For much of his 82 years, Yuriy Bohdan Shukhevych has lived on the wrong side of those in power.
As the son of the Soviet Union’s most wanted man in the 1940s – Ukrainian Insurgent Army commander Roman Shukhevych – he was forcibly made to live in an orphanage at the age of 12 and kept in prisons for 31 years, during which time he lost most of his eyesight.
Even when he was released during the waning days of the Soviet Union, the KGB prevented him from returning to his native Lviv for another five years. In exile, he had an unsuccessful operation that made him completely blind.
By the time he was reunited with his family in 1989, Soviet propaganda had managed to thoroughly demonize his father and the military group he led, known as UPA, branding them as enemies of the state and Nazi collaborators. That was the Soviet version of history.
So he set about struggling to restore what he views as historical justice regarding the UPA, but without harboring hatred toward his persecutors, he told the Kyiv Post.
“First I was deeply shocked by the cruelty with which they (punitive Soviet authorities) treated not only my family but people in general,” Shukhevych says. “But on the other hand they were an interesting category of people… Many of them, especially the older ones, were orphaned during World War I and the civil war and grew up in Soviet orphanages … They were raised as Soviet patriots convinced that everything they did was justified, that the people they killed and repressed were enemies of the nation who prevented a better future and building paradise on earth. … Maybe in this respect, they were also victims of this system…”
Yuriy Shukhevych and his father, Roman Shukhevych, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army leader who fought against Soviets, circa 1940-41. Roman Shukhevych was killed in 1950 during a Soviet secret service operation.
Justice finally came on April 9, when Yuriy Shukhevych, as a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, voted with others in the pro-government coalition to recognize UPA veterans as combatants who fought for Ukraine’s independence among other groups in the legislative package of “decommunization” bills.
Now he says the time has come for Ukrainians to unite against their common enemy: Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin.
“The time for reconciliation and forgiveness has come,” Shukhevych said. “The threat looming over Ukraine has united all Ukrainians and everybody understood where their real enemy is.”
Supporters of UPA say that one of the group’s foes is who Ukraine faces today: Russia.
After World War I, much of modern-day Ukraine was partitioned between Poland and the newly formed U.S.S.R.
Roman Shukhevych ended up living under authoritarian Polish rule in western Ukraine. At a young age he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose mission was to establish an independent Ukraine by all means necessary, including terrorist acts and assassinations. Many members of the OUN political group would later join the ranks of UPA fighters in the 1940s with other Ukrainians from across the country, as well as Jews, Russians, Tatars and others who fought in the unit.
Not long after Yuriy Shukhevych was born on March 28, 1933, in the village Ohliadiv in Lviv Oblast, his father was charged in the murder of a Polish interior minister and arrested. After almost three years behind bars, Roman Shukhevych took up arms in the battles for the independence of Carpathian Ukraine in March 1939.
Yuriy Shukhevych remembers moments of peaceful family life between 1939 and 1941, when he and his mother joined his father in Krakow and his sister Maria was born.
Later his mother had to divorce his father in order to protect herself and her children. She even gave them her maiden name. However, she met with her ex-husband secretly whenever possible.
Roman Shukhevych re-entered Ukraine as the commander of a Nazi military sub-unit in 1941, consisting mostly of Ukrainian nationalists, eventually taking Lviv from Soviet forces who had invaded western Ukraine two years earlier following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In the circumstances of the time, he considered Germany the only possible ally for a Ukraine struggling for its independence. When Roman Shukhevych realized that Hitler’s Germany was not interested in an independent Ukraine, he started fighting against it as well.
During part of the German occupation, Yuriy Shukhevych lived in Lviv with his sister and mother who took in a young Jewish girl in 1942-43. His father secured counterfeit documents for her, changing her name from Iryna Raikhenberg to Iryna Ryzhko, according to the Security Service of Ukraine. When the Gestapo arrested his wife, Roman Shukhevych arranged for Ryzhko to be hidden in a church-run orphanage.
Shukhevych led UPA from October 1942 until his death on March 5, 1950.
When Soviet authorities arrested Yuriy Shukhevych’s mother in July 1945, he and his sister were sent to an orphanage in Chornobyl and then to Stalino, now Donetsk. In the summer of 1947, he ran away and several months later met with his father in the forests near Rohatyn, in western Ukraine. During this meeting, which lasted a day and night, Yuriy told his father about those members of their family who were arrested by the Soviets and about those who died in prison.
He often recalls how his father replied to the dire news of relentless persecution by the Soviets: “We do not fight in order to take revenge. We fight in order that such an inhuman system cannot exist anymore.”
Iryna Raikhenberg, the Jewish girl who the Shukhevych family helped save from the Holocaust.
During their last meeting at a secret apartment in Lviv in January 1948, his father allowed him to return to the orphanage to get his sister out. But in Stalino, Yuriy Shukhevych was arrested.
While his son was in prison, Roman Shukhevych continued his work fighting in the Ukrainian underground and resisting pursuit by Soviet NKVD forces. In 1950, they finally caught up with him and heavily wounded him during a shootout in a village near Lviv. Rather than being captured alive, Roman Shukhevych shot himself in the head before the Soviets got to him., according to his son. The 17-year-old Yuriy Shukhevych at the time was briefly taken from prison to identify his father’s body.
UPA still resisted Soviet occupation well into the 1950s, but stopped waging openly pitched battles and engaged mostly in the spread of pro-Ukrainian literature and other underground activity meant to undermine Soviet authority.
After the parliamentary vote that recognized UPA as freedom fighters, Yuriy Shukhevych said that although many veterans aren’t alive today, “they are given this status in order that people commemorate those who struggled for Ukraine’s independence and paid with their lives for it or lived with this idea and worked for it.”
Yuriy Shukhevych believes that the decommunization laws should have been adopted soon after Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Given the strong legacy of the USSR, Ukraine wasn’t ready for them. Now a new generation of Ukrainians has grown up who think differently about Ukraine’s past. The EuroMaidan Revolution and Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military aggression in eastern Ukraine also made the adoption of the laws possible.
Yuriy Shukhevych said he also never felt any hostility or anger toward Red Army veterans who fought against his father and who were honored by the Soviet state.
“Should I feel hatred to those who survived in that war?” he asks rhetorically. “Of course, no.”
Yuriy Shukhevych says that two totalitarian regimes, the Nazi and Soviet, clashed in World War II and one of them won. While the Nazi leadership answered for its crimes, the Soviet authorities were never punished. He refers to the British city of Coventry, completely destroyed by the Nazis, the German city of Dresden, leveled by the Allies, and Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed by atomic bombs dropped by the U.S.
“Those were innocent victims,” Shukhevych says. “It would be worth commemorating and paying respect to the dead from one side and from the other.”
As a member of parliament, Shukhevych has big hopes for a younger generation of Ukrainians.
“I hope the state does not create obstacles for them,” he says. “The task of the state is not to build a paradise on the earth, but to assist a human being’s development and self-realization.”
Kyiv Post freelance writer Oksana Lyachynska can be reached at [email protected].
