A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev
Timothy Snyder
The incoming Ukrainian president will have to turn some attention to history, because the outgoing one has just made a hero of a long-dead Ukrainian fascist. By conferring the highest state honor of “Hero of Ukraine” upon Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) on January 22, Viktor Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine, the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens. It is no wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many Poles and Jews. Why would President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution, wish to rehabilitate such a figure? Bandera, who spent years in Polish and Nazi confinement, and died at the hands of the Soviet KGB, is for some Ukrainians a symbol of the struggle for independence during the twentieth century.
Born in 1909, Bandera matured at a time when the cause of national self-determination had triumphed in much of eastern Europe, but not in Ukraine. The lands of today’s Ukraine had been divided between the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy when World War I began, and were divided again between the new Soviet Union and newly independent Poland when the bloodshed ceased. The Soviets defeated one Ukrainian army, the Poles another. Ukrainians thus became the largest national minority in both the Soviet Union and Poland. With time, most Ukrainian political parties in Poland reconciled themselves to Polish statehood. The Ukrainian Military Organization, however, formed of Ukrainian veterans in Poland, followed the movement that sought to change the boundaries of Europe: fascism. With Benito Mussolini, who came to power in 1922 in Italy, as their model, they mounted a number of failed assassination attempts on Polish politicians.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev/