Melnykites

Main article: Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists

Melnykites (Ukrainian: Мельниківці, romanized: Melnykivtsi) is a colloquial name for members of the OUN-M or OUN(m), a faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) that arose out of a split with the Banderite faction in 1940. The term derives from the name of Andriy Melnyk (1890–1964), the leader of the OUN formally elected to the post in August 1939 following the May 1938 assassination of the previous leader, Yevhen Konovalets, by the NKVD.

Since 2012, the OUN(m) has been led by activist and historian Bohdan Chervak.

Background

Melnyk, c.1940

A veteran of the First World War (1914-1917) and the Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1921) serving as a senior officer, otaman, and the chief of staff for the Sich Riflemen and later the wider Ukrainian People's Army (UNA), Andriy Melnyk, retaining the rank of colonel, was a founding member of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929, as well as having cofounded its predecessor, the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) in 1920.

Despite having largely stepped back from UVO and OUN operations since his imprisonment by the Polish authorities from 1924-28 whereafter he chaired the OUN Senate, a consultative body that sought to provide ideological guidance, Melnyk was selected by the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (the OUN's executive command in exile, hereon the PUN) after they struggled to select a leader from their ranks in the aftermath of former UVO and OUN leader Yevhen Konovalets's assassination in May 1938, while Melnyk claimed to have received a letter from Konovalets naming him as his preferred successor.

Melnyk was chosen for his more moderate and pragmatic stance; his supporters generally favoured Vyacheslav Lypynsky's conservatism and admired Italian Fascism but publicly distanced themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's contemporary writings, by this time significantly influenced by Nazism. Melnyk's supporters were mostly made up of an older, more cautious generation that largely composed the exiled PUN and had spent their formative years under the auspices of the Ukrainophilism movement with many having fought in the failed independence war whereafter Ukrainophilism was supplanted among radical nationalists, as opposed to the moderate Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance, by Dontsov's brand of integral nationalism, considered by many scholars to be by this point a form of fascism. A younger and more radical faction of the OUN heavily inspired by Dontsov's works and the Nazi movement were dissatified with Melnyk's leadership and demanded a more charismatic and radical leader. This generational divide, that had been largely up until then successfully managed by Konovalets's leadership, led the younger more radical generation to coalesce around Stepan Bandera, the previous head of OUN propaganda from 1931-34 who was in prison for his role in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and had attained notoriety for the publicity that arose from the 1935 Warsaw and 1936 Lviv trials.

Prior to the split, Melnyk and Bandera had been recruited into the Abwehr from 1938 onwards, assigned the codenames 'Consul I' and 'Consul II' respectively, whereby the PUN collaborated with Nazi military intelligence to plan the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 that sought to disrupt the Polish rear during a German invasion. In a Vienna meeting in late 1939, Melnyk was directed by Wilhelm Canaris to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a Ukrainian state which was completed by Mykola Stsiborskyi, the OUN's chief theorist who had at one time advocated for the assimilation of Ukrainian Jews, and encompassed the establishment of a totalitarian state under a Vozhd (Col. Melnyk) with the Ukrainian-Jewish population singled out for distinct and ambiguous citizenship laws.

Split with the Banderite faction

In January 1940, and following his release from prison during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland that unified Ukrainian lands under the Soviet Union, Bandera travelled to Rome with a series of demands, among them the replacement of certain members of the leadership council of the PUN (hereon the Provid) with members of the younger generation, though this was rejected by Melnyk and Bandera subsequently made a challenge to the PUN on 10 February by establishing a 'revolutionary' Provid in Nazi-occupied Kraków, turning down Melnyk's offer to make him head of the home command in Soviet-controlled Galicia. On April 5, Melnyk and Bandera met again in Rome in a final unsuccessful attempt to resolve the growing divide between the two emerging factions with the OUN subsequently fracturing into two rival organisations: the Melnykites (Melnykivtsi or the OUN(m)) and the Banderites (Banderivtsi or the OUN(b)), with Melnyk continuing efforts in vain to try to repair the schism.

Of the three Provid members that Bandera demanded be replaced, he and his followers' accusations encompassed Omelian Senyk losing OUN documents to the Czech and subsequently Polish police as chief administrative officer to Konovalets in the run up to Bandera's and fellow OUN members' trials in 1935 and 1936, Mykola Stsiborskyi (the OUN's chief theorist) having a debate in passing with a Communist agent that attempted to recruit him, and Yaroslav Baranovsky's brother being an agent for the Polish police.

Latent tensions about the ethnic background of Richard Yary, a central member of the OUN(b) behind the split, and the only member of the Provid to join it, whose wife was born an Orthodox Jew and who had been the subject of corruption allegations dating back to UVO cooperation with Weimar Germany, and the personal life of Mykola Stsiborskyi, whose third wife was Jewish, descended into acrimony between the two factions that would continue to trade barbs and rebuttals well into July 1941, regularly publishing polemics throughout the early 1940s. It's possible that an alleged spat between Stsiborskyi and Yaroslav Stetsko whereby Stsiborskyi dismissed Stetsko from his duties in preparation for the 1939 Second Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists held in Rome, asserting that he was unable to complete his duties, contributed to the tensions between Bandera's supporters and the Provid. In an August 1940 letter addressed to Melnyk, Bandera stated that he would accept the colonel's authority if he removed 'traitors' from the PUN, especially Stsiborskyi whom he lambasted for possessing an absence of "morality and ethics in family life" and for marrying a "suspicious" Russian-Jewish woman.

Intending to play the Ukrainian and Polish populations off of one another, Nazi officials sanctioned Volodymyr Kubijovyč, integrally supported by OUN(m) Provid member and former UNA colonel Roman Sushko, to set up the collaborationist Ukrainian Central Committee in April 1940 tasked with administering social and cultural services in the Ukrainian ethnographical area of the General Government, and while it officially remained neutral in the split of the OUN, it tacitly supported Melnyk's faction.

In March 1941, the Banderite faction held the Second Grand Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Nazi-occupied Kraków where Bandera was proclaimed providnyk of the OUN (technically the OUN(b)), having declared the original 1939 Second Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists that had officially ratified Melnyk as leader to have been arear of internal laws. Though Melnyk received widespread support among Ukrainian émigrés abroad, Bandera's position on the ground in Western Ukraine and the demographics of his base meant that he gained control of the vast majority of the local aparatus in the region. The OUN(m) also retained the support of Ukrainian nationalists in northern Bukovina, which had been annexed by the Soviets in mid-1940 and was later recaptured by German and Romanian forces in mid-1941, providing the organisation with approximately 500 much-needed generally younger members. Effective Soviet repression in Central and Eastern Ukraine meant that most of the Ukrainians living in these regions were unaware of the split in the OUN, benefitting the more active Banderites in their battle for legitimacy.

The Second World War and collaboration with the Nazis

See also: Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany and Polish–Ukrainian conflict (1939–1947)

Map of the Reich Commissariat of Ukraine, the 1941-1942 Axis advance into the Soviet Union, and the initial 1941 OUN(m) expeditionary groups.^:78

From their bases in Berlin and Kraków, the OUN(m) and OUN(b) formed expeditionary and marching groups, intending to follow the Wehrmacht into Ukraine during the June 1941 German invasion fo the Soviet Union to recruit supporters and set up local governments with the OUN(b) having formed the Nachtigall and Roland battalions under the Abwehr in February. In July, 500 OUN(m) members penetrated into Ukraine in the form of expeditionary groups, each tasked with a specific route, from bases organised on the territory of the General Government whereafter they organised municipal administrations, civic institutions, schools, and newspapers. In contrast to the OUN(b) that unilaterally proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Lviv on 30 June, the OUN(m) avoided such actions and sought to gain favour with the SS and the Wehrmacht, serving as interpreters and advisors, though Melnyk himself would have his movements restricted to Berlin under house arrest in mid-1941. The day after the Banderite proclaimation, 3,000 bodies were found in basements around Lviv seemingly killed by the NKVD, leading to anti-Jewish pogroms in which some Melnykites participated. Following the recapture of northern Bukovina by Romanian and German forces in mid-1941, the OUN(m) formed the 700-strong Bukovinian Battalion (Bukovynskyi Kurin) under the Abwehr in August, styled off of its namesake that operated from Jan-Oct 1919 during the independence war and hoped to later provide the basis for a Ukrainian army. The Bukovinian Battalion subsequently merged with Transcarpathian OUN(m) formations in Horodenka, Stanislav Oblast on 13 August, numbering approximately 1,500, whereafter it shadowed the Wehrmacht's advance on the way to Kyiv and contributed to the formation of local self-government bodies with some members remaining in Podolia and others joining Ukrainian Auxiliary Police units. Having led the first OUN(m) expeditions into Central and Eastern Ukraine and set up an administration in Zhytomyr, supplanting an embryonic OUN(b) administration and which served as the centre of OUN(m) activity in Ukraine, Mykola Stsiborskyi and Omelian Senyk, both key members of the eight-strong Provid, were assassinated in the city on 30 August, gunned down by Stephan Kozyi, allegedly an OUN(b) member from Western Ukraine whereafter the Nazi authorities began a wider crackdown on the OUN(b). Shortly before they were killed, Stsiborskyi and Senyk met with Taras Bulba-Borovets in Lviv and agreed to send him a number of trained officers for the UPA-Polissian Sich.

Ukrainian nationalists in Lviv in the summer of 1941.
Back row (L-R): Mykhailo Mykhalevych (PUN), Omelyan Koval (OUN(b)), and Yuriy Rusov (Hetmanite).
Front row (L-R): PUN-OUN(m) members Orest Chemerynskyi, Olena Teliha, and Ulas Samchuk.

Despite a secret directive by OUN(b) leadership not to allow Melnykite leaders to reach Kyiv (which Melnykites referred to as a 'death sentence'), a group of OUN(m) members reached Kyiv before the Banderites in the days following the city's capture by the Germans on 19 September 1941, supplemented by an expeditionary group including PUN members, whereby they established the Ukrainian National Council (headed by Mykola Velychkivsky and hereon the UNRada) on 5 October, modelled off of its namesake under the West Ukrainian People's Republic and intended to serve as the basis for a future Ukrainian state, also setting up a base in Rivne, the capital of the Reichcommissariat of Ukraine under Erich Koch. In coordination with the PUN, part of this group joined the Propaganda Abteilung U (Propaganda Division for Ukraine), a division of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Troops, and later set up the newspaper Ukrainske slovo ('Ukrainian Word' and hereon US) in Kyiv that had a circulation of over fifty thousand and propagandised the OUN(m), Ukrainian nationalism, and the Nazi 'liberation'. US published more than a hundred antisemitic articles from mid-September to early December 1941 while chief editor Ivan Rohach, discussing the appointment of Alfred Rosenberg as Reichsminister of the Occupied Eastern Territories in a November issue, wrote that Rosenberg's appointment would contribute to "the speedy elimination of our common enemy— Jewish-Masonic Bolshevism". The Bukovinian Battalion arrived in Kyiv in September, subordinating themselves to the UNRada, and were implicated in the Holocaust with historical accounts evidencing that they guarded and sorted the belongings of Jews murdered at Babyn Yar. Per Anders Rudling maintains that the participation of the Bukovinian Battalion in the extermination of Jews cannot be ruled out while historian Yuri Radchenko concludes this was likely the case. Though the Melnykites intitially enjoyed support against the Banderites from the German military authorities, the OUN(m)'s growing strength in Central and, to a lesser degree, Eastern Ukraine whereby they came to control a number of local administrations, police forces, and newspapers across the region and the incompatibility of Ukrainian statehood with Nazi designs led the SS and Nazi Party officials to overrule the Wehrmacht which, according to John Alexander Armstrong, "evidently believed that Germany really would support Ukrainian independence".^:75 Following on from a mid-November meeting with the Kyiv Gebietskommissar Friedrich Ackmann [de] where the leaders of the UNRada discussed plans to hold an event on 22 January, 1942 commemorating Symon Petliura, a district official announced on 17 November the dissolution of the UNRada, effectively liquidating the Bukovinian Battlion, which in early November had swelled from approximately 700 to 1,500-1,700 strong and whose members were subsequently dispersed with many merged into auxiliary police battalions, forming the core of, among others (particluarly the 109th and 115th battalions), the 118th Schutzmannschaft Battalion in the spring of 1942 that would later be implicated in the 1943 Khatyn Massacre.

As part of a planned series of rituals and commemorative demonstrations, Melnykites held a rally on 21 November, 1941 in the town of Bazar commemorating members of the UNA executed by the Bolsheviks 20 years earlier at the end of the Second Winter Campaign. Between several hundred and several thousand people attended the event with speeches given by OUN(m) representatives and employees of the local occupation authorities while shouts of "Glory to Ukraine!" and "Glory to the leader Andriy Melnyk!" were heard alongside a choir-sung rendition of "Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished" (dating back to 1862, adopted by the Ukrainian People's Republic in 1917, and which would provide the basis for the modern Ukrainian national anthem). Large scale arrests took place in Korosten Raion immediately after the rally ended whereafter they were transported to a former NKVD prison on the outskirts of Kyiv and interrogated. About 200 Melnykites were arrested over the next few days with several dozen of the arrested OUN(m) activists and sympathisers executed by firing squad in early December.

On 12 December, the editorial staff of Ukrainske slovo (incl. Rohach) were arrested by the SD, with the newspaper publishing under the name Nove ukrainske slovo (New Ukrainian Word) from 14 December onwards, abandoning the pro-Melnykite editorial agenda. Having been briefly arrested by the SD on 20 December, Osyp Boydunyk travelled to Berlin, assisted by Petro Voinovsky, commander of the Bukovinian Battalion, where he informed the PUN and Melnyk of the situation in Ukraine who subsequently sent letters to Nazi officials, including a memorandum sent to Adolf Hitler, protesting the arrests and attempting to secure their release. To obtain Velychkivsky's signature for the memorandum, Boydunyk illegally returned to Kyiv in early 1942 where he posed as an arrested person with the help of OUN(m) police and Voinovsky, reportedly being saved by an SD employee who resolved to look the other way. Though initially released on 24 December, the editorial staff were eventually executed in early January 1942, reportedly for 'failing to follow orders' with the same anonymous 1943 German report, historian Yuri Radchenko asserts that this was most likely authored by an employee of the Kyiv SD, alleging that an initial investigation of their offices discovered pro-Western Allies sympathies and chauvinist attitudes and that subsequent interviews of the editorial staff's circle provided a large amount of incriminating material against them.

After the disappearance of the US editorial staff, many Melnykites, including Oleh Olzhych who had only escaped detention due to the local police being controlled by the OUN(m), left Kyiv for Western Ukraine though some remained, poetess Olena Teliha among them. Between 6-9 February, 1942, several dozen OUN(m) members, Teliha and her husband among them as well as OUN(m) sympathiser and mayor of Kyiv Volodymyr Bahaziy, were arrested in Kyiv and held in an SD prison at 33 Korolenko Street, Boyarka. A 4 February report prepared by the SD had portrayed the OUN(m) as enemies of Nazi Germany, in contact with Great Britain and collaborating with the Bolshevik underground. Hearing of Teliha's arrest, Ulas Samchuk turned to an acquaintance in the Rivne SD, SS-Hauptscharführer Albert Müller, who agreed to go to Kyiv in an effort to secure her release. Melnykites subsequently petitioned Alfred Rosenberg and his deputies, whereafter the Kyiv SD was ordered not to execute the arrested and a commission was sent from Berlin that secured the release of some of the prisoners, though the remaining Melnykites that had arrived in autumn 1941 had already been shot. OUN(m) members' memoirs written in the 1970s-1990s generally claim that these individuals were executed at Babyn Yar, though this is disputed by modern historians such as Per Anders Rudling and Yuri Radchenko, with Radchenko asserting that, in the absence of supporting evidence, they could have been executed at many places in Kyiv and not necessarily Babyn Yar with Teliha most likely taking her own life in prison following brutal beatings and torture based on the accounts of a fellow inmate at 33 Korolenko Street and the succeeding mayor of Kyiv, indirectly supported by other evidence. Rudling concludes that the method or location of the executions is unknown but that their bodies probably ended up at Babyn Yar.

OUN(m) members assumed a semi-legal status in Ukraine, wary of further repressions, and attempted to preserve their positions in local police forces, which were generally complicit in the implementation of the Holocaust whereby they guarded Jewish ghettos, rounded up Jews for extermination, and sometimes participated in massacres, as well as self-government structures without provoking the Nazi authorities. On 21 March, Ulas Samchuk was arrested in Rivne by the SD, though he was released in April, as part of a wider crackdown in the spring of 1942 that included OUN(m) members in the SS such as Stepan Fedak (Melnyk's brother-in-law), who was also later released after a year in prison. Fedak subsequently joined the SS Galicia Division which was set up in May 1943 on the initiative of German governor of Galicia Otto Wächter though OUN(m) members together with Kubijovyč's Ukrainian Central Committee played a leading role in its development with Provid member and former UNA general Viktor Kurmanovych endorsing it on Lviv radio. Further significant waves of repressions and executions against Melnykites occurred in late 1942 and throughout 1943 in different parts of Ukraine. Over the course of the Nazi occupation and from the start of Nazi repressions, some Melnykite activists were sent to the Syrets and Janowska concentration camps. Provid member Yaroslav Baranovsky was assassinated by the OUN(b) in Galicia on 11 May, 1943.

Map of Volhynia and the General Governorate for the Occupied Polish Region; 1943-1944 Red Army counteroffensive: Zhitomir–Berdichev offensive and Operation Bagration.

Despite the waves of repressions, Melnykite propaganda abstained from anti-Nazi and anti-German positions though the official Melnykite underground periodical Surma in a June 1943 issue detailed executions against Melnykite local administrations and sympathisers in Zhytomyr, Dnipropetrovsk, and Poltava, as well as repressions across central and eastern Ukraine, in which the Germans were referred to as those "who had their own special plans against Ukraine". Perhaps cognisant of anti-German sentiment and fearful of losing ground in Volhynia to the more active Banderite, Polish, and Soviet partisan groups, the OUN(m) set up partisan sotni from October 1942 onwards, largely on the initiative of rank-and-file members, the most active of which was active from March-August 1943 in the general vicinity of Kremenets and formed out of defectors from police units following the execution of a group of local OUN(m)-affiliated intellectuals. Foremostly directed against Soviet partisan formations, the OUN(m) partisans also skirmished against Polish self-defence and partisan groups as well as independently conducting attacks against the German occupation, generally concerning raids of German prisons in order to free Ukrainians held there. Though for the most part committed by the larger and more pertinent Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) while the OUN(m) was practically marginalised, OUN(m) partisans partook in massacres of Polish civilians whereby Ukrainian nationalists pursued a general policy of ethnic cleansing, especially targeting osadnik colonies and locuses of the Polish underground. Though strongly discouraged by the leadership, OUN(m) partisans sometimes cooperated with OUN(b) formations on an ad hoc basis— the Kremenets partisans, which were dominant in the area, participated in several joint actions with the OUN(b), including, among others, a joint attack on the night of 30 April-1 May against the Polish village of Kuty, establishing a joint headquarters later that month whereafter they conducted attacks against a prison in Kremenets and a Schutzmann barracks in Bilokrynytsia. Part of the unit was disarmed by Banderites and absorbed into the UPA on 30 June and later carried out attacks on the Polish settlements of Gurów and Wygranka on 11 July (Bloody Sunday) in which more than 100 civilians were killed. Almost all OUN(m) partisan formations in Volhynia were disarmed or forcibly merged into the UPA between the summer and autumn of 1943.

In September, members of the local OUN(m) Lutsk Provid met with a number of pro-partnership SS officers in and around Lutsk for negotiations pertaining to the cessation of German reprisals and the release of Melnykite, and also some Petliurite, prisoners whereafter they formed, in the context of ad hoc Ukrainian peasant Self-defense Kushch Units, the Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense (ULS) in November, numbering 150 Melnykites and officially under the command of ten German SS officers, mostly from the Chelm SD. The ULS was allowed to have its own chaplain as well as being granted a propaganda arm, the main output of which was the legion's official journal Nash Shlyakh (Our Path) that published antisemitic, polonophobic, and russophobic articles, characterising the conflict in its April 1944 first issue as a struggle "for the eradication of Polish [slur: lyashskyi] and Jew-Muscovite rule in Ukraine".^:466 Intended to combat Soviet partisans, the unit was deployed in late autumn to the village of Pidhaitsi, near Lutsk, until 18 January, 1944 whereafter the ULS killed a number of Jewish civilians and conducted an "anti-partisan" action against the Polish villages of Karczunek and Edwardopol, near Volodymyr, on the night of 14-15 February. Though Timothy Snyder asserts that the OUN(m) were "in principle committed to the same ideas" as the OUN(b) with regards to an ethnically homogenous state, individual Melnykites opposed the ethnic cleansing of Poles with historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach suggesting that this may have been largely confined to those close to Oleh Olzhych, Melnyk's second-in-command and director of the OUN(m) underground in Ukraine, while a leaflet disseminated in 1944 by Melnykites among the civilians of Volhynia blamed the Banderite faction for the failings of the 'Ukrainian national revolution', condemning them for provoking the Nazi authorities, the "senseless and murderous violence towards the Polish civilian population", and "most of all" acts of violence against non-conforming Ukrainians by the OUN(b) and the UPA.

In late February 1944, the ULS was redeployed to occupied-Poland, quartered in the villages of Moroczyn and Dziekanów in Hrubieszów County, where they attacked several Polish townships and frequently slaughtered Polish civilians. Briefly being redeployed to Volhynia in June whereby they captured and executed Banderite partisans and mobilised local inhabitants for forced labour and returning to Poland in July whereby they continued attacks on Polish settlements, the ULS by the summer of 1944 numbered approximately 1,000 after a recruitment effort and the release of many Melnykites held in German prisons. A ULS combat group partook in street fighting in August during the supression of the August-November Warsaw Uprising whereafter the unit continued to conduct anti-partisan operations in Poland and occupied-Yugoslavia.

Amid the Allied bombing of Berlin, Melnyk and his wife travelled to Vienna in late 1943, being arrested by the Gestapo in late January 1944 after which Oleh Olzhych became acting head of the PUN (and thereby the wider OUN(m)). Melnyk was transported first to a dacha in Wannsee to be interrogated, then in March to the alpine settlement of Hirschegg where he was held as a Sonderhaftling (special prisoner) at the Ifen Hotel, and subsequently to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in July, later being moved on 4 September to a Zellenbau isolation cell. Provid member Roman Sushko, a colonel in the UNA and cofounder of the UVO, had been assassinated in Lviv on 12 January, most likely by OUN(b) members. Olzhych was arrested by the SD in Lviv on 25 May and transported first to Berlin and then to Sachsenhausen in early June where he was kept in a Zellenbau cell for death row prisoners. Having been frequently interrogated and badly beaten over the next several days, which was unusual compared to the treatment of his neighbouring Ukrainian nationalists, Olzhych was found dead in his cell on 9 June— accounts on how he died vary between him succumbing to his injuries or taking his own life by hanging. By autumn 1944, many OUN(m) members across Europe, including nearly the entire leadership bar former UNA generals Viktor Kurmanovych and Mykola Kapustiansky, were being held in various German prisons, with Melnyk claiming to a fellow prisoner at the Ifen Hotel to have been interrogated for a list of such members when he was held in Wannsee.

A November 1944 report of Pressburg SD to Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, informing him about the creation of the Ukrainian National Committee

Suffering from manpower shortages, a group of Nazi Party officials and SS officers endeavoured to set up the Ukrainian National Committee (UNC) to negotiate and coordinate support for the retreating German forces in return for political concessions with a broad spectrum of imprisoned Ukrainian nationalist leaders released and taken to Berlin, including Melnyk and the OUN(m) leadership in October 1944. According to the OUN(m)'s internal documentation, 43 Melnykites were released, Voinovsky, Provid member Dmytro Andriievsky, and Ukrainske slovo editor (iteration published in Paris, 1933-1940) Volodymyr Martynets among them, while a further 179 remained in various prisons and concentration or labour camps. Ukrainian collaborationist military formations were to be transferred to the command of the UNC and consolidated into one unit whereby the ULS was merged into the SS Galicia Division in March 1945, with some initially attempting to defect to the Serbian nationalist Chetniks, and subsequently fighting the Red Army advance through Yugoslavia and Austria. Melnyk and his supporters however were dissatisfied with the progress and value of these negotiations and instead organised a meeting in Berlin in January whereupon it was decided that OUN(m) members would meet the Allied advance and seek to familiarise the Western Allies with the Ukrainian independence movement. According to the Cultural Bureau of the OUN(m) (founded by Olzhych) and its archives, Andriievsky and Boydunyk, in coordination with Melnyk, submitted a memorandum to the U.S. military administration on 27 April, following which it was understood that displaced Ukrainians were to be afforded the right to be separated from Poles and Russians and allowed to display the blue-and yellow flag, which was later the case and general policy for displaced persons.

John Alexander Armstrong posits that even though, "apparent to all", Nazi Germany's chances of victory on the Eastern Front had gone from remote after the Germans' failure to take Moscow to extremely remote after the 1942-1943 winter of Stalingrad, Ukrainian nationalists generally staked their strategic course on hopes that either the Western Allies would intervene in their favour or that the two superpowers would exhaust one another whereby a period of anarchy would emerge in Eastern Europe, similar to that that followed the First World War, whereby an organised but contemporarily inferior nationalist military force could assert itself.^:171-2

Historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach assert that for the duration of the war, even during the repressive crackdowns, the OUN(m) never abandoned its stance on collaboration with the Third Reich as a path to an independent Ukrainian state whereby their orientation oscillated between neutrality and friendship. Radchenko estimates that between several hundred and one thousand OUN(m) members were killed by the Nazis over the war.

Post-WW2 and the Cold War era

The OUN(m) distributed anonymous pamphlets as early as 1946 in west German Ukrainian displaced persons (DP) camps that sought to revise the history of the war into a nationalist propagandist narrative, exclusively victimising and lionising the organisation for the brutal repression many of its members endured and glossing over its complicity in war crimes and much of its collaboration with the Nazis. Historian Yuri Radchenko asserts that these efforts were instrumental in popularising myths surrounding the OUN(m) in the diaspora and newly independent Ukraine. The DP camps became hotbeds of nationalist sentiment with the OUN(m) holding events to honour Stsiborskyi and Senyk for their role in the 'independence struggle', though this garnered controversy in the Ukrainian DP press. The split in the OUN persisted with the OUN(b) engaging in an uncompromising effort to control a number of DP camps in the British occupation zone while the OUN(m) continued to work with the pluralistic Central Representation of the Ukrainian Emigration in Germany— the camps also tended to be socially segregated along factional lines and historian Jan-Hinnerk Antons notes an account of a young girl being forbidden from submitting a poem at an OUN(m) commemorative event by her Banderite father.

Melnyk addressing the Ukrainian National Council at its fourth session (ninth if asserting continuity), held in Munich in March 1957.

The OUN(m) in the postwar years reoriented to an ideology of conservative corporatism, sometimes going by the name 'OUN Solidarists' (OUNs) and discarding many of its prior fascist elements at its Third Grand Congress held on 30 August 1947 whereby the leader was to be held accountable by a congress every three years and the principles of freedom of conscience, press, speech, and political opposition introduced. The OUN(m) was instrumental in reorganising the government of the UPR in exile whereby an effort was made to consolidate Ukrainian émigré organisations in Europe under the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) reconstituted in 1948, though the Union of Hetman Statesmen opposed the associations with the UPR and the OUN(b), arguing for a larger role for the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (the political leadership of the UPA) and recognition of the scale of its support, left in 1950. In addresses to the UNRada and the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada in March and May 1957 respectively, Melnyk began to actively lobby the Ukrainian diaspora for the establishment of a pan-Ukrainian umbrella organisation capable of accommodating the fragmented landscape of diaspora organisations, later realised after Melnyk's death with the founding of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians in 1967. The OUN(m) withdrew from the UNRada in October 1957, rejoining in 1961.

Ukrainske slovo was reconstituted and again published out of Paris from 1948 onwards while the OUN(m) began publishing Surma as a newspaper in the 1980s. At its Seventh Grand Congress in 1970, the OUN(m) rejected radical nationalism and embraced political pluralism. After Melnyk's death in 1964, leadership of the PUN passed on to Oleh Shtul (1964-1977), Denys Kvitkovsky (1977-1979), and Mykola Plaviuk (1981-2012) who also led the government of the (1917-1921) Ukrainian People's Republic in exile.

According to declassified CIA reports from 1952 and 1977, the less intellectual and "radically outmoded" Banderite émigré organisations struggled to build influence on the ground in the Ukrainian SSR whereas Melnykite organisations would go on to establish contacts with Ukrainian dissidents and publish dissident works such as the 1968 Chornovil Papers and five volumes of The Ukrainian Herald. Historian Georgiy Kasianov argues that, during perestroika in the late 1980s, nationalist émigré groups exported a cultural memory to Soviet Ukraine of the OUN as 'freedom fighters against two totalitarian regimes', leading to the proliferation of so-called 'memory politics' in independent Ukraine— though these efforts principally concerned the rehabilitation and enobling of Bandera, the OUN(b), and the UPA given that they best embodied this historical narrative.

Post-Soviet Ukraine

Myroslav Yurkevich, of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, wrote in the third volume of the Encyclopedia of Ukraine published in 1993: "The power and influence of the OUN factions have been declining steadily, because of assimilatory pressures, ideological incompatibility with the Western liberal-democratic ethos, and the increasing tendency of political groups in Ukraine to move away from integral nationalism." That year, the OUN(m) registered in Ukraine as a non-governmental organisation, adopting a national democratic programme at its May 1993 Twelfth Grand Congress held in Irpin. The OUN(m) subsequently set up the Olena Teliha Publishing House in Kyiv the following year that continues to publish Ukrainske slovo as a weekly magazine as well as the scientific journal Rozbudova derzhavy ('Building the State') and a large number of Melnykite legacy works and memoirs. Historians Yuri Radchenko and Andrii Usach assert that the contemporary OUN(m) press "frequently scrubbed the history of the OUN(m) as a whole and of the [Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense] in particular".^:452

In mid-2007, the National Bank of Ukraine released two commemorative coins for OUN(m) members Olena Teliha and Oleh Olzhych.

Chervak in 2014.

After Plaviuk's death in 2012, leadership of the PUN and OUN(m) passed on to Ukrainian activist and historian Bohdan Chervak [ukr] (chief editor of Ukrainske slovo since 2001) who was appointed by President Petro Poroshenko in 2015 as First Deputy Head of the State Committee for Television and Radio-broadcasting, retaining the position as of July 2025. In 2017, he was appointed by Poroshenko to the planning committee for the development of the site of Babyn Yar alongside Volodymyr Viatrovych and Jewish community leaders, subsequently criticising plans to build a Holocaust museum there on the grounds that there was inadequate recognition of OUN members killed by the Nazis, writing in a Facebook post:

“Do these people realise that Babyn Yar is also the place that is inseparable from the historical memory of the Ukrainian nation? It is here where the memory of the OUN groups and of Olena Teliha is preserved."

In 2019, Chervak ran for the Verkhovna Rada as the 49th party list candidate for the Svoboda party though the party received 2.15% of the vote, below the 5% threshold needed for party list candidates to begin to be awarded seats based on proportional representation.

Pro-Melnykite organisations that still exist in the diaspora today include the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada, the Organisation for the Rebirth of Ukraine (ODVU) in the United States, the Union for Agricultural Education in Brazil, the Vidrodzhennia society in Argentina, the Ukrainian National Alliance in France, and the Federation of Ukrainians in the United Kingdom.

Notes

[1] Shapoval, Yuriy (10 July, 2023). OPINION: Why 1943 ‘Volhynia Slaughter’ Remains so Sensitive for Poles and Ukrainians and What Needs to be Done. Kyiv Post.