Potichnyj Collection documents insurgency in Ukraine (04/06/97)

Potichnyj Collection documents insurgency in Ukraine

by Marta Dyczok
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - A diagram of the hideout where Gen. Taras Chuprynka, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was ambushed and killed is now available for viewing at the University of Toronto Library. It is one of over 250,000 documents in the newly opened Potichnyj Collection on Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Ukraine at the Petro Jacyk Central and East European Resource Center.

The largest collection of its kind in North America, it holds materials from Soviet, Polish, German, U.S. and Ukrainian underground archives on insurgency and counter-insurgency in Ukraine during the years 1941-1954.

The energetic Peter J. Potichnyj, professor emeritus at McMaster University, spent over three years compiling the documents. During the official opening of the collection on March 18, he commented, "This is a unique collection, and it is my expectation that after it is properly processed, it will serve the scholarly community well."

For Western researchers, the most interesting materials will likely prove to be those drawn from Soviet sources. They show that in 1944-1945 over 70,000 troops were regularly used against the Ukrainian underground, and that western Ukraine was considered a war zone and treated as an occupied territory long after the end of World War II.

"In my opinion, the story should not end here," Prof. Potichnyj said. "The collection should be added to, expanded and improved, and I think that it will act as a magnet for other similar materials, especially since now we are going through a serious assessment of the Soviet system, especially the period of the Cold War," the Hamilton-based scholar added.

The original Soviet documents, closed to researchers until the collapse of the Soviet Union, are now in Moscow in the archival repository of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs. They were taken to the Russian capital after Ukraine declared independence in 1991. At the insistence of the Ukrainian government, a microfilm copy was made; it has since been deposited in Kyiv, in the Central State Archive of Government Organizations (formerly the Central State Archive of the October Revolution).

Now another microfilm copy has been made and brought to Toronto.

Prof. Potichnyj thanked a number of individuals for expediting the process of bringing the materials to Canada, including Ottawa's former ambassador to Ukraine, François Mathys, and Ukrainian-born Toronto businessman Petro Jacyk.

Mr. Jacyk endowed the University of Toronto's Central and East European Resource Center where the Potichnyj Collection is housed. At the official opening Mr. Jacyk noted, "The only way that we can preserve our culture, preserve our heritage, is in institutions which have the possibility to exist for many years and are professionally maintained." The patron was particularly pleased to see the sketches of the UPA bunkers on display, commenting that as a young man he was one of many who built the hideouts.

Prof. Robert Johnson, director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto, praised the Potichnyj Collection as an important building block of the university's resource base. During the official opening of the collection Prof. Johnson said, "This extraordinary collection sets an agenda for a whole future generation of scholars."

The Potichnyj Collection is divided into two large groupings: insurgency and counter-insurgency. The insurgency materials include documents from the archives of the Polish Security Service on Ukrainian underground activities in 1945-1948; the archive of the UPA Mission in Germany; documents of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council in New York City (ZP-UHVR); unpublished materials from the "Litopys UPA" (The UPA Chronicle) series; UPA veterans' materials concerning the army's propaganda mission to Western Europe in 1947-1949; and a complete set of the Toronto-based Ukrainian-language weekly newspaper "Homin Ukrainy," which has systematically published materials concerning the armed liberation struggle in Ukraine since 1949.

The Potichnyj Collection's counter-insurgency materials include documents on the activities of the German occupation forces, and on the Soviet internal security police and military formations (drawn from the USSR Ministry of State Security's archives). The latter include detailed operational information on the strategies and methods applied by Soviet forces against the Ukrainian underground, statistics on casualties suffered by the UPA, weapons and equipment captured by the Soviets, political decisions pertaining to the underground, and reports by Soviet officials based in western Ukraine that were sent to Kyiv and Moscow.

Much of the Potichnyj Collection is already catalogued and open to researchers, and librarians are hard at work on the remainder. Luba Penzey, head of the University of Toronto Library's Slavic Section and the coordinator of its international library programs with Central and Eastern Europe, is in charge of this effort.

Injecting a note of humor into the opening ceremonies, Prof. Potichnyj awarded a "Socialist Medal of Labor" to Ms. Penzey. University of Toronto Chief Librarian Carol Moore presided over the proceedings, noting that the Potichnyj Collection should attract scholars to the university.

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