Melnykites
Melnykites is a colloquial name for members of the OUN-M or OUN, a faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists that arose out of a split with the more radical Banderite faction in 1940. The term derives from the name of Andriy Melnyk, the leader of the OUN formally elected to the post in August 1939 following the May 1938 assassination of the previous leader, Yevhen Konovalets, by the NKVD.
The OUN collaborated with Nazi Germany for much of the Second World War on the Eastern Front, contributing to the formation of various collaborationist units over the course of the conflict. The OUN despatched expeditionary groups to shadow the Wehrmacht's advance into the Soviet Union and set up local administrations in occupied-Ukraine, though from November 1941 onwards its members were subjected to violent crackdowns by the German authorities. As members of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police units, many Melnykites were complicit in the implementation of the Holocaust in Ukraine.
From October 1942, the OUN and local Melnykites set up partisan units that competed for influence with Banderite, Polish, and Soviet partisan groups, while some OUN partisans independently resisted the German occupation and participated to a peripheral extent in the massacres of the Polish population of Volhynia in 1943. Almost all of them were forcibly disarmed or merged into the Banderite Ukrainian Insurgent Army by the autumn of that year. Around the same time, the local Melnykite leadership around Lutsk negotiated the formation of the Ukrainian Legion of Self-Defense under the SS that combatted Soviet partisans and pacified Polish towns and villages.
Almost the entirety of the OUN leadership were arrested by the Nazis over the course of the war. However they were later released in October 1944 in order to negotiate support for the retreating German Army, which was suffering from manpower shortages, with a broad spectrum of Ukrainian nationalist groups represented under the Ukrainian National Committee. With the war nearing its end, and Nazi officials still rejecting demands for the recognition of Ukrainian statehood, Melnyk and his supporters withdrew from the committee and travelled west in early 1945 to meet the Allied advance.
During the Cold War era, the exiled OUN moderated its ideology away from fascism, and in 1993 registered as a non-governmental organisation in independent Ukraine. Since 2012, the OUN has been led by activist and historian Bohdan Chervak.
Background
A veteran of the First World War and the Ukrainian War of Independence serving as a colonel in the Sich Riflemen and the wider Ukrainian People's Army, Andriy Melnyk was a founding member of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1929 as well as having cofounded its predecessor, the Ukrainian Military Organisation, in 1920. Despite having largely stepped back from direct engagement in the UVO and OUN underground since his imprisonment by the Polish authorities from 1924 to 1928, Melnyk was selected by the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists in the aftermath of Yevhen Konovalets's assassination in May 1938, while Melnyk was reportedly named in Konovalets's oral will as his preferred successor.At the Second Great Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in Rome on 27 August 1939, Melnyk was formally ratified as leader of the OUN and reaffirmed its ideology as continuing in the vein of natsiokratiia, which has been characterised by scholars as a Ukrainian form of fascism and/or integral nationalism, itself sometimes characterised as proto-fascist, or more broadly as extreme or radical nationalism influenced by fascist movements. Historian Franziska Bruder describes the OUN as a classic example of the nationalist movements with fascist characteristics that emerged during the interwar period in Central and Eastern Europe. According to historian Georgiy Kasianov, OUN ideologues borrowed much from Italian Fascism but also emphasised the differences between Ukrainian radical nationalism and established fascist movements. At the conference, Melnyk was styled under the title vozhd in the Führerprinzip tradition.
Melnyk was chosen for his more moderate and pragmatic stance; his supporters generally held Vyacheslav Lypynsky in high regard and often distanced themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's ideology in public. Melnyk's supporters were mostly made up of an older, more conservative and cautious generation that largely composed the exiled PUN, with many having fought in the failed independence war. The OUN made efforts to identify with European fascist movements in the late 1930s, with OUN ideologue Orest Chemerynskyi asserting in a 1938 article that "nationalisms" such as Fascism, National Socialism, and Ukrainian nationalism were "national expressions of the same spirit". In 1939, the Cultural Department of the OUN set up a Commission for the Study of Fascism, according to historian Taras Kurylo with the aim of constructing a theoretical basis for this identification, though these plans were interrupted by world events.
A younger and more radical faction of the OUN heavily inspired by Dontsov's works were dissatified with Melnyk's leadership and demanded a more charismatic and radical leader. This generational divide, that had been largely up until then successfully managed by Konovalets's leadership, led the younger more radical generation to coalesce around Stepan Bandera. Bandera was in prison for his role in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and had attained notoriety for the publicity that arose from the 1935 Warsaw and 1936 Lviv trials.
Prior to the split, Melnyk and members of the PUN had been recruited into the Abwehr from 1938 onwards, with Melnyk assigned the codename 'Consul I', whereby the PUN collaborated with Nazi military intelligence to plan the OUN Uprising of 1939 that sought to disrupt the Polish rear during a German invasion and was largely aborted due to the Nazi–Soviet Pact. In a Vienna meeting in early September, Melnyk was directed by Wilhelm Canaris to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a west Ukrainian state which was completed in 1940 by Mykola Stsiborskyi, the OUN's chief theorist and organisational officer, and encompassed the establishment of a totalitarian state under a Vozhd with the Ukrainian-Jewish population singled out for distinct and ambiguous citizenship laws.
Split with the Banderite faction
In January 1940, and following the release of OUN members held in Polish prisons during the Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland that unified Ukrainian lands under the Soviet Union, Bandera travelled to Rome with a series of demands, among them the replacement of certain members of the Provid with members of the younger generation though this was rejected by Melnyk. Bandera subsequently made a challenge to the PUN on 10 February by establishing a 'revolutionary' Provid in Nazi-occupied Kraków to inflexibly prepare for a revolution in Soviet-controlled Galicia, turning down Melnyk's offer to allow him an advisory position in the PUN.On 5 April, Melnyk and Bandera met in Rome in a final unsuccessful attempt to resolve the growing divide between the two emerging factions with Melnyk declaring the Revolutionary Leadership illegal on 7 April and appealing on 8 April for OUN members not to join the 'saboteurs'. Melnyk decided to put the members of the Revolutionary Leadership before the OUN tribunal, in response to which Bandera and Stetsko rejected Melnyk's leadership and responded in kind. The OUN subsequently fractured into two rival organisations: the Melnykites and the Banderites, with Melnyk continuing efforts in vain to try to repair the schism. The tribunal officially removed Bandera from the OUN on 27 September.
Of the three Provid members that Bandera demanded be replaced, he and his followers' accusations encompassed Omelian Senyk losing OUN documents to the Czech and subsequently Polish police as chief administrative officer to Konovalets in the run up to Bandera's and fellow OUN members' trials, Mykola Stsiborskyi having a debate in passing with a Communist agent that attempted to recruit him, and Yaroslav Baranovsky's brother being an agent for the Polish police. Former president of the short-lived Carpatho-Ukraine Avgustyn Voloshyn praised Melnyk for having an ideology based in Christianity and for not placing the nation above God while auxiliary bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Lviv Ivan Buchko declared that nationalists possessed an outstanding leader in Melnyk.
Polemic
Latent tensions about the non-Ukrainian ethnic background of Richard Yary, a central member of the OUN behind the split and the only member of the Provid to join it, his wife who was born an Orthodox Jew, and corruption allegations against him dating back to UVO cooperation with Weimar Germany, as well as the personal life of Mykola Stsiborskyi whose third wife was Jewish, became the focus of a polemic that ensued between the two factions. It's possible that an alleged spat between Stsiborskyi and Yaroslav Stetsko where Stsiborskyi dismissed Stetsko from his duties in preparation for the 1939 Second Great Congress, asserting that he was unable to complete them satisfactorily, had contributed to the tensions between Bandera's supporters and the Provid.In an August 1940 letter addressed to Melnyk, Bandera stated that he would accept the colonel's authority if he removed traitors from the PUN, especially Stsiborskyi whom he lambasted for possessing an absence of "morality and ethics in family life" and for marrying a "suspicious" Russian-Jewish woman. In late 1940, Stsiborskyi published a white book in response on the "Yary-Bandera diversion-rebellion" in which he recited the course of correspondence and rebuked the Banderites' allegations. Bandera was portrayed as a puppet of Yary who had pocketed OUN funds and who had been scheming against the Provid for over a decade.
Melnykites argued for subordination to the legitimate leader, with an October 1940 issue of OUN periodical Nastup denouncing followers of Bandera for succumbing to the "liberal-democratic vices" of individual defiance of authority and party intrigue. In July 1941, the OUN published a "Black Book of Rebellion" that characterised Yary as "by origin a Czech-Jewish crossbreed" and dismissed Bandera as Yary's "goy" while an OUN newspaper was accused of furthering the two's "Marxist Jewish revolution".