For a long time now, we have been forced to watch exhausting and fruitless negotiations between the Trump administration and Russian criminals led by Putin.
At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities are trying to secure reliable security guarantees for our country among international partners. And we see how difficult it is. Now, in the real period of the Cold War. Ukraine has been under the occupation of the USSR for a long time. Several waves of independence fighters find themselves in exile abroad, having neither a state nor recognition. They are trying to secure at least some support in the world for the enslaved Ukrainian people. At a time when the so-called Ukrainian SSR became a co-founder of the UN, it, at the behest of the Kremlin, plays the role of a subject of international politics. In short, you definitely cannot envy our ancestors, who fought for our independence with their hands tied at that time. However, one of the bright stories of such a struggle unfairly remains in the shadow of our national memory. We are talking about, perhaps, the most noticeable organisation that Ukrainians created on the global stage during the Cold War – the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations.
Our conversation with Hryhoriy Riy, author of research on the history of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and the new book “Secret Missions of the OUN. International Activities during the Cold War.”
The Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations was founded at the height of World War II: 21-22 November 1943, at the initiative of the leadership of Bandera’s OUN. This took place within the framework of the Secret Conference of the Enslaved Nations of Eastern Europe and Asia. The delegates represented 13 nations. In addition to Ukrainians, there were also Belarusians, Georgians, Armenians, Tatars, Ossetians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Circassians, Kabardians, Chuvashs and Bashkirs. They all spoke under pseudonyms and agreed on a joint struggle against Nazi Germany and the USSR. In essence, it was an attempt to create an international coalition of nations that were held in subjection by the USSR. But only with the beginning of the Cold War did this initiative explode with new force.
Many Ukrainian organisations fought for Ukrainian subjectivity in every way they could. But I would speak of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations as the most legitimate structure on the international stage, because in Ukraine it had connections with the Armed Forces, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which fought until the second half of 1950…
Imagine Munich after World War II. The city still smells of burning, the buildings are half-destroyed, and the streets are filled with thousands of political migrants from all over, including Eastern Europe. It was one of the important centres of post-war Europe, where refugees from the Soviet Union flocked. In Germany, in an atmosphere of uncertainty, Ukrainian nationalists began to think about an organisation that could give a voice to those who had been deprived of their homeland. They sent a group led by Ivan Budkovsky to France, and some groups with similar tasks were sent to England, Belgium, and other European countries. They managed to establish contact with nationalist émigré groups in Poland, Romania, Serbia, Lithuania, and Slovakia.
Thanks to active international work, in April 1946 in Munich, it was possible to hold the first founding congress of the ABN, which united into a single mass the still scattered and even contradictory anti-Bolshevik revolutionary forces of the nations, who alone were not able to successfully oppose reactionary Bolshevism. Thus, during the Cold War, the ABN became the voice of the enslaved nations of the USSR. It clearly advocated the overthrow of the Union and the granting of independence to the nations enslaved by Russia.
Immediately after its creation, representatives of the organisation appealed to the countries participating in the Paris Peace Conference with a demand that the West and new international structures, in particular the UN, put pressure on the USSR and recognise the émigré national movements as the legitimate voices of their occupied peoples.
Western caution towards Russia is not new, but a long tradition. That is why the ABN was refused recognition, although foreign intelligence services, for example, US intelligence, continued to cooperate with the Ukrainian underground to obtain information from behind the Iron Curtain. The Ukrainians, in turn, counted on a third world war, during which it would be possible to make the most of this cooperation to restore Ukraine’s independence.
Yaroslav Stetsko, as the head of the ABN, was in regular contact with Lord John Stewart of the Scottish League for the Freedom of Europe. In 1948, he managed to open ABN offices in Edinburgh, Manchester, and Wolverhampton, headed by the UNR diplomat of the time, Jan Tokazhevsky Karashevych. Thus, the most powerful ABN cell outside West Germany emerged.
Against the backdrop of the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, Khrushchev’s construction of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent escalation between the USA and the USSR, the ABN members decided that if it was not possible to achieve official recognition of the exiled representation of the enslaved nations through international structures, then it remained to publicly demonstrate to the world that behind the Iron Curtain of the USSR there were nations who had not come to terms with lack of freedom…
The first demonstration of the ABN in Munich gathered up to ten thousand participants. This demonstration began quite calmly. Several hours of speeches, demands to hear those whom the empire did not want to listen to. But when the participants set off for the former headquarters of the Soviet mission, they were stopped by the Munich police, followed by the American military. They used tear gas against the protesters, and in response, the participants of the rally threw paving stones at the security forces. It seems that it is in our blood. For about an hour, the city lived in this semi-chaotic struggle. The Americans saw for the first time that a real, politically organised movement was growing under their noses. Thus, the ABN first loudly declared itself.
For example, the conference in Mexico City in 1972 became resonant. It took place immediately after Richard Nixon visited Beijing and Moscow, which indicated a warming between the USA and the USSR and the USA and China. Despite the atmosphere of disappointment, the conference participants once again declared the need to counteract Chinese and Russian imperialism. The ABN delegation, led by Stetsko, was the largest, and his tough position irritated the Americans and the British. Why? Because this is how Stetsko began his speech: “The balance of power between nuclear and technological powers does not guarantee a just and lasting peace, because it preserves the current state of Russian domination and communist oppression, ignoring the main power, dozens of enslaved nations and hundreds of millions of enslaved people.”
In the darkest times for the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations and Ukrainians in exile, when in the 70s and 80s the USA and the USSR established relations, and Brezhnev signed the Helsinki Final Act as a reconciliation, the Ukrainian emigration made the most of the smallest window of opportunity to shake up the evil empire…
ABN activists widely covered the persecution of dissidents and fought for their release from concentration camps and mental hospitals. For example, it was thanks to the efforts of ABN that dissident Valentyn Moroz was released from Soviet concentration camps, who, for a long time, was a symbol of political persecution of Ukrainians by the Kremlin on the international stage. ABN’s participation in the Week of Enslaved Nations also brought informational success. This event, although symbolic, was still part of official US policy. One of the initiators of the creation of the resolution on the Week of Enslaved Nations was Ukrainian Lev Dobryansky. Ukrainians very actively participated in the event every year during the Cold War, as did, for example, US President Ronald Reagan, since he was an opponent of the policy of warming relations between the US and the totalitarian USSR.
In July 1983, when representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations were invited to Reagan’s speech, the US president shook hands with Yaroslav Stetsko after his speech. During the Enslaved Nations Week, the fortieth anniversary of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations was also celebrated. This means that at that time, the United States showed some interest in the activities of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. At least, they could not ignore their influence in the environment of emigration from Eastern Europe.
The USSR regularly tried to reduce the influence of the ABN and discredit Yaroslav Stetsko himself. The USSR security agencies took steps to put an end to any support for Ukrainians abroad, to divide them there…
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after numerous unsuccessful demands by the USSR to Western governments to extradite leaders of the Ukrainian liberation movement, the Soviets unsuccessfully attempted to kidnap Yaroslav Stetsko. At the same time, the Kremlin conducted a systematic information campaign to discredit him. The KGB created leaflets in which it incited Jews against him, claiming that he was a Nazi collaborator and had participated in the Jewish pogrom in the summer of 1941 in Lviv.
By the way, about the Jews. Yaroslav Stetsko corresponded for a long time with Gaviv Shiber, the leader of the Anti-Communist League of Israel. In their letters, they discussed the creation of a world anti-communist organisation. Their views on Russian imperialism were different. Shiber believed that the Russians suffered primarily from Bolshevism. Stetsko considered the main problem to be the imperial policy of Moscow and the Russian people. Despite this, both agreed: the communist USSR must disappear. In October 1958, they met for the first time at an anti-communist congress in Guatemala.
What about the “good Russian” emigrants at that time?
Everything is stable here. Russians in exile did not allow the USSR to disintegrate into nation-states and continued, as they do today, the fable about the federalisation of Russia. Alexander Kerensky then played the role of Yulia Navalny. They believed that Russia could be rebuilt into a federal state, where Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and all other nations would be united.
We are currently lacking some kind of strategic vision in the confrontation with Russia. That is, what we are striving for as the ultimate goal. This was exactly what was happening in the Ukrainian emigration, at least in the Anti-Bishov Bloc of Nations. From the moment it appeared abroad until 1991, there was only one strategic goal – the collapse of the Soviet Union on a national basis. In principle, that is what happened. This strategic goal was achieved.
Darka Hirna,
“Face of Independence” spoke
