Andriy Melnyk (officer)

Andriy Melnyk
Official portrait, c. 1940
Native name	Андрій Мельник
Born	(1890-12-12)12 December 1890 Volya Yakubova, Austrian Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died	1 November 1964(1964-11-01) (aged 73) Clervaux, Luxembourg
Allegiance	Austria-Hungary Ukraine
Service / branch	Austro-Hungarian Army Ukrainian People's Army
Years of service	1914–1916 1917–1919
Rank	General Commandant Chief of Staff
Unit	Sich Riflemen
Commands	Sich Riflemen
Battles / wars	World War I Ukrainian War of Independence Anti-Hetman Uprising Ukrainian–Soviet War
Other work	Politician, co-creator of the UVO and OUN

Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk (Ukrainian: Андрій Атанасович Мельник; 12 December 1890 – 1 November 1964) was a Ukrainian military and political leader best known for leading the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists from 1939 onwards and later the Melnykites (OUN-M) following a split with the more radical Banderite faction (OUN-B) in 1940.

Biography

Early life and education

Melnyk was born near Drohobych, Halychyna, into a peasant family. Between 1912 and 1914 he studied forestry at the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna.

First World War (1914-1917)

With the outbreak of the First World War, Melnyk served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army as a volunteer commanding a company of the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen. Due to his kind demeanor, he was referred to affectionately as "Lord Melnyk" by fellow Ukrainian and Austrian officers, who felt that he embodied the English concept of a gentleman, which at that time had been an ideal in Central Europe.

Fighting on the Austro-Russian front in the Carpathian Mountains, he was taken prisoner by the Russians in September 1916, along with most of the Sich Riflemen unit, towards the end of the Brusilov Offensive. In captivity, Melnyk became a close associate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian second lieutenant in the same unit captured in 1915, subsequently joining the Ukrainian independence movement and escaping with Konovalets and his fellow prisoners of war to Kyiv in the spring of 1917 amid the chaos preceding the Russian Civil War.

Melnyk, c.1920

Early activities (1917-1938)

In the midst of the Ukrainian–Soviet War of 1917–1921 and together with Konovalets, Melnyk organised the Sich Riflemen and assumed the rank of Colonel under the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic until German military authorities installed the Second Hetmanate in its place. Melnyk subsequently supported Symon Petliura in the 1918 Anti-Hetman Uprising that followed proposed compromises on Ukrainian sovereignty with the aim of appeasing the Entente powers that in turn initially wanted to restore Imperial Russia to its pre-Treaty of Brest-Litovsk borders. The polyfactional conflict culminated in the 1921 Peace of Riga which placed much of Ukraine in the hands of the Bolsheviks that would go on to effectively repress Ukrainian nationalist movements and the west under Polish control.

Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen, Melnyk was a founding member and co-leader of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) in 1920, an underground militant organisation that engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations, primarily centered around preventing a rapprochement between Polish and Ukrainian authorities. Between 1924 and 1928, Melnyk was imprisoned in Lviv for terrorist activities against the Polish state.

Members of the last supreme command of the Sich Riflemen. Melnyk is seated, second from the left.

Following his release from prison, Melnyk largely stepped back from active engagement in UVO operations and married Sofia Fedak in February 1929, with the organisation going on to merge with several far-right nationalist student movements to form the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists later that month with Yevhen Konovalets at its head. For much of the 1930s, Melnyk chaired the OUN Senate, an ancillary consultative body within the organisation that sought to provide ideological guidance. During this time, he worked as an engineer and as the director of forests on the large estates of the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. A devout Catholic, he went on to become chairman of Orlo, a Galician Catholic Youth organisation that was considered to be anti-nationalist by many OUN members.

Leader of the OUN (1938-1940)

In the aftermath of Konovalets's assassination by the NKVD in a Rotterdam cafe in May 1938, the principal OUN leadership abroad could not agree on a leader from amongst themselves and therefore asked Melnyk to become leader of the OUN, who had claimed to have received a letter from Konovalets naming him as his preferred successor. He was chosen by the leadership in part because of the hope for more moderate and pragmatic leadership and due to a desire to repair strained ties with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, the head of which had sharply denounced the OUN for inciting acts of violence against Ukrainians that disapproved of its methods and its radical nationalism and had charged the organisation with morally corrupting the youth.

At the Second General 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 (literally translating to 'natocracy' or 'nationalocracy'), characterised by many scholars as a 'Ukrainian fascism'. In a May 1938 letter to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Melnyk claimed that the OUN was "ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy". In May 1939, Melnyk took steps to transfer part of the OUN leadership apparatus to a neutral country— initially Spain and later Portugal.

Sometimes at odds with his own organisation, Melnyk opposed the OUN's anti-clericalism and attempted to dissuade OUN members from persecuting their fellow Ukrainians, favouring a more cautious and diplomatic approach to securing Ukrainian independence with the totalitarian OUN at the helm of an Apartheid-like state. The elevation of Melnyk to the position of leader exacerbated a generational divide within the organisation between an older, more cautious generation, many of whom had fought in the conflicts surrounding the First World War, and a younger, more bellicose generation heavily inspired by Nazi ideology that demanded a more charismatic and radical leader and which began to coalesce around Stepan Bandera, the regional head of the OUN in Poland that had attained notoriety following his role in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki and the publicity that arose from the 1935 Warsaw and 1936 Lviv trials.

From 1938 onwards, Melnyk and Bandera were recruited into the Nazi Germany military intelligence Abwehr for espionage, counter-espionage and sabotage, a relationship that had its roots as far back as 1923 pertaining to the UVO, in return for providing the organisation with financial support. The Abwehr's goal was to run diversion activities after Germany's planned attack on the Soviet Union. Melnyk was given the code name 'Consul I'. This information is part of the testimony that Abwehr Colonel Erwin Stolze gave on 25 December 1945 and submitted to the Nuremberg trials, with a request that it be admitted as evidence.

Split with Bandera and the OUN(m) (1940-1945)

In the spring of 1940 and following Bandera's release from prison during the Nazi-Soviet Partition of Poland (which placed Western Ukraine in the hands of the Soviets), Melnyk and Bandera met in Rome in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the growing divide between the two emerging factions with the OUN subsequently fracturing into two rival organisations: the Melnykites (Melnykivtsi or the OUN-M) and the Banderites (Banderivtsi or the OUN-B), with Melnyk continuing efforts in vain to try to repair the schism.

Though Melnyk received widespread support among Ukrainian émigrés abroad, Bandera's position on the ground in Western Ukraine and the demographics of his base meant that he gained control of the vast majority of the local aparatus in the region. Ironically, effective Soviet repression in Central and Eastern Ukraine meant that most of the Ukrainians living in these regions were unaware of the split in the OUN, benefitting the more active Banderites in their battle for legitimacy.

Working from their bases in Berlin and Nazi-occupied Kraków, both factions of the OUN formed marching groups and planned to follow the Wermacht into Ukraine during the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union in order to recruit supporters and set up local governments. As soon as the collaborationalist Nachtigall Battalion entered Lviv on June 30, the group of Banderites, directed by Bandera from Kraków, proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state, though the German military authorities caught wind of this and cracked down upon the OUN-B, arresting Bandera on the eve of the proclaimation. The following day, 3,000 bodies seemingly killed by the NKVD were discovered in basements around Lviv, leading to anti-Jewish pogroms by OUN-B members, integrally enabled and supported by Bandera's rhetorical propagandising of antisemetic violence and ethnic cleansing surrounding the antisemetic Judeo-Bolshevism myth. Melnyk's reaction to the Lviv pogroms of 1941 is a matter of historical debate as there is no surviving evidence that he condemned the massacres and may have tacitly approved. It is generally accepted among historians that Melnyk was at best ambivalent towards the plight of the Jews and at worst actively complicit in the Holocaust given that some OUN-M members took part in the massacres, though there is evidence suggesting he was more pragmatically concerned with securing political autonomy from the Nazi authorities than with any ethnic cleansing, such as his letter to Heinrich Himmler in July 1941.

Melnyk and his supporters meanwhile avoided making any unilateral proclaimations, competing with Bandera's supporters for influence in Western Ukraine and intent on cooperating and gaining favour with the Wermacht in pursuit of a military-political arrangement similar to that of the Croatian Ustashe, thereby seeking to secure a place for a Ukrainian state in the fascist New European Order. Melnyk based the OUN-M's headquarters in Rivne, likely due to it being the de facto capital of the Reich Commissionerate of Ukraine under Erich Koch.

Initially, Melnyk's more conservative and moderate supporters enjoyed support against Bandera's radicals both from the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and from the German military authorities, with some Melnykites informing on OUN-B members. However, alarmed at the OUN-M's growing strength in Eastern and Central Ukraine and taken together with the incompatibility of Ukrainian statehood with Nazi designs on the region, the SS and government officials overruled the Wermacht and ordered a crackdown on the organisation in early 1942 with many of its members arrested or executed. Melnyk himself was taken to Berlin and placed under house arrest with Gestapo surveillance from where he sent letters to Nazi officials, including Adolf Hitler, protesting the change in policy and continued to covertly direct the OUN-M.

A conservative Catholic who maintained the officer's personal code of honor, Melnyk was reluctant to assert dominance or to engage in a ruthless pursuit of power which disadvantaged him versus his younger and more violent rivals in the Bandera camp. Many of Melnyk's close associates were killed by Bandera's Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) between 1941 and 1944 and Bandera's movement came to dominate the Ukrainian nationalist political milieu in most of Western Ukraine.

Historical evidence on Melnyk's reaction to the 1943 Galicia-Volhynian Massacres, which for the most part involved OUN-B members while he and his faction were practically marginalised, is sparse and some historians argue that, together with former OUN-M émigrés generally seeking to play down this event in the post-war years once it attracted greater attention, this reflects tacit acceptance or ideological complicity. A leaflet disseminated in 1944 by Melnykites among the civilians of Volhynia blamed the Banderite faction for the failure of the nationalist movement, condemning them for provoking the Nazi authorities, the "senseless and murderous violence towards the Polish civilian population", and "most of all" acts of violence against non-conforming Ukrainians by the OUN-B and the UPA.

In early 1944, Melnyk was briefly moved to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Bandera was also being held, before the Ukrainian political leadership were taken to Berlin to engage in negotiations with the German authorities for political concessions pertaining to Ukrainian independence under the auspices of the Ukrainian National Committee. Melnyk and his supporters however were dissatisfied with the progress and value of these negotiations and instead organised a meeting in Berlin in January 1945 whereupon it was decided that OUN-M members would meet the Allied advance and seek to familiarise the Western Allies with the Ukrainian independence movement. Melnyk left for Bad Kissingen in February, with the town occupied by American troops on April 7. Petitioning the Allied military administration, Melnyk was able to secure the right of Ukrainians freed from the concentration camps to be separated from Poles and Russians and allowed to display the blue-and-yellow flag.

Post-WW2

After the war, Melnyk remained in the West and lived with his wife in Luxembourg, as well as West Germany and Canada. He remained politically active and headed a number of Ukrainian émigré organizations.

Letters between Melnyk and Bandera in the post-war years indicate that they had reconciled, with Bandera referring to Melnyk as 'Colonel' and head of the OUN's leadership apparatus. The exiled OUN leadership, including Melnyk, Bandera, and Yaroslav Stetsko, attended a ceremony at Konovalets's grave in Rotterdam on May 27, 1958 to mark the 20th anniversary of his assassination.

Death

Melnyk died in Clervaux, Luxembourg, on November 1, 1964 at the age of 73, and was buried at Bonnevoie cemetery, Luxembourg.

In late 2006, the Lviv city administration announced the future transfer of the tombs of Andriy Melnyk, Yevhen Konovalets, Stepan Bandera and other key leaders of the OUN and UPA to a new area of Lychakivskiy Cemetery specifically dedicated to the Ukrainian national-liberation struggle. However this was not implemented.

See also

• History of Ukraine
• Stepan Bandera

External links

• Andrii Melnyk biography in Encyclopaedia of Ukraine
• "The History we don't know. Or don't care to know?" [Історія, якої не знаємо. Чи не хочемо знати?], available online