Book about OUN and UPA is on the list of “the best historical materials” in the USA

American Library Association acknowledged the English-language book by Ukrainian historian, civic activist and politician Volodymyr Viatrovych and Canadian historian and geographer of Ukrainian origin Lubomyr Lutsiuk “Enemy Archives: Soviet Counterinsurgency Operations and the Ukrainian Nationalist Movement” as one of the “best historical materials published in 2022 and 2023,” according to information on American Library Association website.

The book is a collection of translated archive documents about little known pages of Ukrainian-Russian relations, activity of Ukrainian Insurgent Army (УПА) and Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (ОУН). Both organizations were engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during World War II. The American Library Association recommends this book for academic libraries. The book was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

“With most of the letters translated into English for the first time, this volume is a valuable resource for researchers looking into the history of the relationship between the Soviet Union and Ukraine. An introduction in the front of the volume provides information about the Soviet police archives and the development of the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Footnotes are found throughout the book to provide context for the documents,” is written in the annotation to the book at Association website.

Co-authors of the book are Ukrainian historian, former head of Ukrainian Institute of National Memory Volodymyr Viatrovych and Lubomyr Luciuk, Canadian historian, geographer, researcher of the history of the World War II and Ukrainian liberation movement. The book was translated by journalist, editor and researcher Marta Daria Olynyk.

Volodymyr Viatrovych, co-author of the book

“When I was working at Harvard, I saw how little primary sources on the history of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists were available to Western scholars, and how little they were used. These are the most important documents of the underground structures, and, on the other hand, the most important documents of the Soviet punitive system about the struggle against the insurgency,” commented Volodymyr Viatrovych.

The co-authors collected 161 documents from the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine. Among these are the documents of the UPA and OUN confiscated by the Soviet special services and documents of the NKVD-KGB, which deal with the struggle against Ukrainian insurgents. The photos were taken from the archives of the Security Service of Ukraine and the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement. Some of them are already available online on the website of the Electronic Archive of the Ukrainian Liberation Movement.

Lubomyr Luciuk, co-author of the book

Visit websites to buy the book: McGill-Queen’s University Press and Amazon.

As reported earlier, the work by Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Viatrovych “The Gordian Knot: The Second Polish-Ukrainian War. 1942-1947” was published in English by a publishing house in Toronto.

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