In the spring of 2022, Soviet propaganda films about “Ukrainian nationalism” acquired a second life. Uploaded to YouTube, films made decades earlier attracted comments that seemed to have travelled through time. Yet the language was unmistakably contemporary: Ukrainians were called “Banderites,” Ukrainian nationalists were described as “fascists” and “servants of the West,” and Russia’s war was framed as a continuation of the struggle against a familiar enemy image.
A striking example was the Soviet television film The State Border: Beyond the Threshold of Victory, produced in 1987. It depicts Soviet border guards fighting Ukrainian insurgents in 1946, as part of the continuing postwar struggle against the OUN and UPA. Its significance lay not simply in its anti-nationalist imagery, but in the fact that viewers decades later treated its representation of “Ukrainian nationalists” not as a historical artefact but as a description of the present. To these viewers, the enemy had changed little; only the date had.
This raises a larger question: how did categories and stereotypes produced by Soviet propaganda retain their power to be reactivated in post-Soviet Russia? The answer lies not simply in the survival of propaganda narratives but in the institutional mechanisms through which Soviet security organs helped produce them. The KGB did not merely repress those considered nationalists; it helped define what a “Ukrainian nationalist” was supposed to be, turning a heterogeneous range of political, cultural and national demands into a recognizable category of ideological danger. This was particularly important because the category could encompass not only organized political opposition but also demands for Ukrainian linguistic, cultural and national autonomy.
The result was a durable political language and imagery. Its central formulas proved remarkably stable: “Ukrainian nationalists” were portrayed as fascists, traitors, foreign agents and enemies of their own people. Yet the category had different targets at different times: the generalized figure of the “Petliurite” had already served as a Soviet enemy image in the 1920s; in the 1930s, “bourgeois nationalism” was increasingly applied to Soviet Ukrainian intellectuals and cultural figures; and after the Second World War, the focus shifted toward the armed nationalist underground in Western Ukraine, while the figure of the “Banderite” acquired prominence. What persisted was not a single political movement or personal continuity, but a flexible vocabulary for representing different forms of Ukrainian national agency as ideological danger.
GB textbooks dealing with “bourgeois nationalism.” Source: HDA SBU archive, collage by the author.
From Armed Resistance to Political Myth
The postwar struggle against Ukrainian armed resistance marked a decisive transformation of this older enemy repertoire. From 1944 onward, Soviet forces confronted the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and other formations resisting Sovietization in Western Ukraine. The OUN and UPA became central objects of Soviet security operations and propaganda, while the figure of the “Banderite” gradually became attached to a much broader image of Ukrainian nationalism.
To undermine support for the underground, Soviet authorities portrayed it as a criminal force alien to Ukrainian society. The initial postwar framework emphasized collaboration with Nazi Germany. Ukrainian nationalists were described as “bandits,” “traitors” and accomplices of the enemy. Soviet military memoirs and other publications helped disseminate this imagery, presenting the nationalist underground as an enemy not only of Soviet power but of the Ukrainian people themselves.
By the late 1940s, however, the political context had changed. As the Cold War consolidated the Soviet Union’s image of the West as its principal adversary, the representation of Ukrainian nationalism was adjusted. The figure of the “Ukrainian-German nationalist” increasingly gave way to that of the “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist,” supposedly dependent on Western intelligence services. The language of “bourgeois nationalism” was thus increasingly combined with accusations of fascism, treason and foreign dependence.
This transformation made the category adaptable. It no longer referred exclusively to members of particular organizations or participants in armed resistance. “Banderite” and “bourgeois nationalist” could become general political labels connecting Ukrainian national aspirations with treason, fascism and foreign intervention.
Initially, Soviet propaganda did not need to deny Ukrainian identity as such. It distinguished between the supposedly legitimate Ukrainian people and a foreign, fascist and nationalist force portrayed as acting against them. Over time, however, the category of the “nationalist” expanded to encompass increasingly broad forms of Ukrainian political agency.
The Soviet state thus did more than suppress a historical opponent. It helped construct a political type.
From Secret Files to Public Narratives
The security organs were central to this process because they possessed access to information that could be transformed into authoritative accounts of the enemy. The KGB collected documents, conducted interrogations, maintained agent networks and monitored émigré organizations. But this material did not remain confined to secret files. It was transformed into books, films, newspaper articles, lectures and exhibitions. Operational information became cultural knowledge.
This was facilitated by the KGB’s institutional presence in the cultural sphere. Within the so-called “chekist themes,” security organs exercised censorship and editorial functions, while “propaganda support for operational activities” provided a framework for their involvement in public communication.
Popular Soviet partisan prose published in the immediate postwar period often portrayed “Ukrainian nationalists” in strongly negative terms. Source: Collage by the author.
A revealing case is the early-1960s book Echo of the Black Forest, written for young readers. One author, Vladimir Beliaev, was a prolific anti-nationalist writer with close ties to the security organs. His co-author, writing under the pseudonym Illarion Podolianyn, was in fact Illarion Khamaziuk, a senior KGB officer responsible for combating “bourgeois nationalists” and the clergy and the author of KGB training materials on anti-nationalist work.
The manuscript was sent to the Ukrainian KGB after already being reviewed in Moscow. In 1963, the Ukrainian office returned a fourteen-page report identifying “serious deficiencies” and proposing fifty-nine corrections, including factual, ideological and stylistic changes. The report was signed by Vitalii Nikitchenko, head of the Ukrainian KGB.
Here the mechanism becomes visible. A security officer involved in combating “Ukrainian nationalism” was simultaneously participating in the production of a popular narrative about that enemy. The KGB was not simply determining whether a text was safe to publish. It was helping define the narrative the text should convey.
The same mechanism appeared in the KGB’s work on the memoirs of Oleksii Fedorov, a prominent Soviet partisan commander. In 1963, the Committee recommended changes including a passage describing Stepan Bandera’s OUN as “an organization of a completely fascist type” and portraying its members as willing to use terror, treason, robbery and incitement of national hatred. The passage was incorporated into the published text.
Such interventions reveal a broader mechanism of ideological production. The security organs supplied not only information but formulas: recurring descriptions of the enemy that could be reproduced across different genres and media.
Teaching Society to Recognize the Enemy
This production of narratives was closely connected to the Soviet concept of profilaktika, or prophylaxis. Especially after Stalin’s death, political control increasingly involved prevention: identifying potentially dangerous attitudes before they developed into organized opposition.
A 1963 review of Oleksiy Fedorov’s manuscript The Last Winter by the Ukrainian KGB. Source: HDA SBU archive.
Profilaktika also had an educational dimension: the population had to be taught how to recognize ideological danger through prophylactic conversations, lectures, public confessions, newspaper campaigns and collective screenings.
Mass culture was particularly important. Films and books transformed abstract political categories into recognizable human characters. The nationalist could be shown as a murderer, collaborator, liar, religious fanatic or puppet manipulated by foreign intelligence. These representations were not intended to explain the complexities of Ukrainian political history but to eliminate them.
The 1959 film Ivanna, produced at the Dovzhenko Film Studio using materials provided by the KGB Directorate in the Lviv Oblast, is a striking example. It presented Ukrainian nationalism through the intertwined figures of the nationalist underground and the Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church. Its protagonist breaks with nationalist and religious circles and ultimately dies after helping Soviet partisans. The film became a major popular success, reaching tens of millions of viewers.
Its importance lies in how political claims were converted into emotionally compelling stories. Ukrainian national identity could be represented as a path leading to fascism, religious fanaticism and violence, while breaking with it became a form of moral liberation.
The same structure appeared across genres: Soviet internationalism versus Ukrainian nationalism; loyalty versus betrayal; the people versus a small group of criminals manipulated by foreign powers. Repetition was not a weakness of the system. It was one of its strengths.
From Nationalists to Dissidents
Caricature published in the Soviet satirical magazine Perets in 1956. Source: Perets online archive.
By the 1960s, the principal target of the campaign had changed. Armed resistance had been crushed, but Ukrainian national aspirations had not disappeared. A new generation of intellectuals challenged the growing pressure toward Russification and defended the Ukrainian language, culture, historical memory and cultural autonomy. Their activism was closely connected to opposition to the expanding dominance of Russian in education, publishing and public cultural life. The Sixties movement (shistdesiatnyky) was not synonymous with the armed nationalist underground, nor did all its members immediately demand political independence. Yet Soviet authorities increasingly interpreted such demands through categories inherited from the earlier struggle.
The enemy category could be transferred.
The Ukrainian dissident could be presented as the ideological successor of the wartime nationalist. Thus, demands to protect the Ukrainian language and cultural sphere from Russification could themselves be recast as evidence of “bourgeois nationalism.” The defence of historical memory could be presented as rehabilitation of the OUN. Contacts with the Ukrainian diaspora could become evidence of foreign manipulation.
The KGB therefore did not have to invent a new political language every time it confronted a new form of dissent. It inherited and adapted an older repertoire of accusations, attaching it to new political subjects. The categories were never entirely static: their targets shifted from the image of the “Petliurite,” associated with resistance to the Bolsheviks during the Civil War, to the wartime and postwar nationalist underground and, later, to dissidents and human-rights activists. What remained was the underlying logic of translating Ukrainian national agency into evidence of ideological hostility.
The large-scale crackdown on Ukrainian national and cultural activism in 1972 demonstrated this strategy. Dissidents were portrayed as connected to foreign nationalist centres and Western intelligence services. Their activities were presented not as expressions of cultural or political disagreement but as part of a hostile campaign against the Soviet state.
The KGB’s long-running “group operational cultivation” case file Blok, directed against Ukrainian dissidents, illustrates this approach. Individuals could be subjected to surveillance, discrediting, intimidation or arrest depending on their perceived importance and willingness to cooperate. Yet the ideological framework remained consistent.
This continuity became particularly visible in the authorities’ treatment of the Ukrainian Helsinki movement in the late 1970s and 1980s. Organized human-rights activism created a new political challenge, but the authorities continued to explain it through the vocabulary of nationalism, foreign influence and betrayal.
The distinction between the wartime nationalist and the contemporary dissident was thus systematically blurred.
Propaganda as an Operational Tool
By the late 1970s and 1980s, cooperation between the KGB and cultural and media institutions had become increasingly institutionalized. The founding of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group in 1976 had transformed the struggle over Ukrainian rights into an organized human-rights movement. In response, the Soviet leadership sought not only to repress its members but to intensify the ideological offensive against them.
A key turning point came in May 1977, when the Politburo launched a campaign to strengthen “political vigilance.” The KGB expanded its cooperation with publishers, filmmakers, journalists and academic institutions, while the KGB Press Bureau acquired a growing role in supervising and promoting ideological content.
Poster for the 1959 Soviet film Ivanna. Source: Online source.
Annual reports of the Ukrainian KGB indicate the scale of this expansion. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, the production of documentaries, films and lectures increased nearly tenfold; public events grew by a factor of 4.6; radio and television programming expanded approximately 3.5 times; and the number of “creative groups” of writers working on “chekist themes” increased sixfold.
What mattered was not simply the scale of this expansion, but the infrastructure behind it. Anti-nationalist propaganda had become institutionalized. The security organs could initiate or support a cultural project, provide archival material, recommend ideological corrections, organize screenings and monitor public reactions. The resulting works could then be used for “mass-political work.”
The boundary between repression and propaganda consequently became blurred. A film could be part of an operational campaign. A trial could provide material for a documentary. A confession could become a newspaper article. An article could be discussed at a public meeting. The system worked through circulation.
Perestroika and the Persistence of the Enemy
Perestroika might have been expected to undermine this system. Glasnost opened space for political debate, former dissidents returned to public life, and organizations advocating Ukrainian independence emerged. Yet the older repertoire did not disappear. Instead, the mechanisms developed under late socialism were adapted to a changing media environment.
A particularly telling case comes from 1987. In October, the head of the Ukrainian KGB, Nikolai Golushko, sent the republican Party leadership a draft article intended for publication in the press. Titled “Interview from Under the Floorboards,” the eight-page text was designed to discredit leaders of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, including Viacheslav Chornovil and Mykhailo Horyn. The article accused them of serving foreign masters and lacking genuine patriotism. It also revived allegations against Chornovil that the KGB itself had previously helped fabricate.
The text was not an independent journalistic investigation but an operationally prepared instrument intended for public circulation. The reader did not need to know where the story originated. Once published, it appeared as journalism.
The episode is especially significant precisely because it dates from the period of glasnost. The KGB was not simply defending the old propaganda system against a new public sphere; it was attempting to enter that public sphere on its own terms.
Even in 1990, KGB and Interior Ministry recommendations to the republican Party leadership called for exposing the “anti-popular criminal activities” of the OUN and UPA and their links to Nazi security services. They recommended press conferences, meetings with workers, republication of anti-nationalist works, statements by former UPA commanders, and screenings of films produced with KGB involvement.
In July 1991, only months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov still cited public screenings of films about the “bloody activities” of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists as a model for security organs elsewhere. The Soviet state was disappearing. The enemy had not.
The Afterlife of a Soviet Category
This persistence helps explain why Russian propaganda surrounding the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 made extensive use of terms such as “Banderites,” “Nazis” and “denazification.” These terms did not emerge suddenly in the twenty-first century. They belonged to a political language whose institutional foundations had been laid decades earlier.
The continuity should not, however, be understood as a simple transmission of Soviet propaganda from one generation to another. What survived was something more flexible: a mechanism for interpreting independent Ukrainian political agency as evidence of foreign manipulation and extremism.
The identity of the enemy shifted while the underlying structure remained remarkably stable. The category could move from armed opponents of Soviet power to cultural activists, dissidents and human-rights activists, while retaining its core associations with fascism, treason and foreign manipulation. What changed was therefore less the vocabulary itself than the political subjects to whom it was applied. In contemporary Russian propaganda, this expandable category has been extended to encompass Ukraine as a whole.
This is why the Soviet legacy matters. The most durable achievement of the propaganda system was not any individual film or book. It was the creation of a framework in which Ukrainian aspirations could be interpreted as fascism, treason, foreign manipulation or hostility toward the allegedly “real” interests of the Ukrainian people.
The KGB was central to this process not because it controlled every representation of Ukrainian nationalism, but because it connected repression to representation. It investigated alleged enemies, accumulated information about them and helped transform that information into public narratives. It censored cultural products, but it also helped produce them. It discredited individuals, but it also supplied the language in which they could be defamed.
The history of Soviet anti-Ukrainian propaganda is therefore not simply the history of a state misrepresenting its opponents. It is the history of an institutional system for manufacturing political categories.
Russian propaganda since 2014, and with renewed intensity after February 2022, therefore did not invent the vocabulary through which Ukrainian national agency was represented as an existential threat. It reactivated and adapted a repertoire whose targets and meanings had changed repeatedly since the early Soviet period.
This helps explain why Soviet films on YouTube could still function as propaganda in 2022: viewers were not merely watching historical representations of a vanished conflict, but encountering a ready-made vocabulary for interpreting the present.