Terrorists or national heroes? Politics and perceptions of the OUN and the UPA in Ukraine
Abstract This study analyzes controversies and public attitudes concerning the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and Stepan Bandera in Ukraine. The research question is: Which factors affect attitudes toward the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera in contemporary Ukraine? This article employs comparative and regression analyses of surveys commissioned by the author and conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) in 2009 and 2013 to determine the effects of regional and other factors on attitudes toward these organizations and the OUN-B leader. The study shows that regional factors and perceptions of these organizations' involvement in mass murder were the strongest predictors of the views concerning the OUN-B, the UPA and Bandera. Their public support is strongest in Galicia and weakest in the East and the South, in particular, in Donbas and Crimea, two major conflict areas since the “Euromaidan.”
A new estimate of Ukrainian population losses during the crises of the 1930s and 1940s
Ukraine experienced two very acute demographic crises during the Soviet era: the 1933 famine and the Second World War. While different estimates of total losses have been produced previously, we have tried here to distinguish the specific impact of the crises on mortality from their impact on fertility and migration. Taking into account all existing sources of registered data and estimates, a painstaking reconstruction of annual demographic changes has been produced and complete annual life tables have been computed for the years 1926–59. Life expectancy at birth fell to a level as low as 10 years for females and 7 for males in 1933 and plateaued around 25 for females and 15 for males in the period 1941–44.
Les pertes démographiques en Ukraine dans les années 1930 et 1940.
En se fondant sur des estimations, obtenues par projections, de ce que la population en Ukraine aurait ete en cas de transition reguliere, et en comparant ces donnees avec celles des populations recensees dans les annees 1930 et 1940, l'A. peut chiffrer les pertes reelles de population engendrees par les catastrophes sociales majeures subies par le pays a cette periode