The activities of Sviatoslav Karavansky in the Ukrainian nationalist resistance movement during World War II

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to highlight the activities of Svyatoslav Karavansky during World War II, based on the analysis of narrative sources (memoirs and interviews of S. Karavansky), press materials, official documents (materials of investigative cases of communist punitive bodies).Previously, this problem was not considered as a separate research task in historiography. The events of World War II have been the leading theme of world historiography for eight decades. Among the most popular lines of research is the biographical one, which allows us to approach the “humanization” of the historical process, to go beyond the boundaries of “dry” laws and cause-and-effect schemes into the field of “living” history. At the same time, World War II remains a space of a mass of fakes and distortions, due primarily to the fact that the relevant topic is still a tool of fakes, propaganda and the politics of historical memory. In particular, it is actively used in its policy against Ukraine by the aggressor – the Russian Federation. The study focuses on the activities of S. Karavansky in the context of epochal historical events, to show the interdependence of historical phenomena. Also, the genetic method, which allows us to consider the origins of historical phenomena. The study concludes that after a short stay in Belarus, Volhynia and Khmelnytskyi, from March 1942 to March 1944, S. Karavanskyi was most active in Odesa as one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist cell, which represented both Galicians from the OUN detachment groups and Odesa youth. He was sentenced by a Soviet military tribunal in February 1945 to 25 years in camps.Thus began S. Karavanskyi's concentration camp epic, which lasted 31 years. So, during the Second World War, the Odesa activist laid the foundations for the development of Ukrainian effective (integral) nationalism in Odesa, which in various forms continued to develop in the city and exists even now, being the key to the Ukrainian victory over the Russian aggressor in the current war.