Stepan Bandera is the organizer and symbol of the Ukrainian national liberation movement. Stepan Andreevich Bandera, biography, life story, creativity, writers, zhzl

Stepan Andreevich Bandera
Ukrainian Stepan Andriyovich Bandera
Date of birth: January 1, 1909
Place of birth: Stary Ugrinov, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary (now Kalush district, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine)
Date of death: October 15, 1959
place of death: Munich, Germany
Citizenship: Poland
Education: Lviv Polytechnic
Nationality: Ukrainian
Religion: Greek Catholicism (UGCC)
Party: OUN → OUN(b)
Main ideas: Ukrainian nationalism

Stepan Andreevich Bandera(Ukrainian Stepan Andriyovich Bandera; January 1, 1909, Stary Ugrinov, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary - October 15, 1959, Munich, Germany) - Ukrainian politician, ideologist and theorist of Ukrainian nationalism. In his youth, he was known under the pseudonyms "Fox", "Stepanko", "Small", "Grey", "Rykh", "Matvey Gordon", as well as some others.

Was born Stepan Bandera in the family of a Greek Catholic priest. Member of the Ukrainian military organization (since 1927) and the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists (since 1929), regional guide [Comm 1] of the OUN in the Western Ukrainian lands (since 1933). The organizer of a number of terrorist acts. In 1934 he was arrested by the Polish authorities and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1936-1939 he served time in Polish prisons, he received his freedom in September 1939 due to the German attack on Poland. For some time he was underground on Soviet territory, after which he went to the West. Since February 1940 - after the split of the OUN - the head of the OUN (b) faction (Bandera movement). In 1941, he headed the Revolutionary Wire of the OUN, created a year earlier. After the German attack on the USSR, he, along with other figures of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, was arrested by the German occupation authorities for attempting to proclaim an independent Ukrainian state and placed in custody, and later sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, from where he was released by the Nazis in September 1944. In 1947 he became the head of the OUN Wire. In 1959 he was killed by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.
Perspectives on personality Stepan Bandera extremely polar. Nowadays, he enjoys great popularity mainly among the inhabitants of Western Ukraine - after the collapse of the USSR for many Western Ukrainians, his name became a symbol of the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. In turn, many residents of Eastern Ukraine, as well as Poland and Russia, have a mostly negative attitude towards him, accusing him of fascism, terrorism, radical nationalism and collaborationism. The concept of "Bandera" in the USSR gradually became a household name and was applied to all Ukrainian nationalists, regardless of their attitude towards Bandera.

Childhood and youth (1909-1927) Stepan Bandera

A family. Early childhood of Stepan Bandera

Stepan Andreevich Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the Galician village of Stary Ugrinov, on the territory of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Andrey Mikhailovich Bandera, was a Greek Catholic clergyman who came from a family of Stryi petty-bourgeois farmers Mikhail and Rosalia Bander. Andrei Mikhailovich's wife, Miroslava Vladimirovna, nee Glodzinskaya, was the daughter of a Greek Catholic priest from Stary Ugrinov Vladimir Glodzinsky and his wife Ekaterina. Stepan was the second child of Andrei and Miroslava after his older sister Martha-Maria (b. 1907). Later, six more children were born in the family: Alexander (b. 1911), Vladimir (b. 1913), Vasily (b. 1915), Oksana (b. 1917), Bogdan (b. 1921) and Miroslava (died in 1922 infant).

Family bander did not have their own housing and lived in a service house that belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. Stepan spent the first years of his life in a large, friendly family, where, as he later recalled, "the atmosphere of Ukrainian patriotism and vibrant national-cultural, political and public interests" reigned. Father Andrei was a staunch Ukrainian nationalist and raised his children in the same spirit. At home, Bander had a large library, and relatives and acquaintances who took an active part in the Ukrainian national life of Galicia often came to visit the head of the family. Among them were Stepan's uncles - Pavel Glodzinsky (one of the founders of the large Ukrainian economic organizations Maslosoyuz and Selsky Gospodar) and Yaroslav Veselovsky (deputy of the Austro-Hungarian parliament), as well as the sculptor Mikhail Gavrilko, well-known at that time, and others. All these people had a significant impact on the future leader of the OUN. Thanks to the activities of Father Andrey and the help of his guests, a reading room of the “Prosveshchenie” society (Ukrainian “Prosvita”) and a circle “Native School” were organized in Stary Ugrinov.
Stepan was an obedient child, never contradicted adults and deeply respected his parents. Brought up in an extremely religious family, the boy was committed to the church and faith in God from an early age, he prayed for a long time in the morning and in the evening. He did not go to elementary school, because these years fell on military time, so his father, while he was at home, took care of the children himself.

In 1914, when Stepan was five years old, the First World War began. The boy repeatedly witnessed the fighting: during the war years, the front line passed through the village of Stary Ugrinov several times: in 1914-1915 and twice in 1917. The last time, heavy fighting in the area of ​​the village lasted two weeks, and the Bander house was partially destroyed, as a result of which, however, no one was killed or even injured. These events made a huge impression on Stepan, but the surge in activity of the Ukrainian national liberation movement (caused by the defeat of Austria-Hungary in the war and its subsequent collapse), which Andriy Bandera also joined, had an even greater impact on the child. Acting as one of the organizers of the uprising in the Kalush district, he was engaged in the formation of armed groups from the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. Later, Stepan's father moved to Stanislav, where he became a deputy of the Ukrainian National Rada - the parliament of the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR), proclaimed on the Ukrainian lands of the former Austria-Hungary - and some time later he entered the service of a chaplain in the Ukrainian Galician Army (UGA) . In the meantime, the mother and children moved to Yagelnitsa near Chortkov, where she settled in the house of Miroslava's brother, father Antonovich, who temporarily replaced the absent father for the children. Here, in June 1919, Miroslava Vladimirovna with her children again found herself at the epicenter of hostilities: as a result of the Chortkovsky offensive and the subsequent defeat of UGA units, almost all men from Stepan's relatives on the maternal side were forced to leave for Zbruch, on the territory of the UNR. Women and children remained in Yagelnitsa, but already in September they returned to Stary Ugrinov (Stepan himself went to his father's parents in Stry). Only a year later, in the summer of 1920, Andrei Bandera returned to Stary Ugrinov. For some time he was hiding from the Polish authorities, who were persecuting Ukrainian activists, but in the autumn he again became a priest in a village church.

Eastern Galicia within Poland
The defeat of the UGA in the war with Poland led to the establishment from July 1919 of the complete occupation of Eastern Galicia by Polish troops. The Council of Ambassadors of the Entente initially recognized for Poland only the right to occupy Eastern Galicia, subject to respect for the rights of the Ukrainian population and the granting of autonomy. Ethnic Ukrainians refused to recognize the Polish government, boycotted the population census and elections to the Sejm. Meanwhile, Poland, taking into account international opinion, declared respect for the rights of minorities and formally enshrined this in its constitution. On March 14, 1923, the Council of Ambassadors of the Entente countries recognized the sovereignty of Poland over Eastern Galicia, having received assurances from the Polish authorities that they would grant autonomy to the region, introduce the Ukrainian language in the administrative bodies and open a Ukrainian university. These conditions were never met.
The Polish government pursued a policy of forced assimilation and Polonization of the Ukrainian population in Galicia, putting political, economic and cultural pressure on it. The Ukrainian language did not have an official status; only Poles could hold positions in local governments. A stream of Polish settlers poured into Galicia, to whom the authorities provided land and housing. Dissatisfaction with such a policy resulted in strikes and a boycott of elections. In the summer of 1930 in Galicia there were over two thousand arsons of the houses of Polish landowners. The reaction was immediate - within one year, two thousand Ukrainians were arrested, suspected of arson.
In 1920, an illegal Ukrainian military organization (UVO) arose in Czechoslovakia, which used armed methods of struggle against the Polish administration in the territory of Galicia. It consisted mainly of veterans of the Ukrainian Galician army and Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. In 1929, on the basis of the UVO, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was created.

Studying at the gymnasium
As mentioned above, in 1919 Stepan Bandera moved to Stry to his father's parents and entered one of the few Ukrainian classical gymnasiums. Initially organized and maintained by the Ukrainian community, over time, this educational institution received the status of a public, state gymnasium. Despite the fact that the ethnic composition of the Stryi gymnasium was almost exclusively Ukrainian, the Polish authorities of the city tried to introduce the “Polish spirit” into the local environment, which often caused protests from teachers and gymnasium students. Stepan studied at the gymnasium for eight years, studied Greek and Latin, history, literature, psychology, logic, and philosophy. “He was short, brown-haired, very poorly dressed,” his classmate Yaroslav Rak recalled about Bandera, a gymnasium student. The need that Stepan really experienced at that time, in the fourth grade at the gymnasium, forced him to give paid lessons to other students.

A dream come true in 1922 Stepan Bandera, which he cherished from the very first days of his studies - he was accepted into the Ukrainian scout organization Plast. Previously, he was denied due to poor health. In Stryi Bandera was a member of the leadership of the Fifth Plast kuren named after Yaroslav Osmomysl, and then, after graduating from high school, was among the leaders of the Second kuren of senior scouts, the Krasnaya Kalina detachment, until the Polish authorities banned Plast in 1930. In the fifth grade, moreover, Bandera joined one of the Ukrainian youth organizations, which was atypical - usually seventh and eighth graders became members of such associations.
His peers later recalled that as a teenager he began to prepare for future trials and hardships, secretly engaged in self-torture and even drove needles under his nails, thus preparing for police torture. Later, while studying at the gymnasium, according to the Soviet journalist V. Belyaev, who could communicate with people who knew Bander family, little Stepan, on a dispute in front of his peers, strangled cats with one hand "to strengthen his will." G. Gordasevich explains this possible episode by the fact that, preparing for the revolutionary struggle, Bandera checked whether he could take the life of a living being. Self-torture, as well as dousing with cold water and standing for many hours in the cold, seriously undermined Stepan's health, provoking rheumatism of the joints - a disease that haunted Bandera throughout his life.
Gymnasium student Stepan Bandera he went in for sports a lot, despite his illness, in his free time he sang in the choir, played the guitar and mandolin, was fond of the game of chess, which was extremely popular at that time, did not smoke or drink alcohol. Bandera's worldview was formed under the influence of nationalist ideas popular among the Western Ukrainian youth of that time: along with other gymnasium students, he joined numerous youth nationalist organizations, the largest of which were the Ukrainian State Youth Group (GUGM) and the Organization of Senior Grades of Ukrainian Gymnasiums (OSKUG), one of the leaders of which was Stepan. In 1926, these two organizations merged into the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth (SUNM).

Youth (1927-1934)
Student years. Getting started in the OUN
Stepan Bandera - plastun kuren "Red viburnum". Photo from 1929 or 1930

In mid-1927, Bandera successfully passed the final exams at the gymnasium and decided to enter the Ukrainian Academy of Economics in Podebrady (Czechoslovakia), but the Polish authorities refused to provide the young man with a passport, and he was forced to stay in Stary Ugrinov for a year. In my native village Stepan Bandera was engaged in housekeeping, cultural and educational work, worked in the “Enlightenment” reading room, led an amateur theater group and choir, oversaw the work of the “Lug” sports society organized by him. He managed to combine all this with underground work along the lines of the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), with the ideas and activities of which Stepan met in the senior classes of the gymnasium, through the mediation of senior comrade Stepan Okhrimovich. Formally, Bandera became a member of the UVO in 1928, having been appointed to the intelligence, and then to the propaganda department.
In September 1928 Stepan Bandera moved to Lviv to study at the agronomic department of the Lviv Polytechnic. Here the young man studied for six years, of which the first two years - in Lvov, the next two - mainly in Dublyany, where the agronomic branch of the Polytechnic was located and most of the seminars and laboratory classes were held, and the last two - again in Lvov. Stepan spent his holidays in the village of Volya-Zaderevatskaya, where his father received a parish. During the period of higher education, Bandera not only continued to engage in underground work in the OUN and the UVO, but also participated in the legal Ukrainian national movement: he was in the society of Ukrainian students of the Lviv Polytechnic "Osnova" and in the circle of village students, for some time he worked in the bureau of the society " Farmer", continued to work closely with the "Enlightenment", on behalf of which he often traveled to the villages of the Lviv region and lectured. Bandera continued to play sports: first in Plast, then in the Ukrainian Student Sports Club (USSK), in the Sokol-Batko and Lug societies, he demonstrated success in athletics, swimming, basketball, skiing. At the same time, he did not study very successfully, he took academic leave several times - the student's studies were largely hampered by the fact that Bandera devoted most of his energy to revolutionary activities. When the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was created in 1929, he became one of its first members in Western Ukraine. In order to join the organization, the young man was forced to go to the trick and ascribe a year to himself, since the OUN was accepted only upon reaching 21 years of age. Lev Shankovsky recalled that Bandera was already “an inveterate nationalist” at that time and enjoyed the great sympathy of Stepan Okhrimovich, who spoke of a young member of the organization: “There will be more people from this Stepanka!” Despite his young age, Bandera quickly took a leadership position in the organization, becoming one of the most influential figures among workers in the field.

October 21, 1928. The General Council of Krasnaya Kalina at the Academic House in Lvov. First from the left in the bottom row - Stepan Okhrimovich, fourth - Yevgeny-Yuliy Pelensky. Second and third from the right in the top row - Yaroslav Rak and Yaroslav Padoh, respectively. Stepan Bandera- in the top row, fourth from the left
Immediately after joining the OUN Stepan Bandera took part in the I conference of the OUN of the Stryi district. Stepan's first assignment in the newly formed organization was the distribution of underground nationalist literature on the territory of his native Kalush district, as well as among Lviv students. At the same time, the young OUN member performed various functions in the propaganda department, from 1930 he began to lead the department of underground publications, later - the technical and publishing department, and from the beginning of 1931 - also the department for delivering underground publications from abroad. In addition, in 1928-1930, Stepan was listed as a correspondent for the underground monthly satirical magazine Pride of the Nation. He signed his articles with the pseudonym "Matvey Gordon". Thanks to Bandera's organizational skills, illegal delivery from abroad of such publications as "Surma", "Awakening the Nation", "Ukrainian Nationalist", as well as the "Bulletin of the regional executive of the OUN in the Western Ukrainian lands (ZUZ)" and the magazine "Yunak ”, printed directly on the territory of Poland. The Polish police made many attempts to uncover the network of distributors, during which Stepan Bandera was repeatedly arrested, but every time he was released a few days after the arrest.

Bandera entered the wire of the regional executive of the OUN at the ZUZ Bandera in 1931, when Ivan Gabrusevich became the regional conductor. Aware of the young man's success in distributing the underground press, Gabrusevich appointed Bandera as an assistant to the propaganda department, having no doubt that he would cope with the tasks set. At the head of the propaganda department, despite the honor, Bandera had a hard time: work in the field of educated and capable people required him to be able to establish contacts with subordinates. In a short time, the future head of the OUN managed to raise the propaganda work in the organization to a high level, while combining leadership over the department with ensuring communication between the foreign leadership and OUN members in the field. From 1931, Bandera kept in touch with foreign countries, where he often traveled in secret ways. His career began to move up rapidly: in 1932, Bandera went to Danzig, where he completed a course at a reconnaissance school, and the very next year, the Wire of Ukrainian Nationalists, led by Yevgeny Konovalets, appointed him to act as regional OUN conductor in Western Ukraine and regional commandant of the combat department OUN-UVO. In total for the period from 1930 to 1933 Stepan Bandera He was arrested five times: in 1930, together with his father, for anti-Polish propaganda, in the summer of 1931, for trying to illegally cross the Polish-Czech border, then again in 1931, this time for involvement in the assassination attempt on the political police brigade commissar in Lvov, E. Chekhov. On March 10, 1932, Bandera was detained in Cieszyn, and on June 2 of the following year, in Tczew.
On December 22, 1932, on the day of the execution of OUN militants Bilas and Danylyshyn in Lvov, Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych organized and carried out a propaganda action: at six o'clock in the evening, at the time of the hanging of the militants, bells rang out in all Ukrainian churches in Lvov.

Stepan Bandera led edge wire

In the conditions of mass famine in Ukraine in 1932-1933, the OUN under the leadership Stepan Bandera organized a series of protests in support of the starving Ukrainians. At the same time, the regional cadres of the OUN launched a wide front against the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Western Ukraine (KPZU), paralyzing its influence in Western Ukrainian lands. On June 3, 1933, the conference of the OUN Wire decided to assassinate the Soviet consul in Lvov. The operation to eliminate the consul, which he personally led Stepan Bandera, partially failed: on the day when the assassin Nikolai Lemik came to the Soviet consulate, the alleged victim was not there, so Lemik decided to shoot the secretary of the consulate A.P. Mailov, who, as it became known at the trial, was part-time secret agent of the OGPU . The Polish authorities sentenced Lemik to life imprisonment. Another action carried out by Bandera's decree was the planting of a bomb by the well-known OUN activist Ekaterina Zaritskaya under the building of the editorial office of the Pratsya newspaper.

To improve the work of all sections of the OUN in Western Ukrainian lands Stepan Bandera decided to restructure the organization. At a conference of OUN members, held in July 1933 in Prague, he proposed to reorganize the UVO into the combat referent of the OUN. This initiative has been approved. Structural changes were especially reflected in the military actions, the leadership of which was entrusted to Bandera. A twenty-four-year-old young man, at the conference he was formally approved as a regional conductor and introduced to the OUN Wire. During the period of Bandera’s activity in this position, changes also occurred in the tactics of anti-Polish armed uprisings: if before that most of them were of an expropriative nature (the so-called “exes”), then under Bandera, the OUN began to increasingly give preference to terrorist acts that were previously used less widely . The young regional conductor paid attention to various aspects of underground activity: simultaneously with the organization of clandestine militant groups, he called for emphasis on attracting the masses to the armed struggle against the Poles, to take a course towards the mass nationalist movement. For the same purpose, Bandera proposed to reorganize personnel and organizational work and ensure its implementation throughout Western Ukraine, and, moreover, not only among students and former military men, but also among the workers and peasants. Through mass actions aimed at awakening the national and political activity of Ukrainians, Bandera managed to significantly expand the activities of the OUN, which covered many circles of Ukrainian society. These actions included memorial services and manifestations dedicated to the memory of the fighters for the independence of Ukraine during the Civil War, the construction of symbolic graves of fallen soldiers, which caused a hostile reaction and active opposition from the Polish authorities. On the initiative of Bandera, other actions were also carried out, including an antimonopoly one, the participants of which refused to buy Polish vodka and tobacco, as well as a school one, during which Ukrainian schoolchildren boycotted everything Polish: state symbols, language, Polish teachers. The last action was held in one day and united, according to one of the Polish newspapers, tens of thousands of children. During the leadership of the edge wire, Bandera carried out an almost complete restructuring of the process of training and education of personnel in the OUN. Since then, studies have been systematically conducted in three directions: ideological and political, military and combat, and in underground practice. In 1934, the activities of the OUN reached its greatest extent in the interwar period. The regional executive of the OUN, under the leadership of Bandera, approved the decision to organize the so-called “green cadres” at the ZUZ - participants in armed partisan resistance to the Polish authorities, but this project was never put into practice.

Warsaw and Lvov trials
The resolution on the murder of the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky, was adopted back in April 1933 at a special conference of the OUN. Ukrainian nationalists considered Peratsky the main implementer of the Polish policy of pacification in Western Ukraine, the author of the plan for the so-called "destruction of Russia", with which the Polish authorities flatly disagreed. Stepan Bandera, at that time, known under the pseudonyms "Baba" and "Fox", was entrusted with the overall leadership of the assassination attempt. The assassination attempt took place on June 15, 1934: at the entrance to a cafe in Warsaw, the minister was killed by a young militant Grigory Matseyko, who managed to escape from the scene of the crime and later fled abroad. The day before the murder, Stepan Bandera and his comrade Bogdan Pidgayny were arrested by the Polish police while trying to cross the Polish-Czech border. Soon, the police recorded contacts between Bandera and Pidgainy with Nikolai Klimishin, who had been previously arrested in Lvov and was suspected of involvement in the assassination attempt on Peratsky. An investigation has begun. For a year and a half, Bandera was kept in solitary confinement, shackled - his hands were freed only during meals.

On November 18, 1935, in Warsaw, at house number 15 on Medova Street, the trial of twelve Ukrainian nationalists began, including Stepan Bandera. At the very first hearing, he called himself a “Ukrainian citizen who is not subject to Polish laws” and refused to testify in Polish, stating that the court is obliged to respect the will of the accused. Bandera's example was followed by the rest of the defendants and even some witnesses. In addition, every session of the court Stepan Bandera and his comrades from the dock began with the words “Glory to Ukraine!”. The process, which went down in history as "Warsaw", lasted almost two months and was widely covered by both the Polish and world press. figure Bandera received the most attention. So, the correspondent of Literaturnye Vedomosti, who called the young man a “crazy student of the Polytechnic,” emphasized that he was looking straight, and not frowningly, and the anonymous journalist of Polskaya Gazeta, in turn, noted Bandera’s tendency to violent gestures. Throughout the process, Bandera behaved boldly and frankly defiantly. Thus, in response to the prosecutor’s remark that the military activities of the OUN contradict the foundations of Christian morality, he placed moral responsibility for the actions of Ukrainian militants on the Polish authorities, who, “trampling on God’s and human laws, enslaved the Ukrainian people and created a situation in which [he] compelled (...) to kill executioners and traitors.” More than once, Bandera was forcibly taken out of the courtroom as soon as the court came to the conclusion that his behavior was beyond the permissible.

Nikolai Klimishin recalled that none of the defendants and lawyers believed that the court would leave Bandera alive, just as “Bandera himself (...) did not hope that his life would continue. But despite this, he was quite calm all the time and was always ready for a very well planned and accurate performance. On January 13, 1936, in accordance with the verdict of the court, Stepan Bandera, along with Nikolai Lebed and Yaroslav Karpinets, was sentenced to death by hanging. The rest of the convicts were limited to prison terms of various lengths. When the verdict was read out, Bandera and Lebed exclaimed: “Let Ukraine live!” Three OUN members were saved from the gallows by an amnesty decree adopted during the process - the execution was replaced by life imprisonment.

During the time when Stepan Bandera were tried in Warsaw; in Lvov, OUN militants killed Ivan Babiy, a professor of philology at Lviv University, and his student Yakov Bachinsky. An examination showed that the victims of this murder and Peratsky were shot with the same revolver. This allowed the Polish authorities to organize another trial over Bandera and a number of his wards, this time in Lviv, in the case of several terrorist attacks committed by the OUN. At the Lvov trial, which began on May 25, 1936, there were already 27 accused, some of whom were among the defendants in the previous trial - OUN leader Nikolai Stsiborsky called the events in Lvov "revenge for Warsaw." The course of the Lvov trial was much calmer than the Warsaw one, mainly due to the fact that the murder of Babiy and Bachinsky produced less resonance than the attempt on Peratsky, and the defendants were allowed to answer in Ukrainian. Here, in Lvov, Bandera spoke openly for the first time as a regional leader of the OUN. Explaining the goals and methods of the organization's struggle against the Bolshevik ideology, he said: "Bolshevism is a system by which Moscow enslaved the Ukrainian nation, destroying the Ukrainian statehood." Bandera also noted that the OUN takes a negative stance towards communism. He did not deny his involvement in the death of Babiy and Bachinsky - they were killed on his personal order for cooperation with the Polish police. In his last speech, Bandera focused on the diversity of the activities of Ukrainian nationalists and criticized the position of the prosecutor, who characterized the OUN as a terrorist organization engaged exclusively in military activities. “He was no longer a young guy,” Nikolai Klimishin wrote about Bandera at the trial in Lvov. “He was the conductor of the revolutionary organization, who (…) knew what he had done and why, (…) knew what to say, what to keep silent about, what to strive for and what to categorically refuse.”
According to the results of the Lviv process Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment (in the aggregate of both trials - seven life sentences).

Stepan Bandera in custody. Exit from prison (1936-1939)

July 2, 1936 Bandera was taken to the prison at No. 37 Rakowiecki Street in Warsaw. Family members and acquaintances sent him money to buy groceries, newspapers, and books. The very next day he was sent to the Sventy Krzyż (Holy Cross) prison near Kielce. From the memoirs of Bandera himself, as well as Nikolai Klimishin, who was serving time in the same prison, the conditions in Sventa Kshizh were bad: there were no beds in the cells - the prisoners slept on the cement floor, lying down on one half of the bedspread, and covered with the other half . The lack of water and the lack of paper led to a deterioration in the hygienic situation in the prison. For breakfast, the prisoners relied on coffee with a spoonful of sugar and a piece of black rye bread, and for lunch, as a rule, wheat porridge.

Upon the arrival of Bandera and other convicts at the Warsaw and Lvov trials, they were quarantined in prison. Bandera was sent to cell No. 14, and then to cell No. 21. Nikolay Lebed, Yaroslav Karpinets, Bogdan Pidgainy, Yevhen Kachmarsky, Grigory Peregiynyak, were imprisoned together with him. For some time, Nikolai Klimishin recalled, they “began to live as a group”: they exchanged literature, shared food equally. Bandera, according to Klimishin's memoirs, suggested that all cellmates who had not completed their studies at universities study hard with the help of older comrades. So, Karpinets "taught" the exact sciences, Klimishin - history and philosophy, Ukrainian and English. It was during the period of imprisonment, having become acquainted with the works of the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism Dmitry Dontsov, that Stepan Bandera came to the conclusion that the OUN was not “revolutionary” enough in its essence, and this must be corrected. In mid-January 1937, the prison regime was tightened, and the acceptance of parcels from relatives of prisoners was temporarily limited. In this regard, Bandera and other members of the OUN organized a 16-day hunger strike to protest against the actions of the prison administration. As a result, the administration made concessions. In addition, Bandera, Klimishin, Karpinets, Lebed and Kachmarsky were placed in cell no. 17.

On April 29, 1937, a meeting was held in Lvov to organize Stepan Bandera's escape from prison. The meeting was chaired by Osip Tyushka, in addition, it was attended by Vasily Medved, Vladimir Bilas and 20 other nationalists who were to take part in the operation to free the regional conductor. It was not possible to carry out the plan, and by June 1937 Stepan Bandera was transferred to a solitary cell - his fellow OUN members were sent to other prisons in Poland. At the end of the same year, before Christmas, he organized a choir, which he himself led. Father Iosif Kladochny, who confessed to Bandera three times a year in prison, recalled that he "always took Holy Communion" when the priest visited him in prison. Thanks to Joseph Kladochny, Bandera maintained constant contact with the outside world and the OUN Wire until the beginning of 1938, when the Polish authorities, considering the Sventa Krzyzh prison not reliable enough, transferred him to the Wronki prison near the city of Poznan. In June 1938, militants Roman Shukhevych and Zenon Kossak developed a detailed plan for the liberation of Bandera. It was assumed that the prison guard, who, for 50 thousand zlotys, entered into an agreement with the OUN, during the night duty, would lead the prisoner out of solitary confinement, placing a “doll” in his place, and hide it in the pantry, which Bandera would only quietly leave at the right time. The operation was canceled at the last minute for an unknown reason - it is assumed that the militants feared that Bandera would be killed in the process of escaping. Various options for the flight of the conductor were considered by his supporters in the future, however, none of them was put into practice, and Bandera learned about these plans only when he was free.

After the plans to release Bandera became known to the Polish authorities, Bandera was transferred to Brest, to a prison located in the Brest Fortress. For a short period of stay in this institution, he managed to hold a hunger strike against the arbitrariness of the Polish prison administration. Due to a combination of circumstances, Bandera avoided being sent to the famous concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya: on September 13, a few days after the German attack on Poland, the prison administration left the city, and soon Bandera, along with the rest of the Ukrainian nationalists - prisoners of the Brest Fortress, was released. Secretly, by country roads, trying to avoid meeting with German, Polish, and also Soviet soldiers, the former prisoner with a small group of supporters went to Lvov. In Volhynia and Galicia, Bandera established contact with the current OUN network - for example, in the city of Sokal, he took part in a meeting of the territorial leaders of the OUN. After analyzing the situation in Western Ukraine, Bandera came to the conclusion that all the activities of the OUN in this territory should have been refocused on the fight against the Bolsheviks. From Sokal, accompanied by a future member of the Bureau of the OUN Wire Dmitry Maevsky, he reached Lvov in a few days.
The Second World War
The split in the OUN. Bandera - leader of the OUN (b)

In Lvov, Stepan Bandera lived for two weeks in an atmosphere of strict secrecy. Despite this, he managed to get in touch with the OUN activists and a number of leading figures of the Ukrainian church movement. Many members of the OUN, including Vladimir Tymchy, the regional guide in Western Ukraine, supported Bandera's plans for the organization's future activities, namely the idea of ​​creating an OUN network throughout the Ukrainian SSR and further revolutionary struggle against the Soviet authorities in Ukraine. Fearing capture by the NKVD, Bandera decided to leave Lviv. In the second half of October 1939, he and his brother Vasily, who had recently returned from Bereza-Kartuzskaya, and four more OUN members crossed the Soviet-German demarcation line along the ring roads and went to Krakow. Here he was actively involved in the activities of the OUN, continuing to defend the idea of ​​its necessary reorganization. Right there, in Krakow, on June 3, 1940, Stepan Bandera married Yaroslav Oparovskaya.

In November 1939, Bandera left for Slovakia for some time to treat rheumatism, which worsened significantly during his imprisonment in Polish prisons. During the two weeks spent in Slovakia, Bandera took part in several meetings of the leading OUN activists, and later, after undergoing treatment, he left for Vienna, where a large foreign center of the organization functioned. After waiting for the arrival of Vladimir Tymchey in Vienna, Bandera agreed with him on a joint trip to Rome to meet with Andrei Melnik, who in August 1939, at the II Great OUN gathering in Italy, was proclaimed the successor of the leader of the organization Yevgeny Konovalets, who was killed in Rotterdam. A split in the OUN was already evident at that time: some of the congress delegates spoke out against the election of Melnik to the highest post, preferring Stepan Bandera.
Andrey Melnik

The points of view of Melnyk and Bandera on the strategy of conducting the liberation struggle of Ukrainians showed serious differences. So, Bandera considered it necessary to rely primarily on his own strength, since, in his opinion, no one was interested in the independence of Ukraine. A possible union with Germany, he and his supporters considered only as temporary. According to Ivan Yovik, Bandera advocated "to put the Germans before the fact - to recognize the Ukrainian Independent State." Melnik, on the contrary, believed that the bet should be placed on Nazi Germany, and in no case should an armed underground be created. The fact that the division of the OUN is inevitable, Bandera understood long before the meeting with Melnik. Almost two months before the last, on February 10, 1940, he convened in Krakow some leaders of the OUN of Galicia and the Carpathians and, declaring himself the legal heir to Konovalets as head of the organization, created the Revolutionary Wire of the OUN. It included the closest associates of Bandera: Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Lenkavsky, Nikolai Lebed, Roman Shukhevych and Vasily Okhrimovich. The meeting of Bandera and Tymchy with Melnik took place on April 5, 1940 in one of the cities in northern Italy. The conversation was held in a raised voice: Melnik rejected the proposal to break ties with Germany and did not agree to remove Yaroslav Baranovsky from a key post in the PUN, whom Bandera's supporters blamed for some of the failures of the OUN. Melnik's intransigence and Bandera's perseverance led to the historical split of the OUN into two factions - the OUN (b) (Bandera) and the OUN (m) (Melnikov's). Representatives of the OUN(b) also called their faction OUN(r) (revolutionary).

In April 1941, the Revolutionary Wire convened the so-called Great Gathering of the OUN, which unanimously elected Stepan Bandera as the conductor of the OUN (b). Back in 1940, predicting an imminent military conflict between the USSR and Nazi Germany, Bandera began preparations for the armed struggle of Ukrainian nationalists against Moscow. The OUN(b) began to carry out organizational work on Ukrainian lands, formed three marching groups, and organized an underground. In Kyiv and Lvov, leading central bodies were appointed for further functioning. “Bandera,” OUN activist Maria Savchin later wrote, “managed in the overwhelming majority to embrace the young element.” The split did not have any specific ideological background - the focus of the conflict was questions of tactics and contradictions between the "land" and emigration. The split legitimized the real state of affairs: two practically autonomous organizations, the discord between which was aggravated by a dispute between “practitioners” and “theoreticians” and acquiring the features of a generational conflict, received final independence.
"Act of the revival of the Ukrainian state"
"Glory to Hitler! Glory to Bandera! ... ”- the inscription on the signboard on the Glinsky Gates of the Zhovkovsky Castle. Summer 1941, before Bandera's arrest

Just before the start of World War II, Bandera initiated the creation of the Ukrainian National Committee to consolidate the struggle of all forces controlled by the OUN (b), as well as the preparation of the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists (also the Squads of Ukrainian Nationalists - DUN) with German troops, whose military personnel in the future formed the core of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army . Consisting mainly of pro-Bandera-minded Ukrainians, the "Legion ..." was divided into two battalions - "Nachtigal" and "Roland". The preparation of this formation took place in Germany - despite the fact that the OUN (b) positioned the "Legion ..." as an instrument of struggle "against Bolshevik Moscow" and for "restoration and protection of an independent conciliar Ukrainian state", this unit was the result of cooperation between the Bandera movement and the Germans . Subsequently, Bandera justified this circumstance by the need to “secure the freedom and position of Ukraine” and wrote that “Ukraine is ready (...) to put its army on the front against Moscow in alliance with Germany, if the latter confirms the state independence of Ukraine and officially considers it an ally.” The leadership of the OUN (b) planned that with the beginning of the Soviet-German conflict, the squads of Ukrainian nationalists would form the basis of an independent national army, while the Germans were counting on the use of Ukrainian formations for sabotage purposes.
Yaroslav Stetsko

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union - the Great Patriotic War began. And already on June 30, the Germans, rapidly advancing to the east, occupied Lvov. Following them, soldiers of the Nachtigal battalion, led by Roman Shukhevych, entered the city. On the same day, on behalf of the leadership of the OUN (b), Yaroslav Stetsko read out the “Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State”, which announced the creation of a “new Ukrainian state on the mother Ukrainian lands”. In the next few days, representatives of the OUN (b) formed an executive body - the Ukrainian State Board (UGP), organized the National Assembly, enlisted the support of the Greek Catholic clergy, including Metropolitan Andrey (Sheptytsky) of Galicia. Bandera during this period was in Krakow, far from the scene.

Despite the fact that the OUN(b), according to Lev Shankovsky, “was ready to cooperate with Hitler’s Germany for the joint struggle against Moscow,” the German leadership reacted extremely negatively to this initiative: an SD team and a Gestapo special group were immediately sent to Lviv to elimination of the "conspiracy" of Ukrainian nationalists. Stetsko, proclaimed chairman of the UGP, and a number of its members were arrested. On July 5, the German authorities invited Stepan Bandera allegedly to negotiations on the case of Germany's non-interference in the sovereign rights of the Ukrainian state, but upon arrival at the meeting place, they arrested him. He was demanded to abandon the "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State." Regarding what followed, the opinions of historians differ: some believe that Bandera refused, after which he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, while others argue that the OUN (b) leader accepted the Germans’ demand and only later, in September of the same year, was subjected to a new arrest and sent to a concentration camp, where he was subsequently kept in good conditions. One way or another, after the events mentioned, Bandera was kept in the German police prison Montelupich in Krakow for a year and a half and only then was transferred to Sachsenhausen.
In a concentration camp
Roman Shukhevych (left) - Commander-in-Chief of the UPA. First half of the 1940s

In Sachsenhausen, Stepan Bandera was kept in solitary confinement in a special block for "political persons" and was under constant police surveillance. Some historians point out that the Germans provided Bandera with special conditions and good allowances. In addition, he was allowed to visit his wife. It is noteworthy that Andrei Melnik was in the concentration camp at the same time. The heads of both factions of the OUN knew that they were being held in the same concentration camp. Moreover, once, when Melnik was taken out for a walk, Bandera managed to inform him of the death of Oleg Olzhych by writing the name of the murdered man on the window glass in his cell with soap and drawing a cross next to it.

Once in a concentration camp, Bandera found himself out of the process of creating the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Volhynia, which began in October 1942. Despite this circumstance, the command and military personnel of the UPA, like many other nationalist formations, associated their struggle with his name. “Some discussions reached the point that the Ukrainian State should be headed by Bandera, and if not, then let there be no Ukraine,” Maksim Skorupsky recalled to the smoking UPA, noting at the same time that it was not “respectable people” who said this, but “only a besotted youth". In official documents and reports, the Germans used the term “Bandera movement” (German: Banderabewegung) for the Ukrainian rebels, and the concepts of “Banderism” and “Bandera” appeared in Soviet terminology. While in prison, through his wife, who came to visit him, Bandera kept in touch with his associates, namely with Roman Shukhevych, a member of the OUN Wire Bureau and the Chief Commander of the UPA, who actually led the OUN (b) in Bandera's absence. Yevgeny Stakhiv, a longtime supporter of her husband, also had contacts with Yaroslava Bandera. However, according to the modern Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak, Bandera for some time opposed the creation of the UPA and "considered it a step aside, called it" sikorshchina ", that is, copying the Polish underground." At the same time, in the 1946 article “On the Problem of Political Consolidation,” Bandera writes that the UPA is the only liberating military force operating with the only revolutionary political force of the OUN, and only thanks to the UPA did the creation of the UGOS become possible.

From August 21 to August 25, 1943, the III Great Gathering of the OUN took place on the territory of the Kozovsky district of the Ternopil region of the Ukrainian SSR. During the Gathering, it was decided to abandon the position of a conductor and create a Wire Bureau, which included Roman Shukhevych, Rostislav Voloshin and Dmitry Maevsky. After the death of the latter, Shukhevych became the sole leader of the Wire. Bandera, who was imprisoned, was not even elected an "Honorary Head", which, according to Vasily Cook, was due to security considerations - this could "accelerate his [Bandera's] physical liquidation." In the meantime, the Germans, seeking to discredit the OUN(b) and the UPA, distributed propaganda "fliers" in Western Ukraine, where they called Bandera "the senior Bolshevik of Soviet Ukraine", appointed by the "red comrade Stalin."

Gradually, the UPA turned into one of the most combat-ready Ukrainian anti-Soviet units. This forced the German leadership to reconsider its attitude towards Ukrainian nationalism. On September 25, 1944, several hundred Ukrainian prisoners were released from Sachsenhausen, including Bandera and Melnyk. After his release, according to Stepan Mudrik Mechnik, Bandera stayed in Berlin for some time. In response to a proposal for cooperation from the Germans, Bandera put forward a condition - to recognize the "Act of Revival ..." and ensure the creation of the Ukrainian army as the armed forces of a separate state, independent of the Third Reich. The German side did not accept the recognition of Ukraine's independence, and thus an agreement with Bandera was not reached. According to another version, set out by the head of the secret Abwehr-2 division, Erwin Stolze, Bandera was nevertheless recruited by the Abwehr and later appeared in the Abwehr file cabinet under the nickname Gray. As for Melnik, he openly agreed to cooperate with the Germans, as a result of which he lost many supporters.
After release

Having rejected the proposal of the German authorities, Bandera did not face new persecution, but found himself in a situation of inaction. He lived in Germany. The status of Bandera was still not defined: his supporters believed that at the OUN Gathering in Krakow in 1940, Stepan Andreyevich was elected head of the Wire for life. Intending to resolve this issue, Bandera made an attempt to organize the IV Gathering of the OUN, but he failed to do this due to the impossibility of the arrival of delegates from Ukraine. “Bandera was interested in everything that happened and is happening in Ukraine, from which he was completely isolated,” recalled Galina Petrenko, an activist in the Ukrainian national movement and the widow of Ivan Klimov-Legends. Shortly after the release of Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, who had previously been the de facto head of the OUN(b), stated that it was difficult for him to lead the OUN and the UPA at the same time, and expressed the opinion that leadership of the organization should be handed over to Bandera again. In February 1945, he convened another conference of the OUN (b), at which he proposed to elect Stepan Bandera as the head of the organization. Shukhevych's initiative was supported: Bandera became the head of the organization, and Yaroslav Stetsko became his deputy.

With the liberation in 1944 of a group of prominent figures of Ukrainian nationalism, including Bandera, also known as the "katsetniks" (from "KTs" - "Concentration camp"), the contradictions that had accumulated between members of the OUN (b) intensified. Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and their supporters stood on the positions of integral nationalism, advocating the return of the organization to the program and system of 1941, as well as the appointment of Bandera as a conductor not only of the Foreign Parts (ZCH) of the OUN, but also of the OUN in Ukraine. Some of the “katsetniks”, among whom were Lev Rebet, Volodymyr Stakhiv and Yaroslav Klim, did not support this idea, siding with the “kraeviks” - representatives of the OUN who acted directly in the Ukrainian territories and opposed Bandera leading the entire nationalist movement. "Local activists", among whom were representatives of the Ukrainian Main Liberation Council (UGOS) - "the body of political leadership of the Ukrainian liberation movement", accused Bandera and his supporters of dogmatism and unwillingness to soberly assess the situation. Those, in turn, reproached the "local activists" for departing from the purity of the ideas of Ukrainian nationalism.

In February 1946, speaking on behalf of the Ukrainian SSR at a session of the UN General Assembly in London, the Soviet Ukrainian poet Nikolai Bazhan demanded that the West extradite many Ukrainian nationalists, primarily Stepan Bandera, calling him a "criminal against humanity." In the same year, realizing that it was impossible to wage an anti-Bolshevik struggle with the help of Ukrainian nationalists alone, Bandera initiated the organizational formation of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Peoples (ABN) formed back in 1943, the coordinating center of anti-communist political organizations of emigrants from the USSR and other countries of the Socialist camp. Yaroslav Stetsko, Bandera's closest associate, became the head of the ABN.

From August 28 to August 31, 1948, the Extraordinary Conference of the ZCH OUN was held in Mittenwald. Bandera, who was present at it, took the initiative to go to Ukraine in order to personally take part in underground work, but the "local activists" present objected to this idea - even quoting Roman Shukhevych's letters, in which he called Bandera the conductor of the entire OUN, did not help. During the conference, Bandera and his supporters unilaterally deprived the mandates of the delegates-"kraeviks" and handed them over to the representatives of the OUN ZCH, which was notified to the regional Wire, but the leadership of the Wire did not accept this circumstance and provided its delegates with new mandates. This only increased the differences among the members of the OUN (b). As a result, the conference ended with the withdrawal of Bandera from the Board of Commissioners - the body whose members were to collectively lead the ZCH OUN.
Last years

Stepan Bandera in the last years of his life
Image-silk.png With his wife Yaroslava on vacation
Image-silk.png With son Andrey and daughter Lesya
Image-silk.png With Yaroslav Stetsko, daughter and unknown in the mountains

In exile, Bandera's life was not easy. “Bandera lived in a very small room,” recalled Yaroslava Stetsko. - They had two rooms and a kitchen, but still there were five people. But it was very clean." The difficult financial situation and health problems were aggravated by the political atmosphere in which he was forced to act: back in 1946, an internal split was ripening in the OUN (b), initiated by the young "reformists" Zinovy ​​​​Matla and Lev Rebet. On February 1, 1954, at the next conference of the ZCH OUN, this split took shape de facto. This is how the third OUN appeared - "abroad" (OUN (z)).

From the second half of the 1940s, Bandera cooperated with the British intelligence services and, according to some reports, even helped them in finding and preparing spies to be sent to the USSR. The department of British intelligence that worked against the USSR was led by Kim Philby, who at the same time was an agent of Soviet intelligence. It is noteworthy that in 1946-1947, until the formation of Bizonia, Bandera was hunted by the military police on the territory of the American zone of occupation in Germany, in connection with which he had to hide, live in an illegal position. Only by the beginning of the 1950s, Stepan Bandera settled in Munich and began to lead an almost legal existence. In 1954, his wife and children joined him. By this time, the Americans left Bandera alone, while the agents of the Soviet secret services did not abandon attempts to eliminate him. To prevent possible assassination attempts, the Security Council of the OUN (b) assigned its leader enhanced security, which, in cooperation with the German criminal police, managed to thwart several attempts to assassinate Bandera. So, in 1947, the Security Council of the OUN (b) uncovered and prevented an attempt on Bandera by Yaroslav Moroz, recruited by the Kyiv MGB, and in 1948, exposed another MGB agent, Vladimir Stelmashchuk, who arrived in Munich on the instructions of the Warsaw department of the MGB. In the fall of 1952, another assassination attempt on the leader of the OUN (b), which was to be carried out by MGB agents - the Germans Leguda and Leman, was thwarted thanks to the actions of Western intelligence agencies that transmitted information about the impending murder to the German police, and a year later another assassination attempt was made by Stepan Liebgolts , was again prevented by the Security Council of the OUN (b). Finally, in 1959, the German criminal police arrested a man named Vincik, who appeared several times in Munich and was interested in the children of Stepan Bandera.

In the same year, 1959, the Security Council of the OUN (b) found out that a new attempt on Bandera had already been prepared and could take place at any time. The leadership of the OUN(b) came to the conclusion that the leader of the organization needed to leave Munich at least temporarily. At first, Bandera refused to leave the city, but in the end he nevertheless went to the persuasion of his supporters. The organization of Bandera's departure was taken up by the head of intelligence of the ZCH OUN Stepan Mudrik-"Swordsman".
Doom
Main article: Assassination of Stepan Bandera

On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was about to go home for dinner. Before that, he drove to the market, accompanied by a secretary, where he made some purchases, and went home alone. Bodyguards joined him near the house. Bandera left his car in the garage, opened the door with a key at the entrance of the house number 7 on Kraittmayrstrasse, where he lived with his family, and went inside. Here, the KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky was waiting for him, who had been watching the future victim since January. The murder weapon - a pistol-syringe with potassium cyanide - he hid in a newspaper rolled up into a tube. Two years before the assassination attempt on Bandera, using a similar device, Stashinsky liquidated Lev Rebet here in Munich. Always cautious and vigilant, that day Stepan Bandera released the bodyguards before entering the entrance, and they left. Having risen to the third floor, the leader of the OUN (b) recognized Stashinsky - in the morning of the same day he saw him in the church (the future killer carefully watched Bandera for several days). To the question "What are you doing here?" the stranger stretched out his hand with a roll of newspaper forward and shot in the face. The pop that rang out as a result of the shot was barely audible - the attention of the neighbors was attracted by the cry of Bandera, who, under the influence of cyanide, slowly settled and collapsed onto the steps. By the time the neighbors looked out of their apartments, Stashinsky had already left the crime scene. This happened at approximately 13:50.

According to neighbors, Bandera, whom they knew under the fictitious name of Stepan Popel, lying on the floor, was covered in blood and probably still alive. One way or another, on the way to the hospital, the leader of the OUN(b) died without regaining consciousness. The primary diagnosis was a fracture at the base of the skull as a result of a fall. Considering the possible causes of the fall, the doctors settled on heart paralysis. The intervention of law enforcement agencies helped to establish the real cause of Bandera's death - during the examination, the doctor found a holster with a revolver in the dead man (he always had a weapon with him), which he immediately reported to the criminal police. The examination showed that Bandera's death was due to cyanide poisoning.
Images.png External images
Image-silk.png Stepan Bandera in the coffin
Cemetery Waldfriedhof. Modern look

October 20, 1959 at 9 o'clock in the morning in the Munich church of St. John the Baptist on Kirchenstrasse, a funeral service for Stepan Bandera began, which was celebrated by the rector of the church, Pyotr Golinsky, in the presence of Exarch Cyrus-Platon Kornilyak; and at 3 pm on the same day, the funeral of the deceased took place at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich. On the day of the funeral, both in the church and in the cemetery, many people gathered, including delegations from different parts of the world. In the presence of thousands of people, the coffin with the body of Bandera was lowered into the grave, covered with earth brought from Ukraine and sprinkled with water from the Black Sea. 250 wreaths were laid on the grave of the OUN(b) leader. Both representatives of the Ukrainian diaspora and foreigners spoke here: ex-chairman of the Turkestan National Committee Veli Kayum Khan, member of the Central Committee of the ABN Bulgarian Dmytro Valchev, representatives of the Romanian and Hungarian anti-communist movements Ion Emilian and Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak, member of the Slovak Liberation Committee Chtibor Pokorny, representative of the Union of United Croats Koleman Bilic, secretary of the Anglo-Ukrainian Association in London Vera Rich. The Ukrainian national movement was represented by OUN veterans Yaroslav Stetsko and Mikhail Kravtsiv, writers Ivan Bagryany and Theodosius Osmachka, professors Alexander Ogloblin and Ivan Vovchuk, former UPA commander Mykola Friz, Metropolitan of the UAOC in the Diaspora Nikanor (Abramovich), General Mykola Kapustyansky, and Dmitry Dontsov, Nikolai Livitsky and many others. One of the German newspapers covering the events of October 20 wrote that at the cemetery “it looked as if there was no quarrel between Ukrainian emigrants at all.”

Bogdan Stashinsky was subsequently arrested by German law enforcement and pleaded guilty to the deaths of Rebet and Bandera. On October 8, 1962, a high-profile trial began against him in Karlsruhe, as a result of which the KGB agent was sentenced to eight years of strict imprisonment. After serving time, the killer of Stepan Bandera disappeared in an unknown direction.
A family
Andrey Mikhailovich Bandera

Father - Andrey Mikhailovich Bandera (1882-1941) - Ukrainian religious and political figure, priest of the UGCC in the villages of Stary Ugrinov (1913-1919), Berezhnitsa (1920-1933), Will Zaderevatskaya (1933-1937) and Trostyantsy (1937-1941) . Collaborated with the magazine "Young Ukraine", in 1918 he took part in the establishment of Ukrainian power and the formation of peasant armed groups on the territory of the Kalush district. Member of the Ukrainian National Rada of the ZUNR in Stanislavov. In 1919 he served as a chaplain in the 9th Regiment of the 3rd Berezhany Brigade of the 2nd Corps of the UGA. In the 1920s - 1930s - a member of the UVO, was arrested twice along with his son Stepan. On May 22, 1941, he was arrested by the NKVD and taken to Kyiv, where on July 8 of the same year he was sentenced to death. On February 8, 1992, he was rehabilitated by the Prosecutor's Office of Ukraine. Lev Shankovsky called Bandera's father "an unforgettable (...) revolutionary in a cassock, who passed on to his son all his ardent love for the Ukrainian people and the cause of their liberation."
Mother - Miroslava Vladimirovna Bandera, nee. Glodzinskaya (1890-1922) - daughter of priest Vladimir Glodzinsky. She died in the spring of 1922 from tuberculosis - at that time Stepan was already living with his grandfather and studying at the Stryi gymnasium.
Brothers:
Alexander Andreevich Bandera (1911-1942) - member of the OUN since 1933, doctor of economic sciences. He graduated from the Stryi Gymnasium and the Faculty of Agronomy of the Lviv Polytechnic. For a long time he lived and worked in Italy, married an Italian. After the proclamation of the Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State, he arrived in Lvov, where he was arrested by the Gestapo. He was held in the prisons of Lviv and Krakow, on July 22, 1942 he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he died under unclear circumstances (according to the most common version, he was killed by Volksdeutsche Poles, members of the Auschwitz staff).
Vasily Andreevich Bandera (1915-1942) - OUN leader. He graduated from the Stryi Gymnasium, the Faculty of Agronomy of the Lviv Polytechnic and the Faculty of Philosophy of the Lviv University. In 1937-1939 he was a member of the Lvov regional branch of the OUN. For some time he was in a concentration camp in Bereza-Kartuzskaya. Participated in the 2nd Great Gathering of the OUN. After the proclamation of the Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State, he became a referent for the Security Council of the Stanislav regional wire of the OUN. On September 15, 1941, he was arrested by the Gestapo. He was held in the prisons of Stanislavov and Lvov, in the Montelupih prison in Krakow. On July 20, 1942, he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He died under the same circumstances as Alexander Bandera.
Bogdan Andreyevich Bandera (1921-194?) - member of the OUN. He studied at the Stryi, Rogatin, Kholm (illegal) gymnasiums. From November 1939 he was in hiding. In June 1941, he took part in the announcement of the Act of Revival of the Ukrainian State in Kalush. During the Second World War, he was a member of the OUN marching groups to the south-west of Ukraine (Vinnitsa, Odessa, Kherson, Dnepropetrovsk). According to one version, he led the Kherson regional wire of the OUN. The date and place of Bogdan's death are not known for certain: there is an assumption that he was killed by the German invaders in Kherson in 1943; according to other sources, Bandera's brother died a year later.

The Bander family in Wola Zaderevatska. From left to right. Sitting: Andrey Bandera, Daria Pishchinskaya, Rosalia Bandera (paternal grandmother). Standing: Martha-Maria, Fyodor Davidyuk, Vladimir, Bogdan, Stepan, Oksana. Photo from 1933

Sisters:
Marta-Maria Andreevna Bandera (1907-1982) - member of the OUN since 1936, teacher. Graduate of the Stryi teacher's seminary. On May 22, 1941, without trial or investigation, she was transferred to Siberia. In 1960, she was removed from the special settlement, but Bandera's sister was not allowed to return to Ukraine. In 1990, eight years after the death of Martha Maria, her remains were transported to Lviv, and then reburied at the cemetery in Stary Uhryniv.
Vladimira Andreevna Bandera-Davidyuk (1913-2001) - Bandera's middle sister. After her mother's death, she was brought up by her aunt Ekaterina. Graduated from Stryi High School. In 1933, she married priest Fyodor Davidyuk, accompanied him to his place of service in the villages of Western Ukraine, and gave birth to six children. In 1946, together with her husband, she was arrested and later sentenced to ten years in camps and five years in prison with confiscation of property. She served her term in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, then in the Kazakh SSR. In 1956 she was released, in June of the same year she returned to Ukraine, settling with one of her daughters. In 1995 she moved to Stry to her sister Oksana, with whom she lived until her death in 2001.
Oksana Andreevna Bandera (1917-2008) - Bandera's younger sister. After the death of her mother, she was brought up by her aunt Lyudmila. Graduated from Stryi High School. Worked as a teacher. On the night of May 22-23, she was arrested along with her sister Marta-Maria and transferred to Siberia. In 1960, she was removed from the special settlement. After a long break, she arrived in Ukraine, in Lvov, on July 5, 1989. Since 1995 - an honorary citizen of the city of Stryi, where she lived until her death. By decree of the President of Ukraine dated January 20, 2005, she was awarded the Order of Princess Olga III degree.
Wife - Yaroslav Vasilievna Bandera, nee. Oparovskaya (1907-1977) - member of the OUN since 1936. The daughter of a priest, chaplain of the UGA Vasily Oparovsky, who died in battle with the Poles. She graduated from the Kolomyia gymnasium, was a student of the agronomic faculty of the Lviv Polytechnic. In 1939, she was in a Polish prison for some time. During the years of Bandera's stay in the concentration camp, she served as a link between him and the OUN. Shortly after the death of her husband, in the fall of 1960, she moved with her children to Toronto, where she worked in various Ukrainian organizations. She died and was buried in Toronto.
Children:
Natalya Stepanovna Bandera (1941-1985), married Kutsan. Studied at the Universities of Toronto, Paris and Geneva. She married Andrey Kutsan. She had two children: Sofia (b. 1972) and Orest (b. 1975).
Andrey Stepanovich Bandera (1946-1984). Member of a number of Ukrainian organizations in Canada. In 1976-1984 - editor of the English-language supplement "Ukrainian Echo" to the newspaper "Gomon Ukraine". Organizer of a mass demonstration in front of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa in 1973. He was married to Maria, nee. Fedorii. The marriage produced a son Stepan (b. 1970) and daughters Bogdan (b. 1974) and Elena (b. 1977).
Lesya Stepanovna Bandera (1947-2011). Graduated from the University of Toronto. She worked as a translator for Ukrainian organizations in Canada, was fluent in Ukrainian, English and German. She had no children. She lived in Toronto until her death.

Bandera raised his children in the same spirit in which he himself was brought up. His eldest daughter Natalya was a member of Plast, his son Andrei and the youngest daughter Lesya were members of the Union of Ukrainian Youth (SUM). Often coming to the SUM youth camp, where his daughters and son were, the head of the OUN asked the educators to treat his children the same way as the rest. According to Yaroslava Stetsko, Bandera loved his children very much. The son and daughters of Stepan Bandera learned their real surname only after the death of their father. Prior to that, Stetsko wrote, "they went to school and thought they were singing, not Bandera."
Personality. Ratings

According to the Ukrainian philosopher and writer Pyotr Kralyuk, there is still no scientific biography of Bandera, and there are very few "valuable, non-party-affiliated publications". “The problem is that in Ukraine there is no serious and recognized biography of Bandera,” said Andreas Umland, Associate Professor of the Department of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. - Most of the literature on Ukrainian nationalism is written by Ukrainian nationalists. In turn, there is not enough research on people who are not drawn into this ideology.” Other claims to the authors of biographical works about Bandera are made by a modern historian, head of the academic council of the Ukrainian "Center for Research on the Liberation Movement" Vladimir Vyatrovich. He finds it wrong that most of these authors "retell the main facts of his life", instead of showing "the courage to draw a conclusion from these facts" and "call the hero a hero".

According to contemporaries, Bandera was a well-read man - he preferred historical literature and memoirs of political figures, including foreign ones - German, Polish, as well as technical journals. In addition, he had the ability to expressively and convincingly speak, but at the same time he knew how to listen to the interlocutor, while not interrupting him. With a good sense of humor, he was especially fond of hearing someone tell funny stories. Bandera had, according to Bogdan Kazanovsky, who knew him, a phenomenal memory: he had a wide range of interests, tried to lead an active lifestyle and had a complete understanding of everything that interested him. “He knew how to be a good friend and a good boss,” recalled Nikolai Klimishin. Among the members of the OUN, Bandera preferred the active, capable and hardworking, paying secondary attention to the level of education of a person - therefore, before appointing someone to a leadership position in the organization, he tried not to rush, especially if he was not personally acquainted with the candidates. The leader of the OUN was distinguished by high organizational skills, developed intuition, foresight - Vasily Kuk called "undoubted" "the fact that the OUN under his [Bandera's] leadership has become a powerful political and militant revolutionary force." Yaroslava Stetsko recalled that Bandera was a staunch disinterested man: “I can’t imagine that he had, for example, money, but his friends didn’t.”

According to historian Petr Balei, Bandera "was ready to accept death three times on the scaffold" and wanted to see the same willingness "in every Ukrainian." A friend of Bandera's youth, a member of the OUN Grigory Melnik called him "a man who completely devoted his entire essence to the service of the common and national cause." A deeply religious Greek Catholic, he nevertheless never showed hostility towards the Orthodox Church. “He, Stepan Bandera, was very pious,” Yaroslav Stetsko wrote about him. Vasily Kuk noted that Bandera always believed in himself, "and this faith worked wonders." According to Yaroslava Stetsko, he was not a pessimist and really looked at things, he could find a way out of any situation.

The former head of the Security Council of the OUN and ally of Bandera Miron Matvieyko, in his manuscript submitted to the Soviet investigation in August 1951, wrote: "Bandera's moral character is very low." It follows from Matvieyko's testimony that Bandera beat his wife and was a "womanizer", distinguished by greed ("literally shaking over money") and pettiness, was unfair to others and used the OUN "exclusively for his own purposes." However, according to some historians, Matvieyko's words cannot be trusted. Thus, Professor Yuri Shapoval expressed his conviction that the former head of the OUN Security Council was forced to denigrate Bandera under "frontal pressure" from the Soviet special services, and the author of the book "Stepan Bandera: Myths, Legends, Reality" Ruslan Chasty even suggested that on behalf of Matvieyko this was done by Soviet publicists.

Professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences Anatoly Tchaikovsky noted in an interview that Bandera always "possessed extraordinary leadership ambitions." The historian Pyotr Balei, who knew him, also wrote about this feature of Bandera, and the OUN leader Dmitry Paliev called Bandera “a freshman who dreams of becoming a leader-dictator.” Indeed, according to the historian, Professor Georgy Kasyanov, the cult of personality of Bandera as a leader was established in the OUN (b). Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolze, who was in charge of military intelligence for working among Ukrainian nationalists, characterized Stepan Bandera as a "careerist, fanatic and bandit", contrasting him with the "calm, intelligent" Melnik. Bandera's man is also described as "very stubborn and reckless in carrying out his plans and intentions" in the above-mentioned manuscript by Matvieyko. Vladimir Vyatrovich, in turn, recognizes the obviousness that Bandera was an ambitious person, because he “believed in the decisive role of strong-willed personalities in history” and “prepared himself for a great mission from childhood,” but at the same time he was not an authoritarian leader. On the basis of Bandera's documents and personal letters, Vyatrovich concludes that he advocated the unification of representatives of various political forces in the ranks of Ukrainian nationalists, was guided by the majority principle, and was a supporter of democratic tendencies in the OUN program.

Many historians, such as Professor Anatoly Tchaikovsky, Hamburg-based researcher Grzegorz Rossolinsky-Libe, and Hungarian historian Borbala Obrushansky, consider Stepan Bandera to be a supporter of fascism. The well-known American historian, Yale University professor Timothy Snyder called Bandera a "fascist hero" and an adherent of the "idea of ​​fascist Ukraine." “The assertion (...) that Bandera is a fascist attracts scandalous attention,” at the same time, historian Vladislav Grinevich notes. - But if you approach the issue scientifically, then fascism is one thing, integral nationalism, to which Bandera belongs, is another, German national socialism is completely different. And lumping everyone together is wrong.” Modern Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak called Bandera a romantic who grew up in the shadow of war and revolution and dreamed of revolution. “Bandera wanted just such nationalism: on the one hand, xenophobic, aggressive, radical, and on the other, romantic, heroic, beautiful,” Hrytsak shared in an interview with one of the Polish newspapers. “His main idea was a national revolution, a national upsurge.”

According to the modern Ukrainian historian and journalist Danila Yanevsky, Bandera did not play the leading role attributed to him later in the nationalist underground and was "simply artificially pulled into the Ukrainian national movement." Referring to some documents, he drew attention to the fact that the Ukrainian rebels called themselves not "Bandera", but "rebels", "our guys."
Title of Hero of Ukraine
Postage stamp with a portrait of Stepan Bandera, issued in 2009, on the centenary of his birth
Banner "Bandera is our hero" at the football match "Karpaty" (Lviv) - "Shakhtar" (Donetsk)

On January 20, 2010, shortly before the end of his presidential term, President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko issued a decree number 46/2010, according to which Stepan Bandera was posthumously awarded the highest degree of distinction of Ukraine - the title of Hero of Ukraine, with the wording "for the invincibility of the spirit in upholding national idea, heroism and self-sacrifice in the struggle for an independent Ukrainian state. From himself, Yushchenko added that, in his opinion, millions of Ukrainians had been waiting for this event for many years. The audience in the hall, before which the head of state announced the decision, greeted Yushchenko's words with a standing ovation. Stepan, the grandson of Bandera, received the award from the hands of the president.

The assignment of the title of Hero of Ukraine to Bandera caused a mixed reaction and produced a wide public outcry both in Ukraine and abroad. On February 17, 2010, MEPs officially deplored the awarding of the Hero of Ukraine title to Bandera and called on newly elected President Viktor Yanukovych to reconsider Yushchenko's actions. Yanukovych responded by promising to make an appropriate decision by Victory Day, and called Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine "resonant". Many representatives of the Ukrainian public noted the fallacy of the idea of ​​awarding a heroic title to Bandera by Yushchenko "before the end" of the presidential term. According to historian Timothy Snyder, the awarding of Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine "cast a shadow" on Yushchenko's political career.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned the awarding of Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine. In a letter to Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States Oleg Shamshur, the representative of this organization, Mark Weizmann, expressed "deep disgust" in connection with the "shameful" awarding of Bandera, whom he accused of collaborating with the Nazis. A number of Ukrainian scientists and cultural figures, including historians Vladislav Grinevich and Serhiy Gmyria, spoke out against awarding Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine, arguing that he had never been a citizen of Ukraine.

On April 2, 2010, the Donetsk District Court declared Yushchenko's decree on conferring the title of Hero of Ukraine to Bandera illegal, formally referring to the fact that Bandera was not a citizen of Ukraine (according to the law, only a Ukrainian citizen can become a Hero of Ukraine). The court's decision resulted in both support and numerous protests in Ukrainian society. Yulia Tymoshenko, commenting on the cancellation of the decree on awarding Bandera the title of Hero, accused the current authorities of "repressions (...) of the real heroes of Ukraine." Representatives of the Ukrainian associations of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Germany, Ukrainian politicians Irina Farion, Oleg Tyahnybok, Taras Stetskyv, Serhiy Sobolev, as well as former President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk expressed their indignation at the cancellation of the decree. Another ex-president of the country, Leonid Kuchma, on the contrary, said that for him the question of Bandera's heroism does not exist.

The decision of the Donetsk District Court was also negatively perceived by Viktor Yushchenko. On April 12, he appealed against the decision of the Donetsk District Administrative Court, which, in his opinion, did not meet the requirements of the current legislation of Ukraine. On June 23 of the same year, 2010, the Donetsk Administrative Court of Appeal left the decision of the Donetsk District Administrative Court regarding the deprivation of Bandera of the title of Hero of Ukraine unchanged. The decision of the court of appeal could be appealed within a month to the Supreme Court of Ukraine, which was not done. A year later, on August 2, 2011, the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine finally upheld the decision of the Donetsk District Administrative Court dated April 2, 2010, rejecting the cassation complaints of a number of Ukrainian citizens, including representatives of the VO "Svoboda", Viktor Yushchenko, Bandera's grandson Stepan and others.
Memory
Monuments and museums
Main article: Monuments to Stepan Bandera

As of September 2012, monuments to Stepan Bandera can be found on the territory of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil regions of Ukraine. On the territory of the Ivano-Frankivsk region, monuments to Stepan Bandera were erected in Ivano-Frankivsk (January 1, 2009; on the centenary of Bandera), Kolomyia (August 18, 1991), Gorodenka (November 30, 2008), the villages of Stary Ugrinov (October 14, 1990), Sredny Berezov ( January 9, 2009), Grabovka (October 12, 2008), Nikitintsy (August 27, 2007) and Uzin (October 7, 2007). It is noteworthy that the monument to Bandera in his homeland, in Stary Ugrinov, was blown up twice by unknown people - for the first time the monument was blown up on December 30, 1990, on June 30, 1991 it was opened almost unchanged at the same place, and on July 10 of the same year the monument was destroyed again. On August 17, 1992, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the creation of the UPA, the monument was finally restored.

The first monument to Stepan Bandera in the Lviv region was erected in 1992 in Stryi, near the gymnasium where he studied. In addition, there are monuments to Bandera in Lviv (October 13, 2007), Borislav (October 19, 1997), Drohobych (October 14, 2001), Sambor (November 21, 2011), Stary Sambor (November 30, 2008), Dublyany (October 5, 2002), Truskavets (October 19, 2010) and a number of other settlements. In the Ternopil region, a monument to Bandera can be found in the regional center, as well as in Zalishchyky (October 15, 2006), Buchach (October 15, 2007), Terebovlya (1999), Kremenets (August 24, 2011), in the villages of Kozovka (1992; the first in the region) , Verbov (2003), Strusov (2009) and in several other settlements.
Monuments to Stepan Bandera
Monument in Lviv
Monument in Ternopil
Bust in Berezhany
Monument in Stryi

The first museum of Stepan Bandera in history, now known as the Historical and Memorial Museum, began operating in 1992 in his homeland, in Stary Ugrinov. Another Bandera museum was opened on January 4, 1999 in Dublyany, where he lived and studied for some time. In Wola-Zaderevatskaya, where Bandera and his family lived in 1933-1936, now there is his museum-estate. On October 14, 2008, the Stepan Bandera Museum was opened in Yagelnitsa, and on January 1, 2010, the Bandera Family Museum appeared in Stryi. In addition, the Bandera Museum of the Liberation Struggle is located in London, a significant part of the exposition of which is dedicated to the leader of the OUN.
Other
Stepan Bandera Street in Lviv at the intersection with Karpinsky and Konovalets streets

As of 2012, Stepan Bandera is an honorary citizen of Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Kolomyia, Dolyna, Lutsk, Chervonograd, Terebovlya, Truskavets, Radekhov, Sokal, Borislav, Stebnik, Zhovkva, Skole, Berezhan, Brod, Stryi, Morshyn. On March 16, 2010, Bandera was awarded the title of honorary citizen of Khust, but on April 20, 2011, the Khust District Court overturned the decision to award the title.

There are streets named after Stepan Bandera in Lvov (since 1991; former Mira), Ivano-Frankivsk (since 1991; former Kuibyshev), Kolomyia (since 1991; former Pervomaiskaya) and other cities. In Ternopil there is Stepan Bandera Avenue (former Lenin Street). Since March 2012, the name of Bandera has been a prize established by the Lviv Regional Council.

Even during the life of Stepan Bandera, among the military personnel of the UPA, songs where he was mentioned were in circulation. The cornet of the UPA Ivan Yovik wrote in his diary about the insurgent song, which included the lines: “Bandera will show us the way to freedom, // By order of yoga we will become like“ stіy ””, and Maksim Skorupsky recalled that the Streltsy repertoire included the song “Oh for the sun to go down behind the sun ... Bandera will lead us to fight, ”dedicated to Bandera. The Dutch writer Rogier van Arde wrote the novel "Attempt" about the murder of Stepan Bandera, and the Ukrainian director Alexander Yanchuk made the film "Atentate: Autumn Murder in Munich", which was released in 1995. The role of Bandera in "Atentate ..." was played by actor Yaroslav Muka. Five years later, he also played the leader of the OUN in Yanchuk's new film "Unbowed". In literature, Stepan Bandera appears in such novels as The Third Map by Yulian Semyonov and The Strong and the Lonely by Pyotr Kralyuk.

Ukrainian nationalist organizations annually celebrate January 1 - the birthday of Stepan Bandera. On January 1, 2013, a torchlight march in Kyiv, organized by the VO "Svoboda", gathered more than 3,000 participants. Similar events were held in other cities of Ukraine.

In 2008, historian Yaroslav Hrytsak noted that Bandera has a "far from unambiguous image" in Ukraine, and his figure is popular mainly in the west of the country. However, in the same 2008, Stepan Bandera took 3rd place (16.12% of the vote) in the TV project Great Ukrainians, losing only to Yaroslav the Wise and Nikolai Amosov. In subsequent years, the cult of Bandera significantly spread to the East of Ukraine, which, according to Hrytsak, shows the trend of recent years - the growth of Russian-speaking Ukrainian nationalism. However, according to a number of researchers, Bandera remains the historical figure who most deeply and consistently divides Ukrainians into two camps, and the fact that the split line has shifted to the east does not make this split smaller and, moreover, does not lead to its disappearance.

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

In 1943, the 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 the Ukrainian nationalists, who acted under the leadership of Stepan Bendera (Bandera and other nicknames).

Gauleiter of Ukraine Erich Koch after the Second World War, the death penalty on the initiative of Stalin was commuted to life imprisonment (He died at 90 years old (1986). 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 the counterintelligence of the USSR was declassified recently. Stalin guaranteed Koch's life and kept his promise...
After Stalin's death, Koch admitted that “I saved Stalin by warning him of 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 follow the orders of the Nazi elite. I did not share the ideology of the NSDLP…”.
Further there are inserts (translated from English) from Koch's memoirs concerning Bender.

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" - (UVV) from "Eastern Ukrainians", mostly prisoners of war.
In 1944, the OUN and the 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 autumn of 1944, the Germans released S. Bendera and Ya. Stetsko with a group of previously detained OUN leaders. The German press published numerous articles about the successes of the UPA in the fight against the Bolsheviks, calling the members of the UPA "Ukrainian freedom fighters."

In the postwar period, members of the OUN(b) tried to deny their involvement in the massacres and cooperation with the Germans, some documents were even falsified.

By its cruelty, Bender / Bandera can be put on a par with the most bloodthirsty tyrants. If, by an evil 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 the Bandera gangs, the purpose of which was to spread their influence deep into the Soviet territories, would have been successful - conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and mobilization into their ranks of the 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, was also 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 vibrant national-cultural, political and public interests. There was a large library at home, and active participants in the Ukrainian national life of Galicia often gathered ...

Stepan Bandera began his "revolutionary" path in 1922, joining the Ukrainian scout organization "Plast", and in 1928 - in the revolutionary Ukrainian military organization (UVO). In 1929, he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) created by Yevgeny Konovalts 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 destroyed.

At this time, the OUN established close contacts with German foreign intelligence, the headquarters of the organization was located in Berlin, at 11 Hauptstrasse, under the sign "Union of Ukrainian Elders in Germany." BANDERA HAS BEEN TRAINED AT THE INTELLIGENCE SCHOOL IN DANZIG.

From 1932 to 1933, Bandera was deputy head of the regional executive (leadership) of the OUN, organized the robberies of mail 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 Alexei Maylov was killed in Lvov. Interestingly, not long before this, a former resident of German intelligence in Poland, Major Knauer, showed up in the OUN. According to Polish intelligence, on the eve of the murder, the OUN received 40,000 Reichsmarks from the Abwehr (the military intelligence and counterintelligence agency of Nazi Germany).

With the coming to power of Hitler in Germany in January 1934, the Berlin headquarters of the OUN, as a special department, was enrolled in the headquarters of the Gestapo. On the outskirts of Berlin - Wilhelmsdorf - barracks were built at the expense of German intelligence, where OUN militants were trained. In the same year, the Polish Minister of the Interior, General Bronislaw Peracki, strongly condemned Germany's plans to capture Danzig, which, under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, was declared a "free city" under the control of the League of Nations. Hitler himself instructed Richard Jarom, the 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 they were not lucky 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, 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 before a court in Lvov on charges of directing the terrorist activities of the OUN-UVO. In particular, the court considered the circumstances of the murder by members of the OUN of the director of the gymnasium Ivan Babiy and the student Yakov Bachinsky, who were accused by the nationalists in connection with the Polish police. In this process, Bandera has already openly acted as a regional conductor of the OUN. In total, Stepan Bandera was sentenced to life imprisonment seven times at the Warsaw and Lvov trials.

In September 1939, when Germany occupied Poland, Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Abwehr, was released. Irrefutable evidence 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 are being taken through the Abwehr to intensify subversive activities, since those measures that were carried out through MELNIK and other agents seemed insufficient. For these purposes, a prominent Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera 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 in 1938 by the NKVD of Yevgeny Konovalets in Italy, OUN meetings took place, at which Yevgeny Konovalets' successor Andriy Melnyk was proclaimed (his supporters declared him the head of the PUN - Seeing off Ukrainian nationalists). Stepan Bandera did not agree with this decision. After the release of Stepan Bandera from prison by the Nazis, a split in the OUN became inevitable. Having read in a Polish prison the works of the ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism Dmitry Dontsov, Stepan Bandera believed that the OUN was not “revolutionary” enough in its essence, and only he, Stepan Bandera, was able to rectify the situation.

In February 1940, Stepan Bandera convened an OUN conference in Krakow, at which a tribunal was established that sentenced Melnik's supporters to death. The confrontation with the Melnikovists took the form of an armed struggle: the Bandera killed several members of the "Melnikov's" Provod of the OUN: Nikolai Stsiborsky and Emelyan Senik, as well as a prominent "Melnikovist" Yevgeny Shulga.

As follows from the memoirs of Yaroslav Stetsko, Stepan Bandera, through the mediation of Richard Yaroy 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 Ukrainian positions, having found a certain understanding from the admiral, who promised support for the Ukrainian political concept, believing that only with its implementation is the victory of the Germans over Russia possible." Stepan Bandera himself pointed out 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 the 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 a 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) there are documents confirming that Bandera themselves offered their services to the Nazis. In the protocol of interrogation of an Abwehr officer, Yu.D. Lazarek says that he was a witness and participant in the negotiations between Abwehr representative Aikern and Bandera’s assistant Nikolai Lebed: “Lebed said that Bandera would provide the necessary personnel for schools of saboteurs, they would also be able to agree to the use of the entire underground of Galicia and Volhynia for sabotage and reconnaissance purposes on 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, the headquarters of the Bandera OUN decided to transfer the leading personnel to Volhynia and Galicia to organize a rebellion. According to the Soviet counterintelligence, the rebellion was planned for the spring of 1941. Why in the spring? The leadership of the OUN should have understood that open action would inevitably end in complete defeat and physical destruction of the entire organization. The answer comes by itself if we remember that the original date of the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR was May 1941. However, Hitler was forced to transfer part of the troops to the Balkans in order to take control of Yugoslavia. At the same time, the leadership of the OUN issued 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 the Great Assembly of Ukrainian nationalists in Krakow, where Stepan Bandera was elected head of the OUN, and Yaroslav Stetsko as his deputy. In connection with the receipt of new instructions for the underground, the activities of the OUN groups on the territory of Ukraine became even more active. In April alone, they killed 38 Soviet party workers, carried out dozens of sabotage in transport, industrial and agricultural enterprises.

After the last Gathering, the OUN finally split into OUN-(M) (supporters of Melnik) and OUN-(B) (supporters of Bandera), 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 significant differences between the two:
“If Melnik is a calm, intelligent person, then Bandera is a careerist, a fanatic and a bandit.”

During the Great Patriotic War, the Germans had high hopes for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of Bandera OUN-(B) than for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of Melnyk OUM-(M) and Bulba Borovets’ Polessky Sich, who also sought to gain power in Ukraine under the 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 with the establishment of Ukraine as an independent state was needed in order to show the population its importance, here there were personal ambitions. On June 30, 1941, Bandera's ally Yaroslav Stetsko from the city hall in Lvov announced the decision of the leadership of the OUN (B) Wire to "revive the Ukrainian state."

Residents of Lviv reacted sluggishly to information about 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 the clergy were rounded up. The inhabitants of the city 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 forcibly driven to participate in this event.

“The newly resurgent Ukrainian State will closely cooperate with the National Socialist Great Germany, which, under the leadership of its Leader Adolf Hitler, creates a new order in Europe and the world and helps the Ukrainian people to free themselves from the 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 the Sovereign Collective Ukrainian State and a new order throughout the world.

Let the Ukrainian Sovereign Collective 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 among 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 Heroes of Ukraine.

Simultaneously with the proclamation of the Act, supporters of Stepan Bandera staged a pogrom in Lvov. Ukrainian nationalists acted on 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 organized by Bandera in Lvov in the book “Pogromist”, published in New York: “During the first three days of July 1941, the Nachtigal battalion killed seven thousand Jews in the vicinity of Lvov. Jews - professors, lawyers, doctors - were forced to lick all the stairs of four-story buildings before execution and carry garbage in their mouths from one building to another. Then, forced to pass through the line of warriors with yellow-black armbands, they were stabbed with bayonets.

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

Bypassed by a younger competitor, Andrei Melnik wrote a letter to Hitler and Governor-General Frank stating that "Bandera's behavior is unworthy and created their own government without the knowledge of the Fuhrer." After that, Hitler ordered the arrest of Stepan Bandera and his "government". In early July 1941, Stepan Bandera was arrested in Krakow and, together with Yaroslav Stetsko and his associates, was sent to Berlin at the disposal of the Abwehr - to Colonel Erwin Stolze. After the arrival of Stepan Bandera in Berlin, the leadership of Nazi Germany demanded that he abandon the Act of "Revival of the Ukrainian State". Stepan Bandera agreed and called on "the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to smash 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 "honorary arrest." Yes, it’s really honorable: “From the wilderness to the court”, to the “proposed 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, the Banderaites repeatedly met with representatives of various departments, assuring them that without their help the German army would not be able to defeat Moscow. Messages, explanations, dispatches, "declarations" and "memorandums" were sent to Hitler, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and other leaders of Nazi Germany with justifications and requests 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.

The efforts of Stepan Bandera were not in vain, and the German leadership took the next step: Andriy Melnik was allowed to continue to openly curry favor with Berlin, and Stepan Bandera was ordered to portray the enemy of the Germans so that he could, hiding behind anti-Nazi slogans, restrain the Ukrainian masses from a real, irreconcilable struggle 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 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 a legend that Bandera did not cooperate with the Germans and even entered into a fight with them, but the documents say otherwise.

In the concentration camp, Stepan Bandera, Yaroslav Stetsko and another 300 Bandera were separately in the Zellenbau bunker, where they were kept in good conditions. Bandera was allowed to meet, they received food and money from relatives and the OUN-B. Often they left the camp in order to contact the "secret" fighters of the OUN-UPA, and also visited the Friedenthal castle (200 meters from the Zellenbau bunker), which housed the school of OUN agents and sabotage personnel. The instructor at this school was a former officer of the Nachtigall 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, he also succeeded in replacing its chief commander Dmitry Klyachkivsky with his protege Roman Shukhevych.

In 1944, Soviet troops cleared Western Ukraine of the Nazis. Fearing punishment, many members of the OUN-UPA fled with the German troops. The hatred of the inhabitants of Volhynia and Galicia for the OUN-UPA was so great that they betrayed them to the Soviet troops or killed them themselves. In order to activate the OUN 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 went to work as part of the 202nd "Schutzmannschaft" of the Abwehr team in Krakow and began training OUN-UPA sabotage detachments. Irrefutable proof of this is the testimony of a 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 it to the rear of the Red Army with special assignments. Stepan Bandera, in my presence, personally instructed these agents and transmitted through them to the headquarters of the UPA an order to intensify subversive work in the rear of the Red Army and establish regular radio communications with the 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, ABVER was repeatedly thrown "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 the Nazi punitive machine, even if later the Nazis were convinced of his innocence, did not return to freedom. This was the usual Nazi practice. The unprecedented attitude of the Nazis towards Bandera is proved by their most direct mutual cooperation.

When Soviet troops approached Berlin, Bandera was instructed to form detachments from the remnants of the Ukrainian Nazis to defend it. Bandera created detachments, but he escaped. After the end of the war, he lived in Munich, 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 the performers.

On October 15, 1959, Stepan Bendera was killed in the entrance of his house. On the stairs he was met 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 the KGB of the USSR of this kind.

During the Great Patriotic War, more than 3 million civilians were brutally tortured and killed by members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).
Materials of open sources.
Bendera/Bandera has never been a citizen of Ukraine.
His dream was to become the Gauleiter of Ukraine like Erich Koch or any other Nazi-occupied country...

What I will talk about is so scary, monstrous and disgusting that people with a not very healthy heart, I recommend skipping this article. And for those who rally in the squares of Ukrainian cities, demanding the restoration of the "honest name of Bandera," I recommend that you familiarize yourself with the documents that shed light on the activities of these "faithful sons of independent Ukraine."

The current leaders, who were born from the very grains that the miner suffering from bursitis spoke about, certainly did not publish and did not announce at rallies those certificates, memorandums, ciphers, eyewitness accounts and special reports that I found in the archives and about which today's youth, of course he doesn't know anything.

Listen to these voices - voices from beyond. These people could live, study, work, they would have wives, husbands and children, but they are not. Their lineage was interrupted - it was interrupted because these men and women, boys and girls, and even children were not just killed, but brutally tortured by the fosterlings of Stepan Bandera.

“They knocked on us for a long time at night. Dad didn't let go. Something heavy was pounding on the door. She crackled and fell off her hinges. Strangers broke into the house. They tied the father's hands and feet and threw him to the floor. They gouged out his eyes and poked with bayonets in his chest and stomach. Dad stopped moving. They did the same with my mother and sister Olya. This is evidence of the miraculously surviving 11-year-old Vera Selezneva. She survived only because she lost consciousness from the first blow with a rifle butt on the head, and the fighters for an independent Ukraine considered her dead.

And here is the story of an eyewitness who survived only because he climbed into the haystack in time.

“They came to the village at night. They broke into the hut where the teacher, who had come from Poltava, lived. They took her mother by the hair and dragged her across the street to the garden. They killed the old woman in front of their daughter, and then set about the girl. First they cut off her breasts. Then they brought an ax and chopped off the heels. Having seen enough of the torment of the bleeding girl, Bandera hacked her to death.

The next night the bandits came again. Many were in Red Army uniforms. They surrounded the village so that no one could get out. Then they seized the chairman of the village council and crucified him on the gates, driving huge nails into his hands. Admiring the suffering of the chairman, they fired two bursts of machine guns at him crosswise. Then they took care of the family. His father, mother, wife and three-year-old daughter were hacked to pieces with axes. And with the severed hand of a child, a vile inscription was drawn on the wall.

But even this was not enough for the Bandera people. They hung a teacher on the gate, and cut his wife and five children to pieces.”

No less terrible are the reports of the commanders of partisan detachments transmitted to the mainland:

“In March 1943, Bandera burned down four Polish settlements. Before that, in Galinovsk, they hacked to death 18 Poles, in the village of Pindiki they shot 150 Polish peasants, and they took the children by the legs and smashed their heads against the trees. In the town of Chertorisk, Ukrainian priests personally executed 17 people, and in neighboring farms Bandera killed about 700 Poles.

Then they caught the partisan Anton Pinchuk. They chopped off his legs and hung him with a pinned note: “So it will be with everyone who will interfere with the construction of a free Ukraine.” And the scout of the same detachment, Mikhail Marushkin, was cut off his tongue, gouged out his eyes and pricked his chest with a bayonet until they hit his heart.

It is hard to believe that all this was done by people, and not just people, but sincerely believing Christians, and these terrible atrocities were committed by praying and asking for a blessing from the local priest. We already know that the Ukrainian priests took a personal part in the executions, but what they did with those priests who condemned them and did not give blessings for the murder of innocent victims.

“Bishop Feofan, who served in the ancient Mukachevo monastery, in his sermons condemned the bloody antics of Bandera,” one of the special reports says. - Once he received a letter with a picture of a trident: this was the last warning of the bandit underground. But Theophan continued his holy work. Soon he was found dead, and not just anywhere, but in a cell. In other words, the murder was committed on the territory of the monastery, which is considered an inexcusable sin.

In addition, the bishop was not just killed, but killed in a brutal way borrowed from the Middle Ages. They wrapped a piece of wire around his head, tucked a stick under it, and began to slowly rotate it. And so on until the skull cracked.

Among the current singers of Bandera there are people who claim that Ukrainian nationalists fought under the slogan: "Kill the Jew, Pole, Katsap and German." As for the Jews, Poles and Russians, that was the way it was, but the Germans… No, the Bandera people had touchingly friendly relations with the Germans. Evidence of this is the secret order of SS Brigadeführer Major General Brenner dated February 12, 1944.

“Secret negotiations with the leaders of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which have now begun in the Derazhyno region, are successfully continuing. The following agreement has been reached.

Members of the UPA will not attack German military units. The UPA systematically sends its scouts, mostly girls, to the areas occupied by the Red Army and reports the results. Captured prisoners of the Red Army, as well as members of Soviet gangs, the so-called partisans, are handed over to us for interrogation.

In order to prevent interference in this activity, which is necessary for us, I order:

1. UPA agents who have certificates signed by Captain Felix, or posing as UPA members, are allowed to pass freely, weapons are not taken away.

2. When German military units meet with UPA units, the latter allow themselves to be identified by a conventional sign - the left hand in front of the face. Such units are not attacked even in the event of opening fire on their part.

And in October of the same year, Bandera was honored with a conversation with Reichsführer Himmler himself, who said:

A new stage of our cooperation begins - more responsible than before. Gather your people, go and act. Remember that our victory will secure your future.

The first thing the inspired Bandera did was to proclaim a new slogan.

"Our government must be terrible!" - he declared and ordered to start mass terror. If rivers of blood used to flow, now the seas have become it.

The Red Army has already entered the territory of Western Ukraine, ordinary people met it with bread and salt - this is during the day, and at night these people were killed, chopped with axes, strangled with strangleholds and burned alive by zealous executors of Bandera's order.

LOST MOSES

Now, I think, it's time to tell about what kind of person he was - the new Moses of the Ukrainian people. Why Moses? Yes, because that is what the bishop of the Greek Catholic Church called it when the monument to Stepan Bandera was opened in the Ivano-Frankivsk region.

Since few have read the Bible, especially the Old Testament, I will first talk about Moses. In those distant times, Jews fell into slavery and lived in Egypt, there were many of them and every year it became more and more. The young pharaoh who ascended the throne not only did not like the Jews, he was afraid of them. “The people of the children of Israel are numerous and stronger than us,” he said. - When there is a war, he will unite with our enemies and come out against us. We must make sure that these people stop multiplying!”

And they did: the pharaoh ordered that newborn boys be taken away from their mothers - after all, with time they could become warriors - and throw them into the Nile. It must have happened that just at that time a boy was born in one of the families. He was doomed, but his mother figured out how to save him. She knew where and when the pharaoh's daughter bathed - according to rumors, a kind girl - and put the child in a basket and hid it in the reeds. Left alone, the boy wept inconsolably, his crying was heard by Pharaoh's daughter and ordered to bring the child. He was so good that the girl decided to take him to the palace. But she needed a nurse. She was immediately found: she was the mother of the found boy.

When the boy grew up, the pharaoh's daughter adopted him and named him Moses. For many years he lived in luxury, contentment, received the title of an Egyptian priest, but then, defending an Israeli, he killed an Egyptian overseer and was forced to flee. In one of the tribes he was accepted as one of his own, Moses started a family and lived like everyone else until the age of eighty. But then he suddenly decided to lead his brothers out of Egyptian slavery. The god Yahweh liked this idea, he promised his help, made a magician and sorcerer out of Moses, and then sent him to Egypt.

There the old man appeared before Pharaoh and, now convincing, now intimidating, now sending diseases, pestilence, hail and locusts, persuaded him to release the Israelites from slavery. Well, then there was the crossing of the Red Sea “in wet as in dry land”, many years of wandering through the desert, the grumbling of fellow tribesmen dissatisfied with the lack of water and food: in Egypt, they say, although we were in slavery, we ate our fill. Rescued, as always, Yahweh: either he would send a flock of exhausted quails, then he would scatter manna from heaven, then he would release a fountain of water from a rock - and so for forty years.

For forty years Moses led his fellow tribesmen through the desert, until on Mount Sinai he met with Yahweh himself, who declared that he intended to protect the people of Israel and conclude an eternal alliance with him. Such an alliance was concluded: the Israelites pledged to meekly worship Yahweh, and he promised them all kinds of support. It was with his help that Moses led his tribe to the Promised Land. And when he was one hundred and twenty years old, he went to the top of Mount Nebo and, in accordance with the agreement concluded with Yahweh, died alone.

I cannot fail to note that this whole story may not be a fairy tale or a myth: many Bible scholars believe that Moses was a genuine historical figure and that it was he who brought the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. Be that as it may, but Moses became a symbol of an incomparable feat: a symbol of deliverance from slavish obedience, a symbol of striving for freedom, a symbol of readiness for any sacrifice for the sake of this freedom.

But back to Moses by the name of Bandera. He did not need to be hidden in a basket, since Stepan was born in the family of a respected Greek Catholic priest in the village of Stary Ugrinov, which in those years was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The most striking childhood impression was the fierce battles between the Russians and the Austrians, because during the First World War the front passed through their village. Then there was a revolution, again fighting and, in the end, the Polish occupation.

Stepan had to study in a Polish gymnasium. Under the influence of his father, who was an ardent nationalist, Stepan joined an underground organization of schoolchildren, closely associated with the Ukrainian military organization. The UVO was created by Colonel Konovalts and set as its goal nothing less than the preparation of a general uprising to create a great and indivisible Ukrainian state. Somewhat later, the UVO, as a military combat unit, became part of the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, created in 1929.

Bandera, who in those years studied at the agronomic department of the Higher Polytechnic School in Lviv, in three years turned from an ordinary member of the OUN into its leader in Western Ukraine. He did not become an agronomist, but he turned out to be an excellent terrorist. Even then, the first contacts of Ukrainian nationalists with German Nazis were recorded. The Nazis began with the creation of the so-called paramilitary sports schools, and ended with the formation of shock detachments of Ukrainian attack aircraft.

Since terror was considered one of the main ways to fight for independence, Bandera was instructed to carry out several terrorist attacks. The goal is to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and Poland, to prevent Stalin and Pilsudski from finding a common language. For several months he searches for Bandera, and when he finds it, he instructs the militant. It turned out to be a Lviv high school student Nikolai Lemek. The main argument in his favor was that Nikolai was only 19 years old, therefore, when he was captured and then judged - no one doubted this - he would not be sentenced to death, since in Poland the death sentence was passed only to those who turned 21 years old.

Either Lemek's eyesight was not good enough, or he panicked, but when he entered the Soviet consulate in Lvov, he began to shoot not at the consul, but at the first person he came across. It turned out to be a third-rate official, the secretary of the consulate Milov. The killer, of course, was caught and sentenced to life in prison.

(At the beginning of the war, he will be released, but, apparently, because he knew too much and so as not to talk too much, he will be liquidated by Bandera themselves.)

But this was only the first stage of the planned action. Since the Soviet diplomat was killed on the territory of Poland, then, according to the plan of the organizers of the terrorist attack, the Russians should take revenge on the Poles by killing some high-ranking Polish official. The choice fell on the Minister of the Interior Bronisław Peracki. On July 15, 1934, at the entrance to one of the Warsaw cafes, 20-year-old OUN member Grigory Matseiko shot dead Bronislav Peratsky.

The most surprising thing was that they failed to detain Matseyko, and he safely left the cordon. But the police arrested twelve participants in the organization of the assassination, including Stepan Bandera. There was a court that sentenced Bandera to life imprisonment. And in May 1936, another trial took place, which gave Bandera a second life sentence.

By and large, Bandera's bloody career should have ended there, but ... it was September 1, 1939: on that day Germany attacked Poland and the Second World War began. The Fuhrer did not forget his friends and ordered Bandera to be released at any cost, because in the secret card index of the Abwehr he was listed under the pseudonym Gray. Fulfilling Hitler's order, the SS paratroopers dropped into the area of ​​the Holy Cross prison. No matter how bravely the paratroopers fought, they could not fulfill the order: they all died as one during the assault.

But this order was brilliantly carried out by the guards of the prison. After the assault attempt, it was decided to transfer all the prisoners to the left bank of the Vistula, which already belonged to ... the Germans. So Bandera found himself in the arms of his masters-liberators. The first thing he did was to ask for a meeting with his mentor and direct commander, head of the OUN Yevgeny Konovalets.

Alas, they told him, it is impossible. Colonel Konovalets is already there, in heaven. Some Bolshevik killed him.

For many years this action was one of the greatest secrets of the NKVD, and then the KGB. Moreover, no one knew the name of this Bolshevik. Now this name is known: Yevgeny Konovalets, following Stalin's order, liquidated

Pavel Sudoplatov. Here is how he talks about it in his memoirs.

“The idea was to give Konovalets a valuable gift with a built-in explosive device: if the clock works, I will have time to leave.

An employee of the department of operational and technical means Timashkov was tasked with making an explosive device that looked like a box of chocolates, painted in the traditional Ukrainian style.

Using my cover - I was enrolled as a radio operator on the cargo ship "Shilka" - I met with Konovalets in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Le Havre, where he came with a fake Lithuanian passport. The game had been running for over two years and was about to end. It was the spring of 1938, and war seemed imminent. We knew that during the war Konovalets would be on the side of Germany.

In the end, an explosive device in the form of a box of chocolates was made. The explosion was supposed to occur exactly half an hour after the change in the position of the box from vertical to horizontal.

And then came May 23, 1938. The time is ten minutes to twelve. Walking along the alley near the Atlanta restaurant, I saw Konovalets sitting at a table by the window, waiting for my arrival. I entered the restaurant, sat down to it, and after a short conversation we agreed to meet again in the center of Rotterdam at 17.00. I gave him a gift, a box of chocolates, which he loved very much, and said that I could not be away for so long, I should immediately return to the ship.

As I left, I placed the box on the table next to him. We shook hands and I left, barely able to control my instinctive urge to run. I remember that, leaving the restaurant, I turned right into a side street, on both sides of which there were numerous shops. In the first of them I bought a hat and a light raincoat. As I was leaving the store, I heard a sound like a blown tire. People ran towards the restaurant, and I hurried to the train that went to Paris, and from there to Barcelona.

The newspapers have already written about the explosion in Rotterdam. Three versions of the death of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Konovalets were put forward: either he was killed by the Bolsheviks, or by a rival group of Ukrainians, or he was removed by the Poles in retaliation for the assassination attempt on General Peratsky.

I, after a three-week stay in Spain, returned home safely.”

By and large, the liquidation of Konovalets Bandera was on hand, because Andrei Melnik, a figure much less significant than the former colonel, became his official successor. Bandera did not want to obey Melnik, and a serious struggle for power broke out between them in the OUN movement. It ended with the fact that the OUN split into two directions: Melnikov and Bandera.

Hitler patronized Bandera, as he preferred not to speak, but to act, and considered the gun to be the most important argument in any dispute. On June 30, 1941, following the advanced German units, Bandera arrived in Lviv and proclaimed the creation of a Ukrainian independent state with its capital in Lviv.

This did not suit Berlin in any way, because the Germans renamed Lviv into Lemberg, and the territory of the solemnly proclaimed Ukrainian independent state was declared the original German territory of Ostland. Moreover, at one of the meetings in the city of Rivne, Gauleiter Erich Koch, expressing Hitler's opinion, said: “There is no free Ukraine. The goal of our work should be that the Ukrainians should work for Germany, and not that we make this people happy.”

Even more outspoken was the Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank. “If we win the war,” he confided, “then, in my opinion, the Poles, Ukrainians and everything that hangs around can be turned into a chopped cutlet.”

So, and Bandera was talking about some kind of free, independent and independent Ukraine, stretching to the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus.

Berlin did not like these rantings, and Bandera fell into disgrace. And soon something unimaginable happened: Bandera was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen. No, no, not to the infamous concentration camp, but to a very nice town with the same name, where Stepan Bandera lived in one of the state dachas.

The current defenders of Bandera assure that this is not so, that he was in a concentration camp and was on the verge of death for three whole years. And here is what Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolz, who was detained back in 1945, said about this:

“The reason for the arrest of Stepan Bandera was the fact that he, having received a large amount of money from Abwehr in 1940 to finance the OUN underground and organize intelligence activities against the Soviet Union, tried to appropriate it and transferred it to one of the Swiss banks. The money was returned, and he himself was kept by us in one of the mansions of Sachsenhausen.

Such are not very noble deeds ... So, no matter how hard you try, you can’t blind the image of the great martyr from Stepan Bandera.

And here is another interesting fact. In the winter of 1945, Bandera ended up in the rear of the Red Army, or rather, in Krakow. The city was about to fall, and Bandera could end up in the hands of Smersh, and this organization does not like to joke. The fact that Hitler cherished him is evidenced by the fact that the Fuhrer instructed one of the most valuable intelligence officers and saboteurs, Otto Skorzeny, to save Bandera and bring him within the Reich.

“It was a difficult flight,” Skorzeny later said. - I led Bandera along the radio beacons left in Czechoslovakia and Austria in the rear of the Soviet troops. We needed Bandera. We believed him. Hitler ordered me to rescue him by taking him to the Reich to continue his work. I completed this task."

How Bandera thanked his saviors, we already know: until 1954, shots rang out in the cities and villages of Western Ukraine and rivers of blood flowed. Bandera himself, under the name of Stefan Poppel, lived all this time in Munich and from there directed the actions of the militants.

But terror alone was not enough for him, he dreamed of something bigger. That is why Bandera established close ties with British and American intelligence, and even, offering the services of Ukrainian nationalists in the fight against the Soviet Union, corresponded with US Secretary of State Marshall. And in one of his public speeches, he bluntly stated: "I regret that the West has not yet used the atomic bomb against the Soviets."

Who knows what this collaboration of Ukrainian Moses with the initiators of the Cold War would have led to if on October 15, 1959, Stefan Poppel had not crashed down on the steps of his own house at 7 Kreitmayrstrasse. He died on the way to the hospital.

The first conclusion of doctors about the cause of death was a fracture of the base of the skull as a result of a fall. But what does it have to do with scratches near the lips and some white dots on clothes? Then more qualified experts got down to business, who discovered potassium cyanide in Bandera's body. How he got there remained a mystery for another two years.

And on August 12, 1961, Bogdan Stashinsky and Inga Pol turned to the West Berlin police, stating that they had not fled the GDR and were asking for political asylum. When asked what forced them to flee to the West, they answered that it was the fear of being arrested and shot at the Lubyanka.

It was then that it turned out that Bogdan Stashinsky, a native of the Lviv region, was a longtime KGB agent who specialized in activities against Ukrainian nationalists. At first he was a liaison, and then he became an executor of death sentences. In 1957, he killed a prominent figure with a pistol shot that fired ampoules of potassium cyanide.

OUN Lev Rebet. As Stashinsky explained, when fired, the ampoules burst and the poison turned into steam. One breath of this steam was enough for the blood vessels to shrink sharply, and the person died of a heart attack.

And two years later, the turn came to the main nationalist: with a shot from the same pistol, moreover, in the mouth and eyes, Stashinsky killed Stepan Bandera, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and ... permission to marry a German Inge Paul. This was a big mistake, since it was Inga who persuaded her husband to flee to the West.

Bohdan Stashinsky, of course, was tried and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Where did he go then, covered in darkness. It is possible that he changed his surname and fled to some islands: after all, the OUN oath to avenge the murder of their leader remains in force. And another option is also possible: in exchange for information about the KGB school in which he studied, and for the names of agents sent into their ranks, the Bandera people forgave him.

Be that as it may, the grave of the Ukrainian Moses, buried in Munich, has become a shrine, monuments are erected to him in his homeland, schoolchildren study his biography, the leaders of the country declare him a hero, and flowers are laid at his busts...

Everything would be fine, only the road on which he brought Ukraine is pitted with grave hills and oozing blood. It would be nice if everything was limited only to monuments and flowers, otherwise no one canceled the main slogan of Ukrainian nationalists: “We should not be afraid that people will curse us for cruelty. Let half of the 40 million people remain - there is nothing wrong with that!

Vladimir Hanelis, Bat Yam

After the events on the Kiev Maidan, both old and young in different ways - from left to right and right to left - scratch their tongues about the name of Stepan Bandera. Even those who do not speak the language. Often they pronounce - "Bender", "Bendera", apparently taking Stepan Bandera for a native of Bessarabian Bender or a descendant of Ostap Bender.

… The name of the Ukrainian politician, ideologist and theorist of Ukrainian nationalism has become for most 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 in an offended way and turned away ...

An article by BBC correspondent in Moscow 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 various books, thousands of magazine and newspaper publications have been published about Stepan Bandera, dozens of documentaries have been shot.

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

“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.”

“September 25, 1944… the German authorities released Bandera, brought him to Berlin and offered cooperation, but he put forward the recognition of the “Rebirth Act” (Ukraine as an independent state – V.Kh.) as an indispensable condition. The agreement was not concluded and until the end of the war, Bandera was in Germany in an indefinite status.

“According to the conclusions of the government commission for the study of the activities of the OUN and the UPA, created in 1997 by order of the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, the murder of Jews, Polish intelligentsia and supporters of the Soviet government in the early days of the occupation of Lviv, known as the “massacre of Lviv professors”, was the work of the SD and a nationalist unorganized mob.”

“The division “Galicia”, 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 “Information on the number of dead Soviet citizens at the hands of OUN bandits for the period 1944-1953.” dated April 17, 1973, signed by the chairman of the KGB of Ukraine Vitaliy 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 Central Committee of the CPSU “Issues of the Western Regions of the Ukrainian SSR” dated May 26, 1953, during the same time, the authorities killed 153,000 people, sent 134,000 to the Gulag, and deported 203,000. Every third or fourth family suffered. Both sides showed extreme brutality.

Cases have been recorded when OUN members executed prisoners by tying their legs to bent trees and tearing their bodies apart…

... The authorities hanged partisans and underground fighters in the squares and left the corpses in plain sight in order to seize 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 managed to create and lead the Ukrainian state, it certainly would not be liberal and democratic. Bandera is not the figure that should be raised to the shield if Ukraine dreams of a European future.

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

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

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

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

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

The name helps me to open many doors in Ukraine. When I ask you to tell someone that Stepan Bandera called, there was no case that the person did not call back ...

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

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

- Of course, I wanted to. Everyone wants to be a leader when they are young. I saw the respect with which people treat me, and I considered myself an important person. But over the years, life experience comes, 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, like Poltava is the heart of Ukraine. Then my parents moved to Toronto. There, after the murder of my grandfather and the trial of his murderer Stashinsky (1), my grandmother lived. My father, Andrey, worked in Toronto.

- The 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). In 1985, Natalya died, a year earlier, her father died ...

In Ukraine, in Stryi, my grandfather's sisters live - Vladimir and Oksana (3).
They spent many years in Soviet prisons, camps, 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, published in Toronto in English the newspaper "Gomin Ukrainy" ("Homin of Ukraine"). Father used his name, his authority to unite Ukrainians, to awaken national feelings in them.

Did he talk about his father?

- Very little…

- Why?

- Firstly, my father was a very busy person, he traveled a lot, he was not at home much. Secondly, 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 a false name - Poppel. Under the same surname, he came to Canada. As a child, my father did not know whose son he was ...

- As an adult, you probably read the works of your grandfather, memoirs about him. How do you feel today about his personality, his ideas, his struggles?

- My grandfather is a symbol of his generation, a symbol of his time, a symbol of the struggle for the independence of his country. Such as Nelson Mandela became 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 war monsters… I respect their idealism, their sacrifice, their idea – no one will come from Washington, Moscow, or Berlin to build an independent Ukrainian state. You need to rely only on your own strength.

- Stepan, but you know very 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, does not disdain violence and murder. Moscow propaganda created such an image - the image of Bandera, Bandera, 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 is to blame for the massacres of Ukrainian nationalists over Jews 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 in the destruction of the Jews, he can not be guilty. You will not find anti-Semitic statements in any of his works, in any of the documents of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Two brothers of my grandfather, 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 various things could and have happened during the war.

My father and mother brought me up in the spirit of tolerance, 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 in the Chronicle of the UPA.

But I would like to say something else as well. A fairly well-known person, the Jew Saul Lipman, came to our house in Toronto. He talked, argued with my father. And when my father died, he appeared before the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and stated that all Bandera were anti-Semites, that they slaughtered and killed Jews ... I want to say again - I do not exclude anything. Among Bandera, 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 Jew, lawyer Alex Epshtein, helped us a lot in this.

I was very angry with Saul Lipman, but then I realized that you can’t judge the whole 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, retired. He was born in Western Ukraine, and his grandmother (she died) was born in the territories that now belong to Russia. She is the only one from a large family who did not starve to death during collectivization.

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

- In addition to you and your sisters, are there any grandchildren and granddaughters of Stepan Bandera?

- Natalya'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 step that stems from my upbringing, my worldview, my views on life. Now I work in the Kiev branch of the Canadian investment firm "Romyer". Or rather, so - I have my own company that cooperates with Romier. I try 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. And that's all - 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 is strange for me that the grandson of Stepan Bandera is engaged in business in Ukraine, and not politics ...

– I am not only doing business in Ukraine. I'm also a journalist. I have my own column in the Kievskiye Vedomosti newspaper, I often publish in the popular, serious magazine Peak. As for politics... It is very important for me not to discredit the name of my grandfather. Therefore, I am very careful. And I also know that economics makes politics. So what I am doing now is a good contribution to the policy of independent Ukraine. While I'm not going to join any party...

- Stepan, how did your family react to the personality of the murderer of your grandfather - 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 has always been against it. The paradox is that if Stashinsky himself had not confessed to the Americans in the murder, then everyone would have believed that Stepan Bandera was killed by Ukrainians from other organizations - “Melnyk’s” or someone else, and the whole world would know that he was killed by a KGB agent. I would like to meet with him and talk - to restore the historical truth. But no one knows where Stashinsky is now and whether he is alive at all ... Maybe he also has a grandson ...

- If you, the grandson of Stepan Bandera, met the grandson of Stashinsky, would you give him a hand?

- Well, I don’t know ... I don’t know ... Probably, I wouldn’t have filed right away when we met ... But I wouldn’t get into a fight ... I would like to talk to him, understand what kind of person he is ... There are a lot of obscure things 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 Proreznaya Street, and the archives of the KGB (now this department is called the SBU) are nearby, two steps away, on Vladimirskaya. Didn't go there, didn't you recognize?

– 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 belligerent during World War II. So that the surviving old people be 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 fled to West Berlin with his wife and confessed to his crimes. Sentenced to eight years in prison. After the release, the fate and place of residence are not known.
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?), the date and place of death are not known for certain. Presumably - killed by the Germans in Kherson in 1943.

Name: Stepan Bandera

Age: 50 years

Place of Birth: Stary Ugrinov village, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine

A place of death: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Activity: politician, ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism

Family status: He was married to Yaroslav Oparovskaya

Stepan Bandera - biography

Stepan Bandera is a politician of Ukraine who went down in history as a theorist and ideologist of nationalism in Ukraine.

Childhood, the Bandera family

Despite the fact that many facts of his biography are unknown and shrouded in some mystery, but most of the fate of this man is known, since he himself wrote his autobiography. It is known from it that Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909. His homeland was the village of Stary Ugrinov, which is located in the kingdom of Galicia.

The father of the future politician was a clergyman. The family was large: eight children. In this family, Stepan was born the second child. But this large family did not have its own home, so they were forced to live in a house that made it possible for the position of the father. The house where they lived for a long time belonged to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.

Parents have always tried to instill patriotism in their children, to instill in them love for their homeland. Religion was accepted in the family. Stepan has always been an obedient boy who loved and respected his parents. Even in his early years he always prayed. This always happened in the morning and in the evening, and every year these prayers became longer and longer.

Already in childhood, Stepan Bandera wanted to fight and defend his homeland. He always wanted Ukraine to be free, so already in his childhood he tried to accustom himself not to feel pain. So, he conducted tests on himself in order to temper himself and his body. Among such tests were not only dousing with cold and ice water, but also pricking with needles, as well as beating with heavy metal chains. Because of this, he soon developed rheumatism of the joints, the pains of which tormented him all his life.

Stepan Bandera - Education

Even in childhood, Stepan was greatly influenced by the books that were in their house, as well as by those prominent politicians of that time who visited this library. Among them were Yaroslav Veselovsky, and Pavel Glodzinsky, and others.

But at first the child did not go to school, but received primary education at home. Some sciences were taught by Ukrainian teachers who came to their homes, and some subjects were explained by Father Andrei Mikhailovich Bandera himself. But in 1919, when the First World War was already underway, and the boy's father participated in the liberation movement, the child was sent to a gymnasium. This educational institution was located in the city of Stryi. He spent eight years there.

Even though he was poor compared to other high school students, he was very active and went in for sports. In addition, he was fond of music, and even sang in the choir. Stepan Bandera tried to participate in all events that were held for young people.

After graduating from the gymnasium, he moved to Lviv, entering the Polytechnic Institute, choosing the Faculty of Agronomy. At the same time, he begins to develop rapidly and his secret activities in an underground organization.

Stepan Bandera's career

A new page in the biography of Stepan Andreevich Bander began in the gymnasium, where he not only was fond of sports and music, led circles and was responsible for the economic part, but at the same time secretly became a member of the military organization of Ukraine.

In Lviv, he is not only already a member of this organization, but also becomes a correspondent for a satire magazine. In 1932, an active participant Stepan Bandera began to move up the career ladder in a secret organization and took the post of deputy regional conductor, and a year later he was acting as the regional conductor himself.

During this time, Stepan Bandera was arrested five times for his underground activities, but each time he was released. In 1932, he organized a protest against the execution of militants of his secret organization. After that, in 1933, he was instructed to lead the operation to eliminate the consul of the USSR, who was in Lvov. In the same year, he used schoolchildren for his protest action.

But he also had a lot of murders related to politics on his conscience. He organized terrorist acts in which many people who had something to do with politics, as well as their families, died. For all the crimes that he had already committed, in July 1936 he was arrested. But even in prison, he was able to organize a hunger strike that lasted 16 days and which forced the government to make concessions to him.

After the German attack on Poland, Stepan Bandera is released. But already in 1941 he was arrested by the German authorities. First he was in prison, and then spent a year and a half in a concentration camp, where he was under constant surveillance. But still he did not agree to cooperate in Germany. After that, he lived in this country, although he closely followed all the events that took place in Ukraine. In 1945, he takes over the leadership of the underground society OUN.

Stepan Bandera was killed in October 1959 in Munich, where he then lived. His killer was a KGB agent Stashevsky.

Stepan Bandera - biography of personal life

He met his wife Yaroslava Vasilievna in Lvov when he studied at the Polytechnic Institute. This is a happy page in the biography of the Ukrainian nationalist.