The proclamation was read by the head of the temporary government Jaroslaw Stetsko. The Germans insisted that Stetsko rescind the proclamation. When he refused he was arrested, incarcerated, sent first to Berlin, then to the Saksenhausen concentration camp, where he spent most of the war years like his leader and colleague, Stepan Bandera.
After the war, Stetsko headed the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an international structure composed of leaders of the many nations that had fallen captive to the USSR. From 1968 for almost 20 years, Stetsko headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (Stepan Bandera faction). Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was that he managed to place the struggle against the USSR and the evils of communism on the international agenda.
Stetsko was the subject of much Soviet propaganda. Beginning with the late 1960s in such books as “Hopeful of Foreign Bayonets,” “Mouthpieces of the Cold War” in the 1970s, and newspapers such as “News from Ukraine,” “Literary Ukraine,” and the satirical journal “Pepper” throughout, Stetsko was branded a bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist, a war criminal, a warmonger, an imperialist Western agent and even a Zionist advocate.
In 1975, “Literary Ukraine” wrote about the apparent imminent ending of the Cold War, intimating that the world was establishing at last a political climate conducive to settling the most complex international disputes through negotiations.
Yet Stetsko had maintained his hostile attitude, opined the Soviet publication. The Soviets hearkened to 25 years earlier when at an ABN news conference in Frankfurt, Stetsko allegedly had stated: “Now, it’s too late to consider how to avoid war. Now we need to prepare in order to win it.”
The Soviet newspaper then went on to add some creativity attributing it to Stetsko and the ABN leadership: “(they) wrote more than one hateful military slogan which included an appeal to imperialistic leaders with tearful pleas, ‘Drop an atomic bomb on the Kremlin.’”
In June of 1977, the Soviet satirical magazine “Pepper” carried a full page dual caricature of Stetsko with a Swastika and the Trident from 1941 on one side and the Star of David and the Trident from 1977 on the other. The canard labeled Stetsko a war criminal and anti-Semite who supported Hitler’s policy against the Jews in 1941 but in 1977 became a Zionist, appearing at Zionist rallies, bemoaning the persecution of Jews in the USSR.
Stetsko’s 1941 proclamation of Ukraine’s independence was endorsed by both the Ukrainian Catholic and the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches.
The Catholic Church was represented at the assembly by then Bishop Josef Slipyj who went on to head the church after the death of Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky. Subsequently Metropolitan Slipyj was arrested and spent 17 years in Soviet gulags.
Upon his release through the intervention of the Vatican and U.S. President John F. Kennedy, he came to the West. Stetsko befriended then-Cardinal Slipyj after his arrival in the West and for many years served as a most influential secular adviser. Stetsko had always been close to the Catholic Church since he was the son of a Ukrainian Catholic priest and, himself, deeply religious.
In the 1970s, Cardinal Slipyj introduced the concept of the Ukrainian Catholic Church Patriarchate. Stetsko was one of the first to embrace the idea and began addressing Cardinal Slipyj as Patriarch. In a publication by the notorious KGB affiliated “Ukraine Society” in 1973 entitled “Mouthpieces of the Cold War,” the Soviets lambasted Stetsko and his Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists for taking over control of even religious publications in order to “support non-existential positions in all major world religions – the Vatican, the World council of churches, Buddhism and the like.” The Ukrainian Patriarchate was a non-existential position for enemies of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.
Stetsko was born 100 years ago in 1912. For many in my generation he was a source of inspiration, one to emulate, an indefatigable and principled warrior. He was despised by both the Nazis and the Soviets. He was determined to attain a just and independent Ukraine. Sadly, he died five years before the 1991 independence proclamation, but after the Chornobyl disaster. Before his death he insisted that Chornobyl would be the demise of the USSR. Like Moses, he never entered the “promised land,” but he saw it before others.
Askold S. Lozynskyj was executive vice president from 1990-1992 and president from 1992-2000 of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.
