Crypto-Fascist Cult Worship in the Ukrainian Borscht Belt
By: Moss Robeson
Tags: History, Ukraine, Cold War

SUMA opened its Ellenville “Oselia” (resort) in 1955, seven years before the Heroes’ Monument was built. The US-born longtime far-right leader of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) Lev Dobriansky was one of three people who “produced” the memorial. In 1958, according to declassified CIA documents, Dobriansky helped Stepan Bandera’s forever loyal deputy (and as of 1968, successor) Yaroslav Stetsko get his first visa to the United States, which he did in spite of the CIA’s opposition. The Agency supported a rival breakaway faction of the OUN-B led by Bandera’s wartime deputy turned postwar born-again “moderate” rival, Mykola Lebed, although he was arguably the biggest war criminal of the bunch. “The Ukrainians do not understand the basis of American attitudes,” his case officer relayed to superiors in 1952, the year Allen Dulles granted Lebed US citizenship and retroactively legalized his being smuggled into the country three years prior. “For an example, Stetsko is accused of all sorts of terrorism, killing Jews, etc., and because of this, was not allowed in the US…” Six years later, Stetsko made his first trip to the United States, and addressed a large Ukrainian Labor Day rally in Ellenville.

A year sooner, in mid-July 1957, the Ukrainian general Pavlo Shandruk spoke to a crowd of three thousand in Ellenville who gathered for a “patriotic demonstration,” which observed three anniversaries in Ukrainian history: the tricentennial of the death of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnitsky, 40 years since “the resurrection of the Ukrainian Army” during World War I, and the sham 15th anniversary “of the rise into being of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which to this day is conducting underground offensive action against the Reds…” The UPA was actually established in 1943, not 1942, and in fact, the CIA determined the UPA to have been virtually wiped out by 1954. The UPA memorial in Somerset County, New Jersey reads “1942–1952.”

The Germans tapped Shandruk in early 1945 to lead a nominal “Ukrainian National Army,” the First Division of which was formerly known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. As told by the Ukrainian Weekly in 1957, “A thrilling moment in the program was the lighting of torches in the presence of Gen. Shandruk. A representative of each one of the twenty SUMA Branches lighted [sic] his torch, and then announced which part of Ukraine his torch of liberty represented.” Then the torches were “applied to touch off a huge bonfire, whose searing flames symbolized the flame of the coming of the Ukrainian revolution for national independence.”

Large commemorative bonfire at another SUMA camp in upstate New York

In 1959, President Eisenhower signed into law a Congressional resolution drafted by Lev Dobriansky that declared each third week of July, “Captive Nations Week.” In the following months the KGB assassinated Stepan Bandera, just after he got his first visa to the United States. His immediate successor wasn’t Stetsko but Stepan Lenkavsky, who made “his first public appearance on this continent” in 1960 during Captive Nations Week at the SUMA camp in Ellenville. The rally received written greetings from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Vice President Richard Nixon, among others. Also on the camp grounds in 1960, Yaroslav Stetsko lectured another OUN-B affiliated youth group, the Ukrainian Student Association of Mykola Mikhnovsky (TUSM), which relocated its headquarters from West Germany to the United States in 1955.

Born in 1873, Mikhonvsky died before the OUN was founded, but he coined the slogan, “Ukraine for Ukrainians,” and was a big inspiration for the Organization otherwise. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe tells us, Mikhnovsky’s “main aim was a biological and racial marking of the Ukrainian territories.” One of his “Ten Commandments” began, “Do not marry a foreign woman because your children will be your enemies…” In 1929, thirty years before he visited Ellenville, “Bandera’s lifelong friend” and founding member of the OUN, Stepan Lenkavsky, wrote “The Ten Commandments of a Ukrainian Nationalist.” According to Rossoliński-Liebe, the first commandment, “Attain a Ukrainian state or die in the struggle for it,” was lifted from Mikhnovsky when he said, “either we will win the fight or we will die.” Lenkavsky joined Bandera, Stetsko, and Shukhevych in proclaiming a new “Revolutionary Leadership” of the OUN led by Stepan Bandera in 1940. Later during World War II, Lenkavsky said, “regarding the Jews, we will adopt any methods that lead to their destruction.”

No later than 1960, the TUSM began to sponsor an annual summer conference at the Ellenville Oselia that in 1963 paid tribute to Dmytro Dontsov’s 80th birthday. Dontsov, like Mikhnovsky, was born in the Russian empire, but made his way to western Ukraine, ruled by Austria-Hungary during the long 19th century and Poland in the interwar period. It was from here that the OUN sprung in 1929. Dontsov didn’t join the Organization but might as well have been its chief ideologist as a leading progenitor of Ukrainian fascism. The year of his 90th birthday, six months after he died, TUSM organized a panel discussion in New York City “in honor of the late Dmytro Dontsov, regarded as the ‘father of Ukrainian nationalism.’” One of the speakers was Anatoliy Bedriy, editor of the OUN-B‘s “Way to Victory” (Shlyakh Peremohy) newspaper. Associated with TUSM for years, he became its “ideological director” in 1961.

Come 1975, Bedriy was elected the chairman of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (AFABN), another OUN-B tied group. SUMA, TUSM, AFABN, and many more were united under the umbrella of the “Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front,” led in the United States by the so-called Organization for the Defense of Four Freedoms of Ukraine (ODFFU). Like the Ukrainian Youth Association (SUM), the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), and Bandera’s “Foreign Units of the OUN” (ZChOUN), the ODFFU was founded in 1946.

Busts of Roman Shukhevych (left) and Stepan Bandera (right) in Ellenville, New York

The ABN, with Yaroslav Stetsko as its leader for life, was a fascist coalition created by the OUN-B of likeminded anti-Soviet “national committees” (some of them formed under Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories) that clamored for World War III. Rather, the ABN leadership believed war with Soviet Russia was “inevitable,” but survivable. “Moscow’s despotic rule would be eliminated more quickly than one has ever dared to hope,” Stetsko wrote in 1953, insisting, “There Is Still Time … for Russia to experience its Pearl Harbor … The time demands that western commanders of the stature of General Patton place themselves protectingly before the revolutionaries with a few lightning panzer-divisions…” In 1960, in fascist Spain, he declared, “We shall either be victorious together, or else we shall perish one after another!”

I am well aware that the objection is raised that there might be an atomic war. In this respect I should, in the first place, like to touch on a counter-argument connected with mysticism … Fear of atomic war as a means of universal destruction is unjustified in so far as we — provided that we fulfill our ethical duties to God and our fatherland — cannot possibly become the object of destruction!

Four years later, Yaroslav Stetsko returned at least twice to Ellenville to speak at TUSM events. General Shandruk reappeared at the Labor Day rally in 1965, which honored the 15th anniversary of UPA Supreme Commander Roman Shukhevych’s death. SUMA president Lev Futala, a UPA veteran, delivered the keynote address. In 1966, the Labor Day rally marked 40 years since Symon Petliura’s assassination by a Jewish anarchist, and 25 years since the OUN-B’s attempt to declare a de facto Nazi client state on the eve of carrying out a German-led pogrom in Lviv. As in other years when the “Liberation Front” celebrated that day in history, a presumably whitewashed version of Stetsko’s June 30, 1941 speech (“Adolf Hitler…is forming a new order in Europe and the world and…[we] will continue to fight with the Allied German Army…”) was likely read at the base of the Heroes’ Monument. That year, it was reported “most [TUSM] students were of the opinion that a large majority of campus demonstrations, draft-card burnings, sit-ins, teach-ins, and anti-war protests [in the United States] were instigated and encouraged by Communists and Communist sympathizers…”

Shandruk returned once again for the 1967 Labor Day rally, which honored the fake “25th anniversary” of the UPA’s founding. The 1969 Labor Day rally was dedicated to the 10th anniversary of Stepan Bandera’s assassination. In 1970, they commemorated 20 years since the death of Roman Shukhevych, and in 1971, the 30th anniversary of the bloody, short-lived “restoration of Ukrainian statehood” on June 30, 1941. It seems that 1972 might have been the year of the first real “Heroes’ Holiday,” an ongoing tradition held every first weekend of July at the SUMA camp in Ellenville. “The program began Saturday afternoon after lunch with a panel discussion led by members of TUSM…” and on Sunday, representatives of the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front in the United States led a wreath-laying ceremony at the Heroes’ Monument.

In 1973, the OUN-B Front honored the 30th anniversary of the creation of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (the “Galician Division”) and a 1943 conference behind the ABN’s founding three years later. In 1974, the Governor of New York Malcolm Wilson “and other political leaders” attended the 25th annual SUM rally of Ukrainian youth in the United States and Canada, which appears to have been folded into the Heroes’ Holiday. At that year’s Labor Day rally, Ukrainian youth commemorated the 50th anniversary of Mykola Mikhnovsky’s death.

The US-born former Justice Minister of Ukraine Roman Zvarych’s Wikipedia page notes that at age fifteen, he swore an oath to “achieve Ukrainian statehood or… die fighting for it,” but doesn’t explain further. Zvarych and his older brother Ihor were committed members of SUMA and TUSM. In 1974, at the age of 20, Roman was elected the president of the Yonkers branch of TUSM, and the Zvarych brothers attended the annual youth conference of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The ABN represented the “Captive Nations” of the Soviet Union in the World League, so perhaps it should come as little surprise that Yaroslav Stetsko was a major architect of the WACL, Lev Dobriansky vigorously supported this Fascist International project, and “Captive Nations Week” proved to be a beachhead for the ABN in Washington.

“Captive Nations Week,” 1983

The US capital hosted the annual WACL conference for the first time in 1974. Dobriansky introduced Stetsko at the plenary session, who followed a speech by Admiral John McCain Jr, father of the late Senator McCain III. Also that year, “In view of the recent articles in the press listing the names of World War II war criminals, among whom was a former officer of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Lev Futala, and other Ukrainians,” a Ukrainian Anti-Defamation Committee was formed by “representatives of several Ukrainian organizations.” Roman Zvarych, the new secretary of TUSM, joined the committee explicitly tasked to defend “those Ukrainians accused of war crimes,” and UPA veterans in particular.

The following year Roman joined the executive board of the World Youth Anti-Communist League (WYACL). Also in 1975, the Zvarych brothers got summer jobs working in Ellenville, just in time for the “official opening of the SUMA counselor camp.” During the first weekend of July, the Organizations of the Ukrainian Liberation Front commemorated the 25th anniversary of Roman Shukhevych’s death. Several Ulster County officials attended the Heroes’ Holiday. An “all-male bandurist capella from the Irvington, N.J. branch of the veterans of the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army” — the Galician SS — provided entertainment.

In 1976, the American Friends of the ABN began a new tradition at Ellenville that lives on today: “a six-day political science workshop” during the last week of December. The next year it became a TUSM affair. Roman Zvarych was an instructor at the second annual TUSM-led workshop. “The participants heard lectures on various topics related to Ukrainian nationalism. Much discussion was devoted to the current situation in Ukraine… The workshop ended with a bonfire dedicated to two young members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Dmytro Danylyshyn and Vasyl Bilas, who gave up their lives for their country.” (They assassinated a Polish politician in 1931 and were sentenced to death.) Earlier in 1978, Zvarych was elected the “ideological instructor” of TUSM and made a speech at the Ellenville summer camp on the “ideological education” of Ukrainian American youth. The year after that, he opened the Labor Day program, dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Bandera’s assassination, and read aloud Yaroslav Stetsko’s greetings. By 1980, the winter workshop was referred to as a “SUMA-sponsored political-ideological camp,” instructed by Roman and Ihor Zvarych, as well as the Ukrainian historian Taras Hunczak.