Women in the Ukrainian Underground

The diverse fates of women in the Ukrainian nationalist underground.

Women in the Ukrainian Underground examines women’s mobilization in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, depicting the fates of the women involved and considering their representation in film and literature.

Eastern Poland’s inclusion in the Soviet Union through the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact initiated the local Ukrainian population’s long and bloody resistance to Soviet rule. Even after the end of the Second World War, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) persisted in their fight for an independent Ukrainian state. The continued confrontations between the Ukrainian underground and the Soviet security service lasted until the late 1950s. While existing scholarship has focussed on the political aspects of this conflict, women’s participation in opposing Sovietization is largely ignored.

Women in the Ukrainian Underground foregrounds women’s experience in the resistance movement during the conflict with the Soviet secret service between 1944 and 1954. Olena Petrenko describes various methods and waves of women’s mobilization in the OUN and the UPA, and examines women’s role as agents in the underground struggle. The book also considers female sexuality as an instrument of power and gendered experiences of violence. Petrenko’s examination of archival records challenges stereotypes of female insurgents as bloodthirsty, easily compromised, or unthinking subordinates and considers women’s representation in film and literature. Changes in memorialization practices demonstrate how the perception of women’s activities in the nationalist underground has been shaped by competing historical views – in the USSR, among Ukrainian exiles, in post-Soviet Ukraine, and in Russia.

Drawing on both Soviet and underground documents, as well as oral histories, Women in the Ukrainian Underground depicts the fates of the individual women involved in fighting communism.