Oleh Olzhych. Recruiting: Impossible. To Liquidate

Another person has been added to the list of leaders of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement, who were meant to be liquidated by Stalin’s special services on the Kremlin’s instructions. Andriy Melnyk, Stepan Bandera and Mykola Kapustyanskyi the plans of whose assassination have recently become known from the intelligence documents, have now been joined by Oleh Kandyba (pseudonym – Olzhych) – one of the leaders of the Provid (leadership- Transl.) of Ukrainian Nationalists, social and political activist, poet, archeologist. The declassified documents from the Branch State Archives of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine shed light on how it happened.

Oleh Olzhych came into the view of the OGPU of the USSR approximately in 1933. At least one of the first documents from his case file is dated December 7, 1933. It is a report from the foreign residentura of the Soviet intelligence entitled “Composition of the OUN Governing Bodies”. It provides a list of the “Top Management”, headed by Yevhen Konovalets and “Assisting Forces”, including O. Kandyba from Prague. At the end of the message there is a remark stating: “Kandyba – a son of a famous Ukrainian writer Oles” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 4417. - P. 32–33).

Another document of the Foreign Department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR entitled “On the OUN Terrorist Oleh Kandyba” and dated July 2, 1936, provides more details about him, though far from accurate – studying, traveling abroad, living with his parents in Prague. It also reads: “Kandyba O., being a student, joined Ukrainian nationalists and since then he has been personally linked to Ukrainian nationalists such as Konovalets, Halahan, poet Samchuk, Danylchuk, engineer Gordaki Aleksandr, Yaroslav Baranovskyi, Zabavskyi, Khmelevskyi, Melnyk and Martynets” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. - Case 4417. - P. 59).

Obviously, Oleh Kandyba, like many other so -called enemies of the Soviet power, was called a “terrorist” in the document because the NKVD had information that he met with Yevhen Konovalets and other OUN leaders and during the meeting allegedly discussed the possibility of assassinating Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR Maksim Litvinov. But there is no evidence in other archival materials of his participation in planning this and other such measures.

On the contrary, the case reads that in the mid-1930s, Oleh Kandyba was engaged in scientific activity in archeology, history, history of arts, ethnography, and was a distinctive and original poet. One of the foreign agents described him as follows: “On Kandyba – a positive, serious, more engaged in science, than in other things, in addition, writes as a journalist and poet, following the example of his father.

Politically O. Kandyba, while studying at the university, joined Ukrainian nationalists, but rather ideologically than practically…

In 1933–34, Kandyba assumed the “presidency” in the National Ukrainian Red Cross, founded to assist the starving in Ukraine and political prisoners in Poland, but soon refused because he was afraid of the “political nature” of the Red Cross...

… He said about his participation in the OUN that he was working with the OUN only ideologically, participating in its press” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 4417. - P. 52).

In fact, he already took care of conspiracy and did not tell everyone what he did. On the instructions of Colonel Ye. Konovalets, he headed the cultural and educational referentura of the Provid of Ukrainian Nationalists, which established publishing legal and illegal publications and united many famous figures of culture and art. This alone was enough to start his active cultivation along with other leading OUN leaders.

But despite all the efforts, NKVD could not collect more information during that period. Only information about his participation in 1933, 1934 and 1935 in international student congresses in Sofia, where he spoke with a member of the OUN Roman Sushko on behalf of Ukrainian students.

In 1936 – 1939, as noted in one of the papers, the cultivation of Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych was mothballed, there was no new information from abroad about his location and activity. For the next two years, the Chekists had been collecting information on his close relatives. In particular, they found and began to study his father's sisters in Sumy.

The new stage of cultivation began in 1941 and was associated with the name of Pavel Sudoplatov, who at that time was already “distinguished” by the murder of Yevgen Konovalets and held the position of Deputy Chief of the 5th Department (Foreign Intelligence) of the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD of the USSR. The letter under his signature of February 22, 1941, addressed to Chief of the 5th Department of the Directorate of State Security of the NKVD of the USSR Sergey Savchenko entitled “On the Case of Kandyba”, contains the following interesting information: “Oles’ son – Kandyba Oleh Oleksandrovych is an active Ukrainian nationalist, until 1939 lived in Prague with his father and was cultivated by us for recruitment. Please urgently find all Kandyba’s relatives, under some excuse find out everything they know about Oles and his son Oleh and decide who of them could recruite Kandyba Oleh. We are finding out Kandyba’s place of residence in Prague”( BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. - Case 4417. - P. 91).

So only now became known the information about the NKVD’s great desire to try and recruit Oleh Olzhych. After all, it is no longer a secret that such plans were developed in relation to other active leaders of Ukrainian emigration – Roman Smal-Stotskyi, Vsevolod Zmiyenko, Vasyl Vyshivanyi, Mykola Kapustianskyi and others. The Kremlin's tactics at all times was to try to recruit a person and then to get first hand information, if it failed – to discredit the person using a whole arsenal of proven means, if this was in vain – to assassinate.

With regard to Oleh Olzhych, the situation, according to archival documents, unfolded as follows. At the end of March 1941, Sudoplatov received an answer from Kyiv that all close relatives of Oleh Olzhych in the territory of the USSR were found and work on their careful study and deciding who of them could be involved in cooperation to implement measures for the main person of the case. But the German-Soviet War interfered with those plans.

In the first weeks of the war, the NKVD bodies were reorganized, and this enabled Oleh Olzhych to disappear from their view for some time. Therefore, among the archival documents, there is no information either about his heading the OUN Revolutionary Tribunal in 1939-1941, nor about his activity in the occupied Kyiv.

Then, at the beginning of the war, Oleh Olzhych, at the head of the first groups of the OUN, went to Ukraine and headed the nationalist underground in the capital of Ukraine. Soon, on behalf of the OUN Provid, he organized crowded honoring of the soldiers of the second winter campaign, who in 1921 were shot dead by the Bolsheviks near the village of Bazar, in Zhytomyr region. After that, the Nazis arrested more than two hundred local OUN activists. Then arrests of fellows began in Kyiv. In particular, were arrested and later executed in Babi Yar Olena and Mykhailo Telihas, Ivan Rohach, Petro Koshyk, Orest Chymerynskyi and other leading OUN leaders.

At that time, Oleh Olzhych, as the Deputy Head of the OUN (Melnik’s Wing), actually led all the work of the nationalist underground in Ukraine. He was therefore forced to leave Kyiv and constantly hide from the invaders. Eventually, he settled in Lviv, where he continued his activity until 1944.

In 1941 – 1944, the NKGB bodies did not have prompt information about him. The next document was dated August 29, 1944. This is an excerpt from the report of the agent “Zakhidnyi”(“Western”- Transl.), who reported as follows:

“Kandyba - 38-40 years of age, tall, strong, athletic. The face is oval, expressive, the eyes are large, gray with a shade of intelligence and generosity. The hair is light, curly, the nose is straight. Facial expression testifies to determination.

Until 1941, Kandyba was known to me as a writer and journalist of nationalist orientation under the pseudonym Olzhych”.

The agent then reports that he saw Olzhych in January 1942. From the conversation with him, he realized that he was in an illegal position and led the work of the OUN throughout Ukraine. “I got a task from him”, said “Zakhidnyi”, “to contact Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, where to establish links to Odesa and Crimea... But I have not seen him since”. (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. – Case 4417. - P. 124).

The next document is from November 11, 1944. It reports that “at the end of 1941, with the beginning of arrests of Ukrainian nationalists in Kyiv, Kandyba left Kyiv for Lviv, from where he left for Prague in early 1944”. And the last paragraph of the document reads: “The agent “Zakhidnyi” who is on a business trip abroad, is entrusted to find Kandyba and arrange a special measure regarding him” (BSA of the SZR of Ukraine. - F. 1. - Case 4417. - P. 120).

In this context, the special measure meant liquidation. After all, on this day, November 11, 1944, were signed by the same employees of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR separate plans of special measures for assassination in Berlin of Andriy Melnyk and Stepan Bandera. But the situation with Oleh Olzhych was different. The available open information shows that on May 25, 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Lviv. He was jailed in Celenbau's barracks – a separate block for especially important prisoners in the territory of the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. He died from torture during another interrogation on the night of June 10, 1944.

So the NKGB, despite the fact that it had no information about Oleh Olzhych's whereabouts and did not know if he was alive, it did develop plans for his assassination. And this shows that such measures were put on the stream and in every possible way were encouraged, as well as the purposeful policy of Stalin's special services aimed at physical destruction of as many active leaders of the Ukrainian national liberation movement as possible, trying to do so during the war and thus not to be accused by the world community of the state terrorism policy.

As for the circumstances of Oleh Olzhych’s arrest by the Nazis, the researchers have a number of versions. At the same time, there is no information in the archival case. Only in the appendix to the operational documents there is a copy of the Ukrainian public, literary, artistic and popular science journal “Promin” (Issue 3–4 of August 19, 1946) with a publication headed “Oleh Kandyba-Olzhych”. In it, the editorial board states that it publishes “Reminiscences about the life, struggle and death of the famous son of the Ukrainian people – Olzhych”.