Petro Fedun

On February 24 is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Petro Fedun (nickname – Petro Poltava). He was one of the leading ideologists, “political educators” and publicists of the armed underground of the OUN and the UPA in the second half of the 1940s – early 1950s. He was born in Shnyriv village (now Brodiv district Lviv region). While studying at the Brodiv State Gymnasium named after Józef Koženjovsky, he joined the Youth organization within the OUN. In the summer of 1939, he entered the medical faculty of Lviv University. He was mobilized into the Red Army and graduated from junior command and staff courses in 1940. He was lieutenant, platoon commander of the coastal battery in Odesa Military District.

In the first weeks of the German-Soviet war, Petro Fedun was taken prisoner. Soon he was released as a “Right Bank Ukrainian”. He worked at the Ukrainian Relief Committee in Brody. In the summer of 1942, he moved to Lviv, where he continued his medical education. He was a member of the Regional Party of Youth in Western Ukrainian lands, editor of the magazine “Younak”, in which he published his first journalistic articles (1943). Since 1945, all his underground activities have been connected with the establishment of the propaganda apparatus of the leading structures of the Ukrainian liberation movement. He headed the Main Center of Propaganda and Information Service (MCPIS) of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), the political education department of the Main Military Staff of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Information Bureau of the Ukrainian Main Liberation Rally (UGVR). Nicknames were “Volianskyi”, “Sever”. He was sotnik and political educator of the UPA (1946), a member of revolutionary leading body of the OUN (1948). Because of personnel shortage, he introduced a system of training to improve the professional level of propagandists. He contributed to the organization and adjustment of activities of dozens of underground publishing houses. He was an editor of the publications “For the Ukrainian State”, “Visnyk”, “Idea and Rank”, “Independence”, “Propaganda and Information Center under the OUN leadership”, "Bureau of Information of the UHVR”. His propaganda and journalistic works were widely distributed in Ukraine, sent through couriers to emigration centers abroad. On December 23, 1951 he died in a special operation of NKVD units near Novoshyn village (now Stryi district, Lviv region).

In Petro Poltava’s written work “Who are the Banderites and what they are fighting for” (1950) it is noted: “Everything that the Bolshevik propaganda says about us is the most shameless, cynical and vile lie... They fear specifically that the mass of people of the Soviet Union, having learned the real goals of our struggle, its progressive national-liberation character, wasn’t infected by revolutionary, Stepan Bandera’s ideas and didn’t follow the example of the Ukrainian people on the path of anti-Bolshevik liberation struggle”.