Ukrainian nationalism during world war II: Its nature and manifestations

Abstract

This article examines the nature and manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism during World War II. The authors dwell upon the making of the nationalist movement in emigration, and later across Ukraine. The authors come to the conclusion that, in its essence, Ukrainian nationalism was a social-political movement oriented towards the expression, protection, and actualization of the interests of the Ukrainian people. The creation of a Ukrainian nationalist state was seen as the primary means for resolving the above objectives. At the same time, the struggle for its creation began amid the unconcluded process of the formation of the Ukrainian nation. Worthy of note is also the relatively late emergence of political organizations pretending to the expression, as well as localization, of national interests mainly in Western Ukraine and, above all, in Halychyna, a region that had long been part of Poland and Austro-Hungary, which facilitated the entrenchment of anti-Russian sentiments in the latter. By the beginning of World War II, the influence of the Halychynans in the Ukrainian national movement had grown, while the national leaders who had stayed in the USSR were no longer active or were subjected to repressions. The leading positions in the Ukrainian nationalist movement came to be firmly occupied by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), although it was split into several factions within itself, which nevertheless shared the common sentiment of not just Ukrainophilia, but of Rusophobia and Anti-Sovietism, a sentiment largely exacerbated under the influence of a close partnership with the German Nazis. As a result, during the war the most widespread were the radical, more aggressive, manifestations of Ukrainian nationalism, which were accompanied by extreme forms of discrimination against representatives of other ethnicities, going as far as their physical extermination: the Russians, Jews, and Poles. Later on, hatred would be aimed at representatives of their "own" ethnicity deemed to oppose a specific faction within the OUN. Cruel terror attacks would be carried out against residents of Ukraine's both eastern and western regions - communists and Komsomol members, party officials and Soviet activists. By the same token, the OUN movement would be suppressed via mass repressions by homeland security agencies. The events of World War II and its aftermath resulted in serious trauma for many residents of Ukraine and may be viewed as having had an impact on the development of the present-day crisis in Ukraine.