The Bandera Myth as Repressive Reality. Review: Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. Zhyttia Stepana Bandery, trans. from English. Kyiv: Antropos-Logos-Film, 2021. 624 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The review deals with the first scholarly biography of Stepan Bandera by the German-Polish historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. Translations of the book into Ukrainian and Russian were published in Kyiv in 2021. The book encountered resistance to its distribution from Ukrainian nationalists and also received mixed reviews abroad. Historians close to Ukrainian nationalists accused Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe of substituting objective research with propaganda. In view of the sharp public reaction in Ukraine to a scholarly biography of Stepan Bandera written by a foreign author, the review devotes significant attention to the systematic exposition of the book’s content. Bandera is portrayed in its pages as a far-right nationalist with fascist sympathies. His biography is presented inseparably from the history of the OUN, including the participation of this organisation in the Holocaust and the massacre of Poles in Volhynia. The author stresses that Bandera himself did not participate in these crimes, but Bandera’s faction in the OUN (OUN-B) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were guided by his ideas and inspired by his personality as a symbol. The book devotes particular attention to the OUN-B’s complex relationship with the Nazi occupiers. Initially, Bandera’s followers sought to use the German authorities as a tool to achieve independence for Ukraine under their rule (the Act of Restoration of the Ukrainian State, 30 June 1941). The German refusal to cooperate with the OUN-B and repressions against its members became an incentive for Bandera’s followers to create their own army, the UPA. From 1943 onward, the OUN-B began a geopolitical reorientation from Germany to the United States and Great Britain, hoping to secure their support in the struggle against the USSR. This shift predetermined the post-war fate of the organisation’s leadership in the West. After Ukraine gained independence, all OUN factions returned to the country. The OUN-B operated through a series of umbrella organisations, achieving significant influence over Ukraine’s ideological institutions. During the Russo-Ukrainian war, the Bandera myth is seen by the Ukrainian authorities as a consolidating factor in the resistance to aggression. It can be predicted that after the war, this myth will become a powerful factor of division in Ukrainian society. The only antidote to civil discord can be an open discussion about the personality of Bandera, about the OUN and the UPA, and about the model of the country’s future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".