Capitalism in Decay

Peter Potichnyj, allegedly the youngest fighter in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), wrote chapters 6, 11, and 12. A 1966 memo by David Murphy, head of the CIA’s “Soviet Russia” division, said that “Potichnyj collaborated with a cover organization under one of our projects until 1961.” This was probably a reference to something connected to Prolog. According to historian Per Rudling, “Potichnyj was affiliated with the CIA.”

By the 1980s, a pair of North American UPA veteran societies—one affiliated with OUN-B, and the other with CIA-funded ex-Banderites—started to publish “Litopys UPA” (Chronicle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army), a multi-volume “documentary history” of the Banderite paramilitary force.

During the Cold War, according to Rudling, this project was funded by the CIA, and Potichnyj was one of its directors. Meanwhile, the CIA and its Prolog crew smuggled thousands of pieces of literature to Ukraine, including texts such as “Litopys UPA” that romanticized the long defeated Banderite “liberation movement.”

Some number of far-right Ukrainians in the 1990s were enchanted by the “forbidden history” of Ukrainian nationalism in the twilight of the Soviet Union. It’s unclear how effective the CIA was at reaching Soviet Ukrainians or planting the seeds of a nationalist revival in that period.

In the 21st century, the OUN-B has apparently inherited the Litopys UPA project with help from the Center for Research of the Liberation Movement (TsDVR). Dmytro Shtohryn was among the OUN-B leaders that co-founded this pivotal front group in 2002, not long after the rise of Andriy Haidamakha and the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations. That year, Shtohryn served on the steering committee of CUSUR’s main roundtable event. He did the same for the first one in 2000.

The TsDVR put the Banderites at the front line of the memory war in Ukraine, and CUSUR helped put them on the map in Washington. “Sadovyi” had a hand in the creation of these OUN-B “facade structures,” which were both established at the dawn of the 21st century, when it seems that OUN-B was trying to win over new Western backers.

[...]

Yushchenko posthumously awarded the “Hero of Ukraine” title to Roman Shukhevych, [and Axis] collaborator and major ethnic cleanser. This might have been the ultimate goal of the Banderites when they prioritized the UPA and Shukhevych anniversaries in 2007—to put pressure on the president to follow through with this controversial decision, or to lay the groundwork for him.

[...]

At that year’s 26th (and final) Conference on Ukrainian Subjects, the Ukrainian Jewish poet Moisei Fishbein presented a paper on “The Jewish Card in Russian Special Operations Against Ukraine.” Per Rudling has described Fishbein one of “the most successful popularizers of the nationalists’ narrative, denying the UPA’s anti-Jewish violence.”

Among other things, Fishbein (and the TsDVR) promoted the fraudulent autobiography of a fictitious Jewish woman, I Am Alive Thanks to the UPA. In his 2009 speech at Dmytro Shtohryn’s conference, Fishbein also claimed that Roman Shukhevych and his wife saved a Jewish girl during the Holocaust. His speech became a favorite “scholarly” source for Ukrainian nationalists to cite, such as Volodymyr Viatrovych when he argued that “generally there are many proofs to show that Ukrainian nationalists provided help and shelter to persecuted Jews.”