Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
우크라이나 민족주의자 조직
A Ukrainian nationalist movement founded in Vienna in February 1929 through the union of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) and nationalist student groups. Aiming at a united independent state to be achieved through national revolution and national dictatorship, it carried out underground work, terrorism and political assassinations, mainly in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. In 1940 it split into the Bandera faction (OUN-B) and the Melnyk faction (OUN-M), and in 1993 it was legalised in independent Ukraine as a public organisation.
In depth
The Ukrainian-language source says the OUN defined itself as a movement rather than a party and condemned the legal Ukrainian parties of Galicia as collaborationist. It arose from the union of the Ukrainian Military Organisation with nationalist student groups, and at its congress in Vienna in February 1929 Yevhen Konovalets was elected head of its leadership. It initially drew on the nationalism of Dmytro Dontsov, and the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences defines the OUN as a "right-radical movement" oriented towards a national state with an "ultra-right" regime.
Under Polish rule in Galicia and Volhynia the OUN carried out hundreds of acts of sabotage, including arson on the estates of Polish landowners, boycotts of state schools and state monopolies, and raids on government offices to obtain funds. By the count of historian Yaroslav Hrytsak the nationalist underground made 63 assassination attempts, most of whose victims were Ukrainians. Stepan Bandera and others were tried in Warsaw in 1935–1936 over the assassination of the Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki. In 1938 the Soviet regime assassinated Konovalets in Rotterdam, and Colonel Andriy Melnyk took over the leadership.
In February 1940 the organisation split when Bandera's supporters set up a separate Revolutionary Leadership, and their congress in Kraków in April 1941 elected Bandera as leader. Both factions hoped to use the German–Soviet war to establish an independent state in alliance with Nazi Germany. On 30 June 1941 the Bandera faction proclaimed the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State in Lviv, but Bandera was arrested by the Gestapo and in early 1942 confined in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was created in autumn 1942, and at the end of the war the Bandera faction operated under a leadership headed by Roman Shukhevych.
After the war the leaders of both factions remained in the Western Allied zones, and the organisation continued armed underground struggle into the 1950s and an unarmed movement thereafter. According to the English-language source Bandera was assassinated by a KGB agent in Munich in 1959. After Ukrainian independence the OUN moved its structures to Kyiv, the Melnyk faction under the name "Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists" and the Bandera faction through the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists party, and it was legalised as a public organisation in 1993.