Bourgeois historians are clowns. I was reading Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist and the first half is actually alright. He recounts:

• The prewar fascist party summits they attended in Italy alongside the ustaše, under the tutelage of the Italian and German fascists
• The June 30th OUN declaration of an independent Ukrainian fascist republic and welcomed hitler’s remake of Europe
• waffen ss galacian unit
• How the OUN political officers went to the peasant villages and could rally militias out of them
• Their role in galvanizing Ukrainians in the occupied territories to ethnic violence
  • Victims of this violence would go on to call all involved banderites
• Their role in the Lviv pogroms
• Detailed how the OUN pogroms were against Jews, Roma, and Poles living in the occupied territories
• Their presence in the police of the occupied territories despite the ban from nazi leadership
• Their immediate postwar collaboration with British and American intelligence

In the postwar section of the book, focusing on the remainder of the OUN “behind enemy lines” in Soviet Ukraine this clown goes on to say Soviet propaganda created a distorted view of the OUN among citizens of Soviet Ukraine. Soviet “propaganda claims” include:

• OUN was a group of hitlerite dogs
  • They literally swore fealty to him and had a unit in his army but okay…
• All Ukrainian nationalists were OUN
  • Does it really matter if the person participating in the pogrom is a card carrying member or not? The victims themselves call these people banderites and the OUN political officers in towns and villages were tasked with “political education” rallying these people to violence. While not card carrying OUN members, they did follow its political program…
• The OUN was an enemy of the Soviet Union that was conspiring with the capitalist powers to destroy the Union.
  • I don’t even know how you claim this is made up Soviet propaganda in the chapter immediately after the one that details the OUN’s collaboration with western intelligence and participation in Operation Rollback. Activities not meant to destroy the Soviet Union include air dropping OUN militants into Ukraine to being conducting guerilla warfare. Fortunately the KGB had agents in both the OUN and Mi6 and the airdropped clowns were never heard from again.
• It was antisemetic (citing Tim Snyder omegalul) and that the Soviet Union downplayed the Holocaust by saying the OUN were enemies of the Soviet people who murdered Soviet citizens
  • Not even sure the leap of logic here. Pogroms led by the OUN killed Jews, Roma, and Poles. All of whom were or would become citizens of the Soviet Union.
  • The OUN also was unable to make ideological inroads with the Eastern Ukrainians who had lived first in Tsarist Russia, and then in the new Soviet Union and considered writing them off and outright genociding them as well.
  • The stay behind terrorists did kill local Soviet authorities, people they thought were “collaborating” with them (using the very flexible and paranoid definition fascists often do), sabotaged the collective farms, and killed workers on said collective farms. So yes they literally did kill Soviet citizens.

He did thorough research and his book is a good read on the OUN that I still would recommend, but my god the object permanence goes away when the Soviets are mentioned lmfao