Biography of Stepan Bandera (english)

Lviv regional Counsil sent it to European Parliament: Biography of Stepan Bandera   (англійська)

Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (January 1, 1909, Staryi Uhryniv — † October 15, 1959, Munich) was a Ukrainian politician, ideologue of the Ukrainian national liberation movement, and a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

Stepan Bandera was born into a clerical family on January 1, 1909. He was born in western Ukraine, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and called the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The peoples of that empire enjoyed certain rights of self-determination and the Ukrainians living therein knew something about democracy, unlike the Ukrainians living under Tsarist Russia. Bandera’s father was a Ukrainian Catholic priest and civic activist. He supported the co-operative movement among small farmers, educational organizations and agricultural associations. After the collapse of Austro-Hungary and the declaration of the Western-Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR), the elder Bandera helped establish Ukrainian rule and became a member of the new parliament representing the Kalush district. During the ensuing war, Fr. Andriy Bandera served as a chaplain in the Ukrainian Galician Army. Thus, as a young boy, Stepan Bandera saw his parents’ generation try to establish an independent Ukrainian state, only to see them lose it to the Bolsheviks in the east and Poland in the west.

In 1919 Stepan Bandera began his secondary school studies at the Ukrainian- language Himnaziya in the city of Stryi, where his grandfather lived (70 km south of Lviv). Bandera subsequently joined the Ukrainian scouting organization Plast. In 1927 Bandera completed his secondary school studies and applied to study at the Ukrainian Economic Academy in Podebrady (Czechoslovakia), but Polish authorities refused him a passport for travel abroad. The following year, Stepan Bandera enrolled in the Agronomy Department of Lviv Polytechnic University. He was arrested along with his father by the Poles for conducting a memorial service for fallen Ukrainian soldiers. Bandera became an active member of various Ukrainian student and civic organizations that strove to combat forced polonization and discrimination against Ukrainians. He studied in Lviv until his arrest in 1934.

During his student years, Bandera became a member of the Ukrainian national liberation organization, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In June 1933 he became that organization’s chief for western Ukraine. Under his leadership the organization concentrated primarily on social-propagandistic work, but became known for its violent protests against the Famine Genocide in Soviet Ukraine (the Holodomor), as well as against the pacification of Ukrainians by Polish authorities. The first protest was the 1933 assassination of the Soviet representative in Lviv and member of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB), Alexei Mailov. The second protest was the 1934 assassination of the Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Bronislaw Pieracki, in response to the actions of Polish police against defenseless Ukrainian peasants. After Bandera’s arrest in 1934, the Polish court sentenced him to death for his role in organizing these violent acts of retribution. The sentence was later commuted to life-long imprisonment.

After the partition of the Polish state by the Soviets and Nazis in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, Bandera broke free from prison and moved to Lviv in the Soviet zone to resume his work in the underground. Later he moved to the German zone to organize those Ukrainians who fled the Soviet terror that Bolshevik rule brought to western Ukraine. Bandera helped to organize a future Ukrainian government that would seize power in the event of a Soviet-German war. Between 1939 and 1941, the Soviets executed and deported tens of thousands of Ukrainians, and demonstrated they would never allow Ukraine to be independent. The Nazis had no interest in a free Ukraine which they viewed as a “living space” for Aryans. Seeking to avoid war against the world’s two largest armies, the OUN attempted to use German interests in the war against the USSR to train army officers and form the core of a future independent Ukrainian army. But in less than half a year, the OUN was fighting against both Germany and the USSR. On June 30, 1941, on the ninth day of the war between the USSR and Germany, OUN declared the Act for the Renewal of an Independent Ukrainian State and established a multi-party government in Lviv. The Nazis promptly arrested Stepan Bandera and Prime Minister Yaroslav Stetsko, and demanded the act be revoked. Bandera and Stetsko refused and were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, together with other ministers of the Ukrainian government. Stepan Bandera’s two brothers Oleksandr and Vasyl were imprisoned in Auschwitz with other OUN members, where his brothers perished. The German Gestapo joined the Soviet NKVD in the hunt for OUN members. The Soviets executed Stepan Bandera’s father Andriy Bandera in Kyiv just because he was the father of the OUN leader.

OUN nevertheless continued its struggle against Nazi occupation. On the eve of the Battle of Stalingrad, in the Fall of 1942, the OUN united existing groups of guerillas into what became the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), an army that eventually liberated large districts of northwestern Ukraine from German occupation. General Roman Shukhevych, a close comrade-in-arms of Stepan Bandera, became the UPA’s commander-in-chief. A number of high-ranking officers in the UPA obtained their military training in the German army prior to the war. But the UPA also included numerous officers trained in the Soviet Red Army, as well as the Polish and Czechoslovak armies. That was the reality of creating a national army without the backing of a national state.

After German troops retreated from Ukraine, the Soviets sought to suppress Ukraine’s independence. The Soviets dispatched special military units of the NKVD to fight against the OUN. This war lasted into the mid-1950s when the KGB arrested the last UPA commander Vasyl Kuk. OUN members continued their struggle in the Soviet GULAG concentration camps, organizing strikes and anti-Soviet subversion under the slogan “Freedom to nations – freedom to individuals!” The Soviet totalitarian regime imprisoned OUN members for 25-year terms that were often extended. In the camps, Ukrainian nationalists met and worked with Soviet dissidents of different nationalities, and struggled together with them in defense of national and human rights.

After Hitler’s defeat, Stepan Bandera and many other OUN members ended up in the American zone of post-war Germany. They established organizations to promote the cause of Ukraine’s independence. Bandera’s writings and activities proved dangerous to the USSR and its leaders. The order for his assassination was approved at the highest level by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The KGB dispatched Bohdan Stashynsky, a trained killer, to Germany with a weapon to administer an undetectable poison that would simulate a natural heart failure. Bandera was killed in Munich on October 15, 1959 in the stairwell of his apartment building. Foul play was suspected, but nobody knew the truth for sure. It wasn’t until 1961, just two days before the Berlin Wall was erected, that the killer fled from East to West Berlin and surrendered to German authorities. He revealed the details of his murder of Bandera and another Ukrainian leader Lev Rebet in 1957. His trial took place in Karlsruhe, where the German justice system ruled that the Soviet government had ordered and organized the murders. The trial of Bohdan Stashynsky received international coverage, and the world learned about the Soviet Union’s policy of assassinating political opponents, both at home and abroad.

The KGB may have killed Stepan Bandera, but it could not destroy the Ukrainian peoples’ pursuit of independence. That centuries-old dream was finally realized in 1991. Today, independent Ukraine flies the blue and yellow flag – the same flag for which Stepan Bandera fought. Today, Ukraine’s national anthem is the same anthem sung by Bandera and his generation, and Ukraine’s coat-of-arms is a symbol of statehood that dates back over a thousand years. These were also the symbols of the short-lived Ukrainian National Republic during World War I. Finally, these are the same symbols of independent Ukrainian statehood that Hitler demanded Bandera revoke in July 1941. Bandera remained firm and thus became a symbol for all Ukrainian patriots because, in the face of adversity and against all odds, he dared to stand up for Ukraine’s right to be independent. That is why today across Ukraine, monuments to him stand in cities and villages, streets bear his name, songs are sung, films are made and plays are written about him. As a symbol, Stepan Bandera has few equivalents in Ukraine’s history: a prisoner in Poland, then in Hitler’s concentration camp, and finally assassinated by the Soviet KGB. In spite of what foreign politicians may think, Bandera will remain a symbol of the Ukrainian peoples’ fight for freedom.