On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 7:36 AM Michael Pugliese via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote: To put down the Anti-Soviet resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army , not entirely suppressed until the 50's, required substantial effort.
Via Chapter 5. UPA’s Conflict with the Red Army and Soviet Security Forces, "Heroes and Villains: Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/523>," by David Marples. An early work by Marples,"STALINISM in UKRAINE in the 1940's <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230376076>" is also worth consulting <https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780333492611>. The Long Struggle: Soviet Security Forces versus UPA The most documented and discussed aspect of Ukraine during World War II is the conflict that occurred in the later part of the war between the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Soviet security forces of the NKVD.1 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn1> The NKVD was not the only unit involved, many other forces were deployed against the guerrillas, including members of the *Komsomol*. Throughout the postwar years, the conflict was narrated in Soviet writings as one of patriots fighting against ruthless and treacherous bandits, who were tarred with the phrase “Ukrainian-German nationalists,” evidently coined by Nikita Khrushchev, the Ukrainian party boss in the late 1930s who was again sent into the region in 1944. It is also possible that it derives from Soviet propaganda organs. It signified that in official eyes the UPA was a close partner of the retreating Germans and fought on their behalf. However, this view was already being questioned prior to the end of the Soviet period. Thus in 1991, a people’s deputy from the Rivne region, Mykola Porovs’kyi, was reminding the public that the 30,000 people reportedly killed by the UPA—mainly party members sent to Western Ukraine—was the lamentable outcome of a fratricidal struggle initiated by Stalin and his cronies. He noted the crimes committed against the Ukrainian population by the NKVD and demanded the equal treatment of criminals irrespective of what parties or organizations they represented.2 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn2> Perhaps the most important article to appear on the subject in the Soviet period was that of V. I. Maslovs’kyi in the journal *Komunist Ukrainy*. Its appearance in this source indicated that the question was being discussed at the highest levels of the party hierarchy in Ukraine, with an eye to revising the official perspective. Maslovs’kyi remarked that the complexity of the acute political confrontation in the western areas of Ukraine needed to be reflected truthfully by social scientists and historians. Hitherto, discussion had been dominated by clichés and stereotypes. In the Brezhnev years, it had been a taboo subject, and the authorities limited inquiry by restricting or prohibiting access to special archival holdings. However, most people could now acknowledge the archaic methods by which the past was formerly studied; it had led to deformations or even outright falsifications in interpretation. The reason was that the authorities in the area of research and ideology did not like the truth about these dramatic events. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the political struggles in Western Ukraine came under review, but there was still a marked reluctance to expose the social and political roots of the confrontations: their brutality and scale. It was now time in Maslovs’kyi’s view to begin the discussion. The Communist Party in the spring of 1943 had tried to avoid bloodshed. It published and disseminated slogans that guaranteed amnesty to UPA members and supporters if they would cease fighting. This leniency, however, was only one side of the story. Stalin and NKVD chief, L. P. Beria, undermined this humanistic decision and there simultaneously occurred illegal and inhuman actions. Thus Stalin and Beria essentially ignored the official decision to end the conflict in the western areas and escalated the violence. For the first time in an official narrative, it was suggested that anti-Soviet treachery was not the root cause of the violence in this region.3 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn3> According to Maslovs’kyi, after the liberation of Western Ukraine from German occupation, it was possible to avoid large-scale conflict with OUNUPA since the armed underground and armed formations of the nationalists had begun to disintegrate politically, organizationally, and psychologically. At that time, over 13,000 UPA soldiers had given themselves up to Soviet organs. From February 1944 to 1 June 1945, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the NKGB, and the people’s “destruction battalions”4 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn4> had eliminated 9,619 UPA troops, 24,888 had been arrested, and 40,395 had surrendered voluntarily. These figures constituted some 74,902 men out of a total membership of 90,000. Thus by mid-1945, major formations of the UPA barely existed. Its remnants were forced to go underground and change their tactics. At this stage they were “brutalized and doomed.” However, by the end of this same year, these remnants had managed to fill the enormous gaps in their ranks. These reinforcements arrived in the shape of the OUN underground and those who wished to avoid being drafted into the Soviet army. As a result the armed nationalist underground returned to its original strength. Maslovs’kyi asks: how could this have happened? The main answer, he finds, lies in the massive reprisals against the local Ukrainian population initiated by Stalin and Beria. The first wave began immediately once the area had been cleared of the Germans and continued until the spring of 1945. Even in the autumn of 1944, reprisals had begun against the families of German collaborators and OUN-UPA members. Illegally repressed, with no resort to trial and adequate investigations, tens of thousands of people (including the elderly and children) were dispatched to remote areas of the country. Such punishment befell not only prisoners, but even those who had surrendered voluntarily to Soviet organs. Such measures aroused a wave of indignation and immediately increased the number of people in the armed underground. This factor was the most significant reason why 300,000 people came through the ranks of the OUN-UPA in the postwar years, writes Maslovs’kyi.5 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn5> Having revealed such astonishing figures, Maslovs’kyi then tries to convince his readers that the pro-Soviet section of the population nonetheless constituted a majority. He writes that from the time of the liberation of Western Ukraine from the Germans, i.e., from February 1944 until the autumn of 1945, the Soviet army mobilized over 750,000 working class people from these regions, which was 95-98 % of those subject to recruitment. All reportedly fought bravely against the enemy, and half were decorated with orders and medals, including twenty-three that won the award “Hero of the Soviet Union”. In 1945, he continues, the *Komsomol* organizations encompassed 65,000 young Western Ukrainians, and in May of this year, the village Soviets employed 300,000 activists. By the end of the year there were 33,165 Communists in this region. By May 1945, 57,000 troops operated in destruction battalions, and organizations of women and the intelligentsia were growing. By the end of the 1940s, there were reportedly around 500,000 Soviet and *Komsomol* activists in Western Ukraine, and “it is an inviolable fact” that most inhabitants of the region had been consolidated to fight in the battle against the nationalist “bandits.”6 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn6> The figures seem inflated, but they only add credence to the perception of Western Ukraine as a mass battleground in the 1940s, especially at a time when the front had long moved forward, and well after the end of the “Great Patriotic War” following the April 1945 Battle of Berlin. Nevertheless, the Maslovs’kyi article marked a turning point because it ended the one-sided depiction of events and opened the way for further discussion of issues that had long divided residents of Ukraine. One now had a portrayal of more than one million combatants operating in a small agricultural region, flanked on the western side by the Carpathian Mountains, and with village after village divided in their allegiance, but no doubt more inclined toward native sons than to outsiders sent by the Soviet regime. There followed from the nationalists a sustained campaign to denigrate the Soviet forces. An article reprinted from the *Litopys UPA* series noted that numerous NKVD garrisons began to appear in Western Ukraine from January 1946. The NKVD would drive local residents out of their houses. These garrisons were moved frequently from one location to another so that their members could not strike up an acquaintance with local residents. With their arrival, an “extraordinary state” was established in which people required a permit to travel from one village to another. Those caught at night would be arrested or shot outright. The main theme in this article, however, is that of the rape of women and young girls and sometimes even elderly women by NKVD men. To the incidence of rape is linked the transmission of venereal disease, which was allegedly brought to the West Ukrainian village by “the Bolsheviks,” since none existed hitherto. In every village that had an NKVD garrison, there were said to be 10-20 women with venereal disease. The article maintains that its dissemination was a deliberate plot on the part of the NKVD to infect local Ukrainians. On 22 June 1946, UPA insurgents detained an NKVD soldier with venereal disease and under interrogation he confessed that his task was to infect girls held in prisons. The NKVD is also charged with desecrating the bodies of insurgents. In the village of Oleshiv (Stanislav region), the NKVD men tied the body of a dead insurgent to the tail of a horse and dragged it through the streets. Dead bodies were also reportedly left along the roadside with inscriptions on them, while in Sambir cigarettes were inserted into the mouths of dead insurgents and used for target practice.7 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn7> The Soviet security forces are thus characterized as despicable and brutal in their actions against the local population. The image was developed further in a series of articles by Ivan Bilas, which appeared in the reputable weekly of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union, *Literaturna Ukraina*. Bilas begins his account with the story of the most treacherous method used by the Soviet authorities to fight Ukrainian nationalists, namely the creation and deployment of special units that masqueraded as UPA members and as the security services of the OUN. The goal was to compromise the nationalists by killing civilians in the name of the UPA, as well as to eliminate the leaders of both the OUN and UPA. The beginnings of such an operation reportedly began with the dissolution of Kovpak’s Partisan Brigade and its division into mobile units on 20 September 1944. The goal of these units was to combat UPA insurgents, while the staff and property of the Kovpak brigade were transferred to the NKVD. In 1944-45, most NKVD attacks on so-called bandits and rebels took place in Volyn, Rivne, and Ternopil’ *oblasts*. Bilas cites a commander of a special NKVD unit in the Rivne region called Boris Pavlovich Koryakov (b. 1921, Gorky region), and wounded during the encirclement of Kyiv in September 1941. Under his leadership, the NKVD conducted some 200 operations in the Rivne region. Sometimes they posed as UPA insurgents to gain access into villages, and in this way they could inflict large numbers of casualties among the rebels. The victims of such operations, Bilas notes, were predominantly civilians, and sometimes the scope of the terror inflicted was so extreme that even the NKVD began to complain—this was the case in the spring of 1949. The chief culprits were “special units” of the MGB, created to “root out remnants of the nationalist underground.” Allegedly these units led to tensions between the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of State Security because the former was in control of criminal activities, and the special units were committing robberies and murders. It was thus difficult to distinguish who was a mere criminal and who was acting on the orders of the MGB.8 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn8> Similarly, on 9 June 1949, the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, Tymofii Strokach, sent a report to his all-Union counterpart in Moscow, S. N. Kruglov, in which he complained that there had been several occasions when persons posing as MGB agents carried out robberies in Western Ukraine. The MGB had provided them with weapons but refused to clamp down on their ties to the criminal world. Consequently, these employees pretended to be OUN bandits and robbed and plundered the civilian population.9 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn9> Bilas clearly has perused the archives in depth in his coverage of the role of NKVD-MGB punitive and military units that operated in Western Ukraine as the Soviet fronts moved westward. In a subsequent article, he notes that there were a total of 26,304 troops of military police forces already in action by the spring of 1944, of which the largest numbers were in Rivne, L’viv, and Volyn *oblasts*. Two infantry brigades were about to be transferred to the region from the Caucasus, and a tank battalion with 22 tanks was also to be deployed. Later a further 7,700 troops were dispatched from Russia, and this large contingent would be increased each year to fight UPA insurgents until 1953. In general, these intruders, according to Bilas’s account, behaved barbarically. His examples, taken from the autumn of 1944, portray drunken state officials and troops carrying out rape and murder, executing the elderly, beating priests, and setting fire to property. In one case, in the village of Kryven’ke, Ternopil’ *oblast*, 60 NKVD troops under the command of a Major Polyans’kyi burned 45 households, 20 of which belonged to families of sons currently serving in the Red Army at the front. Several senior officials of the NKGB and NKVD were present during this mission, but did nothing to stop the provocative actions of Polyans’kyi.10 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn10> Bilas points out that Western Ukraine, from the perspective of the authorities, was a hostile war zone. He provides stark statistics to illustrate this contention (taken from 1 January 1946, seven months after the end of the Second World War in Europe), citing the completion of almost 40,000 security missions, the deaths of 103,313 “bandits,” the arrest of almost 16,000 active insurgents, and the voluntary surrender of a further 50,058. In the second quarter of 1946 there were reportedly instances when Soviet soldiers fell under the influence of OUN-UPA and began to slander the *kolkhoz* system and demonstrate an unwillingness to fight the “Ukrainian-German nationalists.” One soldier, born in Gorky *oblast*, evidently commented to his comrades: “I am tired of this duty. Why did they bring us to Western Ukraine? We are fighting Banderites but they have done no harm to us.” Crime rates among these troops began to soar, and, as a result of the lenient attitude of some officers, a number of unit commanders had become morally decayed. Together with subordinates, they embarked on drinking sprees and often took part in committing crimes. Torture and abuse, says Bilas, became common in some units, usually involving drinking vodka or moonshine, and then abusing and raping women (including both pregnant women, minors, and the elderly), and frequently posing as OUN bandits. On 23 October 1945, Soviet troops broke into a local branch of the L’viv Historical Museum and stole 18 artworks. Some of the items were discovered after an official inquiry, but others were destroyed or used to decorate local clubs. Another such action occurred at the L’viv archives, involving Soviet cadets training to be military cooks who stole 128 valuable documents of Russian and Polish princes. However, the precise link between this event and those involving actions against Ukrainian insurgents is difficult to discern from Bilas’s text. Yet many MVD and MGB commanders operating in such capacity are cited as committing robberies, often furnishing their apartments with the takings.11 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn11> Alongside the rape and pillage there occurred the systematic deportations of large numbers of Western Ukrainians, which reached a peak of 15,597 persons in 1945, and in the period 1944-49 totaled 50,453 families and 143,141 residents. During the deportations, the mortality rates were very high, and many died from hunger and cold. At the special settlement, the regime was harsh and there was a high death rate. On 17 December 1948, Bilas notes, Strokach sent a letter to Kruglov, in which he suggested that as a result of the situation in the western regions of Ukraine, the return of those who had completed their terms in exile was “inexpedient.” On 6 April 1950, the USSR Council of Ministers issued a secret directive that revoked the original sentences and stipulated that there were no term limits on the period in exile.12 <https://books.openedition.org/ceup/547#ftn12> <SNIP> -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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