# Taras Bulba-Borovets

Taras Dmytrovych Borovets (Ukrainian: Тарас Дмитрович Борове́ць; March 9, 1908 – May 15, 1981) was a Ukrainian leader and nazi collaborator of the Ukrainian National Army during World War II. He is better known as Taras Bulba-Borovets after his nom de guerre Taras Bulba. His pseudonym is taken from the eponymous novel by the Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol.

## Early years

Borovets was born in the village Bystrychi of Rovensky Uyezd, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire. According to some sources, his real name was Maxim. As a result of the Peace of Riga of 1921, this part of Volhynia was annexed to Poland. In his memoirs, Borovets claimed that from the year 1933 he worked for the government in exile of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) and carried out illegal missions on the territory of the Soviet Union. According to the documents of the Polish police, in 1933, he headed the cell of the OUN in his native village. In 1934, after the assassination of Polish interior minister Bronisław Pieracki, Borovets was arrested and sentenced to three years in the Bereza Kartuska Detention Camp. Some historians believe that he was quickly released in 1935 for good behavior, others that this was due to the help of German intelligence. Nevertheless, he remained on suspicion and in 1937 was forced to leave the border area and go deep into Poland.
After the Nazi invasion of Poland, he managed to get to the German occupied part of Poland, the General Government, and in Warsaw got in touch with members of the Ukrainian People's Republic, who told him to return to the area of Sarny, which he did in August 1940. Afterward, after Soviet annexation of Western Ukrainian lands to the Ukrainian SSR Borovets organized an underground anti-Soviet resistance in Volhynia.

## Organization of the Polissian Sich

After Operation Barbarossa at the beginning of July 1941 the Germans appointed him chief of the Ukrainian militia in the Sarny district. The command of the 213th Security Division (Wehrmacht) gave him permission to form the "Polissian Sich" with a thousand men on August 8, 1941. The question, whether this formation was a prototype of the first Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), is debatable. It was highly praised by Germans for cruel massacres of retreating Soviet Army soldiers, but later was officially disbanded and forced to go into underground. Borovets rejected German demands that his troops participate in the massacres of Jews in the area of Olevsk, but they nevertheless did participate in this massacre. At the end of 1941, the Sich's newspaper announced that "now the parasitical Jewish nation has been destroyed". The Sich pogroms at Olevsk involved robbing, torture, and murder of Jews with no German involvement. After the Polissian Sich disbanded, Borovets went into the woods near his native village with about 100 men.

## First UPA

In 1942, groups under Borovets' command began to show hostility towards the Germans. In June 1942, Borovets wrote a letter to Reichskommissar Erich Koch, accusing him of crimes and looting of Ukrainians. The Sich's best-known operation took place at Shepetivka on 19 August. Borovets himself claimed that he "had spilled no German blood". On 15 September 1942, "The law of a Ukrainian Partisan" was published, which called partisan detachments under Borovets the "Ukrainian Insurgent Army". In September 1942, Borovets entered into negotiations with Soviet partisans under D. Medvedev, who tried to attract him to fight against the Germans. The two groups could not reach an agreement, because Borovets refused to obey the Soviet command and feared retaliation from Germans against Ukrainian civilians. Nevertheless, until the spring of 1943 neutrality was maintained between the Borovets detachments and the Soviet partisans.
Parallel to the negotiations with the Soviets, Borovets continued to try to reach an agreement with the Germans. In November 1942, there was a meeting with Obersturmbannführer Dr. Puts, the head of the security service of Volhynia and Podolia general district. Putz said that the negotiations took place only because Borovets never gave orders to "spill German blood". He demanded Borovets and his men join the fight against Soviet partisans. Subsequently, negotiations continued in writing. Borovets demanded the release of arrested Ukrainian nationalists and put forward political demands, but was refused. In March 1943, Borovets wrote that the struggle against the Soviets was vital. He set out the principles on which cooperation could be based:
* The Germans change their attitude towards the Ukrainians, and start to fight against the Bolsheviks.
* The Germans provide military equipment, and Ukrainians give people.
* Cooperation be temporarily formalized as an "independent Ukrainian partisan movement".
Borovets also promised to provide 40,000 people, but all these proposals were ignored.

## Ukrainian People's Revolutionary Army

February 22, 1943 Taras Bulba-Borovets began negotiations with the leaders of OUN (B) to unite all nationalist movements of Ukraine. The UPA was to become the military organization of the united forces, and representatives of the OUN (B) were to enter the common general staff. Borovets rejected the claims of the banderites to full domination and put forward a series of charges against them. In May, the banderites interrupted the negotiations without explanation, but began to call their armed detachments "UPA". On Jule 20, 1943, the UPA of Borovets changed its name to Ukrainian National Revolutionary Army.
Borovets opposed against senseless terror against national minorities, in particular the Poles. Despite this, Borovets could not stop the escalation of the ethnic conflict and his people were involved in the actions against the Poles. When Borovets refused to join the forces of Stepan Bandera's faction, his troops were attacked and partly destroyed, partly subordinated to OUN(B). Presumably, the first wife of Borovets (Czech woman Anna Opochens’ka), was captured and killed by them. According to one of the testimonies, two members of the OUN (B) with a laugh recalled that she was hanged and then "swung and dangled for a long time as her legs twisted about". Borovets and his men were forced to withdraw to territory under the control of Soviet partisans. In September, this group was defeated, and he barely managed to escape. On 5 October 1943 Borovets ordered his troops to disband and go underground. In November, left his forces, by that time a tiny demoralized group, and went to seek German assistance in Warsaw.

## End of World War II and emigration

In November 1943 during negotiations with the Germans Borovets was arrested by the Gestapo in Warsaw and incarcerated in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In the autumn 1944 the Nazis, looking for Ukrainian support in the war they were losing, freed Borovets. He was forced to change his nom de guerre to Kononenko and under this name he led the formation of a Ukrainian special forces detachment in the structure of the Waffen-SS (around 50 men). This detachment was to be dropped in the rear of the Red Army for guerrilla warfare. Those plans never came to fruition and at the end of the war Ukrainian nationalist allies of Hitler demanded to be transferred away from the Eastern Front to allow them to surrender to Allied forces. Borovets' detachment surrendered to the Allies on May 10, 1945, and were interned in Rimini (Italy).
It is commonly believed that he emigrated to Canada or USA in 1948. However, according to the internal documents of the Soviet secret service, which continued to hunt Borovets and his associates until 1969, he remained in West Germany for some time. According to these reports, he worked in the American intelligence school and even traveled to the United States to meet with CIA director Allen Dulles in 1953.
After emigrating he organized the Ukrainian National Guard and published a newspaper, Mech i Volia (Sword and Freedom), and a memoir, "Armiya bez Derzhavy" (Army without a country). He died in Toronto and is buried at the cemetery of St. Andrew Memorial Church in Bound Brook, New Jersey.

## Legacy

In 2014, the American historian Jared McBride criticized a plaque to Bulba-Borovets in a Tablet article titled, "Ukrainian Holocaust Perpetrators Are Being Honored in Place of Their Victims".