Section Days abstract book 2010.indd - RUB Research School ...

WOMEN IN THE ARMED UKRAINIAN
UNDERGROUND, 1942-1954
Olena Petrenko
Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft, Lehrstuhl für osteuropäische Geschichte; Ruhr-
Universität Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany
e-mail: olena.petrenko@rub.de
This dissertation seeks to contribute to the discussion of a contested chapter of Soviet history,
which has taken a central place in “the struggle for history” of post-socialist Ukraine. Since
Ukraine’s emergence as a sovereign state in 1991, the story of the armed underground in
West-Ukrainian territories between the 1930s and the 1950s has become a major political
issue. The public debate around the place of the nationalist resistance movement in Ukrainian
history is inseparable from Ukraine’s highly mythologized collective cultural memory, which
is developing in divergent trajectories in the pro-Russian Ukrainian East and the pro-Western
Ukrainian West. While the participants of the armed underground, and above all, the members
of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the soldiers of the Ukrainian
Insurgent Army (UPA) still fall under the category of Nazi-collaborators and “bandits” in the
East, West Ukrainian population celebrates the resistance fighters as national heroes, which
first fought against the German occupiers and then turned against the Red Army.
Within this framework of ever-increasing volume of scholarship regarding the history of
OUN-UPA, this study will seek to explore the hitherto ignored female presence in the armed
underground of the 1940s and 50s. Memories of that role are still present in public culture,
which, as a rule, highlights their peerless heroism as an extension of the Ukrainian people’s
collective martyrdom. The representations of women’s lives are thus often frozen into
predetermined patterns. In this context, women appear generally as icons and their lives as
allegories of heroism rather than individual, multi-faceted experiences.
Herein lies the intervention of this dissertation. Operating outside of the East-West
ideological framework and without these and other conventional blinders, it will seek to
reconstruct their contribution to the armed Ukrainian underground. What motivations and
circumstances led them to join the armed resistance? Did patriotism really play a central role
in their decisions? What kind of assignments were given to those women and were they
subject to modification? To what extent were these women used by the Soviet security
apparatus in the defeat of UPA? Finally, how do we explain the obvious contradiction
between the selective and superficial celebration, on the one hand, and the silencing of
women’s participation, on the other?