the Ukrainian liberation movement as an anti-Semitic, destructive and
not a constructive state movement, which would be capable of ensuring
human democratic freedoms to the national minorities in Ukraine. The
jury of the Paris court, who consisted for the most part of
supporters of the popular front at that time and of socialist
liberals, refused to believe the testimony of the numerous witnesses
of various nationalities, which clearly proved that Petlura had
neither had any share in the pogroms against the Jews, nor could be
held in any way responsible for them. They ignored the actual facts
of the murder, and by their acquittal of the murderer rendered
Bolshevist Moscow an even greater service than it had expected. Thus
Moscow scored two successes. But it did not score a third, for the
Paris trial did not help Moscow to change the anti-Russian attitude
of the Ukrainians into an anti-Semitic one or to conceal its
responsibility for the murder of Petlura from the Ukrainians.
(Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura - Konovalets - Bandera,
Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, pp. 8-9)
Three reflections arise from the Schwartzbard assassination:
(1) Juror historians. One wonders whether the jurors in a criminal case are
competent to arrive at a fair determination of historical truth, or whether they are
more likely to bring with them personal convictions of historical truth which are
likely to be unshaken by the evidence.
(2) French justice. The acquittal of a self-confessed assassin might be an outcome
peculiar to French justice. Other Western states might more typically require the
conviction of a self-confessed assassin, and consult his motives only to assist in
determining the severity of sentence. A comment which in part reflects on the French
acquittaclass="underline"
It is a strange paradox that the once so sacred right of asylum, even
for the spokesmen of hostile ideologies and political trends,
nowadays does not even include the protection of the fundamental
rights of life of the natural allies of the West in the fight against
the common Russian Bolshevist world danger.
(The Central Committee of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),
Munich, December 1961, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura
Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.
65)
(3) True-believer assassins. If an assassin is sent by the Kremlin, then is it
necessary for the Kremlin to find one who is personally committed to the
assassination? The answer is yes. This is because a Soviet assassin sent to Paris
has some opportunity to defect and to seek political asylum. He might choose to do
so to escape totalitarianism, to raise his standard of living, to avoid going through
with the assassination, and in the Petliura case to avoid the punishment that was
being anticipated from the French courts. On top of that, he must realize that once
he has carried out the assassination, he becomes a potential witness against the
Kremlin, and so might find the Kremlin rewarding him with a bullet to the back of his
head for the success of his mission.
Thus, it is essential for the Kremlin to ensure that the assassin be energized with a
zealous committment to his mission. One way to achieve such committment is to hold
his family hostage. Another way is to incite in him a thirst for revenge based on
wrongs done to his people. Thus, even if the Kremlin did order the assassination of
Petliura, and even if the Kremlin's selection of a Jew to perform the assassination
was for the political reasons outlined in the quotation above, it may nevertheless be
true that a Jewish thirst for revenge played a useful role, and that all the Kremlin
had to do to inspire the requisite motivation was to propose the disinformation that
Petliura was the appropriate target of that revenge.
Pogromist or fighter for independence? The Encyclopedia of Ukraine entry ends
with:
[S]ince the mid-1920s he has personified, perhaps more than any other
person, the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The personification
seemingly also extends to the issue of the pogroms that took place in
Ukraine during the revolutionary period of 1918-1920, and Petliura
has frequently been invested with the responsibility for those acts.
Petliura's own personal convictions render such responsibility highly
unlikely, and all the documentary evidence indicates that he
consistently made efforts to stem pogrom activity by UNR troops. The
Russian and Soviet authorities also made Petliura a symbol of
Ukrainian efforts at independence, although in their rendition he was
a traitor to the Ukrainian people, and his followers (Petliurites)
were unprincipled opportunists.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
1993, Volume III, p. 857)
A continuing threat to the Kremlin. Petliura's leadership of the fight for
Ukrainian independence did not end with his withdrawal from the field of battle:
Long after Symon Petlura had gone into exile and was living in Paris,
armed resistance broke out again and again in his name in Ukraine.
Indeed, even today his name is still regarded by the Ukrainian masses
as the symbol of the fight for freedom [...].
(Dr. Mykola Kovalevstky, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura
Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.
28)
However real the continuing resistance that was carried on in Petliura's name, the
Russian and Soviet authorities - in order to justify Cheka executions
indiscriminately cited Petliura as the author of real and imagined anti-Soviet
actions. For example, summarizing the year 1921 alone, historian Sergey Petrovich
Melgunov relates:
Particularly large was the number of Petlura "conspiracies" then
discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons (including a
Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa, batches of fourteen and
sixty-six in Tiraspol, thirty-nine in Kiev (mostly members of the
intelligentsia), and 215 in Kharkov - the victims in the latter case
being Ukrainian hostages slaughtered in retaliation for the
assassination of certain Soviet workers and others by rebels. And,
similarly, the Izvestia of Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine
co-operative employees, school teachers and agriculturalists who
could not possibly have had anything to do with any Petlura
"conspiracy" in the world.
(Sergey Petrovich Meglunov, The Red Terror in Russia, London, 1925,
pp. 88-89)
Thus, if the impression gleaned from the Shapoval volume is correct (to the effect
that the control of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD lay overwhelmingly in the hands of Jews), then
the situation might be summarized by saying that even while Jews were in reality
pogromizing Ukrainians throughout Ukraine (as we saw in the Melgunov quotation
immediately above), they were simultaneously pogromizing Ukrainian leaders in the
diaspora, as by the assassinations of, among others, Symon Petliura (1926) in Paris
by Cheka agent Schwartzbard employing a handgun, of Colonel Yevhen Konovalets (1938)
in Rotterdam by GPU agent Valyukh employing a package bomb, of Lev Rebet (1957) as
well as Stepan Bandera (1959) both in Munich and both by KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky
employing a poison pistol loaded with cyanide. This same Bohdan Stashynsky
eventually defected to the West where he confessed to the two above assassinations,
thereby demonstrating the reasonableness of the distrust that the Kremlin might feel
toward its own assassins, as well as the reasonableness of the unease that the
assassins might feel concerning being distrusted.
Cause and effect. As is often the case with respect to historical events, the
thread of cause and effect is difficult to untangle. When Petliura makes the
following statement in his Army Order No. 131, he assumes that pogroms cause an
opposition to Ukrainian independence:
Our many enemies, external as well as internal, are already profiting
by the pogroms; they are pointing their fingers at us and inciting
against us saying that we are not worthy of an independent national
existence and that we deserve to be again forcefully harnessed to the
yoke of slavery.
However, it is also plausible that causality proceeds in the opposite direction
that Jewish opposition to Ukrainian independence causes pogroms. Of course, the
causal link can act in both directions simultaneously, with pogroms and opposition
each fuelling the other in an escalating spiral. Who might start such a spiral and
who might encourage it? Petliura views the pogroms not as spontaneous, but as
incited by "adventurers" and "provocateurs." If he is right, then we may ask who
might have sent these adventurers and provocateurs? Who might have been paying them
to do their work? Perhaps the answer is those who might have preferred to absorb
chunks of a dismembered Ukraine rather than coexisting with an independent Ukraine
most particularly, Russia and Poland. And perhaps those who wanted to increase
emigration of Jews out of Ukraine - the Zionists. Russia, Poland, and Zionism
benefitted from pogroms on Ukrainian territory. All who wanted to live peacefully in
Ukraine - whether they were Ukrainians or Jews - suffered from the pogroms.
To see the links to the documents in the Petliura section, please click on the
PETLIURA link below.
Borys Martos Government Proclamation 12Apr1919 The scum of humanity
Above all the Government will not tolerate any pogroms against the
Jewish population in the Ukraine, and will employ every available means
for the purpose of combating these abject criminals, dangerous to the
State, who are disgracing our nation in the eyes of all the civilized nations
of the world.
Borys Martos (1879-1977) was a Ukrainian political
leader, co-operative organizer, and educator.
From a Government Proclamation
To the People of the Ukraine
Riwne, April 12, 1919
To preserve the peace and to maintain public law and order - as the first
condition of a free life for all citizens of the Ukrainian Democratic
Republic - the Ukrainian Government will fight with all its power against
violations of public order, will strike the brigands and pogrom