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THE REVOLUTIONARY ERA AND DNIEPER
UKRAINE’S OTHER PEOPLES Paul Robert Magocsi Excerpts from Chapter 38 from the book ”History of Ukraine”, Toronto / 1996 |
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Click on the map for better resolution Aware of such negative attitudes toward
Ukrainian political aspirations, in 1917 the Central Rada
implemented liberal policies and set up the Secretariat for Nationality
Affairs in an attempt to attract support from Dnieper Ukraine's other
peoples. Adopting the nationality theories advocated by the Austrian
socialists Otto Bauer and Karl Renner, the Central Rada
enacted a law in January 1918 that provided for national-personal autonomy.
National-personal, or national-cultural, autonomy meant that an individual
was guaranteed certain rights with a view to the protection of his or her
language and culture regardless of place of residence. This autonomy was
different in kind from territorial autonomy, in which a specifically defined
area was granted autonomous status. Among the rights guaranteed by
national-personal autonomy were schools, cultural
institutions, and religious societies. All would receive financial support
from the central government, which in turn would establish tax revenues
according to a fiscal plan devised by the nationalities themselves.
Interestingly, only Jews, Russians, and Poles were singled out as eligible
for national-personal autonomy; seven other groups (Belarusans,
Czechs, Romanians, Germans, Tatars, Greeks, and Bulgarians) would first have
to petition for and receive governmental approval in order to obtain
autonomous status. Jews, Russians, and Poles were each given their own
ministries and guaran-teed a certain number of
seats in the Central Rada and Little Rada. The Jews had fifty deputies in the Central Rada (equally divided among five Jewish political
parties) and five deputies in the Little Rada. Jews
also received posts in the General Secretariat and, later, the ministerial
council of the Ukrainian National Republic, in which the Ministry of Jewish
Affairs was created (headed at various times by Moshe Zilberfarb,
Wolf Latsky-Bertholdi, Avraham
Revutsky, and Pinkhes Krasny). Yiddish was made an official language (it even
appeared on some of the Ukrainian National Republic's paper money); Jewish
schools and a department of Jewish language and literature at the university
in Kam"ianets'-Podil's'kyi were established;
and plans were made to revive the historic Jewish self-governing communities
(the kahals) that had been abolished by the tsarist
government in 1844. Of Jewish political parties, the socialists were the
first to cooperate with the Central Rada, and
others, including the Zionists, eventually followed. All Jewish parties,
however, strongly opposed the idea of an independent Ukraine and either
abstained from voting on or voted against the Fourth Universal.
Moshe Zilberfarb The promising atmosphere in
Jewish-Ukrainian relations created by the Central Rada
during the first phase of Dnieper Ukraine's revolutionary era changed during
the Hetmanate of the second phase and then
dissolved completely during the anarchy and civil war of the third phase
(1919-1920). Hetman Skoropads'kyi's government
effectively ended the experiment in Jewish autonomy, but it at least
maintained social stability in the cities and part of the countryside. During
the third phase of the revolutionary era, maintaining such stability proved
well beyond the powers of the Directory, faced as it was with foreign
invasion, civil war, and peasant uprisings. Even though the Ministry of
Jewish Affairs was revived and Jewish autonomy theoretically restored, this
meant little to Dnieper Ukraine's Jews, who faced a wave of pogroms and
so-called excesses (less violent attacks in which there was usually no loss
of life) that intensified after May 1919. Of the 1,236 pogroms in 524
localities recorded between 1917 and early 1921 in Dnieper Ukraine, six
percent occurred before 1919, and the rest after. Estimates of the number of
persons killed in the pogroms during the entire period range from 30,000 to
60,000. Whether the pogroms and excesses were carried out by White Russian
armies, by forces loyal to the Bolsheviks or to the Ukrainian National Republic,
or by uncontrolled marauding bands and self-styled military chieftains (like Hryhoriiv and Makhno), the
Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic and particularly its leader, Symon Petliura, have been
blamed in most subsequent Jewish writings. The pogroms have so clouded the
historical record that authoritative sources like the Encyclopedia Judaica have concluded that no Ukrainian government,
neither the Central Rada, nor the Hetmanate, nor the Directory, was ever sincere about
Jewish autonomy or about 'really developing a new positive attitude toward
the Jews.' Whoever or whatever is responsible for the pogroms of 1919—1920 in
Dnieper Ukraine, there is no question that their occurrence poisoned
Jewish-Ukrainian relations for decades to come both in the homeland and in
the diaspora. The Russian minority in Dnieper Ukraine
invariably opposed the idea of separation from Russia. This applied across
the political spectrum, from the left-wing Bolsheviks, who actually made up
the majority of the members in the Communist party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine, to
the right-wing monarchists, known as the Bloc of Non-Partisan Russians and
represented by the ukrainophobic Russian-language
daily newspaper Kievlianin (Kiev, 1864-1919),
edited by Vasilii Shul'gin.
When, in July 1917, the Central Rada was opened to
national minorities, the Russians had fifty-four deputies. There were also
eight Russians in the Little Rada and two ministers
(Aleksandr Zarubin for
postal services and Dmitrii Odinets
for Russian affairs) in the General Secretariat. As the Central Rada moved increasingly toward autonomy and then
independence for Ukraine, however, the Russian deputies began leaving the
assembly until only four Socialist-Revolutionaries and the minis-ter Odinets remained. With the establishment
of the Hetmanate in April 1918, the majority of
Russians, especially from the center and right side of the political spec-trum, supported the new Ukrainian government. These same
groups also welcomed the efforts of General Denikin's
Volunteer Army to restore Russian control over Ukraine in 1919.
Vasilii Shul'gin The Russians' attitude toward Ukrainian
aspirations is not surprising. From their perspective, they lived in Little
Russia, which for them was an inalienable part of the Russian homeland. As
for Ukrainianism, most Russians considered it
little more than a political idea concocted by a few misguided intellectuals
or a by-product of the anti-Russian designs of foreign powers, especially
Austria-Hungary and Germany. According to such a scenario, the peasant masses
were not Ukrainians, they were Little Russians. It was simply inconceivable
to Russians (or, for that matter, russified
Ukrainians) imbued with such attitudes that their beloved Little Russian
homeland could ever be torn from mother Russia and transformed into an
'artificial' independent Ukrainian state. Poles living in Dnieper Ukraine exhibited
mixed reactions to the events that engulfed them during the revolutionary
era. It was actually owing to World War I that the number of Poles in Dnieper
Ukraine increased. This was the result of large numbers having fled eastward
from the Congress Kingdom, the Russian Empire's far-western Polish-inhabited
entity, which for extensive periods of time was held by the Central Powers.
Cities on the Right Bank received many Poles during this influx; their number
in Kiev, for instance, reached 43,000, or 9.5 percent of the inhabitants, in
1917. Following the February Revolution in the
Russian Empire, the Poles in Dnieper Ukraine organized themselves essentially
into two groups. The Polish Executive Committee in Rus'
(Polski Komitet Wykonawczy na Rusi), led by Joachim Bartoszewicz,
primarily represented the landowning class and conservative National
Democrats, who were sympathetic to the Polish liberation movement. The Polish
Democratic Center party, headed by Mieczyslaw
Mickiewicz, Roman Knoll, and Stanislaw Stempowski,
represented more liberal political trends, although it too supported the
interests of Polish landowners and shared their inclination for an
independent Polish state. Leaders of the Polish Democratic Center party took
advantage of the Central Rada's invitation to
participate in its administration, and it obtained places for twenty deputies
in the Central Rada and two in the Little Rada. Then, following the Fourth Universal in January
1918, the Ministry for Polish Affairs headed by Mickiewicz was created as
part of the ministerial council of the Ukrainian National Republic.
Joachim Bartoszewicz The Ministry for Polish Affairs ceased to
exist following the fall of the Central Rada in
April 1918. The Hetmanate cooperated instead with the
Polish Executive Committee, which welcomed the conservative intention of the Hetmanate government to restore the large landed estates.
The days of the Polish landlords and their hold over the Right Bank
countryside were numbered, however. In response to the peasant revolts and
anarchic conditions which dominated the 1919-1920 period,
and following the establishment of Soviet rule in Dnieper Ukraine, large
numbers of Poles fled westward to the new Polish state. Consequently, the
number of Poles remaining in Dnieper Ukraine decreased by at least one-third,
from 685,000 in 1909 to 410,000 in 1926. The only sizable national minority entirely
to avoid dealings with the Central Rada or with
other non-Bolshevik governments in Dnieper Ukraine were the Germans. Maintaining
the aloofness that had characterized them since tsarist times, the Germans
remained in their rural communities and tried to keep as uninvolved as
possible with both the Ukrainians and the Russians in their midst and in the
urban centers. Because of the all-encompassing changes and cataclysmic events
of the revolutionary era, however, the Germans were unable to remain
unaffected for long. In relative terms, they perhaps suffered the most of all
Dnieper Ukraine's peoples. Already during World War I, the Germans
living in Volhynia and in the Chelm
region, that is, in areas closest to the front, had been deported, in 1915,
by the tsarist Russian government, primarily to Siberia. They were suspect in
the eyes of Russian officialdom, who feared their collaborating with the
advancing German Army. Then, during 1919 and the height of the peasant leader
Makhno's military ravages, many German villages,
especially in Katerynoslav province, were attacked
in destructive pogroms. Their inhabitants either were killed or, if they
managed to escape, eventually reached Germany or the United States. The
pacifist Mennonites and their prosperous rural farms proved especially easy
targets for Makhno's anarchist bands. As a result
of the World War I deportations and the destruction wrought during the
revolutionary era, the number of Germans in Dnieper Ukraine decreased by
almost two-fifths, from 750,000 in 1914 to 514,000 in 1926. The Tatars were different from other
peoples in Dnieper Ukraine in that they inhabited the Crimea, a territory
claimed by the Hetmanate, but in which no Ukrainian
government had any authority during the revolutionary era. Under tsarist
rule, the Tatars suffered cultural discrimination and the persecution of
their national leaders, many of whom were forced to flee abroad, especially
across the Black Sea to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul. There they set up
conspiratorial nationalist organizations, the most important being Vatan, whose goal was independence for the Crimea. Following the February Revolution of 1917,
several Tatar nationalist leaders returned from exile and in April joined
with their Crimean fellows in forming the Muslim Executive Committee. Led by
the recently returned nationalists Noman Celebi Cihan and Cafer Seidahmet Kirimer, the Committee demanded cultural autonomy for the
Tatars. By May, that demand had changed to territorial autonomy, and in July
a Crimean Tatar Nationalist party (Milli Farka) was established to work toward the restructuring
of the Russian Empire on a federal basis. Somewhat in the manner of the
Ukrainian Central Rada, which was meeting at the
same time in Kiev, the Crimean Tatars gradually broadened their goal from
autonomy to complete independence. This process culminated in December 1917
with the creation of a constituent assembly (Kurultai)
in Bakhchesarai with its own government, headed by Noman Celebi Cihan. Throughout 1917, the Crimean leadership
maintained cordial relations with the Central Rada,
which supported the Tatar demands for territorial and cultural autonomy. The
Russians and Ukrainians living in the Crimea, however, were opposed to
Crimean Tatar nationalist activity. It is also interesting to note that the
Crimean Tatars encountered strong opposition from other Turkic groups in the
Russian Empire, especially from the Volga and Ural Tatars. Following the
Bolshevik accession to power in November 1917, Bolshevik-dominated soviets
became an important politicapl factor in the
Crimea, especially in the seaport city of Sevastopol'. The soviets, too,
expressed firm opposition to the goals of the Tatar nationalists. In January 1918, the Bolsheviks drove the
recently created Tatar constituent assembly out of Bakhchesarai
and set up a Soviet government. But it survived only until May, when German
troops from Dnieper Ukraine arrived in the peninsula. Although the Germans
had driven out the Bolsheviks, they refused to recognize the Tatar
nationalists. Instead, they appointed a Muslim military official (actually a
Lithuanian Tatar, Sulkevich) who served German interests.
Following the departure of the Germans from Dnieper Ukraine in late 1918, the
Crimea was ruled successively by a pro-Russian liberal government (under the
Crimean Karaite leader of the Kadet
party, Solomon S. Krym), until April 1919; a Soviet
Crimean Republic in cooperation with the Crimean Tatar National party, until
June 1919; and White Russian armies under General Denikin
and his successor, Petr Vrangel',
who had retreated to the Crimea from the advancing Soviet Red Army.
Solomon S. Krym When, in October 1920, the Whites were
finally driven out of their last European stronghold, the Crimea, the
Bolsheviks returned to the peninsula for the third and final time. They
immediately branded their estwhile allies, the
Crimean Tatar National party (Milli Farka), as counterrevolutionary and declared their own
subordination to the Soviet government in Moscow. A year later, in October
1921, Moscow created the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, which
became an integral part of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.
Thus, by the fall of 1920, Dnieper Ukraine and the Crimea were both within
the Soviet orbit ruled from Moscow.
Petliura and the Pogroms
The
time has come to realize that the peaceable Jewish population — their women
and children - like ours have been imprisoned and deprived of their national
liberty. They [the Jews] are not going anywhere but are remaining with us, as
they have for centuries, sharing in both our happiness and our grief. The
chivalrous troops who bring equality and liberty to all the nationalities of
Ukraine must not listen to those invaders and provocators
who hunger for human blood. Yet at the same time they cannot remain
indifferent in the face of the tragic fate of the Jews. He who becomes an
accomplice to such crimes is a traitor and an enemy of out
country and must be placed beyond the pale of human society. ... ... I
expressly order you to drive away with your forces all who incite you to
pogroms and to bring the perpetrators before the courts as enemies of the
fatherland. Let the courts judge them for their acts and not excuse those
found guilty from the most severe penalties of the law.* The excerpt above is from an order by Petliura issued on 26 August 1919 to the troops of the
Ukrainian National Republic. Despite this and other actions taken by him
earlier in the year to assist the Jewish population, the relationship of Petliura to the pogroms of 1919 has remained a
controversial issue. Subsequent literature on the subject differs greatly,
according to whether the authors are of Jewish or Ukrainian background. The
following are examples of the often extreme difference of opinion about Petliura.
Simon Petliura In 1976, the Jewish writer Saul S. Friedman
published a book about the assassination of Petliura
with the provocative title Pogvmchik, which
concludes with ten reasons why Petliura was 'responsible
for the pogroms.' Among them are the following: 1. Simon Petlura was Chief of
State, Ataman-in-Chief, with real power to act when he so desired. No
Ukrainian leader enjoyed comparable respect, allegiance or authority. 2. Units of the Ukrainian Army directly under his
supervision (the Clans of Death) committed numerous atrocities. Instead of
being punished, the leaders of these units (Oudovichenko,
Palienko, Angel, Patrov, Shandruk) received promotions. 3. Insurgents dependent upon Petlura
for financial support and war material committed pogroms in his name. Petlura maintained a special office to coordinate the
activities of these partisans. Rather than punishing them, he received their
leaders with honors in his capital. 4. There is good reason to believe that Petlura may have ordered pogroms in Proskurov
and Zhitomir in the early months of 1919, and that the Holovni
Ataman [Petliura] was in the immediate vicinity of
these towns when pogroms were raging. Yet he did nothing to intervene
personally; nor did he command the expeditious punishment of the major pogromchiks. 5. Petlura's famous orders of August 26 and 27, 1919, forbidding
pogroms, were issued eight months too late, at a time when the Holovni Ataman had no real power. They were designed
specifically for foreign consumption. 6.
What funds were
authorized for the relief of pogrom victims were a trifle compared with how
much was needed and how much had been stolen from the Jews. Like Petlura's famed orders, they were too little and too late.* In 1969-1970, the American scholarly
journal Jewish Social Studies published a debate about Petliura
and the Jews during the revolutionary years. The Ukrainian-American historian
Taras Hunczak came to the following conclusions: The
frequently repeated charge that Petliura was antisemitic is absurd. Vladimir Jabotinsky,
perhaps one of the greatest Jews of the twentieth century - a man well-versed
in the problems of East European Jewry - categorically rejected the idea of Petliura's animosity towards the Jews. ... Equally
absurd is the attempt on the part of some to establish Petliura's
complicity in the pogroms against Ukrainian Jewry. Particularly disturbing is
the
recent attempt by Hannah Arendt to draw a parallel between the case of Petliura and Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's notorious henchman. In
view of the evidence presented, to convict Petliura
for the tragedy that befell Ukrainian Jewry is to condemn an innocent man and
to distort the record of Ukrainian-Jewish relations.* * Pavlo Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy do istorii ukrains'koirevolutsi'i,
1917—1920 rr., Vol. IV (Vienna 1922), pp. 167-168. * Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik
(New York 1976), pp. 372-373 'Taras Hunczak,
'A Reappraisal of Symon Petliura
and Jewish-Ukrainian Relations, 1917-1921,' Jewish Social Studies, XXXI (New
York 1969), pp. 182-183. Mennonites Caught in the Revolution The reaction of Ukraine's indigenous
German, in particular Mennonite, inhabitants to the revolution and civil war
is summed up by Dietrich Neufeld in a diary-like memoir from 1919-1920 later
published under the title A Russian Dance of Death (1977). Of particular
interest in the book are the Mennonites' perceptions of their own place in
the former Russian Empire, of the anarchist leader Makhno,
of their Ukrainian neighbors, whom they refer to as Russians, and finally -
because they are pacifists - of the difficult decision to take up arms in
self-defense.
Nestopr Makhno Even
these peaceful Mennonite settlers who up till now have remained aloof from
all history-making events are caught up in the general upheaval. They no
longer enjoy the peace which dominated their steppe for so long. They are no
longer permitted to live in seclusion from the world. Makhno. Who
doesn't quake at that name? It is a name that will be remembered for
generations as that of an inhuman monster. ... His professed aim is to put
all 'capitalists' to the sword. Even the Bolsheviks - dedicated to the same
cause but more sparing of human life on principle - are too tame for him. His
path is literally drenched with blood. Presumably,
the Makhnovites despoiled our people because of
their alleged sym-pathy for Denikin.
It can't be denied that our colonists, though professing neutrality, do not
show much sympathy for the peasants. While the peasants opposed the
re-establishment of the old regime, the [Mennonite] colonists remained loyal
to that cause. They even allowed themselves to be enlisted in Denikin's army. Actually, they were tricked into doing so
by being assured that they would be organized into local Self Defence units
only. Many
of our young men, who as a consequence of the German occupation had developed
distinctly anti-Russian attitudes, were eager to avenge the looting and
suffering inflicted on our people [in 1918, before the German troops
arrived]. ... They supported the German army of occupation and, in some
cases, had been foolish enough to inform against certain of the revolutionary
leaders. One
can criticize the Zagradovka Mennonites for taking
up arms instead of hold-ing fast to the principle
of non-resistance. As good Christians they had no right to show hatred toward
their neighbor. Their duty was to love him even when he wronged them.
Instead, they made common cause with a soldiery which plundered and murdered
- even though we have no reason to supect any young
Mennonites of a similar lack of restraint.... The Zagradovka Mennonites took up arms without hesitation.
They are to be doubly blamed for that. First, it was politically unwise. Then
again it was in glaring contradiction to their hitherto professed concept of
non-resistance. The Russian peasants pointed out this contradiction and
called them hypocrites. A bitter truth
was held up to the [Mennonite] colonists: 'When our Russia, our women and
children, were threatened with attack in 1914, then you refused to take up
arms for defensive purposes. But now that it's a question of your own
property you are arming yourselves.' Certainly it was a crying shame that the
[Mennonite] colonists' actions were inspired neither by a desire to protect
the state nor by a true Christian spirit. We
Mennonites are aliens in this land. If we didn't realize that fact before the
war we have had it forced upon us during and after the War. Our Russian
neighbors look on us as the damned Nyemtsy
[Germans] who have risen to great prosperity in their land. They completely
ignore the fact that our forefathers were invited here [one hundred and
thirty] years ago in order to cultivate the vast steppes which lay idle at
the time. They refuse to admit that our farmers were able to achieve more
than Russian farmers by dint of industry and perseverence,
as well as through bet¬ter organization and
management, rather than through political means. ... This
is no longer our homeland. We want to leave! The magic word 'emigration'
travels like a buran [winter wind] from place to
place. Whenever two or three colonists get together the conversation is sure
to be about emigrating. It is the one idea that keeps us going, our one hope. SOURCE: Dietrich Neufeld, A Russian Dance
of Death: Revolution and Civil War in the Ukraine, translated by Al Riemer (Winnipeg 1977), pp. 11, 18-19, 26-27, 63-64, 73,
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