Description

This talk explains new interpretations on why Ukrainians from the Western Ukraine joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) during the Second World War. It reconstructs the motives and pressures that led Ukrainians to make a decision in favour of active insurgency. There was no single motivating factor in joining the UPA. Rather it was the product of a mix of shared experiences common to the population of the Western Ukrainian region. The experiences were personal but also institutional and political, the product of the behaviour of states, armed forces and local administrators in the region. This talk argues that nationalism, as a set of shared values and a common culture, took root in the 1920s at the same time as political nationalism, represented by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and that both forms of national expression were influential in pushing Ukrainians towards a more radical defence of their national identity. The role of the state (the Second Polish Republic and the later German and Soviet occupiers) also played a key part in encouraging Ukrainians to develop a defensive sense of community. The absence of the state in large parts of the Volhynian countryside from 1943 onwards, with the collapse of German power, also played a part in encouraging the insurgent organisation to adopt the role of providing order and security. The insurgency recruited men as well as women, and often for the same reasons. This talk explores the ways in which women, often exploiting kinship networks, adopted particular gender roles which were as essential to sustaining the UPA as the male role of fighting. All of these factors, it is argued, were necessary ingredients in any explanation for the decision to move beyond political activism and passive resentment to an active role in the UPA.

Larysa Zariczniak graduated from a combined undergraduate degree in History and Political Science from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada in 2005. The following year, graduated from the University of Nottingham with a Masters’ degree in History (focusing on analyzing Operation ‘Wisla’) and completed a doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Richard Overy. The years in between the Masters’ degree and the beginning of the doctoral thesis was employed by the Atlantic Council of Canada to intern at the NATO Information and Documentation Center in Kyiv, Ukraine and working on discussions on Ukraine’s accession possibility into the European Union and NATO. Has attended numerous conferences to discuss the oral history, historiography and general history of the UPA.