THE MAIN ASPECTS OF THE CONFRONTATION OF THE MIA AND THE OUN IN THE SECOND HALF OF 1953

Abstract

The authors investigate the issue of transformations in the tactics of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the fight against the Ukrainian national liberation movement in the period after the changes in the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR and the end of the "Beriyev thaw". With the arrival of T. Strokach as the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR, the confrontation with the OUN intensified, and repressive activities intensified. The minister noted that during the administration of his predecessor, no active offensive measures were taken to search for, capture, or eliminate OUN militants, so he ordered to intensify all areas of this work. Along with the search for armed undergrounds, some work was carried out to eliminate their "support" base, and the capabilities of the agency began to be used more widely. The most active armed resistance of the Ouniv underground took place in the Stanislav and Lviv regions, where more than 50% of all considered armed underground members were located. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine did not organize thorough control over the activities of its agency, as a result of which there were cases of deciphering of militant agents, gross violations of the elementary rules of conspiracy, and drunkenness.The increasing attention to the issues of combating the OUN is evidenced by the fact that this issue was considered at the time at the meetings of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, repeatedly at the boards of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in the orders and directives of the Minister of Internal Affairs. The heads of state bodies believed that the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR in 1953 had done some work on suppressing the national liberation movement in Ukraine, but they had not yet fully coped with the task. All these institutions strove to completely eliminate the manifestations of the national liberation movement, revealing in sufficient detail the errors in the work of local departments of internal affairs in this direction. All this happened against the background of the general decline of the national liberation movement, which had already passed its peak in 1944-1945.