The first OUN congress in Vienna: how Ukrainian nationalists united in their fight for statehood.

In the capital of the Austrian Republic, Vienna, from January 28 to February 3, 1929, the Great Assembly took place – the First Congress of representatives from Ukrainian nationalist organizations. During this large gathering, on the final day of the Congress, the establishment of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was announced. A governing body (the leadership) of the new political organization – the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (PUN) – was elected, headed by Colonel Yevhen Konovalets.

Who is Yevhen Konovalets

Why was Yevhen Konovalets chosen to lead this radical political organization? He was an active participant in the First World War as part of the Austro-Hungarian army, and in the spring of 1915, he was captured by Russian forces. Later, after the February Revolution of 1917, he was released and became a prominent figure in the liberation struggle in Ukraine: he led units of "Sich" fighters that suppressed the Bolshevik anti-state uprising in Kyiv in January 1918, centered around the "Arsenal" factory, and in March, he helped liberate the capital of Ukraine after the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.

Subsequently, after Hetman of Ukraine Pavlo Skoropadsky announced the "Manifesto" on November 4, 1918, declaring a federal connection with "White" Russia, Konovalets supported the uprising of the future socialist Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic. Without the support of the "Sich" fighters, the anti-hetman uprising would have been doomed to failure.

In 1919–1920, Konovalets fought against both the White and Red Russians, and after the defeat of the Directory's army, he found himself in an internment camp in Lutsk; he later lived in Czechoslovakia, whose government significantly assisted the Ukrainian emigration. Gradually, he rose to prominence within the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), established in 1920–1921. Ukrainian historian and politician Volodymyr Vyatrovych wrote: "The defeat of 1921 was a shock for many Ukrainian politicians, which they could not overcome, turning into émigré activists detached from Ukrainian realities and dependent on foreign support. For Konovalets, however, the defeat became a catalyst."

Among the founders of OUN were also the Group of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth (HUNM), the Legion of Ukrainian Nationalists (LUN), based in Eastern Galicia, and the Union of Ukrainian Nationalist Youth (SUNM) from the city of Podebrady in Czechoslovakia. However, it was the UVO, uniting veterans who fought against numerous enemies of the Ukrainian revolution from 1917 to 1921, that became the unifying force during the Vienna Congress. Ukrainian political scientist, literary critic, and publicist Oleg Bahan emphasized the goal of UVO: "to organize a qualitatively new liberation movement, uncompromising and devoid of any liberal-socialist narrow doctrinism, whose ideological foundation should be the ideology of nationalism." By the end of the 1920s, it became necessary to structure and consolidate the nationalist movement in the strong hands of the UVO veterans.

Defense of the Rights of Ukrainians in Occupied Territories

Preparations for the first congress of nationalist forces began earlier. Founding conferences were held in Berlin (1927) and Prague (1928), where representatives from the aforementioned organizations met to establish the principles of unification into a single political force. Their participants tried to keep their actions secret; however, both Polish and Soviet intelligence (the main enemies of the Ukrainian nationalist movement) obtained information from their agents.

Thus, on January 28, 1929, in Vienna, the Great Assembly of representatives from the aforementioned nationalist organizations commenced its work, with 30 delegates participating. The main task of the newly created OUN was to defend the rights of Ukrainians in territories occupied by Soviet Bolsheviks and Polish authorities.

Already in 1923, the victorious countries of the First World War, at the Council of Ambassadors of Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, confirmed the final incorporation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia into the Second Polish Republic. The wishes of the Entente countries to provide Ukrainians with national-cultural autonomy were disregarded by the Poles. This caused an uproar among the autochthonous population, which constituted an absolute majority in their ethnographic lands in Eastern Galicia, Volhynia, and Podlasie. Only two telling figures presented by Canadian historian of Ukrainian descent Orest Subtelny in the book "Ukraine: A History" illustrate this: "Of more than 2400 Ukrainian primary schools that existed in Eastern Galicia in 1912, only 352 remained by 1937. In Volhynia, during this time, the number of Ukrainian schools decreased from 440 to eight."

The address announcing the creation of OUN outlined the main programmatic and ideological foundations of this nationalist movement in ethnic Ukrainian territories divided between neighboring states (the Soviet Union, the Second Polish Republic, royal Romania, and democratic Czechoslovakia): "Having as the goal the restoration, order, defense, and expansion of an Independent Unified Ukrainian National State, Ukrainian nationalists will strive to gather the creative forces within the nation and strengthen its resilience externally. Only the complete removal of all occupiers from Ukrainian lands will open opportunities for the broad development of the Ukrainian nation within its own state." The most significant problems for Ukrainian nationalists arose in the Polish state, although the situation in Romania was also complex.

The majority of OUN members were youth from Eastern Galicia. Essentially, this was the youth wing of the organization, although at the initial stage, the representatives of veterans of the Liberation Struggle of 1917–1921 played a leading role. Sharp disputes occasionally arose between these two currents, which can be termed moderate and radical. Only the authority of Yevhen Konovalets restrained these contradictions. The majority of OUN members in emigration agreed with him regarding the formation of a political elite and reliance on their own strength. The younger generation of nationalists (mostly Galicians) faced constant persecution against Ukrainian identity by the strictly authoritarian regime of the Second Polish Republic. Therefore, the "caution" of the older comrades was viewed negatively by them, as they witnessed the assimilationist policies of the Polish authorities towards national minorities (Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Belarusians, Lithuanians constituted more than a third of the population of the newly established state in 1918) taking increasingly abhorrent and brutal forms. However, only Ukrainians, and to a lesser extent Germans (with the help of the measures of the Berlin government in the economy and education – both during the Weimar Republic and under the NSDAP regime starting from January 30, 1933) resisted this course of Warsaw.

Stepan Bandera: A Position as a Death Sentence

The youth wing of OUN sought to address urgent issues regarding relations with the occupying authorities, primarily with the Polish regime of "Chief of State" Józef Piłsudski, who came to power after the May coup of 1926. Stepan Bandera was officially appointed the Regional Leader of the organization for all Western Ukrainian lands at the Berlin conference of OUN in June 1933 (at the age of 24!). In reality, this position could be likened to a death sentence: his predecessors, Yulian Holovynsky and Stepan Okhrimovych, fell victim to the Polish police.

In response to a series of attacks (terrorist acts) carried out by young OUN members, the Warsaw government initiated mass repressions against Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, which they termed "pacification" (from Latin Patificatio). The terrorist acts by OUN members were a reaction to the widespread closure of Ukrainian schools and cultural, educational, and economic organizations, particularly cooperatives. Militarized units of Polish colonists, with the assistance of police and military forces, destroyed "Osviity" in villages, forcing peasants to convert from Orthodoxy to Catholicism – especially in Volhynia and Podlasie. Public physical reprisals against teachers, cooperators, representatives of the clergy, and ordinary Ukrainians became the norm...

Thus, it was precisely due to such actions by the Polish authorities that the radicalization of OUN representatives in occupied territories occurred. A series of attacks took place, including the assassination of the Minister of Internal Affairs Bronisław Pieracki on June 15, 1934, responsible for the brutal "pacifications," as well as the killing of Soviet Consul Secretary in Lviv, Alexey-Andrew Maylov (actually an OGPU employee) on October 21, 1933 – as a reaction to the artificial famine orchestrated by the Kremlin – the Holodomor of 1932-1933.