ALA scandal revisited. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. More clues about convergence of CIA and Bandera cult. Early days of the memory war in Ukraine.
This year the “Bandera Lobby” suffered an emotional rollercoaster when the American Library Association (ALA) only temporarily recognized Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement – Selections from the Secret Police Archives as “one of the Best Historical Materials published in 2022 and 2023.” The award was rescinded after Lev Golinkin wrote an article for The Nation, which asked why the ALA is “Whitewashing the History of Ukrainian Nazis.”
Enemy Archives was compiled by a pair of prominent Banderite memory warriors. Lubomyr Luciuk, whose ex-wife leads the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, might not be a sworn member of OUN-B, or the “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which still exists. Luciuk’s co-editor, on the other hand, doesn’t have as much plausible deniability. Volodymyr Viatrovych served as the “memory czar” of Ukraine (2014-19) only after he led the “Center for Research of the Liberation Movement” (TsDVR, Tsentr Doslidzhenʹ Volʹovoho Rukhu), an important OUN-B front group that has embedded its leaders in the state-run Institute of National Memory and the Ukrainian successor of the KGB over the past 10-20 years.
Something I did not mention in my post about “Bojczukgate”: twenty years ago, the OUN-B assembled an international commission to investigate that scandal at the request of “Sadovyi,” the acting “Land Leader of America” in 2004-2005. “Sadovyi” was Dmytro Shtohryn, the longtime chairman of the Ukrainian Library Association of America (1967-85) and the grandfather of Ukrainian studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He co-founded the TsDVR and reportedly chaired the ALA’s Slavic and East European Section for years.
Over the Fourth of July weekend in 2001, the “Conference of Ukrainian Statehood Organizations” (coalition of OUN-B “facade structures”) in the United States held the 51st annual “Meeting of Ukrainians of America” at a Banderite summer camp in Ellenville, New York. During the Cold War, this was a point of pilgrimage for OUN-B members as the home of the oldest Banderite monument in the world, which remains a quasi-religious site for some. The 2001 “Meeting of Ukrainians” was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of Ukrainian independence, and the 60th anniversary of the “Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State” on June 30, 1941, when the OUN-B tried to establish a pro-Nazi government in German-occupied western Ukraine. (more...)
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