Myth
34
Charles de Gaulle Hoped to Command the UPA and Che Guevara Admired the Ukrainian Insurgents
Igor Bigun
Oleksandr Hunko, Che Guevara and General de Gaulle Admired Bandera, Hazeta po-Ukrajinsky, 13 October 2013
“If I had such an army, like the UPA, the German boot would never tread French ground” – said Charles de Gaulle, French President from 1958–1969.
“What kind of army can boast that even within ten years after the end of the Second World War, it could still fight without external support? Mihailovic’s Chetniks in Yugoslavia surrendered a year after Tito came to power. The Forest Brothers in the Baltics lasted for two years. The Home Army in Poland also two years. The UPA was the most stable” – said Che Guevara.
■ The Essence of the Myth
The leader of the French resistance movement and the French President, Charles de Gaulle dreamed of having an army like the UPA and the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara called the Ukrainian insurgent model the toughest of all the guerrilla movements.
■ Fast Facts
There is no French source which contains these phrases from the French president. Different variations of this expression exist only in Ukrainian publications. Similarly, Che Guevara does not speak about the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in his works.
■ Detailed Facts
General de Gaulle’s phrase where he mentioned the UPA, first appeared in 1990 in Ukraine. The French president’s statement existed in different versions, where individual words changed, but the content was the same.
All of these variants were Ukrainian or originated in Ukrainian publications. Usually, none of them can link de Gaulle’s words to the French original. Sometimes, it is claimed that it came from de Gaulle’s memoirs or during his speech in the city of Rambouillet in August, 1944. But the memoirs of the French politicians do not contain any mention of the OUN or UPA. In the speech in Rambouillet, there is also no mention of them. There are no French sources that confirmed that de Gaulle made this statement. Efforts of historians to find them via the French Embassy were unsuccessful.
Moreover, Charles de Gaulle was not a pro-Ukrainian politician and advocated for a rapprochement with the USSR. Firstly, because the Soviet Union was a French partner in the anti-Hitler coalition. And also because after the Second World War, France deepened its cooperation with the Soviet Union in order to oppose US influence in Europe. So the French president had no reason to support the anti- Soviet armed resistance. And it is unlikely that he would have known about the OUN and UPA activities from behind the Iron Curtain.
Charles de Gaulle
The other supposed authority on the UPA was Ernesto Che Guevara. Historians with higher degrees even often cite him. Allegedly, the famous revolutionary and guerrilla fighter observed in his memoirs or in interviews the longevity of the UPA activities without any external support. Usually, those who quote him, do it without reference to the source.
The fact that an activist of the communist movement would say anything positive about the anti-Soviet nationalists is alarming. Moreover, the quotation that is spread only talks about the anti-communist movements in Ukraine, Poland, Yugoslavia and the Baltic States. Why out of all of the world’s guerrilla movements were only the anti-communist ones selected for comparison? Where Che would had gotten any objective information about the Ukrainian liberation movement is unclear. On the whole, the Soviet Union and external communist propaganda spoke of the “Ukrainian- German nationalists”, “fascist henchmen”, “hirelings of foreign intelligence services”, “Banderite murderers” and so on. Then who can the Cuban commander be talking about?
Ernesto “Che” Guevara
One should refer to his classic work, Guerrilla Warfare. It was published in 1960 and translated into Russian a year later in Moscow. The only passage which refers to Ukrainians is:
“It should be noted that in current interpretations there are two different types of guerrilla warfare, one of which is a struggle complementing great regular armies, such as was the case of the Ukrainian fighters in the Soviet Union, and does not enter into this analysis.”
The great revolutionary was writing about the actions of the Ukrainian Soviet partisan groups and not about the UPA. In other primary sources, the commander expressed no support for the UPA or Ukraine. Therefore, Che Guevara never said this about the UPA.
None of the statements about the UPA from the French President Charles de Gaulle or the Cuban commander Ernesto Che Guevara are not supported by primary sources.
