Legal Basis Of The Organization And Investigation Of Oun’s Security Activities

Abstract

The article defines the legal basis for the organization and conduct of investigative activities of the Security Service of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Attention is drawn to the content of the constituent documents (instructions and resolutions) that governed the procedure for detention, questioning, analysis and systematization of the information received. It was established that according to the internal procedure for organizing the activities of the SB OUN, investigative activity was considered the second after intelligence, a component of counterintelligence protection. For example, in one of the instructions for the Volyn referendum of the OUN SB «Fighting Sexuality and Provocation» it was pointed out the need for purposeful counteraction to the NKVD-NKDB agent. Two dominant areas of work were clearly identified - the prevention and disruption of shares of Soviet special services; conducting their own ideological work in order to raise revolutionary sentiment among the population. The instructions «What a SB officer should know in the fight against an agent» outlined the procedural aspects of investigative actions during the interrogation of Soviet agents. A mandatory requirement was to find out the location of the military units, their command staff, the location and plans of recruiting military recruits and other strategic military facilities, including those under construction. It was found that the organizational forms of conducting investigative actions by Ukrainian nationalists were borrowed from the Soviet NKVD-NKDB bodies, but were modified in accordance with the requirements set by the leaders of the UN Security Council. The practice of investigative activity has led to the separation of two specific types of interrogation: with the «head» (the use of persuasion, logical techniques); with a «hand» (force interrogation with the use of physical coercion, torture). The ideological component was an important part of the interrogation process. The interrogation of the suspect was to be carried out exclusively by the investigator, who had previously been interested in the case, collected operational materials and more. It was a natural rule that allowed the results of the investigation to be achieved. Most of the instructions given were based on Soviet counterparts and were modified to effectively counter the detained NKVD-NKDB staff.

The decisive attitude towards physical and moral means of coercion was a significant lack of investigative actions of the OUN SB. Physical torture became natural, as evidenced by the transcripts of the suspects’ interrogations, and most of these cases ended in death.