Episode 27: Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, Fascism, Genocide, and Cult with Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

Reimagining Soviet Georgia

In terms of post-Soviet memory politics, arguably no figure is more controversial than interwar Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. Since the Maidan uprising in 2014, his memory along with that of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists have been mobilized by both far right nationalists and the Ukrainian state - to varying degrees of success - to create a counter-memory to that of both the Soviet past and the current memory regime of the Russian Federation. This process has had a dual effect - simultaneously emboldening a nationalist memory politics through the sanitization and deification of World War II era nazi collaborators like Bandera, but also encouraged the nationalist-revanchist memory regime of the Russian Federation and it's pointed demonization of Ukrainian nationalism and Bandera specifically. This dynamic has shrouded the actual historical record of Bandera and Ukrainian nationalism in not only misconceptions , but given the political context has dis-encouraged critical engagement with the History itself. For this reason we welcome historian Grzegorz Rossolinksi Liebe on to Reimagining Soviet Georgia, author of the excellent Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist, Fascism, Genocide, and Cult to discuss Bandera, Ukrainian interrwar nationalism and memory politics in service of clarifying the history on its own terms. Book description below: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist is the first comprehensive and scholarly biography of the Ukrainian far-right leader Stepan Bandera and the first in-depth study of his political cult. In this fascinating book, Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe illuminates the life of a mythologized personality and scrutinizes the history of the most violent twentieth-century Ukrainian nationalist movement: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army.Elucidating the circumstances in which Bandera and his movement emerged and functioned, Rossolinski-Liebe explains how fascism and racism impacted on Ukrainian revolutionary and genocidal nationalism. The book shows why Bandera and his followers failed—despite their ideological similarity to the Croatian Ustaša and the Slovak Hlinka Party—to establish a collaborationist state under the auspices of Nazi Germany and examines the involvement of the Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust and other atrocities during and after the Second World War. The author brings to light some of the darkest elements of modern Ukrainian history and demonstrates its complexity, paying special attention to the Soviet terror in Ukraine and the entanglement between Ukrainian, Jewish, Polish, Russian, German, and Soviet history. The monograph also charts the creation and growth of the Bandera cult before the Second World War, its vivid revivals during the Cold War among the Ukrainian diaspora, and in Bandera's native eastern Galicia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.