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
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.

Early life and education

Melnyk was born near Drohobych, Galicia, to Maria Koval (d.1897) and Atanas Melnyk (d.1904/5), a well-known public figure who at a young age became village head and set up a local branch of the Prosvita society. Both his parents died prematurely of tuberculosis, leaving him to be raised by his remarried father's widow who paid for two surgeries relating to his own struggle with the disease, removing two ribs. Between 1912 and 1914 he studied forestry at the Higher School of Agriculture in Vienna, though his studies were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.

First World War (1914-1917)

In 1914, Melnyk volunteered as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army 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 in the battles of Makivka and Lysonia, he was awarded a Medal for Bravery during a visit to the front by Archduke Karl. In September 1916, he was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians, 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 captured in 1915, subsequently joining the Ukrainian independence movement and escaping with Konovalets and his fellow prisoners of war to Kyiv in late 1917 amid the chaos of the Russian Civil War.

Ukrainian War of Independence (1917-1919)

Melnyk, c.1919

In the midst of the Ukrainian War of Independence of 1917–1921 and together with Konovalets, who commanded the unit, Melnyk, his chief of staff, organised the Sich Riflemen and assumed the rank of colonel under the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR), playing a key role in quelling the 1918 Kyiv Arsenal January Uprising before the city was captured in February by the Bolsheviks, themselves dislocated by the German army in March, following the collapse of the frontlines and aided by the Sich Riflemen per the Bread Peace, which dissolved the Central Rada in April and installed the Second Hetmanate in its place. Having been apparent since the failure of the spring offensive and the Battle of Amiens, the German military started to withdraw from Ukraine in the midst of the German revolution and the impending signing of the armistice, thus leaving the new government in a precarious position.

Melnyk subsequently supported Symon Petliura in the November 1918 Anti-Hetman Uprising incited by proposed compromises on Ukrainian sovereignty with the aim of appeasing the Entente powers that in turn initially wanted to restore the Russian Empire to its pre-treaty borders, being awarded the position of otaman of the Ukrainian People's Army (UNA). With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that same month, the Polish-Ukrainian War simultaneously broke out for control of Western Ukraine. Amid the intensification of anti-Jewish pogroms in January 1919, Melnyk, briefly acting as commander of the siege corps, issued an order to court martial anyone caught agitating for or spreading rumours about the possibility of pogroms, though historians generally agree that such orders typically achieved little in the way of restoring discipline among Petliura's forces. Days later and following the re-establishment of the UPR in Kyiv the preceding December, Petliura, Konovalets, and Melnyk proposed that they reform the government into a 'Triumvirate' military dictatorship to unify command, though this was rejected by the UPR Directorate and the Sich Riflemen subsequently withdrew their political representation, the Rifle Council, with Melnyk becoming chief of staff of the UNA until the regular army was liquidated in December 1919 upon the switch to partisan warfare amid a bleak strategic position. That month, Melnyk fell ill from a typhus epidemic at the start of the guerilla-fought First Winter Campaign, whereby he was taken to a hospital in Rivne and ended up in a Polish internment camp in Lutsk. Melnyk was released in the spring of 1920 with the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw that ceded most of Western Ukraine to Poland in return for Polish recognition of the UPR and was appointed military attaché of the UNA in Czechoslovakia, based in Prague, intending to assist Konovalets in setting up a new unit to aid the Kyiv offensive, though this failed to materialise and became irrelevant with the subsequent collapse of the Polish-Ukrainian lines.

Following a Red Army counteroffensive and the Battle of Warsaw, the polyfactional conflict, that had also seen Ukraine contested by the Whites, Greens, and Anarchists among others, culminated in the 1921 Peace of Riga that partitioned Ukrainian territory, placing much of Ukraine in the hands of the Bolsheviks, who would go on to effectively repress Ukrainian nationalist and cultural movements, and the west under Polish control.

Early activities (1919-1938)

Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen in August 1920, Melnyk was a founding member and co-leader of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), an underground militant group that engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations, becoming primarily centered around preventing a rapprochement between Polish and Ukrainian authorities with Melnyk assuming home command of the organisation in 1922, having completed his forestry studies in Vienna. 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 following disbandment, c.1920. Melnyk is seated, second from the left.

Following his release from prison, Melnyk largely stepped back from active engagement in UVO operations and married Sofiya Fedak in February 1929 (the daughter of lawyer Stepan Fedak, one of the wealthiest men in Galicia, whose sister had married Konovalets and whose brother had attempted to assassinate Polish Chief of State Marshal Piłsudski in 1921), 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 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 Orly ('Eagles') in 1933, 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 outside 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.

Melnyk took over the leadership in the midst of the Sudetenland Crisis and the OUN's opportunistic support of Carpatho-Ukraine with the organisation initially directing, in his own words, "all [their] forces and means at [their] disposal" to aid them, later refining this to experienced military specialists on the request of Avgustyn Voloshyn who had become aware that a number of nationalists, some of whom he privately derided as "revolutionary shouters", were planning a coup d'état. Following on from the November 1938 First Vienna Award, itself part of the broader partition of Czechoslovakia, the automnomous region declared its independence from the Second Czechoslovak Republic in March 1939, though Nazi Germany failed to respond to appeals for recognition and the short-lived state was thus invaded and annexed by the Kingdom of Hungary a day later. Melnyk was present in Venice in July for the formalisation of cooperation and recognition between the OUN and the government of Carpathian Ukraine, with the events of the past months dealing an initial blow to Ukrainian nationalists' hopes that Hitler's Germany would support their ambitions in the event of an anticipated conflict against the USSR, compounded by the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact a month later.

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' and largely shaped by integral nationalism. 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". Melnyk sought to avoid the mistakes of the independence war and, in May 1939, took steps to transfer part of the OUN leadership apparatus from Mussolini's Italy to an expectedly neutral country— initially moving them to Spain and later securing their settlement in Portugal.

Melnyk and his supporters within the OUN were generally more conservative and less inclined towards the radical anti-clericalism and violence against non-conforming Ukrainians that had characterised the organisation prior, generally favouring a more cautious and diplomatic approach to securing Ukrainian independence with the semi-totalitarian OUN at the helm of an ethnocratic 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, who 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 codename '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 a final 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.

Initial Second World War collaboration with the Nazis (early to mid-1941)

Working from their bases in Berlin and Nazi-occupied Kraków (with Melnyk and his wife living in a Berlin apartment rented from German general Hermann Niehoff), both factions of the OUN formed marching groups and planned to follow the Wehrmacht 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 Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv with the founding of the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) on 5 October, styled off of its namesake under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as maintaining a significant presence in Rivne due to it being the de facto capital of the Reich Commissionerate of Ukraine under Erich Koch.

Detention, incarceration, and release (mid-1941 to 1945)

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 with the UNRada dissolved in November 1941, the Melnykite newspaper Ukrainian Word puppeted in December, and many OUN-M members arrested or executed by the SD from November onwards. After travelling several times between Kraków, Melnyk had had his movements restricted to Berlin in mid-1941, under Gestapo surveillance, from where he sent letters to Nazi officials including Adolf Hitler, protesting the change in policy and attempting to secure the release of arrested and persecuted members, periodically receiving information of further crackdowns upon OUN-M members in Ukraine.

In a letter to Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky dated July 7, 1942, Melnyk wrote:

"As always before, I am now ready to meet as far as possible in carrying out the initiatives of Your Excellency to eliminate disagreements within our people, which especially at this time needs the greatest possible unity to achieve the ideal of the Nation under the single current political factor in Ukraine— the OUN…

In my experience so far, when I have given so much evidence of my best will and understanding for both human weaknesses and ambitions, and for the peculiar situations and demands of the wave, including the disposition of my own person, I have an unshakable conviction of the right path: not to indulge the disaster, but to fight the disaster. My only regret is that all our citizens did not follow this path at once."

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 the Banderite 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 late 1943, and amid Allied bombing raids, Melnyk moved with his wife to Vienna in an attempt to restore contact with OUN-M members in occupied Ukraine, though, following a brief trip to Berlin where he likely tried to re-establish connections with Nazi officials, he and his wife were arrested by the Gestapo in late January 1944 and taken back to the capital. The following day, Melnyk was moved to a dacha in Wannsee where he was frequently interrogated by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and then moved on the turn of March to the alpine settlement of Hirschegg where he was held as a Sonderhaftling (special prisoner) at the Ifen Hotel. Fellow political prisoner André François-Poncet, with whom he would attend the local church service on Sundays, wrote of him in his diary:

[Friday 3rd March] "This Melnyk is a man of refined culture, very polite and well-mannered. His wife – a small brunette, with lively eyes, delicate facial features, and uses a lorgnette. Both seem indignant at the deprivation of freedom they must endure. They might become pleasant companions in suffering."

In July 1944, Melnyk was moved first to Berlin where he was accused of holding political conversations with fellow arrested persons and trying to establish contact with the OUN-M in occupied-Ukraine. Subsequently he was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Bandera was also being held and from whom he learnt of the death of Oleh Olzhych, the acting head of the OUN-M, before the Ukrainian political leadership were taken to Berlin in October to engage in negotiations with the Nazi authorities, who at this point were suffering from manpower shortages, 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 Clervaux, Luxembourg, having become aquainted with Prince Félix when he was director of forests for the Lviv Metropol, as well as later living in West Germany and Canada.

Melnyk remained politically active, authoring several historical articles on the Ukrainian independence movement and was instrumental in the founding of the Ukrainian Coordinating Committee in 1946 and a new Ukrainian National Council in 1947. In 1957, he proposed the idea of an 'umbrella' organisation to consolidate the fragmented landscape of Ukrainian diaspora organisations, something realised ten years later with the founding of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians. According to CIA reports from 1952 and 1977, the less intellectual and "radically outmoded" Banderite émigré organisations struggled to build influence on the ground in the Ukrainian SSR whereas Melnykite organisations would go on to establish contacts with Ukrainian dissidents and publish dissident works such as the 1968 Chornovil Papers and five volumes of The Ukrainian Herald.

Under Melnyk, the OUN-M distributed anonymous pamphlets as early as 1946 in west German Ukrainian displacement camps that sought to rewrite the history of the war into a nationalist propagandist narrative, exclusively victimising and lionising the organisation for the brutal repression many of its members endured and glossing over its complicity in war crimes and much of its collaboration with the Nazis. Historian Yuri Radchenko asserts that these efforts were instrumental in popularising myths surrounding the OUN-M in the diaspora and newly independent Ukraine.

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 official governing body. 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 Cologne, West Germany, 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