BY Annie LACROIX-RIZ

Annie Lacroix-Riz (born 18 October 1947) is a French historian, professor emeritus of modern history at the university Paris VII - Denis Diderot, specialist in the international relations in first half of the 20th century and collaboration. Her work concerns the political, economic and social history of the French Third Republic and Vichy Government, the relations between the Vatican and Reich, as well as the strategy of the political elites and economic French before and after the Second World War. She denounces contemporary history is under the influence of the world of finance. It appears that she bases her powerful analysis on documentation (secret and otherwise). THIS IS AN UPDATED AND CLEANED UP ENGLISH VERSION FOR CLARITY OF AN ARTICLE ALREADY PUBLISHED ON THIS SITE.

Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera, fighter with Hitler and mass executioner of tens of thousands of Jews and communist resistance fighters, becomes each day a little more the hero of the "democrats" of the West. When the media remember him, the media tamper with his story, transforming the executioner into a glorious nationalist; moreover in 1945 was he not an American agent? Which demonstrates that a paradise exists for the Nazis.

The Ukrainian War was launched by Russia after eight years of Ukrainian-Western aggression (2014-2022) against Russian-speaking Eastern Ukrainians. Their 14,000 dead, mostly civilians, had "interested" our major media as much as the dead civilians of Serbia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq attacked since 1991 by the United States in a global quest for oil control and gas and other raw materials, under cover of NATO, subject to a single American command since its foundation (1950).

The Western coalition — which immediately ridiculed the official Russian goal of “denazification” announced in February 2022, in accordance with the “political principles” enshrined in the Protocol of the Potsdam Conference (August 1, 1945) — claims to act against Russia in the name of "democracy" (new name for the "Free World" of the Soviet era). As the war drags on, the “West” evolves the concept of “democracy” and “hides” the Ukrainian state’s reverence for its war and pre-war criminals.

Thus the West elevated the Ukrainian Nazi Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) as a hero of “Ukrainian independence”: a slight defect that the West forgave him as much as the post-Maidan Ukrainian “democracy”, the promotion of Nazi groups and the clubbing that billionaire Zelenski, a worthy successor to billionaire Poroshenko, administers to the Ukrainian people: destruction of the labor code, wages and salaries, and the banning of opposition parties and newspapers, demanded by the "investors" states-united.

Bandera has only become a “national hero” since the American “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and especially since the Maidan coup organised in February 2014 by Washington against an "intolerable" Ukrainian government, legal but pro-Russian. Its conductor, Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, neo-conservative Madonna of the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA branch) and compulsive Russophobe (and Sinophobe), has held her Ukrainian post since 1993, under Democratic or Republican (excluding the Trump presidency). 

Nuland confessed on December 13, 2013 before the National Press Club, in a conference financed by the Chevron oil group, then on January 15, 2014 before the Senate Foreign Policy Committee, which the American government had, since the fall of the USSR, "spent five billion dollars" to make "democracy" triumph in Ukraine and that Chevron had signed on November 5 an agreement for ten billion dollars of investment for drilling that would put an end to the "country's dependence on Russia". 

Ms. Nuland, "cook" of the Maidan putschists, has since fabricated Ukrainian governments and presided, with the rest of the state apparatus, over the rearmament to the teeth of Ukraine, which Washington has de facto integrated into the operations of NATO since July 2021.

US intimacy with Ukrainian Nazism predated the fall of the USSR in 1991. Their interest in the Ukrainian resources akin to a treasure, like that of all imperialisms, has never ceased since the "opening up" of Tsarist Russia, which ceded to them its modern and concentrated economy, from banking to raw materials. As the German Reich occupied the forefront of the Ukrainian scene for a long time, especially since the First World War, American banks accompanied those of the Reich in the interwar period. But to the secondary role then dictated by the German leader, Hitler.

The Reich, the first power to recognize Russia in 1922, held the upper hand in Soviet Russia, which was treated as a pariah by the imperialist “international community”. Even in the Ukraine which Germany had snatched in 1918 (until Germany's defeat in November), from Russia. (Ukraine) was assailed on all sides by fourteen imperialist powers from 1918 to 1920, until the Bolsheviks had reconquered it by 1920. 

Recognizing the Soviet state, Berlin recovered its capacity for nuisance there, "covered" by the Vatican, an auxiliary to the Reich since the end of the 19th century and even more so since 1914, the Curia commissioned the German Catholic clergy to carry out military espionage in preparation for new projected assaults.

Nazi banderists in the pre-war period
It is in this context that Bandera grew up, a typical product of the Uniatism of Eastern Galicia (Western Ukraine) [UNIATISM: the union of an Eastern Rite church with the Roman Church in which the authority of the papacy is accepted without loss of separate liturgies or government by local patriarchs] was a weapon of war of the Roman Church against Orthodoxy since 1595-1596. Son of a Uniate priest, Bandera was brought up like his peers in the fanatical hatred of Poles, Russians, Jews and other opponents, under the authority of Andreï Szepticky Uniate bishop of Lemberg (Lwow in Polish, Lvov in Russian, Lviv in Ukrainian) named bishop in 1900.

Russophobic, Polonophobic and shock anti-Semitic, Szepticky, like all his predecessors, had to convert Eastern Orthodox to believe in Catholicism, a mission linked to the Germanic conquest. It was first in the service of Vienna, ruler of Eastern Galicia, then, Pius X preferring the powerful Hohenzollerns to the dying Habsburgs since 1907, the bishop Andreï Szepticky, until his death (November 1944), was part of the Drang nach Osten (DNO —“thrust towards the East”) of the Reich, imperial, “republican” and Hitlerian.

The German Reich, which before 1914 financed "Ukrainian autonomy" against Russia, transformed Ukraine into a military stronghold during the First World War. Germany then increased the effort in eastern Galicia, transferred in 1921 by anti-Soviet France to reactionary Poland. "Ukrainian terrorist organisation in Poland", 20 year old Stepan Bandera had founded with his faithful lieutenants Mykola Lebed and Yaroslav Stetsko. They participated in the anti-Soviet campaign on "the genocidal famine in Ukraine" described in 1987 by the photographer and Canadian trade unionist Douglas Tottle, a pioneer in the study of Ukrainian Nazism.

Launched by the Reich and the Vatican in the summer of 1933 — that is to say after the excellent harvest of July had put an end to the scarcity or famine, used zealously by all their allies, including Poland, to Balme Russia —  with Lwow as its center, Ukrainian nazism ideologically prepared the conquest of Ukraine by the Reich. Berlin and the Vatican had undertaken one of the two secret articles of the Reich Concordat of July 1933 to carry it out together.

The Banderists (attached to the OUN) also rendered great service in Poland, not only against the Jews but also against the state. 

On June 15 1934 — the auspicious year of German attacks on heads of state and ministers — Bandera and Lebed assassinated the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki, with "delight", like his leaders, Pilsudski and Beck, in front of "the German friend. Bandera and his friend we sentenced to death by a Polish court.

Meanwhile, the OUN Nazis took on in Eastern Galicia — wrote Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe in 2014 in his landmark thesis on Bandera — the same role as the Croatian Ustashi of Ante Pavelitch, the Slovak Nazis of the Hlinka Party, the Iron Guards Romanians and other Eastern European Nazis: rich with Marks, they had all "adopted fascism, anti-Semitism, racial suprematism, the cult of war and a whole range of far-right values". 

In order not to offend its German “friends”, Warsaw commuted the death sentence of Bandera and Lebed, which was enacted by 1936, to life imprisonment. The Germans liberated them both in the invasion of September 1939.

Banderite Nazis in World War II

Since then, the Uniate OUN, powerful in Slovak and Polish Ukraine (absent from Soviet Ukraine), was the lackey of the Reich. It was subdivided in 1939-1940 into OUN-M and OUN-B, led respectively by Andrei Melnik and by the Bandera-Lebed-Stetsko trio, apparently divided by their disagreement, in regard to "Ukrainian independence": Melnik no longer talked about it, Bandera cherished by the word “independence” which the Reich did not want to see at any price.

The two OUNs [religious Unianist organisations] helped the Sipo-SD (the Gestapo) and the Abwehr to prepare for the occupation of Poland, then for the invasion of the USSR. Members of the OUNs populated the "German police academies" of occupied Poland and increased their ravages after Barbarossa: alongside the Wehrmacht, they immediately liquidated 12,000 Jews in eastern Galicia, and did not stop. 

As auxiliaries of the Sipo-SD, they tortured and exterminated without respite with the blessing of the Uniate clerics, including Szepticky, who blessed the banderists of the 14th Legion of the Waffen SS Galicia (1943-1944) and elsewhere. 

In the Einsatzkommandos, prisons, concentration camps and elsewhere, the two OUNs massacred the "enemies of the Ukrainian nation": “non-loyal” Ukrainians, Jews of all nationalities, non-Jewish Russians and Poles, including 100,000 people at Volhynia, a feat by Bandera that still disrupts the current (false) idyllic Warsaw-kyiv relationship.

In Poland and the USSR, until the complete Soviet liberation of the Ukraine (Lvov, July 1944), these champions of "ethnic cleansing" played in "the destruction of the Jews" the role of the "satellite states [of the Reich] by excellence” (Croatia and Slovakia) . 

The very secondary official conflict between Berlin and the Banderists over Ukrainian “independence” earned Bandera and Stetsko imprisonment in 1942 in an “honor camp” in Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). Lebed, on the run, led the “Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army” (UPA) on their behalf: formed in 1942 from these auxiliary police forces of the Wehrmacht and the SS, the UPA killed common enemies.

Bandera and Stetsko were freed from their hotel "honour bunker in September 1944" they eventually told the CIA. 

In July 1944, a large part of the perpetrators of the massacres had left the Ukraine in German vans. Berlin founded for its Ukrainian Nazis the “Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation” (UHVR), then, in November 1944, a “Ukrainian National Committee” with a Banderist majority. High proof of “national and anti-Nazi resistance”! 

The Soviet capture of Berlin forced them to move to Munich in a hurry, Munich has been the historic center of Nazism and the expansion of the Deutschtum [GERMAN EXCLUSIVITY] since the interwar period. In the spring of 1945 Munich became one of the main centres of the American occupation zone. Of the “250,000 Ukrainians” settled in 1947 “in Germany, Austria and Italy”, so-called “displaced persons”, “a large number were proven members or sympathizers of the OUN” [NAZIS].

The rest of the OUN-UPA criminals had remained in now Soviet Eastern Galicia where, clandestinely, they still massacred — under the leadership of their Uniate clerics "in Western Ukraine” — "tens of thousands" (35,000) of cadres of the Soviet army and communist party official between 1945 and 1951", led by their foreign friends, no longer only Germans, but now the Americans.

From the post-Stalingrad legend of the fight for national independence to the [false narratives of the] articles of Le Monde, in January 2023:

With the defeat of the Reich looming after Stalingrad, the OUN-UPA began to invent a “resistant” history: key to current Russophobic propaganda, this legend was spread throughout the “West” when the Bandera clique officially became “ally" against the USSR. Thus developed the myth of a “resistance of Ukrainian nationalists” as anti-Nazi as it was anti-Bolshevik, which is now maintained by the mainstream “Western” press.

Le Monde devoted January 7 and 8 to Bandera, two articles to this "naive hero of Ukrainian independence". The first, “Stepan Bandera, the glorified Ukrainian antihero after the Russian aggression” pushed the indulgence to such an extent that there was, perhaps in the face of numerous negative reactions, a second article. Its title was more truthful "War in Ukraine: the Bandera myth and the reality of a Nazi collaborator", not the content: Bandera "struggled by all means to liberate Ukraine from the successive yokes of Poland and Soviet Union ". He collaborated with “Nazi Germany” only for this noble objective which made him see in Hitler “a possible ally to launch the Ukrainian national revolution against the Soviet oppressor who had orchestrated, among other atrocities, the great famine of 1932- 1933, the Holodomor, killing 3 to 5 million Ukrainians. So he had plenty of excuses.

The two articles, riddled with big lies and lies of omission, make Bandera "a symbol of resistance and national unity", a complex and "contested" hero. This qualifier outraged Arno Klarsfeld (French Jewish actor) who is now alarmed by the “Western” glorification of the Ukrainian Nazis:

“Le Monde is becoming a biased and misleading newspaper: Bandera is not a “controversial” figure, he actively participated in the Holocaust. How would Le Monde qualify Goring? “controversial” too? shame for a serious newspaper !!! it is truly shameful. On March 15, 2014, the newspaper still admitted that the Maidan coup had put the Nazis in charge of Ukraine. Admittedly, with its Russophobia inherited from the organ of the Comité des Forges, Le Temps, its predecessor: “The Ukrainian far right, an unexpected target for Moscow. The visibility on Maidan of neo-Nazi, ultra-minority groups feeds Russian propaganda against the new power in kyiv”. 

So, justified or not?

Historical science had advanced as early as 1987, with Tottle on the "genocidal famine", on the massacres and on the scams of the OUN-OPA on its activities from 1929 to 1945. Rossolinski-Liebe, whose post-“Orange Revolution” in Ukraine threatened personal safety and banned lectures, completed the picture on outright criminal Bandera. The January 8 article in Le Monde mentions his thesis, without saying a word, and for good reason, about its content.

The Ukrainian-Nazi heroes of “national independence” were very important in the long preparations for the present American era of Ukraine. In their objective of world conquest, the United States included Russia in general, and Ukraine in particular, but had to be content here in the German era of “Europe” with a minor role. American finance capital had, since 1919, been associated with German capital in Eastern Europe. Its major press, including Hearst, a spokesman for German-American circles, took part in the campaign on “the genocidal famine in Ukraine” from 1935 – fifty years before the Reagan uproar on “Holodomor” (its new name) . The end of the Second World War sounded the hour, if not for the succession of the Reich, for collaboration with the heirs of the Reich with a view, in particular, to the conquest of Ukraine.

The American strategy of conquest of the whole of Europe was revealed between the territorial compromise of Yalta in February 1945, hated from the outset, and the definitive decision, in 1947-1948, to liquidate, not only the Soviet zone of influence, but the Soviet state as well. The task was given to Frank Wisner and George Kennan. 

Wisner, a Wall Street business lawyer, had been sent to Romania in 1944 by business lawyer Allen Dulles, head of OSS-Europe since November 1942, in Bern: a Soviet future had to be avoided for Ukraine — a champion of anti-Semitic massacres — by negotiating with Ukrainian elites who had been involved in it. Kennan, a diplomat, had spent his career, since 1931 in Riga (Latvia) then in various posts, fighting the USSR.

The State Department therefore entrusted this tandem, within the framework of the CIA (official successor to the OSS) founded in July 1947, with the application of directive 10/2 of the National Security Council of June 18, 1948 which prescribed the general liquidation of European socialism. A star of the Cold War, Kennan, reasonable since his retirement, unsuccessfully warned Washington against NATO's eastward expansion against Russia after 1991.

Ukraine occupied a central role in this line, and Washington relied on the experience of (Western) Germany, which had once again become an ally barely defeated (as after the Great War). Historian Christopher Simpson described as early as 1988 the incredible rescue-recycling by the OSS and its successors (“Strategic Services Unit” then CIA) of European, German and Ukrainian war criminals. 

Harry Rositzke, leader since 1945 in Munich of the "covert operations inside the USSR" of the Ukrainian Nazis - and a loyal agent who did not mention any names - confessed in 1985: "We knew perfectly well what we were doing. . The basis of the job was to use any trash as long as it was anti-communist.” The American historians Breitman and Goda, specialists in the "Shoah" regular collaborators of the Department of State, completed the file in 2010.

Washington badly needed the Vatican, which, as a rescuer of war criminals en masse via the European clergy, maintained its collaboration with the heirs of the Reich but adapted it to its alignment with the United States, masters of "Western Europe" and great donors (for domestic, Italian, and international use). 

The Curia continued to manage its Uniate breeding ground in Lvov, via prelates and underground priests. Szepticky, who died in November 1944, had been succeeded by Banderite leader Ivan Bucko, former “auxiliary bishop of Lvov” (since 1929), associated with the preparations for Barbarossa and then with the failed “re-Christianization” of the Russians. In the summer of 1945, Washington accepted this "Vatican expert on Ukrainian questions [of] radically anti-Russian opinions", as "apostolic visitor of the Ruthenians (Slavs) of the army of Ukraine" (the OUN-UPA), head, at Rome, until 1971, “Ukrainians in Western Europe”.

From July 1944, just before the entry of the Red Army into Lvov, the massacres of the “Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council” (UHVR) had, including prelates, dealt, under the Roman wing, “with Western governments”.

The British and American allies-rivals collaborated with the groups led, on the one hand, by Bandera-Stetsko (80% of the Ukrainian personnel of the "displaced persons camps in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, the United States and other western countries at the end of the 1940s") and, on the other hand, by Lebed and the Uniate prelate Ivan Hrinioch, liaison officer with the Vatican.

In May 1945 the Americans had picked up and installed, very close to Munich, as chief spy, the Nazi general (member of the NSDAP) of the Wehrmacht Reinhard Gehlen: chief of "German military intelligence on the Eastern front" in the occupied USSR (Fremde Heere Ost, FHO), Gehlen, responsible for the "interrogations", had directed Soviet collaborators from all the occupied regions, including Ukraine, and had been building the Vlassov army since 1942. These Red Army soldiers who joined the Wehrmacht so as not to perish formed criminal gangs which rendered, in the USSR and even against the French resistance fighters in 1943-1944, the same services as the Uniate Nazis. 

Gehlen, a major war criminal, received immense responsibilities in 1945: intelligence espionage and aggression against the USSR, but also anti-communist action in the American zone. 

Adenauer, who appreciated him so much, entrusted him with his secret services when the FRG was founded in the autumn of 1949: the great Nazi Gehlen therefore headed the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) until his retirement in 1968. Given the German experience acquired since the 1930s, its contribution to Ukraine was decisive. Surrounded exclusively by former Nazis, including his former assistants in the occupied USSR, Gehlen therefore maintained the German-Ukrainian collaboration without interruption.

London and Washington collaborated and competed in the use of Bandera and his minions. Washington was more discreet but let the banderists (majority) and other members of the OUN reconstitute themselves in Munich and around. 

The allies-rivals refused under all pretexts to deliver Bandera and other Ukrainian war criminals "refugees" to the USSR, which had been asking for them since the beginning of 1946 for trial. The Americans helped Bandera to settle in Munich from August 1945, forged identity papers for him (in the name of Stefan Popel) and other false documents, including one of "interned in the Nazi concentration camps of September 15 1941 to May 6, 1945 [and] released from Mauthausen concentration camp” one of the legends of today’s “Western” press. They housed him and provided him with many facilities, including a set of journalist cards, including for a “French” newspaper.

The CIA assigned Gehlen and his BND to “deal with” the compromised Bandera, serving military “operations” in Ukraine – still classified. 

Bandera reported directly to Heinz Danko Herre, Gehlen's former second in the Fremde Heere Ost assigned among other things to the Vlassov army and who, "Gehlen's main adviser" at the BND, adored Bandera: "we have known him for about 20 years, and he has more than half a million supporters in and outside Germany. 

Washington dragged out the application for a visa to stay in the United States submitted by Bandera since 1955, but the BND wanted to put its dear Bandera in direct contact with the Ukrainian Nazis of America, immigrants by the tens of thousands since the end of the 1940s. 

The complicity between the CIA and the American Department of Justice made it possible to violate the law prohibiting immigration of Nazis. “The Munich CIA officials” finally accepted “the granting of the [said] visa in 1959”, but Bandera could not reach the United States: a KGB agent executed him in Munich, on October 15, 1959, "the Soviets having decided that they could not afford the resurrection of the alliance between German espionage and Ukrainian fanatics" (Breitman and Goda). This is why the current “national hero” of “independent” Ukraine did not extend his activities across the Atlantic.

Washington had continued, still in collaboration with the BND, its works in and around Ukraine, particularly in Czechoslovakia, "the CIA providing money, supplies, training, radio facilities and the parachuting of trained agents" of the UPA. In the United States itself, the CIA promoted other Banderist allies as heralds of Ukrainian "democracy", such as Mykola Lebed, "notorious sadist and collaborator of the Germans", who had contacted Allen Dulles in Bern at the beginning of 1945.

The CIA immigrated this "leader responsible for 'mass murders of Ukrainians, Poles and Jews'", denounced by immigrants from Eastern Europe, installed him in New York as a "permanent resident", then naturalized Mykola Lebed and made him "Ukrainian national" propaganda in the United States. Since 1955, “leaflets were flown over Ukraine, and radio broadcasts called Nova Ukraina were broadcast from Athens for Ukrainian consumption.” All NATO countries were mobilized for this purpose.

When the Hungarian fiasco of November 1956 had stopped military action in Eastern Europe (and driven the obsessional Wisnan Ber to madness), a so-called "non-profit association" flourished (financed, like the rest, by the CIA), called Prolog, charged with flooding Ukraine with anti-Soviet propaganda. Hrinioch, Lebed's second, directed its Munich branch, the "Ukrainische Gesellschaft für Auslandsstudien" (Ukrainian Society for Foreign Studies). 

In “1957, Prolog broadcast 1,200 radio programs for 70 hours a month, and distributed 200,000 newspapers and 5,000 leaflets. She organized the distribution of “books by nationalist Ukrainian writers and poets”, including in Soviet Ukraine, “until the end of the Cold War”. It "financed the travel of Ukrainian students and scholars to university conferences, international youth festivals" and other events: on their return, the grantees reported to the CIA. Prolog was the only “through CIA operations to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and its forty million Ukrainian citizens.”

In the 1960s, American banderists, including Lebed, made their public conversion to philo-Semitism, systematically denouncing "the Soviets for their anti-Semitism", a very fashionable theme these days. 

The Polish-American Catholic aristocrat Zbigniew Brzezinski, a pillar since the 1950s of the permanent subversion of the USSR and the Ukraine-Russia split, advocated in 1977, as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, the extension of this “wonderful” [SARCASM] program. In the 1980s, between Carter and Ronald Reagan, Prolog branched out into “other Soviet nationalities, which included Jewish Soviet dissidents, supreme irony,” according to Breitman and Goda. 

Brilliant tactic, after decades of hostility or indifference to European Jews, since “Western” propaganda transformed a USSR once hated as Judeo-Bolshevik into a symbol of anti-Semitism.

The American-German-Ukrainian-Nazi operations against the USSR and Eastern Europe, named "Cartel" then "Aerodynamic" then, in the 1980s, "Qrdynamic", "Pddynamic" and "Qrplumb" had never ceased . Breitman and Goda's study ended in 1990, "on the verge of collapse" of the USSR: everything was then ready, in Ukraine, for the next phase, managed by Ms. Nuland and her ilk.

Annie LACROIX-RIZ

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By Alexander Nepogodin, an Odessa-born political journalist, expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Nazi collaborators, dissidents and Soviet functionaries: The untold story of how Ukraine achieved independence

Ukrainian nationalists were persecuted and imprisoned in the USSR but had many allies in circles of power

The end of the Second World War and the defeat of Ukrainian Nazi-collaborators did not put an end to the nationalist movement in the Soviet republic. On the contrary, realizing the futility of underground armed struggle, the "patriots" took the opposite approach. Thus, political leaders in Kiev became unwitting accomplices, who actively continued the work begun in the 1920s to "Ukrainianize” territories inhabited by a mainly Russian population.

Thanks to this, representatives of the Ukrainian national movement began to engage in human rights activities, while simultaneously raising ethnic issues. It resulted in the creation of the People’s Movement of Ukraine party, known as Rukh, which became the driving force that led the country to independence in 1991. Like other nationalists, they played an important role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not Everyone’s Thaw

Repressions against dissidents resumed in the Soviet Union immediately after the end of World War II. In the Ukrainian SSR, this was mainly seen in the struggle against the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), an underground political organization created in the late 1920s, which operated in Galicia and Volhynia. During the War, members of the OUN organized an insurgent army that fought on the side of Nazi Germany. They were aided by sympathetic residents of the Ukrainian SSR’s western regions, which had been annexed in 1939. However, the death of Joseph Stalin and the debunking of his cult of personality put an end to the practice of mass repression. A period of so-called ‘thaw’ began under Khrushchev – a transition from totalitarianism to a milder dictatorship.

Censorship weakened, freedom of speech increased, and there was a relative liberalization of political and public life. As a result, nationally minded Ukrainians gained a certain degree of freedom of expression without the risk of being arrested. However, with the destruction of the OUN underground, they had already become disillusioned with any form of armed struggle. Being mostly intellectuals, they preferred to express themselves not by deeds, but in words.

There were opportunities for this approach. Kiev’s regional committee was headed by Petr Shelest, a native of Slobozhanshchina (the village of Andreevka near Kharkov). Later, during the thaw, he led the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR. During his incumbency, the next stage of Ukrainization began in the republic. He switched to the Ukrainian language himself after his appointment as the Ukrainian SSR’s top official. “Suddenly, small restaurants and taverns with ‘Ukrainian’ names appeared (‘Kuren’, ‘Natalka-Poltavka’, etc.) in the vicinity of Kiev, with elements of Ukrainian ethnography in design and service… Signs with the word ‘Ukraine’ began to appear on various shopping establishments and the like,” recalled Ukrainian writer and literary critic Ivan Dziuba.

In the 1960s, in parallel with the next stage of Ukrainization both from above and below, a new constellation of figures began to form in the Ukrainian national movement. Their first meetings were held in a cinema club at the former Kiev Institute of Noble Maidens, which the Bolsheviks had renamed the October Palace. Young writers, artists, musicians, actors, and directors met there. Among them were Ivan Dziuba, Evgeny Sverstyuk, and Alla Gorskaya, who were to become major figures in the Ukrainian movement.

Soon these creative meetings acquired political undertones. In 1962, artist Alla Gorskaya and poet Vasily Simonenko discovered Bykovnya (now the ‘Bykovnyanskie Graves’ National Historical Memorial) in Kiev and its environs, as well as Vasilkov, which was the killing grounds of the NKVD [the country’s central state agency security, which was replaced by the MSS, and then the KGB – RT], where at least 7,000 victims of Stalin’s repressions were shot and buried from 1937 to 1941.

They sent a letter to Kiev's City Council demanding that the existence of these mass graves be made public and turned into a memorial to the victims of Stalin’s terror. At the same time, Ukrainian intellectuals began to oppose what they considered to be the excessive presence of the Russian language in the Ukrainian SSR’s public life, while condemning ideological restrictions on creativity, and so forth. There was no talk about independence yet, but the movement for civil and national rights was constantly strengthening.

1965 became a landmark year. In September, the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by dissident director Sergey Parajanov premiered in Kiev. It tells the story of two young lovers from warring Western Ukrainian families. Before the screening, the director made a speech, and then literary critic Ivan Dziuba, graduate student Vasily Stus, and journalist Vyacheslav Chornovol took the stage.

They announced to the audience that mass repressions were returning, and members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia were being arrested on political grounds. After their performance, 140 viewers signed a petition demanding an end to political persecution. This act led to few consequences, except for the expulsion of students from universities and the dismissal of some young people from work, but it constituted the first public protest staged by the new nationally oriented intelligentsia

The protest of Dzyuba, Stus and Chornovol signified that the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s struggle had moved to a qualitatively new stage. Whereas, earlier, everything had been limited to muted discontent voiced in kitchens and creative circles, in 1965, dissidents began instigating acts of public protest. Three months after the scandalous premiere, Dziuba wrote Internationalism or Russification?

In his book, the author accuses the Soviet leadership of forcibly Russifying Ukrainians, asserting that the party had adhered to the ideology of great-power chauvinism since Stalin’s time. In his opinion, the only way to end the oppression of the Ukrainian people was to return to the Leninist national policy.

The book was mainly distributed in samizdat (banned literature copied and disseminated by readers – RT), but in 1968, it was published in the emigrant magazine Modernity in Munich. This magazine was supported by the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council, which was associated with the OUN and its one-time leader, the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera. Dziuba’s book found wide resonance in society and provoked a reaction from the authorities – the author was expelled from the Writers’ Union.

However, Petr Shelest, being the de facto head of the Ukrainian SSR and a Politburo member, allowed the book to be published for official use and sent copies to regional party committees for review.

After Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Ukrainian intelligentsia feared a new tightening of the screws and prepared a letter of protest against political persecution addressed to the leaders of the USSR – Leonid Brezhnev, Alexey Kosygin, and Nikolay Podgorny, two of whom (Brezhnev and Podgorny) were Ukrainian themselves. 

It was signed by 139 figures in culture and the arts. The first among the signatories was director Parajanov.

It is not surprising that rumors concerning an underground terrorist Bandera organization spread in the Ukrainian SSR soon thereafter. Subsequently, some of the most active signatories were arrested. One of the letter’s organizers, Alla Gorskaya, who had discovered secret NKVD execution sites back in 1962, died under strange circumstances. Her father-in-law allegedly struck her with an axe out of personal spite, and then repented and immediately committed suicide. It remains a mystery how an elderly man who walked with a cane after suffering a heart attack could have cut a person down with one blow. One of the unofficial versions attributes the murder to the KGB, which allegedly repeatedly summoned the artist, demanding that she remove her signature from the protest letter.

Despite the murder of Alla Gorskaya, the Ukrainian national movement did not cease its activities. Firstly, an underground culture developed – especially in avant-garde art circles in Kiev, Kharkov, Lvov, and Uzhgorod. Secondly, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, which was established in 1976, intensified its human rights activities, while simultaneously raising national issues.

Responding to attempts to publicize violations of the Ukrainian intelligentsia’s rights, the Soviet government promptly suppressed the activities of human rights defenders. From 1977 to 1979, dozens of people were arrested and sent to camps under anti-Soviet laws, primarily Article 62, part 1, of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR on ‘Anti-Soviet Agitation and Propaganda’. Among them were Viacheslav Chornovol, Levko Lukyanenko, and Vasily Stus. The latter’s guilt was acknowledged in court by his own lawyer, Viktor Medvedchuk (later chairman of Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma’s administration and co-chairman of the ‘Opposition Platform – For Life’ party – RT). In the end, the poet was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 5 years’ exile, which turned out to be a death sentence for him.

While well aware of the possible consequences, the dissidents did not stop fighting for civil and national rights. Not all chose this path, however. Some, having supported the intelligentsia at first, later not only distanced themselves from it, but even actively supported their persecutors. For example, USSR State Prize laureate Ivan Drach criticized Ukrainian nationalists who “come mainly from the western edge of our land.” However, his break with the dissidents did not prevent him from later becoming a figure in the national movement or from participating in the preparation of Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence in 1991.

His colleague in the creative workshop, Dmitriy Pavlichko, was at one time suspected of participating in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (the combat wing of the OUN). It is not surprising that he is considered one of the patriarchs of the Ukrainian national movement in today’s Ukraine, as he began advocating for war with Russia in 1991. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, he actively supported Western Ukraine’s annexation by the USSR. For example, he is the author of the following verse: “I am the son of a simple logger, Hutsul from the Carpathian Mountains. Fate smiled sweetly on me, In the glow of the Kremlin stars!”

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union and initiated Perestroika. During the wave of democratization of social and political life, the ‘People’s Movement of Ukraine for Perestroika’, better known as Rukh (from Ukrainian ‘movement’), was created in February of 1989. This was an extremely motley coalition including both moderate communists and radical nationalists, first headed by Ivan Drach, and later shortened its name to simply ‘People's Movement of Ukraine’.

After some time, leadership of Rukh fell to Viacheslav Chornovol, who enjoyed great authority among Ukrainian dissidents thanks to his ten-year struggle with the Soviet regime. However, there were also sincere communists like Drach and Pavlychko in the party. Many well-known Ukrainian nationalist leaders who played a huge role in the 2014 Maidan coup and the subsequent war in the Donbass launched their political careers in Rukh, including Oleg Tyagnibok, leader of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist Svoboda party, and Andrey Parubiy, former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

In the parliamentary elections of March 1990, the Democratic Bloc, which included Rukh, received 111 out of 450 seats, becoming the second largest party in the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. The parliament was controlled by the Communist majority, the so-called ‘Group of 239’, led by Aleksandr Moroz. Nationalists demanding that Ukraine separate from the USSR were supported mainly by residents of Western Ukraine and, partly, Kiev. However, it was Rukh that became the driving force that led Ukraine to independence in 1991.

Events developed at lightning speed. In July of 1990, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, but it had no practical consequences. However, in the wake of rumors about the signing of an updated Union Treaty that would fix the Ukrainian SSR as part of the USSR, students from universities in Kiev and Lviv demanded a new parliamentary election and went on hunger strike, dubbed the ‘Revolution on Granite’.     

At the height of events on October Revolution Square (now Independence Square), 150 people were taking part in the hunger strike. After two weeks, the head of the Ukrainian SSR’s Council of Ministers, Vitaly Masol, resigned. But despite some opposition successes, by the summer of 1991, prospects for real Ukrainian independence appeared illusory. In a March referendum, more than 70% of the inhabitants of the Ukrainian SSR voted for the preservation of the USSR.

At a festival on August 17, 1991, Rukh’s leader, Chornovol, acknowledged that the probability of independence was extremely slim. However, just two days later, a coup took place in Moscow, when the State Committee for Emergency Situations (GKChP) emerged to prevent the signing of a new Union Treaty, which would have turned the USSR into a confederation. As a result, the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR adopted the ‘Act of Declaration of Independence of Ukraine’ on August 24. The activities of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR were subsequently suspended, and then banned.

The collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists, Communist directors, and Soviet-Party nomenclature, amplified by the administrative resources of the Ukrainian SSR’s vertical power structure, made it possible to rally public support. On December 1, 1991, a new referendum was held, in which more than 90 percent of residents voted for an independent Ukraine. Ironically, in Ukraine’s first presidential elections, which were held simultaneously, residents voted, in essence, for the preservation of the Ukrainian SSR by electing party apparatchik Leonid Kravchuk, while nationalist candidates Viacheslav Chornovol and Levko Lukianenko couldn’t garner even a third of the votes between them.

Moreover, in 1992, Chornovol and Rukh had already begun to actively promote the federalization of Ukraine “on the principles of nationalism and national unity.” Vladimir Cherniak, a member of Rukh’s Central Committee, stated that the transition to federalism “will accelerate the process of state-building, as it will free the central authorities from solving regional problems, making it possible to focus their attention on global issues.”

However, such initiatives received no response from the population, and disagreements between party members almost resulted in a split. The old constellation of nationalists that had led Ukraine to independence began to exit the political scene. In their place, more radical organizations emerged that demanded total Ukrainization and war with Russia. Among them were the Ukrainian National Assembly, which had its own armed subdivision dubbed the Ukrainian Nationalist Self-Defense, as well as the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, which was renamed Svoboda in 2004.

By Alexander Nepogodin, an Odessa-born political journalist, expert on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

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THE INFLUENCE OF THE CIA ON THIS PROCESS OF RE-NAZIFICATION HAS NOT BEEN MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE BUT IT IS LIKELY THAT THE CIA HAD A HAND IN WHAT HAPPENED. WE KNOW ABOUT NULAND AND HER $5 BILLION SPENT TO BRING UKRAINE OUT OF RUSSIAN SPHERE OF INFLUENCE. WE KNOW THAT THE US FINANCED THE NAZIS THUS.

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WHILE IS IS WELL DOCUMENTED THAT THE AMERICAN ADMINISTRATION SUPPORTED THE NAZIS, BEFORE, DURIHNG AND AFTER WW2 (SEE OPERATION PAPERCLIP AND UKRAINE NOW: READ FROM TOP), THE US ADMINISTRATION POINTS THE FINGER AT CREDIT SUISSE, THE MAIN SHAREHOLDER HAVING BEEN SAUDI ARABIA, FOR HAVING A FEW "NAZI" ACCOUNTS ON ITS BOOKS...

The troubled Swiss bank Credit Suisse hampered the investigation into accounts possibly held by high-ranking German Nazis and SS officers, some of which turned out to be active for decades, the US Senate announced on Tuesday.

The Senate Budget Committee published the findings on Holocaust Remembrance Day, after issuing its first subpoena since 1991 to obtain the results of the bank’s internal investigation. While the reports are incomplete, they revealed “nearly 100” previously undisclosed accounts linked to the Nazis, and raised new questions about Credit Suisse’s potential support for the so-called “ratlines” the defeated Germans used to flee Europe after 1945.

“When it comes to investigating Nazi matters, righteous justice demands that we must leave no stone unturned. Credit Suisse has thus far failed to meet that standard,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the committee.

Credit Suisse launched the probe in March 2020, after the Simon Wiesenthal Center claimed to have credible information about accounts potentially holding money looted from Jews during the Holocaust.

The final reports showed Credit Suisse appears to have maintained accounts for “at least 99 individuals,” either senior officials in Nazi Germany or members of a Nazi-affiliated groups in Argentina. Seventy accounts “with plausible links” to Argentina-based Nazis were opened after 1945, and at least 14 remained open as recently as 2020. However, no current or dormant accounts were found.

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KEEPING JULIAN IN PRISON IS A FASCIST ACT....