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Yevhen Konovalets

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Yevhen Konovalets
Євген Коновалець
Born(1891-06-14)June 14, 1891
Saschkiw, Lemberg District [de], Galicia, Austria-Hungary
(now Zashkiv, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine)
DiedMay 23, 1938(1938-05-23) (aged 46)
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Allegiance Austria-Hungary (1914–1915)
Ukrainian People's Republic (1917–1919)
Branch Austro-Hungarian Army
Ukrainian People's Republic Ukrainian People's Army
Years of service1914–1919
RankColonel
UnitLemberg District Defense
Sich Riflemen
CommandsSich Riflemen
Battles / wars
Other workPolitician, creator of the UVO

Yevhen Mykhailovych Konovalets[a] (Ukrainian: Євген Михайлович Коновалець;[1] 14 June 1891 – 23 May 1938) was a Ukrainian military commander and political leader of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. A veteran of the First World War and the Ukrainian War of Independence, he is best known as the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from its foundation in 1929 to his assassination in 1938.

Early life and education

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Konovalets was born 14 June 1891 in the village of Zashkiv in Austro-Hungarian Galicia; today the village is in Lviv Raion, Lviv Oblast, Ukraine.[2]

Konovalets attended the Lviv Academic Gymnasium and enrolled at the University of Lviv, where he studied law.[3][4] In 1910 he participated in a protest demanding a Ukrainian university in Lviv, during which he was arrested and at least one person was killed.[2]

Konovalets became an active member of the Prosvita society, a Ukrainian cultural-educational association, and a representative on the executive committee of the Ukrainian National-Democratic Party [ukr].[5] From 1909–1912 he gave lectures and developed the local Prosvita and Sokol societies.[6] During the final years of gymnasium and early student years, Konovalets chose Prosvita because he believed it was the only way to provide mass education in the native Ukrainian language, overcome pro-Moscow influences, and awaken national sentiments among the people.[7]

In 1912 he became secretary of Prosvita's Lviv department, retaining the position though he was later drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army where he spent a year in officers' training and rose to the rank of second lieutenant.[6][8] In 1913 he became a leader of the local student movement. He was greatly influenced by the nationalist ideology and rhetoric of such prominent Ukrainians as Ivan Bobersky, Myroslav Sichynsky [ukr], and Dmytro Dontsov, having become aquainted with the latter two at the II All-Ukrainian Student Congress that year.[2]

First World War (1914-1917)

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With the outbreak of the First World War, Konovalets was mobilised in the summer of 1914, serving in the 19th Regiment of the Lviv Regional Defense.[2][8] In 1915, he was taken prisoner of war by the Russians during the battles near the mountain Makivka (in the Carpathian Mountains) and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp in Chornyi Yar, located between Tsaritsyn and Astrakhan. In 1916, he was transferred to the internment camp near Dubovka.[9]

While in captivity he joined a group of former Galician officers (among them Andriy Melnyk, Roman Sushko [ukr], and Fedir Chernyk [ukr]).[2][9] The February Revolution in 1917 saw the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR) in March, thus starting the Ukrainian War of Independence, with the Central Rada only agreeing to accept former Austro-Hungarian officers following the October Revolution and the onset of the wider Russian Civil War.[10] Konovalets, together with his fellow officers, thus escaped to Kyiv in late 1917.[10][b]

Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1920)

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Yevhen Konovalets in Kyiv, 1918
Yevhen Konovalets (first left) as commander of Sich Riflemen in Shepetivka, 1919

In November 1917, together with the Galician-Bucovina Committee, Konovalets organised the Halytsko-Bukovynsky Kurin of the Sich Riflemen [ukr] as part of the Doroshenko Regiment.[10][2] He later assumed its command and played a crucial role in suppressing the January Uprising in Kyiv, though the city would fall to the Bolsheviks a month later in the Antonov-Ovseenko offensive.[11][2][10] Per the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (signed in February and separate to the one the Central Powers signed with Russia a month later), Konovalets's Sich Riflemen aided the German recapture of the city in March and policed the streets of Kyiv, though the German military authorities soon dissolved the Central Rada in April and installed the Ukrainian State in its place.[2] Refusing to serve under Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Konovalets's unit was disbanded.[2][10]

In the summer of 1918, he convinced Pavlo Skoropadskyi to create a Special Platoon of Sich Riflemen, which was established in Bila Tserkva.[10][11] In November 1918 he officially requested a void of the proposed Federal Union with White Russia from the Hetmanate and actively supported the forces of Symon Petliura and the Directorate of the UPR in the Anti-Hetman Uprising and the Battle of Motovylivka, successfully ousting Skoropadskyi in December with Konovalets subsequently awarded the rank of ataman.[10][11]

According to Peter Kenez, "On December 14, after the Directorate arrived at an agreement with the Germans, who were anxious to complete their evacuation and therefore promised neutrality, the Army of the Directorate under General Konovalets entered the Ukrainian capital and met only sporadic resistance. Fifteen hundred Russian officers were sequestered in the Pedagogical Museum; their weapons were taken away and they were regarded as prisoners of war."[12]

In January 1919, Petliura, Konovalets, and Melnyk put forward a proposal that they reform the government into a 'Triumvirate' military dictatorship to unify command, though this was rejected by the Directorate and the Sich Riflemen subsequently withdrew their political representation, the Rifle Council.[11] The dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the preceding November had seen the Polish-Ukrainian War break out for control of Western Ukraine, with the Ukrainian People's Army (UNA) caught in a Death Triangle the following autumn between the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and the Poles, with no supply lines to the anti-Bolshevik Entente powers. On December 6, 1919, as a result of a meeting of UPR military leaders, Konovalets demobilised his military formations with UNA soldiers given the choice of departing south or participating in the guerilla-fought First Winter Campaign.[11][10] Later that month he was taken prisoner and interned in a Polish prisoner-of-war camp in Lutsk.[10][13][5] Konovalets was released in the spring of 1920 due to the Polish-Ukrainian alliance and travelled to Vienna, hoping to set up a military unit to aid the Kyiv offensive though this was hampered by tensions with members of the Ukrainian Galician Army who were aggrieved at the Treaty of Warsaw that had ceded most of Western Ukraine to Poland in return for Polish recognition of Petliura's UPR.[13] With the subsequent collapse of the Polish-Ukrainian lines he moved to Czechoslovakia.[13]

Leader of the UVO and exile (1920-1929)

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Recognising that the battle for independence was lost, Konovalets together with former members of the Sich Riflemen and the Ukrainian Galician Army set up a new organisation capable of clandestine activities on the lands claimed by Ukrainians and controlled by Poland, the Russian and Ukrainian SSR's, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.[14][11][2] Created in August 1920 in Prague, the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) was aimed at armed resistance against Poland and Russia and was involved in the military training of youth and the prevention of any form of cooperation between Ukrainian and Polish authorities, often resorting to terrorist attacks against Polish politicians as well as members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia.[15][14] The name of the organisation was inspired by Józef Piłsudski's Polish Military Organisation, which had operated during the First World War. After the end of the Battle of Lviv and the wider Polish–Soviet War with the Peace of Riga, Konovalets became the leader of the UVO, based in the city.[14]

Yevhen Konovalets with son Yurko
Yevhen Konovalets' Lithuanian passport, used in exile

Konovalets married Olha Fedak in February 1922, daughter of Stepan Fedak, a lawyer and one of the wealthiest men in Galicia, and whose brother had attempted to assassinate Chief of State Marshal Piłsudski in 1921.[16] Konovalets was forced to flee the country in December that year following the UVO's assassination of Sydir Tverdokhlib.[11] During his exile years he went on to live in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Due to the family's constant forced relocations, their son Yurko, born January 1924, had to learn different languages for his schooling – German, French, Italian – but at home his mother insisted on their speaking their native Ukrainian.[17]

Konovalets based himself in Berlin in 1924, settling the UVO Executive Command there in 1926, from where he developed a network that spread across Western Ukraine as well as an operational command for affiliates across Europe.[14] The UVO received some degree of support from political rivals of Poland, including Lithuania, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia, though Weimar Germany played an outsized role, providing military training for hundreds of UVO members in East Prussia between 1924 and 1928 and transporting money, arms, and ammunition through the Free City of Danzig.[14][18] Waves of arrests of UVO members in Galicia for pro-German espionage from 1924 onwards, starting with the Olha Basarab case, stoked disenchantment with Konovalets's policies with a brief leadership coup of the UVO Home Command resolved by a Berlin tribunal presided over by Konovalets in September 1928.[14]

In late 1928, the new minister of the Reichswehr halted financial support of the UVO, partly due to the influence of Skoropadskyi, exiled in Berlin, who disagreed with the organisation's methods and hoped to popularise the Hetman movement but principally driven by the 1927 withdrawal of the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control that allowed Weimar Germany the space to carry out its own intelligence activities.[14] Konovalets thus moved his centre of operations to Geneva, settling the entire leadership there by early 1929.[14]

Leader of the OUN (1929-1938)

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In February 1929 Konovalets took part in the First Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Vienna, which elected to consolidate the UVO with several far-right nationalist student organisations into the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), with Konovalets as its leader. He promoted its influence among Ukrainian émigrés throughout Europe and America, further developing five foreign organisations operating in the Baltics (in Lithuania), Western (spread across Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, and Switzerland) and Central (spread across Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria) Europe, the Balkans (in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria), and North America (in the USA and Canada).[2]

Konovalets engaged in an international diplomatic lobbying effort that sought to draw attention to the treatment of Ukrainians in Galicia and Volhynia in the context of Polish policies of polonisation and pacification, which were in turn partly driven by UVO terrorism in what formed a vicious cycle.[19][15] Konovalets was invited to the XIth Assembly of the League of Nations in 1930 by the Lithuanian foreign minister where the treatment of minorities in Poland was discussed and the Ukrainian issue highlighted by the German representative (concerned about ethnic Germans in Silesia) as well as by a petition from the UK parliament.[19] However, Konovalets's efforts to win a diplomatic victory over the Polish government came to little as the Ukrainian issue was passed on to the Committee of Three who in turn issued a communique stressing the importance of understanding between Poles and Ukrainians, with the issue largely losing momentum after the 1931 assassination of Tadeusz Hołówko and media reports of the OUN receiving support from Weimar Germany.[19]

In June 1933, Konovalets met with German officials at a conference in Berlin and, though he was wary of the Nazi Party's attitude towards Slavic peoples, they found common ground in the need to change 'unjust' borders and was later discouraged by the German-Polish non-aggression pact.[19][2] Konovalets represented the OUN at the IXth International Congress of National Minorities in September, held in Bern, where members sought to draw attention to the Holodomor and organise aid to the Ukrainian SSR.[19]

Konovalets is widely credited as having successfully managed the generational divide within the OUN that would later cause the organisation to split in two. In response to objections within the organisation to Mykola Stsiborskyi's dynamic marital past and his relationship with a Jewish woman in 1934, Konovalets wrote:

"If nationalism is waging war against mixed marriages insofar as conquerors (especially Poles and Russians) are concerned, then it cannot bypass the problem of mixed marriages with Jews, who are indisputably if not greater, then at least comparable, foes of our rebirth."[20]:325-6

Konovalets did however side with Stsiborskyi when he complained about the particularly extreme antisemitic writings of theorist Oleksander Mytsiuk being published in the OUN newsletter Rozbudova natsiï, reprimanding the editor Volodymyr Martynets.[20]:321

As a result of the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki carried out by regional leadership in June 1934, the OUN alienated many of its international partners and diplomatic contacts with Konovalets forbidden to settle in Geneva and ordered to leave Switzerland in mid-1936, settling instead in Rome. In August 1937, Konovalets met with Japanese diplomats in Vienna to discuss the creation of Ukrainian military units that would be deployed to the Far East in the event of war with the USSR, though the cooperation agreement never materialised.[19]

Assassination

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Konovalets' activities raised Kremlin fears of the OUN's penetration into the Soviet Union. On 23 May 1938 he was assassinated in Rotterdam by a bomb concealed in a box of chocolates disguised as a present from a close friend.[21] The friend had actually been an NKVD agent who had infiltrated the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists: Pavel Sudoplatov, who on a recent visit to the Soviet Union had been personally ordered by Joseph Stalin to assassinate Konovalets in retaliation for the 1933 assassination of a diplomat at the Soviet consulate in Lviv.[21]

Sudoplatov, after a period of training, had slipped into Finland in July 1935, using the alias "Pavel Gridgdenko" and serving as an OUN contact in the USSR.[21][22] According to Sudoplatov, Stalin had told him: "This is not just an act of revenge, although Konovalets is an agent of German fascism. Our goal is to behead the movement of Ukrainian fascism on the eve of war and force these gangsters to annihilate each other in a struggle for power."[23]

Legacy

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Tomb of Yevhen Konovalets in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Due to his sudden disappearance, the OUN immediately suspected Sudoplatov of Konovalets' murder. Therefore, a photograph of Sudoplatov and Konovalets together was distributed to every OUN unit. According to Sudoplatov,

In the 1940s, SMERSH... captured two guerrilla fighters in Western Ukraine, one of whom had this photo of me on him. When asked why he was carrying it, he replied, "I have no idea why, but the order is if we find this man to liquidate him."[24]

On 1 October 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy handed a ribbon of honorary to the 131st Separate Reconnaissance Battalion [ukr] of the Ground Forces to be named in honour of Konovalets.[25][26][27]

Commemoration

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In 2006, the Lviv city administration announced the future transference of the remains of Yevhen Konovalets, Stepan Bandera, Andriy Melnyk and other key leaders of OUN and UPA to a new area of Lychakiv Cemetery specifically dedicated to heroes of the Ukrainian liberation movement.[28]

On June 17, 2011, in Vilnius, Lithuania the conference "Yevhen Konovalets: Lithuanian citizen - the Ukrainian patriot. Celebration of 120th birthday" was organised by the Lithuanian Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, People's Liberation Movement Research Centre (Ukraine) and Ukrainian organisations in Lithuania.

Notes

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  1. ^ Also anglicised as Eugene Konovalets
  2. ^ Online sources vary in their depiction of these events— Konovalets is understood to have escaped in an earlier group (either in mid-1917 or September) with a later group composed of Melnyk, Sushko, and other officers escaping in either December or early January.

References

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  1. ^ "Видатні українські націоналісти" (in Ukrainian). Всеукраїнська націонал-патріотична організація. 2001. Archived from the original on 2009-01-30. Retrieved 2009-10-23.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Linetskiy, Leonid (2020). "Some features of the ideological basis of the national idea of E. Konovalets – the leader of the OUN". Vectors of Competitive Development of Socio-economic Systems. Opole: The Academy of Management and Admimistration in Opole: 61–64. JSTOR 41036769. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  3. ^ Taranenko, Andriy (17 September 2020). "Директорка гімназії: Можна жалкувати про різні скасовані урочистості, але пріоритет здоров'я учнів набагато важливіший". Українська правда SOS (in Ukrainian).
  4. ^ "Євгену Коновальцю - 130. Мистецтво єднати: штрихи до портрета Євгена Коновальця" (in Ukrainian). Український інститут національної пам'яті (УІНП). 2021. Archived from the original on 2025-05-30. Retrieved 2025-06-01.
  5. ^ a b "Konovalets, Yevhen". Encyclopedia of Ukraine. 2. 1989. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  6. ^ a b Khoma I., Shevchenko M. (2021). "Evhen Konovalets and "Prosvita"". Contemporary Era (in Ukrainian) (9): 264–273. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  7. ^ Мороз, Володимир (2021). Євген Коновалець та його доба (in Ukrainian). Лілея-НВ. pp. 89–90. ISBN 978-966-668-537-0.
  8. ^ a b "To Yevhen Konovalets - 130. The art of uniting: touches to the portrait of Yevhen Konovalets". Ukrainian National Institute of Memory (in Ukrainian). 14 February 2022. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
  9. ^ a b Shapoval, Yuriy [Head of the Department for Ethno-Political Studies at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and not the politician] (10 December 2019). "Andriy Melnyk: "Have faith in the future"". KROUN.info (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 11 June 2025.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g h i Bahan A., Stetsiv Y. (2022). "The role of Roman Dashkevych in the formation of the artillery of the Sich Riflemen during the Ukrainian revolution of 1917-1921". East European Historical Bulletin (25): 136–148. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  11. ^ a b c d e f g Compiled by O. Kucheruk, Y. Cherchenko (2011). Andriy Melnyk 1890-1964: Memoirs, Documents, and Correspondence (in Ukrainian). Kyiv: Olena Teliha Publishing House. pp. 231–522. ISBN 978-966-355-061-9. Archived from the original on 11 April 2020. Retrieved 8 April 2020.
  12. ^ Kenez, Peter (2004). Red Attack, White Resistance; Civil War in South Russia 1918. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing. pp. 272–274. ISBN 978-0-9744934-4-2.
  13. ^ a b c Khoma, Ivan (2020). "Evhen Konovalets and the Ukrainian rifle brigade in German Yablonoye" (PDF). Scientific Notebooks of the Faculty of History, Lviv University (in Ukrainian) (21): 257–268. Retrieved June 18, 2025. Note: 'Yablonoye' referring to the Siberian mountain range appears to be a metaphor for 'wilderness'
  14. ^ a b c d e f g h Bolianovskyi, Andrii (1999). "Cooperation between the German Military of the Weimar Republic and the Ukrainian Military Organization, 1923-1928". Harvard Ukrainian Studies. 23 (1/2): 73–84. JSTOR 41036769. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  15. ^ a b Snyder, Timothy (2005). Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-10670-X.
  16. ^ Tereshchuk, Halyna (14 June 2021). "Yevhen Konovalets – the creator of the OUN. 130th anniversary of the colonel's birth". Radio Liberty (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 20 June 2025.
  17. ^ ""Наше життя — це був вічний неспокій...": історія дружини провідника ОУН Ольги Коновалець". umoloda.kyiv.ua (in Ukrainian). Retrieved 2023-05-08.
  18. ^ Lagzi, Gábor (2004). "The Ukrainian Radical National Movement in Inter-War Poland - the Case of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)". Hungarian Academy of Sciences Social Science Research Center Minority Research Institute. 7 (1): 194–206. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  19. ^ a b c d e f Khoma I., Posivnych M. (2024). "Evhen Konovalets and international activities of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists" (PDF). Eastern European Historical Bulletin (33). Drohobych: Helvetica Publishing House: 149–166. Retrieved June 17, 2025.
  20. ^ a b Carynnyk, Marco (2011). "Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947". Nationalities Papers. 39 (3): 315–352. Retrieved June 27, 2025.
  21. ^ a b c "Stalin's hand in Rotterdam: The murder of the Ukrainian nationalist Yevhen Konovalets in May 1938". Intelligence and National Security. 9 (4). 1994. Retrieved June 18, 2025.
  22. ^ West, Nigel (15 August 2017). Encyclopedia of Political Assassinations. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 132. ISBN 978-15381-0239-8.
  23. ^ Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster, pp. 23–24.
  24. ^ Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, page 16.
  25. ^ "В ЗСУ з'явився батальйон Євгена Коновальця" [A battalion of Yevhen Konovalets has appeared in the Ukrainian Armed Forces]. Istorychna Pravda.
  26. ^ "Зеленський присвоїв ім'я Євгена Коновальця 131-му окремому розвідбатальйону Сухопутних військ ЗСУ" [President Zelenskyi names 131st separate reconnaissance battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine after Yevhenii Konovalets]. Hromadske Radio. October 2023.
  27. ^ "On the Day of Defenders of Ukraine, the President presented state awards and took part in the oath taking by military lyceum students". president.gov.ua.
  28. ^ "Lviv to bury the remains of NKVD victims at the Lychakivsky Cemetery on 7 November". Human Rights in Ukraine. Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
  • Volodymyr Kubijovyč, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984 - 2001.
  • encyclopediaofukraine.com
  • Dovidnyk z istorii Ukrainy, Kyiv: Heneza 2002.
  • Vladislav Moulis, Běsové ruské revoluce, Praha: Dokořán, 2002.
  • Foreign Affairs
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