Our Notes & References

Very rare mimeographed publication of drill instructions, with explanations of various commands and exercises, including drawings of U.P.A. soldiers in drill positions and various military formations and exercises.

The book was originally printed by fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia, or UPA) on Ukrainian territory considered to be occupied by Russian and Polish Bolshevik forces. It was most likely published by Ukrainian DPs (Displaced Persons) in Germany in the early months after WWII.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army was a nationalist paramilitary formation and later a partisan organisation that developed out of a far-right section of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists under Stepan Bandera. Founded in 1942, it sought to fight against Soviet and Polish communist forces, as well as against the Nazi occupiers, even though it envisioned an independent Ukrainian state ideologically aligned with Hitler’s Germany, on territory including parts of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. Beginning in 1944, cases of collaboration with the Germans against Poles and Soviet forces were increasingly common. The UPA remained active after the war, retreating to the Carpathian Mountains, from where it continued to combat the Polish People’s Republic into the late 1940s. The publications of the UPA do not appear to have attracted much attention in English-language scholarship.

Rare; we could trace only one other copy, at Toronto.