Serhii Plokhy
speaker
375 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Serhii Plokhy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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You can't justify that as a phenomenon. From that point of view, the celebration of that experience as opposed to looking at that, okay, that happened and we wish that those young men who were idealistic or joined the division for idealistic purposes had better understanding of things or made other choices. But you can certainly celebrate it.
And once that happened, that, of course, became a big propaganda item in the current war. We are talking about 10,000 to 20,000 people in the division. And we are talking about two to three million Ukrainians fighting in the Red Army. And again, it's not like Red Army is completely blameless in the way how it behaved in Prussia or in Germany and so on and so forth.
But it's basically, it's again, we are going back to the story of Bandera. So there is a period of collaboration and that's what propaganda tries to define him by. or there is a division, Galitsin, by 20,000 people, and somehow it makes irrelevant the experience of 2 to 3 million people.
I don't have any particular insights, but I would be very much surprised if even one person in the parliament, I mean, the members of the parliament actually knew the whole story. I would be very surprised.
This is the narrative that is out there. And it's especially powerful in Russia. It's especially powerful in Russia given that there are really the atmosphere that is created really is not conducive to any independent analysis.
That is being done on the academic level, but in terms of the public response and public discourse, the only response that I see is not to focus on the questions raised and put by the propaganda, because you already become victim of that propaganda by definition, but talk about that much broadly. and talk about different aspects of, if it is World War II, about different aspects of World War II.
If it's about issue of the far right in Ukraine, let's talk about US, let's talk about Russia, let's talk about France, let's compare. That's the only way how you deal with propaganda because propaganda is not necessarily something that is an outright lie. can be just one factor that's taken out of the context and is blown out of proportion. And that is good enough.
This is a story of the history of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Bandera as well, already after the end of the Second World War. Because what you got after the Second World War, so imagine May of 1945, the red banner is all over Riksdag.
The Red Army is in control of half of Europe, but the units of the Red Army are still fighting the war, and not just behind the Soviet lines, but within the borders of the Soviet Union. This war continues all the way into the early 1950s, almost up to Stalin's death.
the war is conducted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which have a Ukrainian insurgent army, and the government tries to crush that resistance. So what it does is basically recruits local people to spy on the partisans on the underground. Bohdan Stashinsky is one of those people. His family is supporting the resistance. They provide food.
His sister is engaged with one of the local commanders of this underground unit. And they know everything about Stashinsky's family and they know everything about him because he is also collecting funds for the underground. So they have a conversation with him saying that, okay, that's what we got. And you and your family can go to prison or you help us a little bit.
We're interested in the fiancé of your sister, and we want to get him. And Stashinsky says yes. And once they round up the fiancé, he basically betrayed a member, almost a member of his family. He is done. He can't go back to his village. He can't go back to his study. He was studying in Lviv at that time. So he becomes, as I write in my book, the secret police becomes his family.
And he is sent to Kiev. He is trained for two years. sent to East Germany, into Berlin, and becomes an assassin. They sent him across the border to Western Germany, to Munich, which was the headquarter of Different organizations, anti-Soviet organizations, Ukrainian and Russian and Georgian and so on and so forth. And he kills two leaders of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists.
one editor of the newspaper, and eventually he kills Bandera. He does that with the new weapon, a spray pistol, that eventually makes it into the Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun. And that whole episode is a little bit reshaped, but it is not in the film, but it is in the novel itself. And Dan later has a change of mind under the influence of his German fiancée and then wife.
They decide to escape to the West. While they're doing that, they discover that their apartment was bugged, and probably the KGB knows all of that. A long story short, his son dies in Berlin. The KGB doesn't allow him to go there, but his wife has a nervous breakdown, so they allow him to go there to just calm her so that there would be no scandal.
And two of them, one day before their son's burial, because after that they would be sent to Moscow, they jumped the ship and go to West Berlin. two hours before the Berlin Wall was being built. So if they would stay for the funeral, probably the KGB would not let them go. But also if they would stay, the border would be there.
And he goes to the American intelligence and says, okay, that's who I am, and that's what I did. And they look at him and they say, I don't trust you. We don't know who you are. You have documents in five names. You say you killed Bandera. Oh, we have a different information. He was poisoned and probably by someone in his close circle. A spray pistol? Did you reach too much Ian Fleming?
Where does this come from? He insists. They say, okay, you insist. If you committed all those crimes, we're giving you to the German police, and German police will be investigating you. And then the trial comes, and if he says, if he takes back his testimony, The whole case against him collapses. He can go free.
But he knows that if he goes free, he is a target of his colleagues from the same department. So his task at the trial is to prove that he is guilty, that he has did that. And then he disappears.
Nobody knows where he goes, and there are all sorts of cover stories, and I was lucky to interview a commander, former chief of the South African police, who confirmed to me that Stashinsky was in South Africa.
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