Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine by Stephen Velychenko

Author:Stephen Velychenko
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Government and Violence

Ukrainian leaders, like their Bolshevik enemies, considered their government as legitimate, its use of force as legitimate, and its rivals as rebels. Like the Bolsheviks, they did not control all the territory they ruled. Where they differed is that none of them, unlike their enemy, made explicit calls to kill targeted groups en masse in the name of a higher ideal. The Central Rada during the last weeks of its existence did not even order use of force as punishment for failure to meet food requisition orders.107 There are many known examples of centrally controlled Bolshevik ruthlessness. Trotsky decided in May 1919 to rid himself of pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisan commanders, who chose what orders they would or would not obey, by killing them. He also ordered Chinese machine-gun units set up behind advancing troops with orders to shoot those who retreated. As far as is known, Ukrainian leaders did not resort to such expedients in their attempts to control their troops or warlords.108 There were army orders allowing violence against rebel civilians, but no official public calls for, and justification of, ruthless terror. There are no known government decrees specifying all Jews were enemies to be killed. Army officers and otamans who justified such killing in national terms were in contravention of, not in accord with, government policy.

It is difficult to determine the degree to which Hetman Skoropadsky’s government was responsible for mass violence against civilians. With respect to Jews, on the one hand, the rich both supported and were in it. The government financed Jewish schools. On the other, it annulled all rights the Rada had allotted Jews as a group – although local Jewish councils continued to function. Local officials of White-guard sympathies who were ideological antisemites did instigate pogroms with slogans like “the Jews sold Russia to the Germans and must be beaten,” and ministers ignored them. Conservative Ukrainians, Russians, and Germans published texts blaming Jews collectively for Ukraine’s problems. Peasants and insurgents instigated pogroms they rationalized in terms of punishment of all for the speculation that some had engaged in.109 With regard to peasants, it was government policy to restore landowners, and that restoration did involve violence and atrocities. Around the Poltava town of Kobyliaky (1917 population circa 20,000), the situation just after the hetman came to power was dire. As described by a resident in his diary, “Terrible killing and fires rage in the povit. Landlords are robbed and bestially burned alive.”110 Landowners for their part, hoping to restore the pre-1917 order, are on record, not infrequently, of themselves provoking violence. There were instances of villages that landlords heavily fined, even though no one had taken anything from the estate. German generals enforced martial law and established courts martial that sometimes, but not always, passed death sentences. Some landlords employed mercenaries who were overwhelmingly Polish, Russian, or Russified tsarist officers. The nominally Ukrainian army or police units the landlords summoned were also frequently manned by White or Polish officers – some of whom are on record of ordering peasants to speak to them in Russian.

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