Oleh Martowych

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Upa) Oleh Martowych

The vast country of the Ukraine, on Russia's south-west borders, was a reluctant addition to the Soviet Union when the Communist state was established after the civil wars of the early 1920s. The scene of horrible man-made famines, and Stalin's purges of the Kulak peasants, the Ukraine's sufferings spawned an anti-Soviet resistance movement which became an army equipped and controlled by the Germans after the Barbarossa invasion of 1944. In this history of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), written in German exile by an exiled former member of the UPA at the height of the Cold War in 1950, the author traces the history of the Ukranian nationalist resistance to Communism before and during the war. He plays down the UPA's collaboration with the Nazis - making no mention of any involvement of the organisation with the Holocaust. Nonetheless, this rare typescript history is a valuable account of a phenomenon which is only now receiving its proper historical evaluation.