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Chaos in Ukraine: Defining the Context of Anti-Jewish Violence

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Chaos in Ukraine: Defining the Context of Anti-Jewish Violence CHAPTER 1 Chaos in Ukraine: Defining the Context of Anti-Jewish Violence don’t know how to begin, because I have lived through so much. I have “I survived the following pogroms: Petliura’s, Denikin’s, Sokolovsky’s, and so many more.”1 Roza Rozenvasser, the twelve-year-old girl born in Vasilkov, found herself unable to account for all the violence that she had witnessed from February to November 1919, when she was questioned by the represen- tatives of the Central Committee for Relief to the Pogrom Survivors. Roza’s memory betrayed her, because the outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence followed one another continuously as various armed forces from formal regiments of different armies to armed bands of locals captured Vasilkov or passed through. By 1919, Vasilkov (Vasylkiv), a town to the southwest of Kiev, was home to over five thousand Jews that constituted over forty percent of the popula- tion. The destiny of Vasilkov’s Jewish community is emblematic of the dynamic of anti-Jewish violence as it unfolded and engulfed the territory of Ukraine. In the beginning of February, when the pogrom by the “Petliura’s soldiers,” as Ukrainian National Army soldiers were commonly referred to, devastated the shtetl, it left many Jews dead and Jewish property plundered and ruined. The exact number of pogroms that followed the first one is very hard to pin down, as the witness accounts contradict each other,2 because the pogroms continued for weeks on end, and regiments and armed bands3 followed one another. At least two pogroms were perpetrated by the armed bands led by infamous atamans—Sokolovsky and Zelenyi—who continued to torture and 1 Miljakova, Kniga Pogromov, 320. 2 Ibid., 366–80. 3 The Russian word “banda,” a band, is unanimously used by contemporaries to identify armed gang of (usually) uprooted natives led by a commander—an ataman. 2 Gendered Violence murder the Jewish population, rob their property, and extort money. The sixth pogrom, as related by some survivors,4 happened in July, when the Bolsheviks fought the Volunteer (White) Army. Volunteer Army soldiers started a pogrom in Vasilkov, which lasted for approximately four weeks, while the unfortunate town was captured and recaptured again. Little did Roza Rozenvasser know in November 1919 that in May 1920 yet another pogrom would be perpetrated by the soldiers of the Polish armed forces. Continuous pogroms, multiple armed forces passing through town, and gangs of locals who formed their own armed bands and roved the land were all too common characteristics that defined the life of shtetls and towns all over Ukraine. The disastrous continuous anti-Jewish violence in Vasilkov unfolded in 1919 amid the Civil War that ensued following the First World War and the Revolutions. Chaos would be the most concise yet accurate description of the histor- ical situation in Ukraine from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 until the official declaration creating the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1922. Those were the years when rapidly shifting war fronts, hostile invasions, brutal battles of the Civil War, and prowling warlord armies—combined with two Russian revolutions and erratic succession of various governments—inun- dated Ukraine, which was already being torn from within by the deteriorating economy and the unresolved ethnic hostilities, and turned it into a pandemo- nium of violence and disorder. The Jewish question5 was at the center of this complex situation, and defined the politics and actions of the major belliger- ents engaged in the conflict that included the Ukrainian National Army, former Russian imperial officers united into the Volunteer Army, the Bolsheviks, and a number of guerrilla militant groups. The outbreak of the First World War and the engagement of the Russian army on the Eastern Fronts brought the war violence literally home and became the turning point in the history of anti-Jew- ish violence.6 4 YIVO Archive, file 165, 14022. 5 Oleg Budnitskii has explored in depth in his research how “the Jewish question” (a com- monly used euphemism to describe the complex of problems and all degrees of anti- Jewish opinions in public discourse) has been interpreted and utilized by various belliger- ents in the Civil War. Oleg Budnitskii, Rossijskie Evrei Mezhdu Krasnymi i Belymi (1917– 1920) (ROSSPĖN, 2005), 496. 6 For further research on the topic, see Eric Lohr, “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001); and Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, vol. 94 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003)—as well as CHAPTER 1 3 The First World War exacerbated the turbulent situation in the country and imposed many adversities on the Jews of the Russian Empire. The Russian government’s policies after the beginning of the First World War intentionally victimized and punished its Jewish population that remained deprived of civil rights and confined to the Pale of Settlement, the territory where the Jewish population could legally reside. The Russian Command branded the Jewish civilian population as traitors and spies, and ordered deportation of Jewish resi- dents from the areas close to the front lines, which included vast areas in Ukraine and Belarus. According to the latest estimates,7 deportations affected about half a million Jews in the border communities. In some localities the evacuations, although still looming as a threat, were eventually replaced by the heinous practice of taking hostages among the local Jewish population in an attempt to prevent sabotage and espionage. The result of the expulsions and the violent hostage policies was a massive refugee crisis: large numbers of Jews found them- selves in need of immediate relief and resettlement. Jewish communal and phil- anthropic organizations responded to the crisis and provided aid and support to the uprooted Jewish population. On the eve of the first Russian Revolution in February 1917, the Ukrainian countryside swelled with a vast number of Jewish refugees, who, while being branded as enemies on the one hand, were driven to seek a new economic niche and settlement and, on the other hand, had all their movable posses- sions with them and received humanitarian aid. Those combined factors dis- tinguished the Jewish population as an obvious target of racial violence and fomented the rise of the pogrom wave that devastated the Jewish community of Ukraine during the Civil War and became “a genocidal killing spree that left over one hundred thousand Jews dead in its wake and hundreds of thousands of refugees and orphans.”8 The First World War was a time of crisis for the Jews of the Russian Empire and European Jewry, because the Jews became the scapegoats blamed for all misfortunes and were placed in an extremely vulnerable situation. This Semion Goldin, “Deportation of Jews by the Russian Military Command, 1914–1915,” Jews in Eastern Europe 41, no. 1 (2000): 40–73. 7 Lohr and Goldin share the same estimate. 8 Jeffrey Veidlinger, from the unpublished manuscript of his forthcoming book on pogroms, by author’s permission. The First World War as a point of origin of the pogroms in Ukraine has been recently discussed and supported by many historians. See also Oleg Budnitskii, “Shots in the Back: On the Origin of the Anti-Jewish Pogroms of 1918–1921,” in Jews in the East European Borderlands. Essays in Honor of John D. Klier (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 187–201. 4 Gendered Violence continuous crisis not only paved the way for the anti-Jewish violence but also “became an opening for transformative communal change.”9 The need for organized relief effort, according to Simon Rabinovitch, promoted the com- bined effort of Jewish communal organizations locally and internationally and gave an impulse to the Jewish struggle for the national rights,10 which would forever transform Jewish politics in the world.11 The First World War and the ensuing dramatic revolutionary changes in Europe had the most direct impact on Jewish political activity in Ukraine. The fall of the Russian Empire in 1917 promised positive changes for the Jewish population, gave hope of success to Jewish politics, and evoked powerful pos- itive dispositions and enthusiasm12 among Jewish activists and the general population. The Revolution in February 1917, which abolished discriminatory class-based, religious, and ethnic legislation, initiated the process of revolution- ary change in Ukraine. The Central Rada (Parliament) was constituted in April 1917 in Kiev and, following the agreement with the Provisional Government in Petrograd, three national minorities, the Russians, the Jews, and the Poles, were shortly called to join its ranks. The majority in the Ukrainian parliament pressed for greater independence of Ukraine, and in July 1917 the Central Rada declared autonomy within the Russian Federation and established the Ukrainian government in the form of the General Secretariat, which con- sisted of fourteen branch secretariats. The National Secretariat, a branch of the General Secretariat, had three national minority divisions headed by the vice-secretaries. Later, the secretariats would be renamed into ministries, and each national division would become a separate ministry. The first secretary, and later minister of Jewish affairs, was Moshe Zilberfarb, member of a Zionist party and a fervent autonomist.13 The key issue on the agenda of the Jewish 9 Simon Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights, National Rites: Nationalism and Autonomy in Late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 170. 10 Ibid., 168–69. 11 For detailed analysis of Jewish politics at the time, see Simon Rabinovitch’s research (Rabinovitch, Jewish Rights) and also David Engel’s analysis of the Jewish politics on the eve of Schwarzbard’s trial (Engel, The Assassination of Symon Petliura).
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