[Photo: 100th-anniversary Ukrainian stamp honoring Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) wikipedia..]

Gaither Stewart

Gaither Stewart
There was no sun, no shadows. The star Wormwood had fallen from the heavens and polluted the earth’s waters and after diminishing the shadows, had erased them. The falling of the stars had darkened the earth until all shadows vanished. And in the darkness the seventh seal of judgment loosed from the bottomless pit Abaddon the Destroyer together with the plague of Nazism that swooped down on earth to kill the third part of men and then to hover over the shadowless fields, writing its messages in the earth. (My adaptation of the revelations of the Seventh seal)

Adolf Hitler left a deadly legacy behind him. He must have thought that Abaddon himself had scripted his great historical role: to decimate mankind. As history continues to show us his suicide in the bunker in a Berlin overrun by Red Army soldiers was not the end of Nazism that he constructed in his own image: he was the Destroyer, risen from the fire of the bottomless depths to destroy mankind. An irony of history is that his Nazism—in power in Germany for only twelve years (1933-1945)—was to sweep over the earth, one might think as per the biblical Revelations. We have seen that continuity in postwar Germany and in the USA, in Operation Condor in Chile and Argentina which wiped out the best of the youth of both countries, and in Mexico under the “revolutionary” Fascist dictatorship. And today in Ukraine we witness in action Nazism in its crudest form. The diaspora of Nazism and Nazis and of the children they have spawned and continue to spawn recalls the falling star of Wormwood still spreading darkness over the Earth.

The spirit of Ukrainian Nazi, Stepan Bandera, assassinated in Munich in 1959, defines and infects the U.S.-constructed, assembled, and managed Nazi-inspired government in Kiev brought about by the Maidan coup and the overthrow of the legally elected government of Ukraine. The Nazi spirit of Stepan Bandera, a disgusting and hated man, thrives and spawns its own children.

Western journalists covering the Euromaidan riots and murders in Kiev in late February of 2014 encountered an historical image that few recognized. The black-and-white image of pasty-faced Stepan Bandera was plastered everywhere in the Ukraine capital— on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev’s city hall, and on placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. So who in the hell is this Bandera, the journalists thought.

People like Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland defined Bandera as a Ukrainian nationalist. The U.S. State Department spokeswoman accepted only praise and support for a Nazi regime in Kiev … come hell or high water and fuck European Union objections or warnings not to disturb the Russian bear on the border. Russians said he was a Nazi and an anti-Semite but Western media obediently labeled such words as Moscow propaganda. As a result of U.S. involvement foreign journalists quickly hedged in their reports from the Kiev Maidan. The Washington Post reported that Bandera had had only a “tactical relationship’ with Nazi Germany and that his followers “were only accused of committing atrocities against Poles and Jews.” According to the New York Times Bandera had been slandered by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor. Foreign Policy dismissed Bandera as “Moscow’s favorite bogeyman and metonym for all bad Ukrainian things.” Whoever Bandera was, he couldn’t have been as nasty as Putin claimed.

(Picture of Independence Square (Majdan Nezalezhnosti) in Kiev, often known simply as “Maidan”, where the U.S. coup gave birth to the Nazi-led Ukraine, of which Stefan Bandera was one of the most illustrious forefathers Maidan is a proto-Indo-European word probably of Persian origin and used in Turkish, Pakistani, Indian languages for a large space, meeting place, parade grounds. I encountered the word in Tehran where on a famous Meydan the Shah’s soldiers killed hundreds or thousands of protesters during the Iranian Islamic Revolution. Though not used in Russian, it somehow seeped into the Ukrainian language.)

Especially in Central Europe historical figures flash across the horizon and then quickly fade away into the gossamer past and oblivion. But this man Bandera? Who was he? The name of Stepan Bandera (b, 1909 in West Ukraine, d. Munich1959) is today the symbol of Ukrainian Nazism, the symbol of the ideology and practice of the big, new-old nation of Ukraine, vassal of the USA, and a former Republic of the Soviet Union. But in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv—better known as Kiev—once one of Russia’s major cities, the name Stepan Bandera lives again. To his memory are dedicated streets, squares and monuments in Nazi Ukraine, especially in his native West Ukraine. Today, Nazis of all nationalities pay homage to his memory. In 2010, the pro-West President Victor Yushchenko issued a decree naming Bandera “Hero of the Ukraine”. This decree was annulled that same year by his pro-Russian successor Victor Yanukovich. Then again, in 2015, a year after the Maidan coup and the overthrow of the democratic government, a great majority of the new Nazi-infested government run by the sons of Bandera and his Svoboda and the Right Sektor parties voted unanimously to proclaim Bandera a national hero. Men of the infamous Nachtigall (Nightingale) battalion that fought side by side with the Nazi Wehrmacht, exterminating Jews and Ukrainians alike; at the same time the people of the apparatus of Ukrainian Nazism were also termed national heroes … and they were in power. I will note here that in those days Ukraine invited members of the Association of Foreign Journalists in Rome of which I was a member to visit Bandera’s native Lviv. One still wonders that the European Union did not protest against the coup, against a Nazi-led government in the middle of Europe, the question that prompted the famous response of Victoria Nuland, the real organizer of the Maidan: “Fuck the EU.” That is, official America told official Europe to fuck off. America ordered Europe to fall in line and obey orders. Real history is ugly, brutal and vulgar. Real history is real people doing ugly or beautiful things that seldom reach the pages of written history.

But informed people know better. Informed people know who Stepan Bandera and his followers are. Those terrible Russians were of course right all the time. For the vast majority of Russians, the term Banderovtsy or Banderite is today even worse than Liberal applied to that small minority who worship Western things, yearn for America, the European Union and NATO and detest Putin and Russian nationalists. Much, much worse than Alex Navalny about whose pitiful existence many are unaware; but everybody knows what a Banderite is.

Already in his lifetime the little Bandera—he stood 5 feet and 2 inches—a Russian-hating, West Ukrainian Nazi—was detested literally by everybody: his political opponents within the Ukrainian independence movement hated him, as did many of his own allies and followers; Jews and Russian-speaking ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine hate and revile him as a fascist traitor to his country and a terrorist who collaborated with the Nazis and whose followers murdered thousands of Ukrainians; even his German Nazi masters considered him despicable because he betrayed and murdered his own people; the masses of displaced Ukrainians living in West Germany after World War II hated him for his crimes against other Ukrainians; elements of the post-war German government and many of Germany’s American occupiers hated him… even those he served; Poles hated him for his crimes against the Polish people; Russians hated him in a special way because Bandera, in his German SS uniform, was responsible for the elimination of hundreds of thousands of Russians, soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians alike; today his figure is hated by all Russians because of everything he stood for; Ukrainian immigrants in Russia hate him and dislike being called Banderites because they are Ukrainian.

Yet, nationalists in western Ukraine today revere him as a patriotic freedom-fighter, a martyr who led the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union: Bandera remains a hero in the eyes of the growing number of extreme rightists and Nazis in today’s nationalist, jingoistic Ukraine, among Ukrainian nationalists abroad and right-wing extremists elsewhere. To the joy of re-flowering Nazi-Fascist organizations and parties across Europe, the Nazi- Banderite Svoboda (Freedom) and Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) parties run things in today’s Ukraine. Bandera’s image is honored on a postage stamp while his memory has assumed founder-of-Ukrainian-nationalism proportions. Moscow Avenue in the Ukraine capital of Kyiv was changed to Bandera Avenue. Still, on the other hand, articles galore have emerged in the international press of the life of an ugly and justifiably hated man, especially in Polish, German and English writings which can be seen on the Internet.

Bandera was the son of a nationalist-minded Greek Catholic priest in Western Ukraine, formally known as Eastern Galicia-Volhynia. Stepan grew up as a self-punishing fanatic who is said to have stuck pins under his fingernails to prepare himself for torture at the hands of enemies. And that as a university student in Lviv (Lvov), he whipped himself with a belt. “Admit, Stepan!” he would cry out. “No, I don’t admit!” Yet, his followers found Bandera hypnotic: “You couldn’t stop listening to him.”

Stepan enlisted in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) at age twenty where he steered an already violent faction into more extreme directions. In 1933, he organized an attack on the Soviet consul in Lviv, killing an office secretary. A year later, he directed the assassination of the Polish Interior Minister. He ordered the execution of two alleged informers and was responsible for other deaths as well when the OUN took to robbing banks, post offices, police stations, and private households in search of funds.

A study by the German writer Rossoliński-Liebe of what drove Bandera’s violence takes us through the times and the politics that captured Bandera’s imagination. Galicia—more or less Western Ukraine —had been part of Austro-Hungary prior to WWI. The Polish-controlled western half of Galicia was incorporated into the newly established Republic of Poland in 1918; the Ukrainian-dominated eastern portion (of West Ukraine) where Bandera was born was absorbed also by Poland in 1921 following the Polish-Soviet War and in that period enjoyed a brief period of independence. Bitter at being deprived of a state of their own, Ukrainian nationalists there refused to recognize the Polish takeover and in 1922 responded with arson attacks on thousands of Polish-owned farms. Warsaw resorted to mass arrests. By late 1938, some 30,000 Ukrainian-Poles languished in Polish jails. Polish politicians spoke of the “extermination” of the Ukrainians while a German journalist who traveled through eastern Galicia in early 1939 reported that local Ukrainians were calling for Hitler to intervene and impose a solution of his own on the Poles. The conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands of mixed peoples, languages and cultures exemplified the ethnic wars that erupted throughout Eastern Europe as the legions of Adolf Hitler and Nazism approached in WW Two.

Bandera meanwhile moved ever farther to the right, reading the works of militant nationalists who dreamed of a united Ukraine stretching “from the Carpathian Mountains to the Caucasus, a Ukraine free of Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians, and Jews. He studied the works of Dmytro Dontsov, the ultra-rightist spiritual father who translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Mussolini’s La Dottrina Del Fascismo, and taught that ethics should be subordinate to the national struggle.

I have included a brief excursion into the lands of North Central Europe—Poland and Ukraine (including former Galicia)—because precisely these lands were the Lebensraum (Living Space) Hitler pinpointed for German expansion, the main reason for Germany’s quiet and rapid rearmament. Lebensraum was one of the pillars of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy. One small problem was that like Palestine these lands were inhabited by other peoples. So according to Hitler’s Aryan ideology the peoples of those lands had to be eliminated and peopled by German settlers. Here in a nutshell we have German Nazism in action: rearmament, anti-Semitism against the massive Jewry, the Ostjuden, and racism concerning the non-Aryan Slavic untermenschen.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was marked by extreme anti-Semitism, a message which far overshadowed the spread of socialist ideas spreading in these borderlands since the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, however, anti-Jewish hatred had branded Ukrainian nationhood since the seventeenth century when Ukrainian peasants, maddened by the exactions of the Polish landlords and their putative Jewish estate managers, engaged in vicious pogroms. Nevertheless, while the influence of the OUN spread in Ukraine, Socialism was also taking firm hold. The gruesome pogroms during the Russian Civil War resulted in waves of Jewish emigration to Israel and accelerated the early acquisition of Palestinian lands by legal Jewish emigrants, the subject of a Spanish novel, Dispara, yo ya estoy Muerto (Shoot, I’m Already Dead), by Julia Navarro. A curiosity in the novelist’s presentation was that many of the early Jewish settlers who bought their lands near Jerusalem legally were Socialists/Communists and their small farms and orchards were organized as communist collectives. Still, in Ukraine anti-Semitic passions intensified in 1926 when a Jewish anarchist named Sholom Schwartzbard assassinated the exiled right-wing extremist Ukrainian political leader, Symon Petliura, in Paris. Such events spurred on the Jewish flight from East Europe to Palestine in the years following the Balfour Declaration in 1917 pertaining to the British commitment to the creation of a state of Israel in Palestine.

POLISH-UKRAINIAN-RUSSIAN RELATIONS

Exactly where Russia’s real western border lies—or should lie—is one of the most contentious circumstances in Eastern Europe today. Some understanding of social-political currents in the huge area between Germany and Russia—that is, Poland and Ukraine—can shed light on the significance of the US fascist coup in Kiev of 2014 and the emergence of a fake country under US/NATO dominance. Ukraine with its 233,000 square miles is approximately the size of France with 248,000 square miles.

Stretching back centuries, the memory of the centuries-long confusion of past East Europe appeared like an open invitation to Hitler and Nazi Germany in the quest for Lebensraum and continues to influence EU/German policies of the present. So that the era beginning from World War II provides a useful starting point in understanding the current political role of Nazi Ukraine. Since Ukraine was part of the USSR, the Soviet Union’s western border was its (of the Ukrainian Socialst Republic) frontier with Poland. Today’s Russia borders with a NATO-controlled and occupied Ukraine. Not the same thing at all.

Western Ukraine, particularly the city of Lviv-Lvov, occupies a special part of the Polish psyche—something like Kosovo for Serbs which NATO stole, and where the USA built a huge military base, Camp Bondsteel. Therefore the separation of the former western portion of Ukraine, former Galicia, from the Polish state after WWII was hard for Poles to accept despite the socialist ideology in East Europe at the time when nationalism was not supposed to take on emotional significance. Socialist solidarity between peoples counted more than nationalism; emphasis was on economics, not nationality. Nonetheless, the border changes proved to be a strategic miscalculation caused by blindness to the ever-present nationalism. At the time there was little that Poland could do about what it felt was the unfair dislocation of its eastern provinces (with its many Ukrainians and peoples of complex and uncertain feelings of nationality).

Contemporary Poland has believed that the influence of the EU can re-establish its cultural and historical hegemony in its eastern regions. Poland also believes it can rival Russia in terms of influence in those now western regions of Ukraine: whereas Russia’s influence is dominant in East Ukraine. Thus the German-dominated European Union, via Poland, has a strong influence in West Ukraine. On the other hand, the EU is also concerned about the quasi Fascist government of Poland: it worries that an unpredictable super-nationalistic Poland could consider a Polexit from the European Union, a defection that could topple an already shaky union. Moreover, such fears and hopes create confusion over both Polish and Ukrainian state identity.

Polish nationalists dream of their former great state. A kind of Polish Exceptionalism emerged from the influence of Polish Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) and Solidarity’s historical victory over the communist government in 1989. Aided by God via the Polish Pope, Poles successfully defied Soviet power. Today Poles feel they have a future historical role because of their Exceptionalism. Poles believe their historical legacy entitles them to a major presence in Eastern Europe. And it wants its eastern lands back. Therefore Poland’s special opposition to Russia and its historical legacy. In order to pursue this destiny, after the end of the Cold War Poland decided on its pro-Western course of political and military development. Poland exploits concepts of putative Exceptionalism also within the institutions of the EU and NATO in order to advance its national interests at Russia’s expense. Poland uses what it subjectively considers Russian Guilt to justify Polish Exceptionalism, thereby damaging Russia’s soft power potential. (See: Russian Guilt and Polish Exceptionalism by Andrew Korybko, August 1, 2017 for more on the above)

Stepan Bandera In the Post-War

In such confusion, nationalism and Nazism flourished and men like Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler played their particular roles. During the postwar of the late 1940s and early 50s, Stepan Bandera was an immigrant in West Germany. He worked for the BND, the German Intelligence Service, and its forerunner, the Gehlen Org, a top secret organization established in a Munich suburb run by Hitler’s former intelligence chief in East Europe, General Reinhard Gehlen. Financed by the USA, the Gehlen Org specialized in espionage and training of spies to be infiltrated into the Soviet Union. Bandera and his wife, Yaroslava, and their three children had also settled in Munich. While the Germans and Americans used Bandera only sparingly and for many he seemed forgotten, the Soviet Union had not forgotten him. Repeated attempts were reportedly made on his life. Yet Bandera remained in Munich, living under the name of Stepan Popel, still a thorn in the side of his many enemies.

On October 15th of 1959, Bandera was killed at his apartment on Kreittmayrstrasse 7 in downtown Munich near the Main Rail Station, allegedly by the KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky. According to the police report Bandera had let his bodyguards off that day. When Stashinsky produced his cyanide gun inside a rolled-up newspaper, Bandera didn’t even draw his own gun. Shot in the face, the fifty-year-old Bandera died on a third-floor landing before the ambulance arrived. A medical examination established that the cause of his death was poison by cyanide gas. Stepan Bandera was buried in the Waldfriedhof Cemetery in Munich.

Bandera’s murder was one of the most publicized assassinations of the Cold War. In the sensational show trial in 1962 in the Federal Constitutional Court in the city of Karlsruhe, the 30-year old alleged assassin, Bogdan Stashinsky, a self-declared Soviet citizen, was both defendant as well as star witness about the “nefarious” KGB. He allegedly defected to Germany together with his wife in 1961 and after spilling the beans to the CIA was handed over to German authorities. The young man was presented as a KGB killer and spy; he confessed to having assassinated another Ukrainian émigré in the 1950s. After weeks of testimony, Stashinsky (in reality, a patsy) was condemned to only eight years in prison — for at least two assassinations! The whole affair stank to high heaven. It smelled of false flag operation.

Some reports claimed that the Bandera faction of the OUN had been backed by British MI6 since the 1930s. In any case, Banderites were associated with the CIA in the post-war for espionage in the Soviet Union. Yet American intelligence organizations too described Bandera as “extremely dangerous”, traveling around in disguise, killer, counterfeiter and political abductor. When the Bavarian government cracked down, Bandera promptly offered his services to the German BND intelligence despite the CIA’s growing mistrust of him.

I fictionalized the Bandera-Stashinsky story in the political novel, The Trojan Spy, from which the following excerpts:

Truth is elusive, many-sided. In any case, a young Ukrainian KGB agent by the name of Stashinsky was later tried in Karlsruhe and convicted for the murder of Bandera with a poison spray concocted in Moscow. They said he was an agent of “Smersh”.… A Russian acronym for Death To Spies. Once a top secret NKVD organization for its wet work. For the assassination of enemies. Killers all. Maybe they wanted to enlist him. But I doubt it. One said that during the Nazi occupation of the Ukraine, Stashinsky learned enough German to pass for a German and that he was hired by the KGB already at the age of nineteen after he was caught on a train without a ticket. All unlikely. Not KGB style. He admitted he worked in Germany…. He traveled around Germany…. He had a supervisor in Berlin…. But it’s a long jump from that to Smersh. I’ve always suspected Ukrainian émigré political opponents of Bandera’s murder. Western Ukrainian émigrés were always killing Eastern Ukrainians. With German and American help. That is, if Bandera was even murdered. He might have had a heart attack. As in a fairytale the cold-blooded assassin Stashinsky allegedly repented after he saw a newsreel in an East Berlin theater of poor Bandera lying in his coffin and his wife and children weeping. Can you imagine that touching scene? Oh, the soft heart of a KGB killer! ….Unimaginable….It’s a ridiculous story from beginning to end. Not even the stuff of mythology. Who knows what really happened? Once he got back to East Berlin after killing Bandera, the handsome young Ukrainian fell head over heels in love with a German woman … who hated the Soviet Union….When she learned Stashinsky was a KGB agent, she convinced him of the perfidy of Communism and they escaped to West Germany the day before the Wall was built. Soap opera stuff. An American story, the whole Stashinsky affair. A Reader’s Digest story. The naiveté is disgusting….

Two feature films have been made about Stepan Bandera – Assassination: An October Murder in Munich (1995) and The Undefeated (2000), both directed by Oles Yanchuk—plus a number of documentary films.

A veteran journalist, essayist, and internationally recognized novelist. His latest novel is Time of Exile (Punto Press), the third volume in his Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have also been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. His newest novella, Words Unspoken, is available in multiple formats. He makes his home in Rome, with his wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at [email protected].