Tynchenko Ya.

The case of “Kharkiv petlurivska organisation”: a mysterious history of the starshynas of Bohdana Hmelnytskoho regiment

Section: State terror of the soviet era

Abstract: The article aims to expose the bodies of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR's recruitment mechanisms for active participants in the armed struggle against the Soviet authorities in order to further use them in provocations against former UPR Army soldiers and the identification of Ukrainian resistance. The paper also looks at the subsequent lives of those who lived in the USSR in the 1920s, were involved in GPU investigation cases, and eventually found themselves forced to emigrate to the USA for unknown reasons.The methodology is founded on the ideas of historicism, scientificity, and thorough examination of archival sources. Chronological, comparative, search, and genealogical methods were used to solve the research challenge.Conclusions. All former active participants in the military struggle for the independence of the Ukrainian People's Republic who were compelled to stay in the USSR were closely watched by the Cheka-GPU bodies. The GPU extensively recruited former UPR Army veterans as agents to disclose their genuine feelings, attitudes, and any anti-Soviet schemes and intentions. The GPU organized provocations by setting up "accidental" meetings between agents and conceivable members of the Ukrainian armed insurgency. This encouraged candid discussions between the two groups and sparked the formation of fictitious anti-Soviet organizations. In the fall of 1921, the so-called "Kharkiv petlyurivska organization" was one such operation. It was started by GPU agents and UPR Army veterans Petrovskyi and Trofymenko (Vasilyev). The operation targeted the former officers of the Bohdan Khmelnytskyi-named 1-st Ukrainian Cossack Regiment and other UPR Army soldiers who resided in the oblasts of Kharkiv and Poltava and refused to accept the Soviet government's victory.The Security Service of Ukraine's Sectoral State Archive only contains a summary report on the "investigation" of this case; the operation's conclusion is unclear. Since 1921–1922, the fate of the vast majority of those involved in the alleged "Kharkiv petlyurivska organization" case has been unclear. They then did not show up in any of the GPU-NKVD's accounting or investigating files, specifically from 1925 to 1938. Simultaneously, two individuals who were involved in the case of the so-called "Kharkiv petlyurivska organization" – Professor of medicine Mykhailo Mishchenko and former Bohdan Khmelnytskyi regiment commander Stepan Lazurenko – arrived in Germany in the 1940s and subsequently immigrated to the United States, where they were influential among the Ukrainian migrants. Mykhailo Mishchenko rose to prominence in the scientific community as a psychiatrist, Stepan Lazurenko became a memoirist, and a significant figure in Ukrainian veteran organizations. However, none of them ever brought up the case of the alleged "Kharkiv petlyurivska organization" while they were in exile, nor did they discuss their fellow soldiers from the 1-st Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Ukrainian Cossack Regiment and other UPR Army units that were also mentioned in the report on this case. Thus, the following questions are still unanswered: what happened to the people in the alleged case? Why is there nothing regarding the "Kharkiv Petlyurivska organization" in the SBU's Branch State Archive or other Ukrainian archives? Who were Stepan Lazurenko and Mykhailo Mishchenko in real life, and what was their function in the United States?The relationship between Soviet intelligence and penal agencies and members of the so-called Second Wave of emigration has not yet been covered in the scientific literature and seems to be awaiting further investigation. One of the earliest attempts to bring up this problem is this article.

Keywords: GPU of the Ukrainian SSR, Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, 1-st Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Ukrainian Cossack Regiment, Ukrainian emigration, Stepan Lazurenko, Professor Mykhailo Mishchenko.

  Full-text PDF    https://doi.org/10.15407/vuchk2024.01.005     Citation

• Tynchenko Ya. (The National Museum of Military History of Ukraine, Kyiv, lemberg_landwer@meta.ua) ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5886-4168

Cite:
Tynchenko Ya. (2024). The case of “Kharkiv petlurivska organisation”: a mysterious history of the starshynas of Bohdana Hmelnytskoho regiment. From archives of VUChK–GPU–NKVD–KGB, ( 1 (61)) 5-41. (In Ukrainian). doi: https://doi.org/10.15407/vuchk2024.01.005

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