For most of his life Stefan Bandera was an angry, fanatic outcast, dedicated to a lost cause. His cause was Ukrainian independence, and so hard did Bandera struggle for it that Soviet propaganda refers to all members of the Ukrainian underground as "Banderovtsy." The son of a Ukrainian Catholic priest, Stefan joined the Ukrainian underground in high school, and knew no other occupation. In 1934, when Bandera was sentenced to death for the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronislav Pieracki (for Ukrainians regarded both Poles and Russians as usurpers), the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, presumably to prevent a Ukrainian nationalist uprising in eastern Poland.
The advancing German army in 1939 released Bandera from a Polish jail, and he slipped across the Russian border to organize anti-Soviet resistance. Two years later, when the Wehrmacht attacked Russia, Bandera's partisans fought the retreating Russians and hopefully proclaimed an independent Ukraine. The occupying Nazis scoffed at the idea, and Bandera's men took on the Germans in turn. Tricked into a conference with the Gestapo in 1941, Bandera was arrested and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Released by Hitler in 1944 in the hope that he would rouse the Ukrainian populace to fight the advancing Russians, Bandera set up headquarters in Berlin, while Ukrainian partisans once again fought both the Wehrmacht and the Red army in a vain effort to carve a free Ukraine out of the confusion at war's end. To avoid Russian agents, he fled to West Germany in 1945, but shuttled back and forth in various disguises between Munich and the Ukraine, bringing encouragement and funds to the partisan army, which fought on for four more years before being finally subdued by the Soviets. (Stalin's vice-lord for suppressing the Ukrainians: Nikita Khrushchev.)
After that, using the name Stefan Popel, Bandera lived with his wife and three children in Munich, protected constantly by bodyguards. Fortnight ago. leaving his modest apartment, he went back upstairs for something he had forgotten, leaving his bodyguard waiting in the street. A moment later there was a cry, and neighbors found him lying with a broken neck on the stair landing. An autopsy disclosed the real cause of death: cyanide.
Though Munich police said the circumstantial evidence indicated suicide, Bandera's followers were convinced that he had been tricked or overpowered into taking the cyanide, grimly printed in the funeral announcement: "Died a hero's death at the Bolshevists' hands." And last week in Munich's Waldfriedhof, as 1,500 Eastern European exiles watched silently, Bandera's coffin, draped with the blue-and-yellow banner of Ukrainian independence, was lowered into a simple grave hallowed by an urn full of Ukrainian soil.