The fight against Bandera in the USSR. The defeat of Bandera: how the Red Army cleared western Ukraine of German accomplices

“But Marichka is still looking for her son, whom she abandoned when she fled to the Americans,” says my interlocutor. - Only I know where he is... If she reads this article, she will understand everything. Before me is a unique person. He personally participated in the liquidation of the remnants of the OUN underground gangs in the post-war years in Western Ukraine. He spent 24 hours talking with arrested leaders, trying not only to convert, but also to understand. They still write letters to him with the words: “You are the only one who saw people in us...”. He is not afraid to draw parallels between what happened then and what is happening now.

About the love and hatred of the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) underground, secret methods and special operations to combat them - Georgy SANNIKOV, an employee of the operational radio games department of the KGB of Ukraine, in a frank interview with the MK special correspondent.

— Georgy Zakharovich, today the Ukrainian media write that Western Ukraine does not have any bloody past and that Bandera’s followers were not really cruel. This is true?

— The atrocities were terrible. But there was an explanation for this phenomenon - hatred was intensified from generation to generation for centuries.

- Wait about the explanation. Have you seen the atrocities with your own eyes?

- Certainly. And I saw a torture machine, which was invented by the underground esbist Smok (aka Mykola Kozak, Vivchar). The person was suspended in such a way that all joints were twisted. The pain is the wildest. One of the last leaders of the Ukrainian rebel army, Vasyl Kuk (aka Lemish), told me this in prison: “If I had ended up in this prison, I would have admitted not only that I am an NKVD agent, but that I am an Ethiopian Negus.”

Almost all the leaders of the OUN movement were cruel, just some to a greater extent, some to a lesser extent. Dozens of sophisticated methods of murder were invented. Eyes were gouged out, women's breasts were cut off, stars were cut out on their bodies, bottles were driven into the anus. The wells were filled with corpses. Roman Shukhevych, who headed the UPA, said: “Our politics should be terrible. Let half the population die, but the rest will be as pure as a glass of water.” And they committed all these atrocities to their own people.

— But what kind of ideology should there be to force one Ukrainian to kill another in such a sophisticated way?

— Ukrainians were under Polish oppression for many centuries. In the Stanislav region, the segregation of the Ukrainian population was monstrous. Benches for Poles, benches for Ukrainians. There are separate trailers for Ukrainians working in the mines, and separate ones for Poles. The Poles treated Ukrainians as serfs, slaves. How can I forget this?

And hatred was ultimately transmitted at the genetic level, resulting in the Volyn massacre (in 1943, about 100 thousand people, including women, old people and children, were killed by UPA militants during the expulsion of local Poles from Volyn. - Author). Just look at the “wreaths” alone - when the corpses of children were tied to a tree in a circle! Now they are arguing who came up with the first idea - the Ukrainians or the Poles. There is a version about the appearance of such a “wreath” back in the 30s of the last century, “created” by a crazy gypsy woman from her children. This is another attempt to ward off terrible crimes.

— At what point did hatred for Russians become the same as hatred for Poles?

— When that part of Western Ukraine that was under the Poles became part of Russian Empire. Then in Galicia (three regions - Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, at that time - Stanislavskaya) a society called “Prosvita” arose, which advocated the preservation of Ukrainian culture, traditions and language. But “Prosvita” was prohibited by Tsarist Russia. At one time, the Russian minister Valuev used to say: “What other Ukrainian language is there?! No, this won’t happen!”

REFERENCE "MK": The organization of Ukrainian nationalists - OUN - was created in 1929 by Colonel Konovalets and several military personnel. During the First World War, they joined the Austro-Hungarian army that fought against Russia.

— Was Soviet power hated as much as the tsarist government?

Everything that was connected with it, even indirectly, was subject to destruction by the OUN. And it was enough for some Ukrainian to express sympathy for the Soviets for his entire family to be destroyed the next morning.

They voted for joining the collective farm only in the evening with the lights off, so that it was not visible who raised their hand first. Because such “active” ones were hanged at night by the OUN Security Service - SB. In every village there were her informants who immediately reported everything to the underground. And when the nationalists came to punish, they did it like a bandit, quietly, and they saved their ammunition: they mostly strangled people. For this purpose, the OUN members always had twists - strings like this... The OUN members affectionately called them “mutuzochki”...

- And the Jews? Today, some in Ukraine claim that there were Jews in the Bandera underground.

- These are all fairy tales. Jews were hated just as much as Russians and Poles. This was explained by the fact that they kept shops and taverns and got people drunk. I know of a sad exception. One Jew, a former shopkeeper from Lviv, a certain Khaim Sygal, pretended to be a “fat” Ukrainian, took the surname Sygalenko, and became a centurion in the UPA. For some time he served in the German police. It was he who became famous for the brutal reprisals against his fellow tribesmen. He personally executed hundreds of unfortunate people in a sophisticated manner. After the war, he managed to turn into a Jew again and for many years took refuge in West Berlin as a victim of Nazism, revered by the entire Jewish community...

FROM THE MK DOSSIER:

In order to create the SS Galicia division in 1943, Rosenberg and Himmler argued to the Fuhrer that the inhabitants of Galicia were not Ukrainians, but Austrians. Recruitment for the division took place through the church and the Ukrainian Central Committee in Krakow. Illiterate rural boys were told: “The SS Galicia division is not SS men, but Sich Riflemen!” There was no end to volunteers. Out of 80 thousand, the best 14 thousand were selected. The rest were recruited into police forces.

Cook, Carpo and pennies

— You mentioned Cook. How did you manage to detain him?

“We captured Cook with the help of his contact and especially trusted militant Karpo, whom we recruited. He brought Cook to a bunker controlled by us. This happened in 1954.

— By the way, were there many bunkers in those years?

— All of Ukraine is in them. There were not even hundreds, but thousands! Bunker, cache - they were called differently. This is an underground shelter of different sizes, with a hatch or other exits on top. Nationalists began bunkering in 1944. They tried to build bunkers themselves, and if they brought in Jews or those they didn’t trust, then they destroyed them right on the spot. At that time, Bandera’s followers shot all the dogs in the villages so that they would not bark and give away their appearance.

— First, it turns out you recruited the militant Karpo. And how did you manage to do this?

- Oh, Cook asked me this same question many times later. He exclaimed: “This is impossible!” And we did. I'll describe Karpo to you. Huge in stature, with eyes that were terrifying. He had no teeth - they were eaten away by scurvy. Karpo was scary person. Up to the elbows in blood - he hanged more than a dozen people with his own hands. Cook trusted him completely.

We sent our fighter to Karpo, and he led him through the entire Western Ukraine. Our man had an order: if he felt that Karpo suspected him, he would not hesitate to eliminate him. This was an exception to the rule - we always spared Bandera’s men (I’ll explain why later), but Karpo was too dangerous, although very necessary. And in the right place we grabbed Karpo and began “processing” him. We knew everything about Carpo. And further than the village, then there was no forest anywhere, I didn’t see the city. And that his dream since childhood was to try ice cream and go to the movies at least once. And so, when our man brought him to the right place and he was captured, we showed him Ukraine. When he saw Kyiv, he became frantic. He had no idea what cities there were, what power! And then we brought him to Crimea. They showed him everything - factories, stadiums, theaters... And he broke down. “Reforged” Karpo.

- And he gave you Cook?

“Karpo, who came over to our side, brought Cook and his wife to “our” bunker. They were so tired from the trek that they immediately fell asleep. He tied them up and pressed the panic button. At the checkpoint, a warning light came on, letting us know the exact location. Cook woke up. And then something like this dialogue took place between them (both later told me):

“Friend Carpo, did you sell yourself for pennies? Now “yours” will come running. There is a jar of gold and money. (Cook had with him 400 grams of gold belonging to the OUN.) You will need it. You know I won’t give you up.” - “I won’t take it.” - "Why?" - “I’m not for pennies. I am for the idea."

— How did you manage to recruit Cook himself? What did he buy into?

— There is a category of people who are not recruited. They can provide some assistance that coincides with their interests, but no more. Cook never came over to our side. Some consider him a KGB agent, but in reality this was not the case. And he made an appeal to his underground fighters because he understood: there was no point in fighting further, it was necessary to preserve personnel for the future Ukraine. This was a smart, seasoned enemy. A brilliant conspirator, that’s why he lasted longer than all the leaders.

Only the Central Committee of Ukraine and the top leadership of Moscow knew that Kuk had been captured. The search for the species continued for a long time. He and his wife were placed in an internal prison of the Kyiv KGB, in a special cell.

—What was unusual about her?

- It had a residential appearance - it looked like an ordinary room, with a bed and other furniture. Its contents there were so secret that the employees of the relevant department who knew about it were specifically and strictly warned. Once a week, the assistant prosecutor of the republic came in order to provide prosecutorial supervision. During this time, the cell was given an uninhabited appearance, and Cook and his wife were taken out into the city under the pretext of a walk.

Cook's cell was numbered 300. The number was arbitrary; there were no such number of cells in the prison. And because of his number, he went by the nickname Three Hundred.

- What happened to Cook’s wife?

— She was also a Bandera girl (originally from Dnepropetrovsk), quite active. And Cook sat with her.

- In the same cell?!

- Yes. There was wiretapping all around, and they were talking to each other, they could say something important. I started communicating with Cook by chance. Once I came to the investigation building, where Cook was brought for interrogation. And my comrade had to leave the department. He asked me to stay with Cook, but not to enter into conversation with him. And I really wanted to talk to him. When my comrade returned, accompanied by a group of high-ranking leaders, Cook and I stood almost clinging to each other, each proving that he was right.

And then somehow they tell him that an operational worker will be assigned to you, who will bring you literature, with whom you can talk on any topic, but not about your business. And he asked that it be me. The authorities were fine with this. I was instructed to exert the ideological influence we needed on him.

-Did you succeed?

- Unfortunately no. He had his own ideology - nationalist. It also became clear that we would not engage him as our agent. But we still managed to use him in the events we needed, because it partially coincided with his beliefs. Working with him was difficult, but interesting. I had to be on my guard all the time. This was an extremely dangerous enemy who had extensive knowledge on such pressing issues as national and land. In debates and conversations he used not only his own ideological ideas, but in the right place he also used ours - Marxist-Leninist ones. And he did it masterfully.

- Did he himself try to win you over to his side?

- But of course! He said: you Bolsheviks came to power because the cities supported you, but the village has always been ours, and it would never have followed you. For me, the difficulty was that all our conversations with him took place under auditory control. But sometimes I forgot about it, got carried away, made some mistakes (in the sense that I agreed with his position). But how else - without “singing along” with him in something, I would not have been able to win him over.

— How did you “sing along” with him?

— I quoted Lenin to him. The same Lenin who said that one should not offend the Ukrainians who were oppressed by the tsarist government. Who said that if Ukraine wants to leave, let it go.

— Cook said that in principle he hates Russians, that he wishes them death?

- No never. And I am sure that Cook would not have taken the slogan that is now used in Ukraine thanks to American political technologies: “knives and gilyaks for Jews and Muscovites.” He was much smarter than today's Kyiv rulers.

— Was Cook himself afraid of death?

“He was afraid of disappearing without a trace.” He was sure that he would be shot. Khrushchev also insisted on this. But Kyiv managed to convince not to do this. Otherwise, they would have created another national hero. And so he served his six years, we got him a job in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs so that he would always be under control. How could it be different?

And when the new Ukrainian authorities offered him the title of Hero of Ukraine, he refused. Although his funeral in Kyiv in 2007 was national. Wreaths from the government of Ukraine, from the Ministry of Security, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs... By the way, I managed to say goodbye to him: I called him a couple of days before his death. And you know, I think that he would not support what is happening now. He was for a completely independent Ukraine, and not one that would be ruled by either the West or the East. He once said during the period of the “orange triumph”: “We did not fight for this Ukraine.”

The story of the most beautiful nationalist couple

— Among the leaders of the OUN movement were there many couples or only Cook and his wife?

— There were several remarkable couples. And in general, a lot was built on love. There was such Okhrimovich, one of the leaders of the OUN, a CIA agent, a parachutist, abandoned by an American plane in 1951 along with a group of radio operators. He spent a year in hiding with Cook before we caught him. They exchanged machine guns. Okhrimovich had an American one. By the way, the Americans sent weapons to Western Ukraine, but not enough. American and British planes flew over the territory of Ukraine until 1954, dropping off agents. I declare this with full responsibility. It’s just that even many employees of our special services do not know about this fact.

— Did the Americans support Bandera?

- Yes. It cannot be said that this was at the government level. But at the CIA level, definitely. And it wasn’t massive, it wasn’t intense. So, Okhrimovich was flying not so much on an assignment to establish contact with the underground, but to visit his bride. He wanted to bring it from Ukraine to the West, he thought that there were still channels (and by that time almost all of them had been intercepted by us).

When Okhrimovich found out that the bride had managed to shoot herself, he refused to cooperate and was also shot... There were faithful couples among the OUN members. Loyal to each other and to the idea. I remember some of them (husband and wife), when we detained her, asked to let them go and immediately liquidate them, as if trying to escape. They wanted to die as heroes. They all had their own romance, their own relationships. But we didn't agree.

In general, people of this type dreamed of a heroic death. There was such a case when one of the leaders of the OUN underground, having lost all his guards in battle, came out alone with two pistols in his hands, firing at the approaching soldiers. Every self-respecting OUN member had two weapons. The revolver is trouble-free, but it is very difficult to pull the trigger (for example, you won’t press it), and the pistol is light, automatic, but could fail. And everyone was sure to wear an F-1 lemon. Was tied leather cord from her to the collar. When your hands give out, so that you can pull out the pin with your teeth. 3.5 seconds - that's all. Many tried to blow themselves up during the capture, but we didn’t let them. And then they themselves were happy. Because consciousness changed.

Fortunately, our future captive did not catch anyone. The head of the operation gave the command to the machine gunner to hit the legs. His legs were broken and then healed. One of our leaders recruited him and conducted the conversation as equals. As a Ukrainian with a Ukrainian, in the name of the future of Ukraine. Two ideologies collided. Ours took it. It was an honest conversation, with documentary evidence, about the use of the underground by Western intelligence services for their own purposes - the destruction of Slavic unity. As a result, he became one of our best assistants, and for the underground he forever remained a hero.

— Did you use psychotropic drugs during recruitment?

“We had drugs to put him to sleep for a while and immobilize him. No more. Poisons were never used. We spared the nationalists. Why? Because they are people. We wanted to re-educate them. So all their talk about our cruelty is not true. When there is a fight, then yes, a fight is a fight, they killed. But not a single dog can say that we killed just like that. As they often did. Of course, we also had violations of social laws, but this was not a mass phenomenon and was always punished, including arrest.

- And yet about love...

- Yes, I got distracted. The most beautiful and bright couple among these OUN members were Orlan (Vasyl Galasa) and Marichka (Maria Savchin). They loved each other as deeply as they loved their idea. Marichka is very energetic, feminine, attractive. I saw her many times, but fortunately she never saw me. It was tough. She would have killed any enemy in that bloody confrontation. This is the only woman from the underground awarded the OUN gold medal. She and Orlan had two children born underground. The first one stayed with relatives, we kept him as bait. She abandoned the second one as a newborn and walked across the rooftops.

- How did it happen?

— We had information that she was in Krakow. But we didn’t know where exactly. And then they discovered it by accident, during a raid in a Carmelite monastery. She was there with the child. The Polish bezpeka detained her, and she deceived her. Under the pretext that the child was crying, she asked the security guard to leave. There was a window there, she climbed onto the roof of the second floor and from there ran away to her husband - he was still underground at that time. Since then she has not seen the child and does not know what happened to him. Although I have been searching all these years and am still searching.

- And what happened to him?

- He survived. Nobody knows where he is. We gave him up for adoption to a Polish family. That is, the people of that nation, which she hated just as much as the Russians. I hope she realized long ago that Nazism is a dead end.

- Why did she break up with Orlan?

“After the arrest, we continued to work with them in prison. We wanted to recruit them and then send them to the West. It seemed that we had succeeded in winning them over to our side. But it only seemed so. He gave her orders to pretend that she was recruited. He carefully instructed her how to agree to be withdrawn beyond the cordon and, after the transfer, contact the Americans there and tell everything about the situation in Western Ukraine. He was not only her favorite person, but also her leader. So she agreed. But we were unable to control their conspiracy, and she played her role well. Woman!

There is always an element of risk in our business, but we were sure that even if everything fell through, she would return to him (he remained with us). But she didn't return. The understanding came too late that it was not her, but him, who had to be brought to the West. He loved her and the children madly, he would definitely return. She probably wasn't so attached to her family. They remembered how she watched her eldest from the bus (before being taken to the West through Poland, they organized a secret meeting with her son) - she had no tears. And Orlan, who was accompanying her, sobbed inconsolably. The idea of ​​fighting for Ukraine prevailed over everything else for Marichka.

Fortunately, we had a reliable source in the West, and after a short time we learned that the Americans believed Marichka, decided to carry out a counterplay and expected success. They even gave it a pretentious name - “Moscow-Washington”.

- Why did you send her to the West at all?

“We created a legendary underground led by Orlan in order to introduce our agents into Western intelligence services through a controlled communication line. Of all the operational radio games, Operation Raid turned out to be a failure due to Marichka's departure to the Americans. And “Moscow-Washington” has received its development, but under our control. Together with Marichka, our agent Taras was sent to the West, whom the Americans soon “in the dark”, as if they were already their trained courier, were transferred to Western Ukraine in a specially equipped aircraft. But we already knew about it and controlled the situation. Unexpectedly, Khrushchev himself intervened in our combination and ordered the plane to be shot down. He needed material for a speech at the UN. With great difficulty, Kyiv managed to persuade Moscow not to do this.

- What happened to Orlan and Marichka?

— Orlan was incredibly talented. And this is with a 4th grade education! As a rule, the leaders of the Bandera underground had a good education. After Marichka’s withdrawal, Orlan lived under control in our operational mansion and, together with the operative, studied at the school for working youth, where he was the only one of 160 students who claimed a gold medal. He died in Kyiv in 2002. And Marichka lives in the USA, she has a second family, children.

— And yet, why did America support the Bandera movement?

— American and British intelligence actively used the foreign OUN centers in Munich for their own purposes. There were many Ukrainians there who found themselves in the West after World War II. It was among this Ukrainian diaspora that Western intelligence services found the people they needed to train and send to the Soviet Union. The leaders of the OUN centers proved to their “masters” that an armed underground was still active in Western Ukraine, with the help of which it was possible to successfully obtain intelligence information of interest to the United States and England.

“The Americans have always been sure that our intelligence services interfered too much in the fate of Ukraine...

- What would have happened if we had not defeated the Bandera underground? How many more people would have died? The nationalist idea is a failure. There are no pure nations, especially in today's time. But this idea is exciting. She is like a flammable material. And with the deft regulation of generously paid mass propaganda, it easily penetrates into people's consciousness. It is done. The rest is small: freedom of action, everything is permitted, kill as much as you want. They promise you a wonderful life in the future, without specifying when this future happiness will come...

What's happening today? Even if we discard three quarters of what our TV channels show, doesn’t the remaining quarter speak of harshness? A biathlete works as a sniper, a pilot throws cluster bombs on civilians... These are facts.

“But it may not be nationalism.”

- What then? I've seen too much to doubt it. Unfortunately, we have not monitored the situation with nationalism in Ukraine in recent years. We overslept... In 1990, the Ukrainian National Union - UNS - was created in Lviv. At that time, many residents of Ukraine called members of this organization Ukrainian Nazis. We said nothing.

The Ukrainian National Assembly - Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) - is openly Nazi and Russophobic. The militants of this organization openly boast of their participation in armed conflicts against Russian troops. Do you remember how its participants marched through the silent city with lit torches a few years ago? It was very reminiscent of Nazi Berlin in 1933. And after all, the torches were carried by the grandchildren and children of those who were underground, who died at the hands of the Soviet regime, who were raised accordingly and hated everything connected with Russia. For many years they disguised themselves, became communists, Komsomol members... Even Shukhevych gave the command to legalize themselves and infiltrate the authorities. And they got in.

“That’s when the nationalist movement was stopped. How can we resist him today?

- Only by convictions. Nowadays nationalists say: “I love my Ukraine.” And who doesn't love her? Does the right to love one's homeland belong exclusively to one nation? What should those who live on this territory do and also love their Ukraine, but think and believe differently, speak a different language? So why not turn to the practice of other, frankly speaking, more civilized countries, such as Switzerland, where there are several official languages, or at least Canada, where, by the way, there is a huge Ukrainian diaspora? Today, 1.5 million Ukrainians earn their living in Poland, almost 5 million in Russia. That is, they work for those they hated...

For today's Ukrainian nationalists, Vasil Kuk is like Lenin for communists: everyone has read his books, many have seen him. Even fewer people know that Cook lives on the outskirts of Kyiv. “Now I’m legal,” he says. An Izvestia correspondent managed to meet with the legend of the “Bandera resistance”, who was recently declared a Hero of Ukraine.

Vasil Kuk is the last commander of the famous Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of Stepan Bandera, organized in 1942, which fought “against Poland and Moscow.” Previously, many of the future Banderaites served in the Roland and Nachtigal battalions, but then the Germans disbanded them in the summer of 1941. Now Cook, who has long been reconciled with the Poles and the Russians, calmly attends receptions at their embassies and gives lectures. Everyone he fought against has long since died, and the Ukrainian-Russian gas pipeline has become much more important than past battles.

Vasil Kuk is the only survivor of those who created the UPA and formed “pure Ukrainian nationalism,” which did not imply either racial confrontation or hostility towards Russia. Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma decided to award Vasyl the title of Hero of Ukraine. However, Cook did not accept the proposal and did not believe the president. Cook admits: “The UPA fought only against the occupiers. We did not fight the Russians. Now we are for beneficial cooperation with Russia. Rapprochement with it is useful for Ukraine, we welcome it.” Cook is the first who was not afraid to destroy the legend about the hatred of Ukrainian nationalists for everything Russian.

His UPA became a fighting unit of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), organized in Vienna in 1929. The OUN proclaimed the Act of Restoration of Ukrainian Statehood, for which its head Stepan Bandera was imprisoned German concentration camp"Sachsenhausen". In October 1942, the OUN formed its own combat unit - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. As evidenced by the publication "History of Ukraine", approved by the Ministry of Education, "the UPA has become formidable military force who fought against the fascists and the regime. The UPA was a form of natural self-preservation of the nation."

The future commander Kuk was born in the Lviv region, on what was then Poland, and became a lawyer at the University of Lublin, where he met the future head of the OUN, Stepan Bandera. “We were together in the Slovak Pischany - Bandera was treated there for rheumatism, met with his comrades. When he decided that he needed to fight the fascists, and not act on their side, I supported Stepan. When Bandera was arrested by the Germans, my brothers and I continued his work. It was necessary to prove to the Ukrainians that the Germans were not liberators for them, and the Russians were not enemies."

Cook joined the OUN at the age of 17 (in 1930) and since then has been in prison several times. “We didn’t pay much attention to prisons - we were young,” he says. “We had at our disposal 5 million Ukrainians living in Western Ukraine, whom Poland tried to take away from our and Russian influence into Catholicism. We printed leaflets and books. Then they made grenades and bombs. They set off explosions just on those days when the Poles celebrated the anniversaries of their crown. The bombs I personally created are still in museums."

Can you still make a bomb?

I don't see anything complicated. This recipe is also applicable in today's life. And Vasil Kuk described in great detail how to make explosives from quite accessible mixtures. But let me not quote this recipe in the newspaper, so as not to tempt potential bombers.

In 1954, Cook was nevertheless arrested by the KGB. “I was underground, I disguised myself well, I took the name Yurko the Bear,” says Cook. “This is because I lived in the forests for a long time, and the bears in it are the most cultured animals. I was taken in together with my wife Ulyana when we moved from one secret point to another. First I was transported to Lvov, then to Kiev, and then to Moscow. I sat in solitary confinement, one of the “committee members” talked to me all the time. One of them suggested writing a letter to Moscow: they say “I’ve been in prison for 6 years without a sentence, decide what to do with me.” Nationalist Bear-Cook was pardoned. He was settled in Kyiv with strict orders not to stray far from his apartment.

I could have died 100 times, but I'm still alive. I recently learned that during the entire 6 years of my imprisonment, the “authorities” sent reports and agents on my behalf abroad, to the OUN.

Vasil flips through old albums: “Here are my “forest brothers” - they killed everyone, here are my parents - they served 10 years because of me. Here is my wife - she died.” All his comrades and opponents have left, but he is alive, reading without glasses.

We didn't have racial hatred. People often asked me: “Did you fight against the Nazis?” - We fought. - “And they fought the Poles?” - We fought. And with the communists too. But we did not slaughter the local population. We attacked armed groups that burned Ukrainian villages.

There is a joke about Bandera’s followers: they would rather take a black man into their family, just to know that he is “not a Jew or a Muscovite”...
- A Ukrainian is someone who sincerely wants to be with Ukrainians, no matter what their gender or faith. Blacks were not included in the UPA, but there were many Jews. They worked as doctors for us.

We declared the slogan “The will of the people is the will of man” and adhered to it. The Caucasian detachments mobilized by the Germans came over to our side, and Armenian and Georgian sections appeared in the UPA. They taught me how to really sing “Suliko,” Cook recalls. We had no conflicts with the Bulgarians, Romanians, or Hungarians. The UPA cooperated with their governments.

When Stepan Bandera was asked how many fighters there were in the UPA, he replied: it’s a secret. Can you open it now?
- The UPA operated in all regions of Ukraine, reaching Crimea and Kuban. There were detachments in almost every village, many of them lost contact with the center and worked alone. It is impossible to count everyone. If you believe the documents signed by Beria, in Western Ukraine alone 134 thousand “Bandera members” were arrested, 153 thousand were killed, 500 thousand were repressed, 203 thousand were exiled forever. But these numbers are incomplete. Many survived and continued to fight in the 50s. The OUN and UPA still exist.

The OUN is considered underground, its headquarters are in Munich, where the main archives of Bandera remain. Munich often calls commander Vasil and sends books. In Ukraine, the work of the OUN is continued by organizations with less famous names.

Commander Cook knows them all well

Cook himself now runs the Kholodny Yar society, which perpetuates the memory of Ukrainian nationalists. "Their ranks are expanding and Verkhovna Rada, they even offered me to become a deputy, but I don’t want to anymore.” The militants of the UNSO, the odious Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense, which fought in Transnistria, Abkhazia and Chechnya, are also striving for power. Cook does not take the UNSO seriously. “It doesn’t have enough strong people and powerful characters. Ukraine, unlike Russia and Poland, does not even have sovereign traditions.

Warsaw demands that a memorial to the fallen Polish soldiers be erected in Lviv - and these are the people who killed 30 thousand Ukrainians in Volyn and sent 100 thousand to Polish concentration camps. Kuchma hugs Polish President Kwasniewski, calls him best friend Ukraine and hopes that Warsaw will help Kyiv get into the EU and NATO. At the same time, the Poles are trying to prove to us every day that Ukraine is a former Polish territory. Sooner or later, Warsaw will declare its claims to our land,” Cook said.

Vasil and his UPA fought against everyone, having no chance of victory. Commander Cook, now ruling in his concrete “Khrushchev”, loves to talk about Bandera’s caches, forest underground cities, where UPA fighters hid for decades, unnoticed by the authorities. “Volumes are now being published about the caches. These are not just dugouts, but multi-room buildings with everything necessary for life - from a stove to typewriters. The caches had excellent ventilation - it was brought out through the tree trunks. The raids could not find the caches, they walked through them and didn't notice."

When World War II began (Cook does not call it the Great Patriotic War, he had another war), Vasil fell in love with weapons - German and Soviet machine guns. Now he has a saber hanging on his wall, donated by his current followers. The history of Ukraine has come full circle. Russia and Poland are once again playing a major role in Kyiv's fate. And Commander Cook outlived everyone he cared about. He says: this is the ultimate punishment for what he was and was not guilty of.

Afterword in the publication: Vladimir Nikolaevich Crossroads. We had our own "Moment of Truth"
Police Colonel Nikolai Perekrest caught Bandera for 7 years

Police Colonel Nikolai Perekrest found out who Bandera’s followers were at the end of 1944, when as a 17-year-old recruit he joined the NKVD troops in Western Ukraine. These units fought against armed detachments of Ukrainian nationalists. The service lasted for 7 years: only in 1951 was the struggle declared over. However, even after this, there was still shooting in the forests, and rural activists in the Carpathians went to bed with a pistol under their pillow. The retired colonel told his son, Izvestia correspondent Vladimir Perekrest, about the events of those years.

Only those who have never encountered them can believe in the romantic aura around Bandera’s trident. Their struggle was a senseless and cruel adventure, directed primarily against their own people. More local people died at the hands of Bandera in Western Ukraine than were arrested or deported for aiding bandit groups.

And Cook states that they “did not slaughter the local population”

Well, yes, they mostly shot... I knew people whose loved ones were destroyed by the “forest brothers.” I had a local friend, Vanya Belokury, the first secretary of the Kulikovo district Komsomol committee. His parents and brother were shot by Bandera, but he miraculously survived. And in 1949, the writer Yaroslav Galan was hacked to death with an ax. They say they only killed activists. But who are the activists? Competent, purposeful people. The color of the nation. So Bandera’s followers killed them, accusing them of betraying Ukrainian independence. The slightest suspicion of collaboration with the “Soviets” - and Bandera’s security service handed down a death sentence. They broke into the house of the condemned man, usually at night, shot the whole family, and burned the hut. A copy of the verdict was left on the ashes. It is no coincidence that Cook does not say a word about this unit. The population lived in constant fear.

And at the same time supported the “forest brothers”?

There wasn’t much support, except perhaps in the first post-war years. Then the situation changed. A whole range of measures worked. First, the authorities showed what would happen to your loved ones if you “go into the forest.” Families of gang associates began to be evicted to Siberia. I had a chance to see how this happened in the winter of 1946, when our unit was stationed in the city of Kuty. Blizzard, waist-deep snow, cars could not get through... People were transported on carts, driven on foot. There was crying. A difficult sight... Those who did not oppose the authorities lived quite well. In the post-war years, resources were sometimes directed to Western Ukraine to the detriment of other regions. The region was transforming before our eyes - I lived there until 1959 and saw it. National politics also played a role. In all institutions, Ukrainian was not only the main language, but the only one. Specialists from eastern Ukraine were sent to the region. The ideological ground was knocked out of the Banderaites: the people did not need their protection. By 1948, the bulk of the population, despite the fear that the “security service” sowed, was on our side.

What did this mean?

Local self-defense units were created in villages. They were called "killer battalions" and those who served in them were called "hawks." Bandera’s followers dealt with them especially cruelly, and in order not to expose the guys, ours later abandoned this idea. The committee members now have more informants among the local population. We had very effective signaling devices. Bandera's followers appeared - a man pressed a secret button, and at the regimental headquarters they already knew in which village the bandits were. In addition, the authorities gave many “forest fighters” a chance to return to peaceful life. In 1947-1948, three amnesties were announced. Many gave up, especially in the summer of 1947. One somehow came across me...

How it was?

In the town of Yablonov in the summer of 1947, my colleague and I came across a garden; there were a lot of them there. The guy just called up - completely unexamined. I gave him my machine gun, and I shook the tree. Suddenly I hear a noise. I turned around - two of our machine guns were lying on the ground, the soles of my “comrade in arms” were flashing in the distance, and about five steps away a hefty Bandera man was standing and aiming a “Schmeiser” at me from the stomach. German army boots with high lacing, an officer's jacket without shoulder straps, a cap with a trident, he himself is about 30 years old, he looks brave... But I am both scared and angry. “If you decide to shoot, shoot!” - I say. “Wow,” he laughs, “so brave. You’ve been honored.” That means he liked it, and suddenly changed his tone: “I want to say something, will you make it alive?” I replied: I’ll take it to the district department, and they’ll sort it out without me. He gave me the Schmeiser, I picked up the abandoned machine guns and off we went. The district department wrote a report that the prisoner surrendered himself. I don’t know what happened to him

But in general, who outmaneuvered who militarily?

First they. Well-trained detachments acted against us from 1944 to 1946. The Germans trained them well. And while retreating, they left them weapons and radio equipment. After the war, we were supplied with money from Munich - we more than once found bundles of dollars in caches. And only internal troops fought against Bandera; they had a kind of unspoken agreement with the army units: not to touch each other. They did not attack the garrisons - they understood that then they would fight them differently. At first we were like newborns. They didn’t know the forests, the front-line experience didn’t work for many. As a result, they suffered heavy losses, about one in three. This embittered the command. We had no awards, since that war was not publicly mentioned anywhere, and they began to give short-term leave for a Bandera member personally killed in battle. But I’ll honestly say that if a Bandera member surrendered, they didn’t shoot him for the sake of his vacation - they brought him to trial.

What did they do when they captured ours?

Well, they killed. There was no particular cruelty, but no one escaped from them alive, and no prisoners were exchanged

Is it possible to identify some turning point the fight against Bandera?

Perhaps 1946-1947. “At the top” they finally realized that the enemy deserves to be taken seriously. A reorganization was carried out in our units: regimental artillery, mortars, and anti-tank rifles that were unnecessary in those conditions were removed. More cars and radio equipment were allocated. Specialists in anti-sabotage work appeared. And the situation has changed. Now they were suffering significant losses. I don’t remember the numbers, but there was visual confirmation - extensive Bandera cemeteries on the outskirts of the villages.

Did they officially exist?

Essentially yes. We handed over the bodies of the victims to the relatives. According to their tradition, a birch cross was placed on the grave of a Bandera member who died in battle. And then you come out of the village - a huge cemetery, all white with these crosses. At one time, some “smart head” banned such burials: they say it was too demonstrative. The crosses were ordered to be demolished. And every time they were restored, and even mined.

Were any specific methods used in this war?

Yes, over time we developed our own “tricks”. Mobile groups were created, which, under the guise of Bandera, went on a free search. If they came across combat (that’s what Bandera’s units were called) - they destroyed them. Very effective. There was no such noise as during combined arms operations. Or also - “turntables”. This is a special operation to allow the suspect to prove himself. The detainees are being transported, and along the way, under the guise of Bandera, the convoy is “attacked” by our own employees who know the Ukrainian language. They played it naturally - suddenly, harshly. To be sure, they could hit the guard with a butt. And the suspects are not being transported in handcuffs or tied up.

The attackers pretend that they perceive everyone as one company: “Yeah, gotcha, Muscovites!” Our people are silent, preparing to meet the “last hour” with dignity, and they beat themselves in the chest: “So we are our own, lads!” But the boys “don’t believe it”: “Who did he work for? What kind of person is he? What operations did he participate in? And who can tell about you? Well, okay, live for now.” Or they took us through the forest: come on, if you’re one of us, you should know the caches. If you don’t know, that means it’s ok, well, “to the Gilyaks”! This means: “on a branch”, to hang. They also blurt out names, addresses, and talk about their affairs. Then they simulated the execution of the “Red Pogonnikov”, as they called the NKVD servicemen, and into the forest. And after some time they run into our patrol. Shooting, a chase, and the prisoner again ends up with the “Muscovites”. They just know a lot more about him. A very subtle game. There we had our “moment of truth”.

Did Bandera’s followers have any military tricks?

Their main invention is caches. It was very difficult to detect them, but when service dogs appeared, they found these caches by smell

Cook claims that hospitals were located there...

Didn’t they have five-star hotels underground? They brought their wounded and sick to their homes to medical workers and said: heal them. If you don't cure it, you won't live either. And they treated them - where to go? However, perhaps the highest ideologists of “independence” lived in caches of increased comfort, but those who risked their lives for the sake of their ideas huddled in dugouts, like bobbies in a kennel.

… “It’s very nice that we met, Vasily Stepanovich,” KGB Major Grigory Klimenko greeted the important captive. “You had to chase me for a long time,” replied Vasyl Kuk, the last leader of the OUN and UPA in Western Ukraine, who had just been captured in a forest bunker. This day, May 23, 1954, marked the end of organized armed resistance to the communist regime in Ukraine...

"Cohort of irreconcilables"

The future commander-in-chief of the UPA was born on January 11, 1913 in the village of Krasne, Zolochiv district in the Ternopil region. His father worked on the railroad, his mother raised eight children.

In 1928, he joined the “Yunatstvo” (youth reserve of nationalists), where he was entrusted with the leadership of the “juniors” of the Zolochiv gymnasium and the entire district. Vasyl Kuk described his motives for joining the ranks of the fighters for an independent Ukraine: “If you are a person, if you are insulted and humiliated as a Ukrainian, they despise your language, they want to keep you in a yoke and rule your land - you cannot help but feel the desire to fight for your people, for their state. And is it really possible to sit back when they shot almost all of our intelligentsia, created an artificial famine, deported Ukrainians en masse and destroyed them as a nation?”

Having become a member of the OUN, he performed risky tasks: transported weapons and explosives, delivered illegal literature. In September 1933 he received 2.5 years in prison. When V. Cook was already in the internal KGB prison in Kyiv and did not touch food, alarmed officers asked why he was “eating poorly.” But the prisoner reassured them: “If I wanted to die, I would have done it long ago - I have my own methods from Polish prisons.”

Under the pseudonym “agronomist-engineer Luka Lemishka” he prepared a brochure with the innocent title “Arable Buryak” - “catechism of a conspirator.” Even while in the internal KGB prison, he did not forget his secret tricks: on walks, he clapped his cap on one leg or the other a certain number of times (showing the 64th number of his cell), left conventional notes in the toilet, underlined words in books and asked to pass on wife.

Leader of the Southeast Lands underground

In 1940-1941 V. Cook received Active participation in the work of the Military Headquarters of the OUN (B), taught the basics of partisan warfare in courses for OUN members created by the Nazi intelligence services. The OUN, according to Vasyl Stepanovich, secretly instructed graduates: on the territory of the USSR, contact not the Germans, but the local underground, its intelligence, create a deep radio communication network...

In April 1941, at the Second Great Gathering (Congress), Lemish was introduced into the Central Conduct to the position of organizational referent - “person No. 2” in the hierarchy of the movement. In July 1941, he led a marching group of OUN members with the goal of proclaiming a Ukrainian state in Kyiv, as well as in Lviv. However, at the end of the summer, the Nazis arrested Kuk in Vasilkov and threw him into a concentration camp in Bila Tserkva; Then there were the prisons of Zhitomir, Rivne, Lutsk, from where the escape was organized.

The OUN (B) conduct in the South-Eastern lands, which Lemish headed from the summer of 1942, covered the Donetsk and Krivoy Rog basins, the Dnieper region, Crimea, Odessa, Kuban, and also included the Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk regional conducts (14 regional and 30 district organizations, about 1000 people).

Work in the East became a serious test for the ideology of “integral nationalism.” Residents of the East of the republic, recognized the Central line of the OUN (B), are mainly Russophiles and for them “the concept of an independent Ukraine is like an independent Hutsul region for us.” It is no coincidence that the new OUN(B) program of 1943, devoid of elements of xenophobia, was developed by the group led by Vasyl Kuk. There he met the woman of his destiny. Ulyana Kryuchenko studied at the Institute of Railway Transport Engineers, and served as head of the “Yunatstva” in Dnepropetrovsk and the region. In 1942, he and Vasyl “became a towel,” and his wife received the pseudonym “Oksana.” When she was detained in July 1949, trying to be used to capture Lemish, Oksana apparently agreed to cooperate, but fled to the underground.

In 1947, the couple had a son, Yuri. The vicissitudes of the parents' underground life also affected the fate of the child. Two-year-old Yurk was taken from his uncle, Ivan Kuk (10 years in prison with confiscation), and sent to a special Petrovsky orphanage in Stalino under the name Yuri Antonovich Chebotar. Informants reported: the boy draws and dances well, participates in amateur performances, and enjoys authority among children. He says about his parents that “my mother is in prison, my communist father was shot in Greece, and that’s where I came from.”

Since the spring of 1943, Vasyl Kuk’s activities have been associated with the UPA. The UPA "South" Group, entrusted to V. Cook, carried out the most major battle with NKVD troops - Gurbensky battle in the Kremenets forests (April 21-27, 1944). In it, 14 battalions of NKVD troops and a cavalry regiment, with the support of tanks and aircraft, fought against the UPA-"South" kurens. There is evidence that V. Kuk was awarded the rank of general-coronet by the Ukrainian Main Liberal Rada (UGVR) on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the UPA (1952).

Lemish had a difficult relationship with UPA commander Roman Shukhevych. As the army commander’s personal liaison Ekaterina Zaritskaya stated during interrogations, “Although Shukhevych usually highly appreciated Lemish as energetic and capable person, but always noted that Lemish does not know how and does not want to work with him and always solves all issues individually. In turn, Lemish, as the organizational referent of the Main Line of the OUN and the leader of the OUN underground in Volyn, in the Podolsk region and in the East, always carefully guarded his organizational connections in this territory, ... avoided consulting with Shukhevych and even removed him from participation in the leadership of the OUN in these areas." R. Shukhevych accused his subordinate that, with his connivance, a massive physical “cleansing” of the ranks of the underground took place in Volyn by the OUN security service, which led to its split.

With a machine gun in hand and “Capital” in my head

Lemish became one of the authors new Program OUN (B), adopted in August 1943, which set the task of building a democratic, social state in independent Ukraine, with state economy, a system for protecting workers' rights, guarantees of human rights and equality of nations. V. Cook’s “leftism” did not come from the postulates of Marxism-Leninism (he knew the works of its classics very well). His views on socio-economic transformations rather came from the deep moral and ethical values ​​of Slavic civilization, the “huge” spirit of his ancestors, who strived for the ideals of social justice, from the “Christian Republic” of Zaporozhye, from respect for the choice of millions of Ukrainians to the east of Zbruch.

A member of the OUN (B) Provod, the son of a farm laborer Vasyl Galas (“Orlan”), also spoke about V. Kuk’s views during interrogations. On one of last meetings Lemish told his comrade: “We are standing at our grave, there is no point in going to the West. It’s better to die here honestly, but not to see the scandals of these lords (meaning acute disagreements in nationalist organizations beyond the cordon. - D.V.). Better go, friend Orlan, you yourself are from the “rabble”, and you will defend the “rabble”. And in the West they consider me a Marxist, but we condemn capitalism. But try to invite them to read Marx’s “Capital” - they will immediately call them a Bolshevik agent.” V. Cook knew the value of the “advantages of socialism” - in 1945-1950. he led the activities of the OUN in Eastern Ukraine, writing in 1950 a study (typescript) “Kolgospne slavery”, published in Kyiv only in 2007.

After the death of R. Shukhevych on March 5, 1950, Lemish took command of the UPA and became chairman of the general secretariat of the UGVR. Realizing that further open resistance deepens the gap with the population, leads to senseless victims and is unable to stop Sovietization, V. Cook, from the early 1950s, repeatedly ordered to minimize military and terrorist actions, go deep underground or legalize its participants, while maintaining forces on distant future. In 1952, he imposed a ban on the underground gathering information for foreign intelligence services. Conflicts between supporters of democratization of the OUN and Stepan Bandera, in which Lemish chose the side of the former, caused alarm.

Prisoner "300"

Vasyl Kuk fully felt the hardships of an illegal situation and nomadic life. At the KGB clinic he was diagnosed with myocardial dystrophy, hypoplastic gastritis, asthenia of the nervous system and duodenal ulcer.

Back in 1945, an operational case called “Badger” was opened to search for V. Cook. Only the talent of a conspirator made it possible to recognize attempts to bring him out of hiding with the help of converted comrades. He barely survived, having received through an agent a tube of mail filled with poisonous gas. The direct search and detention of V. Cook (Operation “Trap”) was entrusted to the 1st Department of the Secret Political Directorate of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, headed by the young officer Pyotr Sverdlov.

In the Ivantsevsky forest of the Lvov region, one of the bunkers familiar to him was prepared for Lemish’s meeting, housing three militant agents who had previously enjoyed the trust of V. Cook. On May 23, 1954, without suspecting anything was wrong, he arrived there with his wife. The agents disarmed and tied up the “guests” who had fallen asleep after a long journey. The task force that arrived soon searched the detainees, taking away the poison.

During the investigation, Vasyl Stepanovich (prisoner “300”) gave extensive testimony about the past of the nationalist movement and its current state, the structure of the OUN (B), the main stages of their participation in the struggle for the independence of Ukraine, characteristics of the leaders of the resistance movement and overseas centers of the OUN, the relationship between them and the intelligence services of England and the USA. “He behaves calmly during the investigation,” the detectives noted with satisfaction, “he gives testimony without much denial.” However, Lemish played his game with the “tips” that lasted for years...

The fact is that the “authorities” had their own “considerations for using the arrested Vasily Cook in the interests of the Soviet state,” approved by the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR Ivan Serov. It was intended to use V. Cook for “the purposes of the moral and political defeat of nationalist centers outside the cordon and the disintegration of OUN elements within the country.” On June 20, 1954, V. Cook, after conversations with the head of the operational games department, prepared “considerations” on neutralizing the underground.

Lemish proposed to achieve the unification of nationalists into a single political center abroad, and to put V. Galas at its head. Moreover, he offered to send him to Germany to carry out “unification.” Of course, they wisely did not agree to this, realizing that Lemish, under the guise of cooperation, was precisely trying to destroy the “general line” - to deepen the split of foreign nationalists.

In the fall of 1957, the chairman of the KGB of the Ukrainian SSR, V. Nikitchenko, suggested that “300th” write a “propaganda bomb” for political emigration. Cook demanded an amnesty and expressed fears that he would be shot immediately after the publication of this work. The book never appeared. It should be noted that it was the balanced position of the state security agencies that saved Vasyl Stepanovich from execution, which was what the First Secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, Alexey Kirichenko, was inclined to do. It was no secret in the Central Committee that V. Cook was convinced of the Russification of Ukraine and a retreat from the “Leninist national policy.”

By Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR No. 139/82 of July 14, 1960, Vasyl Kuk and his wife were pardoned and released from criminal liability: “Given the desire of the former head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Kuk to atone for his guilt before the Soviet state by patriotic activities in favor of the Motherland, to satisfy petition from the State Security Committee
information of Ukraine about the extension of the amnesty of 1955 to him and his wife.”

On September 19, 1960, Vasyl Stepanovich read out an appeal on the radio to Ukrainians in exile, published in the newspaper “News from Ukraine” for distribution in the diaspora (at the same time, about 200 former OUN members made “repentant” statements in the media).

Citizen of the USSR - citizen of Ukraine

The detectives who turned to Lemish for “consultations” stated that once he was free, he sharply changed his line of behavior and behaved withdrawn, although he communicated very friendly with his work colleagues.

It was the security officers who played a positive role in the fate of the “unconvoyed” family of V. Cook: they helped their son obtain a then rare education in cybernetics and enroll in graduate school (the Soviet bureaucracy itself would hardly have given a path to the scion of the “bandit leader”). The head of the fifth directorate, Leonid Kallash, argued to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine that it was inappropriate to interfere with V. Kuk in his scientific work, and did not agree with the decision to not allow Yuri Kuk, who was far from politics, to defend his dissertation. But the situation changed with the arrival of the ardent conservative Vitaly Fedorchuk in 1970, and things were moving towards the re-institution of a criminal case.

In June 1972, when the arrests of Ukrainian dissidents began in the Blok case, V. Cook was expelled from the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Closed and scientific topic- “The Ukrainian national question and Ukrainian political parties in Western Ukrainian lands. 1918-1941”, author’s section of the monograph “Marxism-Leninism on the Ukrainian National Question”.

The independence of Ukraine became a moral and political victory for Vasyl Stepanovich’s life’s work. Despite his advanced age, he headed the scientific department of the All-Ukrainian Brotherhood of the OUN and UPA, conducted active lecture work, and published memoirs about his comrades-in-arms.

He did not fawn over the powers that be - and did not allow himself to accept the title of Hero of Ukraine until the state decided on the status of the UPA soldiers. I didn’t want to be a “talking head” for election videos and rallies. He firmly defended his convictions, but did not praise “democracy and progress in Ukraine,” but in fact, wild capitalism...

A cynical time was coming when the “advanced public” didn’t give a damn about a veteran of the Great Patriotic War or a UPA combatant, because these people of strong convictions prevented them from comfortably indulging in “drive” with their teachings, embodying the ideas about the ways of development of their homeland, hard-won by the Ukrainian people themselves.

Vasyl Stepanovich died on September 9, 2007 in the capital of the state, for whose independence he selflessly fought in hopeless conditions. “I would like to wish the youth to be true patriots of Ukraine, builders of the state, to be proud of belonging to the Shevchenko family,” said the rebel general. Will descendants heed his call?

Through a gradual, systematic influence, certain forces brought the earthly civilization of people to virtually a social catastrophe.

One should not assume that cities on Earth are a consequence of the urbanization process. Urbanization is not the reason. This is just a screen behind which the essence of what is happening is hidden. A kind of fig leaf. And it is wrong to consider cities a natural phenomenon, as if earthly civilization cannot do without them. Wow, megacities are the center of culture, science, and industry! Just what culture? Artificially created, divorced from reality, massive, perverted and inherently slavish. The same can be said about science. The city only hinders the accumulation of knowledge about the world around us.

There is too much interference: there is no clean water, no air, no space. In addition, scientific experiments are constantly influenced by artificial electromagnetic fields. The last factor has a detrimental effect on the psyche. As has become known from numerous studies, electromagnetic fields destroy neurons. What kind of science is there when nervous system the person is depressed and works in hostile conditions. Memory is lost and there is a constant lack of energy. All serious discoveries, as a rule, are made in special laboratories outside the city, in nature. So there is no need to talk about serious science in megacities. This is a well-executed comedy.

There are only industrial enterprises, where modern slaves, stupefied by the bustle of various everyday problems, the harmful influence of cellular stations and other types of electromagnetic influence, are in constant stress, sell for money their strength and the time allotted to them “from Above” for life. I said "slaves", and this is not hyperbole, but a sad fact. The cities of our vaunted civilization were created, first of all, as gigantic containers for humanoid bipedal creatures that had lost their higher purpose.

The Western Asian spirit of merchandising realized at the dawn of time that it was almost impossible to manage independent people living on the land by their own labor. They are self-sufficient. They feed themselves, clothe themselves, and live in harmony with nature. And what is most unpleasant, not according to their far-fetched, but according to her, Nature - universal laws. And the Semitic worshipers of the Spirit of the Desert began to act. You must know that everything starts with an ideology that people themselves do not invent. They usually slip it to them.

The first money appeared, and so did its owners. Who they are is no longer a secret.

Now it’s clear why, according to the Talmud, God’s chosen ones are forbidden to cultivate the land in exile? So that they always concentrate in cities and do not try to go to the ground.

Back in the 7th century, Rus' was called Gardarika, i.e. country of cities. And there really were many cities in Rus'. But the interesting thing is that the population of Russian cities, despite the fact that they stood for hundreds of years, never exceeded seven to eight thousand. For a long time, scientists could not understand the reason for this. All over the world, cities grew faster, but in Rus' they did not. There were more of them, a fact, but the number of inhabitants in Slavic cities was always limited. Finally, the scientific men guessed what was going on. It turns out that the inhabitants of Russian cities, no matter who they were: blacksmiths, potters, shoemakers, never lost touch with the land. Living in cities, they remained half peasants. The same can be said about the boyars and even the princes. In Pagan Rus', work in the field was considered sacred and the most prestigious. In Rus' at that time there was a saying “The second mother is our land.” Every Russian had two mothers: one gave life, the second helped to become a full-fledged person.

If we remember the ancient epics, which of our heroes was the most famous? Mikula Selyaninovich, plowman. In terms of strength, it turned out to be more powerful than Svetogor himself. In his bag lay earthly cravings. In other words, it could easily bear the gravitational field of the planet! In pre-Christian times, he was the most respected person in Rus'. Does this mean anything? But in the Christian era, the same ideology of contempt for everything rustic and natural arose, which we see in our time. In Christianized cities, Oratai began to be called smerds from the 10th century. That means stinking - dirty. You can still hear: “Hey you, village!” The word “collective farmer” has become synonymous with the word “moron.” But this is only the background, the field on which the tragedy that we are now witnessing unfolded. When cities began to grow rapidly in Rus', and throughout the world, the Jewish Masters of Money began the second stage of creating an urban herd.

What is the mechanism of urban growth in the West? Each serf, having entered the city and lived in it for a year, received freedom. How everything was arranged for them: the city imperceptibly turned into a trap for the peasants. First they crushed people into feudal dependence, and then they opened the gates, they say, come here. But without any property. As who? Hired worker. More precisely, a real slave! Only instead of a taskmaster and a whip, dependence on money began to appear. Now about the money. We won't say who invented them. Some researchers argue that they are God's chosen ones, others - that they allegedly appeared on their own. Both are wrong. Money on Earth was created by those who wrote the Torah or the Bible. But at first they were gold, silver and gems. For the first stage of concentration of power in the few who had enough of it. In one person, merchants-usurers for seven centuries, trading in slaves, furs, Chinese silk and other things, distributed among themselves the entire bulk of metal money. And not only in the west, but also in the east. After this, the transition to paper counterfeits began throughout the planet. These are what the bankers created. This is true. And the masters of God's chosen ones. How was this done? It’s very simple: paper money appeared as bills of exchange for valuables deposited in banks. But the fact is that the bankers, realizing that no one would take away all the gold deposits from them at once, and besides, they also had their own reserves of gold, began to write out such a number of paper bills, which was several times greater than the reserves stored in their basements precious metal. Fakes? Yes, of course, and in huge quantities! Not provided with anything. But by giving them away at interest, they already received a real return.

They exchanged air for gold and jewelry. Unfortunately, this process continues to operate in our era. Nothing changed. True, for some time the role of private banks was taken over by state banks. By law, only they could mint gold and issue paper money. But this did not last long. After 1913, the issue of the world currency, the dollar, again passed into the hands of private owners. I mean the Fed.

This is where the huge mass of essentially counterfeit money on Earth came from, and these counterfeits are directly related to the size of the urban population. The limited supply of gold and silver money at one point stopped the influx of rural population into the city. You can't live in the city without money. No matter how much you advertise it, if a small part of its population, mainly the rich, have the money, then you will run not to the city, but, on the contrary, from the city, to free bread. This process has begun throughout Europe. One part of the urban poor began to return to the countryside, while the other, together with the bankers and petty bourgeoisie, took up the destruction of the feudal order. Lack of money raised the masses to bourgeois revolutions. This was also the plan. Only in Russia everything turned out differently. And in the east. The Russian peasant, even the serf, did not really strive to go to the city. Moreover, the city, unlike Western European practice, did not free him from serfdom. Instead of the sweet city life, he strove for Siberia, away from the power of the landowners. To freedom. That is why Russia, until the first half of the 20th century, despite the propaganda against the countryside, remained an agrarian country. It turned into a state of megacities only after the industrialization carried out by Stalin. The West forced her to do this, otherwise she would have died.

But let's return to counterfeit paper money. Now, thanks to them, it was possible to keep any number of slaves in cities. Papers are not gold. You can print as many of them as you like. That's the secret. But with counterfeit money, an equally counterfeit person became necessary. In fact, a hominoid of a different race and a completely different culture. Unable to feed himself with his own labor, completely dependent and unable to imagine his life without pieces of paper called money. I didn't say anything about race. Precisely a different race.

What does it mean? After all, city residents successfully not only feed themselves, but also accumulate considerable material values. They feed from stores - supermarkets, thanks to pieces of paper that allow them to do this. So to speak, of a permissive nature to universal documents issued by their owners. And deprive our citizens of life-saving stores, take away public services: electricity, heating and hot water in winter or, even easier, deprive them of their money! What will happen? This whole huge mass of civilized subhumans will immediately turn into a wild, brutal herd of monkeys. General looting will begin. Brother will tear a piece of bread out of brother's mouth. Without hesitation, kill for a warm blanket. And it would never occur to anyone to leave the city for nature, to Mother Earth. Engage in fishing, collecting wild plants, raising livestock and, finally, farming. It will be easier for them to strangle their own kind than to take a shovel and dig up edible roots or make a wick for catching fish. I'm not even talking about the construction of a primitive dwelling and a simple Russian stove.

Why will this happen? On the one hand, because a city dweller does not know how to do anything like this. On the other hand, he simply won’t want to. He learned to really work a long time ago. A highly specialized psyche, formed by an urban lifestyle, will not allow him to do this. It is easier for a city dweller to engage in robbery than to try to save himself through labor. The urban population, or a crowd of slaves, is so dependent on the pieces of paper they receive from their owners, which are called money, that they, these fakes, have become a god for the townspeople. Their only real value, which allows slaves of the spirit to enjoy life. It was this pseudo-value that formed the subrace of urban residents. The fact that this is a kind of subrace has been noticed by many researchers. And not only ours, but also Western ones.

So what is the mechanism for the formation of a slave race in cities? It, like everything ingenious, is very simple. It is known that everything external in a person is connected with the internal; this is a law of nature. Overconcentration on some aspect or image inhibits the development of other qualities in the mind. The psyche begins to malfunction in the direction where the human ego aimed it. Where does this lead? To only one thing - to consolidate such a quality in the depths of the subconscious. Here is the mechanism for building a degenerative human psyche, one for which spiritual values ​​cease to exist as such. For her, only the value of money is real, which allows her to purchase various material goods in the trading network. Vulgar materialism was not born in the countryside, it is a product of megacities. It was formed as a result of the overconcentration of people on the extraction of money. This is a very serious factor. The ocean of paper fakes with which the system drives the simple-minded rural population into the cities simultaneously turns normal people into mentally damaged ones. Those for whom the pursuit of material values ​​becomes the meaning of life. For money, such bastards are ready to commit any crime. Because their consciousness does not perceive anything else besides mercantile interests. Not villagers, but city dwellers with a distorted psyche are easily sold and easily bought. Statistics show that our officials were and remain in first place in terms of corruption. Following them, according to tradition, are the pathetic intelligentsia, who hate their people. Together with her Orthodox Church. Basically, its top. Then there are various kinds of speculator traders and the like. The fact that urban workers are least susceptible to such an infection does not speak about their beliefs, but about the fact that they still have a healthy gene pool, since their grandfathers, or even fathers, came from rural areas. Only sudras or slaves, people with a slave mentality, can be easily controlled.

The civilization of megacities forges such people. And, I must say, successfully. For a long time, especially at school, we were taught that a slave is someone who is whipped to work, poorly fed, and can be killed at any moment. If a slave realizes that he has been turned into slavery, then in spirit he is already free. A real slave is one who does not even suspect that he, his family and all the people around him are slaves. The one who doesn’t even think about the fact that, in fact, he is completely powerless. That its owners, with the help of specially created laws, law enforcement agencies, utilities and, above all, with the help of money they can force him to do whatever they need of him.

Modern slavery is not the slavery of the past. It's different. And it is not built on forceful coercion, but on a radical change in consciousness. When a proud and free person, under the influence of certain technologies, through the influence of ideology, the power of money, fear and cynical lies, turns into a mentally inferior, easily controlled, corrupt degenerate. A slave of the spirit who delights in his chains. We usually call him a layman. Officials, well aware of who they are dealing with, call such a crowd of city slaves with the capacious word “cattle.” What are the megacities of the planet like? Of course, giant concentration camps. Containers of mentally broken, crippled and absolutely powerless ordinary Shudras. To live in a city you only need money. To hell with talents and vocations. Long live the place that pays more! Here it is - a simple and effective mechanism for the death of what we came into this world for. Everything changes with money. Even life itself.

We'll talk about this aspect separately. It is no secret that in modern cities the air is poisoned by car exhaust fumes. In the centers of such cities it is generally impossible to breathe. In summer, the heat becomes especially unbearable. During traffic jams, you can lose consciousness. Poisoned air destroys the health of children and kills the elderly. When there is no wind, cities become especially dangerous. But the paradox is this: in the central part of megalopolises the most expensive land and the most expensive apartments are sold! How can we understand this? Crazy, but it's a fact! No science can explain this behavior of people. Does prestige change for health? But can such a phenomenon be explained only by prestige?

“In 1945-1946, we killed gangs (OUN) at the level of kurens, koshas and hundreds. But the security service (“bezpeki”) did not really allow us to finish off these cruel executioners. When in 1946 we reached the level of supra-district leadership, the traces extended to the Central Committee of Ukraine, headed by Khrushchev. That’s where we were stopped.”

When former officers of the Austro-Hungarian Army, originally from Galicia (the territory of modern Western Ukraine), gathered in Prague in 1920 and created their Ukrainian Military Organization, they first of all created a communications system and the administrative structure of the organization. In this matter, in the 1930s they were assisted by the OVRA (Italian secret police), the German SD security service and the military intelligence ABWER, which trained personnel in its schools in Warsaw and near Berlin. They refined and polished this structure.

In 1943, this entire large-scale project was launched at full blast. Our army then had to destroy the UPA numbering 100 thousand people.

To be able to maintain such an army, the OUN did the following. They took a village as an administrative unit, which should have at least two hundred households. If the village did not have that many, then several were united to reach the required number.

Their superdistrict and viddil were regional structures, and the entire territory of Ukraine was divided into four parts (rays). At the head of all these rays was the Central Wire of the OUN, headed by the Conductor.

The main one was the “Zakhid” ray - the northwestern one, which included Galicia and Transcarpathia, the rest were secondary and did not enjoy the support of the local population.

Let's follow the scheme from bottom to top and look at its levels and links.

This is the village level. This is the basis of the entire structure. On the basis of the village there were various workshops for all types of repairs, workshops for processing raw materials and sewing clothes, etc., etc. The entire economic part was very similar to our collective and state farms.

After the start of the war, Bandera’s supporters did not disperse these organizations, but used them as very convenient structures for themselves. They had a rigid planned system. The task was given in advance about who and what should grow, plant, prepare, and hand over in the fall.

This entire procurement service in the village was led by the ruler, he was the main procurer - the business manager. After procurement, everything was handed over to the village village official against receipt. The stanichny in the village was in the role of chairman of the collective farm, who was in charge of all resources.

Usually everything harvested was stored in the forest, in caches, in a high, dry place, well camouflaged. Everything was carefully taken into account, records were kept of the receipt and expenditure of material assets, and the village resident always knew what supplies he had for how many people. If necessary, he went to the forest, bringing required amount supplies, and distributed them among those houses where militants were billeted.

Usually there was a swarm, or, in our opinion, a platoon, in the village, so the placement of militants in the village did not put a burden on the families. The village worker was responsible for supplying clothing and food.

The most interesting thing is that all units were divided into two parts - women's and men's, each part had its own gospodarchy and stanitsa. Women were engaged in repairing and sewing clothes, washing clothes, dressings, and caring for the wounded.

Among the population of the village, political work was carried out without fail to explain the ideas of the OUN-UPA, and it was carried out by OUN political workers, and for each category of the population it was different, separate for the male population, separate for women (usually women), and also separately among boys and girls. All the priests of the Greek Catholic Church helped them in this, saying in their sermons that they must obey their defenders, since they bring freedom and the right to own the land.

In each village there was a communication point, which was a good peasant house, the owners of which were the so-called communication points.

A round-the-clock watch was organized at this point, since a messenger could arrive at any time of the day or night with an encrypted report. The messengers were almost always young girls between the ages of ten and seventeen.

The legend for moving along the route was carefully worked out. Usually they went to relatives in a neighboring village, the same owners of the communication point. When we found out, we did this: the two of us turned this girl upside down and started shaking her until a coded message fell out of her bra.

A system of conventional signs was widely used for external observers located along the road from village to village within sight of each other. In this case, boys were used. They were also used to monitor the movements and locations of our troops.

The next level is the village, a union of three villages. Its leadership was located in one of these villages. It consisted of a village resident, who was in charge of housing, billeting and supplying hundreds of UPA with everything necessary (that’s 100-150 militants), and a village governor, who led the service for procuring supplies in these villages.

In each village there was a SB (security service) team of 10-15 people, carefully kept secrets, seemingly local residents. They were distinguished by incredible cruelty, worse than any of Dudayev’s men, they killed at the slightest suspicion of cooperation with the Soviet authorities.

As an example, the case with the family of Ivan Semyonovich Rukha. He was summoned to the regional department of the NKVD for questioning regarding his participation in Bandera gangs. He was found innocent, went home, and on the same day his entire family was shot along with their children and thrown into a well.

Ivan was seriously wounded. He climbed out of the well, got to the garrison and spoke about the participants in the execution, among whom was the chairman of the village council, a member of the SB militant group.

...The village had its own investigator, who received information from his informants in the villages, processed it and, if necessary, passed it on to the security service of the village or higher.

The owners of the village's communication point had access to higher levels of management and had at their disposal up to twenty messengers at a time. And the political and educational work with the population was never forgotten. For each age and gender there was a separate educator who supplied his subordinates with the necessary literature and propaganda materials.

At the level of subdistrict and district in the UPA, the kosh and kuren were contained, according to our military regulations - this is an infantry regiment, numbering up to 2000-3000 people.

Kosh differed from the kuren in that it had artillery and mechanized formations. District and subdistrict leadership was located in large villages included in this subdistrict or region, and the headquarters and command of the kuren were also located there. They did not like to live in the forest, although they had concrete bunkers built there with the help of German engineers, well camouflaged, with water and electrical supplies. It happened, after the war, that you drove a UPA detachment into the forest, everyone was surrounded. You enter the forest. And there is no one there, everyone hid in the ground. You take a long iron pin and start piercing the ground until a bunker is revealed.

CALL TO OUN-UPA

At these levels, the OUN-UPA had its own prosecutor’s office and investigative apparatus, consisting of graduates of the law faculties of Lvov, Warsaw and

Krakow universities, Ukrainians by nationality, who worked closely with the regional security forces.

To carry out the investigation, there were secret prisons for holding and torturing prisoners. The regional fighting consisted of 10-15 well-trained and armed people, essentially executioners, carrying out punitive operations on the orders of their commandant. He, in turn, obtained information for carrying out actions from investigators and prosecutors.

They learned information from their people in minor administrative positions in the village council, district council, in the posts of foremen, and chairmen of collective farms. In city military registration and enlistment offices and the NKVD, these were usually technical workers, cleaners, stokers, secretaries-typists, and cooks in special canteens for operational personnel. Only once did the OUN manage to introduce an agent into our combat group, which was destroyed during the capture of Kurenny in one of the villages.

The conscription to the UPA was supervised by the commandants of the mobilization departments; in the event of large losses in the UPA, demands for the mobilization of the required number of people were transmitted through the system of messengers to the villages; for evading conscription - execution.

Particular attention should be paid to the “hundreds of brave young men” and the same “hundreds of brave girls” in the special purpose department. It was a real forge of OUN-UPA personnel.

All youth were divided into three age groups, 10-12 years old, 13-15 years old and 16-18 years old. All these age and gender groups had their own tasks, actions and demands. The youngest were used as observers, scouts and messengers, the older ones - as saboteurs. For example, in the “hundreds of brave young men” at the special purpose department, he began his “ labor activity» as an intelligence officer, the future President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk.

How serious this organization was can be judged by the way they monitored the tank reserve of the 1st Ukrainian Front, stationed in the Tuchinsky forest in 1944, with the subsequent targeting of German aircraft at it. We didn’t like these young men; it used to be that we would surround a gang that had killed our comrades, and they would throw down their weapons, raise their hands and shout that they were children.

And the “hundreds of brave girls” in the same department are real sadists, we didn’t even take them prisoner, we shot them on the spot. They practiced on our captured soldiers how to apply splints to broken limbs, breaking their arms and legs, or cut them open to study field surgery and methods of suturing wounds.

They kept their well-equipped regional hospitals for one hundred seriously wounded people in inaccessible forest areas.

The supra-district leaders preferred to keep a low profile and were usually in the forest, in their bunkers. They had everything there for autonomous life: electric lighting, their own water supply and sewerage system, and radio communication with foreign countries.

At the supra-district level there were schools for junior commanders and political educators, analogues of training camps in Ichkeria, located in the deep Carpathian forests. Most of them were destroyed in 1943 by a partisan unit led by Vershigora.

In the forests in the Orzhevsky farms of the Glevalsky district of the Rivne region there was also the Central line of the OUN-UPA, in a well-equipped concrete bunker with all amenities, built under the supervision of German engineers.

Viddils under each region with a division subordinate to them existed only in 1943-1944. They were destroyed by our army in April 1944 in the battle of Kremenets.

In the cities, the influence of Bandera’s followers was much less than in the villages. In the city they only had an external surveillance service and messengers. And the OUN leadership was afraid to be there, since the NKVD worked well in the city. Yes and urban population, more literate and better versed in the political situation, did not want to cooperate with Bandera’s supporters.

It was with this carefully hidden organization that SMERSH had to fight immediately after the liberation of Ukraine. Until the end of the war, Soviet power ended in regional centers.

The owners of the village were Banderaites. To put an end to this, after the war in western Ukraine, garrisons were placed in every village. The entire 13th Army was needed for the Rivne region alone, after which everything began to fall into place.

The bandits were driven into the forest and deprived of supplies, and SMERSH began to destroy the leaders first. After their destruction, the gangs disintegrated, since most people were mobilized into the UPA under pain of death, their own and that of their relatives.

“WE WERE NOT REALLY ALLOWED TO FINISH THE EXECUTIONERS”

In 1945-1946, we killed gangs at the level of kurens, koshas and hundreds. But the security service (“bezpeki”) did not really allow us to finish off these cruel executioners. When in 1946 we reached the level of supra-district leadership, the traces extended to the Central Committee of Ukraine, headed by Khrushchev. That's where we were stopped.

In 1946, work to combat Bandera in the Rivne and Lvov regions was curtailed. The departments of Security Service, OKR SMERSH, and BB (fight against banditry) were liquidated. General Trubnikov, head of the Rivne NKVD department, and General Asmolov in the Lvov region were removed from their posts. And from Kyiv to Lvov, on the orders of Khrushchev, General Ryasny was transferred, as it turned out later, a sympathizer of the nationalists. As a result, the security service carried out reprisals against our people until the 1950s.

After Stalin's death, under the amnesty carried out by Khrushchev, all active participants of the UPA-OUN were released and returned to their homeland.

In the 1950-1960s, the quiet restoration of the OUN began. They began by nominating their people to party and economic positions; there were cases of admitting the conductors of OUN ideas and political referents of the OUN to the Komsomol with further career growth(a striking example is Leonid Kravchuk). And those who interfered with them were either intimidated, blackmailed with the lives of their loved ones, or eliminated under the guise of an accident or a domestic quarrel.

In 1974, I came to Western Ukraine, and my friends told me that in many high party and economic posts, not to mention small ones, especially in rural areas - in the Rivne, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk regions - there are OUN people. Shelest, who was the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine until 1972, hid all this from Moscow.

At the end of the so-called perestroika, in 1989-1991, thanks to Gorbachev’s treacherous policy, this long-maturing abscess opened up. "Rukh" (in Russian - "Movement") arose.

Fueled by money from the Vatican and the Western diaspora from Canada and America, the systematic seizure of power by “Rukh” began throughout Ukraine. The seizure of Orthodox churches by Greek Catholics began with the help of militants from UNA-UNSO. This organization was revived precisely at that time as the most extremist political movement of former Banderaites, dissatisfied with the activities of RUKH.

Bandera and his associates were declared martyrs and victims of the NKVD. Great support and ideological patronage of “Rukh” and UNA-UNSO was provided by the former “brave young man”, at that time deputy head of the ideology department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Kravchuk, who later became chairman of the Rada, and then president.

Roman Nosikov

After the Battle of Kursk, Soviet troops finally seized the strategic initiative and began to liberate Ukraine. In November 1943, Kyiv was cleared of the Germans, after which in the first half of 1944 the Korsun-Shevchenko and Lvov-Sandomierz operations were carried out to liberate the territories west of the Dnieper. At this time, the Red Army soldiers clashed with units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)*.

Liberate Ukraine

After the defeat of the Nazis on the Kursk Bulge in the summer of 1943, the Red Army was rapidly approaching the Dnieper. The Germans hastily strengthened their positions. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)*, one of whose leaders was Stepan Bandera, also prepared to repel the advance of Soviet troops. For these purposes, a hasty mobilization of the armed wing of the organization was carried out - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (now an extremist organization banned in Russia).

Its backbone consisted of people from Western Ukraine who shared nationalist ideas and professed radical anti-Sovietism. Organizationally, the UPA was divided into several units autonomous from each other: “West” (Lviv region), “North” (Volyn) and “East”. The main combat units were battalions (300-500 soldiers) and companies (100-150 people), as well as platoons of 30-40 soldiers. They were armed with rifles, machine guns and even Hungarian tankettes and anti-tank guns.

According to historians, by January 1944, that is, by the time the Red Army began operations in Right Bank Ukraine, the number of UPA people was about 80 thousand people. Of these, about 30 thousand were constantly under arms, the rest were dispersed throughout villages and towns and were involved in combat operations as needed.

Units of the 1st Ukrainian Front under the command of Army General Nikolai Vatutin were the first to enter the battle with Bandera. The nationalists initially tried not to get involved in major clashes with units of the Red Army, preferring the tactics of small attacks.

War on a grand scale

This went on for several months, until on March 27, near the village of Lipki in the Rivne region, Soviet troops surrounded two battalions of Bandera’s supporters. The battle lasted about six hours. About 400 bandits were killed on the spot, and the rest were pushed back to the river.

When trying to cross it by swimming, about 90 people drowned, only nine people were captured by the Red Army - all that was left of the two UPA battalions. The report addressed to Joseph Stalin said that one of the commanders, nicknamed Gamal, was identified among the corpses.

Another major battle took place two days later near the village of Baskino in the same Rivne region. A Bandera detachment of several hundred people was taken by surprise by Soviet soldiers. The UPA bandits were pushed back to the river and began crossing. And everything would have been fine, but on the opposite bank an auxiliary company of Red Army soldiers was waiting for them. As a result, the nationalists lost more than 100 people.

Climax

But the largest battle between the Red Army and the UPA took place on April 21-25, 1944 near the Gurba tract in the Rivne region. The battle was preceded by an attack by Bandera at the end of February on General Vatutin, as a result of which he died. To deal with the armed detachments of nationalists, the 1st Ukrainian Front, which Georgy Zhukov began to command after the death of Vatutin, allocated an additional cavalry division, artillery and eight tanks.

From the UPA side, detachments of the “North” unit with a total number of about five thousand people took part in the battle. Soviet troops had significant superiority, having 25-30 thousand soldiers. As for the tanks, according to some sources, there were eight of them; according to other sources, the Soviet command used 15 armored vehicles. There is also evidence of the use of aviation by the Red Army. Despite the numerical advantage of the Soviet units, Bandera’s troops had excellent knowledge of the area and, to a certain extent, the help of the local population.

The battle itself was an attempt to break through the main forces of Bandera through the front line into territory controlled by the German army. Lasting for several days, the battle eventually ended in a decisive victory for the Red Army. More than two thousand UPA soldiers were killed, and about one and a half thousand were captured. The losses of Soviet troops amounted to about a thousand people killed and wounded. Despite the fact that the remaining Banderaites were able to break through to the Germans, the backbone of the “North” unit was defeated. This significantly facilitated the task of further liberation of Western Ukraine.

Another major operation against Bandera was carried out by the Red Army at the height of the Lvov-Sandomierz operation. On August 22-27, Soviet rifle and cavalry units conducted a raid on fortified points and UPA camps in the Lviv region. More than 3.2 thousand bandits were destroyed, more than a thousand were captured. The Soviet troops received an armored personnel carrier, a car, 21 machine guns and five mortars as trophies.

Roundup war

In 1945, at the last stage of the Great Patriotic War, when the front line went far to the west, the so-called round-up tactics were mainly used against the “runaways.” Its essence was that first reconnaissance in force was carried out in order to call the nationalist forces into open battle. When they got involved, the main Soviet forces came into action. This tactic was much more effective than searching for armed bandits in the mountains and forests.

Raid operations were also sometimes carried out on a large scale. Thus, in April 1945, a 50,000-strong group under the command of General Mikhail Marchenkov defeated the UPA forces in the Carpathian region on the line of the new Soviet-Polish border. More than a thousand Banderaites were killed, several thousand were arrested.

After the end of the war, the surviving nationalists finally switched to guerrilla warfare tactics. It was possible to put an end to the Bandera underground only by the beginning of the 1950s.

*- organization banned in the Russian Federation