Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society. Группа авторов

      YULIYA YURCHUK AND ANDREAS UMLAND

Introduction

      Studies in the Course and Commemoration of the OUN’s Anti-Soviet Resistance*

      Yuliya Yurchuk and Andreas Umland

This is the fourth installment in a series of thematic JSPPS sections of research papers on the memory and history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) as well as the OUN Bandera-wing’s military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukr. abbrev.: UPA).1 Within this series, historians and social scientists detail findings from their research on interwar and war-time Ukrainian radical nationalism as well as its contemporary public and scholarly interpretations and representations—not least, against the background of the Russian–Ukrainian war since 2014, and its related propaganda campaigns.2 The third 2020 special section, for instance, dealt with the OUN’s and UPA’s complicated relationship to German Nazism, the participation of OUN members in the Holocaust, and the issue of whether certain East European ultra-nationalist movements like the OUN or the Ustaša should be classified as fascist.3

      Debating Ukrainian Nationalism’s World War II Record

These and other recent peer-reviewed papers have provided the background for the start of a separate series of—at least, two—JSPPS special sections under the title “A Debate on ‘Ustashism,’ Generic Fascism, and the OUN,” the first installment of which is printed in this issue.4 This discussion complements our earlier research articles—including the present ones—on the OUN, yet markedly departs from traditional collected editions. The ustashism debate in JSPPS, to be sure, also refers to a plethora of empirical details and contains some relevant quotes, as ordinary academic papers and the present series of special sections do.

Yet, the ustashism debate consists of uniformly non-reviewed and largely disputational commentaries rather than research articles proper. Within the series “A Debate on ‘Ustashism’, Generic Fascism, and the OUN,” a variety of scholars in the fields of comparative fascism, East European right-wing extremism, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalism discuss a 2015 seminal paper by Oleksandr Zaitsev (Ukrainian Catholic University at L’viv) on the OUN’s “ustashism,” in the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies.5 A first response to Zaitsev’s paper was published in 2020 in JSPPS in the form of a research paper by two specialists on the Ustaša, Tomislav Dulić and Goran Miljan (Uppsala University), who focused on the relationship between fascism and abolitionism.6 For the “Debate on ‘Ustashism’, Generic Fascism and the OUN,” we have asked a number of experts on the East European far right, historical Ukrainian nationalism, and comparative fascism to voice their