'Nazigate' & the 'Bandera Lobby'
An epic scandal in Canada scratches the surface
Leaders of the Ukrainian Canadian “establishment” evidently made the right call to ignore the “Nazigate” scandal(s) and wait for things to blow over. Lev Golinkin, a recent guest on the “Bandera Lobby Show,” broke the international news story about Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka: “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-year-old veteran who fought with Nazis.” His latest article in The Forward, which received far less attention, might have capped off the media’s attention to “Nazigate”: “Canadian government has given $2 million to Ukrainian Canadian groups that celebrate Nazi collaborators.”
Those groups included the politically influential Ukrainian Canadian Congress and several historic front groups for the Banderite (OUN-B) and Melnykite (OUN-M) wings of the far-right Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Both factions of OUN collaborated with Nazi Germany and perpetrated the Holocaust, still exist, and today collaborate with neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Lev Golinkin started with the Melnykites, who were the ones, historically, that supported the creation of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division. He also highlighted state funding for active OUN-B fronts like the Ukrainian Youth Association and Homin Ukrainy newspaper. But so far there have been no waves from this story.
I was briefly optimistic that Golinkin’s latest article could break open a new chapter in “Nazigate.” John Paul-Himka, a leading historian of Ukraine and professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, apparently got the ball rolling during his appearance on the “Bandera Lobby Show.” On Twitter, several thousand people watched a clip of him saying that “the Canadian government and American government have been supporting OUN fronts for years in large amounts of money.” The Edmonton branch of the left-wing Association of United Ukrainian Canadians soon called on the Canadian government to “halt all state funding to all Ukrainian-Canadian organizations which honor any Ukrainian nazis or nazi-collaborators.”
“Nazigate” has largely migrated to the University of Alberta’s Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS), also in Edmonton. Per Rudling, another leading historian of Ukrainian nationalism and professor at Lund University in Sweden, brought attention to many problematic CIUS endowments and recently co-authored (with famous Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff) an article on “Canada’s long failure to hold resident Nazis accountable.” Rudling posted this update to Facebook on Saturday:
Compelled to voice my concerns about recent developments at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at my alma mater, the University of Alberta. Following the attention the university's decision to return a CIUS-administered endowment established in the name and honor of Jaroslav Hunka, the CIUS recently announced an online event, a "conversation and context" on the 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS. In addition to the now-cancelled Hunka endowment the CIUS administers yet another dozen endowments in the honor of Waffen-SS volunteers. This, understandably raises questions.
Apparently in response to concerns raised about this, the CIUS invited a certain Alik Gomelsky, a community memory activist who has actively promoted ("defended") a number of ethnonationalist groups with a documented history of involvement in mass anti-Jewish violence during World War II. The "Controversies & Context" event with Gomelsky was scheduled to be held online today, Saturday Oct 14. As far as I can ascertain, Gomelsky entirely lacks scholarly credentials. No peer reviewed articles, zero citations on Scopus, Web of Science, or Google Scholar. His preferred venues appears to be blogs, various Facebook discussion groups - and venues linked to the very far right OUN(b) League of Ukrainian Canadians. Attempts to get a clarification from the CIUS as to how and why Gomelsky was chosen for this task, how his credentials were assessed - and by whom - have been ignored by the CIUS. Instead, the event was quietly removed from the institute's website and Facebook wall.
There are several questions that remain unanswered: How was Gomelsky selected? Was it by initiative or recommendation by the "community"? Who assessed his CV and credentials? Why was the event quietly cancelled and withdrawn from its website? Does economic dependence of strongly nationalistic donors influence the choice of topics, guests, and questions raised? Does a legacy of a dozen endowments in the name and honor of Waffen-SS volunteers of well over one million dollars translate into influence over how certain issues are approached? Collaboration, pogroms, and the Holocaust are issues of significant substance. Personally, I share the interim provost's unease of my alma mater administering endowments in the honor of Waffen-SS veterans. In my opinion, a candid, critical discussion about this matter is healthy - and badly needed.
Alik Gomelsky is a Jewish Ukrainian “memory activist” propped up by the “Bandera Lobby” in Canada. Last year, the “Peterson Literary Fund,” an arm of the OUN-B dominated BCU Foundation in Canada, awarded Gomelsky a grant and declared him a finalist for its literary prize. Several months earlier, Gomelsky told a Ukrainian Canadian podcast that “Bandera has nothing against Jews.”
Bandera has no relation to the Nazi war crimes and he has no participation in Shoah Holocaust at all, but I heard lots of funny stories because they’re saying that “Bandera killed my father, my mother,” whatever, “my grandfather.” I said, “when?” “Oh, 1942.” I said, “you know he was in a prison, in a camp.” One minute silence, this person said to me, “you know that Nazis released him from the prison? And he went to kill the Jews.” No, it’s not a joke, it’s real. Real conversations. It’s what they say. So propaganda just brainwashed this people and they don’t understand what they’re talking [about].
In the same interview, Gomelsky insisted that the 1941 autobiography by Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko, in which he endorsed the Nazi genocide of Jews in Ukraine, was a “Soviet fake,” because the viciously antisemitic Stetsko “never talked about [Jews] like that, never wrote about that, and he was very friendly to Jews.” Earlier this year, Gomelsky organized a trip to Canada for Moshe Azman, one of two Chief Rabbis of Ukraine, which included a “beautiful meeting with the League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) and the Buduchnist Credit Union (BCU)” — two of the most important OUN-B “facade structures” in Canada.
The LUC, which even lists the OUN-B as one of its “affiliate organizations” online, has targeted historian Per Rudling in Sweden in 2012 and 2020. In the latter case, the OUN-B leadership of LUC wrote a letter to the Vice-Chancellor of Lund University and (among other things) accused Rudling of “inciting hatred and, possibly, violence towards our community.” More recently, in the wake of the Yaroslav Hunka scandal, the LUC organized a “community panel discussion” on “Defending Against Russian Influence Operations” with alleged Russian disinformation experts, Marcus Kolga and Ian Garner.
Marcus Kolga is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a right-wing Canadian think tank, and founder of “DisinfoWatch,” supposedly “a leading Canadian foreign disinformation monitoring and debunking platform.” Shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, he declared “the need for a coherent national Canadian strategy to defend against the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare.” Kolga told CBC News about the Hunka affair, “I’ve never seen the sort of frenzy that Russian propagandists have gone into over the past number of days…”
According to Ian Garner, author of Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth, “We had an open, engaging, and well-informed discussion about modern Russian propaganda. If you’d ever like to talk about it, I’m always happy to do so.” (Garner declined to discuss further.) Among those in the audience was a member of the OUN-B’s militant, far-right Youth Nationalist Congress in Ukraine who now represents the Banderite “OUN Fund” in Canada. The meeting took place at the Old Mill Toronto, which is a part-time hotel, part-time successor of the former Ukrainian Cultural Center in Toronto that served as the Canadian headquarters of OUN-B.
The OUN-B affiliated “Ukrainian Cultural Centre Toronto” received at least four million dollars from the Canadian government since 2007, some of it after the Banderites sold this building on Christie Street and probably bought the Old Mill Toronto hotel, as well as the new Canadian headquarters of OUN-B located nearby. In 2007, Yaroslav Hunka and other Ukrainian Waffen-SS veterans received medals from the Toronto branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, which was then chaired by someone from the OUN-B affiliated Ukrainian Youth Association. The ceremony was held at the old Ukrainian Cultural Center on Christie Street, with two major sponsors: the Melnykite and Banderite credit unions in Canada.
Alik Gomelsky has written blog posts for the League of Ukrainian Canadians website, and allegedly “works closely” with Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a well-connected Canadian organization that strives to foster a “shared [Ukrainian-Jewish] historical narrative.” Historian Tarik Cyril Amar has criticized the UJE’s “tendency to seek for what it calls a ‘shared narrative’ by evading or de-emphasizing the hardest questions that need addressing in any honest ‘encounter,’ such as Ukrainian nationalist antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust.”
UJE and Gomelsky’s new letterhead organization, the “Association of International History and Political Science,” co-hosted a meeting with Rabbi Azman in Toronto. They met in August at the headquarters of the Ukrainian National Federation (UNF), the original OUN front group in Canada, which still has a Melnykite bent, although it may no longer take directions from the far-right OUN-M in Ukraine. The UNF president might be the only Ukrainian Canadian leader that has publicly defended Yaroslav Hunka. He worked up the courage not long after sitting down with Gomelsky at a Ukrainian festival in Toronto to discuss “fighting Russian disinformation” for the UNF-affiliated “Kontakt Ukrainian TV.”
In 2019, the UJE organized a controversial ceremony in the historic Jewish cemetery of Sambir, a small city in western Ukraine, to unveil a monument dedicated to 17 members of the OUN who were allegedly shot there by the Germans. According to Eduard Dolinsky, director-general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee in Kyiv, “It’s like putting a monument to killers on top of the graves of their victims.” The UJE project leader acknowledged that the story of 17 martyred nationalists is dubious, but shrugged it off as “a necessary compromise” to restore the Jewish cemetery. “I would be very uneasy about such a monument in Canada,” he told Radio Canada International. But UJE has remained silent about the “Nazigate” scandals and Canada’s monuments that honor Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.
James Temerty, the UJE chairman and financier, is an ultra wealthy philanthropist born in eastern Ukraine during World War II, who sits on the International Advisory Board of the politically powerful Atlantic Council. He formerly chaired and co-founded the National Advisory Council of the nationalist Ukrainian Canadian Congress. According to the UJE website, its goal is “not a negotiated narrative that offers compromises regarding historical evidence,” but to hear it from Temerty (at the 2010 triennial Congress of Ukrainian Canadians), his organization aims to “neutralize Moscow’s trouble-making initiatives between Ukrainians and Jews.” Over ten years ago, Temerty personally disinvited John-Paul Himka from a UJE event due to pressure from Ukrainian nationalist leaders in Canada.
UJE’s “Ukrainian” co-director, Adrian Karatnycky, is a lifelong New Yorker and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He has accused the Ukrainian Jewish Committee leader Eduard Dolinsky of being a “miserable liar,” and attacked Ivan Katchanovski, the Ukrainian Canadian political scientist who brought international attention to the Yaroslav Hunka scandal, as “evil and mendacious.” In September 2014, Karatnycky warned that far-right extremists “will try to mount a coup in Kyiv. Mark my words.” In recent years, he’s claimed that such talk “about the existence of supposedly Nazi tendencies in Ukraine is absurd.”
“I’ll say something that I think may be regarded as controversial,” Adrian Karatnycky chimed in at the latest Washington roundtable organized by the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations, another OUN-B front group. “I do think it is important to acknowledge that some currents in Ukrainian nationalism had for short periods of their existence, antisemitic incidents and antisemitic tropes.”
That is not to say that they were collaborators with the Nazis. That is not to say that they were complicit in the Holocaust. It is simply to say that some of these traditions did have, as in most of Europe where nationalist and right-wing movements had, antisemitic tropes… I think it’s important to discuss these things openly. It’s important to criticize that element of the past, but at the same time to project an accurate description of the fighters for Ukrainian independence, many of whom, as in the case of the OUN-Bandera, were within days of the Nazi takeover of Ukraine targeted for destruction, arrest, imprisonment, and execution…(!)
Adrian Karatnycky’s co-panelist, Serhiy Kvit, the Banderite former Education Minister of Ukraine (2014-16), participated via Zoom and had two framed pictures of the pro-Nazi “spiritual father” of the OUN behind him—the genocidal fascist ideologue, Dmytro Dontsov. Karatnycky has publicly identified Kvit as a member of the OUN-B leadership. Twice during this event, Karatnycky spoke of the “useable past,” which he evidently considers to include the OUN, but not the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, if only because the latter was “created by the Germans, and no Ukrainian should be celebrating an imperial occupying power’s institutions.”
I have spotted Karatnycky hanging out with Walter Zaryckyj, “WAZ,” the antisemitic US leader of OUN-B and executive director of the Center for US-Ukrainian Relations. When I saw Zaryckyj last month, he asked if I was going to play the “antisemitism card,” and reminded me that he has an Israeli son-in-law and a relationship with the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. The last time that Adrian Karatnycky spoke at one of Zaryckyj’s events, he took no issue with the far-right OUN-B youth leader from Cleveland in attendance, whose hobbies include dressing up like a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police that perpetrated the Holocaust.
“I know nothing about 18-year-old activists,” said Karatnycky, who vouched for the Banderites nevertheless. “Nor much about the contemporary OUN-B save for the fact that its leaders are strongly pro-Israel and not antisemitic. Raising concerns about the accuracy and motives of Wiesenthal is not anti-semitic.” This last sentence was referring to an old clip of Zaryckyj promising members of the Ukrainian Youth Association in Canada, “We’re gonna go after [Simon] Wiesenthal,” the famous Nazi hunter, who “wasn’t in the concentration camp all the time,” and “fought our [Banderite] partisans.”
After the Yaroslav Hunka affair, Jewish groups and others have called on Ottawa to release all the secret information from the 1986 Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada, including a classified report by Alti Rodal, the Director of Historical Research for the Deschênes Commission. Rodal is now the Jewish co-director of the UJE, which counts among its partners the nationalist Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the (Banderite-led) Ukrainian World Congress, and the problematic Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities (VAAD) of Ukraine, the leader of which is probably the foremost Jewish defender of the OUN, and does “not represent the Jews of Ukraine” according to a statement signed by many Ukrainian Jewish leaders in 2018.
Peter Potichnyj, said to be the youngest ever member of the OUN-B’s Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), sits on the Academic Council of UJE. According to historian Per Rudling, Potichnyj has “argued that Jews, killed by UPA, were killed because they were communists.” Someone once suggested that a better name for the UJE would be the Ukrainian Canadian Encounter.