Andriy Melnyk

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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 1938 onwards and later the Melnykites (OUN-M) following a split with the more radical Banderite faction (OUN-B) in 1940. Born in Austrian Galicia, Melnyk volunteered in the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen at the outbreak of the First World War and was later captured by the Russians in 1916. He escaped captivity in late 1917 and served as a senior officer in the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic during the Ukrainian War of Independence, rising to the rank of colonel. Melnyk went on to cofound the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO) in 1920 that continued the armed struggle against Poland in Western Ukraine and which later formed the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. Following his time in prison between 1924 and 1928 in connection with the Olha Basarab case, he largely stepped back from active engagement in the UVO–OUN underground. After the assassination of Yevhen Konovalets by the NKVD, Melnyk was selected to lead the OUN and collaborated with Nazi intelligence to plan the largely aborted OUN…Citește mai mult

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Early life and education Andriy Atanasovych Melnyk was born in Volya Yakubov, a village near Drohobych, Galicia, to Maria Kovaliv (d.1894/7) and Atanas Melnyk (d.1905), a public figure who at a relatively young age became village head and set up a local branch of the Prosvita society. Melnyk graduated from a gymnasium in Stryi in 1910. Both his parents died prematurely of tuberculosis, leaving him to be raised by his remarried father's widow, Pavlyna Matchak, who paid for two surgeries relating to his own struggle with the disease between 1910 and 1912, 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.

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First World War (1914–1917) In 1914, Melnyk volunteered in the newly formed Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen (USS) where he commanded a company that was engaged in sabotage, rising from a khorunzhyi to the rank of lieutenant. He later fought in the Battle of Makivka and received the silver Signum Laudis medal in late 1915 during an awards ceremony by Archduke Karl. He was reportedly referred to as "Lord Melnyk" by his 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. In early September 1916, Melnyk was wounded and taken prisoner by the Russians during the Battle on Mount Lysonia [ru] alongside several hundred USS soldiers.

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Captivity Melnyk and his comrades in the USS (including Roman Sushko and Fedir Chernyk) were transferred between several prisoner-of-war camps, including briefly one in Tsaritsyn, before they were moved to a lightly guarded internment camp in the village of Dubovka as of March 1917. Melnyk became a close associate of Yevhen Konovalets, a Ukrainian second lieutenant captured in 1915 who was held in the Tsaritsyn camp and from whom Melnyk learned of the developments in Ukraine surrounding the February Revolution and the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. The Central Rada was initially reluctant to form a regular army and, out of fear of being accused of Austrophilism, refused to accept former members of the Austro-Hungarian army from Galicia into the first Ukrainised regiments. Melnyk worked with his fellow USS officers in the internment camp to organise a system of lecture courses for their fellow prisoners-of-war on political economy, the history and geography of Ukraine, and military affairs in preparation for joining the Ukrainian War of Independence. Former Austrian soldiers were later permitted into Ukrainian ranks and Konovalets, who was working to organise a military unit, sent word to the Dubovka camp. Melnyk and his fellow officers made their escape in…Citește mai mult

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Ukrainian War of Independence (1918–1920) On arriving in Kyiv, Melnyk assumed the position of chief of staff in the Galician-Bukovinian Kurin of the Sich Riflemen, commanded by Konovalets, under the Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR). Amid a lack of coordination among nationalist forces, Konovalets and Melnyk developed an operation plan to quell the 1918 Kyiv Arsenal January Uprising in which the Sich Riflemen distinguished themselves and played a key role in liberating the city. Melnyk held the position of otaman in the Ukrainian People's Army (UNA) and in recognition of his contribution was conferred the rank of major as of March and later the rank of colonel. Kyiv 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. Dissatisfied with disruption caused by the socialist agrarian reforms of the Central Rada, the German military authorities supported a coup d'état in April and installed the Ukrainian State in its place. Melnyk accompanied Konovalets to a meeting with Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi on 29 April, with the Sich Riflemen forced to disband on 1 May after refusing to recognise Skoropadskyi's authority. Alongside Konovalets…Citește mai mult

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Interwar political activities (1920–1938) Alongside Konovalets and former Sich Riflemen in August 1920, Melnyk was a founding member of the Ukrainian Military Organisation (UVO), an underground militant group that continued the armed struggle against Poland and engaged in acts of terrorism and assassinations. Having completed his forestry studies in Prague and Vienna, Melnyk moved to Lviv in September 1922 upon which he was briefly arrested. Melnyk assumed the position of head of the UVO Home Command in early 1923 and set about rebuilding its base into a conspiratorial underground. In April 1924, he was arrested in connection to the Olha Basarab case and imprisoned in Lviv for intelligence activities against the Polish state. Following his release from prison in September 1928, Melnyk largely stepped back from direct involvement in the UVO underground and married Sofia Fedak in February 1929. Sofia was 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. Earlier that month the UVO had merged with several far-right nationalist student movements to form the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) with Yevhen Konovalets at its…Citește mai mult

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Leader of the OUN (1938–1940) On hearing of Konovalets's assassination by the NKVD outside a Rotterdam cafe in May 1938, Melnyk and his wife travelled to Vienna. However, due to a delay in conveying the news, they were unable to reach Rotterdam in time for the funeral five days later and instead travelled from Vienna to Rome to meet Konovalets's widow (Melnyk's sister-in-law). On returning to Lviv in June, Melnyk learned that the Leadership of Ukrainian Nationalists (the OUN's executive command in exile and hereon the PUN or the Provid) could not agree on a leader from amongst themselves and were considering asking Melnyk to become leader of the OUN. Melnyk travelled to the Free City of Danzig where he met in September with Provid member Omelian Senyk who informed him that Konovalets's oral will stated him as his preferred successor whereafter he accompanied Senyk to Vienna and was elected head of the PUN on 14 October. He was chosen by the Provid 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. Sheptytsky had sharply denounced the OUN for inciting acts of…Citește mai mult

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Support for Carpatho-Ukraine 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. Melnyk travelled to Prague to meet with the Czech government and despatched Oleh Olzhych to Transcarpathia to represent the PUN, as well as sending others on diplomatic missions, while as many as 2,000 young radicals from Galicia crossed the border. Melnyk later refined the OUN's support to cultural figures and experienced military specialists on the request of Carpatho-Ukrainian leader Avgustyn Voloshyn who had become aware that a number of nationalists, some of whom he derided in his correspondence 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 autonomous 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. In the aftermath of this defeat Melnyk privately announced his intention to resign as…Citește mai mult

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Formal ratification as leader At the Second Great 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 'natiocracy'), which has been characterised by scholars as a Ukrainian form of fascism and/or integral nationalism, itself sometimes characterised as proto-fascist, or more broadly as extreme or radical nationalism influenced by fascist movements. At the conference, Melnyk was styled under the title vozhd in the Führerprinzip tradition. In a May 1939 letter to German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Melnyk had claimed that the OUN was "ideologically akin to similar movements in Europe, especially to National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy". Melnyk and his supporters within the OUN were generally more conservative and less inclined towards the radical anti-clericalism and terror that had characterised the organisation prior, highly regarding the ideology of Vyacheslav Lypynsky while often distancing themselves from Dmytro Dontsov's ideology in public. 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…Citește mai mult

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Collaboration with Nazi intelligence From 1938 onwards, Melnyk was recruited into the 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 attacks on Poland and the Soviet Union whereby Melnyk assisted in planning the largely aborted OUN Uprising of 1939 and was assigned the codename 'Consul I'. Following the Nazi–Soviet Pact and the German invasion of Poland, Melnyk met with the head of the Eastern Department of the German Foreign Office in Berlin on 3 September 1939 where he was told that Ukrainian armed involvement against Poland neither lay in German nor Ukrainian interests and to reserve his forces. Wilhelm Canaris later gave the order to ready the OUN group on 11 September and met with Melnyk in Vienna where he directed him to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a west Ukrainian state. Canaris congratulated Melnyk on "the successful resolution of the question of western Ukraine" and asked for a list of government officials. Melnyk instructed Roman Sushko, who was to lead an expedition into Poland,…Citește mai mult

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The Holocaust and antisemitism The OUN-M formed the Bukovinian Battalion under the Abewehr in August which, alongside OUN-M members in the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, would go on to support the implementation of The Holocaust in Ukraine— Melnyk's own reaction and role in this has received very little attention from scholars. According to the historian Yuri Radchenko, Melnyk had a "more or less clear picture of what was happening in Ukraine". The OUN-M's press organs in German-occupied Ukraine published antisemitic propaganda throughout the early 1940s. Radchenko argues that such material could not have been disseminated without Melnyk's knowledge or approval.

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Detention in Berlin Having travelled several times between Berlin and Kraków to oversee preparations for the OUN-M expeditions, Melnyk had his movements restricted to Berlin in late July under Gestapo surveillance. On 28 July, Melnyk sent a letter to Heinrich Himmler protesting the annexation of Galicia into the territory of the General Government. In contrast to the OUN-B, Melnyk and his supporters meanwhile avoided making any unilateral proclamations, competing with Bandera's supporters for influence in Western Ukraine and intent on cooperating and gaining favour with the SS and the Wehrmacht in pursuit of a military-political arrangement similar to that of Tiso's Slovakia and Ustaša Croatia. In response to the assassination of Mykola Stsiborskyi and Omelian Senyk in August, Melnyk refused to countenance violent reprisals against the Banderites. The OUN-M established the Ukrainian National Council (UNRada) in Kyiv on 5 October, which was intended to serve as the basis for a future Ukrainian state. Initially, Melnyk's supporters enjoyed support against the Banderites 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,…Citește mai mult

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Imprisonment In late 1943, and amid Allied bombing raids, Melnyk moved with his wife to Vienna, 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 Vienna 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 SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Wirsing [ukr]. Melnyk was permitted to meet OUN-M member Yevhen Onatsky, a representative of the OUN in Italy and one of its ideologists, at a dinner where they were joined by Gestapo agents and obligated to speak German. Melnyk was subsequently 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 and former French ambassador to Germany André François-Poncet wrote of him in his diary: [Friday 3rd March] This Melnyk is intelligent, distinguished, very polite, with very good manners; 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.…Citește mai mult

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Post-WWII exile After the war, Melnyk remained in the West and lived with his wife in Clervaux, Luxembourg, having become acquainted with Prince Félix when he was working on the estates of the Lviv Metropol, as well as later living in West Germany and Canada. Melnyk remained politically active and continued to lead the now-exiled OUN-M, authoring several historical articles on the Ukrainian independence movement, and was instrumental in the founding of the Ukrainian Coordinating Committee in 1946. At the Third Great Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1947, Melnyk was elected head of the OUN-M for life. Together with President of the UPR in exile Andriy Livytskyi, Melnyk supported the reconstitution of the Ukrainian National Rada in July 1948 which thereon served as the legislative body of the UPR in exile and sought to unify Ukrainian émigré organisations in Europe for further consolidation with the Pan-American Ukrainian Conference that had been formed in November 1947. However, the Union of Hetman Statesmen objected to the associations with the UPR and the OUN-B left in 1950 after demanding a more central role. In 1954, Melnyk contributed a collection of eulogies of OUN and OUN-M members to a book marking the 25th anniversary…Citește mai mult

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Death and legacy Melnyk died in Cologne, West Germany, on 1 November 1964 at the age of 73, and was buried at Bonnevoie cemetery, Luxembourg. Melnyk's aspiration of consolidating the diaspora was eventually realised in 1967 with the founding of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.

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Commemoration In July 2006, a monument to Melnyk was unveiled in his native village of Volya Yakubov in Drohobych Raion. In late 2006, and as a result of a meeting between modern OUN-M leader Mykola Plaviuk and administration officials, Lviv City Council announced plans to transfer the tombs of Melnyk, Konovalets, Bandera and other key leaders of the OUN and UPA to a new area of Lychakiv Cemetery specifically dedicated to the Ukrainian national liberation struggle, though this was not implemented. On the basis of the Ukrainian decommunisation laws passed by the Verkhovna Rada in 2015, Melnyk is legally recognised in Ukraine as one of the fighters for Ukrainian independence in the 20th century. Following a campaign by modern OUN-M activists, a second monument to Melnyk was unveiled in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2017. In December 2020, the Museum-Estate of the Leader of the Ukrainian National Liberation Movement Andriy Melnyk was opened in Volya Yakubova to coincide with the 130th anniversary of his birth. The Museum-Estate is situated in a house that was owned by his relatives since his parents' house is no longer standing. As of 2023, Melnyk's grave was maintained by members of the Union of Ukrainian Women in Luxembourg.…Citește mai mult