Was the OUN a Fascist Movement? A Historian's Honest Answer

The question Russia keeps imposing

“Can the OUN — Melnyk’s faction or Bandera’s — be classed among fascist organizations?” This question, Zaitsev notes, is constantly imposed by the Russian side, because for Kremlin propaganda “Bandera” is a universal label. His answer is measured: “you can, but you shouldn’t.”^[1]

Why “you can”? Because the OUN did indeed have certain fascist features and was influenced by fascism — the historian does not whitewash this. Why “you shouldn’t”? Because classing the OUN as fascist erases a fundamental distinction: unlike fascist parties in power (the Italian one, the Nazi one, Romania’s Legionary movement), the OUN was first and foremost a national-liberation organization. That is why the more accurate term is “proto-fascist”: a movement that had some features of fascism and could potentially have become full-fledged fascism — but only under different circumstances^[1].

Fascism, Nazism, nationalism: three different things

The very label “Banderite-Nazi” works only because it conflates three concepts that in fact are not equivalent to one another. This is spelled out separately by historian Ihor Shchupak (director of the Tkuma Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies) in a webinar with the channel’s author: most Russians do not distinguish Nazism from nationalism at all — for them these are “the same thing”^[14].

All three are worth untangling. Fascism is a fuzzy concept: historians have no single definition, and it is stretched to cover Mussolini’s Italian fascism, Spanish Francoism, and German Nazism alike. But Italian fascism built a corporative state and lacked the extreme racial antisemitism of Nazism — for a time, there were even Jews among the activists of the fascist party^[15]. Nazism is narrower and more specific: a far-right current based on a biological pseudo-racial theory (a hierarchy of races, with “Aryans” above all) plus anticommunism and antisemitism, carried into the practice of state-building in 1933–1945^[16]. Nationalism, meanwhile, is an altogether different category: historians count more than 15 of its varieties, and the core idea of political nationalism is achieving one’s own state; it is characteristic of subjugated peoples and can be either left-wing or right-wing. Without such constructive nationalism, no nation-state would have come into being — not India, not Bangladesh, not Ukraine. Its opposite is chauvinism (asserting the dominance of one’s own ethnic group at the expense of others) and its imperial variety — great-power chauvinism, which Shchupak sees in both the Russian Empire and present-day Russia^[17].

This shows why the Kremlin’s equation is false at every step: the OUN is nationalism (a movement for the statehood of a subjugated people), not Nazism (racial theory + the Holocaust); and to project “Nazism” onto Ukrainians from a state that itself lives by great-power chauvinism is a substitution of concepts. None of this removes the questions surrounding the OUN’s proto-fascist features or participation in violence (see below), but it separates the real history from the label.

1941: the fork in the road that never happened

Such a chance did exist — in the event of achieving its own state. In 1941 the OUN(b) proclaimed the restoration of Ukraine’s independence. But Hitler did not recognize this independence — and thereby crossed out the possible fascist path. From that moment the OUN’s struggle began, including against fascism: it abandoned its orientation toward fascist states^[2].

From 1943–1944 (the Third Grand Assembly of the OUN, the platform of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council) the movement began to evolve toward democratic nationalism, abandoning the integral nationalism of the 1930s. Even Bandera, in his last articles before his murder, used the concepts of democracy and tolerance — though whether this was sincere conviction or political expediency in life in the West, Zaitsev leaves an open question^[3].

”Hitler’s ally”: what actually lies behind the label

The Kremlin cliché “Bandera = Hitler’s ally” rests on several real facts which, if not muddled together, paint a more complex picture — and which do not soften the crimes (more on those below), but only state precisely who was where.

Bandera did not enter Lviv and was not even in Ukraine during the war. In 1941 his deputies and two battalions of Ukrainian nationalists marched in with the Wehrmacht, while Bandera himself was at that time in Kraków^[6]. Subsequently, from 1941 to 1944, he was held in the German concentration camp of Sachsenhausen — where the Nazis themselves had thrown him (more on this below)^[12].

The “Nachtigall” and “Roland” battalions were not “SS.” These were two special battalions formed in 1941 within the “Brandenburg-800” regiment — a unit of the military intelligence (Abwehr) of Nazi Germany, not the Waffen-SS^[7]. The Abwehr was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris — a Baltic German born in the Russian Empire; unlike Hitler, with his racial dogma about “Slavic Untermenschen,” Canaris reckoned not to enslave but to break up the USSR and create buffer states allied with Germany — a plan Hitler did not share^[8]. A common Russian confusion conflates these 1941 battalions with the Waffen-SS “Galicia” division — which was created only in 1943 and was an entirely different formation^[11]. The distinction is significant: the OUN’s “proto-fascist” features are not membership in the SS.

The Act of June 30, 1941, had several editions. In the version proclaimed from a balcony on Lviv’s Rynok Square, the end did indeed mention “hope in Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany”; in the draft versions this phrase was absent^[9]. In any case, Hitler did not recognize the independence: the Germans arrested Bandera and the head of the proclaimed government, Yaroslav Stetsko, and the battalions themselves were disbanded after Bandera’s arrest^[10].

None of these facts “whitewash” the OUN — and precisely for that reason they are compatible with the honest framing of the next section. They only show that the label “Hitler’s ally” conceals a real collision: a movement that hoped to use Germany for its own state very quickly found itself in conflict with it — while the participation of some nationalists in the Holocaust does not cancel out that conflict.

An honest reckoning with the past

The hardest part — and it is precisely here that Zaitsev shows what an honest, rather than apologetic, position looks like. The work of the Canadian historian John-Paul Himka on the participation of the OUN and UPA in the Holocaust is, in Zaitsev’s words, a serious challenge to “Ukrainian historians who deny the participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the extermination of Jews.” Himka, he stresses, does not “work for Russia” — on the contrary, he condemns Russian aggression; his charge is that an uncritical cult of the OUN-UPA harms Ukrainian statehood itself^[4].

Zaitsev’s conclusion is blunt: there is no denying that many Ukrainian nationalists took part in violence against the Jewish population — in the militia created by the OUN, in the German auxiliary police infiltrated by the OUN, and on their own initiative^[4]. As for the OUN leadership, he cautiously suggests rather indifference: Jews were not regarded as part of the Ukrainian political nation. And as for Volhynia: Bandera, imprisoned at the time in Sachsenhausen, was hardly aware of the events in real time — but “afterward he did not condemn them, and that too must be acknowledged”^[5].

The Volhynia tragedy itself is also part of this honest reckoning, not an exception to it. In the summer of 1943, in Volhynia, the UPA carried out an ethnic cleansing of the Polish civilian population: coordinated attacks on Polish villages (culminating in the “Bloody Sunday” of July 11, 1943) that spared neither women nor children. Estimates of Polish casualties in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia vary: Polish historiography mostly cites 50,000–100,000 dead; historians such as Timothy Snyder, around 40,000–60,000 in Volhynia and another ~25,000 in Galicia; Ukrainian estimates are lower. The cleansings were mutual, but deeply asymmetrical: in response the Polish underground also killed Ukrainian civilians, but on an order of magnitude smaller scale. This is a war crime that an honest history names rather than conceals^[13]. The classification of the event remains a matter of scholarly debate (Poland defines it as genocide, most Ukrainian and Western historians as ethnic cleansing/tragedy), but the very fact of the mass killing of Polish civilians is denied by no specialist. Russia actively speculates on Volhynia, setting Poles and Ukrainians against each other — yet this speculation gives no grounds either to deny or to justify the crime.

What this means

The truth here is uncomfortable for both oversimplifications. The Russian cliché “Ukrainians = Banderites = Nazis” is a lie: integral nationalism does not equal Nazism, and the OUN was a national-liberation movement that evolved toward democracy. But the apologetic denial of crimes is also a falsehood, one that honest Ukrainian historians like Zaitsev reject. The strength of Zaitsev’s position lies precisely in the fact that it is not afraid of complexity: to acknowledge both the proto-fascist features and the participation in violence, both the national-liberation essence and the turn toward democracy. Russian propaganda, by contrast, feeds on exactly this — discarding complexity in favor of a label.