"real" biography of Stepan Bandera. Stepan Bandera - organizer and symbol of the Ukrainian national liberation movement

05/02/2010

The fading President Yushchenko finally awarded Stepan Bandera the title of Hero of Ukraine. According to VTsIOM, 37% of Russians consider Bandera a terrorist and a murderer. According to my feelings, 95% of Russians do not know anything about him. Studying the biography of Bandera, you experience deja vu. Something painfully familiar in the story. Then you understand: this is a classic biography of some fiery Leninist revolutionary. Yes, even if Iron Felix. I was stuffed with such biographies in school.

In the summer of 2007, my wife and I took a trip to the city of Lvov. We were returning home from the Crimea, and decided to pass through Lvov, and further, to Brest, Minsk...

It is interesting to see - what kind of Western Ukraine is this?

Beyond Ternopil, on dense grass and big trees villages are scattered on the slopes, solid, prosperous. Every village has an obligatory church, or even two. On the slopes there are herds of cows, sheep, very large herds. On one slope they saw a cemetery: a chapel and long neat rows of low white stone crosses. Stopped. I decided that this was a burial place from the First World War, it turned out that soldiers of the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, from the division "Galicia" were buried here, who died in the battle near Brody already in the Second World War ...
History ... our history says different things about the participants in these events: traitors, Bandera, nationalists ... Here, among these graves, you understand something else: these people, no matter how you treat them, fought for the freedom of Ukraine. Freedom, as they understood it ... My mother's brother, my uncle Grigory, a tank driver, died near the city of Stanislav, now Ivano-Frankivsk, perhaps in battles with these very "Bandera", but my hand does not rise they have a stone in them. They fought for Ukraine, and in this war they gave the most precious thing - their lives. "The fighters are sleeping, they said their own, and they are right forever!"

Stepan Bandera... This person has been slandered in history, like Symon Petliura - vilely, unfairly and undeservedly. Bandera is always spoken of with the prefix "traitor", although he never betrayed anyone. Opposed to Soviet power? Yes, he performed! But he did not swear allegiance to her, she was as alien to him as to anyone. Soviet man those years the German fascist. Once, the author of these lines argued with a Kyiv editor, and when asked who Bandera betrayed, the opponent, not in the least embarrassed, said: he betrayed Melnik. (Melnik is one of the leaders of the OUN.) Even such an insignificant episode was adopted by the falsifiers of history!

Some authors put Stepan Bandera on the same level with such an odious person as General Vlasov. But Vlasov, we note, was favored by the Soviet government, had considerable privileges, and most importantly, he swore allegiance to this authority. Nevertheless, when a threat to his life was created, he easily broke his oath and went over to the side of the enemy. In the Novgorod forests, when his army was surrounded, and the starving soldiers ate the bark of trees and fought for a piece of fallen horse meat - they kept a cow at the headquarters for Vlasov so that his Soviet lordship could eat milk and eat meatballs. This fact from the TV show about Vlasov, I did not remember the names, did not write down, did not take screenshots. Believe the reader, so believe, no - so no.

Stepan Bandera was sentenced to death by a Polish court, spent many days on death row, but did not bow to the enemy. What happened to him to experience "with a noose around his neck", what psychological and mental anguish to go through - only God knows. He did not make a hero out of himself, he was not proud of his prison past, he did not boast of suffering, and he was meanly killed from around the corner by the Russian executioner from the NKVD, Stashinsky. Bandera was a real, unbending fighter for the independence of Ukraine. Suffice it to say that the OUN and UPA armed formations he led fought against the Polish oppressors, against the Nazis, and against the Red Army. The valiant army of General Vlasov, we note between the lines, never came out against the Wehrmacht. Today, by the way, those Ukrainians who have experienced merciless, truly bestial, inhuman cruelty are still alive. Soviet army and especially the troops of the NKVD in the western regions of Ukraine. The Red Riders used truly savage methods in the fight against the Ukrainian insurgent movement: detachments of thugs from the NKVD dressed in the uniform of UPA fighters and committed atrocities in Western Ukraine. Which then Soviet propaganda attributed to the "Bandera" It is not surprising that the struggle against the invaders continued until the mid-fifties. The occupiers were all those who came without an invitation to these lands: Poles, Germans, and Russians. Alas, it is! And why was this people and its heroes so defamed? Just because they wanted to live on their own land according to their own laws?.. “In your own house, you have your own truth!” said the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko a hundred years before these events.

Stepan Bandera, like Petlyura, is accused of anti-Semitism - and there is no worse crime in the world. Was Bandera an anti-Semite?

“One of the heaviest accusations against Bandera is connected with the so-called massacre in Lvov. It happened in the same 1941 on June 30, when Bandera proclaimed the restoration of the Ukrainian state. Information about this event is conflicting. The number of victims is estimated from 3 to 10 thousand. The vast majority of them were Jews, as well as communists. “Exactly the same thing happened there as in the Baltic and in the eastern part of Poland, which the Red Army occupied in September 1939. Now in Poland they often try to forget this, but in the early days of the German occupation, Poles joined the police in large numbers. The reason was the impression left by almost two years of Soviet occupation,” says historian Jekabsons. It is difficult to say to what extent the massacre was the Ukrainians' own initiative, and to what extent it was a German-inspired event. It must be remembered that the week before the KGB killed 4,000 political prisoners in Lvov, mainly Ukrainian nationalists. When the corpses of the victims were exhumed, the picture was similar to the one that was in the courtyard of the Riga Central Prison in the July days of 1941. In addition, the Germans spread rumors that it was the “Jewish Bolsheviks” who committed the atrocities against the prisoners. This provoked loved ones to a thirst for revenge. The consequences were Jewish pogroms. Obviously, the OUN also took part in them. However, anti-Semitism, which is sometimes mentioned, was not the basis of the ideology of the OUN and UPA. And Bandera himself did not directly take part in the Lviv massacre, and there is no information that he gave any orders there. “If in some way he was guilty of the Lviv events, it was only because he propagated Ukrainian national ideas, to a certain extent setting people up to take revenge,” explains Jekabsons. There is no unanimity among historians in assessing the attitude of Bandera towards Jews. But the fact is that Jews later fought in the ranks of the UPA both as fighters, and as commanders, and especially as medical personnel. It is noteworthy that in the early 1950s, when Israel and the Zionists were declared enemies of the USSR, Soviet propaganda broadcast that the UPA and the Zionists were going hand in hand.”

Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Ugryniv Stary in Galicia (modern Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine), which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the family of a priest. In 1919 Stepan Bandera entered the gymnasium in the town of Stry not far from Lvov. In 1920, Poland occupied Western Ukraine, and the training took place under the supervision of the Polish authorities. In 1922, Bandera became a member of the Union of Nationalist Youth of Ukraine, and in 1928 he entered the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School with a degree in agronomy.

The situation in western Ukraine was aggravated by repression and terror by the Polish authorities, caused by the disobedience of the Ukrainian population of Galicia and other regions. Thousands of Ukrainians were thrown into prisons and a concentration camp in the Kartuz region (the village of Bereza). In the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), founded by Yevgeny Konovalts back in 1920, Stepan Bandera, who was deeply indignant at the actions of pan Poland, could not fail to notice, and since 1929 he has been leading the radical wing of the OUN youth organization. In the early 1930s, Bandera became deputy head of the regional leadership of the OUN. Attacks on mail trains, expropriations and robberies of post offices and banks, murders of political opponents and enemies are associated with his name. national movement Ukraine.

For organizing, preparing, attempting and liquidating the Minister of the Interior of Poland, Bronislaw Peratsky, he, along with other organizers of the terrorist attack, was sentenced to capital punishment in the Warsaw trial in 1936. However the death penalty subsequently commuted to life imprisonment.

Bandera was imprisoned until the beginning of World War II, when Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 13, 1939, thanks to the retreat of the Polish army and the flight of the prison guards, he was released and sent first to Lvov, which by that time was already occupied by Soviet troops, and then, illegally crossing the Soviet-German border, to Krakow, Vienna and Rome to coordinate further plans for the OUN. But during the negotiations between Bandera and Melnik, serious disagreements arose.

Bandera forms armed groups from his supporters and on June 30, 1941, at a rally of many thousands in Lvov, he proclaims an act of independence for Ukraine. Bandera's closest associate, Yaroslav Stetsko, becomes the head of the government of the newly created national Ukrainian cabinet of ministers.

Following this, in early July, in the zone of Soviet occupation, the NKVD shot Stepan's father Andrei Bandera. Almost all of Bandera's close relatives were transferred to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

However, the reaction from the fascist authorities followed immediately - already in early July, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Berlin, where they were asked to publicly abandon the ideas of a national Ukrainian state and annul the act of independence of Ukraine of June 30.

In the autumn of 1941, the Melnykites also tried to proclaim Ukraine independent, but they were followed by the same fate as the Banderaites. Most of their leaders were shot by the Gestapo in early 1942.

The atrocities of the fascist invaders on the territory of Ukraine led to the fact that all more people went to partisan detachments to fight the enemy. In the fall of 1942, Bandera called for the unification of the disparate armed detachments of the Melnikovites and other partisan associations of Ukraine under the command of Roman Shukhevych, the former head of the OUN battalion "Nakhtigal". On the basis of the OUN, a new paramilitary organization is being formed - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). The national composition of the UPA was quite diverse (the rebels were joined by representatives of the Transcaucasian peoples, Kazakhs, Tatars, etc., who ended up in the territories of Ukraine occupied by the Germans), and the number of the UPA reached, according to various estimates, up to 100 thousand people. A fierce armed struggle took place between the UPA and the fascist invaders, red partisans and units of the Polish Home Army in Galicia, Volyn, Kholmshchyna, Polissya

All this time, from the autumn of 1941 to the middle of the second half of 1944, Stepan Bandera was in the German concentration camp Sachsenhausen

After the expulsion of the German invaders from the territory of Ukraine by Soviet troops in 1944, the struggle of Ukrainian nationalists entered a new phase - the war against the Soviet Army, which lasted until the mid-1950s.
On October 15, 1959, Stepan Andreyevich Bandera was shot dead in the entrance of his own house by KGB agent Bogdan Stashinsky.

Our time reveals many secrets, many yesterday's heroes become demons, and vice versa: recent enemies become the pride and conscience of the nation, the heroes of Russia. Like, for example, Emperor Nicholas the Bloody, it is not clear for what merits he became a saint overnight, or General Denikin, whose hands are up to the elbows in the blood of the Russian people, or Kolchak, a traitor, a traitor recruited by the British General Staff. And only Simon Petlyura and Stepan Bandera, defamed by "historians", slandered by history, remained implacable enemies for Russia. Because they are Ukrainians, and for a Russian there is no more irreconcilable enemy than a Ukrainian, whom they hypocritically call a brother.

This is especially evident today, in the light of the aggression unleashed by the Russian "brothers" in eastern regions Ukraine.

November 2014

Bandera or Banderists are people who share the ideas of killing people of other nationalities than Ukrainians. The group got its name in honor of the founder of the movement, Stepan Bandera.

As often happens, the name has become a household name, and today everyone who shares such views to one degree or another is called Bandera.

The movement originated back in 1927, when Stepan was finishing high school. The main idea of ​​organizing a resistance group was based on the opinion that only pure Ukrainians can live in Ukraine.

Other nationalities, people of mixed blood must be expelled. Unfortunately, Bandera recognized death as the only possible way of exile.

Stepan Bandera was born on January 1, 1909 in the family of a priest, was a scout and wanted to become an agronomist. After graduating from high school, he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under the leadership of Konovalets.

And this is where the fun begins. According to historical notes, Stepan Bandera did not share the views of the OUN leader, and was guided by more radical views.

At that point in time, the territory of present-day Ukraine was under the rule of Poland. The ideas of liberating their native country from the invaders found support among the students of the gymnasium even after the release of Bandera. Many residents were against the Poles' invasion and the impending German threat.

One of the leaders of the OUN, Melnik, held similar views, but planned to conclude a peace agreement with Hitler. Actually, on the basis of these contradictions, Bandera managed to gather a large army of followers.

Murder and prison

Bandera is considered responsible for the murder of a number of prominent political figures. His associates organized the assassination of the Polish school curator Gadomsky, the secretary of the Soviet consulate Maylov and the Minister of the Interior of Poland Peratsky.

In parallel, there were murders of Polish and Ukrainian citizens. Anyone who was suspected of having links with a foreign government was doomed to a brutal death.

In 1934, Bandera was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, thanks to a lucky coincidence (the invasion of German and Soviet troops), after five years the prison holidays ended.

Full of strength and desire to act, Bandera again gathered like-minded people around him. Now the USSR has been declared the main threat to the well-being of the country.

Against everyone

Bandera assumed that the alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union would not last long. Therefore, a strategy was developed to assert the independence of the Ukrainian state.

It was supposed to offer the German government to conclude an alliance with the Bandera army and legitimize the rights and freedoms of the inhabitants of their native country. Hitler did not consider it necessary to cooperate with Bandera and, under the guise of supposedly peaceful negotiations, took Stepan into custody.

So an ardent supporter of the struggle for the purity of the Ukrainian nation was sent to a concentration camp. Then hard times came for Nazi Germany, Soviet Union started the attack. Hitler decided to release some of the imprisoned nationalists, tried to woo Bandera.

And again, the main condition for support was the desire of the main Banderite to recognize the existence of a separate state of Ukraine. The Germans refused a second time. Bandera stayed in Germany, began life in exile.

At the back of history

After the liberation of the Ukrainian lands, the activities of the OUN began to revive. But Bandera remained out of work, active German propaganda recent years war made a once heroic nationalist a Soviet spy.

Stepan created a foreign branch of the Organization and tried to control the situation in a subtle way. For several years, until the early 1950s, little was known about Bandera's life. Rumor has it that he collaborated with British intelligence, helped to send spies to the Soviet Union.

The last years Bandera lived in Munich and tried to lead normal life. Periodic assassination attempts forced members of the overseas OUN to provide their leader with bodyguards. But the guards could not prevent the murder of a nationalist - on October 15, 1959, Stepan Bandera was killed with a pistol with potassium cyanide m.

Summing up

Many atrocities and brutal murders are attributed to the Bandera movement. Almost all the ongoing looting, torture and torment are considered guilty of Bandera's followers.

Thousands of innocent civilians and hundreds of invaders. How much truth in these accusations can be decided, perhaps, only by the descendants of the participants in those distant events. Really calculated figures of losses among the Soviet people:

• Soviet military - 8350;
• Ordinary employees and chairmen of committees - 3190;
• Peasants and collective farmers - 16345;
• Workers of other professions, children, housewives, old people - 2791 .

It is difficult to calculate how many civilians from other countries died. Someone claims that entire villages were cut out, someone focuses on the troops of the invaders.

As in that well-known proverb - "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" - so Bandera went through the country like a hurricane. Apparently, the ideas of the total cleansing of the Motherland from foreigners have firmly settled in the hearts of people. Will we repeat the mistakes of the past now?

Stepan Andreyevich Bandera is an ideologue of Ukrainian nationalism, one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in 1942, the purpose of which was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. He was born on January 1, 1909 in the village of Stary Ugryniv, Kalush district (now Ivano-Frankivsk region) in the family of a Greek Catholic priest. After the end of the civil war, this part of Ukraine became part of Poland.

In 1922, Stepan Bandera joined the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth. In 1928 he entered the agronomic faculty of the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School, which he never graduated from.

In the summer of 1941, after the arrival of the Nazis, Bandera called on "the Ukrainian people to help the German army everywhere to smash Moscow and Bolshevism."

On the same day, Stepan Bandera, without any agreement with the German command, solemnly proclaimed the restoration of the great Ukrainian state. The "Act of the Revival of the Ukrainian State", an order on the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the creation of a national government was read out.

The proclamation of Ukraine's independence was not part of Germany's plans, so Bandera was arrested, and fifteen leaders of Ukrainian nationalists were shot.

Ukrainian Legion, in the ranks of which, after the arrest political leaders fermentation began, was soon recalled from the front and later performed police functions in the occupied territories.

Stepan Bandera spent a year and a half in prison, after which he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was kept along with other Ukrainian nationalists in privileged conditions. Bandera was allowed to meet with each other, they also received food and money from relatives and the OUN. Often they left the camp in order to contact the "secret" OUN, as well as the Friedental castle (200 meters from the Zelenbau bunker), which housed the OUN's intelligence and sabotage personnel school.

Stepan Bandera was one of the main initiators of the creation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) on October 14, 1942. The goal of the UPA was proclaimed the struggle for the independence of Ukraine. In 1943, an agreement was reached between representatives of the German authorities and the OUN that the UPA would protect railways and bridges from Soviet partisans and support the activities of the German occupation authorities. In return, Germany promised to supply UPA units with weapons and ammunition, and in the event of a victory of the Nazis over the USSR, to allow the creation of a Ukrainian state under the protectorate of Germany. UPA fighters actively participated in the punitive operations of the Nazi troops, destroying, among other things, civilians who sympathized with the Soviet army.

In September 1944, Bandera was released. Until the end of the war, he collaborated with the intelligence department of the Abwehr in the preparation of OUN sabotage groups.

After the war, Bandera continued his activities in the OUN, whose centralized administration was in West Germany. In 1947, at a regular meeting of the OUN, Bandera was appointed its leader and was re-elected to this position twice in 1953 and 1955. He led the terrorist activities of the OUN and UPA on the territory of the USSR. During the Cold War, Ukrainian nationalists were actively used by special services Western countries in the fight against the Soviet Union.

It is alleged that Bandera was poisoned by a KGB agent on October 15, 1959 in Munich. He was buried on October 20, 1959 at the Waldfriedhof cemetery in Munich.

In 1992, for the first time in Ukraine, the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was celebrated, and attempts began to give its participants the status of war veterans. And in 1997-2000, a special government commission was created (with a permanent working group) in order to develop official position in relation to the OUN-UPA. The result of her work was the removal from the OUN of responsibility for cooperation with Nazi Germany and the recognition of the UPA as a "third force" and a national liberation movement that fought for the "genuine" independence of Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko on January 22, 2010 announced the posthumous award to Stepan Bandera.

On January 29, 2010, Yushchenko by his decree recognized the members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

Monuments to the leader of Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera have been erected in Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk regions. Streets in the cities and villages of Western Ukraine are named after him.

The glorification of UPA leader Stepan Bandera is criticized by many veterans of the Great Patriotic War and politicians who accuse Bandera of collaborating with the Nazis. At the same time, part of Ukrainian society, living mainly in the west of the country, considers Bandera and Shukhevych to be national heroes.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources

Vladimir Hanelis, Bat Yam

After the events on the Kiev Maidan, both old and young in different ways - from left to right and right to left - scratch their tongues about the name of Stepan Bandera. Even those who do not speak the language. Often they pronounce - "Bender", "Bendera", apparently taking Stepan Bandera for a native of Bessarabian Bender or a descendant of Ostap Bender.

… The name of the Ukrainian politician, ideologist and theorist of Ukrainian nationalism has become for most of those who eat “noodles” from Russian television plates a “horror story”, “Barmaley”, a kind of bloody cannibal worse than Hitler, Himmler, Stalin and Dzerzhinsky combined.

A few days ago, at some celebration, my table neighbor said that during the war, Bandera himself, together with the Nazis, killed Jews. When I asked how he, sitting in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, could do this, the man pouted in an offended way and turned away ...

An article by BBC correspondent in Moscow Anton Krechetnikov "Four myths about Stepan Bandera" has been published on the Internet. The article is very objective and "cold-blooded". Let me give you a few quotes. In general, hundreds of various books, thousands of magazine and newspaper publications have been published about Stepan Bandera, dozens of documentaries have been shot.

“As for Bandera himself, truth, half-truths and myths are closely intertwined in the idea of ​​him.”

“July 5 (1941 - V.Kh.) Bandera was arrested in Krakow and placed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he spent more than three years in solitary confinement - however, in a special section for "political persons".

“In their propaganda leaflets, the Germans called Bandera an agent of Stalin.”

“September 25, 1944… the German authorities released Bandera, brought him to Berlin and offered cooperation, but he put forward the recognition of the “Rebirth Act” (Ukraine as an independent state – V.Kh.) as an indispensable condition. The agreement was not concluded and until the end of the war, Bandera was in Germany in an indefinite status.

“According to the conclusions of the government commission to study the activities of the OUN and UPA, created in 1997 by order of the President of Ukraine Leonid Kuchma, the murder of Jews, Polish intelligentsia and supporters of the Soviet government in the early days of the occupation of Lviv, known as the “massacre of Lviv professors”, was the work of the SD and a nationalist unorganized mob.”

“The division “Galicia”, formed in April 1943 by the German occupation authorities from local volunteers, had nothing to do with the OUN-UPA. Attempts to bring Bandera and his supporters under the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal regarding the SS are designed for ignorant people.

“According to the “Information on the number of dead Soviet citizens at the hands of OUN bandits for the period 1944-1953.” dated April 17, 1973, signed by the chairman of the KGB of Ukraine Vitaliy Fedorchuk, the number of people killed by Bandera was 30,676 people, including 8,250 military and security officials.

As follows from the closed resolution of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the CPSU “Issues of the Western Regions of the Ukrainian SSR” dated May 26, 1953, during the same time, the authorities killed 153,000 people, sent 134,000 to the Gulag, and deported 203,000. Every third or fourth family suffered. Both sides showed extreme brutality.

Cases have been recorded when OUN members executed prisoners by tying their legs to bent trees and tearing their bodies apart…

... The authorities hanged partisans and underground fighters in the squares and left the corpses in plain sight in order to seize those who would try to bury them.

According to independent historians, Bandera was a radical nationalist by conviction and a terrorist by methods. If he could create and lead Ukrainian state, it certainly would not be liberal and democratic. Bandera is not the figure that should be raised to the shield if Ukraine dreams of a European future.

On the other hand, Stalin or Dzerzhinsky were even more criminals - at least in terms of the number of victims. If some Russians openly praise them and do not meet with rebuff from society and the state, then why not justify Bandera for some part of Ukrainians?”

After such a protracted, but, in my opinion, necessary introduction, I offer the readers of MZ an interview with Stepan Bandera, the grandson of Stepan Bandera. I took it to Kyiv in June 2000. Stepan Bandera Jr. lived in Ukraine at that time, was engaged in journalism (he now lives in Canada).

He is young (30 years old), not tall, well-fed, friendly, open, smiling. Well Educated – Journalist, PR Specialist and civil law. Single, a citizen of Canada, lives in Kyiv... The grandson of a man whose name is pronounced in Ukraine, and not only in Ukraine, with admiration or hatred.

– How does a person with that name live and work in Ukraine?

- Interesting! Not so long ago I was supposed to give a lecture at Donetsk University. I ran along the corridors there - I could not find the right audience in any way. He opened the door of one of the offices, turned to the man sitting there. He asked, “Who are you, what is your last name?” I answered - Stepan Bandera. The man twisted his finger at his temple and said: “And I am Simon Petlyura!” I had to show documents... This man was in shock...

The name helps me to open many doors in Ukraine. When I ask you to tell someone that Stepan Bandera called, there was no case that the person did not call back ...

But sometimes people believe that a grandson must, by inheritance, genetically, have the qualities of a grandfather - a leader, a leader ...

– Have you ever wanted to be a leader, a leader?

- Of course, I wanted to. Everyone wants to be a leader when they are young. I saw the respect with which people treat me, and I considered myself an important person. But with the years comes life experience you begin to understand things a little differently ...

- Where were you born? Who are your parents?

– I was born in 1970 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This is the heart of Canada, like Poltava is the heart of Ukraine. Then my parents moved to Toronto. There, after the murder of my grandfather and the trial of his murderer Stashinsky (1), my grandmother lived. My father, Andrey, worked in Toronto.

- The son of Stepan Bandera?

- Yes. My grandfather had three children. The eldest daughter, Natalya, was born in 1941, my father was born in 1947, and the third child, Lesya, was born in 1949 (2). In 1985, Natalya died, a year earlier, her father died ...

In Ukraine, in Stryi, my grandfather's sisters live - Vladimir and Oksana (3).
They spent many years in Soviet prisons, camps, were exiled to Siberia
and returned home only after the declaration of independence of Ukraine.

- Who was your father, Andrei Bandera?

- He was very interesting person, public figure, journalist, published in Toronto on English language newspaper “Gomin Ukrainy” (“Gomin Ukrainy”). My father used his name, his authority to unite Ukrainians, to awaken national feelings in them.

Did he talk about his father?

- Very little…

- Why?

First, my father was very busy man, traveled a lot, was little at home. Secondly, this is the main thing, he was only twelve years old when Stepan Bandera was killed. But even when the grandfather was alive, the family lived in conditions of strict secrecy. Their communication was limited. My father lived under a false name - Poppel. Under the same surname, he came to Canada. As a child, my father did not know whose son he was ...

- As an adult, you probably read the works of your grandfather, memoirs about him. How do you feel today about his personality, his ideas, his struggles?

- My grandfather is a symbol of his generation, a symbol of his time, a symbol of the struggle for the independence of his country. Such as Nelson Mandela became in South Africa. I regard my grandfather as a representative of a very idealistic, romantic generation of fighters who gave their lives for the freedom of Ukraine.

They fought against Germany and the USSR, a handful of people against giants, against huge war monsters... I respect their idealism, their sacrifice, their idea – no one will come from Washington, Moscow, or Berlin to build an independent Ukrainian state. You need to rely only on your own strength.

- Stepan, but you know very well that for many people the name of your grandfather has become another symbol - a symbol of the cruelty of a bandit who shed a sea of ​​blood ...

- Every totalitarian regime needs the image of a cruel enemy who wants to destroy the state by any means, does not disdain violence and murder. Moscow propaganda created such an image - the image of Bandera, Bandera, Hitler's - the image of a Jew ...

- Since the word “Jew” was mentioned in our conversation, let's talk about this topic. I often read and heard that your grandfather is to blame for the massacres of Ukrainian nationalists against Jews during the war and after it. How do you feel about such statements and what was the attitude towards Jews in your family?

– My grandfather spent most of the war in a German concentration camp. So in the destruction of the Jews, he can not be guilty. You will not find anti-Semitic statements in any of his works, in any of the documents of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Two brothers of my grandfather, Alexander and Vasily, died in Auschwitz (4). Their blood mixed with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews who died there - this is very important to me. At the same time, I do not rule out that various things could and have happened during the war.

My father and mother brought me up in the spirit of tolerance, respect for people of any nationality. There was not even a hint of racism or anti-Semitism in our family. In the camps, in the schools of Ukrainian nationalists, in the USA and Canada, everywhere we were told: there were Jewish medical workers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. This is also written in the Chronicle of the UPA.

But I would like to say something else as well. To our house in Toronto came pretty a famous person, Jew Saul Lipman. He talked, argued with my father. And when my father died, he spoke before the Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes and stated that all Bandera were anti-Semites, that they cut and killed Jews ... I want to say again - I do not exclude anything. Among Bandera, as in all other armies, there were different people. But to say that they all slaughtered and killed Jews is a lie. My mother and I came to Ottawa and protested. A Jew, lawyer Alex Epshtein, helped us a lot in this.

I was very angry with Saul Lipman, but then I realized that you can’t judge the whole nation by the actions of one person.

- Tell me about your mother.

– My mother, Marusya Fedorii, was born in Belgium, in a camp for Ost-Arbeiters. Her father is my grandfather Mykola, lives in Winnipeg, retired. He was born in Western Ukraine, and his grandmother (she died) was born in the territories that now belong to Russia. She is the only one of big family, did not starve to death during collectivization.

Mom works in Toronto, in the Department of Immigrant Affairs. Sisters - Bogdana and Olenka - live in Montreal.

- In addition to you and your sisters, are there any grandchildren and granddaughters of Stepan Bandera?

- Natalya's children live in Munich - Sofia and Orest.

- Why did you come to Ukraine? What are you doing here?

– Moving to Ukraine is a logical step that stems from my upbringing, my worldview, my views on life. Now I work in the Kiev branch of the Canadian investment firm "Romyer". Or rather, so - I have my own company that cooperates with Romier. I try to attract foreign investors to Ukraine.

- It turns out?

- With difficulties. But we are trying to change the image of Ukraine in the eyes of businessmen. And that's all - Chernobyl, corruption ... By the way, my first partners in Ukraine were local, Ukrainian Jews.

Let's go back to the beginning of our conversation. And yet it is strange for me that the grandson of Stepan Bandera is engaged in business in Ukraine, and not politics ...

– I am not only doing business in Ukraine. I'm also a journalist. I have my own column in the Kievskiye Vedomosti newspaper, I often publish in the popular, serious magazine Pik. As for politics... It is very important for me not to discredit the name of my grandfather. Therefore, I am very careful. And I also know that economics makes politics. So what I am doing now is a good contribution to the policy of independent Ukraine. While I'm not going to join any party...

- Stepan, how did your family react to the personality of the murderer of your grandfather - Stashinsky?

- Stashinsky himself, voluntarily surrendered to the Americans, repented ... People close to our family offered to find him and take revenge. Simply put, kill. But the family has always been against it. The paradox is that if Stashinsky himself had not confessed to the Americans in the murder, then everyone would have believed that Stepan Bandera was killed by Ukrainians from other organizations - “Melnyk’s” or someone else, and the whole world would know that he was killed by a KGB agent. I would like to meet with him and talk - to restore the historical truth. But no one knows where Stashinsky is now and whether he is alive at all ... Maybe he also has a grandson ...

- If you, the grandson of Stepan Bandera, met the grandson of Stashinsky, would you give him a hand?

- Well, I don’t know ... I don’t know ... I probably wouldn’t have filed right away when we met ... But I wouldn’t get into a fight either ... I would like to talk to him, understand what kind of person he is ... There are a lot of obscure things in the Stashinsky case. Maybe someday the KGB archive will be opened and we will find out the whole truth.

- We are talking in your office, on Proreznaya Street, and the archives of the KGB (now this department is called the SBU) are nearby, two steps away, on Vladimirskaya. Didn't go there, didn't you recognize?

– I was told that these archives are now in Moscow. It is very important for me that the Ukrainian state recognizes the OUN-UPA as a belligerent during World War II. So that the surviving old people be recognized as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.

- How do members of Stepan Bandera's family feel about the proposal to transfer his ashes from Munich to Kyiv?

- In different ways ... I think it’s cold for grandfather to lie in German soil ...

Notes:
1) Stashinsky Bogdan (1931) - KGB agent, killer of Ukrainian nationalist leaders Lev Rebet (1957) and Stepan Bandera (1959). On August 12, 1961, together with his wife, he defected to West Berlin and confessed to the crimes. Sentenced to eight years in prison. After the release, the fate and place of residence are not known.
2) According to reference data: Andrei Stepanovich (1946–1984); Lesya Stepanovna (1947–2011).
3) Sisters of Stepan Bandera: Martha-Maria (1907-1982); Vladimir (1913–2001); Oksana (1917–2008).
4) Stepan Bandera's brothers Alexander (1911-1942) and Vasily (1915-1942) died in Auschwitz under unclear circumstances. Presumably - killed by Volksdeutsche Poles, members of the camp staff; Bogdan (1921–194?), the date and place of death are not known for certain. Presumably - killed by the Germans in Kherson in 1943.