He said:
Sometimes we are afraid to burn down a house, whereas it is absolutely necessary to burn it down without any hesitation. I don’t mean to say that our goal should be to burn houses down—the Soviet man never resolves any problems in such a manner, however, whenever this is necessary, when the right moment comes, then this is what we should do.26
He went on to say that should such facts emerge, “I’m not talking about [instances of] large-scale arson / then please take into account that the right moment had come and that it was necessary to do this.”27
The example of the above-mentioned statement by General Bragin shows that during the clashes the Internal Troops units were merciless towards their enemy: killing the wounded fighters was a common practice, and the soldiers did not bother about accidental victims. Another common practice was to break the guerrilla fighters’ resistance by setting fire to farms in which they were given shelter. This happened even in the situation when their presence was reported by the farm owner himself. The Soviets were entering areas in which, according to their propaganda, they could expect a warm welcome. Meanwhile, in reality, they met with distrust on the part of the local population, and they were constantly at risk of being attacked by guerrilla fighters. Frequently, the response of the NKVD Internal Troops was to treat all inhabitants of areas where the UPA was active as “criminals.” As a consequence, during their dragnet operations they often killed innocent people and later, in their reports, presented these victims as killed guerrilla fighters. For example, on 21 October 1944 fifteen NKVD soldiers came to the village of Kryvenke in Probizhna raion in Ternopil oblast’ to displace “families of criminals.” They were attacked by guerrilla fighters, lost three soldiers, and withdrew. On the next day, a unit commanded by major Polyaski and lieutenant Moldovanov arrived and carried out “a wild pogrom of the village.”28 Ten villagers: men aged between sixty and eighty, were shot dead (apparently the younger ones managed to escape), and forty-five farms were burnt. Five of the individuals who were killed were family members of Red Army servicemen.
Soviet documents contain descriptions of many such cases of lawlessness and abuse. It is likely that many more were never discovered by inspection bodies, and that this is why no accounts of these events can be found in the archival materials. In its resolution of 10 January 1945 even the Central Committee of the Ukrainian branch of the party admitted that “unacceptable incidents” had happened when the NKVD and the NKGB burnt down houses and killed individuals who had no links with the guerrilla movement, as a result of which they “discredited both themselves and the Soviet authorities.”29
The almost blatant violation of the USSR’s official legal norms by Soviet officers likely indicates that this was a common practice. The situation could not have been different—on the one hand, the Soviets were forced to maintain “the Soviet rule of law,” but on the other, they were expected to deliver immediate results in their fight against the guerrilla fighters and the underground movement. This meant that the number of individuals killed and arrested was expected to increase month by month. Reports sent to the headquarters were carefully read and thoroughly analyzed. Any decline in combat activity was immediately noticed and condemned. When faced with the choice whether to be “law-abiding and humanitarian” and expose oneself to the risk of being accused of ineptitude (or in the worst case—of supporting nationalists) or to break the law and expose oneself to the less likely risk of being accused of abuse, most people chose the latter option.
This behavior was welcomed by the Soviet leadership. On 10 January 1945, in Lviv, during a meeting of party activists and officials responsible for economic affairs in Lviv oblast’, the 1st secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Nikita Khrushchev explained the rationale for the repression in the following way:
They simply won’t respect us if we don’t take relevant measures, all members [of the resistance movement—GM] should be arrested, those who deserve it should be tried, or perhaps hanged, the remaining ones should be sent (read: deported—GM) and this will be the time when we will know that everything is OK and the people will know that we will take a hundred in exchange for a single individual... They need to be afraid of our revenge.30
It should be noted that the Soviets were aware that this type of behavior discouraged the local population from supporting the communist rule. Moreover, the local residents likely had the feeling that they were under occupation. This is why, at least from 1945, the Soviets tried to reduce the scale of lawlessness and abuse in order to win over a portion of residents of Volhynia and Galicia and engage them in the fight against the OUN-B and the UPA.
Although in 1944–45, the Soviets did not manage to eliminate the guerrilla movement, they did force the Ukrainian leadership to disband the bigger units. In the end, in 1946 the leadership of the OUN and the UPA decided to abandon the “insurgent-guerrilla fight against the superior strength of the communist regime”31 and switch to deep conspiracy. The authorities continued to fight these small groups of underground activists until the mid-1950s.
In 1944–45, the activity of the OUN-B and the UPA in the USSR was at its most intense. Over that period, according to Soviet statistics, the Ukrainian guerrilla movement carried out 6,600 armed operations. The strength of the UPA is confirmed by the fact that its units were capable of waging regular battles with the NKVD Internal Troops. According to official information, in 1944–45 the Soviets carried out 39,773 “chekist-military” operations against the OUN and the UPA. They killed 103,313 members of the underground movement and guerrilla fighters, detained 110,785 individuals, and 50,058 members of the OUN and the UPA emerged from the underground, having appeared before amnesty committees. In addition, 13,704 deserters and 83,284 individuals evading military service in the Red Army were arrested. These figures, plus the thirty thousand deported individuals, give a total of a staggering more than 390,000 people (it should be noted that around five million Ukrainians lived in the two regions).32
There is no doubt that the NKVD troops delivered the Ukrainian underground movement and the guerrilla movement a series of heavy and painful blows. Operations carried out by the NKVD Internal Troops contributed to a reduction in the scale of activity of the guerrilla movement, and most importantly they offered some degree of protection to the government apparatus built by the communists. This is why the activity of the NKVD Internal Troops should be viewed as an important factor that facilitated the post-war Sovietization of western Ukraine.
However, what is shocking is the scale of the acts of repression which accompanied the actions of a purely anti-guerrilla nature. They affected nearly every family in the western oblasts of Ukraine.
There is no doubt that the Soviets applied the principle of collective responsibility, repressing thousands of innocent people, often with only a loose or non-existent connection to the nationalist underground. Such ruthless treatment of the inhabitants of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia was not a result of the cruel methods of combat used by the OUN and the UPA. The Soviet troops showed similar brutality during counter-guerrilla operations conducted at that time in the Baltic states, and even in Poland, where in July 1945, during the operation in the Augustów Forests, at least 592 local inhabitants were arbitrarily declared “bandits” and subsequently executed without trial.33 It should also be noted that the involvement of such large forces and resources in Galicia and Volhynia by the Soviet repressive apparatus contradicts the popular thesis about the lack of social support for the OUN and UPA. Certainly, the underground could not have survived for so long without the broad support of the local population, who saw it as the only force resisting communist violence.
This is why in these regions the memory of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is the idealized memory