Yushchenko's Fascist: The Bandera Cult in Ukraine and Canada

Viktor Yushchenko’s 2010 designation of Stepan Bandera, the war‐time leader of the most radical and violent branch of the Ukrainian far right, as a national hero constituted, in many ways, the climax of the third post‐Soviet Ukrainian president’s instrumentalization of history. Yushchenko’s political use of history triggered sharply polarized, and often emotional discussions of Bandera’s role in history, not only in Ukraine, but also in Canada, the United States, Poland, and Israel. This article analyzes the “Bandera debate” against the backdrop of the significant advances in the historiography of war‐time Ukrainian nationalism since the openings of archives in recent decades.