Denationalizing Treachery: The Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Late Soviet Discourse, 1945–85

Abstract

The time and place of the postwar struggle of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) against the Soviet regime in West Ukraine contradicted two foundational myths of late Soviet society: (1) the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and (2) the myth of the Friendship of the Peoples. This article examines how Soviet-Russian mass media dealt with these contradictions in the decades leading up to perestroika. The Soviet state attempted to excise the OUN/UPA’s postwar activities from collective memory through omission until the late 1970s, when it launched a propaganda campaign to expose and demonize the OUN/UPA. The new political circumstances of the “Second Cold War” account for the timing of this campaign, but the well-worn language and arguments it employed reflected the stagnation of the Party’s postwar ideology, which posited the unity and incorruptibility of the “new historical community of the Soviet people,” and accordingly denationalized the OUN/UPA’s “treachery.”