Following the 2004-5 Orange Revolution President Viktor Yushchenko embarked on an ambitious
project to rehabilitate the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Following the Euromaidan Revolution and Russiäs invasion of
Ukraine in 2014 a more systematic effort was made to affirm these groups as a center of a new
historical canonical canon. This endeavor necessitated a highly selective rendering of these
organizations¿ history not least in regard to their role in the Holocaust and their systematic
massacres of the Polish minority in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943¿44. The attempts to
rehabilitate some of the OUN¿s most prominent leaders ¿ Mykola Lebed¿ Roman Shukhevych Stepan
Bandera Yaroslav Stets¿ko and others ¿ all faced significant obstacles as newly available
archival materials undermined key tenants of the state-sanctioned memory. The book¿s
introduction to the intellectual history of Ukrainian nationalism and particular conditions of
nation building of a stateless nation is followed by an investigation of post-Soviet memory
management. The study engages the contentious issue of the taxonomy of the OUN¿s ideology
before concluding with a chapter on how Ukraine¿s rehabilitation of this organization has been
weaponized by the Russian Federation to justify its criminal war of aggression. In this war
Ukrainians defend not only their territory their stubborn resistance is a defense of a
rules-based order democracy fundamental human rights and the right to self-determination. As
a by-product of this is it may also offer a way out of a memory impasse beyond Bandera and
the OUN.
