KGB veteran on working with the Bandera underground

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

Photo: Georgy Sannikov

“But Marichka is still looking for her son, whom she abandoned when she ran away to the Americans,” my interlocutor says. - Only I know where he is … If she reads this article, she will understand everything.

Before me is a unique person. He personally participated in the liquidation of the remnants of the OUN underground gangs in the post-war years in Western Ukraine. Day and night I talked with the arrested leaders, trying not only to turn over, but also to understand. They still write letters to him with the words: "You are the only one who saw people in us …" He is not afraid to draw parallels between what was then and what is happening now.

About the love and hatred of the leaders of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) underground, secret methods and special operations to combat them - an employee of the operational radio games department of the KGB of Ukraine Georgy SANNIKOV in a frank interview with the special correspondent "MK".

Georgy Zakharovich, today the Ukrainian media write that Western Ukraine has no bloody past and that the Banderaites were not really cruel. It's true?

- The atrocities were terrible. But this phenomenon had its own explanation - hatred was whipped up from generation to generation for centuries.

Wait for an explanation. Have you seen the atrocities with your own eyes?

- Certainly. And I saw a torture machine, which was invented by the famous underground esbist Smok (aka Mykola Kozak, Vivchar). The man was suspended in such a way that all the joints were twisted. The pain is the wildest. One of the last leaders of the Ukrainian rebel army Vasyl Kuk (aka Lemish) told me in prison this way: "If I got into this machine, I would admit not only that I am an NKVD agent, but that I am an Ethiopian Negus."

Almost all the leaders of the OUN movement were cruel, just some more, some less. Dozens of sophisticated murder methods have been invented. They gouged out their eyes, cut off the breasts of women, cut out the stars on their bodies, drove bottles into the anus. The wells were filled with corpses. The head of the UPA Roman Shukhevych said: “Our policy should be terrible. Let half of the population die, but the rest will be as clean as a glass of water. And they did all these atrocities with their own people.

But what should be the ideology to force one Ukrainian to kill another so subtly?

“The Ukrainians have been under Polish oppression for many centuries. In Stanislavskaya oblast, the segregation of the Ukrainian population was monstrous. Benches for Poles, benches for Ukrainians. Separate trailers for Ukrainians working in mines, separately - for Poles. Poles treated Ukrainians like slaves, slaves. How can I forget this?

And hatred was eventually transmitted at the gene level, resulting in the Volyn massacre (in 1943, UPA militants during the expulsion of local Poles from Volyn killed about 100 thousand people, including women, old people and children. - Auth.). What are the only "wreaths" worth - when the corpses of children were tied to a tree in a circle! Now they argue who was the first to invent - the Ukrainians or the Poles. There is a version about the appearance of such a "wreath" back in the 30s of the last century, "created" by a crazy gypsy woman from her children. This is another attempt to ward off terrible crimes.

At what point did hatred for the Russians become the same as for the Poles?

- When that part of Western Ukraine that was under the Poles became part of the Russian Empire. Then in Galicia (three regions - Lviv, Ternopil and Ivano-Frankivsk, at that time - Stanislavskaya) a society called "Prosvita" arose, which advocated the preservation of Ukrainian culture, traditions and language. But "Prosvita" was forbidden by tsarist Russia. At one time, the Russian minister Valyuev used to say: “What other Ukrainian language is there ?! There is no such thing and will not be!"

REFERENCE "MK": Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - OUN - was founded in 1929 by Colonel Konovalets and several military personnel. During the First World War, they joined the Austro-Hungarian army, which fought against Russia.

Did they hate Soviet power as well as tsarist one?

Everything that was connected with it, even indirectly, was subject to destruction by the OUN. And it was enough for some Ukrainian to express sympathy for the Soviets, so that the next morning his whole family was destroyed.

For joining the collective farm, they voted only in the evening with the lights off, so that it would not be visible who raised his hand first. Because such "active" ones were hanged at night by the Security Service of the OUN - SB. In every village there were her informants, who immediately reported everything to the underground. And when the nationalists came to punish, they did it like a gangster, quietly, and they took care of the patrons: they mostly strangled people. For this purpose, the OUN people always had twists - such ropes … The OUN people affectionately called them "mutuzochki" …

And the Jews? Today, some in Ukraine claim that there were Jews in the Bandera underground

- These are all fairy tales. Jews were hated as much as Russians and Poles. This was explained by the fact that they kept shops and taverns, soldered people. I know of a sad exception. One Jew, a former shopkeeper from Lvov, a certain Khaim Sygal, pretended to be a "shyry" Ukrainian, took the name Sygalenko for himself, and became a centurion in the UPA. For some time he served in the German police. It was he who became famous for the atrocious reprisals against his fellow tribesmen. He personally executed more than one hundred unfortunate people in a sophisticated way. After the war, he managed to turn into a Jew again and for many years hid in West Berlin as a victim of Nazism, revered by the entire Jewish community …

FROM THE DOSSIER "MK"

Cook, Karpo and pennies

You mentioned Cook. How did you manage to detain him?

- They captured Cook with the help of his liaison and especially trusted militant Karpo, whom we recruited. He brought Cook to a bunker controlled by us. It happened in 1954.

By the way, were there many bunkers in those years?

- All of Ukraine is in them. There were not even hundreds, but thousands! Bunker, cache - they were called differently. This is a shelter of various sizes under the ground, a hatch on top or other manhole exits. Nationalists began to bunker in 1944. They tried to build bunkers themselves, and if they attracted Jews or those who did not trust, then they destroyed them right on the spot. At that time, Bandera's men in the villages shot all the dogs so as not to bark and betray their appearance.

First, it turns out, you recruited the militant Karpo. How did you manage it?

- Oh, Cook asked me the same question many times later. He exclaimed: "It's impossible!" And we did. Let me describe Karpo for you. Huge growth, with such eyes that terrified. He had no teeth - scurvy had eaten them. Karpo was a terrible person. Blood to the elbows - more than a dozen people hanged with his own hands. Cook trusted him completely.

We sent our fighter to Karpo, and he led him through the whole of Western Ukraine. Our man had an order: if he felt that Karpo suspected him, without hesitation to liquidate him. This was an exception to the rule - we have always spared Bandera (I’ll explain why later), but Karpo was too dangerous, although he was very much needed. And in the right place, we grabbed Karpo and started "processing" him. We knew everything about Karpo. And what was next to the village, then the forest was nowhere to be found, I did not see the city. And that he had a dream since childhood - to try ice cream and go to the movies at least once. And so, when our man brought him to the right place and he was captured, we showed him Ukraine. When he saw Kiev, he was in a frenzied state. He had no idea what cities there are, what power! And then we brought him to Crimea. They showed him everything - factories, stadiums, theaters … And he broke down. "Reforged" Karpo.

And he gave you Cook?

“Karpo, who came over to our side, brought Cook and his wife to“our”bunker. Those from the transitions were so tired that they immediately fell asleep. He tied them up and pressed the alarm button. At the checkpoint, a warning light came on, letting us know the exact location. Cook woke up. And then something like the following dialogue took place between them (both told me later):

“Druzhe Karpo, sold for a pittance? Now "yours" will come running. Here is a jar of gold and money. (Cook had 400 grams of gold belonging to the OUN with him.) It will come in handy for you. You know I won't give you up. " - "I won't take it." - "Why?" “I’m not for pennies. I am for the idea."

How did you manage to recruit Cook himself? What did he buy?

- There is a category of people who are not recruited. They can provide some kind of assistance coinciding with their interests, but no more. Cook never came over to our side. Some consider him an agent of the KGB, but in fact it was not. And he made an appeal to his underground workers, because he understood: there is no point in fighting further, it is necessary to keep cadres for the future Ukraine. It was a smart, hardened enemy. A brilliant conspirator, so he held out longer than all the ringleaders.

Only the Central Committee of Ukraine and the top leadership of Moscow knew that Cook had been captured. For the species, the search continued for a long time. He and his wife were placed in an internal prison of the Kiev KGB, in a special cell.

What was unusual about her?

- It had a residential appearance - it looked like an ordinary room, with a bed and other furniture. Its content there was so secret that the employees of the corresponding department who knew about it were specially strictly warned. Once a week, the assistant prosecutor of the republic came in the order of prosecutor's supervision. At this time, the cell was given an uninhabited look, and Cook and his wife were taken out into the city under the pretext of a walk.

Cook's cell was numbered 300. The number was conditional, there was no such number of cells in the prison. And because of the number, he passed with us under the nickname Three hundredth.

And what happened to Cook's wife?

- She was also a Banderovka (originally from Dnepropetrovsk), quite active. And Cook sat with her.

In one cell ?

- Yes. There was a "wiretapping" all around, and they talked to each other, they could say something important. I began to communicate with Cook by chance. Once I came to the investigation building, where Cook was taken for interrogation. And my friend from the department had to leave. I asked Cook to stay, but not to enter into conversation with him. And I really wanted to talk to him. When my comrade returned, and even accompanied by a group of high leaders, Cook and I stood, almost clutching each other, proving each of his innocence.

And then they somehow tell him that, they say, an operative will be assigned to you, who will bring you literature, with whom you can talk on any topic, but not on your business. And he asked that it was me. The authorities arranged it. I was instructed to exert the ideological influence we need on him.

Did you succeed?

- Unfortunately no. He had his own ideology - nationalist. It also became clear that we would not involve him in cooperation as our agent. But we still managed to use him in the events we needed, because it partially coincided with his beliefs. It was difficult to work with him, but interesting. All the time you had to be on the lookout. He was an extremely dangerous adversary with extensive knowledge of such burning issues as nationality and land. In debates and conversations, he used not only his ideological calculations, but in the right place also applied ours - Marxist-Leninist ones. And he did it masterly.

And he himself tried to persuade you to his side?

- And how! He said: here you, Bolsheviks, came to power, because the cities supported you, and the village has always been ours, and it would never have followed you. The difficulty for me was that all our conversations with him took place under auditory control. But I sometimes forgot about it, got carried away, made some blunders (in the sense that I agreed with his position). But how else - not "singing along" to him in something, I would not be able to win him over.

How did you "sang along"?

- I quoted Lenin to him. The same Lenin who said that it is impossible to offend the Ukrainians who were oppressed by the tsarist government. Whoever said that Ukraine wants to leave, let him leave.

Cook said that in principle he hates Russians, that he wishes them death?

- No never. And I am sure that Cook would not have taken the slogan that is now used in Ukraine thanks to American political technologies: "Jews and Muscovites - for knives and for Gilyaks." He was much smarter than today's Kiev rulers.

Was Cook himself afraid of death?

- He was afraid to disappear without a trace. I was sure that he would be shot. Khrushchev also insisted on this. But Kiev managed to convince not to do this. Otherwise, they would have created another national hero. And so he served his six years, we got him to work in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, so that he was always under control. How could it be otherwise?

And when the new Ukrainian authorities offered him the title of Hero of Ukraine, he refused. Although his funeral in Kiev in 2007 was national. Wreaths from the government of Ukraine, from the Ministry of Security, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs … By the way, I managed to say goodbye to him: I called him a couple of days before his death. And you know, I think that he would not support what is happening now. He was for a completely independent Ukraine, and not one that would be ruled by the West or the East. He once said during the "orange triumph": "We did not fight for this Ukraine."

The story of the most beautiful couple of nationalists

Were there many couples among the leaders of the OUN movement, or only Cook and his wife?

- There were several notable couples. And in general, a lot was built on love. There was such Okhrimovich, one of the leaders of the OUN, a CIA agent, a paratrooper, abandoned by an American plane in 1951 together with a group of radio operators. He spent a year underground with Cook until we caught him. They exchanged machine guns. Okhrimovich had an American one. By the way, the Americans threw weapons into Western Ukraine, but not enough. American and British planes flew over the territory of Ukraine until 1954, dropping agents. I declare this with full responsibility. It's just that even many employees of our special services do not know about this fact.

Did the Americans support Bandera?

- Yes. It cannot be said that it was at the government level. But at the CIA level - definitely. And it was not massively, not intense. So, Okhrimovich flew not so much on an assignment to establish contact with the underground, as to his fiancee. He wanted to bring it from Ukraine to the West, he thought that the channels were still there (and they had already been intercepted by us almost all by that time).

When Okhrimovich learned that the bride had managed to shoot herself, he refused to cooperate and was also shot … There were loyal couples among the OUN members. Loyal to each other and to the idea. I remember that some of these (husband and wife), when we detained her, asked to release them and immediately liquidate them, as if trying to escape. The heroes wanted to die. They all had their own romance, their own relationships. But we disagreed.

In general, people of this type dreamed of a heroic death. There was a case when one of the leaders of the OUN underground, having lost all guards in the battle, one came out with two pistols in his hands, firing at the approaching soldiers. Every self-respecting OUN member had two weapons. The revolver is reliable, but it is very hard to pull the trigger (you, for example, will not pull it), and the pistol is light, automatic, but which could fail. And everyone wore an F-1 lemon. A leather cord was tied from her to the collar. When your hands refuse - so that you can pull out the pin with your teeth. 3, 5 seconds - that's all. Many tried to undermine during the capture, but we did not give. And then they themselves were glad. Because consciousness was changing.

Fortunately, our future prisoner did not catch anyone. The head of the operation gave the command to the machine gunner to hit on the legs. They broke his legs, then they cured him. He was recruited by one of our leaders, conducted the conversation as equals. As a Ukrainian with a Ukrainian, for the sake of the future of Ukraine. Two ideologies collided. Our took it. It was an honest conversation, with documentary evidence, about the use of the underground by the Western special services for their own purposes - the destruction of Slavic unity. As a result, he became one of our best assistants, and for the underground he will forever remain a hero.

Did you use psychotropic drugs during recruitment?

- We had drugs to put to sleep for a while and immobilize. No more. Poisons have never been used. We spared the nationalists. Why? Because they are people. We wanted to re-educate them. So all the talk on their part about our cruelty is not true. When a fight, then yes, a fight is a fight, they killed. But no dog can say that we killed just like that. As they often did. Of course, we also had violations of social law, but this was not a mass phenomenon and was always punished, right up to arrest.

And yet, about love …

- Yes, I'm distracted. The most beautiful and brightest couple among these OUN members were Orlan (Vasyl Galasa) and Marichka (Maria Savchin). They loved each other as deeply as they loved their idea. Marichka is very energetic, feminine, attractive. I have seen her many times, but she, fortunately, never. It was tough. She would have killed any enemy in that bloody confrontation. She is the only underground woman to be awarded the OUN gold medal. He and Orlan had two children born underground. The first one stayed with relatives, we kept him as bait. She threw the second one to the newborns and walked across the rooftops.

How did it happen?

- We had information that she was in Krakow. But where exactly, we did not know. And then they discovered her by chance, during a raid in a Carmelite monastery. She was there with the child. She was detained by the Polish bezpeka, and she deceived her. Under the pretext that the child was crying, she asked to leave the guard. There was a window, she climbed onto the roof of the second floor and ran away from there to her husband - he was still underground then. Since then, she has not seen the child and does not know what happened to him. Although I have been looking for all these years and are still looking.

And what happened to him?

- He survived. Nobody knows where he is. We gave him up for adoption by a Polish family. That is, the people of the nation that she hated as much as the Russians. I hope she has long understood that Nazism is a dead-end path.

Why did she break up with Orlan?

“After the arrest, we continued to work with them in the prison. We wanted to recruit them and then send them to the West. It seemed we were able to win them over to our side. But it only seemed to be. He gave her orders to pretend that she had enlisted. He carefully instructed her on how to consent to the withdrawal from the cordon and, after the transfer, to contact the Americans there and tell her everything about the situation in Western Ukraine. He was not only her beloved person, but also a leader. So she agreed. And we could not control their conspiracy, and she played her part well. Female!

There is always an element of risk in our business, but we were sure that even if everything went wrong, she would return to him (he stayed with us). And she didn’t come back. Too late came the understanding that it was not her, but him that should be taken to the West. He was madly in love with her and the children, he would definitely return. Probably, she was not so attached to the family. We remembered how she watched the eldest from the bus (before being taken out to the West through Poland, they organized an unofficial meeting with her son) - she had no tears. And Orlan, who was seeing her off, sobbed inconsolably. The idea of fighting for Ukraine prevailed in Marichka over everything else.

Fortunately, we had a reliable source in the West, and after a short time we learned that the Americans believed Marichka, decided to carry out counterplay and hoped for success. Even the name was given to her pretentious - "Moscow-Washington".

Why did you send her to the West at all?

- We have created the legendary underground, led by Orlan, in order to introduce our agents into the Western special services through a controlled communication line. Of all the operational radio games, Operation Raid, as a result of Marichka's departure to the Americans, was a failure. And "Moscow-Washington" got its development, but already under our control. Together with Marichka, our agent Taras was sent to the West, whom the Americans soon "blindly", as if already their trained courier, transferred to Western Ukraine in a specially equipped plane. But we already knew about it and controlled the situation. Suddenly, Khrushchev himself intervened in our combination and ordered the plane to be shot down. He needed material to speak at the UN. With great difficulty Kiev managed to persuade Moscow not to do this.

And what happened to Orlan and Marichka?

- Orlan was incredibly talented. And this is with education in grade 4! As a rule, the leaders of the Bandera underground had a good education. After the withdrawal of Marichka, Orlan lived under control in our operational mansion and, together with the operative, studied at the school for working youth, where he was the only one of 160 students who applied for a gold medal. He died in Kiev in 2002. And Marichka lives in the USA, she has a second family and children.

And yet why America supported the Bandera movement?

- American and British intelligence actively used the foreign centers of the OUN in Munich for their own purposes. There were many Ukrainians who found themselves in the West after World War II. It was among this Ukrainian diaspora that the Western special services found the people they needed to prepare and send them to the Soviet Union. The leaders of the OUN centers proved to their "masters" that an armed underground is still actively operating in Western Ukraine, with the help of which it is possible to successfully obtain intelligence information of interest to the United States and England.

The Americans have always been convinced that our special services interfered too much in the fate of Ukraine …

- What would have happened if we had not defeated the Bandera underground? How many more people would die? The nationalist idea is a failure. There are no pure nations, especially today. But this idea is exciting. She is like a flammable material. And it, with the clever regulation of the generously paid mass propaganda, easily penetrates the minds of people. It is done. The rest is for little: freedom of action, everything is allowed, kill as much as you want. You are promised a wonderful life in the future, without specifying when this future happiness will come …

What's going on today? Even if we disregard three quarters of what our TV channels show, the remaining quarter does not speak about harshness? The biathlete works as a sniper, the pilot throws cluster bombs at the civilian population … These are facts.

But it may not be nationalism

- What then? I've seen too much to doubt. Unfortunately, we have not monitored the situation with nationalism in Ukraine in recent years. We slept … In 1990, the Ukrainian National Union - UNS was created in Lviv. Then many residents of Ukraine called the members of this organization Ukrainian Nazis. We were silent.

The Ukrainian National Assembly - Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) - is openly Nazi and Russophobic. The militants of this organization openly boast of their participation in armed conflicts against Russian troops. Do you remember how its participants marched with lighted torches through the silent city several years ago? It was very reminiscent of Nazi Berlin in 1933. And after all, the torches were carried by the grandchildren and children of those who were underground, who died at the hands of the Soviet regime, who were appropriately brought up and hated everything connected with Russia. For many years they disguised themselves, became communists, Komsomol members … Even Shukhevych was given the command to legalize, infiltrate the authorities. And they got in.

It was then that the nationalist movement was stopped. How to resist him today?

- Only by convictions. Now the nationalists say: "I love my Ukraine."Who doesn't love her? Does the right to love one's homeland belong exclusively to one nation? And what about those who live in this territory and also love their Ukraine, but think and believe differently, speak a different language? So why not turn to the practice of other, frankly speaking, more civilized countries, such as Switzerland, where there are several state languages, or at least Canada, where, by the way, there is a huge Ukrainian diaspora? Today 1.5 million Ukrainians earn their living in Poland, almost 5 million in Russia. That is, they work for those whom they hated …

Eva Merkacheva