Petro Mirchuk.Stepan Bandera: A Symbol of Revolutionary Uncompromisingness.New York; Toronto, 1961

“If I regret anything, it is only that I will not be able to bow down for Ukraine a second time.”

Petro Mirchuk. Stepan Bandera: A Symbol of Revolutionary Uncompromisingness.

New York; Toronto: Organization of the Defense of the Four Freedoms of Ukraine; Ukrainian Liberation League, 1961. — 159, [1] pp.: portrait, illustrations. — 21 × 14 cm. Printed in London. Contents: 28 chapters, separate list of 12 illustrations.

Publisher’s cover of thick red paper: author’s name at the top, title below in black, vertical black lines on the left, OUN emblem—a trident-sword in a circle—next to the title; names of both publishing organizations, city, and year at the bottom; author and title in black on the spine. Back cover blank. Top and bottom edges of the spine rubbed and creased, spine flap turned in, light rubbing along the edges of the cover; several light water stains and spots on the back cover, color faded in places. Text block firm, binding intact, no loss; paper cream-colored, with slight yellowing along the edges, text clean. No inscriptions, stamps, or bookplates. Condition: good.

First edition. The book has historical and cultural value and is of collector’s interest.

INFORMATION

The book was published two years after Stepan Bandera’s assassination in Munich and is structured as a chronological biography: gymnasium years, work in the OUN Regional Executive, leadership of the propaganda department from 1931, the Warsaw and Lviv trials of 1935–1936, break with Colonel Melnyk’s Provid, the Act of June 30, 1941, imprisonment in Sachsenhausen, post-war emigration, and circumstances of death. The chapter “Historical Decision” explains why the revolutionary OUN rejected any association of its actions with the policy of Hitler’s Germany. Illustrations show Bandera from 1927 to photographs of his funeral and grave in Munich; the book opens with a reproduction of a sculptural portrait.

Petro Mirchuk (1913–1999) — OUN member from the early 1930s, Regional Executive official, prisoner in Polish jails and the German Auschwitz concentration camp, in the United States from 1950; historian of the liberation movement, author of “An Outline of the History of the OUN” and “The Ukrainian Insurgent Army 1942–1952.” He wrote as a direct participant in the events, so his works are simultaneously a source and a partisan version of history.

The edition was published by two organizations of the overseas nationalist milieu — the Organization of the Defense of the Four Freedoms of Ukraine in New York and the Ukrainian Liberation League in Toronto, which successively published literature on the liberation struggle for the community in the United States and Canada in the early 1960s; printing was commissioned in London. The second edition was not published until 1992. Such books almost never made it to Ukraine before 1991 and were stored for a long time only in private diaspora collections.