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Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult

Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult

by Grzegorz Rossolinski - Liebe (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2014

    $37.18
Synopsis

The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers faileddespite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaa and the Slovak Hlinka Partyto establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 654
 Edition: UK ed.
 Publisher: Ibidem-Verlag
Published: 15 Oct 2014
ISBN 10: 3838206045
ISBN 13: 9783838206042

Media Reviews
This important, heavily documented and rigorously researched book could not be published at a better time. Arguing that Stepan Bandera, leader of the radical faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was motivated by a fascist worldview, the author shows that the OUNA's specific goal was to create an independent and ethnically homogeneous Ukraine, free of Russian-Bolshevik, Polish, and Jewish influence, and led by a charismatic dictatorial leader at the head of a single party. The author exposes the intimate links between the OUN and Nazi Germany as well as its violent ethnic cleansing of Poles in Western Ukraine and its collaboration with the Germans in the genocide of the Jews, all actions for which Bandera acted as the leading spirit even from his German imprisonment. Many Ukrainians will find this argument, meticulously documented and persuasively argued, deeply troubling. Yet it is a case that needs to be made and which this book accomplishes with such energy and breadth. -- Omer Bartov, History Professor at Brown University This book is bound to generate debate, since it confronts a man and movement of mythic stature with their difficult historical context and with masses of documentary evidence. It is a pioneering effort to situate Stepan Bandera and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists within a history of fascism and ethnic cleansing. Bandera and his movement exercised a powerful influence on the mental framework of modern Ukrainian nationalism in Western Ukraine and the overseas diaspora and even, more indirectly, on the academic discipline of Ukrainian studies. What is written here requires reflection and engagement; it makes a major contribution to the discourse on the meaning of modern Ukrainian history.-- John-Paul Himka, Professor of History at the University of Alberta This fascinating and well-researched monograph provides a comprehensive account of the political career of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and of the cult that has come to surround his personality. It is essential reading for all those interested in the history of Eastern Europe during the Second World War and subsequently. -- Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University For more than half a century after his death Stepan Bandera has been for many Ukrainians the hero of the liberation movement. On the basis of Bandera's biography, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe records the history of Ukrainian militant nationalism throughout the twentieth century, the changing relationship between the movement and German National Socialism, and its collaboration with Western secret services. The Bandera cult, this study shows, is part of the highly controversial politics of memory dividing Ukraine once more into East and West. -- Susanne Heim, Institute of Contemporary History Berlin and Munich Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe has written a thought-provoking book about the life and afterlife of a controversial figure of the Ukrainian radical right wing, Stepan Bandera. In particular, his chapters on BanderaA's interwar Polish period, the postwar Soviet persecution of Bandera partisans, and the evolution of Soviet ideology about Bandera contribute much that is novel and challenging to the former prevailing narratives. Much information is based on recently accessible archival collections. -- Mark von Hagen, Arizona State University Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe's comprehensive book on Stepan Bandera, leader of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), transcends the confines of a conventional biography. It is an important, heavily documented study of the OUNA's ideology and its attempts to create an ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian nation-state. Rossolinski-Liebe shows that, despite the OUNA's fascination with fascism and mass violence, the relationship between Nazi Germany and the OUN, especially between 1941 and 1944, was complicated and equivocal. During the Cold War, the radical nationalism and anti-bolshevism cherished and advocated by the OUN still shaped the ideology and policy aims of many Ukrainian refugees in countries such as Canada, the UK, the USA, and West Germany. Placing BanderaA's activities in the contexts of occupation, extreme nationalism, fascism, and anti-communism, the monograph is a major contribution to scholarship on twentieth-century Ukrainian and European history. -- Arnd Bauerkamper, Free University of Berlin