Veteran SMERSH about Bandera: they didn't let us finish off the executioners

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Using the example of the struggle against the UPA in the post-war period, the author shows the complexity of the multi-level structure of this organization. The popular today emphasis on the last 20 years of Ukrainian "democracy" as the reason for the current events does not cover the continuity of the modern junta from the post-war Bandera …

“In 1945-1946, we killed (OUN) gangs at the level of kurens, koshas and hundreds. But the security service ("bezpeki") of these cruel executioners was not really allowed to finish us off. When in 1946 we reached the level of the supra-district leadership, traces reached the Central Committee of Ukraine, headed by Khrushchev. And that's where they stopped us."

When in 1920 former officers of the Austro-Hungarian army from Galicia (the territory of modern Western Ukraine) gathered in Prague and created their own Ukrainian military organization, they first of all created a communication system and an administrative structure of the organization. In this case, they were assisted in the 1930s by the OVRA (Italian secret police), the German security service SD and the military intelligence ABVER, which trained personnel in their schools in Warsaw and near Berlin. They modified and polished this structure. In 1943, this entire large-scale project was launched to its fullest. After our army had to destroy the UPA numbering 100 thousand people. To be able to maintain such an army, the OUN did the following. They took a village as an administrative unit, which should have at least two hundred households. If the village did not collect so much, then several were combined, up to the required amount.

Further, the nationalists acted according to a triple system, that is, 3 villages were united in a stanitsa, 3 stanitsas in a sub-district, 3 sub-districts in a district, 3 districts in a nad-district, 3 nad-districts in a viddil. Their nadraion and viddil were regional structures, and the entire territory of Ukraine was divided into 4 parts (ray). At the head of all these rays was the OUN Central Wire, led by the Guide. The main ray was "Zakhid" - the northwestern one, which includes Galicia and Transcarpathia, the rest were secondary and did not enjoy the support of the local population.

Let's go through the diagram from bottom to top and look at its levels and links.

Here is the village level. This is the backbone of the entire structure. On the basis of the village, there were various workshops for all types of repairs, shops for processing raw materials and sewing clothes, etc., etc. The entire economic part was very similar to our collective and state farms. After the start of the war, Bandera did not disperse these organizations, but used them as very convenient structures for themselves. They had a rigid planning system. The task was given in advance, who and what should grow, plant, prepare, and hand over in the fall. All this procurement service in the village was supervised by the donor, he was the main procurer - the business executive. After the procurement, everything was handed over against a receipt to the village village. Stanichny in the village was in the role of collective farm chairman, who was in charge of all the resources.

Usually, everything that was prepared was kept in the forest, in caches, in a high, dry place, well camouflaged. Everything was carefully taken into account, records were kept on the arrival and consumption of material assets, and the stanitsky always knew what reserves, for how many people he had. If necessary, he went to the forest, bringing the required amount of supplies, and distributed it among those houses that had the militants on duty.

Usually there was a swarm in the village, or, in our opinion, a platoon, so the deployment of militants in the village did not put a burden on families. The stanitsa was engaged in the supply of clothing and food. The most interesting thing is that all divisions were divided into 2 parts - female and male, each part had its own master and stanitsa. The women were engaged in repairing and sewing clothes, washing linen, dressings, and caring for the wounded. Among the population of the village, political work was carried out on a mandatory basis to clarify the ideas of the OUN-UPA, and political workers of the OUN were engaged in it, and for each category of the population they are different, separate for the male population, separate for women (usually women), and also separately among boys and girls. All the priests of the Greek Catholic Church helped them in this, saying in their sermons that one must obey their defenders, since they carry freedom and the right to own land.

In each village there was a communication point, which was a good peasant house, the owners of which were the so-called communication points. At this point, a round-the-clock watch was organized, since at any time of the day or night a liaison could come with an encrypted report. The messengers were almost always young girls between the ages of 10 and 17. The route legend has been carefully worked out. Usually they went to their relatives in the neighboring village, the same owners of the contact point. When we found out, we did this: we turned this girl upside down together and began to shake it until an encrypted message fell out of her bra.

A system of conventional signs was widely used for outside observers who were located along the road from village to village within sight of each other. In this case, boys were used. They were also used to monitor the movement and locations of our troops.

The next level is a village, a union of three villages. Its leadership was in one of these villages. It consisted of a stanitsa stanitsa that was in charge of placing, staying and supplying everything necessary for hundreds of the UPA (this is 100-150 militants), a gospodar stanitsa, who was in charge of the procurement service in these villages.

In each village there was an SB (security service) battle of 10-15 people, carefully conspiratorial, with the appearance of local residents. They were distinguished by incredible cruelty, worse than any Dudayevites, they killed at the slightest suspicion of cooperation with the Soviet authorities. As an example - the case with the family of Ivan Semyonovich Rukha. He was summoned to the NKVD regional department for interrogation about his participation in the Bandera gangs. He was found not guilty, went home, and on the same day his entire family was shot, along with their children and thrown into a well. Ivan was seriously wounded. I got out of the well, got to the garrison and told about the participants in the execution, among whom was the chairman of the village council, a member of the SB militant.

… The village had its own investigator, who received information from his informants in the villages, processed it and, if necessary, transferred it to the security service of the village or higher.

The maintainers of the communication center of the village had access to higher levels of leadership and had at their disposal up to twenty liaison officers at a time. And the political and educational work with the population was never forgotten. For each age and gender, there was a separate educator who supplied his subordinates with the necessary literature and campaign materials.

At the level of the sub-district and the region, the UPA held back the kosh and kuren, according to our military regulations - this is an infantry regiment, numbering up to 2000-3000 people.

Kosh differed from kuren in that it had artillery and mechanized formations. The district and sub-district leadership was located in large villages that are part of this sub-district or district, and the headquarters and command of the kuren were located there. They did not like to live in the forest, although there they had built concrete bunkers with the help of German engineers, well camouflaged, with water and electricity supply. It used to be, after the war, you drive a unit of the UPA into the forest, everyone is surrounded. You enter the forest. And there is no one there, everyone hid in the ground. You take a long iron pin and start poking through the ground until you find the bunker.

APPEAL TO OUN-UPA

At these levels, the OUN-UPA had its own prosecutor's office and an investigative apparatus, consisting of graduates of the law faculties of Lviv, Warsaw and

Universities of Krakow, Ukrainians by nationality, who worked closely with the regional security forces.

For the investigation, there were secret prisons for the detention and torture of prisoners. The district fighting consisted of 10-15 well-trained and armed people, in essence executioners, who carried out punitive operations at the behest of their commandant. He, in turn, obtained information from investigators and prosecutors for carrying out actions.

They learned information from their people in small administrative positions in the village council, district council, at the posts of foremen, collective farm chairmen. In city military registration and enlistment offices and the NKVD, these were usually technical workers, cleaners, stokers, secretaries-typists, cooks in special dining rooms for the operational staff. Only once did the OUN members manage to introduce their agent into our combat group, which was destroyed during the capture of a kuren in one of the villages.

The conscription to the UPA was led by the commandants of the mobilization departments, in the event of large losses in the UPA, the demands for mobilizing the required number of people were passed to the village officers through the system of liaison officers, and for evading the draft - execution.

Special attention should be paid to "a hundred courageous young men" and the same "one hundred courageous girls" in the department of special purpose. It was a real forge of OUN-UPA personnel.

All young people were divided into three age groups, 10-12 years old, 13-15 years old and 16-18 years old. All of these age and gender groups had their own goals, actions and demands. The younger ones were used as observers, scouts and messengers, the older ones as saboteurs. For example, the future president of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk began his “labor activity” as an intelligence officer in the “hundred brave youths” under the special purpose department.

How serious it was can be judged by the way they monitored the tank reserve of the 1st Ukrainian Front, which was stationed in the Tuchinsky forest in 1944, followed by German aviation pointing at it. We did not like these young men, it used to be that we would surround the gang that killed our comrades, and they throw down their weapons, raise their hands and shout that they are children.

And “a hundred brave girls” in the same department are real sadists, we didn't take them prisoner, we shot them on the spot. On our captured soldiers, they practiced practical exercises on applying splints to broken limbs, breaking their arms and legs, or cutting them open to study field surgery and methods of stitching wounds.

They kept their well-equipped district hospitals for a hundred seriously wounded in a hard-to-reach forest area.

The supra-district leaders preferred not to shine, they were usually in the forest, in their bunkers. They had everything there for autonomous life: both electric lighting, and their own water supply with sewerage, there was radio communication with abroad.

At the supra-district level, there were schools for junior commanders and political educators, analogs of training camps in Ichkeria, located in the dense Carpathian forests. Most of them were destroyed in 1943 by a partisan unit led by Vershigora.

In the forests of the Orzhevsky farms of the Glevalsky district of the Rivne region, there was also the OUN-UPA central wire, in a well-equipped concrete bunker with all amenities, built under the supervision of German engineers.

Viddils in each region with a subordinate division existed only in 1943-1944. They were destroyed by our army in April 1944 in the battle near Kremenets.

In the cities, the influence of the Banderaites was much less than in the countryside. In the city, they had only an external surveillance service and liaison officers. And the OUN leadership was afraid to be there, since the NKVD worked well in the city. And the urban population, more literate and better versed in the political situation, did not want to cooperate with Bandera.

It was with this carefully covert organization SMERSH that he had to fight immediately after the liberation of Ukraine. Until the end of the war, Soviet power ended in regional centers.

In the village, the owners were Bandera. To end this, after the war in western Ukraine, garrisons were deployed in every village. A whole 13th army was needed for one Rivne region, after which everything began to fall into place.

The bandits were driven into the forest and deprived of supplies, and SMERSH began to destroy the leaders in the first place. After their destruction, the gangs disintegrated, since most of the people were mobilized into the UPA on pain of death, their own and their relatives.

"WE WERE NOT GIVEN TO HIT US ONLY"

In 1945-1946, we killed gangs at the level of kurens, kosha and hundreds. But the security service ("bezpeki") of these cruel executioners was not really allowed to finish us off. When in 1946 we reached the level of the supra-district leadership, traces reached the Central Committee of Ukraine, headed by Khrushchev. Here we were stopped.

In 1946, work was curtailed to combat Bandera in the Rivne and Lviv regions. The departments of the Security Council, OKR SMERSH, BB (fight against banditry) were eliminated. They dismissed General Trubnikov, the head of the Rivne department of the NKVD, and General Asmolov in the Lviv region. And from Kiev to Lvov, at the direction of Khrushchev, General Ryasny was transferred, as it turned out later, who sympathized with the nationalists. As a result, the security service carried out reprisals against our people until the 1950s.

After Stalin's death, under the amnesty held by Khrushchev, all active members of the UPA-OUN, who returned to their homeland, were released.

In 1950-1960, the OUN began to quietly rebuild. They began by nominating their people to party and economic posts, there were cases of admission of the guides of the OUN ideas and political representatives of the OUN to the Komsomol with further career growth (a vivid example is Leonid Kravchuk). And those who interfered with them, or intimidated, blackmailing the life of loved ones, or eliminated under the guise of an accident or domestic quarrel.

In 1974, I came to Western Ukraine, and my friends told me that in many high party and economic posts, not to mention small ones, especially in rural areas - in Rivne, Lviv, Ivano-Frankovsk regions - there are OUN people. Shelest, who was the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine until 1972, hid all this from Moscow.

At the end of the so-called perestroika, in 1989-1991, thanks to Gorbachev's treacherous policy, this long-ripening abscess opened up. There was a "Rukh" (in Russian - "Movement").

Fueled by the money of the Vatican and the Western diaspora from Canada and America, a systematic seizure of power by "Rukhom" began throughout Ukraine. The seizure of Orthodox churches by Greek Catholics began with the help of militants from UNA-UNSO. This organization was revived just then as the most extremist political movement of the former Bandera, dissatisfied with the activities of the "RUKh".

Bandera and his associates were declared martyrs and victims of the NKVD. Great support and ideological patronage of "Rukh" and UNA-UNSO was provided by the former "brave young man", at that time the deputy head of the ideology department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine Kravchuk, who later became the chairman of the Rada, and then the president.

Roman Nosikov