the former “prisoner” of Sachsenhausen.

Being in absolute safety and leading the OUN and UPA organizations, Stepan Bandera shed a lot of human blood with the hands of his executors.

On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was killed in the entrance of his house. He was met on the stairs by a man who shot him in the face from a special pistol with a stream of soluble poison.

During the Great Patriotic War, at the hands of members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), about 1.5 million Jews, 1 million Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, 500 thousand Poles, 100 thousand people of other nationalities.

Prepared by Igor Cherkashchenko, member of the Supreme Council of the “SELF-DEFENSE” movement, assistant to the deputy of the Kharkov Regional Council of Natalia Vitrenko’s Bloc “People’s Opposition”

For comprehensive coverage of the issue

135 tortures and atrocities applied by OUN-UPA terrorists to the Polish population of the Eastern outskirts.

The methods of torture and atrocities listed below are only examples and do not cover the full collection of methods of death in agony applied by OUN-UPA terrorists to Polish children, women and men. The ingenuity of torture was rewarded.

Crimes against humanity committed by Ukrainian terrorists can be the subject of study not only by historians, lawyers, sociologists, economists, but also by psychiatrists.

Even today, 60 years after those tragic events, some people whose lives were saved are worried when they talk about it, their hands and jaws begin to tremble, and their voice breaks in the larynx.

001. Driving a large and thick nail into the skull of the head.
002. Ripping off hair and skin from the head (scalping).
003. Hitting the skull with the butt of an ax.
004. Hitting the forehead with the butt of an ax.
005. “Eagle” carving on the forehead.
006. Driving a bayonet into the temple of the head.
007. Knocking out one eye.
008. Knocking out two eyes.
009. Nose cutting.
010. Circumcision of one ear.
011. Cropping both ears.
012. Piercing children through with stakes.
013. Punching through with a sharpened thick wire from ear to ear.
014. Lip cutting.
015. Tongue cutting.
016. Throat cutting.
017. Cutting the throat and pulling the tongue out through the hole.
018. Cutting the throat and inserting a piece into the hole.
019. Knocking out teeth.
020. Broken jaw.
021. Tearing the mouth from ear to ear.
022. Gagging of mouths with oakum when transporting still living victims.
023. Cutting the neck with a knife or sickle.
024. Hitting the neck with an ax.
025. Vertical chopping of a head with an axe.
026. Rolling the head back.
027. Crush the head by placing it in a vice and tightening the screw.
028. Cutting off the head with a sickle.
029. Cutting off the head with a scythe.
030. Chopping off a head with an axe.
031. Hitting the neck with an ax.
032. Infliction of stab wounds to the head.
033. Cutting and pulling narrow strips of skin from the back.
034. Infliction of other chopped wounds on the back.
035. Bayonet strikes in the back.
036. Broken bones of the ribs of the chest.
037. Stabbing with a knife or bayonet in the heart or near the heart.
038. Causing puncture wounds to the chest with a knife or bayonet.
039. Cutting off women's breasts with a sickle.
040. Cutting off women's breasts and sprinkling salt on the wounds.
041. Cutting off the genitals of male victims with a sickle.
042. Sawing the body in half with a carpenter's saw.
043. Causing puncture wounds to the abdomen with a knife or bayonet.
044. Piercing a pregnant woman's stomach with a bayonet.
045. Cutting open the abdomen and pulling out the intestines of adults.
046. Cutting the abdomen of a woman with an advanced pregnancy and inserting, for example, a live cat instead of the removed fetus, and suturing the abdomen.
047. Cutting open the belly and pouring boiling water inside.
048. Cutting open the belly and putting stones inside it, as well as throwing it into the river.
049. Cutting open the belly of pregnant women and pouring broken glass inside.
050. Pulling out veins from groin to feet.
051. Placing a hot iron into the groin – vagina.
052. Inserting pine cones into the vagina with the top side facing forward.
053. Inserting a pointed stake into the vagina and pushing it all the way to the throat, right through.
054. Cutting the front of a woman's torso with a garden knife from the vagina to the neck and leaving the insides outside.
055. Hanging victims by their entrails.
056. Putting a glass bottle into the vagina and breaking it.
057. Inserting a glass bottle into the anus and breaking it.
058. Cutting open the belly and pouring food inside, the so-called feed flour, for hungry pigs, who tore out this food along with intestines and other entrails.
059. Chopping off one hand with an ax.
060. Chopping off both hands with an ax.
061. Piercing the palm with a knife.
062. Cutting off fingers with a knife.
063. Cutting off the palm.
064. Cauterization of the inside of the palm on a hot stove in a coal kitchen.
065. Chopping off the heel.
066. Chopping off the foot above the heel bone.
067. Breaking of arm bones in several places with a blunt instrument.
068. Breaking leg bones with a blunt instrument in several places.
069. Sawing the body, lined with boards on both sides, in half with a carpenter's saw.
070. Sawing the body in half with a special saw.
071. Sawing off both legs with a saw.
072. Sprinkling hot coal on bound feet.
073. Nailing hands to the table and feet to the floor.
074. Nailing hands and feet to a cross in a church.
075. Hitting the back of the head with an ax to victims who had previously been laid on the floor.
076. Hitting the entire body with an ax.
077. Chopping a whole body into pieces with an ax.
078. Breaking alive legs and arms in the so-called strap.
079. Nailing the tongue of a small child, who later hung on it, to the table with a knife.
080. Cutting a child into pieces with a knife and throwing them around.
081. Ripping the belly of children.
082. Nailing a small child to the table with a bayonet.
083. Hanging a male child by the genitals from a doorknob.
084. Knocking out the joints of a child’s legs.
085. Knocking out the joints of a child’s hands.
086. Suffocation of a child by throwing various rags over him.
087. Throwing small children alive into a deep well.
088. Throwing a child into the flames of a burning building.
089. Breaking a baby's head by taking him by the legs and hitting him against a wall or stove.
090. Hanging a monk by his feet near the pulpit in a church.
091. Placing a child on a stake.
092. Hanging a woman upside down from a tree and mocking her - cutting off her breasts and tongue, cutting her stomach, gouging out her eyes, and cutting off pieces of her body with knives.
093. Nailing a small child to the door.
094. Hanging on a tree with your head up.
095. Hanging from a tree upside down.
096. Hanging from a tree with your feet up and scorching your head from below with the fire of a fire lit under your head.
097. Throwing down from a cliff.
098. Drowning in the river.
099. Drowning by throwing into a deep well.
100. Drowning in a well and throwing stones at the victim.
101. Piercing with a pitchfork, and then frying pieces of the body over a fire.
102. Throwing an adult into the flames of a fire in a forest clearing, around which Ukrainian girls sang and danced to the sounds of an accordion.
103. Driving a stake through the stomach and strengthening it in the ground.
104. Tying a person to a tree and shooting at him as if at a target.
105. Taking one out into the cold naked or in underwear.
106. Strangulation with a twisted, soapy rope tied around the neck - a lasso.
107. Dragging a body along the street with a rope tied around the neck.
108. Tying a woman’s legs to two trees, as well as her arms above her head, and cutting her stomach from the crotch to the chest.
109. Tearing the torso with chains.
110. Dragging along the ground tied to a cart.
111. Dragging along the ground a mother with three children tied to a cart drawn by a horse, in such a way that one leg of the mother is tied with a chain to the cart, and to the other leg of the mother is one leg of the oldest child, and to the other leg of the oldest child is tied the youngest child, and the leg of the youngest child is tied to the other leg of the youngest child.
112. Punching through the body with the barrel of a carbine.
113. Constricting the victim with barbed wire.
114. Two victims being pulled together with barbed wire at the same time.
115. Pulling together several victims with barbed wire.
116. Periodically tightening the torso with barbed wire and pouring cold water on the victim every few hours in order to regain consciousness and feel pain and suffering.
117. Burying a victim in a standing position in the ground up to his neck and leaving him in this position.
118. Burying someone alive up to the neck in the ground and later cutting off the head with a scythe.
119. Tearing the body in half with the help of horses.
120. Tearing the torso in half by tying the victim to two bent trees and then freeing them.
121. Throwing adults into the flames of a burning building.
122. Setting fire to a victim previously doused with kerosene.
123. Laying sheaves of straw around the victim and setting them on fire, thus making the torch of Nero.
124. Sticking a knife into the back and leaving it in the victim's body.
125. Impaling a baby on a pitchfork and throwing him into the flames of a fire.
126. Cutting off the skin from the face with blades.
127. Driving oak stakes between the ribs.
128. Hanging on barbed wire.
129. Ripping off the skin from the body and filling the wound with ink, as well as dousing it with boiling water.
130. Attaching the body to a support and throwing knives at it.
131. Binding - shackling hands with barbed wire.
132. Inflicting fatal blows with a shovel.
133. Nailing hands to the threshold of a home.
134. Dragging a body along the ground by legs tied with a rope.

For a long time, the name of the movement was distorted - “Bendera” instead of “Bandera”; in the 50s. The NKVD created punitive detachments, dressed in the uniform of "Bandera", which destroyed them in order to arouse hatred among the lower classes towards the OUN-UPA, etc.

4. During the Patriotic War, which began in 2014, separatists and Russians called all defenders of Ukraine nothing more than “Bandera” or “Bandera’s punitive forces.”

5. What are the main services of Stepan Bandera to the people of Ukraine? He

Became one of the organizers in 1929 of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the main instrument of the national liberation movement of Ukrainians in subsequent decades. Since 1933, Bandera became the regional guide of the OUN in Western and the regional commandant of the combat department of the OUN-UVO, since 1940 - the head of the OUN-UPA (b);

On July 5, 1941, members of the OUN-UPA (b) in Lvov announced the “Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State,” which announced the creation of a “new Ukrainian state on the mother Ukrainian lands,” for which Stepan Bandera was arrested on the same day and subsequently sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp until September 1944;

His followers, led by Roman Shukhevych, created the Ukrainian army OUN-UPA, which fought both the fascist (1942-1944) and communist regimes in the USSR from 1944 to 1956.

2010 - Hero of Ukraine "for the invincibility of the spirit in upholding the national idea, heroism and self-sacrifice in the struggle for an independent Ukrainian state."

The then President of Ukraine, during the ceremonial events in honor of Unity Day, noted that millions of Ukrainians had been waiting for Stepan Bandera to be awarded the title “Hero of Ukraine” for many years.

The post-war years were the most difficult for Stepan Bandera. So, for example, only in 1948 he changed his place of residence six times (Berlin, Innsbruck, Seefeld, Munich, Hildesheim, Starnberg). Ultimately, Bandera and his family moved to Munich in order to give his daughter a good education. The fact is that Stepan and his wife tried to protect her from everything that was happening around her father, and never told her that the famous Stepan Bandera was actually her blood father. “At the age of 13, I began reading Ukrainian newspapers, which wrote a lot about Stepan Bandera. Over time, based on my own observations, as well as constant changes of surname, and also due to the fact that a huge number of people were constantly around my father, I some suspicions arose. And when one of my acquaintances let it slip, I was sure that Stepan Bandera was my own father,” said Natalia, Bandera’s daughter.

Stepan Bandera's mother died of tuberculosis at the age of 33, and he himself had poor health since childhood. He was mainly worried about his joints, often in his legs. In this regard, all his efforts to get into Plast were unsuccessful. He managed to join this organization only in the third grade. “He was short, brown-haired, very poorly dressed,” his comrade Yaroslav Rak recalled to Bandera.

Once a group of students gathered in the Academic House in Lvov, one of whom immediately declared that he had nothing to do with politics and was outside it. Stepan Bandera was also present. When the “non-political” student tried to shake his hand, Bandera turned away. Then Stepan was reprimanded, to which he replied: “If you don’t like it, you can sue me.” A few decades later, the same student, whose last name turned out to be Stashinsky, became the killer of Stepan Bandera.

The social network "" also has a fairly large number of groups dedicated to Bandera. The largest of them is group called "Stepan Bandera".

Biography of Stepan Bandera.

1927 - Bandera entered the Ukrainian Economic Academy in the village of Podebrady (Czechoslovakia). However, the Polish refused to provide him with a foreign passport, and therefore he continued to live in his native village, where he was engaged in cultural, educational and economic activities;

1928 - moved to live in, where he enrolled in the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School, where he studied until 1933, and before the final exams he was arrested because of his political activities;

1932-1933 - deputy regional conductor;

1933 - appointed regional guide of the OUN in Western Ukraine;

1934 - arrested by Polish police. He was under investigation in prisons in Lvov, Warsaw and Krakow;

From November 18, 1935 to January 13, 1936, the Warsaw trial took place, in which Stepan Bandera, along with 11 other defendants, was convicted of involvement in the OUN, as well as for organizing the murder of Bronislaw Penatsky, internal affairs of Poland. Bandera was initially sentenced to death, but it was later commuted to life imprisonment;

On September 19, 1939, when the situation of the Polish troops became almost critical, Bandera was released;

On July 5, 1941, shortly after the adoption of the act of proclamation of the restoration of the Ukrainian state, the Germans arrested Bandera;

December 1944 - Bandera is released along with several other OUN guides;

1950 - resigned from the post of head of the OUN conductors;

August 22, 1952 - resigned from the post of head of the conductors of the entire OUN-B. However, his decision was not officially accepted, and therefore he remained in this position until his death;

Bandera lived the last years of his life in Munich under the name Stefan Popel.

Murder of Bandera.

On October 15, 1959, in Munich, in the entrance of house number 7, located on Kreitmayr Street, at 13:05 local time, a bloodied but still alive Stepan Bandera was found. However, he soon died.

The results of the medical examination showed that the cause of Bandera’s death was poison. As it turned out, later, his killer, who was Bogdan Stashinsky, shot Bandera in the face from a special pistol loaded with potassium cyanide.

Two years after Bandera's death, the judiciary announced that Stashinsky acted on the orders of Khrushchev and Shelepin. The killer was sentenced to 8 years in prison. Later, the German Supreme Court declared that the USSR in Moscow was to blame for the death of Stepan Bandera.

Bandera's funeral took place in 1959 in Munich.

Perpetuating the memory of Stepan Bandera.

1995 - Ukrainian director Oleg Yanchuk shot “Atentat - Autumn Murder in Munich,” which is dedicated to the post-war fate of Bandera;

2005 - “Unconquered”, in general about the fate of Bandera;

Rohir van Aarde, a writer from the Netherlands, wrote the novel “Assassination”, dedicated to the political assassination of Stepan Bandera;

January 1, 2009 - in honor of the centenary of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian state enterprise Ukrposhta issued a commemorative envelope and postage stamp with his image.

2009 and 2014 in the Ternopil region of Ukraine were declared the years of Stepan Bandera;

2012 - Lviv Regional Council initiated the founding of the award named after Hero of Ukraine Stepan Bandera;

Streets in the following cities were named in honor of Bandera: Lviv, Lutsk, Dubovitsy, Rivne, Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chervonograd, Drohobych, Stryi, Dolina, Kalush, Kovel, Vladimir-Volynsky, Horodenka, Izyaslav, Skole, Shepetivka and some others populated areas, including villages and towns;

There are 6 Stepan Bandera museums in the world:

Museum of Stepan Bandera in Dublyany;

Museum-Estate of Stepan Bandera (Vola-Zaderevacka);

Historical and Memorial Museum of Stepan Bandera (Stary Ugryniv village);

Museum of Stepan Bandera (Yagolnitsa);

Museum of the Liberation Struggle named after Stepan Bandera (London);

Bandera Estate Museum (Stry).

Monuments to Bandera.

Most of the monuments to Stepan Bandera were erected in the period 1990-2000, since until that moment the personality of Bandera was prohibited by the communist ideology of the Soviet Union.

The following monuments to Stepan Bandera are currently known:

1991, Kolomyia - monument;

2007, Lvov. Monument;

1998 - Borislav;

2001 - Drohobych;