The Man with the Poison Gun

by Serhii Plokhy

  Borys Vitoshynsky repeated again and again in his articles that Stashinsky’s testimony was not the plot of a mystery novel or a movie. It was an indictment of the murderer himself and his masters in Moscow. “Stashinsky’s testimony, aside from the feeling of constant distaste that he arouses toward himself with it (we have in mind only critically thinking people), is constantly and extraordinarily interesting and simply sensational, like a thrilling spy novel, to the many who allow themselves to be ‘taken in’ by the Moscow spy,” wrote Vitoshynsky. “Unfortunately, we are not dealing with a novel. This is a narrative of evil deeds by a person who, on the orders of the criminals in the Kremlin, took the path of the greatest crimes: betrayal of all that is one’s own and noble; the path of murder, constant lying, and service to evil.”6

  It became the task of the Banderas’ attorney, Hans Neuwirth, and the representative of the Rebet family, Adolf Miehr, to change the atmosphere in the courtroom and the tone of the sympathetic newspaper reports by unmasking him as a traitor, a committed communist, and a manipulative KGB spy. Before the trial, the Bandera people had gathered enough background information on the Stashinsky family to prove that Stashinsky had at least ideologically turned on his own kin. The Stashinsky family was indeed active in Ukrainian affairs, and Stashinsky’s uncle had even been arrested and executed by the Soviet regime for his support of the Ukrainian underground. Neuwirth and Miehr finally gained an opportunity to use this information during the fifth day of the trial, when both questioned the accused at significant length. They did everything in their power to portray him as a traitor to his people.7

  Stashinsky turned out to be a difficult nut to crack. To Neuwirth’s question of why he had called himself a Russian throughout the course of the trial, he answered that he had used that term to denote his political allegiance, not his ethnic identity. To Neuwirth’s question of whether he knew that, according to the Soviet constitution, Ukraine had the right to secede from the Soviet Union, Stashinsky answered that it was a legal question, and he was not a lawyer. But he was clearly lying when he denied any knowledge that his uncle, Petro Stashinsky, had been killed by the Soviets, and he refused to answer whether he would have killed his sister if the KGB had ordered him to do so.

  “You used the word ‘traitor,’” said Adolf Miehr, referring to Stashinsky’s earlier statement, according to which he believed originally that defecting to the West would be a betrayal of his homeland. “Do you, as a Ukrainian, know at least this fact of the Ukrainian liberation struggle, of history, that the liberation struggle has been directed since the beginning of this century, and even earlier, not against any particular regime, not against any particular political order, but against the rule of any foreign nationality in Ukraine and against any occupation?” Stashinsky dodged the question. “I cannot answer that question,” he told the court. “You proceed from the assumption that I am almost a historian, and that my sister, who knew how to write, has historical knowledge like that of a professor of history.” Miehr was not convinced and asked what Stashinsky’s sister was fighting for. “She fought for an independent Ukraine,” finally came the answer he was trying to elicit. That was as far as the two German lawyers, who had undergone a crash course on the Ukrainian liberation movement during the previous few days, managed to get in their efforts to present Stashinsky as a traitor to his nation.8

  Stashinsky’s own lawyer, Helmut Seidel, preferred to stay as far away from issues of national identity, family loyalty, and personal betrayal as possible. His line of defense was clear and simple: Stashinsky, whoever he had been before and at the time of the killings, had changed. He had reevaluated his actions and undergone a major moral and psychological transformation. There was no better proof of that than his defection to the West and his confession, which was the most solid piece of evidence that the investigators, and now the trial judges, had to go on. “Why did you admit all this when you came to the West, given that it would have been impossible to learn of it had you not admitted it?” asked Seidel. Stashinsky gave what was most likely a prepared response. “At first I only decided never again to carry out an assassination,” he told the court. “My political and ideological transformation took place during my stay in Moscow. All that I lived through in Moscow prompted me to make that decision. I admitted that it was my duty somehow to make up for my misdeed and try to warn people against anything of the kind.” This was the main conclusion that Stashinsky and his attorney wanted the court to draw from the lengthy testimony regarding his meeting with Aleksandr Shelepin and his stay in Moscow after his marriage.9

  Professor Joachim Rauch, a specialist in psychology from Heidelberg University, who observed Stashinsky in February and March 1962, was called as a witness. He suggested that Stashinsky was not someone who could invent stories or try to attract attention to his own personality by resorting to self-accusation. In fact, argued the professor, Stashinsky lacked an active imagination. He also depended excessively on the opinion of others. “As far as will is concerned, Mr. Stashinsky makes the impression of a mild individual,” testified Rauch. He later explained what he meant: “For all his intelligence, Mr. Stashinsky . . . is not independent in his thinking.” He had tried to decide matters of principle for himself, but once he was married, Stashinsky had relied on his wife’s judgment: “His wife’s authority took the place of his own. He would probably be unable to renounce the past on his own. . . . He has a tendency to avoid unpleasant problems, not to solve them independently; he wants to push them aside.” Seidel must have been thrilled—as harsh as the assessment was, it made it easier for Stashinsky to claim he had been brainwashed by the KGB.10

  The role of Inge Pohl in his moral conversion was something that Stashinsky mentioned again and again in his testimony about their stay in Moscow and their decision to escape to the West. As always, Heinrich Jagusch tried to check Stashinsky’s story. “If your inner transformation took place as you have now described it, didn’t you discuss all that in detail with your wife? When the heart is overloaded, a person needs to share his thoughts with someone.” Stashinsky agreed. He told the court that he and Inge had most of their conversations outdoors, but not all of them could be arranged that way, and the KGB probably picked up their indoor conversations. As always, the court had to rely on Stashinsky’s word and his powers of persuasion.11

  And his powers of persuasion turned out to be quite substantial. As the trial progressed, fewer and fewer observers doubted his testimony. It was during the third day of the hearings that Jagusch decided to put to rest speculation that Stashinsky was merely a puppet feeding anti-Soviet hysteria. “Did anyone here in the Federal Republic of Germany influence you at any time (leaving aside the investigative agencies) as to what you were to say about this or that point at this trial?” asked Jagusch soon after Stashinsky concluded his testimony about the killing of Bandera. “No, that never happened,” responded Stashinsky. The judge probed further: “Was there ever an earlier attempt to prompt you, for one reason or another, to tell us fairy tales here and incriminate yourself?” “Never,” answered Stashinsky. “Perhaps someone did that from outside the Federal Republic of Germany?” suggested Jagusch. “No,” said Stashinsky. “Are you sure?” insisted the judge. “Yes!” came the answer.12

  43

  PROSECUTION

  The last day of the court proceedings fell on October 15, three years to the day after the killing of Stepan Bandera. His followers came to the courtroom dressed in black suits and wearing black ties. That day they attended a liturgy in memory of their murdered leader at St. Stefan’s Church in Karlsruhe. Stashinsky noticed the unusual dress code in the courtroom, but it is not clear whether he made the connection with the event three years earlier.1

  Bandera’s followers and mourners were pleased that day with the position taken by the chief public prosecutor, Dr. Albin Kuhn, an older gentleman with a bald head and round glasses who presented the government’s case against Bogdan Stashinsky. Kuhn’s speech was anything but good
news for the defendant. Kuhn said that Stashinsky had known at the time of the murders that the spray pistol would kill his victims. He defined Stashinsky’s crime as “murder, namely, treacherous homicide.” The prosecutor recognized that Stashinsky had acted on behalf of the KGB and was an instrument in the hands of a state that resorted to killing its political opponents, but he refused to treat the KGB as a military organization and declared its orders illegitimate.

  Kuhn concluded his presentation by stating: “The law provides that murder be punished by an absolute penalty, and extenuating circumstances, as represented by the person of the accused, cannot be taken into account in this case.” He asked the court to sentence Stashinsky to two life terms for the murders he had committed, and an additional three years for his espionage activities. Whatever rumors of a clemency deal Congressman Charles Kersten had heard in Washington before leaving for the trial appeared to be false. As expected, Stashinsky had implicated the Soviet leaders in organizing political killings abroad, but the prosecutor showed no leniency in return. Things seemed to be working out very badly for Stashinsky.2

  Next to speak was Hans Neuwirth. Neither Stashinsky nor his lawyer could have expected anything good from Neuwirth, whose line of questioning in the previous days suggested that he was not only skeptical of Stashinsky’s conversion story but also well informed about particulars of Soviet and Ukrainian politics and history. Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist members believed that Stashinsky had shown his true colors under such questioning. “Stashinsky’s rude behavior toward the lawyers who ask him questions, his floundering and the impolite tone of his answers cast him in an entirely different light,” wrote one of Bandera’s followers present in the courtroom. “Only now is it apparent what he is really like: submissive and obedient to those on whom he depends; contemptuous of those whom he does not fear. He even mocks such people. It turns out that at heart he remains a KGB operative, a ‘Soviet’ man.”3

  Reporter Borys Vitoshynsky claimed that Stashinsky was lying not by distorting the facts but by omitting an important part of his life story. He referred to the Stashinsky family’s involvement in the nationalist underground and his motivations for betraying his sisters. Other reporters questioned whether Stashinsky had indeed joined the secret police in order to save his family. “There must have been other motives here that Stashinsky deliberately concealed,” wrote the Paris-based Ukrainian newspaper Ukraïns’ke slovo (Ukrainian Word). The nationalists wanted Stashinsky to say more about his involvement in the suppression of the Ukrainian underground before he had been called to Kyiv for training. Stashinsky refused, answering Neuwirth’s question about how often he took part in anti-insurgent operations by saying only that he had done so as often as ordered. They wanted him to say how many insurgents he and his comrades had killed, and who else in the emigration had fallen victim to KGB assassins, but he either did not know or declined to answer those questions. They also wanted him to describe the heroic struggle of their friends in the underground, but he would not.

  Finally, Bandera’s followers raised questions about his motives for defecting to the West. “Stashinsky fled to the West not because he was a ‘repentant’ Bolshevik,” wrote Vitoshynsky. “He had quite different, selfish reasons for that.” Bandera’s people laid out how they perceived those true motives in an article they published after the trial. It stated that Stashinsky’s defection was “a perfectly logical step after he observed that distrust of him and his wife on the part of the Moscow leadership of the KGB was obviously growing with every passing day. . . . As a longtime KGB operative, he knew that that institution does not long indulge its suspicious personnel or partners who know too much about jointly committed secret crimes.” Stashinsky was selfishly fleeing for his life, not because of any change of heart.4

  The Bandera people had good reason to be skeptical about the confession of a KGB assassin who had become an overnight media darling and a symbol of repentance and frankness. They had every reason to question his claims that he was ignorant about so much of the Ukrainian liberation struggle, given the fact that members of his family were stalwarts of the Ukrainian underground in the village. He certainly knew what had happened to his uncle, whose corpse had been found in a Lviv prison after the Soviets left the city in June 1941.

  The belief that Stashinsky had defected not out of repentance but to save his own life was shared by his former bosses in the KGB. Yurii Nosenko, a KGB officer who had defected to the West in 1964, told CIA interrogators that once Stashinsky detected a microphone in his apartment, he must have become afraid that the KGB was going to assassinate him. That, as he knew, happened fairly regularly to agents involved in politically sensitive operations during the Stalin era. Ironically, Bandera’s followers and the KGB seemed to agree on one thing: Stashinsky was a turncoat who could not be trusted.5

  Hans Neuwirth began his final statement by saying that he was not seeking revenge on behalf of the Banderas, a clerical family that had lost three of its sons in the struggle for the liberty of Ukraine. But as Neuwirth called Stashinsky a traitor who had betrayed his sister’s trust to penetrate the Ukrainian underground, it sure sounded like revenge. Stashinsky began to shift in his seat, and the public could see blood rising to his face—a rare occurrence during the trial. That was not the end of Neuwirth’s insulting comparisons: he went on to say that Stashinsky’s KGB masters had trained him like a dog to kill innocent victims. Still, Neuwirth, like Kuhn before him, acknowledged the defense’s thesis of Stashinsky’s spiritual transformation. “The man was a product of a method of upbringing like the one used to train [Ivan] Pavlov’s dogs, but then this woman appears,” said Neuwirth, referring to Inge Pohl, “and she is the one who, appealing to his conscience, ultimately justifies our [Western] system.”

  But that was as far as Neuwirth was prepared to go in showing sympathy for Stashinsky. “Whatever the angle from which we consider this case,” continued the attorney, “we have no possibility of granting absolution, as in a confessional. We are sitting in a courtroom. However diligently we may seek something human, there always remains the murder and destruction of two people.” Bandera’s followers in the room were not overly impressed with Neuwirth’s oratorical skills—he was nervous and spoke in a very low voice—but they liked what he said, not only about Stashinsky but also about their struggle for independence. “According to the principles of our Western tradition, such a struggle is sacred,” declared Neuwirth. “And it is precisely the Ukrainians who have shown us throughout their difficult historical process that they are prepared to follow the call of that tradition.”6

  As the court recessed for lunch around noon, Stashinsky’s prospects looked as bleak as they ever had in the course of the trial. He had done the seemingly impossible in making the judges and the public like him. Even the prosecutor and the victim’s attorneys agreed that he had repented and was no longer the man who had committed the murders. But none of that seemed to matter. The prosecution was demanding two life sentences plus three years. Over the course of the day it seemed more and more likely that they would get their wish.

  One of the most memorable speeches that day was given by Stepan Bandera’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Natalia. Her statement was a tribute to her father, who, she reminded the court, had been murdered exactly three years earlier. Bandera’s death had left a bleeding wound in the hearts of his three children. When Natalia Bandera rose to speak, silence fell on the courtroom. Even the journalists stopped turning pages in their notebooks. She shared with those present some very personal memories of her father, a professional conspirator whose true identity had not been disclosed even to his children. “[I] remember that on one occasion when I was ill with a serious inflammation of the middle ear, I asked my mother who the strange gentleman was who had stood by my bed and stroked my cheek,” said Natalia in a voice trembling with emotion. “I had completely forgotten my father.” She was referring to the years immediately after the war, when Bandera’s family had lived apar
t from him in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Mittenwald.7

  Even after the family reunited under one roof in the late 1940s, Natalia did not know either her true name or her father’s identity for a long time. “At the age of thirteen, I began to read Ukrainian newspapers, and I read a lot about Stepan Bandera,” recalled Natalia. “Gradually, and on the strength of my observations regarding the surnames of many people who were frequently together with my father, I began to draw my own conclusions. On one occasion an acquaintance made a slip, and I was then certain that my father was really Stepan Bandera. But even then I realized that I dare not let my little brother and sister into this secret, since it would have been highly dangerous if they had innocently and unknowingly divulged this fact.”

  Natalia Bandera’s speech gave the audience something that had been altogether lacking in the trial testimony until then—a sense of the human tragedy caused by Stashinsky’s actions. Dressed in black like her father’s associates, Natalia reminded the audience of Stashinsky’s testimony in which he said that his case officer, Sergei Damon, had assured him that Bandera’s children would be thankful to him for what he had done once they grew up. Natalia said that that would have only happened if the KGB had kidnapped them and subjected them to a reeducation program, as they did with Yurii Shukhevych, the teenage son of the commander in chief of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. For his children, Bandera was the supreme moral authority in their lives, a hero who had died for God and Ukraine. “He personified this noble ideal,” declared Natalia, “and he will continue to be the guiding star of my life, as well as of the life of my brother and sister and of all the youth of Ukraine.”8