War of All Against All: A Review of Traitor

As the Red Army marches across Ukraine on their way to finishing off the Nazi regime, 17-year-old Tolya Korolenko shoots his platoon’s political officer, who is in the act of sexually assaulting a young woman in Lwów/L’viv, a city contested by Poland and Ukaraine. With no option except to flee or be executed at the hands of the Russians like his father, the half-Ukrainian, half-Polish Tolya is rescued by a Ukrainian nationalist group led by the enigmatic Solovey. Solovey needs a sniper to execute a Soviet Marshal, and Tolya’s reputation precedes him. Things soon go awry, with other associates of the group suspected of betrayal, and Tolya knows his time is short, for as soon as they find out about his Polish heritage and he finishes his mission, the Ukrainian nationalists will execute him.

In her third novel, McCrina weaves Tolya’s story with that of Solovey, born Aleksey Kobryn into a prominent Ukrainian family. Like Tolya’s parents, Aleksey’s are long dead, lost to Soviet genocide and the war, and all he has left is his younger brother, Mikola. Then 19-year-old Aleksey’s attachment to Mikola parallels his defense of Tolya three years later even when other group members warn him that Tolya may be a traitor.

In the end, all are traitors – turned by ideology into becoming mass murderers, out for their own advantage, or simply trying to survive. McCrina highlights the lesser-known Eastern front of the battle against Hitler, where titans of tyranny faced off but a plethora of nationalist groups – the Ukrainian Nachtigallen seeking a better deal for the nation under Hitler, the only slightly less collaborationist (but fiercely anti-Communist) UPA, and the Polish nationalists drawn from the country’s former elite – made the front a war of all against all. Her in-depth research doesn’t overwhelm the story at all, but makes vivid and concrete each scene, each battle, each bombed-out building, each flight across war-torn countryside. When almost every teenager is an orphan and chances of survival are slim, coming of age feels like coming to the end, a reality McCrina captures in this fascinating and compelling read.