fighting activity until the mid-1950s. However, as early as the turn of 1945 and 1946, due to the activity of the NKVD, large guerrilla fighter units were demobilized and adopted the tactics known as “deep underground.” In this period, nearly four hundred thousand residents of this region, i.e., almost every family, were affected by Soviet repression. The memory of these acts of repression has contributed to the emergence of the cult of the UPA in present-day Ukraine.
Key words: NKVD Internal Troops, OUN and UPA, Stalinist-era repression, dragnet operations targeting guerrilla fighter movements, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, deportation.
The Internal Troops of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were an important element of the Soviet repressive apparatus. This unit was formed back in 1918 (as the Military Corps of the VChK (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission)) and from its early days was viewed as the armed wing of the communist party, intended to perform special tasks. The assumption was that it should be composed of soldiers who were particularly enthusiastic about communist ideals and ready to carry out repressions against anyone considered an enemy of the revolution.
The NKVD troops began to play a special part following Germany’s attack on the USSR. Pursuant to a Sovnarkom decision of 25 June 1941, these troops were responsible for ensuring security to the rear of the Red Army. To this end, the NKVD troops were expected to fight the enemy’s sabotage and disruption groups and criminal groups, track down spies, protect transportation routes, organize patrolling activities, and finally, prevent marauding and desertion. However, when the Red Army launched a counteroffensive, the NKVD troops were tasked with fighting the national guerrilla movements and carrying out acts of repression, i.e., arrests and deportations, targeting any “reactionary elements” in the areas under communist rule.2 Archival materials declassified following the collapse of the USSR indicate that the pacification of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia was particularly bloody. It affected as many as several hundred thousand individuals, including those killed, arrested, and deported. Despite its magnitude, until the end of the twentieth century this operation remained practically unknown to a wider public.
In the pre-war period, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were parts of the Polish state. They were inhabited by more than five million Ukrainians and one and a half million Poles (as well as around seven hundred and fifty thousand Jews, most of whom were murdered during the Holocaust). In September 1939, these areas were seized by and illegally annexed to the USSR; from 1941 they were occupied by the German army; and at present they make up the western part of the Ukrainian state. These areas saw the operation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which was formed in 1943 and was subordinate to the Banderite wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). Its purpose was to fight for the creation of an independent, united, and de facto mono-ethnic Ukrainian state.
Immediately after the German attack on the USSR, Ukrainian nationalists counted on the emergence of an independent state similar to Croatia ruled by Ustaše, and therefore they supported the attacking Wehrmacht by organizing a series of diversions. They also took part in numerous anti-Jewish pogroms.3 However, the members of the body established in Lwów/Lviv by the OUN, which proclaimed itself to be the Ukrainian government, was interned. Hitler decided to include Eastern Galicia in the Generalgouvernement—the German administrative unit for those parts of Poland which had been not annexed by Germany in 1939, whereas Volhynia became a part of “Reichskommissariat Ukraine.” In this situation, the Bandera followers also joined the anti-German underground. At the beginning of 1943, OUN-B created numerous partisan units called the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They began to fight against the German police forces, though in a limited way (which did not prevent the UPA making an agreement with German intelligence in 1944) and they started an open war with the communist partisans.
One dark episode in the history of this organization is the “anti-Polish operation” launched on 9 February 1943 with the intention of physically eliminating (by killing or expelling) the Polish population in all areas which—according to the OUN and the UPA—were to become parts of the future Ukrainian state. Brutal, genocidal purges lasted until the beginning of 1945, and as a result about 100,000 Poles were killed. At least 1–2 thousand Jews in hiding also fell victim to the OUN and the UPA.4
However, the leadership of the OUN and the UPA viewed the USSR as the biggest threat to Ukrainian independence aspirations. Mindful of the experience of the 1930s, when in Ukrainian lands belonging to the USSR the communists provoked artificial famine as a result of which three million people died, the leadership feared that Ukrainians living in Volhynia and Galicia might suffer the same fate. This is why the activity of the Ukrainian underground movement increased considerably once the front had moved through these areas. Local residents were called on to boycott the Red Army mobilization and prohibited from providing the obligatory in-kind contributions. UPA members killed local activists and attacked the newly-created village councils. The guerrilla movement spread into vast wooded areas and in both regions met with massive support on the part of the local Ukrainian population.
In mid-1944, the UPA reached the peak of its development. More than a hundred sotnias (the equivalent of a company or a squadron) had between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand guerrilla fighters. When this number is increased by groups of conspirators organized in units covering a major portion of Ukrainian villages and by numerous supporters, it can be assumed that UPA units were able to mobilize up to a hundred thousand individuals. The spirit of resistance was reinforced by rumors being spread suggesting that the Soviets intended to “physically annihilate” the Ukrainian nation and planned to displace all Ukrainians from the two regions to Siberia.
Although as early as the beginning of 1943 the communists were aware of the fact that the UPA existed (they knew it for example from reports provided by their own guerrilla movement), initially they tended to disregard or at least to underestimate the UPA’s strength and influence.5 One breakthrough moment was when General Nikolai Vatutin, a hero of the Battle of Stalingrad, was seriously wounded in an ambush laid on him by the UPA in February 1944 (he died of his injuries several weeks later in a hospital in Kyiv). In March 1944, the activity of the UPA was examined by the State Defense Committee of the USSR. A decision was made to boost forces responsible for fighting the guerrilla movement on the one hand, and carrying out large-scale repressions against members of the underground movement and their relatives, on the other. Recommendations were issued for example to organize public executions and to displace “criminals” and their families.6 To tarnish the image of the resistance movement, from the beginning in official language guerrilla fighters were referred to as “Ukrainian-German nationalists,” which was intended to suggest that the OUN and the UPA had close ties to the Nazis.
In Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, activities targeting the Ukrainian underground movement were commanded by People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Ivan Ryasnyi, his deputy Tymofiy Strokach, and People’s Commissar of Security Affairs of the USSR Sergei Savchenko. In October 1944, the Soviets managed to reconstruct the network of Soviet security bodies, i.e., the NKVD/NKGB, to which the NKVD Internal Troops were operationally subordinate.
It was to some degree natural for the NKVD Internal Troops to bear the main responsibility for carrying out operations targeting guerrilla fighters. By 25 March 1944, the 9th Ordzhonikidze Division and the 10th Sukhumi Division of the NKVD Internal Troops arrived in Volhynia and Podolia. They had just finished the deportations of the Chechen and the Kalmyk populations. Apart from that, eight Motor Rifle Brigades of the NKVD Internal Troops7 were ordered to go to Volhynia, alongside the 18th cavalry regiment and a special armored battalion from the 1st Feliks Dzerzhinskii Division. According to official statistics, each brigade was supposed to be composed of five battalions with a total of 4,050 soldiers,8