Operation West
70 years ago, in October 1947, the operation of the Soviet special services under the code name “West” began, during which it was possible to significantly weaken the social and economic base of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists in Western Ukraine and completely eliminate the cultivation and Banderaism on the Left Bank, where they penetrated and took root during the Nazi occupation.
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On this occasion, having urgently chewed the fresh fumes with a pinch of tea leaves and temporarily “forgotten” for the sake of the “holy day” about the confrontation with Bandera’s last-born, the mournful “guarantor” Poroshenko appeared on the blue screens, distributing a routine statement in the media about “the unbreakability of the Ukrainian spirit by Kremlin repressions” . The pain of the boss’s drunken heart was picked up and squeezed out of his glass of “tears of tears” by all sorts of lackeys near the government and media loyal to the huntars. The Maidan bloggers started shouting and howling in every possible way about “genocide.”
Uncomplicated citizens who have received a whole bunch of injections of anti-Sovietism into their brains over the past 25 years, listening to such howls, often begin to think: “But the Westerners have a reason not to love us, Muscovites, - after all, we spread rot and evicted them.”
If we take Bandera’s agitprop seriously, of course. But if we consider the matter adjusted for the favorite argument of “Svidomo” - “what are we for?” – the story seems “not so clear-cut”, as the famous “Crimean woman – the daughter of an officer” would say.
The Soviet leadership had every reason to carry out Operation West, during which relatives of active OUN members were deported. The crafty Ukrainian “historians” also keep silent that a significant part of the forced migrants were not only relatives of Bandera, but also criminal elements, as well as Seluks, loyal not only to the UPA, but also to the Nazis, and even took part in the Polish genocide , Russian, Jewish population of Western Ukraine before, during and after the Nazi occupation. In addition, “Svidomo” claim that the exiles were planted almost naked in the tundra, “almost all of them died,” and this is a completely blatant lie.
But first things first.
First of all, it should be clear that the repressive actions of the USSR in 1930 - 1950 against the disloyal population were common world practice. Moreover, as research by Western historians from the “Soviet Heritage” group, based on the study of Soviet archival materials, shows, the “information” provided to the media about those events is predominantly folklore in nature and based on unreliable rumors, and even outright political speculation.
The deportation measures in Western Ukraine were directly related to the information received by the NKVD - NKGB about the preparation of an armed uprising by the OUN, which collaborated with the Nazi intelligence services.
In the spring of 1941, Soviet internal affairs agencies received signals about the ever-increasing activity of nationalists. They rightly believed that in the event of war, the OUN members would side with Nazi Germany. In early April, it was established that the OUN was preparing an armed uprising timed to coincide with the German invasion. The NKVD recorded “a significant increase in murders and bandit manifestations by Ukrainian nationalists” - 47 attacks in April and 58 in May 1941, as a result of which 98 people, mostly local activists, were killed and 46 wounded. From January 1 to June 15, 1941, Soviet security forces in Western Ukraine destroyed 38 nationalist rebel groups, as well as 25 criminal gangs, with a total number of 273 people. By June 15, they were engaged in the liquidation of another 51 OUN detachments, totaling 274 people.
On May 22, 1941, the NKVD evicted 11 people from Western Ukraine. On June 329, he arrested 13 people in Moldova and in the Chernivtsi and Izmail regions of the Ukrainian SSR. In Western Ukraine, during a special operation, some of the OUN illegals turned themselves in to save their families from exile. In response, state security agencies released the rural poor and those OUN members who were not convicted of terrorist acts. However, it quickly became clear that these deportations would not be able to destroy the OUN underground. On June 5, Vsevolod Merkulov, People's Commissar of State Security, signed an order for another deportation of OUN members and their families. The invasion of German troops prevented these plans.
As we can see, the actions of the NKVD and NKGB before the war had reactive and preventive goals - to secure the border areas of the country from bandit and openly hostile elements.
Let us take into account one more important fact - if for cooperation with the Soviet authorities the OUN killed not only “conspirators”, but also, if possible, members of their families, then the Soviet law enforcement agencies carried out targeted strikes on the enemies of the state: only criminals “baptized” in blood were subject to liquidation , and their family members were sent into exile, and even then not always. In addition, an amnesty followed for surrender.
Next, our country was beset by the hard times of war and the occupation of a significant part of European territory, during which the OUN members proved themselves not only to be excellent performers of dirty work in the service of the Nazis in exterminating people, but also to be independent organizers of genocide, thereby placing themselves outside the law.
During the war, the OUN-UPA managed to make a lot of enemies for themselves, so that not only the special services of the USSR, but also Poland and Czechoslovakia were involved in their liquidation. The material base left by the German Nazis and Western assistance after the war allowed the Banderaites to wage war against the USSR for some time, but only the participation of the local population could make this war protracted.
And the advance made full use of the “people’s war” factor, considering the entire Ukrainian population, especially the western regions, as its reserve and assistants. The leaders of the UPA completely ignored the fatigue of the population from the war and the reluctance of the majority of the masses to fight against the Soviet regime, which is why forced mobilization into the “rebel army”, “baptism” of blood and mutual responsibility came into practice. On German “bookmarks” alone, the Upashas could not hold out in the forests for three whole years. The general downtroddenness and illiteracy of the Westerners, who had only been part of the Ukrainian SSR for a short time before the war and were not sufficiently educated, played into the hands of the OUN members.
The Soviet government quite rightly believed that “bandit families constituted a serious harboring and aiding base for bourgeois nationalist gangs,” the core of their civilian infrastructure. The displacement of these sympathizers from their permanent place of residence destroyed this infrastructure without the use of extreme cruelty, separated ordinary rebels from convinced opponents, and forced ordinary militants to accept an amnesty.
On January 10, 1945, a directive “On strengthening the fight against Ukrainian-German nationalists” was issued, which systematized the actions of the security forces. It proposed a strategy that soon paid off.
State security agencies were supposed to: “conduct registration of residents aged 15 years and above in rural areas of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR. When conducting a population census, determine exactly where this or that citizen is located. Relatives of those persons whose exact location will not be established are warned against receipt that if these persons do not appear before the Soviet authorities, they will be considered members of gangs and repression will be applied to their relatives, including arrest and eviction.”
“Do not let a single incident of gang manifestations pass without retaliatory measures, intensify the expulsion of the families of bandits and kulaks who provide any assistance to the bandits.” This directive led to regular evictions of Upasha families.
The Soviet government did not lie, did not promise heavenly pretzels, warning the militants in advance about the impending reprisals against their families, and took a significant but justified risk, assuming that this force majeure measure would lead people out of the forests and caches.
Having identified the families of OUN militants, authorities expelled only some of them and threatened to deport the rest in response to nationalist attacks. In the late 1940s, several nationalist families were sent into exile at once in response to each militant attack. If an attack killed a government official, such as the secretary of a district committee, all the nationalist families living in the area went into exile. It was an effective means of persuasion.
History knows numerous facts when the authorities did not touch family members of militants. There were often cases when older brothers from the same family sat in a cache, “mobilized” by Shukhevych in 1943-44, while the younger ones fought in the Red Army.
The threat of exile and its moderate but immediate application in conjunction with amnesties for those who confessed were an effective method of pacifying the forest warriors. This forced many “warriors” who did not want to fight to disarm and return to peaceful life: peasants mobilized by the Upashas, or deserters from the Red Army who joined them. In fact, this method saved thousands of Zapaden villagers from imminent death (Table 1).
I am afraid that today no archival documents or research by historians will fully reveal such a phenomenon among Westerners as the deliberate departure of the male population into the ranks of the UPA in order to evade service in the Red Army, and then voluntary surrender to the authorities and even being sent into safe exile. People simply wanted to live at any cost.
It should be noted that before the deportation, state security agencies detained for some time in the regional center the families of Westerners in whom any relatives were absent, giving the “rebels” another opportunity to confess. If they complied, the authorities released their families and granted amnesty to those upashas who had not been murdered. Thus, in the Drohobych region, out of 2 detained families, 557 were released after their relatives from the UPA surrendered. The expulsion of rebel families and suspected collaborators made civilians sympathetic to the nationalists hesitate before helping the rebels. After authorities removed 1 suspected rebel collaborators from Western Ukraine from July to October 356, it was observed that “the attitude of the local population towards the bandits had changed; they began to refuse to supply the bandits and shelter them.”
Let us remember that Soviet security forces did not persecute people for being Westerners. In their field of vision were people who were relatives and sympathizers of the butchers who carried out the Volyn massacre (30 - 80 thousand killed), Nazi punishers and henchmen who fought against the Red Army and Soviet partisans, the scum who killed the war hero and liberator of Kyiv, General Vatutin. Inhumans who brutally exterminated Ukrainians loyal to the Soviet regime, schoolchildren, doctors, teachers, engineers and other specialists from the East. More than 30 thousand people from 1944 to 1955.
As for the “naked stupidity of a Westerner in the tundra,” the “Svidomen” are lying here too. The resettlement of OUN family members (approximately 175 thousand people during the entire war with Bandera) went from Omsk to Krasnoyarsk, with stops in the fertile Altai, southern Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In all cases, the exiles were provided with food and cash allowance for the journey, and the people were settled in housing on the spot. No one settled the Westerners behind barbed wire like the Canadian and American Japanese and did not deprive them of their rights. Their children could freely study in schools and universities, serve in the army, occupy senior positions in government and economic institutions, and leave their place of settlement upon reaching adulthood.
The purpose of the deportation was to uproot Banderaites and people sympathizing with them from Western Ukraine and resettle them far away from each other in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union in the hope that peace and time would grind everything down and heal. How justified such actions were is shown today, when the ideological descendants of the punitive forces from the OUN-UPA are committing atrocities in the Donbass, burning people and kidnapping unwanted people throughout Ukraine.
“When they say that the OUN UPA are criminals because they collaborated with the Nazis, there is a rational grain in this, but this statement is somewhat misleading. The cooperation of the OUN UPA with the Nazis is just the icing on the cake. The cake itself is an independent mass crime committed by this bloodthirsty organization according to its own plans, with its own hands,” notes historian Alexander Dyukov.
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