Following its declaration of independence in 1991, Ukraine has sought to produce a new national history. After the 2004 Orange Revolution, newly elected president Viktor Yushchenko embarked on an ambitious project to rehabilitate the most radical branch of the far-right interwar and wartime Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Their leaders were rehabilitated in an effort to affix them as central heroes in a thoroughly revised canon of Ukraines past. This rewriting of history has required a highly selective rendering of those organizations history, in particular with regard to their role in the Holocaust and murderous ethnic cleansing of Poles from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in 1943-1944.



Juxtaposing the Ukrainian governments official representation of the OUNs leaderssuch as Stepan Bandera, Roman Shukhevych, Mykola Lebed, and Iaroslav Stetskowith the emerging international scholarly research that has come to light since the opening of the archives, Per A. Rudling illuminates the deliberate blind spots of Ukraines new national memory. His book contextualizes the sharply divergent remembrance of these groups in Ukraine and its neighboring countriesnot the least, against the backdrop of the current impasse in Polish-Ukrainian relations.