The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  In December 1949, Sudoplatov was given his most significant assignment yet: to locate and kill the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Roman Shukhevych. The seasoned forty-two-year-old nationalist leader had learned his military skills as the commander of Nachtigall, the Abwehr Special Forces Battalion in 1941, and he had taken control of the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists while Bandera was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. Sudoplatov and the deputy security minister of Ukraine, General Viktor Drozdov, mobilized a whole army of secret-police officers and agents to hunt down Shukhevych. The breakthrough came in early March 1950, when a former member of the underground betrayed Shukhevych’s courier, twenty-five-year-old Daria Husiak. Upon her arrest, Sudoplatov interrogated Husiak personally, but she did not betray her superior. The secret police then put her in a cell with a female informer, who got a note from Husiak to be passed to Shukhevych in a village near Lviv. More than six hundred officers quickly descended on the village of Bilohorshcha in search of the resistance leader.

  When Soviet forces broke into the house that Shukhevych occupied, he tried to fight his way out and was killed in action. “Our group, which entered the house, began the operation, in the course of which Shukhevych was asked to surrender,” read Sudoplatov’s report. “In answer to that, Shukhevych put up armed resistance and began firing a machine gun with which he killed Major Revenko, a department head of the Ministry of State Security of the Ukrainian SSR, and, despite measures taken to capture him alive, he was killed by a sergeant of the MDB in the course of the gunfight.” One of Shukhevych’s wounds suggested that at some point in the shootout he killed himself to keep from falling into the hands of the secret police. But Sudoplatov could report to Moscow that his mission had been fulfilled. Another leader of the Ukrainian movement was down.4

  With Shukhevych gone, Stepan Bandera’s symbolic importance as leader of the underground and emblem of its continuing resistance grew disproportionately to his actual involvement in Ukrainian developments. The assassination of the Soviet propagandist Yaroslav Halan by the members of the nationalist underground had only solidified Bandera’s position at the top of the list of the enemies of the Soviet regime. Nikita Khrushchev demanded his head. According to some accounts, it was in the fall of 1949 that the Soviet Supreme Court had passed a death sentence on Stepan Bandera. Sudoplatov recalled later that once Khrushchev was in Moscow, he asked him to prepare a plan “for liquidating the Bandera leadership of the Ukrainian fascist movement in Western Europe, which is arrogantly insulting the leadership of the Soviet Union.”5

  3

  SECRET AGENT

  On a summer evening in 1950, a plainclothes policeman showed up on the doorstep of a modest peasant house in the village of Borshchovychi near Lviv. The house belonged to the well-respected Stashinsky family. The father worked as a carpenter and was known for his love of books; the mother ran the household. They had three children—two daughters and a son—all in their late teens or early twenties.1

  The family had less than two acres of land, but they had never welcomed the communist regime. They were committed Ukrainian patriots, and it was in their home that many of their neighbors had first heard the Ukrainian national anthem, or seen a trident—the coat of arms of the short-lived Ukrainian state that was crushed by a Bolshevik invasion in 1920. The region was under Polish rule until 1939, so the singing of the Ukrainian anthem and the display of the Ukrainian coat of arms were by no means innocent manifestations of local patriotism. After the Soviet takeover of the region, the Stashinskys found themselves among the victims of Bolshevik terror. In October 1940, the Soviet agents arrested a close relative, the thirty-six-year-old Petro Stashinsky, an activist of the Ukrainian cultural movement and a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. In June 1941, Petro Stashinsky was shot in a Lviv prison, just days, if not hours, before the Soviets withdrew from the city. He shared the fate of thousands of Ukrainian patriots. The family took Petro’s arrest and killing very hard.

  When the Soviets returned in 1944, the members of the Stashinsky family were strong supporters of the OUN. They helped the men from the forest in any way they could, and their home became a safe haven. Sometimes twenty to thirty men would arrive, and Mrs. Stashinsky would go around the neighborhood and collect food for them. The two daughters, Iryna and Maria, became couriers for the underground. Both sisters were arrested and held for a time by the secret police. “When they were reported, they were taken to the prison in Yarychiv,” recalled one of the family’s neighbors years later, referring to a prison in a neighboring town. “And they beat and assaulted them so badly that . . . Maria had given up any hope of ever being married. She used to say: ‘What good am I to anyone when I’m so destroyed?’” Iryna was fired from her position as a teacher in the local school. The Stashinskys were put on the secret police list of suspects, and the father of the girls kept a supply of dry bread on hand in case he was arrested and forced to undertake the long journey to Siberia.2

  Now, the policeman wanted to talk to nineteen-year-old Bogdan Stashinsky. He was the pride of the family—the first to go to college. He was also popular with the local girls. A slim youngster with an open, rather long face, a pronounced nose, and a noticeable cleft in the middle of his chin, he wore his hair high and fluffy, held his lanky body erect, and cultivated a carefully groomed appearance. Born on November 4, 1931, Stashinsky had been educated under the Poles, the Soviets, the Germans, and then the Soviets again. Under the Poles, the main language of education was Polish; under the Germans and Soviets, it was Ukrainian. Depending on the occupiers, either German or Russian was considered by the curriculum as a foreign language. In 1945, when the war ended, he moved to Lviv, seventeen kilometers from his native village, to continue his education. He dreamed of becoming a medical doctor but did not get into medical school. Instead he studied mathematics at the local teachers’ college. He went home every few days for a supply of food, taking a train, which he could not afford. He usually snuck in without paying the fare.

  The plainclothes policeman told Bogdan he would have to come to the railway police station immediately to talk about a ticket incident that had taken place a few days earlier. Bogdan had been caught taking the train without paying, and officers had already taken his name and address and then let him go. Now they wanted Bogdan back. Given the family’s background and ties to the underground, this seemed to be a minor problem. He could have been charged with a serious crime; maybe now he would be. Bogdan followed the policeman to the station. To his surprise, there was a senior officer awaiting him. “Captain Konstantin Sitnikovsky,” the officer introduced himself. He was welcoming, and seemed more interested in the young student’s life and attitudes than in the incident on the train. He asked questions about Bogdan’s studies, his family, and his parents. That was it. After the friendly talk, he was allowed to go home. He did not know whether there would be a follow-up invitation for another talk. For the moment, the police were leaving him alone. This was good news; when one of Maria Stashinsky’s colleagues in the underground had been arrested for her role in the resistance, Captain Sitnikovsky had beaten her up and put a gun to her head, imitating execution.3

  From his friends in Lviv, Bogdan knew that the secret police had been paying special attention to students since the assassination of Yaroslav Halan. One of the identified killers, the eighteen-year-old Ilarii Lukashevych, was a student at the local agricultural college. Almost immediately, the authorities either arrested or expelled any students who were close to Lukashevych. They also intensified the ideological harassment of students from the region. The campaign was led personally by the first secretary of the Ukrainian Komsomol (Young Communist League) and future head of the Soviet KGB, Vladimir Semichastny. In October and November 1949, the secret police arrested more than one hundred university students and employees. Soon after Khrushchev delivered his speech, interrupted by the note demanding that he call the Kremlin, fifty students were expelled from
Lviv colleges. Over the course of the year, the Lviv Polytechnical Institute lost 344 students, amounting to 8 percent of its student body. Overall, up to 2 percent of Lviv students, almost all of them from recently annexed Western Ukraine, were affected by the purge.4

  The secret police simultaneously stepped up its efforts to recruit informers among Lviv students whose families lived in the countryside—an area infested with guerrillas. Some transferred to other colleges in order to avoid the attention of the secret police; others switched to correspondence programs and left Lviv to go back to their families. One of those who had to leave Lviv in the summer of 1950 was a future leading Ukrainian historian, Mykola Kovalsky. In the fall of 1949, he was removed as head of a student trade-union cell; in March 1950, he was forced to join the Komsomol; and in the summer, at the end of the academic year, he packed up his belongings and signed a request to transfer to a correspondence program. He attributed his decision to leave the city to the atmosphere of “ideological and political terror inflicted on Western Ukrainian youth in the higher educational institutions of Lviv during the era of rampaging Stalinism, when [secret police] informers, denunciations to the police, and betrayal were imposed from above.” Kovalsky’s closest friend, also a future historian, Zenon Matysiakevych, was not so lucky. He was expelled from the university altogether. Neither Kovalsky nor Matysiakevych belonged to the underground.5

  Bogdan Stashinsky would also be unlucky. In a few days, the same policeman showed up on his doorstep once again and invited him to another meeting with Captain Sitnikovsky. This time, the captain wanted to talk about the underground and the involvement of members of his family in its activities. It sounded as if he knew almost everything already. “Sitnikovsky knew of my sister’s collaboration with the underground and was familiar with the situation in our village,” recalled Stashinsky later. There was no doubt that Sitnikovsky was trying to recruit Stashinsky as an informer. “He presented me with a choice: either I could extricate myself from this situation and help my parents or I would be arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, and my parents would be sent to Siberia,” he recalled, describing his second meeting with Sitnikovsky. He knew that what the officer said was no empty threat. On a regular basis, the secret police were arresting people for “crimes” much less serious than those his family had committed.6

  Bogdan Stashinsky’s village of Borshchovychi was surrounded by forests where a detachment of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was active. It was led by a native of a neighboring village named Ivan Laba, who took nom de guerre “Karmeliuk” after a famous nineteenth-century Ukrainian peasant rebel. Laba had joined the nationalist movement in 1941, soon after the Germans had driven Bandera’s followers underground. Like many other Ukrainian nationalists, Laba had been captured by the Gestapo and sent to Auschwitz, where he had managed to survive the war. At the end of the war he rejoined the guerrillas and became one of their local leaders. Laba dated Bogdan Stashinsky’s younger sister, Maria, and knew Bogdan personally. Bogdan knew many other members of the underground as well—they came to his house on a fairly regular basis.7

  Captain Sitnikovsky explained that resistance was senseless. Stashinsky did not disagree with the officer. He knew that going to the forest was equivalent to a death sentence: the chances were nine out of ten that anyone who did so would be caught or killed by the police. Should he save himself and his family by cooperating? If he refused, he would lose his dream of getting an education. Furthermore, he would go to prison, and so would the members of his family. Sitnikovsky did not request a formal agreement right away. “Although he was recruiting me, he did not ask me directly,” recalled Stashinsky later, “and he took a careful approach so that I would not see myself as a traitor.” To save his family members, he would now have to spy on them. “I knew that if I accepted the proposal, I would quarrel with my parents, but I found myself in such circumstances that it was clear to me that it would be better to accept his proposal,” remembered Stashinsky. “I believed that in that way I would succeed in protecting my parents from Siberia and my sisters from prison.”

  Stashinsky left the meeting without saying either yes or no. But his yes was implicit in his silence. He did not confide in his family or try to figure out a solution with their help. He convinced himself that he was saving his family, even if it was against what they would wish. Stashinsky was also saving himself. He was nineteen years old, not active in politics, and dreaming about the bright future ahead of him. With that future now under threat, he decided to cooperate. Some of his village acquaintances believed that he simply got scared. His next meeting with Sitnikovsky took place at the captain’s private apartment.

  The new secret agent received the Ukrainian code name “Oleh,” a name with origins that went back to one of the first princes of medieval Kyiv. From now on, Stashinsky would sign all his reports with that name. Most of them dealt initially with information about the underground that he learned from his sister Iryna. But this was not enough. To rehabilitate himself completely in the eyes of the authorities and protect his family, said Sitnikovsky, the young man would have to carry out one more mission—that of penetrating the resistance group led by Ivan Laba. His task was of enormous political importance. Captain Sitnikovsky had learned that one of Halan’s assassins had recently joined the group. Stashinsky was to locate him in the forest, gain his trust, and discover who had ordered the killing. Stashinsky was promised that this would be his last mission. After that, he would be allowed to continue his studies. Once again, he felt that he had no choice but to agree. Once again he chose not to turn to his family.

  Stashinsky knew about the assassination of Halan from the papers. He also knew that one of the assassins, the forestry college student Ilarii Lukashevych, had been apprehended and sentenced to death. What he did not know was that he had already met the second killer, Mykhailo Stakhur, whom he knew only by his nom de guerre, “Stefan.” Stakhur was in the vicinity of his village as part of Laba’s group. In March and April 1951, the secret police spread the rumor that they were going to arrest Stashinsky for his ties with the underground. They pretended to look for him. Stashinsky returned from Lviv to his native village and told his relatives that the secret police were hot on his heels. Everyone agreed that under the circumstances he had no choice but to flee to the forest and join the guerrillas.

  Bogdan’s sister Iryna sent a message to her friends in the forest, and Ivan Laba came in person to pick him up. Some members of the underground were suspicious of Bogdan’s intentions, but Iryna insisted, and Laba took him in. Laba admitted to Bogdan that he did indeed have under his command an insurgent who had assassinated Halan. In May 1951, Stashinsky met Mykhailo Stakhur, who confirmed that he had worked with Lukashevych in the murder. The two had gone to Halan’s apartment and, in the middle of a conversation with him, had asked the writer to close the window. When he turned his back to his visitors, Stakhur killed him with a small axe that he had brought along and hidden under his coat. Once he had this information, Stashinsky had all he needed to complete his mission. He had found the killer, had learned the circumstances of the assassination, and could now tell Captain Sitnikovsky where the culprit was hiding.

  In mid-June 1951, Stashinsky unexpectedly left the underground group. He went to report the results of his mission to Sitnikovsky. Less than a month later, on July 8, a special secret-police unit arrested Stakhur. The secret police forced an elderly local family that had supplied food to the insurgents to put sleeping powder into a fruit compote offered to the rebels. When the powder took effect, the officers arrested Stakhur together with three of his comrades. One of them was Yaroslav Kachor, who had advised Laba a few months earlier against taking in Stashinsky. Stakhur was put on trial and hanged in October 1951.8

  Stashinsky’s disappearance and the subsequent arrest of Stakhur had blown his cover, leaving no doubt that he was acting on behalf of the secret police. The news came as a shock to the other members of the Stashinsky family, who w
ere now shunned by their fellow villagers, many of them supporters of the underground. The very people whom Bogdan had tried to save now turned against him, refusing to recognize him as their son and brother. Stashinsky’s world had crumbled around him. He had earned the right to continue his education, but he could not do so without the continuing support of his family. Educational loans were nonexistent, and scholarships were small. Students who had little or no support from home often lived up to six in a dormitory room, surviving on cheap fish and considering potatoes a major feast.9

  The secret police kept its word, however. While others were arrested, the Stashinsky family was left alone. They also gave Bogdan Stashinsky a choice: he could continue his education, or he could join a secret police unit with a monthly salary of between 800 and 900 rubles—three times the wages of a village librarian, and a fortune by student standards. “It was [only] a proposal,” remembered Stashinsky later, “but I had no alternative to accepting it and continuing to work for the NKVD. By now, there was no way back for me.” Indeed, Stashinsky had nowhere to go. He had saved his family by betraying it. They did not want to have him around anymore. The secret police would become his new home and family.10

  4

  PARACHUTIST

  Bogdan Stashinsky was assigned to a special unit of the MGB—the Ministry of State Security, a predecessor of the KGB—that consisted of former insurgents who had agreed to work for the other side, either voluntarily or under duress.

  Such units were first created in 1944, as the Red Army began to take over the Western Ukrainian territories formerly under German control. Disguised as units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, they engaged in terror, deception, and sabotage, including atrocious crimes against the civil population designed to turn public sentiment against the insurgents. Altogether, the undercover secret-police killed more than a thousand people and arrested twice as many. Some of the members of undercover units had second thoughts and returned to the forest, revealing the methods of MGB counterintelligence operations to the real insurgents. But most felt trapped and stayed where they were: with the blood of their own people on their hands, they, like Stashinsky, had nowhere else to go.