The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  Nikita Khrushchev had dreamed of returning to Kyiv ever since the loss of the city to the Germans in September 1941. In the spring of 1942, soon after the Red Army stopped the Germans at the approaches to Moscow, he pushed for a Soviet counteroffensive in Ukraine with the goal of capturing its old capital, Kharkiv, and advancing on the industrial center of Dnipropetrovsk. The offensive, which began on May 12, 1942, saw Soviet tank formations break through enemy lines and push beyond Kharkiv into the steppes of Left-Bank Ukraine. But as the troops moved further southwest, meeting little if any resistance from the Germans, they realized that they were walking into a trap. The Germans had closed ranks, creating an encirclement akin to those that the Red Army had suffered the previous year. Khrushchev pleaded with Stalin to stop the offensive, but Stalin refused. It was too late to remedy the situation anyway. In a disastrous operation that lasted eighteen days, the Soviets lost 280,000 men killed, missing in action, and captured. When Stalin asked Khrushchev whether the figure of 200,000 POWs reported by the Germans was a lie, Khrushchev said that it was about right. Stalin blamed him for the defeat; only the presence of other Politburo members when Stalin refused to follow his advice and halt the clearly doomed operation saved Khrushchev from possible execution.

  The battle for Ukraine turned out to be prolonged and bloody. The tide turned at Stalingrad in February 1943, as the Red Army defeated the million-man army of Germany and its allies. Immediately after Stalingrad, the Red Army continued its offensive and retook Kursk, Belgorod, and Kharkiv from the Germans. But Field Marshal Erich von Manstein launched a counteroffensive, retaking Kharkiv and Belgorod and routing fifty-two Soviet divisions. Not until August 23, 1943, after the victory at Kursk, did the Red Army manage to take Kharkiv once again. On September 8, the Soviets raised the red banner over the city of Stalino (the former Yuzivka and future Donetsk). In the next few months, Soviet forces took the rest of Left-Bank Ukraine. They breached the Eastern Wall, the defensive line established by Hitler to stop the Soviet advance on the Right Bank of the Dnieper, in numerous places on a front extending more than 1,400 kilometers. The Red Army managed to field more than 2.5 million men against some 1.25 million Germans. The fighting was ferocious: according to conservative estimates, the Soviets lost over a million killed and wounded and the Germans more than half a million. No one counted the losses among the civilian population. They were enormous.

  As the party leader of occupied Ukraine, Khrushchev was deeply involved in organizing partisan units behind the German lines. The Nazi occupation policies provoked resentment, outrage, and eventually defiance, which drove people into the ranks of the resistance. While there were numerous urban resistance cells, the countryside provided a natural habitat for large groups of partisans, who waged a long and exhausting war against the occupiers. Ecology was the key. Since the steppes provided poor cover for resistance fighters, they fought in the woods of the northern Kyiv and Chernihiv regions, the forests and marshes of northern Volhynia, and the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. Apart from their habitat, their professed Ukrainian patriotism and hatred of the Nazi occupation united the partisans. The former Soviet-Polish border and ideology, however, divided them. West of the border, nationalists led the partisans, while communists predominated east of it.

  As a rule, the Soviet secret police organized the communist guerrillas, who received orders and supplies from a body called the Ukrainian Staff of the Partisan Movement, headed by an NKVD general and part of the Moscow-based Central Staff of the Partisan Movement. One of the best-known partisan leaders of Ukraine, Sydir Kovpak, had headed a city council before the war. Apart from his experience as a guerrilla commander during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918, he had graduated from an NKVD school that trained cadres for partisan warfare. The Soviet partisans began their activities in early 1942 with attacks on German units behind the lines and centers of occupation administration. As time went on and the Red Army began its westward advance after the Battle of Stalingrad, the activities of Soviet partisans increased in number and scope. If there were 5,000 fighters in 1942, their numbers had increased almost tenfold by 1944.

  The Germans tried to deal with the growing partisan movement, which not only challenged their control over Ukraine but also disrupted communications and deliveries of supplies, by unleashing a reign of terror on the local population. This included burning villages that the occupation authorities believed to be under partisan control or suspected of supporting the partisans. With German manpower in short supply, the authorities relied on police battalions recruited from the local population. Their members rarely joined the police for ideological reasons and included many former members of the Communist Party and the Komsomol (communist youth organization) seeking to escape persecution or even extermination by the occupation authorities. As there were locals on both sides of the divide, partisan warfare often turned into a brutal vendetta in which relatives of the partisans and policemen paid the ultimate price for choices made by their kinsmen. With the war turning against the Germans in 1942, more and more policemen changed sides and joined the partisans. At times it was difficult to tell a collaborator from a resistance fighter. It was a long war, and many shifted from one role to the other over its course.

  After the capture of Kyiv, Khrushchev immediately immersed himself in administration, reintegrating the former Soviet territories into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) and reincorporating the lands that the Soviets had not controlled before the war. It turned out to be a long and formidable task that would take most of his time and energy. By early 1944, the front had moved west of the Dnieper. By March, Soviet troops had retaken Right-Bank Ukraine and crossed the prewar border, pushing into Romania. In October 1944, the Red Army crossed the Carpathians and gained control of Transcarpathia, which official propaganda hailed as the final act in the reunification of the Ukrainian lands. There was no talk of a possible return of the territory either to Hungary or to Czechoslovakia. More than half a million Red Army soldiers died in the fighting for western Ukraine.

  “As we pushed the Germans west, we encountered an old enemy—Ukrainian nationalists,” recalled Khrushchev as he described his efforts to reincorporate western Ukraine into the Soviet state in 1944 and 1945. The Soviet authorities often referred to these nationalists generally as “Banderites,” given the overall control of the nationalist insurgency by the Stepan Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Eventually, this term came to denote anyone who fought in the ranks of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), controlled by Bandera’s followers. The name was misleading in more than one sense. First, not all the UPA fighters shared the nationalist ideology or belonged to the OUN. Second, Bandera himself never returned to Ukraine after his arrest by the Germans in the summer of 1941 and had no operational control over the forces that bore his name. He became a symbolic leader and a proverbial father of the nation, imprisoned by the Germans for most of the war and then living as an émigré in West Germany.

  The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which had close to 100,000 soldiers at its height in the summer of 1944, was fighting behind the Soviet lines, disrupting Red Army communications and attacking units farther from the front. A number of commanders led the insurgents, the most prominent being the former commander of the Nachtigall battalion, Roman Shukhevych. Like Shukhevych, many UPA commanders had German training, which they received as members of auxiliary police units. They abandoned those units with their weapons in early 1943. While they regarded the Germans as their main enemies, in 1943 the UPA mostly fought the Polish insurgency. The long history of animosity between Ukrainians and Poles in Volhynia and Galicia, exacerbated by each side’s mounting suspicions of the other’s intentions, led in the spring and summer of 1943 to mass actions of ethnic cleansing involving the burning of villages and mass murder of innocent civilians.

  The influx into Volhynia, soon after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in February 1943, of Soviet part
isan units led by Sydir Kovpak triggered the Ukrainian-Polish conflict. They received support from some Polish settlers in Volhynia, who viewed the Soviets as potential allies against the Ukrainians. Ukrainian and Polish historians still argue over whether the OUN leadership sanctioned Ukrainian attacks on Polish villages and, if so, on what level. There is no doubt, however, that most victims of the ethnic cleansing were Poles. Estimates of Ukrainians killed as a result of Polish actions in Galicia and Volhynia vary between 15,000 and 30,000, whereas the estimates for Polish victims are between 60,000 and 90,000—two to three times as high. The Germans, while not actively involved in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, incited both sides to continue it, sometimes supplying weapons to the combatants. If they could not control the countryside, they could at least keep their enemies divided. They also benefited from UPA operations against the advancing Red Army.

  Among the UPA’s major successes was the killing of a leading Soviet commander, General Nikolai Vatutin. On February 29, 1944, UPA fighters ambushed and wounded Vatutin as he was returning from a meeting with subordinates in Rivne, the former capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. He died in Kyiv in mid-April. Khrushchev, who attended Vatutin’s funeral, buried his friend in the government center of Kyiv. After the war, he came up with an inscription for the monument: “To General Vatutin from the Ukrainian people.” Khrushchev believed that the inscription would infuriate the Ukrainian nationalists, but party officials in Moscow treated it as an expression of the selfsame Ukrainian nationalism. Khrushchev appealed directly to Stalin, who allowed him to go ahead with his original plan. The Ukrainian-language inscription was placed on the monument, which was erected in 1948 and still stands in downtown Kyiv—one of many reminders of the complexity of Ukrainian memory of World War II.

  In World War II, Ukrainians found themselves on more than one side of the conflict. The absolute majority fought in the ranks of the Soviet army. Moscow enlisted more than 7 million Ukrainians of various nationalities—every fifth or sixth Soviet soldier came from Ukraine. Over 3.5 million were called up at the start of the war, and roughly as many again were drafted in the course of it. Many soldiers who survived the German onslaught and imprisonment in 1941 were released to their families and then seized and drafted immediately after the Red Army retook the areas where they lived. They became known as “men in black jackets,” as most were thrown into battle immediately after being drafted—without proper uniforms, training, ammunition, or even arms. As people who had stayed under German occupation, the military command regarded them as traitors and considered them expendable. Most of the “men in black jackets” died in combat on the outskirts of their towns and villages days after the long-awaited “liberation.”

  While the Soviets had no qualms about taking Ukrainians into the army and sending them into battle, the Germans long refused to enlist the men from the conquered territories in their regular units. They were welcomed, however, as auxiliaries—Hilfswillige (willing helpers), or Hiwis. An estimated 1 million former Soviet citizens joined Hiwi auxiliary units, with Ukrainians and natives of Ukraine constituting roughly one-quarter of that number. The policy began to change after Stalingrad as the Germans started running out of manpower. The newly formed non-German units came under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and became part of the Waffen-SS—the military branch of the SS (Schutzstaffel), Himmler’s brutal police force. Among Waffen-SS divisions were units recruited from almost every European nationality, including Frenchmen, Swedes, Russians, and Ukrainians. Close to 20,000 Ukrainians served in the course of the war in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, known as the Division Galizien.

  The German governor of the District of Galicia, Otto von Wächter, promoted the idea of creating the division. A native of Vienna, Wächter played the old Austrian game of supporting the Ukrainians against the Poles, and his rule witnessed an increase in the number of Ukrainian schools in the district. His German regime banned political organizations and hunted down OUN operatives but tolerated Ukrainian welfare, cultural, and even academic institutions—a striking difference from all other parts of Ukraine. Wächter believed that the Ukrainians were loyal enough to entrust with arms. In Berlin, however, many doubted both their loyalty and their racial status. Eventually the leadership decided to call the division Galician rather than Ukrainian, deeming Galicians, as former Austrian subjects, a more “civilized” and reliable group than Ukrainians in general. Berlin not only divided Ukraine along the old Russo-Austrian boundary but also conducted its policy toward different parts of the country following the old Austrian patterns. The division would consist only of Galicians, and its name and symbols would make no reference to Ukraine and Ukrainians.

  The recruitment of volunteers for the division, announced in April 1943, immediately caused a split in the nationalist underground: the Bandera faction was vehemently opposed, while followers of Bandera’s opponent, Colonel Andrii Melnyk, supported it. Mainstream Ukrainian political leaders, including bishops of the Catholic Church, were also divided. Those who supported the formation of the division thought as much in terms of Galicia’s Austrian past as did the Germans in deciding to create it. Back in 1918, the existence of a Ukrainian legion in the Austrian army had allowed the Ukrainians to train cadres and acquire arms that they used in the war for independence. Many in the Ukrainian community thought that history might repeat itself. Few were happy with German rule in Ukraine, even fewer shared the Nazi ideology, and no one believed in a German future after Stalingrad and Kursk. Apart from hard-nosed calculation, only their shared anticommunism brought the Ukrainian politicians and the German authorities together.

  Backed by mainstream Ukrainian politicians and presented to Ukrainian youth as an alternative to going to the forest to join the Bandera insurgents or staying under imminent Soviet occupation, enrollment in the division seemed a lesser evil to parents who sent their sons to join its ranks. Most would soon have reason to regret their choice. Trained and commanded by German officers, the division got its baptism by fire in July 1944 near the Galician town of Brody. It was both a christening and a wake. Soviet forces surrounded the Division Galizien, together with seven other German divisions. Total casualties reached almost 38,000, with 17,000 taken prisoner. The Division Galizien, which numbered close to 11,000 men, was virtually wiped out: only about 1,500 managed to escape. The Battle of Brody spelled the end of the division as a fighting force. Later that year, replenished with new recruits, it was sent first to Slovakia and then to Yugoslavia to fight partisans. There history repeated itself as farce, if not as tragedy—vintage 1918 memories of Ukrainian units in Austrian uniform securing Ukrainian independence gave way to 1944 realities of Ukrainians wearing Nazi swastikas and putting down the liberation movements of fellow Slavs.

  On July 27, 1944, the Red Army recaptured Lviv. The seizure of that city and western Ukraine presented Nikita Khrushchev and the political leadership of Soviet Ukraine with a new set of challenges. The main concern with Lviv was the possible formation of a Polish city government that would declare loyalty to the Polish government-in-exile in London. Khrushchev rushed into the city left open by the retreating Germans. “We were afraid that some local bodies might arise there that would turn out to be hostile to Soviet rule,” he remembered later. “We had to move quickly to put our people in charge of the city. And that is what we did.” In 1944, Lviv was a largely Polish city surrounded by a largely Ukrainian countryside. It became a bone of contention between Stalin on the one hand and the Polish government-in-exile, supported by the Western Allies, on the other. Khrushchev’s installation of Soviet administrative bodies meant that Stalin was not going to accommodate Polish hopes of keeping the city.

  Two days before the capture of Lviv, Stalin had bullied the members of the Polish Committee of National Liberation—the communist government-in-waiting created by the Soviets to replace the Polish government-in-exile in London—into agreeing to the future borders of the Polish state, which woul
d roughly follow the Molotov-Ribbentrop line of 1939 and leave Lviv on the Soviet side of the border. A letter Stalin had received a few days earlier from Khrushchev helped him in this effort. The Ukrainian party boss wanted to attach to his republic not only Lviv and other areas east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line but also the city of Kholm (Chełm), located in a predominantly Ukrainian-populated region—Khrushchev’s wife, Nina Petrivna Kukharchuk, came from that area. Stalin threatened his Polish clients with Khrushchev’s request, giving them to understand that if they did not agree to give up Lviv, he would push for Kholm as well. They caved in, taking Kholm and abandoning their claims to the Galician capital. Kholm, captured by the Red Army on July 23, became the first town west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line taken by the Soviets and the first seat of the Polish government dependent on Moscow.

  In September 1944, the communist-dominated Polish government and the Khrushchev-led administration of Soviet Ukraine signed an agreement on the new borders and an exchange of population intended to make the borders not only political but also ethnic boundaries. The idea behind the agreement was quite simple: Poles were to go west, to areas beyond the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, while Ukrainians would go east of that line. Stalin was eager to move not only borders but also peoples in order to stabilize future frontiers, get rid of minorities, and thereby forestall any possibility of irredentist movements in the Soviet territories. While the nationalists had planned to bring prewar borders into line with ethnic boundaries, Stalin took a further step, adjusting ethnic boundaries to fit the borders he established by force of arms.