The Banderivtsi are members of an assortment of right-wing organizations in Ukraine. The term derives from the name of Stepan Bandera, head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists that formed in 1929 as an amalgamation of movements including the Union of Ukrainian Fascists. The union, known as OUN-B, had been engaged in various atrocities, including murder of civilians, predominantly Jews and Poles under the Nazi German administration. The term Banderites was also used by the Bandera followers themselves, and by others during the Holocaust, and the massacres of Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia by OUN-UPA in 1943–1944. According to Timothy D. Snyder nowadays the word is used to denote Ukrainian nationalists who sympathize with the fascist ideology, and consider themselves followers of the OUN-UPA myth in modern Ukraine.
History
The first murder operation carried out by OUN with the active participation of the then 25-year-old Bandera was the assassination of Bronisław Pieracki, Poland's Minister of Interior, in June 1934. Bandera provided the assassin with the 7.65mm caliber pistol personally. His subsequent arrest and conviction turned Bandera into an instant legend among the militant Ukrainian nationalists of the Second Polish Republic. Bandera, who escaped from prison after the German invasion of Polandin September 1939, offered his services to Nazi Germany in exchange for an ongoing financial and logistical support. Several months before the German attack on the USSR, in February 1941 Bandera became the leader of the faction of OUN known as OUN-B, or the Banderivtsi. In July 1941 however Bandera himself was arrested and sent to a concentration camp in Germany, which he left only in 1944. Subsequently, the OUN-B formed Ukrainian death-squads which carried out pogroms and massacres without any encouragement or help from the Germans. To ensure maximum impact of the systematic ethnic cleansing campaign in the contested territory, OUN-B faction spread antisemitic, racist, and fascist propaganda among the ordinary peasants and other Ukrainians. Aided by Stetsko, Shukhevych, and Lenkavskyi, Bandera wrote a manifesto titled "Ukrainian National Revolution" that called for the annihilation of so-called ethnic enemies. The manifesto informed the locals how to act, and included specific instructions about the killing of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainian opponents of fascism. Bandera coordinated the pogroms from behind. He did not participate in them; he remained in the area of occupied Kholmshchyna further north-west. The vast majority of pogroms carried out by the Banderites occurred in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, but also in Bukovina. The most deadly of them was perpetrated in the city of Lviv by the people's militia formed by OUN with direct participation of civilians, at the moment of the German arrival in the Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. There were two Lviv pogroms, carried out in a one-month span, both lasting for several days; the first one from 30 June to 2 July 1941, and the second one from 25 to 29 July 1941. The first pogrom took the lives of at least 4,000 Jews. It was followed by the killing of 2,500 to 3,000 Jews by the Einsatzgruppe C, and the "Petlura Days" massacre of more than 2,000 Polish Jews by the Ukrainian militants. During the pogrom, on June 30, 1941 Bandera declared a sovereign Ukrainian state in Lviv, and a few days later was arrested by the Germans who opposed it. Bandera was sent to detention in Germany. His supporters took over the command of the UPA death squads two years later, in November 1943.
