Bohdan Stashynsky
Encyclopedia
Bohdan Stashynsky (also known as Bogdan Stashinsky) (born November 4, 1931 in Borshchovych
, Poland
) is the KGB
assassin of Ukrainian nationalist
leaders Lev Rebet
and Stepan Bandera
who were killed in the late 1950s.
, Stashynsky completed his early education in 1948 and studied to become a teacher at the Lviv Pedagogical Institute. Stashynsky's family were supporters of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). His three sisters were members of the organization. In 1950 he was arrested for traveling without a ticket on public transportation to Lviv from his village. After agreeing to act as an informer he was released. Through his sisters he infiltrated the workings of the UPA and forwarded information to the MGB.
In 1953 he was sent to Kiev
to continue studies in espionage
. In 1954 he was sent to East Germany under the name Joseph Leman where he perfected his knowledge of German. In 1956 he often traveled to Munich
where he began to perfect his false identity.
in Moscow. At that time, Alexander Shelepin
was Chairman of the State Committee for Security
of the Council of Ministers. The assassination was known to and approved by the Chairman
of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev
.
In 1957, the KGB trained the 25-year-old Stashynsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide
capsule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack. Stashynsky used the weapon to kill Lev Rebet
in 1957. On October 15, 1959 he used an improved version of the same gas gun to assassinate Stepan Bandera
in Munich
.
Stashynsky was honoured by Moscow with the Order of the Red Banner
by Shelepin for his work and given his final assignment to kill Yaroslav Stetsko
. Stetsko, also living in Munich was a prominent anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist leader and also the President of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
. He was to be assassinated in 1960, but it could not be perpetrated for reasons which have as yet not been clarified.
in 1961.
Explaining what motivated him to kill Rebet, Stashynsky told a court that he had been told that Rebet was “the leading theorist of the Ukrainians in exile,” since “in his newspapers Suchasna Ukrayina (Contemporary Ukraine), Chas (Time), and Ukrayinska Trybuna (Ukrainian Tribune) he not so much provided accounts of daily events as developed primarily ideological issues.”
After Stashynsky's defection
the Soviet government tried to avert negative exposure by means of propaganda
. On October 13, 1961, it arranged a press conference in East Berlin at which another agent of the Soviet secret service, named Stefan Lippolz, appeared in order to make certain "disclosures" regarding the murder of Stepan Bandera. He blamed the murder on the cashier of Bandera's own organization, Dmytro Myskiv, who had died in the meantime. This diversion manoeuvre was a failure since it was established that the fictitious "assassin" was not in Munich when Bandera was assassinated but was in Rome
at the time, where he stayed for several days.
According to West German Intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen
,
reported that Bohdan and Inge Stashinsky had been given new identities and had been been provided asylum by the apartheid government of South Africa
.
Pustomyty Raion
Pustomyty Raion is a raion in Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine. Its administrative center is Pustomyty. It has a population of 112 009.It was established in 1959.-External links:*...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
) is the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
assassin of Ukrainian nationalist
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is a Ukrainian political organization which as a movement originally was created in 1929 in Western Ukraine . The OUN accepted violence as an acceptable tool in the fight against foreign and domestic enemies particularly Poland and Russia...
leaders Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet was a Ukrainian political writer and anti-communist during World War II. He was a key cabinet member in the Ukrainian government which proclaimed independence on June 30, 1941...
and Stepan Bandera
Stepan Bandera
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian politician and one of the leaders of Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine , who headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists...
who were killed in the late 1950s.
Early biography
Born to a family of villagers not far from LvivLviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...
, Stashynsky completed his early education in 1948 and studied to become a teacher at the Lviv Pedagogical Institute. Stashynsky's family were supporters of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). His three sisters were members of the organization. In 1950 he was arrested for traveling without a ticket on public transportation to Lviv from his village. After agreeing to act as an informer he was released. Through his sisters he infiltrated the workings of the UPA and forwarded information to the MGB.
In 1953 he was sent to Kiev
Kiev
Kiev or Kyiv is the capital and the largest city of Ukraine, located in the north central part of the country on the Dnieper River. The population as of the 2001 census was 2,611,300. However, higher numbers have been cited in the press....
to continue studies in espionage
Espionage
Espionage or spying involves an individual obtaining information that is considered secret or confidential without the permission of the holder of the information. Espionage is inherently clandestine, lest the legitimate holder of the information change plans or take other countermeasures once it...
. In 1954 he was sent to East Germany under the name Joseph Leman where he perfected his knowledge of German. In 1956 he often traveled to Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
where he began to perfect his false identity.
Assassin
Stashynsky, received the instructions to carry out the assassination directly from the headquarters of the KGBKGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
in Moscow. At that time, Alexander Shelepin
Alexander Shelepin
Alexander Nikolayevich Shelepin was a Soviet state security officer and party statesman. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its Politburo and was the head of the KGB from 25 December 1958 to 13 November 1961.Shelepin was born in Voronezh...
was Chairman of the State Committee for Security
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
of the Council of Ministers. The assassination was known to and approved by the Chairman
Premier of the Soviet Union
The office of Premier of the Soviet Union was synonymous with head of government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics . Twelve individuals have been premier...
of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
.
In 1957, the KGB trained the 25-year-old Stashynsky to use a spray gun that fired a jet of poison gas from a crushed cyanide
Cyanide
A cyanide is a chemical compound that contains the cyano group, -C≡N, which consists of a carbon atom triple-bonded to a nitrogen atom. Cyanides most commonly refer to salts of the anion CN−. Most cyanides are highly toxic....
capsule. The gas was designed to induce cardiac arrest, making the victim's death look like a heart attack. Stashynsky used the weapon to kill Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet
Lev Rebet was a Ukrainian political writer and anti-communist during World War II. He was a key cabinet member in the Ukrainian government which proclaimed independence on June 30, 1941...
in 1957. On October 15, 1959 he used an improved version of the same gas gun to assassinate Stepan Bandera
Stepan Bandera
Stepan Andriyovych Bandera was a Ukrainian politician and one of the leaders of Ukrainian national movement in Western Ukraine , who headed the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists...
in Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
.
Stashynsky was honoured by Moscow with the Order of the Red Banner
Order of the Red Banner
The Soviet government of Russia established the Order of the Red Banner , a military decoration, on September 16, 1918 during the Russian Civil War...
by Shelepin for his work and given his final assignment to kill Yaroslav Stetsko
Yaroslav Stetsko
Yaroslav Stetsko was the leader of the Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists , from 1968 until death. In 1941, during Nazi Germany invasion into the Soviet Union he was self-proclaimed temporary head of the self-proclaimed Ukrainian statehood...
. Stetsko, also living in Munich was a prominent anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist leader and also the President of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations was a co-ordinating center for anti-Communist émigré political organizations from Soviet and other socialist countries. The A.B.N. formation dates back to an underground conference of representatives of non-Russian peoples that took place on November 1943, near...
. He was to be assassinated in 1960, but it could not be perpetrated for reasons which have as yet not been clarified.
Defection
His new German wife, was shocked to find herself married to an assassin, and following the KGB's stance that effectively broke their family life, he defected to U.S. officials in West BerlinWest Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
in 1961.
Explaining what motivated him to kill Rebet, Stashynsky told a court that he had been told that Rebet was “the leading theorist of the Ukrainians in exile,” since “in his newspapers Suchasna Ukrayina (Contemporary Ukraine), Chas (Time), and Ukrayinska Trybuna (Ukrainian Tribune) he not so much provided accounts of daily events as developed primarily ideological issues.”
After Stashynsky's defection
Defection
In politics, a defector is a person who gives up allegiance to one state or political entity in exchange for allegiance to another. More broadly, it involves abandoning a person, cause or doctrine to whom or to which one is bound by some tie, as of allegiance or duty.This term is also applied,...
the Soviet government tried to avert negative exposure by means of propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
. On October 13, 1961, it arranged a press conference in East Berlin at which another agent of the Soviet secret service, named Stefan Lippolz, appeared in order to make certain "disclosures" regarding the murder of Stepan Bandera. He blamed the murder on the cashier of Bandera's own organization, Dmytro Myskiv, who had died in the meantime. This diversion manoeuvre was a failure since it was established that the fictitious "assassin" was not in Munich when Bandera was assassinated but was in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
at the time, where he stayed for several days.
According to West German Intelligence chief Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen was a General in the German Army during World War II, who served as chief of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front. After the war, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union , and eventually became head of the West...
,
"...Bohdan Stashinskyi, who had been persuaded by his German-born wife Inge to confess to the crimes and take the load off his troubled conscience, stuck resolutely to his statements. His testimony convinced the investigating authorities. He reconstructed the crimes exactly as they had happened, revisiting the crumbling business premises at the Stachus, in the heart of Munich, where Lev Rebet had entered the office of a Ukrainian exile newspaper, his suitcase in his hand. And he showed how the hydrogen cyanide capsule had exploded in Rebet's face and how he had left him slumped over the rickety staircase. The case before the Federal court began on October 8, 1962, and world interest in the incident was revived. Passing sentence eleven days later, the court identified Stashinskyi's unscrupulous employer Shelyepin as the person primarily responsible for the hideous murders, and the defendant -- who had given a highly credible account of the extreme pressure applied to him by the KGB to act as he did -- received a comparatively mild sentence. He served most of it and was released. Today the KGB's 'torpedo' is living as a free man somewhere in the world he chose on that day in the summer of 1961, a few days before the wallIn 1984, Associated PressBerlin WallThe Berlin Wall was a barrier constructed by the German Democratic Republic starting on 13 August 1961, that completely cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin...
was erected across Berlin.
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
reported that Bohdan and Inge Stashinsky had been given new identities and had been been provided asylum by the apartheid government of South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
.