Ukrainians

In 1921, disgruntled and radicalised veterans of the First World War organised the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) after unsuccessfully taking up arms for Ukrainian independence. In 1929 the UVO merged with a number of other far-right groups and student fraternities into the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. The leading figure in the 1920s and 1930s was Evhen’ Konovalets’, a former colonel in the Ukrainian Sich Sharpshooters, an embryonic Ukrainian army which had fought for the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic and the German puppet regime of Pavlo Skoropads’kyi. Explicitly totalitarian, the OUN rejected the concept of democracy in favour of the Leadership principle and one-party rule. The Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists stands at the head of the Ukrainian revolutionary currents and collaborates with those revolutionary movements of the peoples enslaved by Moscow and with those states which seek the total destruction of the USSR.