Ponypalyak O. Activity of Officers’ and Sergeants’ Schools of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (1943 – 1946).

This dissertation is an extensive scientific study of the history of Officers’ and Sergeants’ Schools of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA), where hundreds of officers and thousands of sergeants of the armed forces of the Ukrainian liberation movement were trained in the middle of the twentieth century. It is the first comprehensive and systematic analysis of the activity of military schools of the UIA conducted on the basis of an extensive collection of primary sources and previous scientific studies. Through the application of contemporary scientific methods and approaches, the author analyzed the historiographical contours of the subject matter, and researched and systematized available primary sources, both of the Ukrainian liberation movement and of the Bolshevik regime. Since military schooling in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in the interwar period and during World War II was a key and immediate precondition for the establishment UIA military schools, the author performed a thorough analysis of OUN’s military training in order to determine the reasons and circumstances of the emergence of UIA’s Officers’ and Sergeants’ Schools. On the basis of the primary sources and existing historiographical studies, the author formulated his own hypothesis that explains the development of UIA’s military training centers.