MOSCOW, April 18. /TASS/. Over 4,000 former members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) (designated as an extremist organization and outlawed in Russia) joined the reserve units of the Red Army and were uncovered by the Soviet Union’s SMERSH (Death to Spies) military counter-intelligence agency by August 1944, according to a memo that SMERSH deputy chief Nikolay Selivanovsky submitted to the heads of the State Defense Committee, Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has made the memo public on the 80th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of Western Ukraine.
In the spring of 1944, Soviet forces liberated right-bank Ukraine, reaching the Soviet border, the FSB pointed out. Based on an order from the People's Commissariat of Defense of the Soviet Union, dated February 9, 1942, all draft-age men from the liberated areas were called up into reserve regiments and divisions. Many members of nationalist units of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) fell into this category. This fact was exposed by SMERSH officers, whose mission was to combat "elements infiltrating the units and institutions of the Red Army."
According to Selivanovsky’s memo, "from April 1 to August 25, 1944, SMERSH branches arrested 6,625 people" from reserve rifle divisions formed in Western Ukraine. Those included 375 former active German collaborators and more than 2,000 "members of religious sects reluctant to take the military oath and fight against the Germans." However, most of them - 4,220 people - were identified as OUN and UPA members.
"When the conscription campaign for the Red Army was launched in Western Ukraine, OUN and UPA members were instructed by their ringleaders not to evade the mobilization but to join the Red Army and establish nationalist groups inside military units to carry out subversive activities," Selivanovsky pointed out. The primary goal was to conduct anti-Soviet propaganda among other Ukrainian service members, create groups of armed defectors willing to join UPA gangs and carry out terrorist attacks on army officers. The memo sheds light on several instances like this occurring in various military units.
Besides, as a result of SMERSH activities, 4,383 suspicious service members were sent to special camps of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, including 2,700 alleged collaborators of German occupiers, 220 people who used to serve in the German and Hungarian armies and 1,462 former Red Army soldiers who had either been held captive or who had escaped the enemy "under suspicious circumstances."