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Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944 Author(s): Jared McBride Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 3 (FALL 2016), pp. 630-654 Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.75.3.0630 Accessed: 27-10-2016 17:18 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5612/slavicreview.75.3.0630?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review This content downloaded from 128.97.27.20 on Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:18:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944 Jared McBride On a September aft ernoon in 1943, Artem Bubela, a former auxiliary police- man from the village of Krymne in the north-west region of Volyn’ oblast in Ukraine, was walking along the outskirts of the village when he encountered an acquaintance, another Krymne resident, Vasilii Sikorskii.1 Some thirty years later, Bubela recounted this meeting to Soviet prosecutors: On the outskirts of Krymne I saw . Vasilii Sikorskii, who had served in a [Ukrainian Insurgent Army] (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia, UPA) band. He was dressed in a new suit and new coat. He was carrying two big suitcases and was armed with a rifl e. I said hello and asked him what he was carry- ing. He said he was returning from the forest, and he was carrying stolen goods from the Polish population. He then told me that the bandity [bandits, UPA], along with him and other residents of Krymne, had destroyed a num- ber of Polish villages. He told me the UPA bandity had encircled the Polish villages, stabbed and shot the population, and then set their homes on fi re. The Krymne residents who had been told to appear in the woods with saws and axes helped the bandits rob the population and steal their livestock. He then told me that UPA bandity killed the entire population: small children, the elderly, men and women.2 While Bubela’s account provides an overview of his conversation with Sikorskii, it is stripped of emotional content. How did Bubela react to Sikor- skii’s news of mass murder? Did he disapprove of Sikorskii’s actions? Did he congratulate Sikorskii on his good luck? Or was Bubela disappointed that he missed out on the spoils? Bubela had escaped his police service and refused to join the UPA months prior. However, the UPA had recruited Bubela again for this operation, and this time he alleged that he hurt his leg and could not participate. To the Soviet prosecutors, Bubela explained that he was scared of the banderivtsy (slang for the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera-wing [OUN-B] and UPA) and wanted nothing to do with them.3 Anyone familiar with these men’s biographies might wonder if Bubela Research support for this article was provided by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Founda- tion and the United States Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Program. The author would like to thank Jeff rey Burds, J. Arch Getty, Gail Kligman, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, David Sabean, and the participants of the Georgetown workshop. Special thanks to Tarik Cyril Amar, Michael David-Fox, and Aliza Luft for their help. The author also thanks the editor, Harriet L. Murav, and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback. 1. Ukrainians whose names have been Russifi ed in archival documents are left in the form in which I found them. 2. Haluzevyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy (HDA SBU), spr.67454, tom 4, ark.188. 3. Despite great eff orts by the KGB to place Bubela at the crime scene, no incriminat- ing evidence was found. Slavic Review 75, no. 3 (Fall 2016) This content downloaded from 128.97.27.20 on Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:18:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SS7125.indb7125.indb 663030 110/20/160/20/16 88:26:45:26:45 AAMM The OUN-UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944 631 and Sikorskii had, during this encounter, spoken of their violent pasts. Sikor- skii had not served in any police forces, and this operation was perhaps his introduction to participation in mass violence. In it, not only did Sikorskii witness the brutal murder of one thousand people, but he had hacked at least two Polish people to death with his own household ax. Sikorskii surely would have known Bubela was no stranger to such violence given that Bubela had served in the Krymne police for two years before his escape. In a small village like Krymne, everyone knew one another. Sikorskii would have known that Bubela was among the Ukrainian police who accompanied the Krymne Jew- ish population on their journey from the town center to their deaths outside of Krymne in September 1942—not far from where the two men met.4 This fall 1943 meeting of the policeman and the perpetrator in Krymne, a forgotten Ukrainian hamlet on the border with Belarus, spoke in many ways to the local violence that engulfed this region during the Nazi occupation of 1941 to 1944. Before the war, these two peasants had never left this raion. In the span of two and a half years, they had participated in the murder of over 2,000 people, the majority of whom were once their neighbors. In the fall of 1943, when these two men met on the outskirts of their village, the occupation was 28 months old. There were virtually no Jews left in Volhynia, and now the Poles’ days were numbered, too. This article discusses the ethnic cleansing campaign against Volhynian Poles in which Sikorskii participated. Importantly, I refer to this case specifi cally as one of “ethnic cleansing” fi rst, because that is the defi nition that its organiz- ers used, and second, because of scholarly consensus that this was a case of ethnic cleansing as opposed to genocide (notably, scholarly consensus of what constitutes genocide is much less clear).5 For example, one OUN-UPA leader, Mykola Lebed, declared that the organization’s intention was to “cleanse the entire revolutionary territory of the Polish population.”6 Similarly, in its use of the term “cleansing,” the OUN-UPA leadership, including Lebed, referred specifi cally to the use of mass violence, including killing but also forced ex- 4. Bubela’s daughter claimed he was not at the mass shooting of Jews, but was “at home sick”—a common excuse used by local policemen during criminal investiga- tions. Interview with Ekaterina Gul΄ conducted by the author, Krymne, Ukraine, Novem- ber 26, 2011. 5. Among the works using this term for the events in Volhynia of 1943–1944, see in particular the work of Timothy Snyder, who uses “ethnic cleansing” for “violent policies aiming to clear territories of national enemies, though not to kill every man, woman and child.” Timothy Snyder, “The Causes of Ukrainian-Polish Ethnic Cleansing 1943,” Past & Present, 179, no. 1 (May 2003), 197. Similarly, Norman Naimark, in Fires of Hatred de- scribes the “intention of ethnic cleansing” as to “remove a people and oft en all traces of them from a concrete territory.” Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Harvard, 2001), 3. For a brief review of the academic debate over the term “genocide,” see Scott Straus, “Contested Meanings and Confl icting Impera- tives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 3, no.3 (Novem- ber 2001), 349–75. 6. Petro Balei, Fronda Stepana Bandery v OUN 1940 roku: Prychyny i naslidky (Kyiv, 1996), 141. This content downloaded from 128.97.27.20 on Thu, 27 Oct 2016 17:18:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SS7125.indb7125.indb 663131 110/20/160/20/16 88:26:45:26:45 AAMM 632 Slavic Review pulsion, to ensure that there would be no Poles left in Volhynia by the end of German occupation.7 Thus, whether Poles left on their own accord as a result of nationalist violence or they died at the hands of the OUN-UPA, the goal remained the same for Ukrainian nationalists: to create a “nationally pure space” in western Ukraine through cleansing policies.8 This, as many schol- ars on the subject have noted, distinguishes the case from one of genocide as the OUN-UPA did not intend to kill every Pole as a goal in and of itself—they only wanted to cleanse the territory of them. Ethnic cleansing led by the OUN-UPA resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Volhynian Poles in 1943 and forced thousands of others to fl ee Volhynia. The subject is well-traversed in Ukrainian and Polish historiog- raphies, and still carries potent political currency in relations between Po- land and Ukraine partly due to its importance to the Polish Kresy community (Poles from Second Republic of Poland’s eastern territories who now live in Poland).9 Yet despite being one of the most violent ethnic cleansing episodes in 20th-century Europe, the Diaspora-dominated Ukrainian academic com- munity in North America has overlooked this history in English-language lit- erature, while others who write more generally about violence in twentieth century Europe have not attended to the episode in detail.10 Additionally, in some academic circles in Ukraine and North America, there is still debate as to whether there was a campaign to cleanse Poles from the region at all.

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