Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) was an international anti-communist organization founded as a coordinating center for anti-communist and nationalist émigré political organizations from Soviet and other socialist countries.
The organization was initially known as the Committee of Subjugated Nations (CSN), founded as a conference of non-Russians in November 1943. Based in Zhytomyr, the organization, closely tied with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, advocated for collaboration with Nazi Germany in order to achieve the division of the Soviet Union. After World War II, the CSN's leaders re-founded the organization as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations in Munich, where it continued to advocate against the Eastern Bloc. It dissolved in 1996, following the end of the Cold War.
History
Background The OUN
In the 1930s, in the region of Galicia which at the time was a part of Poland, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had emerged among the Ukrainians of Galicia to fight for independence from Poland. In turn, the OUN had received support from the Abwehr, German military intelligence, in its struggle against Poland, marking the beginning of a relationship with Germany that continued into World War II. The OUN-B faction led by Stepan Bandera had attracted many veterans of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a Waffen-SS division mostly made up of Ukrainians from the Galicia region. The OUN in Galicia was in conflict with the Polish state in the 1930s, waging a terrorist campaign of bombings and assassinations. During the Second World War, the OUN fought against the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) resistance group for the control of Galicia, a region the OUN saw as part of the future Ukrainian state it wished to establish. Because of this background, Polish emigre groups shunned the ABN, which was regarded as a vehicle for the anti-Polish OUN.
The OUN was described by the historian Anna Holian as a "deeply anti-Semitic" group, citing the OUN's resolution at its Second Great Congress in 1941 that it "combats Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime". American journalist Russ Bellant described the OUN's program as: "OUN, even in its postwar publications, has called for ethno-genetically pure Ukrainian territory, which of course is simply calling for purging Jews, Poles, and Russians from what they consider Ukrainian territory." The OUN activists had provided many of the gunmen working for the SS who shot down 90,000 Ukrainian Jews in 1941-42 and that Stetsko had organized a pogrom in Lviv in 1941 that killed thousands of Jews and Poles.
The Nazis' eastern policy
Alfred Rosenberg, the Minister of the East, had come to identify Russia with the Soviet Union, and Russia in turn with Asia. In contrast to his hostility towards the "Asiatic" Russians, Rosenberg had great hopes of using the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union to raise new armies to replace the Wehrmacht's heavy losses on the Eastern Front. Rosenberg favored an approach he called "political warfare", under which Germany would support the independence of the non-Russian peoples to undermine the Soviet Union.
Foundation: The Zhytomyr conference According to Stephen Dorril, the Zhytomyr conference of 21–22 November 1943 - where the ABN's forerunner, the Committee of Subjugated Nations (CSN), was established - was part of Rosenberg's "political warfare". Dorril and Mark Aarons argue that the post-war claim that the ABN had been founded as an anti-Nazi and anti-Communist group has no basis in reality as the CSN had been founded by Rosenberg's Ostministerium. At a time when the Red Army was steadily pushing the Wehrmacht back, part of the purpose behind the Anti-Bolshevik Front was to create a framework for waging guerrilla warfare against the Soviets in territories such as Galicia that the Germans expected to lose in the near future.
About the formation of the CSN in 1943, Bellant stated in a 2014 interview:"The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 under German sponsorship organized a multinational force to fight on behalf of the retreating German army. After the battle of Stalingrad in ’43, the Germans felt a heightened need to get more allies, and so the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, and others with military formations in place to assist came together and formed the united front called the Committee of Subjugated Nations, and again worked on behalf of the German military. In 1946, they renamed it the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations or ABN. Stetsko was the leader of that until he died in 1986.I mention this in part because the OUN tries to say, well, during the war we fought the Germans and the Communists. The fact of the matter is that they were the leadership of this whole multinational alliance on behalf of the Germans the last two years of the war and in the war thereafter. All the postwar leaders of the unrepentant Nazi allies were under the leadership of Yaroslav Stetsko." Bellant described the ABN as "...the high council for the expatriate nationalist groups that formed the police, military, and militia that worked with Hitler during World War II. Some were organized as mobile killing teams that exterminated villages and sought to murder whole ethnic, racial and cultural groups". Bellant described the ABN as a coordinating group for genocidal collaborationist groups from eastern Europe. In support of this claim, Bellant noted the Byelorussian Central Council of the ABN was a continuation of the Central Rada set up by the German authorities in 1941, and that policemen serving the Central Rada played a decisive role in exterminating the Jewish community of Belarus in 1941–43. When Romania signed the armistice with the Allies in August 1944, the German government set up a Romanian "government-in-exile" headed by Sima of the Iron Guard, and the Romanian Liberation Movement led by Sima was a direct continuation of the "government-in-exile" that had existed in 1944–45. The leadership of the Croatian Liberation Movement of the ABN was led by men who served in the Independent State of Croatia in 1941–45, and most of the men leading the World Federation of Free Latvians had served in the SS and "had assisted the Nazis in exterminating the Jews of their Baltic homeland". The Bulgarian National Front of the ABN led by Ivan Dochev was a continuation of the Union of Bulgarian National Legions, where Dochev had begun his political career.
The driving force at the Zhytomyr conference was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. During the conference, a platform of joint revolutionary struggles against what the participants called Russian communism was formulated. The goal of the ABN was to remove Communists from power, abolish the Soviet Union and divide it into national states.
From Zhytomyr to Munich After the war, the loyalty of men with military experience from Galicia, the eastern part of which had just reincorporated back into the Soviet Union, led British military intelligence agency MI6 to see the OUN as possibly useful for subversion against the Soviet Union. For two years after World War II, the UPA, the guerrilla military arm of the OUN waged a guerrilla war in Galicia against the Soviet and Polish authorities.
The OUN comprised the largest contingent in the ABN, and the majority of the OUN members came from Galicia. Given an organizational structure in Munich in 1946 sponsored by MI6, the ABN extended its range of activity and began to include Eastern European emigration from other countries apart from Ukraine. In its founding statement in April 1946, the ABN declared "Bolshevism is the criminal theory and practice of terroristic nonparty dictatorship which excluded even the slightest bit of freedom, democracy and nationality". The ABN declared the Soviet Union to be the "prison of nations", and announced that the break-up of the Soviet Union was its principal goal. As a part of its critique of the USSR, the ABN identified the Soviet Union with Russia, presenting Soviet policies as merely a continuum of the policies of Imperial Russia. Typical of this viewpoint was an ABN pamphlet which stated: "Aggressive and destructive Bolshevism merely exhibits a new, higher form of Russian imperialism, which grew across the centuries by conquering foreign lands and subjecting foreign peoples in Europe as well as in Asia". The ABN presented Russians as biologically different from the rest of humanity, portraying the Russians as having a genetic predisposition towards extreme violence and aggression. The ABN argued that the peoples of Eastern Europe were white and thus had a "natural" love of freedom while the Russians were portrayed as having a "natural" inclination towards cruel despotism owing to an unfortunate infusion of Asian genes going back to the Mongol conquest of Russia in the 13th century. Because of what the ABN argued was this biological difference between the white peoples of Eastern Europe vs. the Russians whose Asian genes had deformed them, the ABN excluded Russia from the list of nations it wished to liberate. Throughout its existence, the ABN equated Russians and Communism as one and the same, engaging in propaganda that sought to "demonize" Russians as an utterly evil people for whom no redemption was possible.
The ABN envisioned a federation of independent states in eastern Europe after it broke up the Soviet Union to be called the "New Order". All of these states were to be "ethnically pure" with no place for minorities. As such, all of the minorities were to "return" to their proper homelands once the "New Order" was established. In particular, there was to be no place for Jews, who were portrayed as an "alien" people who did not belong in any of the envisioned states. Holian wrote that ABN tended to say little about the "Jewish question" after 1945 largely because of the "Final Solution" had largely "solved" the "Jewish question" by exterminating most of the once vast Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, but the group's ideology about the "Jewish Question" largely reflected the OUN's thinking on the subject.
Cold War The most active groups among the Bloc were the Ukrainian national organizations. According to Dorril, in 1946–1947, with Anglo-American support, the OUN-B's secret police, the Sluzhba Bezpeky, conducted Operation Ohio, an assassination campaign in displaced persons camps in western Germany. The victims were suspected Soviet agents, members of rival Ukrainian groups, and those who knew too much about the collaborationist background of the ABN's leaders. One American, the controversial ex-military commentator and conspiracy theorist L. Fletcher Prouty, recalled that the assassins "were the best commercial hitmen you ever heard of".
The ABN was headed by Yaroslav Stetsko, a Ukrainian nationalist who supported the Holocaust and anti-Soviet politician, from the time of foundation until 1986, the year of his death. Stetsko was succeeded by his widow, Slava Stetsko. She wrote the foreword to the 1969 book Captive Nations-our first line of defense by Bailey Bernadine that offered the following political definitions: Anti-semitism: A smear word used by the Communists against those who effectively oppose and expose them Fascist: An anti-Communist Nazi or Hitlerite: An active anti-Communist In her foreword, she praised Captive Nations as "objective, factual" and "highly recommended".