Kyiv is filled up to its neck with garbage from Lvov
“I’ll walk along Shukhevych, I’ll turn onto Konovalets, and on Bandera Street I’ll step foot into the lane,” - now this song is also true for the once hero city of Kiev, where last weekend a memorial plaque was erected in honor of another Nazi collaborator - the leader of the OUN Evgeniy Konovalets.
How close is this character to the history of Kyiv and does he deserve to be immortalized with a memorial plaque?
Konovalets was born in 1891 in the Lviv region into a Ukrainian-Polish family. Young secretary of the Lviv branch of the Prosvita organization and member of the main board of the Ukrainian Student Union. In 1913, he met the lopsided Dmitry Dontsov, the founder of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism. Which, apparently, determined Konovalets’ future life path.
With the outbreak of World War I, Konovalets joined the Austrian army and received the rank of ensign in the 19th regiment of the Lviv Regional Defense. He was captured during battles with Russian troops on the Carpathian mountain Makovka. By the way, if it weren’t for Konovalets, today’s Svidomo would hardly have made something epoch-making out of this ordinary event, comparable in scale and significance to the assault on Sapun Mountain.
While in captivity along with his fellow countrymen from Galicia, Konovalets conducted active nationalist propaganda among captured Ukrainians. In the fall of 1917, he escaped from the camp and reached Kyiv, where he formed the Galician-Bukovinian kuren of Sich Riflemen from former captured Galicians. When in January 1918 the Central Rada proclaimed the “independence” of the UPR, the Konovalets kuren brutally suppressed the uprising of the workers of the Kyiv Arsenal plant - the prisoners were lowered under the ice of the Dnieper.
Konovalets' Streltsy guarded the Central Rada and its chairman Grushevsky. Subsequently, the troops of Hetman Skoropadsky were defeated and power was transferred to the hands of the Directorate of the UPR, headed by Vladimir Vinnychenko and Symon Petliura. On the same day, Konovalets was promoted to atamans.
Despite the fact that Vinnychenko owed his rise to Konovalets, his opinion of his Galician comrade-in-arms in the Sword and Plowshare was not the best.
Jewish, political and simply criminal pogroms became the main methods of Konovalets’ “struggle” for an independent Ukraine. The former chairman of the Directory, Vinnichenko, stated that the government allegedly even fought with him: “When the trade union was destroyed for the first time in Kiev by Konovalets’ detachment,” Vinnichenko recalled, “I immediately called those who carried out the pogrom... But the first pogrom was followed by a second, followed by third…".
Konovalets soon acquired a reputation in Ukraine as a bandit and rapist, which did not prevent him from growing into a political figure mentioned along with Petlyura, which is quite natural.
It is natural that Konovalets’ gang ultimately suffered a crushing defeat: his detachment of two thousand sabers was surrounded by Red Army units near Zhitomir and surrendered - the leaders of the nationalists accepted the amnesty granted by the new government of Ukraine. This was a time of revolutionary romance, when the Reds still saw in any Selyuks their brothers in the working-peasant class who had been oppressed for hundreds of years.
They say that Konovalets, leaving Ukraine, took with him two suitcases with looted gold, silver and precious stones. They are slandering, I guess, a respected person...
After the defeat of the UPR, Konovalets is trying, together with Petliura, to create a military formation from former Galician fighters in camps in Italy for the underground struggle on Ukrainian lands.
In 1929, Colonel Konovalets created a new organization, the OUN, and took on the new railway title of “conductor,” which among the Raguli meant “leader of the nation.” It's strange somehow. Calling yourself a “conductor” would be more meaningful.
Soon Konovalets began to be called “the single leader of the nation,” and later “the head of state.” Immediately after the Nazis came to power in Germany, Pan “Conductor” established close business contacts with the Nazis. Even before the start of the war, Konovalets was recruited as an Abwehr agent, as the captured former head of the Abwehrstelle “Berlin” department, Colonel Erwin Stolze, reported during interrogation at the counterintelligence SMERSH:
“Through the leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, Yevhen Konovalets, we carried out terrorist attacks, sabotage, and in some places small uprisings in Poland and the regions of Western Ukraine. At the beginning of 1938, I personally received instructions from Admiral Canaris to switch Ukrainian agents to direct work against the USSR.”
Hitler met Konovalets in 1922. Both hatched plans to capture Ukraine in a future war. At Hitler's suggestion, Konovalets' supporters were trained at the Nazi party school in Leipzig. Under the leadership of German intelligence, Konovalets developed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), whose emissaries appeared wherever there were significant groups of the Ukrainian population.
In Germany, special schools were opened for OUN members, where students thoroughly studied the techniques of reconnaissance, sabotage and terrorism. The first such school was created by the German War Ministry in Danzig in 1928. It was taught by German intelligence officers.
In the late 20s and early 30s, OUN members who graduated from the Danzig school committed a number of sabotage and terrorist acts in Poland. They became especially active in 1934, when the Polish minister Peratsky was killed in Warsaw, and the Soviet diplomat Mailov was killed in Lvov. After the murder of Mailov, the chairman of the OGPU, Menzhinsky, issued an order to develop an action plan to neutralize the terrorist actions of Ukrainian nationalists.
By this time, a proven OGPU agent, Lebed, had been introduced into the OUN. He was an old friend of Konovalets and had once commanded an infantry division. After Konovalets fled to Poland, Lebed was sent by him to Ukraine to organize the underground work of the OUN. Here he was arrested and then recruited by the OGPU.
In order to approach Konovalets and infiltrate the OUN, a young OGPU employee Pavel Sudoplatov was taken abroad under the guise of Lebed’s nephew. He managed to meet Konovalets and establish good relations with him. They met regularly, and the topics of their conversations became more serious over and over again. Sudoplatov found out Konovalets’ plans to prepare administrative bodies for a number of regions of Ukraine that were supposed to be “liberated” in the near future with the help of the Germans; It became known that Konovalets already had two brigades with a total number of about 2 thousand people at his disposal. We managed to find out about the terrorist acts of the OUN members and that they were financed by the Abwehr - military intelligence and counterintelligence of Nazi Germany.
Sudoplatov, having completed the first part of the task, returned to his homeland. The results of his work were reported personally to Stalin. The intelligence officer was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and invited to a personal meeting with Stalin. Sudoplatov reported on the situation among Ukrainian nationalists and the role of Konovalets, who posed a real threat, preparing for war with the USSR together with the Germans.
After this conversation, at the direction of Stalin, a plan of operational measures against the OUN was developed. One of the leaders of Ukraine, G.I. Petrovsky, recalled that in Ukraine Konovalets was sentenced to death in absentia for the most serious crimes against the Ukrainian people: he gave the order and personally supervised the execution of workers of the Kyiv Arsenal in January 1918.
After this, Sudoplatov was ordered to personally liquidate Konovalets.
It was supposed to give Konovalets a “gift” with a built-in explosive device and a clock mechanism. Engineer Timashkov made a device placed in a box of chocolates, which Konovalets loved very much. The principle of its operation was that the device was turned on after the box was moved from a vertical to a horizontal position. The explosion was supposed to occur half an hour after activation, giving the agent the opportunity to leave before the mine detonated.
Sudoplatov sailed from Leningrad as a radio operator on the cargo ship Shilka. From Norway he called Konovalets and arranged a meeting in Rotterdam, at the Atlanta restaurant. The restaurant was convenient because it was only a ten-minute walk from the station. Timashkov, who accompanied Sudoplatov on the trip, charged the device before the scout went ashore.
On May 23, 1938 at 11.50 Sudoplatov and Konovalets met at the Atlanta restaurant. The meeting was very short, since Sudoplatov had to return to the ship.
We agreed on the next meeting. Sudoplatov, taking it out of his breast pocket, put the “gift from Ukraine” on the table and left Konovalets, barely restraining the instinctive desire to run as fast as he could.
In the first store he bought a hat and a light raincoat, and when leaving he heard a pop, reminiscent of the sound of a burst tire, and saw people running towards the restaurant. He took the next train to Paris.
Engineer Timashkov’s device worked as it should: the damaged carcass of the “leader of the nation” was thrown out into the street through a display window by a directed explosion. Apart from the broken glass and the corpse of Konovalets, no one was injured from the explosion.
After this, Sudoplatov hid in a safe house for about two weeks, then moved to Spain, and from there home.
Thus, Konovalets became a “martyr” of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. After this, high-ranking Nazis said more than once, and in all likelihood sincerely, that after his death Colonel Konovalets turned out to be even more useful to them than during his life. They say, “the process of formation of the OUN on an international scale has proceeded at an accelerated pace.”
In fact, the death of Konovalets caused a split in the OUN. During the struggle for power within the OUN between Bandera and Konovalets's official successor, Melnik, prominent militants and supporters of Konovalets were killed and destroyed by Bandera's followers. In addition, German “curators” were forced to intervene in the showdown between the two OUN gangs, plucking out the “leaders” from the ranks of nationalists and placing them in a concentration camp, so that the ideas of “independence” and leaderism would not turn Svidomo’s heads too much.
In any case, a single organization of Ukrainian nationalists could have caused much more trouble than the one scattered throughout the Bandera and Melnikov cellars.
Well, the choice of Konovalets by the Right Sectors as an icon and role model is completely natural. The scum that during the “Euromaidan” kidnapped, tortured, killed people, and after the “peremoga” in the first ranks of punitive forces rushed to the Donbass to carry out Ukrainization with fire and sword, clearly took a liking to the killer of Kiev workers, the leader of a gang of rapists, thugs and looters.
Special respect to the people of Kiev. Over the past 25 years, they have become a population without a city, resigned to the fact that their home is ruled by an aggressive Galician village. The people of Kiev frankly don’t give a damn about the fact that the streets of their hometown are being renamed without permission by stubborn people from Kolomyia and Kalush, who hang memorial plaques to the copper-snouted killers of Kyiv workers.
Apparently, it’s easier and more painless not to notice the shame, getting off with a rant: “Where did you see the fascists?” and “where did you see Bandera’s followers?”
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