Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine: Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917-1923 9780228010296

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LIFE AND DEATH IN REVOLUTIONARY UKRAINE

LIFE AND DEATH IN REVOLUTIONARY UKRAINE Living Conditions, Violence, and Demographic Catastrophe, 1917–1923

Stephen Velychenko

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBn 978-0-2280-0897-2 (cloth) ISBn 978-0-2280-1029-6 (epDF) ISBn 978-0-2280-1030-2 (epUB) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Life and death in revolutionary Ukraine : living conditions, violence, and demographic catastrophe, 1917–1923 / Stephen Velychenko. Names: Velychenko, Stephen, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210271582 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210271663 | ISBn 9780228008972 (cloth) | ISBn 9780228010296 (epDF) | ISBn 9780228010302 (epUB) Subjects: lcSh: Violence – Ukraine – History – 20th century. | lcSh: Ukraine – History – Revolution, 1917–1921 – Atrocities. | lcSh: Ukraine – History – Revolution, 1917–1921 – Health aspects. | lcSh: Ukraine – Social conditions – 20th century. | lcSh: Ukraine – Politics and government – 1917-1945. Classification: lcc Dk265.8.U4 V45 2021 | DDc 947.708/41 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Figures follow page Introduction

71

3

1

Under the Tsars

2

Living Conditions Under Ukrainian Governments

3

Living Conditions Under the Bolsheviks

4

Violence Against Civilians: The Russian Bolshevik Government 117

5

Violence Against Civilians: Ukrainian and Polish Governments 144 Conclusion

22

192

Appendix 1: Orphans Appendix 2: Tables Notes

223

Bibliography Index

309

283

213 217

90

50

LIFE AND DEATH IN REVOLUTIONARY UKRAINE

Introduction While the contest between man and man may be more spectacular and may involve greater destruction in mass, the assault by the microbes is far more insidious, more elusive, and on the whole far more deadly. Indeed war is in a sense simply an incident which man foolishly permits to enter into that greater struggle with germ life …1

David Davis, Professor of Bacteriology, University of Illinois, 1917

Between the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, Europeans from Finland to Greece, Ireland to Armenia, lived through an apocalyptic decade of war, pestilence, famine, and death. Ukraine was one of the countries where war, revolution, and societal collapse produced demographic catastrophe. Part of what Churchill called the “wars of the pygmies,” and “the unknown war” in eastern Europe, events in Ukraine were as messy and deadly as those in the Balkans, or on the front lines in the war of the giants in France.2 An American historian has written, “No region of the Russian Empire witnessed more violence, more destruction, and more unvarnished cruelty of man to man during Russia’s civil war than the Ukraine.”3 In the last decade, historians shifted from a previous focus on high politics and battles on the Western Front, and now relate what the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse did behind the fronts in eastern and south-eastern Europe: the physical destruction, civilian deaths, maiming, rape, deportations, disease, impoverishment, and depravation.4 This literature includes reviews of psychological issues among survivors, such as bereavement, and the neuropsychiatric effects of diseases and witnessed horror on nerves and brains.5 Historians also note that all sides committed atrocities and that millions throughout Europe approved and accepted the violence.6 This book provides the first survey and description in any language of what the Four Horsemen did in Ukraine. This subject has been forgotten and overshadowed by the horrors of the 1933 famine, the Stalinist repressions, and World War II: “During the years that both Hitler and Stalin were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or the world.”7 To that total, Ukraine’s losses between 1917 and 1923 should not be excluded.

4

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

The Political Events Eastern Ukraine belonged to the tsarist empire in 1914. With the abdication of the tsar, Ukrainian socialist leaders created the Central Rada in March 1917. That November, they proclaimed the Ukrainian National Republic (UnR ) and claimed authority over the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire. In April 1918, with the backing of German generals, Ukraine’s financiers, industrialists, and landowners, the Ukrainian-born tsarist General Pavlo Skoropadsky overthrew the Central Rada. He established a neo-monarchist regime called the Ukrainian State (Ukrainska Derzhava) with himself, as hetman, at its head. Skoropadsky abdicated one month after Germany’s surrender in November 1918. In his place, Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura re-established the UnR and declared themselves the heads of its temporary government – the Directory. The Ukrainian State and the Central Rada held a core territory of five tsarist provinces for at least six months each. The borders of the Directoryruled UnR fluctuated with the fortunes of war. Its core was an area of land measuring roughly 200 square kilometres, including most of Podillia province and parts of Volyn and Kyiv provinces. During 1919, UnR territory was about equal in size and population to Bolshevik Ukraine. It presided in these regions for two periods of no longer than five months each: between December 1918 and April 1919, and then from August to November 1919. The total population in this area varied between three and ten million. In the south-east, the border moved back and forth in the wake of war with the Whites and Nestor Makhno’s army. The only territory the Directory controlled with only a few weeks’ interruption was the area around the city of Kamianets-Podilskyi. The Directory collapsed in December 1919. It established a government-in-exile in Poland and had to allow Polish troops to occupy territory as far east as the Zbruch River. Representing between ninety and ninety-five of Ukraine’s three hundred Soviets, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks seized power in Kharkiv on 12 (25) December 1917. They set up a government with the help of approximately 4,500 troops and Red Guards, of whom approximately 2,100 had arrived from Moscow the previous week. Of the twelve members of the newly formed People’s Secretariat, four were Ukrainians and four were Ukrainian-born Germans.8 This People’s Secretariat claimed to be the true government of the UnR , an area including five provinces that Russia’s Provisional Government had formally allotted to the Central Rada that June. Bolsheviks in the remaining Ukrainian provinces remained formally under the authority of Petrograd. The Secretariat arrived in Kyiv on 30 January (12 February) 1918, from where the Germans evicted it in March. That month, the Brest-Litovsk Treaty obliged the Bolsheviks to recognize the provinces controlled by the

Introduction

5

Central Rada as an independent state. Moscow then placed all Ukraine’s Bolsheviks under the authority of its Kharkiv subsidiary. The relevant order explicitly avoided legitimating Ukraine’s Soviet Republic in national terms. The region was defined as a “soviet republic on Ukrainian territory” within which Soviets in previously excluded territories had to unite to better face the German threat.9 Russian leaders formed Ukraine’s Bolsheviks into a separate party (Communist Party of Ukraine – cpU ) in Moscow in July 1918. Its founding resolution, specifying it was a subordinate part of the Russian Communist Party (Rcp ), was not made public until the party’s Eighth Congress in March 1919. No more than 7 per cent of cpU members in 1918 declared themselves Ukrainian. That total rose to 19 per cent in 1920 due to an influx of former Left-Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionaries (Borotbists). Thus, when Ukraine’s Bolsheviks proclaimed the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic and created their Council of People’s Commissars in January 1919, Ukrainians who supported them did not know they were subordinated to the Russian party and its republic. Nor did pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians know that a secret June 1919 resolution unconditionally subordinated their Food Procurement Commissariat to the central Russian one.10 Until August that year, Bolshevik Ukraine’s core territory was a region of 300 square kilometres around the north-eastern town of Chernihiv. In the west, the border shifted following the war with the Directory. Bolsheviks ruled most of what had been tsarist-Ukraine from January 1920. Until 1923, their control was challenged by guerilla forces led by Makhno and warlords (otamany). Western Ukraine (eastern Galicia) had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire. With its collapse, the Polish Liquidation Commission in Krakow claimed authority over the entire province of Galicia as part of the new Polish state. In its last official act, however, the Habsburg monarchy, on 31 October 1918, denied the Liquidation Commission any authority over eastern Galicia and instructed its governor to appoint Ukrainians to all government posts there. The instruction was telegraphed to Krakow that evening, but the Liquidation Commission did not forward it to Lviv (Lwow, Lemberg).11 On 1 November in Lviv, the last Habsburg governor handed his authority over to his deputy, Volodymyr Detsykevych, who then gave it to Ukrainian leaders. They, with approximately 3,500 soldiers, had seized power that morning in all but two key cities and proclaimed the Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUnR ).12 In Lviv, local Polish political activists took up arms against the new republic before the independent Polish government had been formed, without the permission of the Liquidation Commission. They found the city’s Polish inhabitants unwilling to fight.13 By 22 November, Poles controlled the city thanks to reinforcements from Poland. These could arrive because Ukrainians had failed to hold Przemysl (Peremyshl), where the bridge over the San River linked Krakow and Lviv. Ukrainians negotiated

6

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

with Polish leaders rather than arresting them and failed to blow up the bridge when they could have. Western Ukrainian leaders claimed sovereignty over fifty-two eastern Galician districts (povit, powiat, bezirk), with approximately six million people, and an area slightly bigger than Ireland. With the loss of Lviv, Przemysl, and their environs, the ZUnR controlled forty districts, which in 1910 had just under four million people and was about as big as the 1922 Irish Republic. Fifteen per cent of this area’s urban population was Ukrainian speaking. Poland conquered the ZUnR in July 1919 after a seven-month war. Before western Ukraine was incorporated into Poland as Malopolska Wschodnia, it was briefly ruled by the Bolsheviks as the Galician Soviet Socialist Republic.14 Until 1921, no one group or government could control an area for more than seven months. ZUnR survived for eight months. In the former tsaristUkrainian provinces between 1917 and 1921, governments changed on average nine times – fourteen in Kyiv province. The average in central Russia during that three-year period was three to four times. By 1920, the UnR had collapsed, and the Bolsheviks ruled Ukraine. But their control rarely went further than provincial capitals and a few miles each side of rail lines. They faced serious partisan resistance from units loyal either to the UnR or to Makhno until the end of 1922. UnR leaders-in-exile thought they could organize the decidedly anti-Bolshevik rural population into an uprising to win back power, backed by Poland. Perhaps they had heard that British efforts to suppress the IRA in Ireland had not crushed its independence movement, but only driven it underground, and turned fighters into ever more efficient and ruthless partisans who posed a serious drain on British manpower and resources. As of January 1921, however, due to their agreement with Russia, Polish leaders were prepared to equip secretly only a few hundred troops, not an entire army as they had the year previous. Exiled UnR leaders nonetheless continued supporting partisan groups for another two years. In the wake of their failed 1920 summer offensive, the Poles allowed the UnR to control a small area of territory around Kamianets-Podilskyi. Descriptions of that region in 1920 likely reflected conditions throughout much of Ukraine. One journalist there wrote, “all Ukraine is drowning in garbage and excrement.” A member of the official White Russian delegation in Poland related, “I was told by men of the volunteer armies that whole districts of Ukraine reminded one of a lunatic asylum.”15 An American journalist who travelled the region wrote, “All one can say is that the western Ukraine is perhaps one of the nearest places imaginable, for the city folk at any rate, to Hell.”16 In October 1919, what remained of ZUnR ’s army was stationed in Podillia. Its chief medical officer described its condition to its commanding general as follows: “Sir, our army is no longer an army, it is not even a hospital, it is merely a wandering storehouse of corpses.”17

Introduction

7

By the spring of 1920, parts of Ukraine were so devastated that they resembled the Western Front. Already by the autumn of 1919, what commodities were available were astronomically expensive. Besides the shortage of food in towns, there was lack of fuel. That meant little if any hot water, heat, or electricity. Most hospitals were closed, doctors used herbs, and diseases raged, particularly typhus and syphilis. A train trip from Kharkiv to Kyiv that took sixteen hours in 1914 took sixteen days in 1919. Between 1920 and 1922, an estimated 2.5 per cent of Bolshevik Ukraine’s population (just under 660,000) died from typhus alone.18 By the end of 1919, the central Ukrainian town of Kirovohrad (pop. 41,000) had lost 90 per cent of its medical personnel. It had one functioning hospital with thirty beds that faced a daily influx of one hundred wounded soldiers. Rates of infection in Katerynoslav province for only one disease, typhus, were 60 to 80 per cent by 1920. There was not a family without one ill member. Where all were ill in villages, there was no one to care either of them or of their livestock – which would wander off, be stolen, or die from neglect.19 In villages, no iron meant no horseshoes for the remaining horses, or for ploughs. The 1919 harvest was unprecedented, but no one milled the contents of bursting silos. Nothing could be exported because of the Entente blockade. Surplus grain was milled primarily for moonshine, and drunkenness was endemic. Pigs and dogs ate bodies left on streets in sight of passers-by until someone bothered to bury the remains.20

Ukraine, Europe, and Empires English-language historians now recognize that the devastation and slaughter of civilians that marked the beginning of Europe’s twentieth century began on the territories of its land empires before the German army invaded Belgium, and continued after the collapse of those empires in November 1918. They also note that, like civil wars, wars in European overseas imperial colonial territories that involved imperialism and national liberation were bloodier, nastier, and more devastating and brutal than wars between established European states. The 1899 Hague Convention, for instance, did not consider the Chinese “civilized,” and so provided a rationalization for European officers to order the merciless butchery of Boxer insurgents.21 Because Ukrainian lands were colonies in land empires, events there also involved not only warfare between states with regular armies on established fronts, it also involved armed struggle between national-liberation and imperial-revanchist movements that engulfed civilians.22 This, and the ensuing high levels of devastation, brutality, and civilian deaths that characterized revolutionary Ukraine until 1923, differentiated it from western European countries and made it similar to countries that experienced anti-colonial national-liberation wars. Thus, Ukrainian events of those years should figure

8

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

not only in the comparative study of the socio-economic impact of war and revolution in Europe, but also in imperial and colonial studies. If, before the war, one set of imperial powers was involved in a “scramble for Africa,” during the war another set was involved in a scramble for Ukraine. “As much as anything, World War I turned on the fate of Ukraine.”23 Besides the presence of a national liberation movement in revolutionary eastern Ukraine, which overlapped with socialist revolution and Russian civil war battles fought on its territory, the frequent changes of claimants to power after 1917 also distinguished Ukraine from western Europe. Those changes undermined the public administration upon which services, sanitation, and health depended. In western Ukraine, armed military struggle lasted for five years, from 1914 to 1920. The first four years of war there did resemble the war in France, as hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of artillery pieces wreaked death and destruction as front lines moved back and forth. Between 1919 and 1923, eastern Ukraine had no such front line that occasionally moved a few hundred yards in one direction or another. For five years, death and destruction were inflicted by thousands of troops with dozens of artillery pieces fighting wars of movement along rail lines. Multiple fronts shifted monthly or weekly, dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of miles back and forth. This kind of mobile warfare could be more deadly than trench warfare. The highest casualty and death rates in France and Belgium were in the opening mobile months of the war, not during the later static trench phase.24 Another difference between Ukraine and countries west of the front – except in Italy where civilian deaths were higher than in France, Britain, or Germany – was that a few miles behind the horrors of industrial mass killing in the trenches, civilians and soldiers, though subject to shortages and rationing, could count on functioning, equipped hospitals, health care, and public sanitation. Governments maintained their monopoly on violence – except in Ireland. Women army nurses were rarely, if ever, exposed to battle. Municipal governments stalled in places during the great flu epidemic – including America. Some called Philadelphia a city of the dead in the fall of 1918. But otherwise, services functioned. Britain and France fielded mass armies and produced arms without a total collapse in services or living standards. West of the front, mass civilian fatalities, epidemics, and atrocities were the exception. Malnutrition, shortages, and living conditions were not severe in Britain and France. Full employment, good pay, negligible material destruction, rent control, and sufficient food for equitable rationing meant urban living and public-health standards declined only marginally from pre-1914 levels. East of the front in German-, Austro-Hungarian-, and Russian-ruled lands, pre-war standards fell dramatically, and the civilian population suffered

Introduction

9

correspondingly more.25 In those territories, malnutrition, shortages, and infrastructure collapse were the rule. New governments could not enforce a monopoly on violence. Women nurses in Ukraine normally did find themselves in the line of fire on battlefields. Because battle lines shifted, nurses were posted in mobile units, where, like men, they lived in proximity to carnage and death. Rival partisan units and gangs of deserters or criminals meant that death for civilians behind those moving fronts could be as omnipresent as on the fronts, with the difference that civilian deaths were often unseen, sometimes unknown, and not celebrated. In Ukraine, as in the Balkans, modern warfare occurred in a context of squalor, collapse of what little infrastructure existed, atrocities, and mass civilian deaths. The American and western European press devoted much attention to the horrors of the Balkan Wars between 1912 and 1914. Today there is a body of English-language literature about them.26 Few at the time paid attention to later excesses and violence in Ukraine – except as it concerned Jews. There was no Carnegie commission on the causes and conduct of the war in Ukraine. Today, there is no English-, German-, or French-language survey of the violence that raged through Ukrainian lands, nor of the demographic consequences of that violence and destruction.

Historiography and Sources: Eastern Ukraine Historians of revolutionary Ukraine have focused on its political-military history and the efforts of rival elites to establish governments. They only recently began examining civilian living conditions. Survey histories mention neither this subject nor the demographic consequences.27 Perhaps the best study to date describing Russian living conditions under Bolshevik rule, and their impact on behaviour, is Ivan Narskii’s account of how the horrors and destruction left an indelible scar on the Russians who lived through them, and accounted for many of the pathologies of Russian society.28 To the degree Ukrainians lived in similar circumstances, much of his description of how those years obliged people to learn how to survive, and made them forget how to live, applies to them as well. Serhyi Ostapenko, in 1920, was probably the first to try and determine Ukraine’s total population loss during the war and revolution.29 Andryi Okopenko that year also observed the problem that faced Ukraine was not what kind of political order it should have, but whether or not its population would survive. The Entente had lifted the blockade on Bolshevik Russia that year, but still blockaded Ukraine’s western border, thus denying it desperately needed medical aid. The International Red Cross was the only important foreign organization that realized Ukraine’s human crisis and was prepared to send aid.30 Modest Levytsky initiated the first known public discussion

10

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

of the disastrous legacy of those years. A practising doctor, in 1919–20 he had been in charge of the health section in the UnR ’s Ministry of Roads. In Prague, in 1922, he pointed out that the worst thing that had happened between 1917 and 1921 was the appalling collapse of the overall health and well-being of the population – what he termed “sanitarna ruiina.” Material damage, he continued, could be mended in a few years, particularly because reconstruction was of interest to foreign capital, “the Archimedean motor” of world affairs. But to improve general standards of health and sanitation would take decades. Not only because the collapse had been so catastrophic and there was absolute shortage of material and medical personnel, but also because foreign capital was not interested. Between 1915 and 1922, he noted, no medical school had graduated any doctors whatsoever. In the meantime, unnatural death rates would be high, and those who did not die from diseases like syphilis or tuberculosis would pass them on to the next generation.31 That same year, also in Prague, Pitrim Sorokin postulated upon the moral consequences of massive deaths, and noted that the disproportionate deaths among the young and most able adversely affected the future generation:32 For the same reason, persons who are morally defective suffered less. During the War they were not taken into the army, therefore were not at risk of death. During the revolution, conditions just favored their survival. In conditions of brutal struggle, lies, deceit, unscrupulousness and moral cynicism, they felt good; held profitable posts, committed atrocities, cheated, changed their positions as needed, and lived well and joyously. Totally different were the morally honest. They could not “swindle,” steal, abuse and rape. Therefore, they starved and dissolved biologically. The surrounding horrors overwhelmingly influenced their entire perception of life, their nervous system could not withstand the “exasperating” environment – which resulted in their faster extinction. Because of their morality, they could not in one way or another protest against the occurring atrocities, let alone praise them: that attracted suspicion, persecution, punishment and death. Nor could they easily refuse to fulfill their duty. In conditions of war and revolution, such behavior again increases the risk such people would die. That is why during that time, and especially during the revolution, the percentage of deaths of people with a deep sense of duty (on the Red and White sides [one might add here the Ukrainian]) was much higher than the percentage of deaths of the “amoral” (self-seekers, cynics, nihilists and plain criminals). The percentage of deaths of prominent, gifted and mentally qualified individuals during those years is incomparably higher than the percentage of deaths of ordinary gray masses.

Introduction

11

Published accounts of eastern Ukrainian urban living conditions, the brutalization, and atrocities are included most often in materials written by  Ukraine’s Jews and Russians in exile.33 The known published, nonBolshevik Ukrainian memoirs, diaries, letters, and autobiographies by leading political figures like Dmytro Doroshenko, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Ievhen Chykalenko focus on high politics. Mention of living conditions appears in Volodymyr (Vladimir) Korolenko’s diary, in some of the published memoirs or diaries of literate Ukrainian peasants, of local educated professionals in small towns, and of Polish landowners.34 Many such materials were probably lost or destroyed. Many others remain unknown. Perhaps the first published work on how the collapse of urban infrastructure affected daily life in the former tsarist empire was by an A. Sokolovskii, Zasrannaia Rossiia podmoisia (Petrograd 1918)  – today a bibliographical rarity. A general overview of living conditions, based on published documents that focused primarily on Russia, appeared in 1922 in Paris by former Russian SR and co-op activist Sergei Maslov. His account of internal conditions is particularly valuable because of his position in the government and informant network.35 In Ukraine, sociologists and doctors began studying the consequences of the war and revolutions in the early 1920s and published exceptionally valuable articles in the journal Profilakticheskaia meditsina. These items are of great significance because much of the statistics upon which they are based were possibly destroyed in 1941.36 Those who wrote these articles perhaps accented the horrific and deplorable – with the laudable purpose of trying to get more resources to aid the people they wrote about. Nonetheless, they remain the best available published sources on the subject. Primary sources on the subject include contemporary newspaper articles and Red Cross commission reports.37 Ukrainian, Jewish, and Russian political émigrés collected information on conditions in Ukrainian territories, which they then published abroad in newspapers and journals. Memoirs and diaries written in emigration, or in Ukraine before 1929 when self-censorship was unlikely, were primarily by educated, usually urban, middle- and upper-class men and women. Such accounts of living conditions and infrastructure and are plentiful in western Europe, where their authors constituted a significant proportion of the total population. Many common infantry soldiers also wrote memoirs.38 In tsarist-Ukraine, there are fewer such materials because there were fewer such men, even fewer women and, of those, there were more Jews, Russians/Russified non-Russians, and Poles, than Ukrainians. Thus, more information is available on the living conditions of Ukraine’s non-Ukrainian urban minority than of its Ukrainian majority. During the 1920s, some Bolshevik party members recorded their experiences and published them in Litopys Revoliutsii. There also was a Ukrainian project to

12

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

collect peasant opinions. These collections, however, contain little information about violence, destruction, or living conditions.39 During that decade, few testimonials from literate peasants were actually collected in Bolshevik Ukraine, and fewer published.40 One particularly important source for causes of death that has yet to be examined for the years 1917–23 is church registers (metrychni knyhy). A historian who examined a selection of Kyiv province parish death registers for the years 1918–20 claims he saw no civilian deaths attributed specifically to UnR soldiers. Some entries attributed cause of death to unspecified “Ukrainians.” Many entries, under cause of death, read, “shot by the Cheka,” “slashed to death by the Cheka,” “executed by Soviet authorities,” “tortured to death by Red Army men.” Deaths at the hands of White troops are also recorded. Church registers are important because they normally recorded cause of death, unlike Bolshevik registers for the years 1919–23, which are extremely rare and normally with only a blank space in the cause of death column. Of 236 volumes of Bolshevik registers from Kyiv province, only six have death entries for these years.41 Research into the effects of war and revolution on health and living conditions had stopped by 1930 in the USSR . The subject itself disappeared from official historiography. Nor was the subject studied abroad. The horrors of the 1933 famine, Stalinist repressions, and World War II eclipsed those of the revolutionary years, which faded from memory and history books. Only after 1991 did historians in the former USSR again begin looking at how World War I and the revolution affected daily life, prices, wages, and living conditions. Some of these works include mention of public health, sanitation, and disease. Russian historians have published surveys on such subjects covering Russia as well as individual provinces or cities,42 as have Ukrainian historians.43 A recent French monograph includes a chapter on health and sanitation in 1919 Kyiv.44 Pre-1923 conditions are sometimes noted in studies devoted to the 1920s.45 Polish historians began examining the situation in Polish lands.46 Histories of the medical services focus on organizational and administrative issues, not on how effective the established agencies were.47 Recent studies devoted to individual capital cities and the anti-Jewish pogroms include sections on health and public sanitation.48 Jewish privations and pogroms are well covered and documented. No one, as yet, has examined the scope or impact that collapse of living standards and disease had on Ukrainians in all eight former Ukrainian provinces of the empire after 1917. One general survey of epidemics and diseases in the region does not mention Ukraine at all.49 This book is a survey and does not pretend to be comprehensive. It is based primarily on two groups of archival sources. The first were central

Introduction

13

Health Ministry reports held today in Ukraine’s central archive (Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Vyshchykh Orhaniv Ukrainy – T sDAVO ). Although the Rada had a Ministry of Health, there is no record of what it did as its records were lost in July 1919. The extant records of this ministry date from then.50 Those who compiled its reports may have exaggerated the suffering and depravation they saw in the hope of moving their superiors to give them desperately needed funds and resources. But these accounts, in particular doctors’ reports, were probably less affected by rumour and hearsay than were newspaper articles. The second main source was Profilakticheskaia meditsina. Until 1929, it published pioneering articles about Ukrainian society during the revolution, often by participants/eyewitnesses, using materials collected during the revolutionary years. As of November 1919, the Bolshevik secret police, or Cheka, was charged with overseeing all aspects of public health and sanitation, and Russian reports mention a specific unit established for these matters. Its records presumably include information about health, disease, and sanitation (osobaia rabochaia gubcheka po borbe za chistotu). Analogous special Cheka units existed at the provincial level in Ukraine. The whereabouts of their records is unknown.51 Violence in the territories of the former Russian empire during the years in question has been better studied than public/health, sanitation, and living conditions.52 During those years, while the Bolsheviks increasingly compared their Red Terror favourably with the French Jacobin reign of terror, their enemies used the analogy to condemn them.53 Among the subjects of contention are the numbers of victims, Ukrainian government culpability for pogroms, whether ideology or circumstances account for the Red Terror, the degree to which that terror contributed to victory, or White Terror contributed to their demise.54 What few dispute, since 1991, is that all sides in former tsarist-Ukraine committed atrocities, or that all nationalities had their victims and perpetrators. Russian-Bolshevik units plundered and butchered, and were butchered in turn – sometimes by former party members and Red Army men, who, having returned home to see their farmsteads destroyed and families destitute or dead, conducted revenge-terror against the commissars.55 Ukrainians killed Russians and other Ukrainians; Russians killed Ukrainians and other Russians.56 In Kyiv, Volyn, and Podillia provinces, Ukrainians lynched Polish landlords. Polish vigilantes and irregulars repaid Ukrainians in kind.57 In southern Ukraine, German Mennonites had their share of victims. All sides killed Jews – observant and apostate.58 Special organized committees systematically identified and counted as many Jewish victims as they could. There was no comparable effort to compile figures on Christian victims and those committees that did, rarely, if ever, identified them by nationality. Historians, consequently, can only assume that since Ukrainians made up

14

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

the overwhelming majority of the population in their provinces, they also made up the majority of victims – with the proviso that, because as many as half of city populations were Russians, Jews, and/or Poles, they likely made up proportionately more of the urban dead than did Ukrainians. The Bolsheviks and Whites established committees to examine and document atrocities committed by their rival whose reports often included photos. Historians have now established that both sides inflated the number killed by their rival. The Whites are not known to have counted those executed by their own men. Bolshevik figures likely underestimate the total of their victims. Bolshevik commissions and newspapers recorded party members and sympathizers arbitrarily murdered by their enemies, and published lists of prisoners shot by the Cheka. These reports included little, if any, information about pogroms committed by their own subordinates. Ukraine’s Bolsheviks, in early 1920, instructed their subordinates to collect information about White atrocities, which they then used in their propaganda. In villages, they would exhume the corpses and allow church burials for that purpose – attended by party members.59 White commissions normally provided lists of urban victims in territories they controlled in 1919, whom Bolsheviks had arbitrarily shot or mutilated then killed. Russian papers Kievlianian and Malaia Rus, reported atrocities and killings in Kyiv. Published White and Bolshevik sources include Ukrainian names but do not indicate nationality. Whites produced two known documentary films about Bolshevik atrocities in Kyiv and Kharkiv in 1919. The Germans produced another in late 1918 or early 1919. “Die Bolschewisten Breuel” deals with the January 1918 killing in Kyiv.60 Jewish committees from as early as 1916 began recording how many of their people had perished in pogroms. They published documented reports that included photos of victims.61 The photos and films in particular leave no doubt as to the horrors that took place in Ukraine. The UnR established two investigative commissions in 1919 to document anti-Jewish pogroms only. Neither is known to have published any findings.62 Ukrainian newspapers contained little about pogroms instigated by Ukrainians. There is a reference to UnR officials trying to collect evidence of Bolshevik atrocities against Ukrainians. It is unknown what it was they actually collected.63 Individual accounts of Bolsheviks arbitrarily killing Ukrainian-Christian civilians were recorded by military justice personnel.64 Some local officials did try to document Bolshevik atrocities and bring to trial perpetrators. But to date, there is no evidence of any eastern Ukrainian government or private organization establishing commissions to systematically document and publish testimonials of atrocities committed by Reds and Whites against Christian civilians.65 In August 1919, the west Ukrainian Galician army, then in Podillia province, established a commission

Introduction

15

to exhume and examine 3,000 corpses murdered by the Bolsheviks during the previous months. The whereabouts of this commission’s records are unknown.66 Like church death registers, newspaper accounts of Bolshevik atrocities and excesses (e.g., Shliakh [Vinnytsia] published through August 1919), memoirs, diaries, and biographies, have yet to be collated and studied.67 The UnR had its secret police, the Political Department, and military counter-intelligence. Their personnel, like those in all such organizations, were involved in unsavoury activities. Little is known about this subject, as few of their records have survived.68

Historiography and Sources: Western Ukraine Specialist monographs by unbiased historians now note that Poles and Ukrainians both had their share of victims and perpetrators between 1918 and 1921.69 Both sides ran concentration camps.70 A Ukrainian officer wrote, “The Polish nation allotted its war with the Ukrainian nation the character of a colonial war. Consequently, the victor tormented the opponent as he would a criminal, and the tormented took revenge in return.”71 Western Ukrainian Jews in December 1918 formed “The Eastern Galician Jewish National Council (Skhidnohalytska Zhydivska Natsionalna Rada)” that collected reports on pogroms in ZUnR -controlled territory. Its archive, which included those reports, was dispersed and lost in May 1919 in the wake of the Polish occupation.72 With regard to violence against Christian civilians, there exist markedly more known published sources and research on Ukrainian excesses and atrocities than published sources and studies on Polish atrocities.73 Since 1991, Poles have published document collections recording Ukrainian atrocities, but neither in Poland nor Ukraine has anyone published analogous collections relating to Polish atrocities. Current polemics and discussions about Polish-Ukrainian relations do not mention this subject.74 Today, whereas no unbiased historians would deny Russians and Ukrainians were both victims and perpetrators, in Poland some still claim that, in western Ukraine between 1918 and 1920, Poles were only victims – not perpetrators. Since 1991, Poles study and record atrocities against Jewish and Polish civilians, not atrocities and violence against Ukrainian civilians.75 The Polish right-wing National Democrats (nD ) under Roman Dmowski began publishing accusations of Ukrainian excesses against Poles in November 1918. The government, in May 1919, established a commission under nD Jan Zamorski to document and record Ukrainian atrocities. In 1919, journalist Jan Gella published Ruski miesiac 1 XI  – 22 XI 1918. Ilustrowany opis walk listopadowych we Lwowie, that listed only Ukrainian excesses, as did a book by journalist Franciszek Krysiak.76 In 1920, anti-Uniate

16

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

(Ukrainian Greek-Catholic), Polish priest Mieczyslaw Tarnawski wrote an article accusing all Ukrainians collectively of trying to destroy everything Polish in “Eastern Little Poland.” Polish Archbishop Bilczewski circulated this text among Polish politicians and diplomats under his name.77 Strictly confidential circulars, sent to governors appointed to Ukrainian territory newly occupied in May 1919, instructed them to immediately examine all acts of violence against Poles, to collect all official Ukrainian instructions relating to Poles, and to determine whether and how they had been implemented.78 Today, Polish collections regarding Ukrainian incidents are preserved and catalogued.79 Since 1991, Polish authors and editors who have published some of those materials added decidedly biased introductions reflecting antiquated nD positions on Ukrainian issues. This includes anachronistic terminology like “the Ukrainian invasion of Eastern Little Poland.”80 These editors and authors leave readers with the impression that only Poles were victims in the Polish-Ukrainian war, rather than an explanation of why each group had victims and perpetrators.81 Such editors explain Ukrainian atrocities much like the authors of the documents they publish: in terms of pathology, a genetic disposition to hate and murder, or they give no explanation at all. They do not explain to readers that pathological killers are rare and there is never a single motivating force behind excesses and atrocities on the local level. Conviction or belief, in this case nationalism and religion, were obviously present, and some perpetrators were believers. But others were not, and readers are not reminded of this, or that motivations in time of war and upheaval vary. Editors do not explain that some may have used breakdown of order to settle personal scores, some may have been forced to kill, maim, or steal; may have been motivated by peer pressure; or that some may have acted in expectation of gain. The editors of these publications are apparently unaware of recent scholarship on the subject of mass violence.82 One Polish historian has claimed that the war saw few atrocities because the officer corps of both sides were overwhelmingly professionals who had served in the pre-war imperial armies, and for whom “extremist nationalism” was alien.83 This seems both irrelevant and unlikely. Serving Ukrainians and Poles in the Austro-Hungarian army would have witnessed, heard, or perhaps even partook in excesses on the south-eastern front. Ex-Austrian army officers on both sides would have known their service regulations provided for “the greatest severity” in dealing with any kind of civilian opposition, in particular within “the area of the army in the field.” Hundreds of thousands of Poles in the German army would also have witnessed, heard, or perhaps taken part in excesses in Belgium and northern France. The officers would have known German regulations also provided for brutal treatment of civilians – in contravention of the Hague Convention which Germany signed.84

Introduction

17

Western Ukrainian National Democrats began publishing instances of Polish excesses in their newspaper in November, as did other Ukrainian newspapers.85 The first published references to incidents of Poles contravening the rules of war appeared in the first weeks of November 1918 in the newspaper Dilo (Lviv). The first known public request made by ZUnR for evidence of Polish atrocities was published in March 1919.86 ZUnR established its Committee for the Investigation of Polish Atrocities attached to the Diplomatic Representation in Vienna in the summer of 1919. Its agents were able to collect documents, testimonies, and affidavits on the spot for only a few weeks in June 1919 on territories taken back from the Poles after the Chortkiv Offensive.87 The Ukrainians produced no equivalent during the war of the 200-plus pages of the Krysiak and Gella volumes. No historian has yet produced an authoritative account of violence against civilians in western Ukraine comparable to William Hagen’s Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920.88 In a comparative context, it deserves notice that during the Irish war for independence, Irish leaders made a point of publishing detailed accounts of British reprisals and atrocities committed by special units called the Black and Tans. These were decisive in mobilizing a significant portion of the British establishment to condemn the government and force it to recognize an independent Ireland. Ukrainian efforts were weaker than the Irish, and, unlike the Irish who circulated their accounts of atrocities in England, Ukrainians could not circulate them in Poland. The major source for information about Polish excesses and atrocities, besides memoir literature, are western Ukrainian newspapers and ZUnR and UnR government publications. Newspapers often titled articles “Polish atrocities.” The whereabouts of the original collected testimonies used for government publications are unknown. Today, surviving victims and perpetrators are long dead. The children and friends who heard their stories are also dead and, if they did record their memories, their accounts have not been collected. There is also a possibility that Poles as victors, while scrupulously collecting evidence of Ukrainian atrocities, just as scrupulously destroyed evidence of their own.89 In one published document from March 1919, noting excesses of troops from western Poland, the commanding officer ordered they be investigated and prosecuted, but that reference to such matters be kept secret.90 The Polish government refused to allow neutral third-party investigators into western Ukraine. In July 1919, Warsaw even threatened to sever diplomatic ties with the Vatican if the Pope sent it a formal letter protesting Polish behaviour in western Ukraine. In June 1920, the government again denied permission to the apostolic visitator Giovanni Genocchi to travel and report on the situation in western Ukraine.91

18

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

Of the Ukrainian publications released abroad in 1919–20 on Polish excesses, not including translations, three are by the government-in-exile. These refer to and reproduce some of the collected testimonies mentioned above  – often without witnesses’ names.92 For example, “In Kolomiia Poles from the residence of the Polish Catholic priest Klius on 24 May 1919 shot Ukrainian Lieutenant Kulchytsky … Captain P., Lieutenant M., and Second-Lieutenant K., saw the Polish Catholic priest Klius shoot at Ukrainians and incite juveniles to do the same.”93 A fourth publication is a 1920 memorandum on Polish persecution of Greek Catholics compiled for Pope Benedict XV by Belgian Ukrainophile priest Father Franz Bonn.94 There is also reference to Polish excesses in the Vatican and Red Cross archives.95 A letter on Polish excesses by ZUnR foreign minister Mykhailo Lozynsky was addressed directly to Jozef Pilsudski.96

“Something is being done about Ruthenia, but … I don’t remember what.” Today, knowledge about Ukraine has improved somewhat from 1919 when Woodrow Wilson made the above comment.97 Historians of World War I now duly note it continued in eastern Europe for four years after it ended in western Europe. Most normally mention former tsarist-Ukraine in their work and provide a short survey of political events there.98 Authors of recent work on violence specifically tend to focus on its causes and mention Ukraine in passing. Some provide greater detail about select Ukrainian events to illustrate a broader issue. Authors of recent English-language works specifically about violence in Ukraine focus on elite political history, the pogroms, and the warlords.99 They do not always remember that not everything that happened in Ukraine during those years was necessarily “Ukrainian.” In Ukraine between 1929 and 1991, social aspects of its revolution were not studied except insofar as they fit into an official Bolshevik account that excluded the existence of a “Ukrainian revolution.” The events of 1917–21 were classified as “The October Revolution in Ukraine.” That Russocentric paradigm had no space for a non-Russian national aspect. What inter-war émigré and post-1991 Ukrainian historians regard as a national revolution and liberation war against invading Russian Armies under Red or tricolour flags, the Bolshevik paradigm classified as “civil war.” What émigré and present-day Ukrainian historians consider a Ukrainian peasant movement, the Bolshevik paradigm classified as a “struggle against political bandits.” The paradigm presented Bolshevik-Russia’s war against the UnR as a “struggle against Petliurism.” The use of Cheka punishment battalions manned by foreigners was “fraternal international assistance.” Official historians presented events in Ukraine as a Russian regional battle between Reds, Whites, bandit gangs,

Introduction

19

and foreign imperialists. The paradigm after 1953 incorporated some work on medical services, but, otherwise, ignored living conditions. Viacheslav Popov has written what is, for the moment, the only Ukrainian-language survey of daily life in revolutionary Ukraine. But there is no single survey in any language describing the sufferings of Ukraine’s civilian population between 1917 and 1923, when the last serious partisan resistance had disappeared, nor the magnitude of losses that resulted from the violence in that part of Europe. This book attempts to fill this gap and place Ukraine, where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode for another five years after they had left western Europe, within the continent’s “continuum of violence.” It surveys the impact of political collapse, social breakdown, violence, and upheaval on civilian living conditions. The book will, hopefully, provide empirical background for those interested in further study of how disease, violence, and death related to political aims, governmental authority, and victory or defeat. It reminds readers that all nationalities/groups had their share of victims and that violence stemmed not only from ideological convictions and political military rivalry. Also involved were personal vendettas, greed, mundane criminality, and desires to retaliate for perceived injustice. Mere difference does not generate conflict or violence. That is caused by contexts. As moral inhibitions shrank during war, atrocities against civilians became commonplace. Perpetrators could become victims and victim-survivors could become perpetrators. Individuals made moral choices. Others can denounce them for it, but should consider what they would have done in similar circumstances; circumstances defined by war and the collapse of infrastructure that produced disease and hunger – which made no distinctions and killed all equally.100 The book includes extended descriptions of, and statistics related to, the consequences of murderous violence and social collapse. It studies physical, not metaphorical or symbolic, death and disease. Its underlying theme is that living conditions should be treated as part and parcel of events and not ignored or treated as something discrete and separate. Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine does not encompass south-eastern territories under Nestor Makhno or the Whites, neither of which, unlike the Ukrainian national and Bolshevik republics, had central ministries of health that collected data.101 The pogroms in these territories have been studied, but not their living conditions – which were likely much the same as elsewhere in the country. Chapter 1 outlines the significant attempts made before 1914 to improve public health and sanitation. Chapters 2 and 3 review civilian living conditions in what were tsarist-Ukrainian territories between 1917 and 1923. They attempt, through the written word, to describe to those who have not experienced analogous tragedy what life was like. The chapters include descriptions of basic hygiene – behaviour relating to washing, cleaning,

20

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

spitting, drinking, manners, and notions of propriety. Chapters 4 and 5 examine governmental culpability for violence and terror. They argue that violence against Jews stemmed not only from the ideology of antisemitism, but was also structurally determined – related to behaviour and social function. Malice, spite, conniving, cowardice, victimization, hate, brutality, and opportunism are human dispositions shared by all social groups and nationalities everywhere. As Thucydides pointed out centuries ago, these will run amok when the institutions created to control them collapse. The conclusion points out that the revolutionary upheavals produced Ukraine’s first great demographic catastrophe of the twentieth century. It demonstrates that the atrocities against civilians, shortages, and epidemics during those years resulted in as many, if not more, deaths as did the killing in battles between armies. It considers some of the psychological consequences that arise from relentless intimidation, humiliation, profound trauma, destitution, or threat of random violence. Appendix 1 surveys the plight of orphans. Appendix 2 provides statistics on population and medical services before and after World War I. This book classifies as excesses the torture, random arbitrary beating, arbitrary destruction or confiscation of dwellings, foodstuffs and property, that social norms regarded as morally unacceptable. It defines violence as the intentional physical coercion of non-combatants by armed soldiers, armed partisans, or armed criminals that results in bodily harm or death. European thinkers in countries with long-established governments able to enforce a monopoly on coercion established a distinction between legitimate force exercised by that government, and illegitimate violence perpetrated by others. Leaving aside the matter of how valid or invalid that distinction is in peacetime, it breaks down in conditions of war and imperial collapse. Rival elites consider the violence they use to establish or re-establish their governments and monopolies on coercion as a legitimate use of force.102 Finally, this book classifies people by nationality, as did the literate and educated at the time it studies. This was a category that could be based either on descent, language-use, or self-ascription. Those who classified and compiled the data used in this book collected it according to those criteria, and however imprecise that data may be, they remain among the most important sources historians use. At the time, most considered nationality as natural, singular, constant, and emancipatory. With the exception of Russian Bolsheviks and some supporters who, in theory, claimed class rather than nationality should be the primary focus of political loyalty, others generally accepted that nationality should define primary identity and determine political loyalty. That was unlike today, when most academics regard nationality as a changeable variable among other identities people can have, and whose

Introduction

21

emancipatory anti-imperialism leaders can, but do not inevitably, transform into exclusivist or expansionist creeds. Most today also accept that not all of the illiterate, semi- or uneducated at the time, defined themselves or behaved according to elite criteria. Accordingly, this book draws due attention to the idea that identity was but one of the elements that underlay conflict and violence, alongside loyalties, localism, avarice, vindictiveness, peer pressure, and social function. It takes more than inflammatory oratory to provoke mass killing.103 For their comments and criticisms on this book, I am grateful to Antony Polonsky, Jochen Bohler, Serhyi Yekelchyk, Piotr Wrobel, and my editor Richard Ratzlaff.

chApteR 1

Under the Tsars If we compare figures from that year [1895] with those from the province [Chernihiv] 15–16 years earlier, then we will see how, in that time, the medical help available to the population grew substantially.

Oleksandr Rusov (1898)

The European Context By the early twentieth century, European governments, reformers, and scientists, had made considerable improvements in public sanitation that were reflected in lower death rates, higher birth rates, and longer life expectancy. Much of that stemmed from the dissemination in the 1890s of discoveries by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister. These included the knowledge that germs spread infections, vaccinations and handwashing could prevent diseases, and that heat could kill bacteria in foods. In the wake of the great nineteenth-century typhus and cholera epidemics, hygiene became fashionable among the urban educated, who began identifying dirt with illness, and cleanliness with health. The circle of those of who regarded cleanliness as a sign of respectability widened. By 1914, avoidance and prevention measures against infections in cities and towns had become routine. New attitudes about health and sanitation spread from city to village, from the wealthy to the poor, from west to east. Earlier elite indifference and neglect surrounding what is now called public health issues, was replaced by disgust, intolerance, and concern over the consequences of ignoring those issues. The shift was assisted considerably at the turn of the century by soap manufacturers, whose interest in profit made them educators in hygiene and cleanliness by virtue of their mass advertising. The new attitudes slowly displaced inherited contrary customs and attitudes. Workers and peasants, for instance, shared a preconception of dirt as a kind of protective barrier against the ills of the world, and considered body washing as something done, at best, seasonally. They washed their clothes, but not themselves.

Under the Tsars

23

Sweat, they thought, cleaned the body. French peasants would say, “people who take baths die young,” and “the more the ram stinks the more the ewe loves him.” For workers, dirty hands were a sign of honest hard work. Peasants considered dirt a component of good health, and lice a fact of nature – an insect that preserved good health by cleaning the blood. Aside from summer swimming, any body washing that was done, was done before feast days. Most European cities had public baths by 1914, but frequency of use was low. Until the 1850s in France, people thought it was beneficial to live alongside offal, excrement, and garbage dumps, and to inhale the odours that filth emitted. People rioted in 1830s when city authorities attempted to clean the streets. Some thought the stink cured tuberculosis. Until the end of century, most people washed only the body parts that showed.1 Louis XIV washed only his hands every morning. He took two baths in his entire life. A French country doctor in the 1870s wrote, “the feet, the armpits, the genitals of the peasant, exhale an odor in itself so foul and penetrating that it often forced me to ventilate my examination room, after a consultation which lasted only fifteen minutes.” Another, in 1900, complained about the difficulty in treating female diseases: “A ridiculous modesty condemns this mysterious and secret region, where every disease is easily classified as shameful and the slightest gesture of cleanliness is considered an immoral act, to a revolting neglect.” A public school inspector in Bradford, England, reported that more than 30 per cent of the primary school children he examined had not removed their clothes in at least six months – which promoted contagious skin diseases.2 Alongside inherited preconceptions, material-technical realities impeded the spread of new attitudes toward hygiene and cleanliness. The hours necessary to walk to communal pumps or rivers to fetch clean water, chopping ice in winter to reach water, cold dwellings, and the hours needed to heat water, disinclined people from washing. The process was hard physical work for those who did it – the women. A pre-war British estimate indicated that urban families on wash and bath days could use as much as fifty gallons daily. That involved women fetching and carrying up to twenty pails from the nearest standpipe or well. The total weight could be as much as 500 pounds. Then, in the absence of drainpipes, the wastewater had to be carried out again. To avoid the stairclimbing, people often would just go to the nearest window.3 Costs slowed the building and installation of pipes, pumping stations, drains, sewer tunnels, treatment plants, and pavements. Villages, the working poor, and the unemployed were the last and least affected by slowly improving public health and sanitation. As of 1914, ten- to twelvehour workdays, malnutrition, miserable housing, alcoholism, sweat-shops, casual violence, prostitution and tuberculosis were still commonplace for the unskilled and working poor.

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Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

London, on the eve of the war, was the world’s richest city in the world’s most powerful country. Jack London’s comments about it in 1902 describe its other side, a side that existed in most other cities at the time as well: “The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.” In a city where no one was more than a five-minute walk from a slum, for a poor working family, a one-room dwelling in a tenement was “not home but horror.” He confirmed the opinion of the Chinese ambassador, who three years earlier remarked London was “too dirty.” In 1884, journalists wrote that the city’s streets were the dirtiest “of any city in the civilized world.”4 Mid-century Londoners, with no accessible well, drank from an excrement-filled Thames River. They also commonly kept farm animals, including cows, because, until the intercity rail system was built, dairy products inevitably spoiled before they could reach urban consumers. They hoisted the cows by pulley up into their attics – and threw their excrement into the street or basement cesspools, which were not always emptied when full. Mid-century rural small towns and villages normally had polluted waterways, open manure pits and dung heaps, leaky cesspits, stinking public outhouses, and wells contaminated with offal. In 1849, the doctor who discovered that polluted water caused cholera was ignored and ridiculed until 1866, when city fathers initiated the first reforms to clean water and sewage.5 To what degree reformists exaggerated degrees of dirt and destitution to obtain funding for their reforms will perhaps never be known.6 What is known, is that with those funds, reformers made significant changes from the 1880s. The small French town of La Machine in the Bourgogne in the 1850s had no paving, no sewers, no garbage dump, no flush toilets, and took its water from a few wells. By the end of the century, all its streets were paved and it had a public water supply and sewer system. By 1914, over half of the cities in north-western Europe did not yet have sewer systems, but most all did have clean, piped water and enforced housing standards. The majority of the urban population no longer lived in slums.7 Despite a lingering romantic image of healthy country life, in reality, for the first time in history, cities were becoming less deadly to human life than villages. Except for tuberculosis, infectious mass epidemic diseases had disappeared.8

The Russian Empire Reformers won the ear of ministers and began systematically introducing health care and public sanitation improvements during the 1890s. They were motivated in part by their western European counterparts, in part by humanitarian concern, and in part by the great 1892 cholera epidemic,

Under the Tsars

25

which struck five Ukrainian provinces again in 1909. No less important was the epidemic of syphilis that, alongside tuberculosis, doctors began to realize, was widespread not only in the Russian empire, but also in Europe and the United States. In England, on the eve of the war, 7 to 10 per cent of men under forty were infected; in America, an estimated 15 per cent of the total population were.9 Figures from 1888 show as many as 5 per cent of Kyiv city’s population were infected, and almost 2 per cent of the province’s population. The highest rate of infection appeared to have been among educated professionals – 24 per cent.10 Until imperial Russia’s first Ministry of Health was established in 1916, the subsections of other institutions dealt with sanitation and health: rural councils (zemstvo), the army, the interior and rail ministries, municipal governments, and individual factories. Change was slow. Plans were often not implemented because no funds were available (see figures 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, 13). Local civilian officials hindered medical initiatives or undertook them without consulting doctors. Conditions in Iuzivka (Stalino-Donetsk), with a population of over 50,000 people but no water or sewage system in 1910, remained much the same in 1922. In 1924, no more than 25 per cent of its garbage and excrement could be removed monthly.11 Up to the war, some officials still distrusted doctors as politically dangerous (neblagonadezhni); however, by the turn of the century, few still shared the opinions of conservative monarchist Konstantin Leontiev. In 1864, he considered a magnificent century-old tree more precious than twenty common peasants: “I will not cut it down in order to buy them medicine against cholera.”12 Officials had begun to relent. In 1905 in Kharkiv province, the zemstvo had to petition the governor to allow medical personnel to travel to towns and villages to inform people about the cholera that had broken out. They had to wait six months – but got permission. When officials discovered that 50 per cent of the medical students who staffed the cholera clinics in the province were Jews, who were not supposed to live there because it was outside the Pale of Settlement, they initially ordered them to leave. When the zemstvo petitioned the governor to allow them to remain, he granted permission within days.13 During the 1910 cholera epidemic in Odesa, officials decided that garbage piles, pigs, and birds caused the disease. They began a campaign to disinfect everything and ordered police to catch and kill the animals – while doing nothing about polluted water. Priests were mobilized to give advice about how to cope with the disease, because officials here, unlike in Kharkiv province, regarded doctors who spread health and sanitation information as potential subversives. Nonetheless, while some officials loosened supervision of medical personnel, others, up to 1917, continued to vet, supervise, and sometimes even cancel medical conferences. Such behaviour explains

26

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

why infant death rates, for instance, began rising even after 1907, and were considerably higher in towns than in villages.14 By 1914, rural and urban conditions of life had improved, as compared with 1870. Death rates had fallen overall, particularly among infants, and more medical personnel and facilities were available per head of population – notably in those provinces with zemstva.15 Between 1882 and 1910, doctors in Kharkiv province considerably lowered the rate of smallpox infections – and the decline would likely have been higher had inoculation been declared obligatory.16 An overlooked event that influenced improvement in overall health was the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904. Because Russia imported tea from China, the rail link allowed the price to fall dramatically in the decade before the war. Cafés served tea from the 1890s, but after 1905, when its price fell, tea became a widely consumed beverage throughout most of the empire for most, all except the rural poor. A 1918 photo from a village in southern Ukraine of a peasant household entertaining a group of Ukrainian officers shows a samovar placed prominently in front of the table. The family appears to be well off – which suggests that, as of that year in rural southern Ukraine, tea had again become a prestige beverage limited to the better-off.17 In Kyiv under the hetman, tea was worth its weight in gold.18 Tea drinking is significant because the leaf’s antibacterial properties reduce the prevalence of waterborne disease among drinkers even when they do not boil the water. Also, because the beneficial ingredients of tea passed into infants via mother’s breast milk, it contributed to lower infant mortality. This likely played a role in the slow decline of incidence of diseases like dysentery and cholera between 1902 and 1914 in towns where most did drink tea – as it had the previous century in England.19 It is important to remember that generalizations like those above are not all based on reliable data. First, it was still organizationally impossible to survey the entire empire’s population for each and every issue. Second, “towns” were defined according to legal status, not socio-economic indicators, which meant de facto towns were often classified as “villages” and vice versa. Third, statisticians did not yet have a clear delineation between rural and urban. Until 1907, with few exceptions like Kyiv, towns had no defined limits. That meant city officials decided arbitrarily who did and did not fall under urban jurisdiction and, thus, within the range of their services, surveys, and infrastructure. Statisticians would include or exclude people and territories according to where local officials thought the limits should be.20 A fourth problem with imperial statistics was that figures published by the Central Statistical Committee did not always correspond to those published by local zemstva or provincial statistical committees. That was because central officials issued no standard methodological/criteria instructions or guidelines to local statisticians. The Chief Medical Inspectorate

Under the Tsars

27

of the Interior Ministry, for example, using figures from its local branches, calculated that the total population of the empire ranged from two to six million fewer than indicated in Central Statistical Committee figures. In Ukrainian provinces, one problem was a reluctance by some to consider “Little Russians” separate from Russians. This led to fewer Ukrainian speakers being registered as such in the 1897 census, in part also because officials intimidated underlings to declare themselves Russian.21 Close examination of the rural-urban migration figures, for example, convincingly shows there were more ethnic Ukrainians and fewer ethnic Russians in Ukrainian urban centres than shown in 1897 urban population totals.22 Finally, Russian publications, even still today, rarely separate figures for Russia proper from what is termed “European Russia” or “Russia west of the Urals.” Nor do compilers compare the Russian empire with other empires. Instead, they incorrectly compare it with European national states. Such sloppiness makes comparison almost impossible and leads to false analogies. It leads to absurd claims, such as because there were 25,500 doctors in the entire empire in 1911, “Russia,” had almost as many as England. A correct comparison would juxtapose the total number of doctors in the Russian empire with the total in the British empire, or the total in “Great Russia” with the total in England – specifying whether reference was to England or the United Kingdom.23 More officials realized improvement was necessary and condoned it in the decades before the war. But changes were not uniform throughout the empire. The urban wealthy in cities obviously enjoyed better conditions than the poor (see figures 1 through 9).24 Smaller towns tended to have worse living conditions and infrastructures than larger towns, albeit this often depended on the local city council. Poltava, for instance, provided acceptable levels of services and supplies until 1918. Decline began less because of the war than the election of a new town council in August 1917. They brought in a majority of young men with socialist convictions, but no administrative experience. Collapse came in 1918, when the Bolsheviks took the city.25 Urban infrastructure in pre-war towns west of the Dnipro (right-bank Ukraine) was generally worse than east of it, because central rulers regarded it as a war zone. They reasoned that, since the cities there would be destroyed, it made little sense to fund improvements. By the same kind of logic, generals conscripted the sick: “better the sick die in battle than in bed.” Thus, the border city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, with 50,000 people in 1914, did not have a rail link to the nearest train station or even one ambulance. That year, the city had to borrow money in London to begin building a piped-water system.26 General health and sanitation conditions outside Warsaw in the pre-war Polish provinces were likely the same as in the Ukrainian provinces. That is, the majority of the population beyond city

28

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

centres still had little or sometimes no sanitary services or infrastructure. For all but the rich, serious illness or injury meant pauperization, dispossession, possible eviction, earlier-than-normal death, and disintegration of families.27

Water Urban water systems were an important indicator of public health. In 1911, the water sources of forty-four of the fifty towns in the empire west of the Urals were badly polluted. An 1897 inspection tour of Volga-towns characterized them as “literally sinking in their own filth.” As of 1915, six cities, of which two were Russian (Rostov-on-Don and Moscow) and three Ukrainian (Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv), had both water and sewage systems that covered the entire city centre. Because most of the system was privately built, and owners cared more about profit than purity, the water delivered was not necessarily pristine – as illustrated by cartoonists (see figures 1, 2, and 4). Water was filtered through sandbags and people normally expected to find silt and leeches in it. Not to mention bacteria. Quality usually improved after the city bought out owners. In Kyiv, a pipe system built in 1872 that drew water from the Dnipro River no longer obliged people and vendors to go to the river and carry buckets and barrels up to dwellings. The pipes significantly improved the air quality, as they allowed city workers to more easily fill tanks to sprinkle streets thrice daily, thus reducing choking levels of summer dust. When Kyiv officials in 1907 realized that Dnipro River water was the main cause of cholera, they disconnected the old pipes and linked the city’s water system to underground wells. By 1914, approximately half the population had access to pure, artesian water.28 St Petersburg grew by one million between 1895 and 1917. It annually used one hundred million tons of water. But it had no sewer system prior to 1917, and its filtration system, built in 1899, could process no more than five million tons annually. Inhabitants, thus, had to boil all water before drinking. On the eve of the war, Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovsk) and Warsaw had the empire’s best urban water systems, encompassing almost all city buildings. In the former, the population rose from 113,000 in 1897, to 268,000 in 1917. Even so, as of 1914, among the great world cities, it ranked among the highest in terms of death rate, of whom 50 per cent were infants. In 1897, it had the highest rate of syphilis infection in Europe.29 As of 1898, when St Petersburg had none and Moscow had just built its system, fifteen towns in Ukraine already had piped water. By 1915, that had risen to thirty-three.30 As of 1914, systems did not yet include all the buildings, nor was the water always clean if it was pumped from a local river. Either the pumps were too weak to produce the pressure needed

Under the Tsars

29

to avoid sedimentation, or not all plants had even sandbag filters. Of 762 settlements classified as cities in the fifty provinces west of the Urals, 149 had piped water, and 27 had sewer systems as of 1904. By 1916, only Kyiv, Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, and Odesa had both water and sewer systems – but not all their dwellings were connected, and only the latter two cities had effective filtration systems. The Russian empire had nineteen cities with sewer systems at the turn of the century. Germany, as of 1880, had fifty.31 As of 1915, approximately 60 to 65  per cent of towns in the eight Ukrainian provinces drew water from wells. Connection to the systems became mandatory in 1912.32 Except for the rich, most people either carried their own water from common outdoor pumps, or, even in cities with piped water, bought it from delivery wagons. Poorer people living on third or fourth floors would buy and carry only minimal amounts necessary. They consequently had little or nothing for daily washing or laundry, which, in any case, few did regularly at the end of the century. Public baths (bania) were relatively common throughout the empire, but, as few were well maintained, located, or clean, they could as well promote as inhibit the spread of disease. Not only were most all – except the luxurious – unregulated, crowded, unventilated, dirty, and damp, some used unfiltered water collected downstream from polluting sources. Most discharged their effluent untreated. One bath in Kharkiv was just downstream from a soap factory and cast-iron factory. Another was downstream from a brewery. Among the diseases patrons risked catching were venereal, because some had staff not averse to providing what today is called “unprotected sex” to customers who did not come just to wash. Public baths serviced not only wealthy profligate thrill-seekers. Those among the large numbers of young migrant workers, who lived without wives or girlfriends, could gratify their needs in baths, rather than in brothels or with streetwalkers. A Kyivan doctor observed in the 1880s:33 Our Russian banias do not meet even very elementary sanitary requirements; there is no supervision of the bathhouse workers [banshchiki], and among them it is not rare to find syphilitics; in the banias dirt abounds, ventilation practically does not exist, the conditions under which they are heated are chaotic – the air is often filled with coal-based carbon monoxide; the water, thanks to broken containers, is often filthier than filthy rivers; the sponges are never washed and never disinfected, the common tubs are also not cleaned or disinfected. At the present time we have decrees about the bania, but just the same, at the current time there is absolutely no oversight to determine if they are followed.

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Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

As of 1904, only 5 per cent of towns in the empire had sewage systems. Only the very rich could afford indoor faucets, sinks, and toilets connected to the water systems of cities that had one. Dwellings that did have toilets normally drained into a cesspit via a direct, straight pipe, with nothing to prevent odours from the pit rising back into the house. Urban buildings of the rich had cesspits in the basements. The poor lived in buildings either with shared cesspits in cellars or courtyards, or with none at all. Cesspit cleaning was arranged on a private basis and owners, loathe to pay for cleaning, did not always empty them when they had to. The results were visible in courtyards, alleys, stairwells, gutters, and outhouse floors. Public toilets began appearing during the 1890s in the empire – usually in big train stations. Since no one knew about bacteriological infection when cesspits were built, they were made porous to allow the contents to seep into the ground. The remaining solid matter was shovelled from the pits at intervals, or not, depending on arrangements between owners and collectors, who carted it away. The workers, travelling as they did in early morning when it was still dark, would often dump loads somewhere on the road closer to the city than the designated lot, or enter into illegal arrangements with a landowner or peasant in the vicinity to dump somewhere on their property, or into a nearby river. Runoff from such indiscriminate practice, as well as from designated lots, thus found its way into fresh water. Until Louis Pasteur proved otherwise, no one considered such practices inimical to health. No one was concerned about seepage into groundwater and waterways because it was generally accepted that water eventually diluted pollutants. No one knew about bacteria before Pasteur – not all the illiterate and uneducated did so afterwards. People assumed water was potable if it was relatively clear and did not stink. Only in the wake of frequent cholera and typhoid epidemics did city officials undertake collection and cleaning campaigns. In Britain, such work was undertaken as emergency measures and stopped once the epidemic had passed until the 1840s, when reformers adopted them as permanent practice. Within the decade, all cesspits in central London had been removed, and the sewer system improved. By 1900, fish again abounded in the Thames.34 For cities in the Russian empire, that turning point came some forty years later.

Medical Issues Not all hospitals, as of 1900, were up to the standard of the times, and the ill could not always be sure of recovery in those that were not. Reports noted hospitals with rotten floors, dilapidated buildings, overcrowding, lack of ventilation, and terrible toilets. One such hospital in St Petersburg was located on Obukhovskii Street. In 1912, one of its nurses described terrible

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conditions. The air stank, the linens and blankets were old, patients had no comforts, and there was never enough of anything. During the war, conditions in hospitals worsened as staff began charging for services and corruption increased. Already in 1915, eyewitnesses reported head doctors embezzling funds, theft from patients, and pilfering of medicines and instruments for sale on the black market – and that was in hospitals already short of, or even totally lacking, instruments and medicines.35 In Kyiv province in 1917, the provincial police chief reported that as his men travelled from village to village trying to confiscate liquor peasants had stolen from distilleries, among their hidden possessions they found medicines and hospital equipment.36 In Kharkiv, theft of everything from money to clothes to medicines was rampant in the city’s publicly funded clinics and hospitals. Facilities were unkept and filthy because cleaning staff was not paid. Officials would not register released patients to keep collecting their subsidies, while registering as a “patient” for a price, anyone who wanted, for whatever reason, to stay at their hospital. Statistics on population per available hospital beds indicate that, on the eve of the war, Kharkiv city was second only to the capital (133:1). The figures for Kyiv and Odesa were 187 and 165. By comparison, the figures for Berlin, Paris, and London were 83, 84, and 90.37 While larger cities usually had as many medical personnel as did cities in western Europe, peasants were less-well served. As of 1913, the Ukrainian provinces had 952 rural medical centres with a doctor, and 1,008 with a medic or nurse only.38 The only source of modern medical assistance in villages were zemstvo medical centres that often also provided services for local towns. Kyiv, Volyn, and Podillia provinces were worse off in terms of health and sanitation than the other Ukrainian provinces because they got zemstva fifty years later than the others. Zemstva provinces averaged four to five such centres before 1914 – approximately one per one hundred settlements and 20,000 people. Medics (sanitar/feldsher) dealt with as many as 30 per cent of those who sought aid. In some rural areas, villages were as much as two days’ wagon-ride distant from a medical centre or clinic, and, upon arrival, people often had to wait another two to three days before someone could see them. As of 1913, Ukrainian provinces (including Taurida) had 1,702 civilian hospitals, of which 825 were run by the zemstva, and 1,344 clinics.39 The Ukrainian provinces, with an average of 1.5 and 1.8 doctors and medics per 10,000 population, were better serviced than the Polish provinces – except with regard to sewers, where five Polish towns, as opposed to only two Ukrainian towns, had them. The provinces with the highest number of doctors per 10,000 population were Warsaw (five) and Petersburg (eight) (see table 4). The city of Katerynoslav, on the eve of the war, had one doctor per 1,400 inhabitants. Rural ratios were higher but improving. The population per zemstvo doctor in Chernihiv province, for example, dropped

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from 47,500:1 in 1879, to 27,100:1 in 1895.40 Illustrative of the disparity between rural and urban medical services are figures from Kremenchuh (population 100,000, 1914) and environs. While the city had fifty-one doctors, fifty-eight medics, and three hospitals, two adjacent rural volosts (population 22,000) had one doctor and five medics.41 Tax-funded health care was extended after 1905. Governmental, municipal, and zemstvo clinics and hospitals offered services without charge or for token fees. Although, in theory, care from government and zemstvo doctors was free, in practice, they often charged nominal fees because their pay was low. After 1912, companies were no longer obliged to run clinics for their workers but provide only first-aid assistance. Services were better in zemstvo provinces than in those without, and free services, in cities that had it, were usually provided by zemstva. While private practice existed, it was generally frowned upon both by intellectuals and doctors themselves, who normally worked either in government or company clinics and hospitals. Charities, the church, and Red Cross also ran clinics and hospitals, as did the Jews specifically for their own. Local officials at any time could order doctors who did practise privately, in the event a government doctor was unavailable, to do whatever was required. Most doctors spent most of their time involved with government and police work, like forensics and reports, rather than with patients. Town doctors also found themselves preoccupied with the surveillance of brothels and prostitutes.42 As a rule, sick or injured urban poor rarely got medical care beyond first aid. As of 1910, a village hospital averaged ten to thirteen beds, a district (povit/uezd) town hospital, as many as forty-five, and a provincial capital hospital, as many as two hundred. A well-run zemstvo with adequate funding had well-run hospitals. At the end of the century in a district hospital in Chernihiv province, patients were well fed, washed, clothed, and the dead were buried with no cost to the family. The hospital had the rare luxury of a heated indoor toilet. Daily patient rations included three-quarters of a pound of meat, one chicken, two pounds of butter, two pounds of bread, and half-pound portions of various cereal-porridges.43 Moscow and Petersburg had thousands of beds and dozens of hospitals and clinics. In the decade before the war, as diagnosis and filing improved, doctors saw a steady rise in reported hospitalization and infections, which indicated probably more people were turning to medical personnel when sick than before. The records of the Nizhyn zemstvo hospital for 1905 showed it dealt with 20,000 patients that year – an average of 82 daily. The majority were men from the nearby settlements, and the majority of complaints involved respiratory and digestive complaints, followed closely by scabies. The records indicate the main causes of disease were overcrowded living premises, no toilets, and ignorance of what caused illness.44

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The number of rejected conscripts is often taken as an index of general health. In the Russian empire, their total rose very slightly from 7 per cent in 1902, to 8 per cent in 1913. Because the rise in reported hospitalizations might have been due to more precise data collection, and the increase in rejected conscripts was minimal, it is difficult to know if these figures show that overall public health improved during this short period of time. What would have to be done is to determine whether, given the population increase, the number of reported sick, hospitalized, and rejected was proportionately the same in 1902 as in 1913. No one has yet done that.45 The pre-war decades saw an increase in the number of medical personnel, but sources differ as to totals. One source lists 21,218 (15,141 urban) civilian doctors, and 24,417 (9,390 urban) medics for the empire west of the Urals in 1913.46 Other sources indicate an estimated 33,000 men and women doctors in the empire in 1914. Approximately 75 per cent resided in either provincial or district capitals. In rural areas, where approximately 25 per cent of doctors practised, per capita ratios averaged 1:20,000 for the empire as a whole. In 1913, the Ukrainian provinces (including Taurida) had 5,788 (3,986 urban) civilian doctors and 6,189 medics (1,981 urban).47 Another source shows 7,800 doctors and 12,400 medics and nurses in 1914. Of the latter, 5,174 doctors and 5,946 medics were civilian; 1,033 doctors and 3,160 medics worked in the zemstvo system, which serviced as much as 80 per cent of the population. That year, there were 1,679 civilian hospitals, with the most in Kyiv province (309), and the fewest in Chernihiv (166). The ratio of doctors, using the latter figures and including army doctors, to Ukraine’s total population averaged 1:3,471. This approximated ratios in Norway, Spain, and Italy: respectively 3,630, 3,280, and 3,570. The ratio for Britain was 1:1,730, Germany 1:1,500, and France 1:1,864.48 Counting only civilian doctors, the average Ukrainian ratio would fall to 1:5,740. The urban per capita average ratio, including only civilian doctors, was 1:751, with the highest in Kharkiv province (1:458), and the lowest in Chernihiv province (1:13,700). Overall, approximately 65 per cent of all civilian doctors and 33 per cent of all medics were urban (see table 2). The ratios for Vienna, Paris, London, and Berlin were, respectively, 750, 790, 720, and 800. The pre-war decades saw a significant increase in the number of doctors per capita. In Kharkiv province it rose from 1:9,000 in 1885 (1,158 in Kharkiv city), to 1:4,100 (401 in Kharkiv) in 1912.49 The 1913 ratio of doctors to Ukraine’s rural population averaged 1:17,000. Ukraine’s ratios fell with the outbreak of the war when mobilization reduced the number of civilian doctors – as it did on all sides – falling to 1:5,800 in Germany and 1:14,000 in France.50 In 1914, 7,447 doctors were drafted into the army. By 1917, that total had risen to 15,193 – almost half of all the doctors in the empire in 1914.51

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Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

Medicine was not readily available outside the bigger cities. In 1905, there were 3,919 pharmacies in the empire, of which approximately 60 per cent were urban. The total had risen to 4,900 by 1917, primarily thanks to the 1914 Dry Law, after which trade in high-proof alcohol shifted to pharmacies where it could be bought with a prescription. As of 1913, approximately 2,000 of the empire’s 6,800 trained pharmacists practised in the Ukrainian provinces, which had 1,096 pharmacies (353 urban). All but 43 run by zemstva were privately owned and run, but strictly regulated. Provincial distribution of pharmacies varied considerably, and alongside them were almost as many drugstores (aptekarskii magazini) that could only legally sell non-prescription medicines – many nonetheless sold forbidden drugs. As much as 80 per cent of all medicines were imported, primarily from Germany. Only one of the empire’s fourteen pharmaceutical factories was in Ukraine – in Odesa. In 1914, pharmacists were mobilized together with doctors. All medicines and drugs were put under the control of the army and difficult to obtain legally for civilians.52

Pollution and Waste In the twenty years before the war, Ukraine’s listed urban population had grown by over three million. Waste production increased in due proportion – but not disposal. Waste included smoke, soot, cinders, garbage, offal, dead carcasses, rotting vegetables, assorted litter, and excrement. The bad food, filth, and dirty, crowded living conditions that characterized life for many in the rapidly growing towns provided pristine environments for infectious diseases that quickly took the most vulnerable among newly arrived migrants and the poor than the rich. Cases are on record of families losing half of their children in the course of a few days.53 Garbage and waste disposal figures from central Russian towns were probably similar to their counterparts in Ukrainian provinces  – and in western Europe fifty years earlier. In Viatka (population 50,000), the city had only 50 waste barrels to collect 180 barrels of human waste and 1,845 of garbage daily.54 Only 10 per cent of the refuse and excrement was disposed of. How much of remaining refuse was removed depended on how many owners paid private carters for removal. Ufa could dispose approximately 25 per cent of its waste. What remained was either buried in nearby abandoned corners, in pits that soon overflowed, left in a pile to slowly evaporate while sinking into the ground and seeping into any nearby wells or groundwater, or dumped into a gutter where it lay until washed away by the rain. Until cities built slaughterhouses, cattle were normally killed behind local butcher shops. The sights, sounds, and smells accompanying the movement and slaughter was not conducive to urban

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sanitation and health. Slaughterhouses began to operate only in the 1890s, which was also when most cattle began arriving into cities by train instead of on hoof. Even so, the last portion of the drive was through the streets, where the cattle left their excrement.55 In bigger towns, the filthiest quarters were around hostels and flophouses. Usually near the rail station or main market square, they provided for transient day labourers of both sexes. Because there were always more people than beds, during winter in particular, they were regularly over capacity. Men and women mixed indiscriminately. None had baths or toilets or basins, and there was little, if any, cleaning or maintenance. Bad food, cheap liquor, dirty people, dirty clothes, dirty bedding, dirty buildings, and anonymity combined to make these hostels epicentres of disease ranging from tuberculosis to typhus and syphilis.56 Until electric trams, cars, and trucks began appearing in the larger cities on the eve of the war, transport was horse-drawn. The by-product of muscle power remained visible on the streets and perfumed the air until it was removed or a wind blew it away.57 A horse, on average, produced two pints of urine and between twenty and twenty-five to forty pounds of manure daily – and to that must be added the contribution of cities’ pigs and cows. London’s animals produced up to an estimated 40,000 tons daily. New York in 1900, with its 3.5 million people, had 150,000 horses producing at least 1,500 tons of manure daily. In Rochester (population 162,000, which was 40,000 fewer than Kharkiv), 15,000 horses produced at least 150 tons of manure daily. To these totals must also be added the excrement of cattle still driven to butchers through city streets. In London, what was collected of that mass of excrement was dumped in vacant lots where piles could rise as high as forty and fifty feet. Rochester’s one year total could cover one acre of land with a pile 175 feet deep.58 The piles stank and attracted flies and rats. Large volumes of urine-drenched straw in stables also stank intolerably if not changed daily. During the summer, when removal did not keep pace with production, the traffic beat the dried street piles into dust that covered everything in the vicinity (see figures 5 and 9). The world’s first Urban Planning Conference, held in 1898, actually called to resolve the urban manure problem, concluded there was no solution. The problem ended, at least in the bigger cities, when municipalities forbade keeping livestock in city limits, and electric- and gas-motor vehicles began replacing horses in the decade before the war. In smaller towns, pigs and goats freely roamed the streets. They ate at least some of the manure and garbage, thereby helping city workers keep the streets clear of some effluent. The pigs and horses were not alone. Cows, geese, and chickens also wandered city streets until the 1890s, because rich and poor kept animals on their properties. This was possible, even in bigger

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cities like Kyiv, because, until the end of the century, when they began being displaced by multistorey apartments, the average city building was a two-storey house with a yard. As of 1880, the year before the city’s water system was built, observers considered Kharkiv “an exceptionally filthy city.” Half its streets were so covered with garbage they were impassable, while the very centre of town resembled a cesspit. In addition, because it was a major centre of local and imperial fairs that drew up to 50,000 people with their wagons annually, it was nicknamed “the shit factory.” On fair days, the city was enveloped in swarms of insects as well as an all-encompassing dust cloud.59 With a population of approximately 200,000 as of 1917, Kharkiv was the first town in the Ukrainian provinces east of the Dnipro to have a sewer system. As of 1913, its sanitation system had 595 barrels for waste and garbage, of which 44 belonged to the city. It also had the greatest area of paved roads – 53 per cent. Whether or not that sufficed for people to stop calling it by its nickname by then is unknown. Its municipal garbage disposal department, established in 1911, apparently functioned efficiently up to 1917.60 Because Kharkiv was badly situated geographically, it had no ready supply of clean water. By mid-century, it was not only the site of huge fairs, but also of a rail junction and manufacturing centre. Summarizing a survey of 22,596 Kharkiv dwellings done in 1892 (population 197,000), contemporaries concluded it had lower standards of living than Kyiv or Odesa. Only 27 per cent of the dwellings had a separate kitchen. In the other 73 per cent, kitchens were used as living quarters. Six per cent had heated toilets, and 1.5 per cent had a bathtub. Twenty per cent still had earthen floors. Alongside the disease considered typical for Kharkiv, malaria, which killed thousands annually, between 1830 and 1901 the city also had sixteen serious epidemics of either cholera or typhus. Death rates began to fall in the 1880s thanks to the city’s first water main, which gave downtown inhabitants easily accessible clean water. Nonetheless, on the eve of the war, contemporaries still considered Kharkiv unhealthy. Only a minority had access to clean water, garbage was still strewn through the city, and most dwellings were overcrowded and dirty.61 While observers in Kharkiv thought it was filthier than Kyiv, those in Kyiv did not share that opinion. In 1890, even before the massive wartime influx of migrants, doctors characterized Kyiv’s health and sanitation as abysmal (see figures 5 and 6).62 To the joys of urban life, for those who lived near factories, was added the smog and acrid vapours that poured forth from chimneys. Those who risked opening windows and taking a deep breath would inhale a toxic mix of sulphur, ammonia, rotting garbage, offal, human and animal excrement, phosphate acid, kerosene fumes, and coal dust. The pungent odour being decidedly worse in summer than winter.

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The small town of Myrhorod (1897 population 10,000) had no drains or sewers. Unlevelled roads resulted in huge puddles after storms that would remain for weeks and fill up with waste of various sorts. As the pools evaporated, mould and scum formed on top, emitting a foul stench, while the liquid mixture slowly seeped into groundwater, which, as sampling indicated, was polluted. Groundwater and the local river were the town’s sources of water. As almost all the town wells were no more than ten feet deep, people drank polluted water. Dirty water from the town’s nearby river, which was muddy and flowed slowly, was made worse by the garbage and excrement dumped on its banks and into it. Only a few wells located in phosphorus sands on the town borders yielded salty-tasting but potable water. Expansion and new construction was done in the years before the war in the wake of a sweep of cholera in 1908–11. Plans were afoot to improve the situation, which would have lessened incidents of food poisoning, dysentery, and typhus infections, but nothing more was done before 1917 (see figures 8 and 10).63

Rural Conditions While peasants understood physical injury and dealt with it as best they could, they had no idea about relationships between illnesses and conditions. Consequently, preventive behaviour was minimal. All maladies could easily end in virulent infections. The situation was not particular to Ukraine. Nobody anywhere realized dirt caused infections at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Descriptions of rural living conditions in mid-century France by urban observers were much like those written about Ukrainian villages: “Unless you have seen it [French villages] as we have done, with your own eyes, you cannot believe the wretched state of the  clothing furnishing and food of the inhabitants of our countryside.” The uneducated thought disease was the result of sin, or negligence, or some predisposition. Doctors were a possible source of assistance by the end of the century, but people turned first to folk healers. The sick were expected to suffer through stoically.64 Serhyi Podolynsky, a doctor, published a description of Ukrainian rural living conditions in the 1870s.65 He related that women washed clothes with bare hands in rivers mid-winter. They soaked hemp in October standing in cold water so long that they normally came out blue – and then some would walk up to half a mile home in their wet clothes. When they got pneumonia, or bronchitis, or rheumatism, or arthritis, they attributed the malady to spirits and evil eyes. Burdened with work and child care, women had little time to cook, so the daily rural diet was based on often undercooked, or raw, acidic gritty grains and vegetables, primarily cabbage, beets, potatoes, and rye. These produced digestive ailments, that, as noted above, predominated

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in recorded medical data. In general, peasant daily fare was bad because it varied little and they sold their best produce.66 Many of Podolynsky’s observations were later confirmed statistically. The most frequent recorded health problems were related to digestion – which stemmed from bad diet. As a rule, per capita, diseases apparently afflicted many more women than men. In 1926, for instance, for every recorded 1,000 women infected with various genital diseases, there were only 42 men.67 A review of all major illnesses between 1900 and 1914 showed that the most recurrent reported disease, malaria, accounted for 70 per cent of all recorded illness in Ukraine (59 per cent in Russia). This was followed by tuberculosis (16 per cent in Ukraine, 12 per cent in Russia), and syphilis (14 per cent in Ukraine, 29 per cent in Russia). The highest total number of reported diseases were from Katerynoslav and Kharkiv provinces. The fewest, from Podillia and Volyn. Overall, reported illness was three times higher, and sometimes more, in towns than in villages –in particular, syphilis and tuberculosis.68 How these figures related to reported longer lifespans and lower disease rates in Ukrainian than Russian provinces is unknown. A slight decrease in the average number of children who died under the age of ten, from 70 per cent circa 1860 to 50 per cent in 1913, indicated some improvement in rural health conditions.69 But ignorance of cause and effect, and of basic sanitary practices that, today, are regarded as commonplace, as recorded by Podolynsky in the 1870s, remained widespread. A 1924 survey of 19,489 people in all Ukraine indicated 28 per cent knew what caused the four most prevalent diseases in the country at the time: tuberculosis, syphilis, typhus, and cholera. The rate was slightly higher for men than for women, and considerably higher among the literate (45.6 per cent) than the illiterate (14.4 per cent). While 47 per cent of literate-but-poor peasants knew what caused tuberculosis, only 15 per cent of the illiterate rich did so. Only 12 per cent of illiterate females and 22 per cent of illiterate males knew what caused syphilis.70 A detailed review of figures from Kharkiv province of 1,114 rural men and women (455 literate), showed lower than national averages. No more than 6 per cent of illiterate women and 17 per cent of illiterate men in the province knew the causes and signs of tuberculosis, syphilis, typhus, and cholera.71 That same year, a survey of moonshine production and drinking, based on 476 questionnaires distributed throughout the country, showed 52 per cent of respondents had no idea that alcoholism was injurious to health and did not believe doctors who told them otherwise. Seventeen per cent reported moderate or no drinking at all. Eighteen per cent condemned it. The large majority drank moonshine often, and also imbibed it as medicine, sometimes re-enforced with kerosene. In the words of one respondent, “No one ever died from moonshine.” Another said, “It is known

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moonshine is bad for health, but when they find it, they drink like there is no tomorrow.”72 A medical student in 1890s Moscow recounted that peasants were convinced that it was not cholera that killed people but medicine from doctors, who were carrying out the orders of powerful landowners to poison them because there were too many of them.73 By the 1900s, the traditional reluctance among peasants to seek medical aid began dissipating, as did the notion, recorded by Podolynsky thirty years earlier, that hospitals were more likely to spread diseases than cure them. Where a clinic or hospital was nearby, with dedicated staff and free care, inhabitants were sooner inclined to get medical assistance when necessary.74 While the recorded number of people going to medical centres for help when ill was increasing before the war, when sick or injured, most rural inhabitants still first turned to prayer or the local herbalist/healer/midwife (znakhar, akusherka). The pre-war situation was illustrated in public-health posters intended to change personal hygiene habits the Bolsheviks began distributing in the 1920s. In simple language with big pictures, these posters explained what today is considered commonplace (see figures 14 to 17). Particularly effective was a large poster portraying tiny people fleeing from advancing monstrous lice (see figure 18).75 In the decades before the war, population growth accompanied a decline in the amount of land per rural household, and no increase in yields because there was little modernization of farming techniques. Ukrainian peasants, obliged under Sergei Witte’s industrialization plan to pay more tax than their Russian counterparts, had to sell as much as possible of their better produce to pay it. Consequently, while they exported more grain per capita than did Russian peasants before the war, Ukrainian peasants and their animals consumed less of worse-quality food. The resulting digestive ailments contributed to lower resistance to diseases and shorter lives. The undernourished majority’s situation was compounded by the inability of most to purchase basic metal farming and household implements. These items, when available, were expensive not only because almost all iron and steel produced in Ukrainian territory was geared for heavy industry, but also because approximately half of that was exported to Russia. Thus, few households in 1914 had the cheap manufactured metal items that were making rural life easier and healthier at the time in western Europe: metal roofs, washbasins, bathtubs, hinges, iron tools, and wheels.76 After 1917, these items became even rarer, or obtainable only at exorbitant prices. In villages, malnutrition was common. Even the affluent ate less and could not pay their taxes in the wake of crop failures (six between 1873 and 1906). Malnutrition impairs immune systems and lowers resistance to infections. This, in turn, retards mental and physical growth in children and make diseases lethal that otherwise would not have been. The hungrier a

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person is, the less they concern themselves with anything except acquiring food. This reduces resistance to infections and disease. In 1901 in Poltava province, one million peasants were malnourished, and two million could not pay their taxes. In Kyiv, Podillia, and Volyn provinces at the beginning of the century, the average rural income per household was thirty rubles, while all expenses amounted to forty-nine rubles. At the turn of the century, 70 per cent of Ukraine’s peasants could not produce the 957 pounds of grain needed annually to feed themselves and their livestock – against a backdrop of a steady decline in yield per acre in the decade before the war. To make up the difference, families sold food they otherwise would have consumed.77 Nor was strenuous agricultural work conducive to good health for malnourished men or women.78 Doctors reported rural dwellings were not conducive to good health and contributed to low life expectancy. Although pleasing to the eye, the interior of the typical Ukrainian white-clay, thatched, rural house with earthen floor was bad for the body. It was cramped, dark, damp, and stuffy. Houses not well maintained and cleaned were infected with rodents and fleas. A fullgrown man normally had to stoop while inside. Sixty-two per cent of houses consisted of one room; 32 per cent had two rooms. An average family of five or six lived, cooked, ate, slept, and suffered illness in a space approximately fifteen by eighteen feet and no more than ten feet high. Only 25 per cent of surveyed dwellings had openable windows, and they were so small that no more than 15 per cent of dwellings had normal daylight inside during the day. Kerosene lamps made stale air worse. According to popular lore, at times the air was so thick you could hang an axe on it. Most of the heat from the oven went up the chimney.79 In summer, inhabitants preferred to sleep outside. Accounts differ on the prevalence of fleas, rodents, and insects. One contemporary wrote that because Ukrainians, as a rule, kept their houses clean, they suffered only from lice because they almost never washed. Lice attacked the author as soon as she arrived, and she related it was impossible to rid her clothes and bedding of them. “Although I am Ukrainian on my mother’s side and very much like this country, I must confess the people’s personal slovenliness sickens me.”80 Approximately 30 per cent of households kept young livestock inside during the winter. The wealthier and southerners lived better than the poor and the northerners, but not significantly. More of the wealthy had brick or stone houses with tile or shingle, rather than straw roofs, and double-pane windows, than did the middle or poor. Approximately the same percentage of wealthy middle and poor households (16–18) lived in houses made of wattle and clay – bad and unhygienic building materials. An inspection of twelve schools in Pereiaslav povit in 1913 showed the buildings were dark and stuffy. None had adequate heating, and in at least one building, ink

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froze during winter. Young and old, male and female, teachers and pupils all used the same outhouse. These were filthy, unheated, with unlined pits underneath, and emptied no more than once a year. They were usually next to storage closets. Outhouses directly attached to buildings released their odours into the classrooms.81 A stand run by the Kharkiv zemstvo at the 1911 International Public Hygiene Exhibition demonstrated the unsanitary conditions then prevailing in the average village were much the same as in the 1870s. It included a diagram illustrating how water wells, normally located at the bottom edge of villages, were surrounded by mud that collected yard-impurities that flowed toward the river after rainfalls. Seventy-five per cent of examined wells contained more than safe amounts of chlorine. In the southern provinces, the ground water was bitter because it was saline. An examination of village sources in 1923 indicated approximately 30 per cent contained polluted water. Inhabitants judged water potable if it tasted normal. A 1925 survey of approximately 5,000 rural wells revealed almost all were badly built and had some degree of bacterial pollution. Ukrainian water tended to have high levels of unhealthy mineral deposits as well.82 People had wells near the houses, which meant they were also near the stables, chicken coops, and farmyard. As a result, the well water was exposed to all sorts of slush and had noxious matter seeping into it. In 1911, the Pereiaslav zemstvo allotted funds to build hygienic wells in all villages that needed them. As of 1914, nothing had been done. By contrast, Kharkiv province in 1910 began to partially subsidize the repair or construction of hygienic wells in villages. By 1916, it had built or renovated 734.83 Seventy-four  per cent of surveyed houses swarmed with fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and lice, but had few bedbugs or cockroaches, except in the houses of the wealthy  – more of whom reported them than the poor. The chief doctor of the Russian province Voronezh reported, on the eve of the war, that peasants regarded bedbugs and cockroaches as a sign of well-being. Bug infestations indicated the owners had lots of pillows and quilts and were sufficiently affluent not to bother about leftover food lying around the house.84 Whether that was also the case in Ukraine is unclear. But, as in Russia, it is likely that only the wealthier Ukrainian households were warm enough, and had enough food scraps lying around the house, for bedbugs and cockroaches. During winter, a single stove heated its immediate perimeter, the area by the walls and windows and any stored liquid froze. Except for the wealthy, peasant cottages rarely had window shutters, which meant thick sheets of winter frost accumulated on the panes. In the spring, the melting ice formed puddles on the floor that intensified the internal damp and stink. These also provided good conditions for annual epidemics of smallpox and diphtheria, which led to particularly high death

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rates among children. According to one researcher, if not for the nature of their work that obliged them to be outside, “the lack of light and air in [their] domiciles would inevitably kill-off the population (pryvezlo naselennia do vymyrannia).”85 It was common practice for men to spit on the floor in the house and not to wash the entire winter, for instance, which left them with boils by the spring.86 With first frost, young and old stayed indoors. “And inside it is crowded; when all lie down to sleep, there is no room to walk. It is somewhat better for the wealthier peasants because some of them have what is termed a ‘clean’ room. But, it happens that no one lives in there [because it is intended for guests] and the entire family inhabits one room.”87 Doctors’ and statisticians’ reports describe tight, dirty, living conditions for the majority of the middling and poor, urban and rural, with all domestic functions done in one room, as conducive to contagion and high rates of infectious diseases. Did such descriptions exaggerate misery because those who made them judged according to western European, urban-scientific values and sought to shame high officials to reform? No one has yet examined this issue. Depravation and ill health are not visibly present in photographs of rural Ukraine taken at the time.88

The Jewish Shtetl In tsarist-Ukraine, Jews made up, on average, 20 per cent, and, in places, as much as 50 per cent of the town population west of the Dnipro. Russian law prohibited Jews from owning land or engaging in any land-related activity. Almost no Jews farmed. Trotsky’s father was an exception. In the streets immediately surrounding the town market square, Jews normally inhabited all the dwellings.89 As a result of tsarist policies and natural calamity, namely fires, Jewish settlements by the 1880s had become dirtier and unhealthier, and most Jews poorer, than earlier. Simultaneously, the 1861 peasant emancipation allowed non-Jews to migrate to towns where, as artisans or craftsmen or traders, they competed with the longer-established Jews and lowered their already marginal profits. An English traveller’s description of a Jewish dwelling brings to mind the slums of Manchester and London: “narrow coffins called rooms, reeking with filth … they begin their daily work in the den that is a bedroom, sitting-room, dining room, workshop and temporary coffin.”90 Surveys indicated post-1880 Jewish ghettos and shtetls were dirtier, poorer, and had a higher density of people per dwelling than the surrounding Christian areas. Jews had higher rates of diseases and infections than the Christian population – yet lower death rates due to almost no alcoholism or syphilis, low infant mortality, and extremely few illegitimate births. Up to the war, despite worse living conditions within the settlements they had

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to inhabit, Jews had higher birth rates than Christians. Among the reasons for this were hygienic practices imposed by religious rules that had no counterpart in Orthodoxy – like washing hands before meals. No alcoholism and strict moral prohibition of extramarital sex led to extremely low rates of syphilis and gonorrhea. Unlike Ukrainian women, who normally returned to work three days after childbirth, Jewish women remained at home and cared for the newborn. Infanticide was unknown among the Jews. Doctors at the time believed Jews had acquired immunity to tuberculosis.91 The lack of sewage disposal and easy access to clean water characteristic of all small towns was made worse by overcrowding. Jewish writers of the period depicted the ghettos and shtetls as more dirty, smelly, filthy, unhealthy, squalid, and gloomy than poor Christian districts. Jewish recruits were weaker and sicklier than Christians in general, and the drafted had higher rejection rates – although these were close to those of poor Christians who came from similar crowded, dirty environments. Zemstvo medical services did not extend to Jews, and city hospitals accepted them only if they paid. Jews established their own private clinics and hospitals, of which there were 130 in the Ukrainian provinces by 1914. Local Jewish councils also funded rudimentary communal medical services. But Jews did not necessarily receive better care than their Christian neighbours. Sometimes an establishment run by one Jewish sect refused services to members of other sects.92 Most Jews had contempt and disregard for public health officials – Jewish and Christian. Jews in Poland were known to have fled disinfection centres during the war and to have burned them down. Except for the wealthy, most Jews, like Christians, still first resorted to self-treatment, herbs, charms, and local healers when sick. Although Jews were prepared to see Jewish as well as Christian medics when ill, they generally shared a suspicion of gentile government officials. It was still commonly believed that illness and death were private family matters best handled only by religious personages. Traditionalist/Hasidic rabbis disliked reformist/Haskalah Jewish doctors infringing on affairs that, according to the Talmud, fell within their purview. They argued, for instance, doctors could not write prescriptions on the Sabbath. Some Jewish doctors were reluctant to change popular sanitary practices, even in the face of epidemics and evidence of the benefits of proper hygiene, because of religious dictates. Jewish undertakers and cemetery employees, to cite another example, who disregarded the most basic tenets of disease prevention when handling corpses, also had no qualms about ignoring or disobeying local Christian health officials. This included not reporting disease and deaths. In German-controlled territories during the war, German medical officials, among whom were German Jews, were horrified at the condition of Jewish settlements, where death rates were usually higher than that of the Christian population.93

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Before the war, particularly in the wake of the 1892 cholera epidemic, reformist Jewish leaders, charities, and even Hasidic rabbis had begun to make concerted efforts, with limited success, to change their peoples’ behaviour in accord with modern standards. They also began establishing a single, separate Jewish system of health care within the empire. Many Jewish doctors, strongly influenced by populist ideals of serving the people, provided services free. In 1912, wealthy philanthropists in the empire and abroad organized the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (Obshchestvo okhraneniia zdorovia ievreiskogo naseleniia; as of 1921 – Obschestvo zdravookhraneniia ievreiev) to try and improve general conditions of health and sanitation. It functioned in Ukrainian provinces through 1919, as reported in its journal Izvestiia obshchestva okhraneniia zdorovia ievreiskogo naseleniia. By the outbreak of the war, there were more Jewish medical centres and hospitals proportionate to the total Jewish population than hospitals relative to the Christian population. Much like their Christian counterparts, most of the institutions left much to be desired and people saw them as a last unavoidable recourse. How Jewish and gentile doctors and systems interacted in Ukraine after 1917 is unstudied.

Nutrition and Disease Reports at the time depicted the poor as suffering from chronic malnutrition. They ate worse than the wealthier, had fewer children, and died younger. An 1890–91 study of 19,392 people in Poltava province showed the average age of death for landless peasants was fourteen, while the average age for those with forty acres or more was forty-one. The 15–20 per cent of households with seventy acres of land or more, livestock, and implements, were considered wealthy. The average family of five to six people with an average of twenty to twenty-seven acres; the necessary implements; fowl, cow, horse, or ox was self-sufficient and able to produce a surplus. As of 1914, on average, 50 per cent farmed that necessary minimum or more, and had at least one horse and/or cow – with the percentage being higher in the south and lower in the north. The average household allotment in the early 1900s was fifteen to twenty acres in northern provinces and thirty-five to forty in the southern. Per capita, the average had dropped from six to seven acres in 1861, to four in 1913.94 The amount of land held was an imprecise indicator of status and well-being, however. Amounts necessary for survival or surplus varied according to circumstances. Households with large allotments were not necessarily rich if they had no children, animals, or implements. Those with less could either rent land, work for wages, or spend more time fishing, or beekeeping, or manufacturing than farming to survive – or emigrate. Few families lived from farming alone, as members worked in trades and

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craft manufacturing. Thus, a rural family with little or no land, but who worked as tailors, potters, smiths, cobblers, or carpenters, or labourers, or rented land, was not necessarily poor. Also, those with rich soil would need less of it to produce a good crop than would those with poor soil. The poorest were those with small plots, no livestock, and many children who depended solely on seasonal day labour for wages. In 1913, the average wage for one day’s work during harvest time was one ruble – the cost of three pounds of pork. Other times, daily farm wages ranged from thirty to forty kopeks – the cost of a dozen eggs. The wealthier the family, the more vegetables, meat, and dairy products they consumed. However, high taxes and commodity prices, alongside low food prices, forced even the rich to eat little meat and to sell, rather than consume, most of their better-quality grain, butter, and eggs.95 Mykola Molodyk, from a village in the vicinity of Oleksandrivsk (Zaporizhzhia), recalled that, in the decade before the war, his seven-member family owned sixteen acres and rented forty. As a middle-level household, they lived comfortably and could save. His aunt’s family was poorer, with twenty-two acres. But they rented their land and also lived adequately – as did others who were poor. He remembered three families in the village who went hungry and suffered because they were drunks. Differences in wealth were little reflected either in dress, behaviour, or diet. As of 1916, hunger and shortages began to affect Oleksandrivsk, but life went on normally in his village – which did not suffer requisitioning or damage under the Germans in 1918. The first who suffered were the rich in late 1918, who refused to pay a levy or resisted requisitioning when Makhno occupied the village.96 In the Russian empire, there was an unprecedented mass movement from village to town and back of rural males seeking seasonal labour after the 1861 emancipation. The resulting free time and free movement had momentous social consequences that set a backdrop to developments after 1917. A landowning household, for example, on average, had to work 121 days to produce a crop. Those who did not want or have other occupations after 1861 were left with 244 idle days. Of those, 128 were recognized official holidays – duly celebrated with heavy drinking. To those 128, peasants added another 42 days of occasions they thought should be holidays according to popular customary tradition. After 1861, the number of men inclined to drink to oblivion also increased because not all could not cope with a life freed from paternalist landlord supervision and regulation. Zemstvo doctors in 1911 reported 0.3 per cent of all peasants in Ukraine’s zemstvo provinces (53,000) were mentally ill – an increase almost thirty-five times from the number reported in the 1860s (1,526 – 0.03 per cent of peasants counted). The 1911 number was probably higher in reality. The influx of seasonal rural workers to towns set the backdrop for the spread of syphilis. The infected

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spread it in their villages when they returned. Very few were willing to admit to the disease until it was so advanced that it was impossible to ignore – at which point they would go to a hospital. In 1887, one district in Katerynoslav province reported that 94 per cent of the patients in its hospitals were syphilitics.97 Russian provinces had the highest rates of infection probably because the majority of seasonal migrant workers were Russian men. While the rate of reported infection in 1913 for the central Russian provinces was 79 per 10,000, for the Ukrainian provinces, it was 45 – with Kherson and Kharkiv provinces having the highest rates – 77 and 66 respectively. Urban rates of infection were twice as high as rural rates – and probably even higher because not all private doctors provided data to local officials.98 At the turn of the century, as much as 20 per cent of imperial Russia’s population was recorded as infected. In the Russian empire, 65 per cent of those recorded were between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six. Among the twenty-nine provinces with an infection rate of 3 per cent or more of total population, only one was Ukrainian.99 The massive rapid migration into towns caused by industrialization facilitated contagion. Urban habitation exposed migrants, who had hitherto spent most of their time working outdoors, to crowded indoor working conditions. These spread among them diseases less prevalent in their villages, and against which they had little or no immunity. Usually living from hand to mouth, such migrants also probably ate less and worse than they did at home. When they returned home, they infected their families with whatever they had. Alternatively, more proficient collection of data may have created the illusion that people were worse off than their grandparents – when statistics were less precise. The highest imperial death rates as of 1910 were among children fifteen years and younger (654 per 1,000). The Ukrainian provinces had a lower infant death rate as of 1910 than Russian provinces (19 as opposed to 25 per 100 births). Ukraine’s rural death rate was lower than the urban rate, and lower for boys than girls, but both remained unchanged between 1886 and 1910.100 On average, the imperial death rate and infant death rate was much higher than in western European countries, and higher in Russian provinces than in the Ukrainian provinces. As of 1910, the imperial death rate (fifty provinces west of the Urals) for children under age one averaged 245 per 1,000. The eight Ukrainian provinces averaged 196 (334 for children under age five). Twenty-five Russian provinces averaged 294 (450 for children under age five). In general, infant death rates were high among Russians, lower among Ukrainians, and lowest among Jews. This was, in part, because of different mothering practices, and, in part, because the more southern location of Ukrainian lands had a longer growing season and more temperate climate than Russia.101

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In 1914, of twenty-two surveyed diseases, the most prevalent were flu (767,926 reported cases) and malaria (438,796 reported cases).102 In third place, four venereal-related diseases totalled 324,659 reported cases. As compared with figures from 1889, the increase in numbers of infected was higher than the total population increase – keeping in mind that the reported figures were minimum totals and recording and reporting was progressively improving. In general, the number of reported infected with the surveyed diseases during those twenty-five years, except for cholera, scurvy, and rural smallpox, which declined, apparently increased by an average of three times or more – greater than the population increase. Tuberculosis had the highest rate of increase, rising from 27,449 reported cases in 1889, to 216,078 in 1914. In the Ukrainian provinces on the eve of the war, the incidence of typhoid, typhus, and diphtheria per 10,000 people averaged twice the rate in Russia proper.103 In 1913, the most prevalent diseases were flu, malaria, and scabies, followed by the four venereal diseases. Between 1902 and 1913, the total number of reported infected from the surveyed diseases, excluding the four venereal cases, had increased by approximately 620,000 (see table 9). However, in light of population increase, that total was arguably not excessive. It suggests that improvements in services and infrastructure were beginning to have an impact in the final years of the tsarist regime. Even Kyiv province, where zemstva were established only after 1905, and whose medical services were less developed than in those provinces where they had functioned since the 1860s, saw an increase in the number of hospital beds per head of rural population from 1:5,700 in 1904, to 1:3,400 in 1911.104 As electrical, water and sewage systems, medical facilities, and knowledge slowly spread, reported instances showed an overall decline in death rates and rise in birth rates. Survey materials collected by urban professionals in pre-war tsarist Ukrainian provinces show living conditions for the majority were dirty and unhygienic by the standards of north-western European national states that had begun reforms decades earlier. Those who lived unwashed, in an environment of dirt roads, animals, coal stoves, cold, damp, vermin-infested dwellings, and open kerosene lamps, in high-density poor urban districts and villages, were more susceptible to disease than those who washed and lived with electricity, paved roads, insulated dwellings, and without animals. The wealthier were somewhat cleaner with better living conditions. They had lower death rates and fewer illnesses than the poorer.105 As of 1910, the average imperial life expectancy was thirty-one years for men and thirty-three for women. The average for the Russian provinces was the same. The average for north-western Europe and the Ukrainian provinces was approximately ten years higher. Ukrainian death rates, in 1913,

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were almost twice as high as in Denmark.106 As far as could be determined at the time, death and birth rates in pre-war tsarist towns, except in the Baltic provinces, were lower than in villages, but towns still had mass epidemics of typhus and smallpox. Overall, Ukraine’s pre-war populations appear to have been healthier than Russia’s. Odesa, Riga, and Warsaw had the best public-health infrastructure. They were the cleanest cities and had the lowest death rates in the empire, but even there, the rates were higher than in western European cities of the same size. In the 1890s, death rates per 100,000 inhabitants from infectious diseases in the Russian empire west of the Urals were twice to four times that in western European countries.107 As the war progressed, health and sanitation improvements stopped. Cars and trams disappeared; horses reappeared. Services shrank, numbers of transient dispossessed increased, city work staffs shrank, and manure and garbage piles grew as never before. By January 1918, in almost all Ukrainian towns all collection had stopped.108 By 1917, the effects on health were appearing, particularly during the spring thaw in towns, on a malnourished population living in stuffy, damp dwellings where temperatures hovered just above freezing in winter. Contagion was facilitated. Numbers of dead rose.

Western Ukraine Although Austria-Hungary undertook major health and sanitation improvement projects in the decades before the war, levels of public health and sanitation in tsarist-Ukraine’s small towns and villages were apparently higher than in neighbouring western Ukraine. In villages close to the local manor, the better-off would mimic new ideas, trends, and behaviour they saw the aristocracy had adopted – who, unlike their tsarist counterparts, resided on their estates. The lady of the manor often kept a pharmacy locals went to for medicine. Nonetheless, damp, dirt, fleas and bedbugs, and infections remained the norm for most people. In western Ukraine, much like farther east, only town centres had paved streets on the eve of the war. Beyond, unpaved streets meant that, after heavy storms and each spring, mud could be so deep that horses had difficulty getting through. The standing water was dirty and polluted. People were generally reluctant to go to a hospital if there was one in the vicinity. As in tsarist-Ukraine, the older the person, the fewer teeth they had.109 At the turn of the century, Lviv streets were overflowing with filth, excrement, and garbage. In small towns until the end of the century, people still relieved themselves in public in daylight with no one minding. Observers recorded piles of excrement lying in entrance doorways and that, in small towns, animals and humans “lived together in perfect harmony.” Wandering pigs ate most everything that was in the streets. Depending on how many districts are included in

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eastern Galicia, there averaged anywhere from 36,000 to 44,000 persons for each of the province’s eighty-seven public and private hospitals. The average for tsarist Ukrainian provinces was 20,000. In the decade before the war, western Ukraine also had a lower life expectancy and higher death rates than tsarist Ukrainian provinces. While the city of Lviv had a very low level of syphilis infection (9 per 10,000) in 1896, the rate for Stanyslaviv province between the years 1902 and 1918 fluctuated between 500 and 800 per 10,000.110 In 1931, the author of a guidebook to Chortkiv still described its Jewish ghetto as follows: “It is a wonder, how in the 20th century, people can live and work in such conditions.”111

chApteR 2

Living Conditions Under Ukrainian Governments Lice devoured the Ukrainian state … its army … everything.

Dr Vasyl Nalyvaiko (Proskuriv, October 1919)1

In November 1918, Polish nationalists declared independence and began forming a government. Historians today allot that moment particular significance. What they overlooked, until recently, is that independence was probably not the first thing on all peoples’ minds. That month, Warsaw was a very cold and dark place, with a hungry, unemployed population whose primary occupation, if they were among those lucky enough not to be bedridden by disease, was looking for food and fuel. Streets were filled with beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and long queues at stores or soup kitchens. Speculators and black marketeers spent fortunes in a thriving underground nightlife. Public transport was almost non-existent. A major concern of the city council was to ensure police stations had enough coffins for the dead.2 Americans in the spring of 1919 reported no children playing in Warsaw’s streets because they were not strong enough to play.3 The situation was much the same farther east. In Kyiv, when the government declared western and eastern Ukraine united into one state in January 1919, no one remembered when the filthy streets and government buildings had last been cleaned. There was no heating, so staff who did come to work wore their sheepskins at their desks. Men with moustaches had icicles hanging from them – indoors.4 Kyiv city library had closed two months earlier when its indoor temperature averaged 3°c . The pedagogical museum, once the seat of the Central Rada, was used as an overcrowded detention centre whose inmates were seething with lice and where the toilets were “beyond description.”5

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The Central Rada and the Ukrainian State The Rada claimed authority in a country whose people were already suffering the consequences of war-time destruction, upheaval, and shortages. By 1917, non-military related production had collapsed and pre-war reform plans, shelved. Rapid deterioration of infrastructure and services and urban malnutrition had made more people susceptible to infection and disease than previously.6 Local clinics, hospitals, with staff that had not been conscripted, were swamped by waves of refugees and wounded soldiers. Incidence of diseases rose accordingly. In Poltava province, by 1916, there were 30 per cent fewer rural births and 25 per cent fewer urban births than in 1914. While the rural death rate fell, the urban death rate had risen 14 per cent. These tendencies were likely the same in other provinces.7 In the spring of 1917, Kamianets-Podilskyi’s Sanitation Commission was informing people the city was awash in filth and garbage. Although it was doing what it could, the commission begged rich and poor to clean their surroundings as, otherwise, all would suffer from the diseases that would inevitably arise.8 Zemstva clinics began to charge for their services after February 1917 and sent back those who could not pay to their families – who spread contagion. Many others who fell ill no longer bothered to seek medical help.9 Rising prices, shortages, inflation, devaluation, and rising criminality changed moral values as more people lied, cheated, and stole to survive. Bakers used less flour in bread. Some added lead to make loaves appear as if they were full measure. Merchants increased prices because only large denomination notes circulated and they could not give change. When the disappearance of copper led to the disappearance of small denominations, people employed various illegal stratagems to obtain them. Speculators bought from peasants on roads bringing produce to town in the early morning, and then resold the goods for higher prices at the markets. By 1916, after initial enthusiasm over the benefits of prohibition had passed, people were drinking again – illegally – and often concoctions of various toxins that killed them. For a fee, doctors gave phony prescriptions for medicinal alcohol that was legally available in pharmacies. While men suffered in battle, increasing numbers of their wives, daughters, sisters, and widows turned to prostitution to make ends meet. Rural women, without their men, besides their normal chores, had the added burden of heavy fieldwork, sometimes without horses or oxen. Resulting physical injuries were often chronic, yet women would normally refuse a stay in bed for whatever treatment was available because the demands of child care forbade it. In 1923, a village doctor in central Ukraine recorded that 60 per cent of those who passed through the local hospital were women.10

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After the collapse of the monarchy, central funding for cities progressively decreased and people stopped paying taxes. Municipal services like welfare and policing deteriorated, and eventually ceased. Conscripted city workers, low wages for those who remained, and too few horses and wagons meant garbage collection diminished in frequency or stopped. The refuse and excrements that people dumped in huge piles in yards, parks, or city streets were bigger than before 1914, stayed there longer and were soon infested with many more rats, flies, and wild dogs. In Kyiv in July 1918, the city authorities requested forty horses from the army to help remove the garbage. None were forthcoming as the army had none to lend. Berdychiv city council that same month reported that the city was flooded with garbage and requested funds to pay for more wagons and cartage-barrels to remove it. There is no record of a response. In Bila Tserkva, garbage lay unremoved in the centre of town. The situation was worse in the suburbs. In the Jewish quarter, people threw their trash out of the windows. In markets, buying and selling went on amid piles of filth. Mohyliv-Podilskyi in autumn 1917 was the first stop for army trains returning from the front, each of which disgorged hundreds of walking wounded who tried to make it to the hospital. The corpses of those who could not lay where they fell for days as the town did not have the carts to remove them. The hospital had no beds or medicine, and a nurse who worked there estimated as many as thirty-five of every forty died daily. Because the cemetery was full, the dead could not be buried but only covered with some dirt. At night, dogs would dig out the bodies and chew at them.11 By 1917, urban dwellers spent most daylight hours standing while buying and selling at street markets. Food, clothing, fuel, and even liquor prices rose uncontrollably. Massive amounts of stolen goods from state enterprises and army depots were sold on black markets. Cities always seemed to have many more ration cards in circulation than people. In 1918, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled, legally and illegally, to Ukraine where life under German protection was preferable to life under the Bolsheviks. These fugitives included Russian peasants. As urban conditions deteriorated, townsfolk increasingly migrated to the countryside where food was more readily available. Because money became increasingly worthless with each passing month, and the products peasants needed, scarce, those who still produced surplus grain traded less and ate more of it. What remained, they either hid or distilled into liquor – which sold at much higher prices than the grain needed to make it would have sold for. Floods of refugees including not only the displaced, but prisoners of war, unemployed officials, and criminals, began flowing east from the front in 1915. Their presence strained what resources remained at their destinations. In 1915 alone, 366,000 passed through the eastern city of Kharkiv, 46,000

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of whom remained. Between 1914 and 1916, the city’s recorded population had increased by 33,000 – but was likely much higher given that many remained unregistered. Among the registered refugees were 2,000 workers. Those who did find work, by 1916, were making no more than unskilled workers. Those who did not, lived in terrible conditions. Both dissatisfied groups provided willing recruits for the Bolshevik party. As the city council had to direct increasing amounts of money into welfare for the newcomers, there was less for infrastructure maintenance – already in decline because many of the city’s workers had been drafted in 1914. As prices, taxes, and the population rose, services, transport, and roads deteriorated. One factor that kept conditions from being even worse than what they were, at least until 1916, was that the city was able to use twice as much water as in 1912 because the sanitation system had not yet collapsed.12 The destruction of housing and infrastructure in the front-line provinces of Volyn and Podillia made the situation there much worse than farther east. As refugees and migrants inflated urban populations, prices for rent and accommodation rose. In the summer of 1918, the provincial capital of Vinnytsia’s registered population had grown by over 10,000 from its 1914 total, and the city no longer had the resources to maintain the severely strained services. By 1917, families who could not pay rent because their men were at the front, or dead, were being evicted – adding to the homeless population. The collapse of the building trade contributed to the housing shortage. By 1917, rental advertisements had disappeared from Kyiv newspapers. As supplies of oil and coal, which were directed to the war industry, dwindled for civilians, the power stations had to ration electricity. That meant dark nights and limited times for pumped water. No energy meant bakeries had to close, and buildings on the piped-water system got no water. Kerosene, tallow, and wax, if available, were expensive. No less consequential was the disappearance of cheap matches. People stopped obeying sanitation regulations and, if they had to, preferred to pay fines, because that was easier and cheaper than cleaning. Dirty streets provided breeding grounds for rats, flies, and rabid dogs. As coal disappeared, increasing use of wood for fuel led to deforestation and the destruction of urban parks and trees. As the price of firewood increased, indoor winter temperatures fell. The winter of 1917 was particularly frigid with temperatures falling to −20°c . Shortage of fuels not only resulted in cold dwellings, but an inability to boil water, which was usually contaminated, and so engendered cholera. Huddling for warmth in winter facilitated the spread of bedbugs, lice, and typhus. Buildings that were progressively stripped of their wooden doors, frames, floor and ceiling boards for firewood, slowly buckled, and some collapsed, reducing further available housing space and intensifying overcrowding.

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Deteriorating conditions led to the first registered outbreaks in 1915 of what, by 1919, became massive epidemics. In December 1918, Kyiv medical officials noted serious levels of typhus infection that had been already reported in the provinces that summer. That same summer, cholera broke out in Kharkiv city, and typhus in Kharkiv province. Volyn and Podillia provinces reported typhus in February 1918. The progressive increase in the number of infected and spread of contagion was described in Ukrainian Health Ministry press and provincial reports through 1918 up to January 1919. Schools and factories began being closed that fall to impede contagion.13 In 1920, after five months of malnutrition and a two-month bout of typhus, one survivor found a mirror and recorded, “I am a mere caricature of myself. My eyes are deeply sunken in their sockets, my head is full of bald spots where the hair has fallen out, and my beard … long and straggly. That is how we all look. The women had to get their hair cut-off short … typhus causes it to fall out anyways.”14 Masses of wounded soldiers, passengers in rail stations waiting for late trains, and refugees, either in camps or billeted on homeowners, created large concentrations of humans without adequate facilities who carried infections and diseases. The humans and the facilities were inevitably soon infested with germ-carrying lice, cockroaches, maggots, bedbugs, and fleas. As train wagons and stations stopped being maintained, the pests, filth, and number of transients increased. Kyiv’s main rail station had become a huge flop house by December 1918, packed solid with soldiers, refugees, and private traders (“bagmen”) – some infected with diseases and all covered in lice. Dozens, if not hundreds, literally lived there, and every day a dozen or two corpses were removed from the halls. Station authorities reported it was impossible to clean and renovate without evacuating the station – which was also impossible.15 Refugees contributed to the spread of typhus and cholera because they travelled with little if any food, shelter, or clean clothing. Mortality rates among refugees at one rail junction in November 1918 was reported at 20 to 25 per cent.16 Distance could provide security for civilians, because the farther a settlement was from a rail station, the less chance it would be on the path of an invading force or a destination for refugees. Nonetheless, officials routed refugees to destinations distant from rail stations to avoid already overflowing settlements, and so they slowly spread their diseases to remote, previously uninfected populations. In small towns and villages, local officials had become indifferent about their medical facilities by 1918 and made little effort to maintain them. Government and transport had collapsed, and, with them, financing and supply ceased. All passing troops would inevitably occupy clinics and hospitals not yet vandalized because they were usually the best kept in the settlement. They used what could be

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burned for fuel, and, when withdrawing, took with them any supplies they could, including bedding. By 1917, all metal production had been directed to armaments and little was available for civilian use. Consequently, blacksmith shops, short not only of metal, but tools, coal, and of their drafted blacksmiths, either shut down or produced a fraction of their pre-war outputs. That meant no sickles, scythes, axes, shovels, pitchforks, washbasins, saws, or nails, not to mention soap or civilian clothes, could be found anywhere except the black market at outrageous prices. Beginning in 1914, shortages became more serious with each passing year. In general, for the average white- or blue-collar worker, the bigger the town they lived in, and the fewer relatives they had, the worse and less frequently they ate. Those without rural relatives either sold or traded belongings for food as long as they could, made gardens on empty land, worked in nearby villages for food, or simply migrated to villages. In 1914, villagers no longer had to produce for export. By 1918, they paid few if any taxes. They consequently produced less and consumed more of what they did produce. Government purchase of foodstuffs in 1914–15 left them with lots of cash, but, by 1916, the shift to war production, fixed prices, and inflation left them with nothing to buy. That meant an inability to repair or build. As sugar and salt became scarce, peasants could preserve less of what they produced. Buried grain in sacks will rot in time. It was reasonable, therefore, to turn unprofitable, unconsumed surplus grain into very profitable moonshine – which did not spoil and was more valuable as a barter item on the black market per unit than the amount of grain needed to make it. Through the war years, the urban price of food steadily rose, while its quality declined. That resulted in higher levels of malnourishment for the urban than the rural population, and lower resistance to cold and disease except among the rich. The bigger the city, the higher the prices, and worse the food. By the end of 1917 already, bread was arriving to stores half-baked and smelling of damp because it was usually made from old, mouldy flour. Half the eggs on sale were usually rotten. Milk that looked like milk tasted like water and stank. Meat was usually bad or consisted of bones, fat, and sinew.17 Spiralling prices in Kyiv resulted in food adulteration with lead, sawdust, straw, and cat and dog meat. Tea and coffee were rare and expensive. Kyiv’s two dairy farms that supplied its milk reported in November 1918 that, unless they got funds for fodder, they could no longer provide milk.18 The high cost or complete lack of soap, among other commodities, meant already weak and malnourished people could wash neither themselves nor their clothing or bedding. Soldiers released from hospitals were often issued back the same dirty uniforms they had arrived in because they could not be laundered. By 1919, sewage systems, in the few towns that had them, were,

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as a rule, broken down. An overall rise in criminality during the war years was abetted by unenforceable regulations and rationing that produced black markets, and forged coupons and permits. By 1915, the bootlegging generated by the Dry Law and increased unsold grain, led to the disappearance of yeast from the open market, which, in turn, contributed to the reduced quantity and quality of baked goods. The disappearance of legal alcohol was matched by an increase in cocaine use and more gambling with ever-rising stakes among those who had money. The only cheap and plentiful commodities in towns by 1919 were army uniforms, moonshine, small arms, and small-arms ammunition. Adolescent girls selling themselves on city street corners and in what were left of city parks, mostly chopped down for fuel by then, were also cheap and plentiful.19 Binge drinking swept town and country. It is difficult today to believe accounts describing, already in 1917, the swinish gusto with which men drank. Whether or not women partook is unclear. In the spring of that year, a Kyivan newspaper reported that, in one village, the authorities, in accordance with the Dry Law, had confiscated and poured a store of eighty-proof grain spirits into the ground. It formed a huge mud lake and seeped under a steam boiler. Local inhabitants would shovel the mud into sacks and sell them for ten rubles each to buyers who then somehow extracted half a bottle of liquor from their purchase. So much earth was dug and sold that the boiler collapsed and killed a number of scavengers underneath. Nevertheless, the digging, selling, bottling, and drinking went on. A similar incident is reported from near the town of Vinnytsia that year. There, the authorities had dumped the contents of the local distillery into the ground and the locals, as they had farther east, proceeded to suck out the liquor as best they could – mud and all. Elsewhere in the region, men would jump into full vats and drink until they drowned. The local educated did not imbibe directly from the vats with the looters. They watched from a distance and bought from them. The dead drunk were stripped half-naked and robbed where they lay by other drunks and bystanders. Drunks who entered distilleries with lit cigarettes, or who lit matches inside, would blow them up and burn to death inside. In one such instance in Kyiv province, an eyewitness reported that the crowd ignored people who had managed to get outside and were burning in front of them. They focused on scooping up the liquor trickling out of the distillery into a nearby pond. The stream was aflame and the local policeman ordered a wagon-load of manure dumped on it to put out the flames. People later returned, scooped out the mixture, took it home, filtered it, and drank the result.20 As the need for medical services, supplies, and personnel grew, their availability shrank. Before the war, as much as 70 per cent of all medical instruments and medicines were imported from Germany and Austria.

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During the war, supplies were directed to the army and became luxury items for the much-reduced numbers of civilian doctors and medics whose patients had to stand for hours to see them. As hospitals lost government funding, they either had to close or charge patients – which Kyiv’s largest hospital began to do in 1918.21 Besides the overall lack of facilities, personnel, and funding to provide care, the little hospital space available in 1918 was reduced by German and Austrian officers commandeering them for their own troops. In reply to German demands to isolate by force, if necessary, all who came in contact with the infected, the Ukrainian Health Ministry replied it could not because there was no law that allowed it, and in any case, such a law could not have been enforced.22 Zemstvo hospitals continued to charge for services. Incompetence and sabotage made bad situations worse. In 1917, after the collapse of the tsarist army, Rada officials failed to take over massive army medical depots, whose supplies were systematically looted. Afterwards, Hetman Skoropadsky appointed a White Russian chief medical officer for the army, who systematically began replacing Ukrainian army doctors with Russians. Under his tenure, remaining massive medical depots scattered throughout Ukraine were either transferred to the White Army on the Don, or continued to be looted. By November 1918, there was almost nothing left in them.23 By 1919, doctors and hospitals, civilian and military, could only obtain what was left of those supplies at high prices at town markets. During the last months of the UnR ’s existence, corruption was rife and massive. The millions officials stole, obviously meant the army and doctors got little.24 The hetman created Ukraine’s first Ministry of Health and its situation reports covered the entire country for most of 1918. They present a picture of general collapse. That summer, they noted what remained of the medical system in the former front provinces Volyn and Podillia had broken down. Many clinics and hospitals that still functioned reported severe overcrowding and patients lying on floors.25 That autumn in Kyiv, because regulations were not enforced, the street markets/bazaars where most people bought their food were filthy. Vegetable and animal waste lay around dirty stalls covered in swarms of flies. Pigs and dogs roamed the area eating what they could find. Because there were no toilets anywhere near, sellers and buyers relieved themselves wherever they could. A similar situation was reported in Bila Tserkva. The town of Vinnytsia (population 75,000), had only one functioning hospital with twenty-five beds – and that was the local Jewish hospital. Kovno (population 20,000) had only one doctor.26 Against this backdrop of general decline, a drought between March and June of 1918, the ensuing bad harvest and malnutrition, the great flu epidemic arrived and killed more people that year than did typhus. Figures from fourteen small towns and villages in Kyiv province from 15 to 31 August show 1,916 of a total of

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2,273 reported sick had influenza. It killed 134 of the 203 that died during those weeks. In Kharkiv province that October, the flu killed a few hundred each week. In Kharkiv district and parts of Poltava and Kyiv provinces, up to half the populace was infected, and the recorded death rate in the former averaged 20 per cent. Local officials wrote to Kyiv explaining it was impossible to cope with the flu, syphilis, and gonorrhea, not the least because of the astronomical rise in the cost of medicines and materials that were available.27 The outbreak of war brought with it a massive increase in the number of venereal-infected troops. Figures from the Moscow general hospital from 1914 indicate 7,000 venereal cases entered in November, and again in December. By 1915, there were 1,500 infected soldiers per doctor. Commanding generals were so shocked they refused infected troops leave for treatment. One in three soldiers in the army who survived three years of service had syphilis or gonorrhea. By July 1917, they totalled an estimated two million imperial troops.28 That almost equalled the total reported military and civilian cases for the entire empire in the 1890s – between 1,248,000 and 2,000,000. The first Ukrainian Women’s Congress, held in Kyiv in September 1917, drew attention to the problem and appealed to generals to cure infected troops and inspect the demobilized. By 1917, when the collapse of the army included the collapse of its medical services, the situation worsened – not only with respect to venereal but all diseases.29 Why the year 1918 recorded the fewest number of reported infections for eight diseases (222,000) for the period 1915–23 is unexplained.30 The rising numbers of syphilis- and gonorrhea-infected created a market for quack remedies, as reflected in popular newspapers.31 These had contained the occasional quack advertisements for sexual diseases before 1914. Their number increased during the war, and, by 1917, Kyivan newspapers had entire pages filled with nothing but advertisements for quack remedies (see figure 11). Dr. Morna’s Blenozol Pills, for instance, offered a guaranteed cure for gonorrhea after using only five boxes (Iuzhnaia kopeika, 28 January 1917). The failure of the 1917 summer offensive, and the collapse of the army, created a massive flow of demobilized, demoralized troops through Ukrainian territories. Their role in land seizures and fomenting rural anarchy is well known. Less well known is that many of the returning soldiers brought home with them not only lice and Bolshevik propaganda leaflets, but syphilis and gonorrhea bacilli – diseases that, alongside typhus and cholera, were the most widespread and deadly in Ukraine during these years. By 1918 in Kyiv province, zemstvo officials reported syphilis had become so commonplace and widespread in villages that it had attained the status of commonplace “household illness” (pobutova khoroba). From an already high general rate of 8 infections per 1,000 in 1909, the reported rate had risen

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to 13–22 per 1,000 in 1918, among which 60 to 80 per cent of the reported infected were women and children. In one Kyiv city hospital before the war, an average of 4,000 cases were registered annually. In 1918, that figure had risen to 25,000.32 In June 1918, officials reported that the spread of syphilis in Podillia province was phenomenal, and they were totally unable to cope. In Kharkiv, a Duma report noted that the 15,000 syphilitic soldiers who came to the city monthly, where they stayed until they could be evacuated further, did not scrupulously obey instructions to abstain. As noted, before the war, high rates of syphilis were centred in Russian provinces, introduced there by migrant workers. By 1918, syphilis raged also in Ukraine, where it was spread by returning soldiers. By July of that year, there were eastern Ukrainian villages wherein all families had at least one infected member.33 In the west, every village in Vinnytsia district in 1919 had syphilitics.34 While the number of civilian sick rose, the number of doctors fell because all except the retired were conscripted. Extant Central Rada statistics from early 1918 show that for all the Ukrainian provinces, there were 212 civilian doctors in government service, alongside approximately the same number of medics. These presumably excluded Red Cross and Jewish doctors who worked in Jewish hospitals.35 When the army demobilized, so did all of its doctors. This meant they no longer got paid and, as governments came and went, their requests for wages circulated for months from one office to another as officials tried to determine who should pay them.36 In the meantime, they remained unpaid. Low wages or no wages led some to take advantage of the situation creatively. In Kyiv, doctors in one hospital are on record as offering a bed and care for 450 rubles a day.37 As of 1918, under the hetman, higher pay and somewhat better conditions resulted in more medical personnel migrating to towns, thus denuding an already much-understaffed rural system. In Kharkiv city in 1918, for instance, there were 528 (1:1,650) doctors, as opposed to 280 (1:19,000) in the rest of the province. Those that remained outside the larger towns were overworked. Figures from central Ukraine in 1918 show rural staff averaged ten operations and twenty-five to forty consultations daily. Not the least of doctors’ problems was the gradual disappearance of affordable or free medicines, because, by 1918, the number of pharmacies in Ukraine had dwindled to half of their pre-war total. That summer, when the average daily worker’s wage was five to eight karbovantsi, the average price for a prescription in private pharmacies was six karbovantsi. Imports from Germany in 1918 were too few to improve the situation. As of 1918, three pharmaceutical plants functioned in Ukraine.38 Doctors suffered, as everyone else, from previously unimaginable price rises and devaluation. In a petition to the ministry, they complained of malnourishment and penury. Senior physicians in Kyiv province did not

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retire. They had no idea of what they could do if they did not practise and feared they would starve. Whereas in 1914 their monthly salary of 100 rubles had been adequate, they now claimed 500 to 800 was necessary only to cover expenses. In cities, establishing additional private practice hours was not possible because doctors had to deal with so many corpses, they risked infecting their live patients with something. In the country, the rural doctors that remained had stopped visiting villages because, since 1917, their travel expenses were no longer covered. Whereas some doctors were afraid to retire, in Kherson province there was a collective resignation citing low pay as the reason.39

The Directory From its first days, the UnR was flooded with reports from provincial officials about raging epidemics and their total inability to carry out their duties in the absence of money, resources, and personnel.40 Underlying the spread of disease were the sanitary conditions in cities and towns that had been deteriorating since 1914. There was little evidence of German “order” during the last weeks of the hetman’s rule. Kyiv would go without pumped water for as many as ten days straight and residents had to rely on rainfall. Streets were filthy because there were no horses to pull the garbage-collection wagons. Huge piles arose at dumps in various parts of town where they stank as they slowly rotted. At the city’s main market, the Bessarabka, the daily Health Ministry report noted, “There was much evidence of the lack of public toilets.” Conditions in hospitals and prisons were appalling. In February 1919 in Kyiv, there were sixty to seventy cases reported daily of typhus alone.41 While individual towns did create special emergency central committees to coordinate treatment and care, there was no such organization at the national level. Ministerial organizational mismanagement and incompetence under the Directory in 1919 was all too common. Whites or Bolsheviks, or Poles or speculators, stole supplies and facilities that remained after the collapse of the hetmanate, or available supplies were not where they were most needed. Individual warlords would commandeer supplies and then refuse to give them either to the Health Ministry or the regular army. That summer, seventy-seven wagons of medical supplies the ZUnR had managed to dispatch eastwards before it collapsed had disappeared.42 The army’s chief medical inspector reported in March 1920 that, the summer previous, total administrative chaos and an inability to police led to little or none of available funds being spent on army medical supplies. He requested a public collection of bedding and supplies in June. It was initiated only in November – when the government was on the verge of collapse. In Proskuriv and Zhmerynka,

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medicines from two pharmacies brought from Kyiv in the spring of 1919 were sold to speculators. Anti-Ukrainian rail workers gave away thirty-two hospital trains to either the Bolsheviks or the Poles – leaving the army with two.43 Local authorities also were often incompetent. A horse died near a church in Vinnytsia. Its corpse lay there for a number of days stinking to high heaven as the dogs tore it apart because no one could decide who was responsible for removing corpses from streets.44 A former officer later wrote that most army hospitals by autumn 1919 were places of such gruesome horrors that soldiers avoided them if they possibly could. Those who could, ran away as soon as they could, to their units, any nearby domicile that would take them, or to rail stations where they hoped to get trains home. He claimed that in late September 1919, in the basement of Zhmerynka station, workers found 600 corpses of such walking wounded and sick, who had died there seeking shelter while waiting for a train. The stations’ marble stairs were covered with blackened straw and hundreds of soldiers dead and dying from typhus. In the Mohyliv army hospital in November 1919, patients were freezing to death in their beds because there was no heating, and the dead lay unburied for weeks.45 The desolation that reigned in the town of Zviahel in Volyn province, after it had been retaken by Ukrainian forces in vicious fighting with Polish and Bolshevik troops in August 1919, was perhaps typical of towns on a battle line. The pre-war population of 28,000 had shrunk to 2,000 – with another estimated 13,000 fled to neighbouring settlements or living in the woods. Not only Jews suffered. Tradesmen and artisans had all fled. Fleeing Bolsheviks set the town on fire. Everything they could not take with them, they destroyed. With winter coming, those who remained not only lacked shelter, clothing, and fuel, but even pots to cook in. Wandering gangs killed and raped during the battles whoever they came across. The Catholic and Orthodox churches were desecrated, and priests stripped and beaten in the streets. There was no one to bury the dead, which animals ate as they lay in the streets – leaving only the bones. The incoming UnR authorities could do nothing. The governor was bombarded daily with pleas and complaints about marauding Ukrainian troops.46 Typhus and smallpox raged west of the Dnipro from the autumn of 1919. Sick soldiers quartered in private dwellings because there was no room in hospitals, and who usually tried to avoid being sent there, infected the civilians. The government set up an special committee to deal with the epidemic, but besides publishing warnings and instructions, it did little because of the chronic shortage of supplies, facilities, and personnel. Unlike their Bolshevik counterparts, Ukrainian officials could only collect rudimentary estimates on total numbers of infected and dead. As in Bolshevik territories, working conditions in Ukrainian hospitals were bad, and death rates among medical

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personnel, high. Because there was no fuel for heating, those who survived typhus risked dying from pneumonia. By January 1920, hospital death rates were as high as 50 per cent.47 A report from late 1919 noted that typhus infection in Podillia province averaged at least 400 monthly, as opposed to the pre-war average of 40 to 50 annually.48 In the summer of 1919, doctors in Proskuriv’s biggest army hospitals, which had expanded from 200 beds in 1914 to 1,100 beds, had somehow miraculously managed to restore and clean a complex the size of a village. But without medicines, they could do little but watch how young men with dysentery died in terrible pain in front of their eyes, in wards which medics, fearful of contagion, refused to enter.49 In the wake of the Ukrainian army’s retreat in the fall of 1919, Dunaevtsi was one of the towns where it left its sick and wounded. According to a member of Ukraine’s state theatre troupe who travelled through the town for two weeks, 300 soldiers had been left totally to themselves without doctors, nurses, or staff in an old factory with broken windows and no heating because there was no more room in hospitals. Some men lay naked. The floor was so covered with garbage and excrement it was impossible to walk without stepping on it. Some, delirious with fever, ran back and forth mindlessly through the filth. Typhus patients lay with frozen legs. The horrific conditions were unimaginable, he later related to his troupe. They then published a letter to the editor on the subject, with an urgent request for people to help the unfortunates.50 Besides medics, nurses, and orderlies, garbage collectors were in such short supply they qualified for draft exemption. In Kamianets-Podilskyi in September 1919, a draft notice arrived for Gustv-Fridrykh Adolf-Frantsevych Solomon, who went and showed it to the mayor. Sometime later the mayor sent a letter to the general staff requesting an exemption. He wrote Solomon was a specialist in the elimination of stray and rabid dogs, and the man responsible for cleaning city streets. As such, he was indispensable to the city and impossible to replace.51 By 1920, city officials in Kamianets-Podilskyi had stored 12,000 barrels of garbage and excrement, while Vinnytsia and Zhmerynka had 20,000 stored wagon loads each of filth. That October, a suburb of Kamianets-Podilskyi, with a population of approximately 1,000 in 1897, needed sixty horses and fifteen waste barrels to remove, daily, eighty to one hundred barrels of garbage to the local dump. But the authorities only had two barrels and one horse with which they could not remove more than eight to ten barrels. The leftovers, piled fence-high on the streets, joined the human excrement that residents also evacuated onto the streets from their doors and windows. Added to the mixture were animal entrails because sellers slaughtered cattle in the streets. Ever since the hospital lost its wagon, cleaners dumped its garbage and excrement on the street in front. The reporter added, “There is

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a very good climate for disease but no one is fighting this although all see it and all want to protect themselves.”52 In the town of Khmilnyk, 20,000 of its 25,000 population was Jewish. The poor lived two to three families per two to three rooms by late 1919. Bathing was difficult or impossible; clean changes of clothing were rare or non-existent. In the town, typical of others in the region, there were no public toilets or empty garbage pits. People threw excrement and garbage directly out of their windows and doors – or into the same local river that they used for drinking water. Those who did have a toilet of some sort could only have its pit emptied if they were rich, since the one man who had a barrel, horse, and cart for waste charged high removal rates. As the barrel was small and the roads bumpy, the cart’s trail could be seen and smelled by all. Kremenchuh was another city awash in filth. With sixty to eighty barrels available for garbage removal in 1914, by 1920 it had only ten, so the filth piled up. Attempts to regulate by decree had no effect because there was nothing with which to clean. Since garbage could not be removed to a dump, the remaining city workers spread it in piles around the city. Public toilets were used until they overflowed and were surrounded by little creeks. At that point, citizens relieved themselves in ever-widening areas around them.53 In March 1920, the retreating Bolshevik army had slaughtered a few thousand of its horses for lack of fodder some two miles outside of Mohyliv in Volyn province. They skinned the corpses for leather and left them on the open ground to rot. The resulting stink and vermin infestation was intolerable. Because the city did not have the funds to either burn or bury the remains, workers simply dragged them into shallow ditches and covered them with dirt. The spring rains uncovered the remains, which then stank even more after rotting for three months.54 In May 1919, the Entente refused to recognize the UnR  – mainly thanks to White Russian and Polish delegations who claimed it was Bolshevik. One consequence of the ensuing blockade was that no relief missions were allowed into Ukraine as they were into Poland. The last train with Red Cross relief supplies reached Ukraine in early November 1919. Originally organized in June by the Austrian Red Cross by request of the ZUnR government, the train took five months to reach UnR territory. Refused passage by the Polish government, it had to travel via Romania.55 The Swiss officer commanding the twenty-three–wagon train, Major Lederrey, was horrified by what he saw in Podillia province. This included witnessing the hotel maid removing used paper from the toilet bowl, washing it, and then placing it by the seat again for reuse. He was also struck by what he did not see, no children under seven, and few women with full heads of hair. Like men, most had shaved to avoid lice. While the infected awaited death, a doctor told him, the healthy awaited infection. Prices, given in “Ukrainian rubles,” as compared with 1914,

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he noted, were unimaginable. At a time when workers made 6,000 to 7,000 rubles monthly, a doctor earned 1,000 and a nurse, 720. Shoes had risen from 10 rubles to between 2,000 and 3,000; eggs from 4 to 5 kopeks to 3 rubles each; one pound of bread from 4 kopeks to between 10 and 20 rubles. A cup of tea at a restaurant cost 4 to 5 rubles. Clothing was so expensive on the black market that no one could afford to buy it. He noted the wife of a doctor he had met had made herself a dress from a burlap sack – the sacks often also served as hospital blankets. Because no fuel was available for his train’s engine, he had to request permission from local officials to tear up and use rail ties. On the eve of its collapse, UnR territory in Podillia province, with approximately four million people, contained twenty-four hospitals  – among which were some where the entire staff was infected with something. Lederrey estimated one doctor per as many as 20,000–30,000 people and pointed out everyone’s single concern was only to survive. While typhus was widespread, the available statistics indicated dysentery and cholera had the highest death rates in 1919: 44 per cent and 58 per cent respectively. Besides astronomical prices, theft, corruption, and speculation were rampant. Vermin were plentiful. The patients he saw in hospitals looked like skeletons. Unless they had their own clothing, they lay uncovered on boards with some straw for mattresses. The stench was horrific because no one cleaned the toilets. Interiors were dark. Broken windows had been boarded because there was no heating. Some lay in their beds with their feet frozen solid. Asking why the orderlies did not clean the overflowed, plugged toilets, he was told they were lazy and it was almost impossible to find anyone to do such work. Full hospitals and lack of transport meant that incoming wounded were left at stations in the open for days where they slowly died. Lederrey claims he saw the sitting corpse of a soldier who had strangled himself. Those who could, tried to walk to the hospital. Those who left after discovering it was full, simply lay down in whatever stairwell, hall, or courtyard of any building they could find – where they also died. Lederrey noted, among the background circumstances to the conditions he witnessed, the local populations’ total ignorance of basic hygiene. Succeeding armies during five years of war, besides destroying property, requisitioned supplies, while deserters stole them. Because governments conscripted almost all doctors and commandeered all hospitals for the army, the civilian population was neglected. The civilian sick, scattered in houses because there was nowhere else for them, spread contagion. The bad situation was made worse by armies and wandering bands of deserters who left their wounded in villages. Alongside economic collapse was almost total collapse of communications. The army controlled the trains that did run.56

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Ledderey’s report is confirmed by Viktor Andrievsky, who published his account of what he witnessed in eastern Ukraine in the last half of 1919 while travelling west. He wrote cities were dead – filled with tens of thousands of corpses of people who died from cold, hunger, disease, or execution. No food, no fuel, no water, no electricity, no clothing, no salt, no gas, no paper, no ink, no bandages, no medicine – except at outrageously high prices. No iron meant the army could not shoe its horses and haul its artillery. Peasants could not repair broken ploughs. Surplus grain in villages was not milled because there were no buyers, so most went for moonshine. Trains from Kharkiv to Kyiv took sixteen days – as opposed to sixteen hours in 1914.57 There are no extant figures on medical personnel, hospitals, and clinics on UnR territory. Some from Kamianets-Podilskyi in late 1919, on the verge of the UnR ’s collapse, indicate conditions in hospitals ranged from tolerable to bad. In November of that year, Kamianets district (population 400,000) had four hospitals (fifty-two beds), and ten clinics, of which five had doctors and five medics only. The total reported number of typhus patients only that year for the district was 5,357.58 Inspector reports on military hospitals and conditions on the rail system have survived. As of February 1919, the Railway Public-Health and Epidemic Council reported that every rail car in Ukraine was infected with one kind of disease or another, and that if they could not be disinfected, it would take no responsibility for the consequences. These were grave because the overcrowded stations and trains spread infections. Passengers would stay and sleep in overcrowded stations for days, where they shared space with the sick that overcrowded hospitals had sent to station waiting rooms. The town of Rivne in 1919 was a central staging area for refugees moving west. German and Austrian officials refused the ever-increasing multitude passage west unless they underwent a four-week quarantine. There were no facilities to offer shelter or food, and how they were supposed to prove they had been in quarantine is unknown. The massive crowds of passengers, refugees, and troops around rail stations, and hundreds of others living in stationary wagons around the tracks, produced mountains of garbage and excrement. Cleaning was impossible. Contagion and infection, inevitable. Officials and doctors issued orders, but what was done is not recorded.59 Major rail junctions had many wagons waiting for locomotives or clear tracks, as well as wagons being used as living quarters. Because people used the toilets in the stationary wagons, inspector reports from Zhmerynka, Proskuriv, and Brody all reported huge piles of excrement all along the tracks in the station area. Whether anyone implemented their instructions to build latrines and forbid wagon-toilet use is unrecorded.60 To appreciate the degree of collapse, it should be remembered that Zhmerynka station, just west of Kyiv, before the war was the most luxurious in the empire. With tuxedo-clad waiters in

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the restaurant, it was sumptuously decorated with porcelain, marble stairs, silver, crystal chandeliers, stained-glass windows, and palm trees.61 An undated Bolshevik document from October 1919 on conditions in UnR army hospitals includes reports, presumably found by Bolshevik troops, by a Dr Lebediv, the medical officer of an army hospital in Podillia province. The document consists of seven statements by patients given to the doctor, and an inspection officer’s report on conditions. It lists no bandages – with one patient reporting dressings changed every five days – no medicine, no baths for incoming casualties, rare visits from doctors or nurses, very little care, and lots of lice. Bedsheets were dirty, rarely changed, and rooms were cold. Meals came late, and the little bad and cold food there was consisted mostly of cabbage and buckwheat porridge – with no fat or butter or oil. Tea was cold and sometimes there was none for three days. Patients could not help each other because all were feverish and weak. Already sick patients would get infected with additional diseases because of the conditions. Men would be brought in, and sometimes lie for three to five days naked because there was nothing with which to clothe them while their own clothes were laundered. Inevitably, many who could have lived, died. In one hospital, fifteen plates for eighty men meant they had to eat in rotation. There was one lamp for every five rooms, no heaters, no quilts, and a severe shortage of sheets and mattresses. Three men would share two mattresses, and two would share one blanket. As often as not, those who were lucky enough to have their greatcoat used it to cover themselves. New arrivals would get mattresses, and some, bedding, directly removed from corpses. One doctor’s statement included in the document reported complete anarchy at his hospital, where staff would have parties and doctors lay drunk in the aisles. Water could not be boiled because often horses were not available to bring fuel. Usually, incoming casualties were simply dropped in the hallways where they lay for indeterminate periods of time because there was no one to see to them. In one case, he reported that the food was so bad he told the nurses not to serve it. They did and, as a result, six men in his ward died.62 All inspector reports contain similar details. The Kamianets army hospital in June of 1919 had seven doctors, seven interns, sixty medics, and eighteen nurses to deal with nine hundred and twenty patients. Those that had beds in the main building had tolerable conditions. Because the hospital had to deal with more patients than it was built to handle, overflow was quartered in tents, hastily constructed barracks, or simply laid on the ground in the open air. The hospital had no readily available source of water. It had no kettles, no shoes, and was short of dishes, fuel, and transport. In the provincial zemstvo hospital, three doctors and four assistants had to deal with six hundred patients. Arrivals would wait four to five days before being seen.

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Because it had no ancillary staff, the few medics and nurses had to do all the cooking, cleaning, and menial tasks. The Proskuriv army hospital, built for 500 to 600 patients, in June 1919 was swamped with almost twice that number. As result, half had no beds, nor sometimes even straw to lie on. There was no bedding or straw available for purchase in markets. On the day he wrote his letter to the health minister, the chief physician said his hospital was running out of flour. He remarked, in an itemized list, that all his previous requests for food, clothing, fuel, and medicines had either been refused or ignored. He threatened to resign.63 Acute shortage in the army of disinfectant, including such a basic as iodine, led to experienced staff using pure-grain moonshine instead – of which there was no shortage. The substance served both as disinfectant and as orally administered anesthetic. One serving soldier remembered uniforms were so lice-infested that they fell out in swarms when shaken over a fire.64 In Kamianets-Podilskyi in December 1919, unknown persons began dumping corpses from the army hospital in a field on the edge of town. When the stench became unbearable, other unknown persons buried them. However, the graves were too shallow. Eventually legs and arms began to stick out of the ground, which stray dogs gnawed. The surviving documents do not indicate whether the area was eventually cleaned.65 Reports label medical conditions in the army during its early July 1919 retreat as catastrophic in part because the UnR ’s three hospital trains were not running. By October they were operating, but barely. Wounded would spend eight to ten days travelling what, before 1914, would have a been no more than a day at most from the front to Kamianets. Sometimes they had to spend additional days in wagons because there was no transport to take them to the hospital.66 Relations between staff and patients were not always ideal. One doctor’s assistant at the Kamianets army hospital in September 1919 (who, it later emerged, was mentally unbalanced due to typhus), accused a colleague (with whom it later emerged he had differences) of whipping a patient with a telephone wire for supposedly selling hospital underwear. The patient later died. The Health Ministry investigated the case for two months and discovered it was an orderly who had done the whipping, not the accused, and that the underwear in question belonged to the patient and not the hospital. During the investigation it did emerge that staff did beat patients.67 In the syphilis ward of Kamianets army hospital, an inspector in August 1919 described total anarchy. For whatever reason, patients were given freedom to do as they willed. So they did. The ward was characterized by round-the-clock drinking, debauchery, and gambling with stakes in the tens of thousands. No one controlled comings and goings, where inmates got treatment, or whether they got treatment at all. Because they were

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already infected, the men assumed there was no reason to abstain, so suitably amenable (zaprodalni) women were also present at the parties. The toilets had not been cleaned since 1916 and were crawling with swarms of maggots and flies. Liquor was obtained from an obliging lady neighbour, who lived across the street from the hospital. With the ominous nomen Stepaniva Khvanasiva Revkevych-Tarnovska, she also hosted all-night festivities in her flat.68 Some accounts indicate that not all the women who looked like nurses were nurses. General Oleksandr Kozma, a professional soldier in the tsar’s army before he joined the Ukrainian cause, observed in 1918:69 Overall, there are almost no real nurses, most of them are adventurers out for treasure or a husband, and many are simply persons with an amoral past and tarnished present, in short, prostitutes. Unfortunately, this is all under the cover of the Red Cross. During the Japanese war, they [doctors] got the idea of dressing prostitutes from brothels as nurses and taking them around hotels … During the last war [1914–18] gentleman doctors turned their hospitals into real bordellos … I saw this with my own eyes in Rennenkampf’s First Army and heard with my own ears the complaints from those nurses who refused to give themselves up to the animal needs of the gentlemen doctors. Ivan Vyslotsky, a Ukrainian Galician army intelligence officer, reported in the summer of 1919 that the nurses in a Bolshevik army hospital left behind by retreating troops, intentionally as later discovered, were Bolshevik spies – seven of seven, plus three of four doctors. This was a common Bolshevik tactic, he reported. When the Galician army joined forces with the UnR in the summer of 1919, other nurse-informers entered its hospitals as well. But “thanks to the energetic and decisive initiative of our intelligence officers this flow of Bolshevik spies with red crosses on their sleeves was stopped. In Zhmerynka, on the day after its liberation from the Bolsheviks, the seven ‘nurses’ were found guilty of spying for the latter. They were executed on the spot.” He also noted that Bolshevik partisan units in 1919 would assault Ukrainian army hospitals and kill all the sick and wounded. A report from the town of Birzul that October revealed that Bolshevik troops shot an unspecified number of 400 wounded Ukrainian troops they had ordered to leave a hospital but who were unable to walk. A report from KamianetsPodilskyi also notes that Bolsheviks killed wounded Ukrainian soldiers left in villages.70 The claim that Bolsheviks killed patients is also in a report in Vilna Ukraina (24 April 1919). It relates a Ukrainian officer witnessed Bolshevik troops, on the night they captured the city, massacring wounded and sick Ukrainian soldiers in a hospital in Zhytomir. A UnR agent from a western province reported in 1921 that Bolsheviks killed syphilitics.71 These reports

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are credible in light of two other foreign reports. Czech Dr Vaclav Girsa, who worked in a Kyiv hospital during the Bolshevik occupation of January 1918, reported to British officials that “Many seriously wounded were taken from Kief [sic] hospitals and ruthlessly murdered in the streets, Bolsheviks forced into the streets and shot men with abdominal wounds, broken limbs and grave injuries in other parts of their bodies.” British agents also reported that, in late 1918, Bolsheviks in Moscow were killing those infected with glanders because they could not cope with all the infected.72 During the last days of the UnR , in November and December of 1919, hospital staff would flee with the medicines, leaving patients as they lay. Hospitals could not discharge recovered soldiers because there were no uniforms or footwear to issue them, while more sick and wounded continued to flow into wards. Faced with collapse, the government, for its part, began dismissing medical staff. In June 1919, a report on the situation in Kamianets-Podilskyi noted conditions were so bad that some hospitalized soldiers shot themselves. One army hospital in the capital that autumn described staff conditions as, “work under insufferable conditions without any remuneration whatsoever for this convict-like (katorzhna) labour.”73 American observers in early 1920 described Jewish dwellings as “miserable shacks with accumulations of dirt inside and out that nauseates you to look at it. The clothes that people wear are ragged torn and filthy. You see the lice crawling all over them … They have no baths … Even the wealthier class is compelled to go without bathing.”74 Bolshevik reports compiled that year also give insight into daily life in Ukraine in 1919 in areas abandoned by retreating UnR troops. Particularly useful are two surviving texts from Novomoskovsk and Verkhnodniprovsk districts in Katerynoslav province. The first was supposed to have a staff of eighteen doctors and sixty-five medics. During 1919, four doctors and five medics died, and half of the remainder got sick. Medical facilities managed to function up to October thanks to support from co-ops, the zemstvo, and private loans. Working personnel by the end of the year was down to four doctors, twenty-three medics, and seven nurses. Little improved during the first months of Bolshevik rule. By January 1920, besides reduced personnel, no funds, and no medicines, no fuel or transport, all medical centres in the district had been shut down. The second report was more detailed. Verkhnodniprovsk district (population 295,000), the author reckoned, had at least 60,000 sick in April 1920. It had a total of 225 beds for them. One medical station per 28,000 people provided services for those within a maximum radius of two miles. At such a distance, the report noted, no more than 50 per cent of the population had access. With seventeen doctors and one hundred and nine medics in January 1919, by the next year the totals had fallen to thirteen and sixty-five respectively. The hospitals that still

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functioned did so only thanks to the heroic efforts of their staff, and, even so, that was at 30 per cent capacity. The local population remained much reliant on traditional healers.75

The Western Ukrainian Republic Western Ukrainians formed their independent republic on territories that, from 1914, had been on the front lines, and upon which armies, by 1918, had razed innumerable huts and manors. Those who did not flee their homes, or returned after fronts moved on, dug holes to live in or built shacks from the leftovers of demolished buildings. Some lived in abandoned trenches alongside their cattle. Manor houses used as hospitals for cholera, upon evacuation, were burned down to prevent contagion. In the Iaroslavl region, the westernmost part of Ukrainian ethnic territory, almost 70 per cent of the buildings were destroyed by 1917. In 1918, only 30 per cent of the arable land had been sown. With the collapse of the Habsburg empire, western Ukraine no longer had access to medical supplies. The only and last known shipment was sent by the Red Cross from Vienna in May 1919 – and that contained no medicines. As public services had collapsed by 1918, towns were as filthy and filled with garbage and festering overflowing cesspits as farther east. Civilians had little, if any, medical help. Ukrainian doctors were all conscripted into the army. With very rare exception, Polish doctors refused to see to Ukrainian patients.76 Hotels in the town of Chortkiv in 1919 were full. They not only lacked bedding. They also had no personnel to wash what they had, which meant that it was infested with bugs and lice. A shortage of fuel meant that, by January 1919, water could not be pumped to the city’s higher regions where the main hospital and army barracks were located. Part of the barracks had been turned into a prison, and as the main latrine in the middle of the courtyard was soon plugged, prisoners began relieving themselves in ever-widening circles around it. When it rained, the courtyard turned into an unimaginable fetid swamp of excrement. Since there was no running water, meanwhile, other indoor toilet drains were plugged. As gases built up from the accumulated excrement and garbage, the pressure resulted in occasional explosions that covered everything nearby in a brown sludge. One of the first places that this happened was in the bath and laundry rooms – which meant that prisoners no longer could wash themselves or their clothes. The medical officer inspecting wrote that what he saw reminded him of scenes from Dante’s Inferno, and that even an angel would emerge a Bolshevik from such a place.77 In conclusion, it should be noted, documents contain rare references to the government caring for some of its wounded soldiers. In September

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1919, for instance, one seriously wounded soldier was sent with a nurse to Prague for an operation. A small number of hospitals also seem to have been run tolerably well and fed and cared for their patients. For instance, the Kamianets provincial peoples’ (narodnyi) hospital’s only problems in August 1919 were too few surgical instruments and too many patients – which meant some lay on the floor.78 Jews were worse off than Christians in ZUnR due to restrictions on trade and the reluctance of local authorities to issue them necessary special passes. No less damaging was the confiscation or forced exchange of Austrian crowns for Ukrainian karbovantsi, which became worthless with the collapse of the UnR . This affected Jews harshly because almost all made their living from trade. Whereas before the war, 12 per cent of the Jewish population required welfare assistance, in March 1919 that had risen to 52 per cent. Survival was possible only by breaking the law and paying bribes. The result was higher rates of malnutrition and death among Jews than Ukrainians. The Jewish National Council was able to arrange financial assistance from the Hoover and various foreign Jewish organizations in April 1919. How much of that actually arrived is unknown.79

Fig. 1 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. A depiction of the city water system as so bad that even animals won’t drink the water. Kievskaia iskra, 16 May (1907) 58

Fig. 2 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. Death explaining it is unjust to condemn the city council for polluted water because it finds the conditions ideal. Kievskaia iskra, 13 September (1907)

Fig. 3 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. A depiction of how apartment owners assured city inspectors that all is in order and that nothing actually stank on their property. Kievskaia iskra, 26 September (1907)

Fig. 4 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. The depiction of a man drinking from a downspout rather than a nearby barrel of “drinking water” as a comment on the condition of the city’s drinking water. Kievskaia iskra, 4 October (1907)

Fig. 5 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. A depiction of the condition of Kyiv’s public thoroughfares. Kievskaia mysl, 22 May (1908) 169. no. 41

Fig. 6 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. A comment on conditions in hospitals explaining patients recovered “like flies” less thanks to medicine than to the pristine order and sanitary surroundings. Kievskaia iskra, 2 April (1908)

Fig. 7 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. Typhus telling Cholera not to worry as there would be enough victims for both of them. Kievskaia iskra, 13 June (1908)

Fig. 8 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. Cholera notes that the sleeping town council will wake up eventually. A comment on the widely held view that the council did little or nothing to improve sanitary conditions. Kievskaia iskra, 31 July (1908)

Fig. 9 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. A summer suit for Kyivans not wishing to die from the summer dust and water. Kievskaia mysl, 21 May (1910) 169

Fig. 10 Cartoon in Kyiv newspaper. Two Grim Reapers discussing recent Kyiv city council plans to enforce hygiene standards on basement dwellings. One fears he will have less dead to collect. The other assures him no reforms will be implemented any time soon. Iuzhnaia kopeika, 20 February (1916)

Fig. 11 Kyiv newspaper. Full page of ads for syphilis and gonorrhea remedies. Iuzhnaia kopieka (29 January 1917)

Fig. 12 Cartoon in a Ukrainian paper drawn after the Germans entered Kyiv illustrating the failure of the “democratic self-governing Duma,” dominated by a Russian SR and Russian Menshevik majority, to clean the city, provide food, make the streets safe, and provide water. Gedz 4 April (1918)

Fig. 13. Detail figure 12, which explains the fire brigade can do without trucks and piped water and use seltzer to put out fires. Gedz 4 April (1918)

Fig. 14. Bolshevik poster explaining that flies spread disease. Arkhiv Druku (1919–20)

Fig. 15 Bolshevik poster telling people to wash hands before meals. Arkhiv Druku (1919–20)

Fig. 16. Bolshevik poster explaining that laundry should not be done indoors because that creates damp. Arkhiv Druku (1919–20)

Fig. 17 Bolshevik poster portraying girls laughing at a man scarred with smallpox. It then explains that it is not the fault of the person that they are infected, that a vaccination has been long available, and that today only the simple and backward do not get vaccinated. Arkhiv Druku (1919–20)

Fig. 18 Bolshevik poster. “Fleas lice and flies spread pestilence. They carry death, and death takes everyone sparing no one. All Join the Fight against Pestilence.” Arkhiv Druku (1921)

Fig. 19 Report from UnR Political Information Department on Polish atrocity (1919). t sDAVo f. 538 no 1 sprava 102 no. 108.

Fig. 20

Fedir Krychevsky, Tryptych (1927): Life – The Return

Fig. 21 German cartoon. Although drawn as a comment on the impact of the war on Germany, the cartoon captures the effect four years of war had on all the European countries involved. K. Kirchner ed., Flugblattpropaganda im 1. Weltkrieg: Europa. Erlangen, 1985

chApteR 3

Living Conditions Under the Bolsheviks Either the lice will defeat socialism, or socialism will defeat the lice.

Lenin, December 1918

A doctor in the UnR Ministry of Public Health, who had remained in Bolshevik-controlled territory, in an undated report probably written in 1921 claimed they totally ignored the physical well-being of Ukraine’s population. Decidedly anti-Bolshevik, he claimed the civilian population had nothing because all medical supplies and doctors and nurses had been nationalized and sent to the army, or exchanged for unspecified items from Moscow. No hospitals could function properly. They could not get supplies at local markets because no one would take Bolshevik money. All services had to be free and, consequently, hospitals and clinics had to rely on not always forthcoming state funding. After four years of war, all laboratories, schools, and institutions had stopped functioning. City water supply was catastrophic. Prostitution was rampant despite Bolshevik-style marriages and “free love.” In the ditches alongside suburban roads, corpses would lie for weeks.1 Conditions are described in another report delivered in Berlin to the Ukrainian government-in-exile, which was either stolen or copied by Bolshevik agents. The fugitive unnamed author, a Ukrainian professor who had worked for the Bolsheviks in 1920 in a job that involved travelling, observed that urban populations were considerably worse off than the rural population. After the Bolsheviks retook Ukraine in 1920, they controlled only the cities and territory for a few miles on each side of the rail tracks. Raids on, and destruction of, individual villages, according to this report, failed to intimidate the population who, if they avoided or resisted Bolshevik requisitioning, not only had enough to eat and a good harvest that year, but they were also well supplied with small arms and manufactured goods produced locally. They obtained the former in exchange for food from Red

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Army troops in an established barter system with set prices for everything. Workers who had fled the towns and worked in local blacksmith shops with locals supplied manufactured goods. Peasants had so much butter and pork fat that they used them as lubricants. The smaller the town, the more tolerable the life. In cities, life was miserable – characterized by serious shortages, terror, endless revisions and mobilizations, and the capricious violence of local authorities beyond the control of their superiors. The report does not mention diseases.2 Olga Englehardt confirmed that the peasants ate well.3

The Urban Population Bolshevik reports from 1919–22 confirm conditions were horrific, but not that they totally ignored public health and sanitation. By 1921, because Bolshevik control beyond cities and district towns was still tenuous, most all their medical reports dealt with urban conditions.4 Just after they had taken Kyiv, in late 1919, one commander reported that in the hospital he saw that the beds, floors, and stairs were covered with the sick and dying. The morgue held 2,000 corpses piled on top of each other to the ceiling.5 Life in Donetsk province in 1921, according to one report, was unimaginable: “The population is literally living in its own filth and excrement.” Waves of refugees led to an average of ten people inhabiting a single room. Dirt and shortages ensured an abundance of lice. People were interested in nothing except finding food.6 Raging epidemics did not deter thieves, apparently indifferent to the risk of infection. In 1919 in Odesa, and likely elsewhere, reports indicate they not only stripped the dead lying in streets but broke into cemeteries. They dug up graves, stripped corpses of their clothing and, if they found a coffin, took that as well for use as firewood.7 By the time of the 1921–22 famine, the city’s sanitation garbage collection system had collapsed. The death rate per 1,000 had risen from the 1914 average of 23, to 90 as of 1922. The reported death rate was two-and-a-half times higher than the birth rate as of January 1921, and six times higher by that December. The total population by 1919 had dropped by almost 100,000. In August of that year, just before it was re-taken by the Bolsheviks, people had to stand in queues for hours to buy water – sold by weight. Footwear was either unobtainable or unaffordable and people wore wooden sandals on bare feet.8 In 1922, hundreds of corpses daily were taken off the streets – many partially eaten by dogs after having lain there for days. Mortuaries and graveyards, with their overflowing piles of corpses, provided additional fare for dogs. What medical personnel there were, worked without pay and without instruments, dressings, bedding, or medicines.9 Almost all urban dwellings after 1919 were either co-op or state-owned. By then, most all urban services no longer functioned and most of the

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infrastructure was damaged or destroyed. Most workers in towns still lived in brick dwellings with wooden floors, with access to cold water in a nearby pump, and roofs that usually did not leak. But the buildings were cold, damp, stuffy, dark, and usually overcrowded, even before 1917. Coal stoves sucked in oxygen while emitting soot. Residents normally kept windows shut because the outside air stank. Not infrequently, inhabitants would either sleep on floors or use beds in shifts. Communal dormitories were not always maintained or cleaned. At the end of the 1920s in the Donbass region, the situation had not changed much since 1920. Only 4 per cent of worker settlements had cesspits and people still normally piled their garbage alongside their buildings. The piped water available to 14 per cent of the regional population was unfiltered and undrinkable. Public wells were surrounded by filthy mud ponds because they were not cemented or bricked. Since most workers were born in villages, they carried village practices with them into the towns – like not opening windows to air out the premises.10 In Kyiv, 58 of every 1,000 people in 1922 lived in basements. Besides the above-noted issues, these were subject to flooding.11 On rainy days, these hovels collected the sewage overflow from the streets that caked their floors when it dried. Nor had much changed by 1921 in Kyiv since early 1918 (see figure 12). One then-resident described it as “dirty, grey, hungry, uninteresting and depressing. It was as if the entire town had sunk into a kind of swamp.” Necessities of life were unobtainable at reasonable prices. Manufacturing was dead; criminality, theft, unemployment, and speculation were rampant. Life bustled only in the bazaars with their illegal private trading.12 Because private trade was illegal, hundreds of thousands of urban dwellers had to break the law to survive as itinerant “bagmen” (mishochnyky). They travelled between city and village trading goods for grain at bazaars, regardless of considerable dangers – like freezing on trains if they failed to get an inside space. They ensured Ukraine’s big, south-eastern cities, in particular, survived because they provided the average inhabitant with more food than the government could via rations.13 In the face of the restrictions and controls, another way people survived was to carry on as they had before 1914 – at night. Sleeping during the day, gentile and Jew rose at sunset and began trading, travelling, manufacturing, and distilling.14 Secular Bolshevik Jews who were higher party officials, like their Russian comrades, were relatively well fed, clothed, and housed. The condition of observant Jews as of 1920 was catastrophic. Because the overwhelming majority were small-traders and craftsmen, and because all private trade and manufacturing was forbidden, they had no legal work or income. Those unprepared to risk arrest by trading, risked dying of starvation. Since almost no Jews were farmers, they had no access to food other than what they

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could obtain from Ukrainian peasants – who may or may not have been willing to trade. They often did not know which was worse: life under the Bolsheviks, or the threat of a pogrom when an opposing group appeared and attempted to oust the Bolsheviks, reported Mikhail Gorenshtein, a Jewish UnR government official recently arrived in Poland. “Kyiv has become a graveyard, all the shops are closed, there is no electric light or water, no trams, no telephones, and the population has been turned into slaves.”15 While the general urban population went hungry, and pay and rations did not always arrive for government workers, Bolshevik commissars caroused in nightclubs drinking as much moonshine as they wanted at 50,000 rubles per bottle. In July 1921, that was about the price of one-quarter pound of sugar, one-half pound of white flour, or five times the average monthly wage of a well-paid, non-party government official, and ten times that of a lower-level clerk.16 Morphine, cocaine, and opium use were as widespread as heavy drinking. Rates of usage rose, first because the 1914 Dry Law resulted in troops using cocaine as a substitute for alcohol. Second, the wounded became dependent on the morphine they got as a painkiller. Use spread under Bolshevik rule among all social groups. The drugs were smuggled and readily available on the urban black market through the revolutionary years. As of 1921, an estimated 60 per cent of doctors, nurses, and medics in Petrograd were addicts. An estimated 60 per cent of users were under the age of twenty-five. As of 1923, approximately 80 per cent of orphans arrested for vagrancy had become addicted by the time they were ten. The drugs were normally available in brothels. As of 1923, 70 per cent of arrested prostitutes were addicts.17 Because monthly rations for higher party officials placed in the “nomenklatura,” were relatively good, there was a considerable gap between what and how much poor peasants and workers consumed, and how much the Bolshevik leadership strata that claimed to be their representatives consumed. The higher the rank, the better the food, the greater the portions – and the likelihood they would be available.18 In 1923, the average monthly nomenklatura ration included the following (in pounds): twenty-eight of white flour, four of cheese, five of butter, and one of salt, as well as sixty eggs, and sixty glasses of milk. This socio-economic divide defined by calorie consumption between the well-fed and undernourished corresponded not only to a social divide between Russian workers and Russians in the party nomenklatura. In Ukraine it also corresponded to a national divide, because the population was overwhelmingly Ukrainian, and the nomenklatura were overwhelmingly Russian or Russified.19 The Russian/Russified ruling minority ate more and better, and were healthier and less susceptible to disease, than the ruled native majority who ate worse and less – with Jews being in both groups.20 The Russian novelist Konstantin Paustovskii lived

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in Odesa in 1920. He described the bread available there for the average person as follows: “The bread had one remarkable property: the crust was quite separate from the loaf … The space between them was filled with a cloudy, sour-tasting liquid … Some people liked it. They sucked the juice and said it cured swellings of the joints.” Cold and malnutrition produced these swellings that hurt when touched and burst when washed. “In cold weather, they ached and when it was warm they itched unbearably.”21 A report from the town of Pohrebyshi near Berdychiv from November 1920, described that town as totally destroyed, and surrounding towns as “wiped off the earth.” The refugees, mostly Jews, fled to Pohrebyshi with nothing, and met with no assistance because the locals were little better off. The hunger and cold provoked disease among the 1,100 inhabitants – with the worst off being 130 orphans.22 The Bolshevik inspector reported he was helpless – particularly in view of the fact local peasants refused to accept Bolshevik money. A doctor in Poltava noted in his diary that typhus first appeared in the city when it was under Bolshevik control in March 1918. The epicentre was the former tsarist military academy that 1,500 Red Guards had commandeered as a barracks. During a town health and sanitation committee meeting, the commissar reported the building was filled with garbage and filth. As the toilets were plugged, all relieved themselves in the corridors. Excrement literally flowed down the stairs. “They [Red Guards] threw shit from the top floor straight down the stairwells.” Russian soldiers who had occupied the town school left it in no better condition. Spanish flu raged in the city as of September.23 An undated report, probably from early 1920, lists 10 to 15 per cent of the total population infected by typhus. That estimate rose to 50 per cent by the spring. Cities allegedly had sufficient medical personnel. Villages, this report claimed, were “literally dying” because of disease.24 Katerynoslav province had been a major battle zone through 1919. The mobile nature of the battles meant that all armies normally left their sick and wounded at the nearest town or village. Those men were a major cause of rural contagion. A report from 1920 estimated the death rate in the entire province, and in Katerynoslav city, to be 45 per cent from typhus and cholera alone. In the city, the rate had supposedly fallen from 75 per cent in September 1919. As of February 1920, allegedly every village in the province was infected with typhus.25 An undated report, from an unknown address sent to the commissariat in Kharkiv sometime in mid-1920, noted there were so many infected corpses that they could not all be buried expeditiously, and had to be stacked in mortuaries and hospitals. Gravediggers were few, common graves were the norm, and usually shallower than required. To avoid greater danger to public health than already existed, the authors suggested building

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a crematorium, and, in the interim, using a factory furnace.26 In Kyiv city in March 1920, an inspector discovered over one hundred corpses had been lying unburied for two weeks in a temporary morgue. Hospital officials explained they could not bury the bodies because they could not find any shovels or crowbars to break the still-frozen soil.27 The situation of the Ukrainian civilian population was likely worsened by the Bolshevik policy, as of November 1919, not to evacuate Red troops with infectious diseases from front-line territories. This was intended to prevent spread into Russian territory. It did little to stop spread in Ukrainian territory, most of which was still a warzone, where, as noted in the above reports, the infected swarmed overcrowded rail stations and hospitals. It was also Bolshevik policy to give medical priority to troops – overwhelmingly non-Ukrainians in Ukraine. This included ejecting civilian patients from hospitals and conscripting remaining civilian doctors to care for troops instead of civilians. Thus, Kharkiv province, which had 425 doctors in January 1919, after the Bolsheviks retreated was left with only 185 that May – of whom 97 were themselves sick with typhus. When the Bolsheviks retreated, they took with them all medical supplies they could. Kharkiv city’s commissar reported unburied corpses half-eaten by dogs in the suburbs. He recommended using those corpses for food – particularly for the poor Tatar population.28

Hospitals By 1919, few equipped hospitals remained. Health care and public sanitation had broken down along with the municipal governments that were supposed to run them. Although the number of hospital beds per person overall had risen by 1923, as compared with 1910, Ukraine had considerably fewer hospital beds in its 154 urban settlements per person (1: 245) than did Russia (1: 137). While the number of doctors and medics per large urban settlement had fallen from their 1910 averages, it had risen by 1923 in smaller towns – presumably due to massive flight from cities caused by food shortages.29 In Poltava, in face of the Bolshevik advance in November 1919, doctors and nurses fled en masse from hospitals, leaving the living and dead where they lay. They took with them all the bedding, clothing, medicine, and food they could carry. One doctor who remained bemoaned in his diary how none of those who fled and stole would have to answer for their unethical behaviour. The number of typhus cases began to rise dramatically that month, and the doctor reported working twelve hours daily both at home and the hospital. Graves could not be dug fast enough.30 Medicine was almost impossible to obtain, with no more than 600 pharmacies in the entire country as of 1924 – down from a 1913 total of 1,096. What was available was in towns.

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Importation of medicines by German and American charities in 1922 was stopped in the summer of 1923. As of 1921, with 1,417 hospitals, Ukraine apparently had 200 fewer than in 1914. In 1921 (see tables 2, 4, 5, and 6), the number of rural medical centres in 1923 had declined to 1,197, from 1,960 recorded in 1913.31 As of 1923, there averaged one rural medical centre (not all of which had doctors) for every 17,800 people (see tables 5 and 7).32 Bolshevik reports on urban hospitals are numerous and often detailed. They provide valuable descriptions of urban conditions.33 These indicate that, with very few exceptions, conditions ranged from bad to horrific. Planning and providing services, already difficult by 1917, was further complicated by fluctuating populations. Kyiv saw a population decline of almost 158,000 between 1914 and 1917, an influx of almost 12,000 in 1918, another influx of 65,000 in 1919, and then an outflow of almost 178,000 at the end of that year.34 Urban conditions worsened markedly in the wake of nearby major battles that brought floods of wounded into towns. In the summer of 1920, two reports, one on a hospital in the Kharkiv region and another on an army hospital in presumably right-bank Ukraine, noted that either both, or at least one, had no toilets, no water, no baths, no clean dressings, no electricity, no decent food, no clean bedding, patients on floors, bugs on the tables, three men using one spoon, and corpses lying on beds or floors for five days or more before they could be buried.35 In November 1921, the Kharkiv garrison medical officer reported seventy to eighty patients coming daily into already overflowing hospitals, where recovery times in some cases lasted up to six weeks. He described the situation as “on the verge of catastrophic,” with some beds holding two patients. Hospitals in Kremenchuh, with space for 2,000 patients, after battles with Denikin were flooded with 6,000.36 In the then-capital Kharkiv, a November 1920 report revealed very little or a total lack of water in hospitals. Without electricity, hospitals effectively stopped functioning after sunset. Patients lay on floors in their uniforms or street clothes, sometime for weeks. Everything was covered with lice, cockroaches, and bedbugs. Orderlies and staff, clothed in rags, often barefoot and cold because there was no heating, would simply refuse to work come autumn. One hospital in Poltava did not have any paper. Slippers were a rare luxury. A report claiming the death rate had apparently dropped from 15 to 18 per cent in 1919 to 3 to 4 per cent is difficult to accept. Another report, the following year, indicated little had changed. It depicted the tragic situation of nurses and orderlies. They got little food and no pay for months. The best left and the remainder turned into predators, taking hospital property and even food from the patients. Patients felt constant hunger, and more so the honest staff, who were allotted less rations. Dirty sheets stood in damp piles of five to ten tons slowly rotting because there was no water or soap to launder them.37 A report on the main army hospital in the city, from 1920,

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listed conditions as bad as those described in the UnR hospital noted in chapter 2. One difference was that the Kharkiv nurses at one point simply refused to go to work because they were cold, hungry, and barefoot.38 In Kharkiv hospitals, in the fall of 1920, 50 per cent of the black bread available to patients consisted of chopped straw.39 A hostel for the homeless looked like a derelict building. It was infested with lice, had no water, no medical staff, and the indoor temperature averaged 2–3°c . It recorded an average of one death per day. During an inspection, the doctor found one corpse that had lain in a room for eight days, and next door, seven men with typhus lying in one bed. Her request to have the men transferred to the zemstvo hospital was unanswered.40 Against this backdrop, there seemed to have been exceptions. Apparently the Kharkiv Technological Institute in July 1920 ran a 450-bed hospital that was fully supplied and excellently administered. A Cheka inspector recommending it be shut down in light of the high infection rate in the city was refused by his superior.41 In the small town of Dora (Podillia province), the city prison was infected with typhus up until 1922. Untreated prisoners, rarely fed, became so weak from fever that when they went to relieve themselves in the open-pit toilets, they would fall in. As of 1922, the average ratio of doctors to population in the province was 1:7,100 – approximately twice the pre-war average.42 In the central Ukrainian town of Kremenchuh, the situation in its eleven hospitals was more or less the same as in the capital, according to reports from November 1921. Because little food or much else was available from government depots, the directors of hospitals would get cash from Kharkiv to buy supplies at bazaars – which some could not do because the local branch of another agency refused the hospital permission to either take the cash or to buy. A similar situation existed in Poltava where hospitals had dirty bedding, little fuel, overcrowding, and were enveloped in a ubiquitous overpowering stink. Some had no working toilets or baths, others had none at all. One doctor averaged 200 patients. A total of 83,378 patients went through the city’s hospitals in 1920, yet, according to figures, the death rate was under 2 per cent. The author attributed this to the extraordinary dedication of the staff. Besides the already mentioned shortages, there was also a lack of needles and thread, so mattresses could not be mended. Nor were nails, bulbs, or electricity available. Hospitals that had them, used small portable stoves (koptylka), that produced little heat, but much smoke that lingered in wards and halls alongside the sometimes almost-intolerable smell. Water had to be brought in by hand in pails. The bread was sometimes so bad, patients died from eating it. Shortages of dishes and bowls meant patients ate in relays – sometimes on unwashed dishes.43 A January 1921 report from Odesa noted that horses died for lack of fodder. Without wagon transportation, the sick could not get to hospitals, while the dead could not be taken away. In

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the women’s syphilis ward of one hospital, conditions were such that, when patients came for treatment and saw the ward, they turned and left.44 That same year, typhus came again to Katerynoslav. Its public hospitals were in such dreadful condition that families refused to send their infected members and hid them at home. When the person died, they reported them. When no one came to take away the body, the families abandoned their dwellings in terror, leaving inside the corpse together with those ill but alive.45 Katerynoslav and Pavlohrad in central Ukraine had thirteen hospitals. With exception of four army hospitals, reports from 1921 noted the remainder were characterized by the same conditions as noted above. The field hospital of the First Cavalry Army, conversely, was not as well supplied as the town hospitals. It had two syringes and one needle for its 223 syphilis patients. One orphanage had a death rate of 50 per cent. Complaining repeatedly for one month to the local branch of the Health Commissariat had no results. In one hospital, theft by staff was rampant. No one was ever arrested or jailed, because most had relations who worked as city employees and covered for them in case of problems. The situation was the same in Poltava city.46 Conditions in Bolshevik Ukraine by the end of 1920 were likely similar to those in Russia. In the Perm army hospital that November, for example, the day of a Cheka inspection, only one “health worker” was on duty for the 400 patients. The floor was coated with a sticky ooze of filth and garbage. Urine and excrement lay in puddles on the floor alongside clumps of infected spittle and vomit because there were no spittoons. Food was served on the floor, or damp windowsills, because there were no tables. Like their counterparts in Russia, towns like Pavlohrad were awash in garbage. Penza (population 80,000), in 1920, had twenty-six horses and thirty-four barrels available for garbage removal. To fully rid the town of three years of accumulated waste, it would have had to have 4,000 horses to haul three loads daily for three months.47

The Rural Population Before 1917, most doctors practised in towns. In 1922, the situation was unchanged. In 1913, the average per capita distribution of approximately 1,700 rural doctors was 1:17,000. In 1923, 36 per cent of the listed rural doctors were Russians, 29 per cent Ukrainian, and 23 per cent Jewish.48 In 1925, 73 per cent of the 6,330 doctors worked in the Health Commissariat (another 3,074 were in private practice), 33 per cent worked in rural districts, and 73 per cent were located in Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Katerynoslav provinces.49 The pre-war distribution of doctors to rural population was reached in 1924.50 Sometime in 1920, as part of the Health Commissariat’s Medical Department (Viddil Likuvalnoi Medytsyny), officials established a rural section

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(Sektsiia silskoi medytsyny). The plan was to provide one doctor for every 10,000 people, to be available within a 4.6-mile radius. One set of documents related to this institution that have survived provide a glimpse of death and disease in villages before 1921. Among these documents are three situation reports from three districts outlining the situation there in 1920: Zmiiv (1921 population 203,817) in Kharkiv province, Sosnits (1921 population 280,000) in the Chernihiv area, and Melitopol in then-Odesa province. One particularly noteworthy observation by the author of the Zmiiv report was the scale of hospital theft. Apparently, everybody stole anything they could, from bed linen, to medicines, and surgical instruments. Orderlies picked the best portions out of the patients’ food ration before they served them.51 A particularly well-written summary on the situation in ten of Novomoskovsk district’s thirteen medical stations in the autumn of 1920 listed the main problems under three categories. The first was lack of fuel – except in one hospital where staff had managed to supply themselves by totally ignoring all rules and regulations. Elsewhere the consequences were dire. Patients lay in their sheepskin coats. A hospital that had access to straw burned it in iron stoves to keep the temperature at 9°c . One doctor’s office was so cold that water froze there. Where some fuel was available in the vicinity, there were no wagons to transport it – except if staff managed to persuade a passing military unit to go and forcibly requisition horses and wagons from local peasants. Wood could not be left stored long in the open because peasants would inevitably steal it, while the local forest commissariat in charge of wood supply could cut very little timber because its men had no saws. Sunflower oil cake or pomace (makukha) was apparently plentiful, but reserved for the army who would not surrender any. The second problem was that cold and lack of medical supplies made surgery impossible. One hospital arranged a room for minor operations, without anesthetic, in a next-door peasant’s cottage. A third problem was the impossibility of doing repairs. Workers demanded payment in food, which hospitals could not provide. If workers were available, they were not always able to find materials. Medical centres without food or medicines or fuel shut down.52 A final set of documents that illustrate the situation outside major towns, is a collection of reports submitted to doctors’ conferences in Katerynoslav province in the fall of 1920. The Bolsheviks had just re-occupied the province and were still fighting partisans in some districts. These documents indicate chronic shortages of most everything from water to soap, and widespread breakdown of pipes and buildings. The situation regarding food for hospitals had been tolerable until an order was issued forbidding purchases at bazaars. Reports from the town of Kryvorizh claimed there were no more medical supplies at all. Agents would travel to the district capital, distances of up to fifty miles, and came back empty-handed. Doctors estimated their supplies

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would end in December. Reports from district capitals noted that most wells were either poisoned or derelict, and pipe systems broken. In Nikopol, one barrel of water cost 2,000 rubles. In Novomoskovsk’s single hospital, the temperature averaged 7°c , and pipes and windows were broken and frozen. While money did arrive at one point to repair the windows, nothing was done because there were no windows anywhere to buy. While some hospitals reported heating with straw, others reported they had none. In either case, it meant patients lay on springs, boards, or the bare floor. The was little or no soap either for washing or laundry, which meant remaining sheets were rarely washed – most in any case, had been cut-up for bandages. Not the least of doctors’ problems was lack of staff because few were prepared to work for the miserable wages offered.53 The above-noted availability of food among the rural population after 1917 is confirmed by other sources. In 1901, a tsarist commission determined that 722 pounds of grain annually per person represented the amount consumed in the average rural diet. Because peasants had to market increasing amounts of grain to pay rising taxes, the average consumed had fallen to 563 pounds by 1914. By 1921, the recorded average consumed had risen again to 722 pounds. A Bolshevik survey of eating habits from the winter of 1920 concluded peasants were consuming approximately the same amount of fats, starch, and meat as in 1913.54 Peasants likely ate better than the urban dweller in 1920 than they did in 1914, but that changed in 1921. First, because the 1920 harvest was almost half that of 1913; second, a bad harvest the next year due to draught; and third, buried surplus had either been consumed, or discovered and requisitioned. During the 1921 famine, households in the affected regions would trade or sell whatever tools they did have for food. This was a terrible decision to make, because it meant families that survived could not work the land they had the next year – or could only work less of it.55 If the above consumption figures were true, it would imply that requisition squads were taking less than peasants had sold in 1913, or the squads lied in their reports. Alternatively, it would mean that peasants concealed their total land cultivated and production to make it appear they only had what they needed for survival. In light of such considerations, whether Bolshevik production-requisition totals for 1919–20 corresponded to the actual amount of land peasants sowed and foodstuffs they harvested will likely never be known. In one district in Kharkiv province that year, two reports on land sown differed by almost 150,000 acres. In 1921 in all Ukraine, agents uncovered and registered 930,000 previously concealed acres.56 With the breakdown of the transportation system, tea was among the commodities that became scarce and expensive. The Bolsheviks in 1918 confiscated the huge stores of the various pre-1917 tea companies and

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placed them under the authority of Tsentrochai. These supplies, and a 1919 agreement with China to import tea, allowed them to include tea in Red Army, industrial-workers’, and party nomenklatura rations. Presumably, this included Bolshevik-controlled Ukrainian territory, but how much tea reached there, or non-Bolshevik territories, is unclear. There are references to people labelling hot water “Bolshevik-tea,” which suggests tea was not readily available for those not on the ration system. Olga Englehardt mentioned tea drinking in 1922. In any case, while Ukraine’s population sooner had access to, and perhaps preferred drinking home-brew to tea, they suffered the consequences. Peasants, who had little reason to produce more than necessary for consumption, not only drank more alcohol and slowly lost the incentive to work, but they also had more time to idle. Thus, alongside returning soldiers and amnestied criminals, young peasants fuelled city migration and became recruits for partisan units and criminal gangs. Surveys of rural living conditions done in 1923–24 provide good descriptions of how people lived after the battles had mostly ended. One such survey included every tenth house in 214 villages in forty-three of Ukraine’s then fifty-seven provinces (okrukh). The survey covered 42,411 people in villages with an average population of 2,000 each. It is unlikely that one full year of peace would have allowed people to make significant repairs and improvements. There is no analogous pre-revolutionary survey that would allow detailed comparison with pre-1914 rural conditions. The survey indicated that, overall, conditions of life were better in the south and east than in the centre, north, and west – although some indicators in the south-east were worse than those elsewhere. Thirty-two per cent of those surveyed, for instance, slept in beds, but the averages for Podillia and Chernihiv provinces were 11 per cent and 45 per cent respectively. Fortyfour per cent of those surveyed in Chernihiv province slept on the floor, while only 18 per cent did in Podillia. As soap had disappeared, people washed less. In Poltava, the price per pound rose from just under two rubles in October 1917, to eleven in May 1919, to sixty in February 1920.57 On average, 17 per cent washed once weekly, 18 per cent once monthly, and 63 per cent once or twice yearly. The corresponding figures for Podillia province were 3, 13, and 84 per cent. While the richest 10 per cent of families used a healthy minimal amount of three to four pounds of soap monthly, the survey also indicated that 13 per cent of the wealthiest did not wash with soap, while 7 per cent of the poorest did. Overall, 9 per cent washed their hands with soap daily.58 In Kharkiv province, 7 per cent used soap daily, but no one used it for laundry. Eight per cent took a bath once a week, 59 per cent did so sometimes, 33 per cent never did. People could be cleaner in the summer when almost 70 per cent reported bathing outdoors; 41 per cent reported monthly outdoor bathing. A noblewoman residing in a Poltava province

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village in 1922 was repelled by how dirty her relatively well-off hosts were and claimed they never washed. A standing joke at the time explained the Ukrainian was washed twice in his life: when he was born and when he died.59 Of infants, 26 per cent were washed weekly and 35 per cent monthly – which suggests almost 40 per cent were not washed at all. Fewer than 2 per cent of the surveyed had separate towels for family members. Most everybody changed their underclothes weekly – a practice that could be maintained during the revolutionary years when, among the items townsfolk exchanged for food, was underwear. As many as 96 per cent of houses in some surveyed districts had no outhouse; 98 per cent had no wash basin, and bathtubs were rare. People preferred not to wash in the cattle troughs each household had. Because these were used for everything from washing to watering the livestock, the water became stagnant and cloudy. As such, people realized they were sources of infection.60 Dwellings were rundown. No more than 10 per cent of those surveyed were built after 1921, and no one made repairs and renovations. On average, 50 per cent of houses had wooden walls, which afforded the best protection from the elements. Forty-two per cent had clay walls, which conducted damp and cold. In the five central and southern provinces, where wood was not readily available, only 22 per cent had wooden walls. Eighty-one per cent of all dwellings, 50 to 60 per cent in Donetsk and Katerynoslav provinces, had straw roofs. Prone to rodent infestation, the roofs were maintained with difficulty during the war years because the drop in cereal production meant less straw. In 1923, 50 per cent of the surveyed dwellings had leaky roofs. On average, 95 per cent of surveyed houses had either packed earth or clay floors – which conducted damp. Even in forested northern regions, only 15 per cent of houses on average had wooden floors. With the exception of Donetsk province, where 82 per cent of houses had a foundation, elsewhere the average was 14 to 15 per cent. Seventy-six per cent of houses had no openable windows, 40 per cent had only minimal outdoor light, 23 per cent had no outdoor light at all. Hinges and hooks in villages were rare and glass inordinately expensive – if available. Eighteen per cent of the surveyed, located primarily in Donetsk and Katerynoslav provinces, lived with cattle under the same roof. Average families consisted of five to six persons. Except for Donetsk and Katerynoslav provinces, where 42 per cent of houses had two rooms, in the other seven provinces only 26 per cent had two rooms. Even families with two rooms normally reserved one for visitors and guests. In winter, they heated and lived in only one. Fifty-seven per cent of the surveyed houses averaged 176 to 330 square feet of space (33 to 55 sq ft per person) at a time when doctors considered 100 sq ft per person the necessary healthy minimum. Not only was that too small a space for that number of humans

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in houses, but few slept alone, and none had their own towel. No more than 32 per cent of the surveyed had large beds. Approximately 30 per cent slept in beds. Twenty per cent slept on the floor, and 20 per cent on their ovens – both of which were unhealthy. As much as 70 per cent of the surveyed had no bedding and covered themselves with their clothes. Ninety-seven per cent, including rich and poor, had only one towel per household, used by everyone to wipe everything. Five per cent of the surveyed in Odesa province had no towel at all in their houses. Towels normally hung in corners until they became so filthy that they were removed for use as a rag. No more than 2 per cent had an indoor washstand. Seventy-four per cent had no outhouse. It was standard practice for people to relieve themselves wherever convenient. The houses were dark inside during the day. In Kharkiv province, up to 80 per cent of the surveyed were either dark or very dark.61 As of 1923, money still had no value. The preferred currency was bread. In theory, there was no longer reason to limit production to consumption only. By that year, an estimated 10 per cent of households had lost land, 30 per cent neither lost nor acquired, 60 per cent acquired an average of twelve acres – up to twenty-four in the south. Fifty-eight per cent of households, regardless of having more land than in 1917, claimed they did not have enough for subsistence (twelve acres). Nor did all of the remainder report they had the seed, implements, and livestock to farm what they did have. As of 1923, 61 per cent of all Ukrainian households were listed as planting twelve acres of land or fewer and having no surplus – almost the same number as in 1917. According to collected data, a peasant in Kharkiv province who planted twenty-four acres (9 per cent of provincial households), reaped an average of 7,200 to 7,300 pounds of grain. That amount could cover consumption, but not all needs, expenses, and high taxes, which required a total of at least 14,000 pounds of grain. Assuming inhabitants did not systematically lie to enumerators and enumerators did not lie to their superiors, additional declared income from wage labour noted in official statistics obviously did not cover the difference, and what emerges is that the land peasants got did not appreciably improve their lives or behaviour. The official data showed that peasants ate less, could not make repairs, or purchase necessities like needles or shoes even if available.62 Assuming the recorded descriptions and statistics were true, they would indicate that, as of 1923, peasants produced less and still lived in unhealthy surroundings that left them vulnerable to diseases. If the data did not reflect reality, it would suggest peasants were better off than they admitted to officials – at least until the 1921 famine that contributed to the persistence of disease, hunger, and high infant mortality.63 There was no particular reason for peasants to admit to higher production because of high taxes and little if anything available to obtain in return for that production. But even assuming they did produce more than they

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admitted, that total was limited by circumstances. Those who acquired land did not necessarily acquire the credit, or livestock, or tools they needed to produce more. Owners lost work time walking back and forth between new allotments scattered over wide areas. Because there was less livestock than before 1914, more work was done by hand, and less manure was available for fertilizer. Shortages of fuel and raw materials meant peasants had to use wooden, rather than more-effective metal tools. The almost complete lack of footwear meant families had to share boots during the winter – and none but the richest could walk outdoor until April or even May, when bare feet would not freeze. A second survey of Kyiv province was more detailed. In one region (Hrebenka), data from 1917, 1920, and 1923 show the population had reached its 1917 total in 1923, but as of 1920, had approximately 6,500 fewer people than in 1917. By 1923, some indicators had risen from those recorded in 1920, but the decline was not yet reversed. The number of households without livestock increased from 898 in 1917, to 1,930 in 1920, to 2,194 in 1923. While the number of households without a cow fell to 1,946 in 1920 from 2,476 in 1917, presumably because of seizures, by 1923 the number of those without had risen to 3,511, presumably due to sale or Bolshevik requisitioning. In 1923, the total number of recorded horses had fallen from 7,846 in 1917, to 6,967; pigs from 8,094 in 1917, to 1,602; cows from 4,969 in 1917, to 4,228; and domestic fowl from 38,370 in 1917, to 24,769.64

The Jewish Shtetl A similar survey of the small-town Jewish population in the Vinnytsia region was undertaken in 1927. Although it reflected conditions that existed after four years of peace, it is as best a statistical description available of what conditions were probably like between 1917 and 1923. The survey indicated that Jews lived in marginally better dwellings than did Ukrainian peasants, turned to doctors more often, and had slightly lower per capita infection rates of almost all illnesses. Unlike Ukrainians, almost all Jews, because their dietary laws required clean hands at mealtime, usually had soap and used it. They used separate sets of dishes at meals, and their houses were less infested with pests. However, any resulting health benefits from these better indicators were offset because Jews, mostly artisans, spent almost their entire days inside, unlike Ukrainians. Living on cramped small streets, they had no ready access to fresh air and green spaces. Their dwellings were without gardens and were much closer to each other than were peasant cottages. Because a high percentage of Jews were poor, more of them than Ukrainians were malnourished because they ate less. Ninety-four per cent of the surveyed had no outhouses; like Christians, they dumped excrement

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in corners and streets – but the piles were closer to houses and street stalls than in wealthier sections of town or in the country.65

Public Health and Sanitation Not the least of problems faced by health officials was that, until 1923, leaders allotted limited resources primarily to political publications, whose press runs, consequently, contrasted sharply with the miserly runs of a few thousand copies allotted to the Commissariat of Public Health.66 In the autumn of 1920, Ukraine’s health officials submitted plans for leaflets in runs up to 100,000, and for pamphlets and medical texts in runs of 20,000 to 30,000, but they were never sure whether they would be allotted the necessary paper.67 In 1920, the highest press run of a published health information leaflet was no more than 17,000 copies. Professional medical journals circulated between 50 and 100 copies per province. Ukraine’s rail system in October 1920 was allotted twelve pamphlets on health matters in 15 to 20 copies each for its sixty-one stations and post offices.68 Rural medical centres apparently got nothing or little in 1920–21 and, consequently, could not compile statistics.69 A report dated February 1920, excluding one province and listing totals for five diseases (typhus, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, and scurvy), indicates 61,728 reported cases for all Ukraine, of which 62 per cent were typhus. This total was ridiculous in light of the fact that the total number of recorded ill for these diseases in the Ukrainian provinces in 1913, the last year of peace, was in the hundreds of thousands.70 As noted in chapter 1, in a report from Verkhnodniprovsk district in central Ukraine in 1920 (population 295,000), the author reckoned at least 60,000 (21 per cent of the population) were sick from all causes. In mid-1921, it was estimated that at least 70 per cent of Ukraine’s total population had tuberculosis.71 In Kyiv, in February 1920, the average death rate was three-and-a-half times higher than the previous February, and twenty-three times higher than in 1923, when rates fell to more or less their pre-war averages. The Polish Red Cross reported conditions in the wake of the Polish occupation that May as “indescribable.” Nobody in Kyiv washed because there was no soap. Lack of fuel meant few if any families could have hot meals or boil water. The pumping system did not work so water had to be taken from wells on the outskirts of town or the Dnipro. The latter two sources were available primarily to those nearby; however, because carrying pails was no easy task for the emaciated populace, nor was the river water potable, the dirt, cold, and malnutrition led to gastric diseases, cholera, and tuberculosis. No public transportation made terrible conditions worse.72 There were no obstetric clinics. If they were lucky, pregnant women might have been able to count

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on a midwife. Infant mortality rose again to what it had been circa 1900. In reality, it was likely higher than the reported 30 per cent.73 As already noted, statistics from the years 1919–21 most probably did not indicate actual total infections. What that reported data can more likely indicate is whether rates rose or fell. Figures from Katerynoslav, for instance, show substantial declines in reported cases of typhus, dysentery, and smallpox during 1920.74 Rates of typhus infection in Kharkiv remained steady until July 1921.75 Statistical tables showed that the number of reported cases of typhus, cholera, smallpox, and flu began to decline in Russia in late 1921. Ukraine’s Health Ministry also noted a marked decline in reported infections in early 1921. Although the reported total of those infected with seven diseases, excluding venereal, was probably understated, it indicates decline – as later confirmed. At that time, for hundreds of thousands of sick, there were an estimated 13,397 hospital beds in Bolshevik Ukraine.76 The highest reported rates were from Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and Donetsk provinces, while the lowest were from Luhansk and Volyn. The majority of typhus cases were rural civilians.77 Reports from Kharkiv and Kyiv provinces, submitted to Kharkiv that fall, attributed a rise in reported infections primarily due to an influx of refugees.78 A March 1920 report pointed out a steep fall in the number of those seeking medical assistance, increasing reliance on quacks, midwives, and folk healers, and hostile attitudes toward medical personnel in general. All of which marked a reversal from pre-war public-health improvements. In response, commissars decided to mount a propaganda campaign on the merits of modern medicine.79 One such publication recorded that peasants had little idea of what caused illnesses and normally attributed them to “the wind,” or spirits. As such, they believed spells were vital to healing – spells known only by the healers and midwives. They had no idea of how the body functioned and thought that each disease had a cure whose effects would be instantaneous. Distrust of physicians, often mistrusted as outsiders, as opposed to healers and midwives who were trusted as local people, increased when prescribed medical remedies either failed, or required time for healing. People did not understand why one died of some malady while another survived it, or that medicines would have limited or no effects if they ate bad food, wore dirty clothes, lived in overcrowded squalid dwellings, and drank water whose contamination was not visible to the naked eye. The booklet included numerous descriptions of healer-remedies it classified as useless and harmless or useless and dangerous.80 Combined statistics on minimal reported infections for Ukraine in 1920 rarely included syphilis. Those figures were recorded separately. The disease is noted in 1920 data from the Kharkiv military district – which encompassed almost half of Ukraine. These indicated that, in terms of total infected, syphilis was second only to typhus among troops.81 In 1921, 60 of

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every 1,000 Red Army men in that district alone had venereal diseases – a stark contrast from the reported 44 per 1,000 for the entire tsarist army in 1913. During the first six months of 1921, Berdiansk district reported 11,456 infections from all causes, of which 7,983 were typhus. Of the 1,505 reported venereal and syphilis cases, 1,245 were military.82 The rate among troops west of the Dnipro was higher. Fifty per cent of those infected in the Kharkiv district claimed they got it from prostitutes, as opposed to 20 per cent west of the Dnipro.83 A doctor from an unidentified village, who worked there through the revolutionary years, recorded reported syphilis infections rose from fewer than ten in 1914, to more than fifty in 1922. Reported cases of tuberculosis rose from forty to one hundred and sixty. Since the most tuberculosis-infected were the elderly, and the elderly minded the children, they inevitably infected the children.84 As symptoms contracted during the revolutionary years manifested themselves, and record keeping improved, it emerged in 1924 that Ukraine’s national average of syphilis infections was 232 per 10,000 – almost five times the pre-1914 average.85 There are no specific figures for Ukrainian cities, but they might have equalled Petrograd where, in 1922, doctors estimated 90 per cent of its population were infected with the disease.86 As noted in chapter 2, contemporary accounts record that Bolsheviks killed hospital patients in 1918–21. Some evidence shows they targeted syphilitics. A diarist in northern Ukraine recorded that in 1924 sexually transmitted diseases were so widespread that the infected were killed or poisoned: “Former hospital patients said that during their stays those infected with syphilis were shot, the venereal infected were taken out for burial daily by the hundreds. In hospitals those infected with syphilis were poisoned so they would not spread the disease.”87 A study of villages in Volyn province from 1923 to 1924 showed patterns of infection. In some cases, local women had intercourse with passing troops. In others, particularly in villages near towns, prostitutes fleeing hunger infected local men during the course of their business. In most instances, the source was men returned from the front already infected, who then either married or had extramarital intercourse with local women. Reported cases, particularly from villages, did not reflect the actual total. Peasants often went to, and were recorded in, urban clinics. The general tendency after 1923 was for the total of newly reported venereal infections to fall noticeably, and for reported cases of secondary and tertiary symptoms to increase.88 Bolshevik Ukraine had a total of twenty-three specialist, but normally badly equipped, venereal clinics in 1923, and 595 hospital places reserved for venereal patients in 1925.89 Ukraine’s recorded infection rate for syphilis per 10,000 was at least 47 in 1924, up from 41 in 1912. In rural areas, the rate was at least 51, and in cities, 218. The Donbass had the highest infection rates, with

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some areas averaging as much as 10 per 100. An exhaustive detailed survey of 1,524 men and women was done in the Zhytomir region in early 1925. They worked in local factories but lived in villages. Fifty-one per cent of the women and 22 per cent of the men were ignorant of the cause and signs of syphilis. Ninety per cent of those infected still indulged in sexual relations, and 82 per cent of them shared towels and eating utensils with those they lived with. The organizers considered it one of the most infected regions in the country, noting that other surveys were superficial and failed to reflect the reality. Of the surveyed, 5 per cent of the Ukrainians and 2 per cent of the Jews, who were local, were infected. Of the migrant Russians, 31 per cent were infected. Seventy-five per cent of the infected were between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine. Of the urban infected, twice as many administrative male staff as workers were infected because the former frequented prostitutes much more often.90 Tuberculosis, syphilis, and typhus were the three major afflictions in the Red Army in Ukraine, which was comprised overwhelmingly of Russians. Between 1920 and 1922, due to factors like lower recruiting standards, which led to acceptance of the already infected, along with bad food, and bad lodgings, tuberculosis and respiratory disease rates, in general, skyrocketed to 12 and 33 per 1,000 respectively. Lenin in August 1918 was so worried about syphilis in among Red troops he ordered three of his men in the town of Nizhni to organize “immediately [sic], mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds [sic] of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, former officers and the like.”91 There is no record if anyone issued such orders in Ukraine. In 1920, no more than 11 per cent of the million-strong Red Army in Ukraine were Ukrainian speakers; the following year the figure fell to 9 per cent. Figures for the Kyiv province “punishment battalion” in 1919 show that 87 per cent were Russian speakers. It is unknown to what extent the foreign composition of that army was responsible for spreading contagious disease among Ukrainians who, otherwise, might not have been infected had those troops not been there – particularly in eastern Ukraine.92 Not the least of the diseases the war and revolution caused was lead poisoning. Poltava province, for instance, was an important centre of pottery manufacturing. Before the war, the lead needed to glaze the clay was imported from England. It was no longer available after 1914, and, as stocks dwindled, potters had to use less and worse quality lead or substitutes. The shortage of wood and coal meant kilns could not be run at the required temperature for the requisite time. Because the finished products were not properly glazed, lead leached into the contents and poisoned users.93 While people could sometimes benefit from official corruption, at other times it made bad health and sanitation situations worse. According to Sergei Maslov, corruption and theft were as omnipresent and all-pervading

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as an epidemic. “In present-day Russia corruption is the essence of life; every transaction begins and ends with a bribe.” The higher the official the more sure they were the secret police would not molest them. “Parents teach their children to steal; and the next generation is contaminated.” One manifestation of this was that, although private practice had been formally abolished, high officials ordered doctors to come and minister to them when necessary.94 In February 1921, army commissar Skvortsov-Stepanov, a friend of Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Mikhail Frunze, wrote to him requesting his son, a cadet infected with typhus, be sent to Moscow for treatment. Frunze sent the order to the commissar of health who duly arranged a place in a hospital train for the boy.95 In Katerynoslav, food purchased by hospitals on the open market was bad, because, as was later discovered, the officials concerned pocketed the difference in prices between fresh and stale produce. Doctors in Konstantinohrad (Poltava province), complained to the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate about rampant cheating at the local Food Procurement Commissariat depot, where it was almost impossible to have requests filled. When he complained, the applicant got an earful and threats of arrest for counter-revolutionary activity. Chickens were allotted by unit rather than weight, and since they did not have their throats cut, it emerged that the commissariat was providing hospitals with sick chickens that had died. Food was doctored. When delivered, it came late and was usually bad. According to regulations, all patients could have as much tobacco as they wanted. Although the depot had some seven tons, it provided none.96 Train stations in Bolshevik Ukraine were much the same as in UnR territory. In Kharkiv, for example, in March 1920 there were no fewer than 160 rail carriages being used as housing in the city station. Inhabitants routinely disposed of their excrement and garbage onto the tracks. While the parked carriages interfered with traffic, the accumulated filth was not particularly troublesome in freezing winter temperatures. However, if it was not removed before the spring thaw, everything would melt into a foul, stinking, vermin-infested contaminated stew.97 In some northern towns such conditions persisted into 1922, as stations there were overwhelmed by refugees from the famine in the south arriving to beg or trade for food. One eyewitness wrote that a “sea of people” surrounded his local station and adjacent track as far as he could see in April of that year. Many were half-naked, and people died daily. “The filth and stench is unbearable. Many lie ill. Garbage is everywhere.” A decree from the summer of 1920 requiring all rail stations to have a constant ready supply of hot water for all passengers in suitably hygienic conditions, on pain of court martial of the station officials, appears to have had little effect.98 Conditions on moving trains were bad. The experience is difficult to imagine today. Journeys that took hours before 1914 took days, or sometimes

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weeks. Except for leftover luxury carriages reserved for high officials, the rest had no lighting, rarely had windows, were overcrowded, unheated, filthy, stank, had no toilets, and crawled with lice, bugs, and fleas. Passengers had to carry their own food and water. Not infrequently, the healthy travelled alongside the sick and the dead. Where troops travelled with women, their public behaviour deviated much from accepted pre-war norms.99

Policies Bolshevik leaders did not ignore public health and sanitation. They declared medical services centralized and free upon taking power. In practice, how much of the little that was available got to civilians depended on local circumstances and initiatives.100 The names of the established central organizations changed.101 Particularly important during the revolutionary years was the All Ukrainian Emergency Health Committee (VseUkrainskoe chrezvychainoi sanitarnoi komitet), formed in February 1920. Together with the Commission for the Struggle against Typhus (Kommissia borotby s tyfom), and a similar organization attached to the army, it composed a “public health dictatorship” whose decisions were obligatory for all. The organization was combined into the All Ukrainian Emergency Epidemic Committee (Vseukrainska chrezvychaina epidamicheskii komitet) in January 1921.102 Khristian Rakovskii was its chairman from its beginnings until June 1921. All its decrees, as those of its parallel subordinate units, were obligatory for all organizations.103 Each province and district had a committee subunit including representatives of other local institutions. Its members would review problems, make a decision, then send a resolution to the appropriate organization for implementation. The Public Health Commissariat was subordinated to this committee. Ukraine’s Red Cross had Ukrainian and Russian wings and dealt primarily with refugees, troops, and Jewish pogrom victims. A detailed Bolshevik report from May 1919 noted it functioned better than the Health Commissariat, but recommended it be subordinated to the commissariat.104 Within a month of its formation, the health committee ordered all recently recovered typhus patients registered so they could be commandeered, as necessary, to work in typhus wards – as they were immune. In May, it decreed fuel shipments to hospitals had priority. It ordered all tailors and anyone with a sewing machine be registered and mobilized to produce bedsheets and covers at set state prices. Those who refused were fined and/ or had their machines confiscated.105 Doctors were commandeered and sent where necessary. Where medicine was sold at markets, Cheka troops would arrest the “speculator” and confiscate the goods. When a hospital required renovations, workers were to be mobilized and sent.

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Insofar as such decrees had any results, they presumably won support of some for the Bolshevik order.106 Yet, one historian observed that the gruesome conditions created a perverse kind of support among others. Much like English puritans who condemned traditional sports like cockfighting and bear baiting not because they made animals suffer, but gave men pleasure, such persons enjoyed hearing Bolsheviks boasting not about improvements in the lot of the poor, but the misery they inflicted on the once well-to-do.107 Some orders were implemented in reasonable time, some were not. In one instance, during 1920, the Bolsheviks opened new hospitals and clinics in Kyiv province. Situation reports from the end of the year indicate nothing much had improved as the new facilities, like the old ones, needed repair and lacked food, medicines, fuel, and horses.108 On 13 October 1920, the Kremenchuh Committee ordered lightbulbs and electric wire for its hospitals from Kharkiv. The items arrived on 2 February 1921.109 On 19 February, an inspector submitted a report to Ukraine’s Council of Peoples’ Commissars in Kharkiv on a typhus hospital in the Kharkiv region. He outlined what a patient could expect. After being dropped on the floor by the incoming transport, which then left without being disinfected, the patient lay there for three to eight days until he was moved to a camp bed with only a mattress. He lay in his own clothes covered only by a greatcoat – if he had one. The hospital was crawling with lice and had no sheets. Since old sheets could not be washed, they were sent to the train station where cleaners used them as cleaning rags. If the man survived, he left in the same clothes he had upon arrival – not disinfected. Dirty water was thrown out the front door, as was human excrement. Excrement was also deposited in bathtubs – and left there. Since 90 per cent of the toilets were plugged, patients did their business everywhere except there. The metal dishware was rusted and corroded because it was never washed. Every 800 patients were supervised by ten doctors, twenty-one nurses, and thirty-six medics – if they themselves were not sick. A duty nurse in a ward with 150 patients would normally be on her feet for twenty-four hours. This letter eventually made its way to Rakovskii, who resided in Kharkiv, and, on 22 February, the hospital got one million rubles.110 How many resolutions and decrees were successfully implemented will perhaps never be known. There is much evidence of bureaucratic inertia, overlapping authorities, long delays, and inefficiency. In Katerynoslav, in 1920, a flood of resolutions and a poster campaign were not followed up by any activity. In reality, only trade-union members could use the free state medical care.111 Failure, collapse, and neglect were likely more obvious to the average person than achievements. That would explain why the popular term people used to refer to lice was “semashki” – a diminutive form of the name of the commissar for health, Nikolai Semashko.

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Extant paper trails can read like a story by Nikolai Gogol – or the script from the British television series Yes Minister. In December 1920, Ukraine’s commissars ordered 785 garbage barrels from the Forest Commissariat. The order was sent marked “immediate” to seven different establishments in different provinces in April 1921. As of October 1921, when the paper trail ends, messages kept coming from the workshops concerned, explaining either that work was being done, that it was not being done according to specifications because of shortages, or that it was not being done at all and had been sent, instead, to private artisan workshops.112 When officials got word of some disaster or infection, they inevitably sent a telegram ordering immediate action. What ensued was not always immediate. It is approximately 300 miles from Kharkiv to Chernihiv, and 200 to the town of Nizhyn – all linked by telegraph. On 13 March 1922, during a cholera epidemic, the Kharkiv office of the regional rail system sent a telegram ordering all corpses of those who died in transit to be removed from trains and stations and buried. Presumably, because these were cholera victims, others feared to approach them and were leaving them where they lay. On 4 May, Nizhyn officials got the order. But the order it then sent to subordinates on 31 May did not specify corpses were to be buried – only that officials take measures to prevent the spread of diseases. The order to remove corpses arrived the next day – from Chernihiv. On 31 July, the Nizhyn authorities allotted an area near the cemetery for the corpses. During the five months the correspondence went back and forth, the disease spread. On 18 August, the first cases of cholera were reported in the isolated regional village of Danyna.113 The Zaporizhzhia provincial emergency commission head wrote a letter to Rakovskii himself in March 1921. He explained the Central Extraordinary Committee should not issue urgent directives to local units bypassing regular channels without first considering local conditions, as that only resulted in delay and disorganization. He requested the central office to coordinate its actions with its local subunits.114 Besides overlapping, inefficient bureaucracies, acute shortages of most everything hindered implementation. There are instances when nothing would be done after orders concerning immediate delivery of personnel and/or materials arrived in a provincial or district capital, because there were no personnel to deliver, nor materials anywhere in the vicinity for them to deliver. In Katerynoslav province in January 1921, the chief engineer reported he could not renovate the hospitals as ordered because he had no materials, no transport, and no workers. Pipes clogged and broke, he added, primarily because staff used drains as toilets and receptacles for garbage.115 Records from the Poltava province Extraordinary Health Committee through 1920

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indicate it generated a stream of directives and orders, including such petty issues as indicating quarantine on houses with cholera cases, and obliging officials to ensure plumbers had medical supervision on the job. Yet, an inspector accused it in March 1921 of “feeble work” and passivity, whose members did nothing except attend meetings.116 In other cases, despite its plenipotentiary status, central as well as local committees’ orders were simply ignored. Thus, in Kharkiv, a 1921 report on the city’s hospitals noted that all complaints had been ignored. The situation, consequently, was worse that November than it had been six months earlier, and hospitals resembled the worst category of night hostel. The Cherkassy district committee reported to Kharkiv, in September 1920, that city authorities ignored all its resolutions. In Kharkiv, despite a committee decree forbidding any other government agency from commandeering medical facilities, the Cheka did just that in the capital.117 The Odesa Epidemic Committee reported in an undated message to Kharkiv, “All [your] telegraph orders to the Food Commissariat to send supplies to the Epidemic Committee are unfulfilled.” The committee’s existence did little if anything to improve the disastrous conditions in hospitals. Throughout Kherson province in June 1919, there were no sheets for civilian hospitals because they had all been requisitioned by the army. In Odesa that month, patients got only a half ration of bread daily, and staff got nothing because there was literally nothing in government warehouses. Just under one-half ton of food intended to last for a week had arrived earlier, but the normal weekly requirement for the city’s hospitals was just under nine tons.118 Regardless of Ukraine’s total economic collapse, recorded by Bolshevik officials as of March 1919, the next month, the leadership in Moscow, nonetheless, decided to send wounded Russian soldiers from Russia for treatment to Ukraine’s army hospitals.119 In the summer of 1920, Rakovskii sent a personal order to the Kharkiv provincial party committee to find out why its health committee was inactive. When the Kherson provincial committee ordered army doctors to also work in civilian institutions, the army’s medical officer refused to send them, explaining that if the doctors wanted to, they could volunteer to work during their free time in the civilian institutions. The situation that year in civilian hospitals was particularly acute because, as of March, all doctors over forty had been conscripted for military service. In another case, officials in charge of a food depot in December 1921 refused the request of the central emergency committee to release 180 tons of bread to rail commissariat hospitals. The committee had already ordered 1,105 ration units for the 1,105 patients, and depot officials explained that, because any more was against regulations, the order would first have to be approved by the health commissariat. There is no further record of how the issue was

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resolved.120 Between October 1921 and January 1922, a series of telegrams have survived between the town of Kremenchuh, the provincial capital, Katerynoslav, and the republic capital, Kharkiv, concerning a copper-wire mesh needed by Kremenchuh’s water board. All were marked immediate and urgent, and the last one complained, that, for the second time, the mesh sent was the wrong size. In reply to repeated requests for 25,000 bowls and dishes, 18,000 bedcovers, and 14,750 tables for its hospitals, Kharkiv officials only got replies: “the order will be sent when it is ready.”121 When street conditions became exceptionally unbearable, provincial or city authorities would declare a compulsory cleanup week. All able-bodied, and, normally, the wealthier and educated, were sometimes mustered out at the point of a bayonet and ordered to clean their own dwelling areas, adjoining public spaces, and public buildings on pain of fines or sentencing to a concentration camp. Authorities in Berdiansk in southern Ukraine in 1921 reported that after such a two-week campaign, with the assistance of local troops, by 19 May they had removed 2,000 wagon loads of garbage, 260 barrels of excrement, and 11,000 drays of street rubbish. By 30 June, conditions were just as they had been before the campaign. As the authorities explained, there was no infrastructure to permit systematic maintenance. Horses were too few and weak, carts and barrels were lacking, and remaining city workers refused to work because they were not paid.122 There is little to suggest Bolshevik efforts had somehow improved the lot of the general civilian population before 1923. What those efforts did do was increase the total number of health-related administrative offices and personnel – but only marginally increased the per capita distribution of doctors, nurses, medics, clinics, and hospitals. Figures suggest the number of doctors in Ukraine had increased from 5,267 in 1913, to 5,932 in 1920. The most were in Odesa and the fewest in Chernihiv provinces. In 1922, for the then-approximately twenty-six million population, the total had risen to 8,864 (1:2,900). The least were in Chernihiv province. Kyiv province had the most of all Ukrainian provinces. By nationality, 47 per cent were Jews, 14 per cent Ukrainian, 30 per cent Russian. Of 4,425 nurses, 53 per cent were Russian, 16 per cent Ukrainian.123 In the summer of 1920, Ukraine’s Public Health Commissariat central offices had approximately 400 to 500 employees and bureaucrats, and fifty doctors.124 A list of 229 completed personnel forms gives some idea of who the central personnel were. The list includes all positions from doctors to caretakers. It shows the overwhelming majority were Russians (eighty-four, of which forty-seven were probably Ukrainian-born), and Jews (ninety-nine, of which sixty-eight were probably Ukrainian-born). Sixteen of the former and thirty of the latter were doctors. Three of the six on the list who classified themselves as Ukrainians were doctors.125

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Famine Lenin in Moscow declared the New Economic Policy (nep ) in March 1921. The policy, in theory, was supposed to leave more foodstuffs in peasant hands by replacing arbitrary quotas with a fixed tax in kind. In practice, in Russia and Ukraine, quotas remained higher than most households could meet, and squads still used force.126 Regardless of Lenin’s decree, in April in Ukraine, Rakovskii explained that, “there will be absolutely no changes in quotas or deadlines, and any rumours to the contrary are idle speculation.” The nep declaration circulated to local officials was marked “secret.” That year, Lenin had expected Ukraine to send to Russia 900,000 tons of grain – 126,000 tons more than in 1919. In southern Ukraine, data showed peasants who produced the most grain per capita before 1914 did not have enough for subsistence in 1921. When drought hit southern Ukraine that summer, the result was famine.127 Leaders received first reports in July 1921. Nonetheless, that August, following central command, Ukraine’s leaders ordered requisition squads to apply more force and reinforced them with troops to ensure they met their targets. Secret orders commanded local party committees not to interfere with requisitioning units that were under direct control of Moscow only, and were to continue confiscating and requisitioning by force according to the old quotas. Those who complained were to be arrested. Extant orders show if villages did not meet quotas within two days, agents shot hostages and confiscated any and all foodstuffs they could find.128 Leaders officially recognized Ukrainians were starving and lowered targets only in December 1921 – ten months after the nep had been declared and five months after learning of famine. Until May 1922, despite famine, Bolsheviks shipped 813,000 tons of grain from Ukraine to Russia (of which 270,000 went for export) and did not suspend tax payments as they had in Russia. Those who could not meet targets were still arrested or shot through 1921. Central leaders demanded their Ukrainian subordinates fulfill their quotas – who acted accordingly. A member of Ukraine’s committee to help famine victims in June 1922 characterized the policy up to December 1921 as follows: “to collect foodstuffs whatever happens, the food supply units of the Ukrainian SRR , ignoring everything, including the [literal] destruction of agricultural production, continued forced requisitioning, to save the breadbasket of the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic] – the Volga region.” The region worst affected by the famine, and its associated consequences of disease and criminality, was Zaporizhzhia province– the centre of Makhno’s movement. The famine effectively ended anti-Bolshevik resistance in south-eastern Ukraine. Some argue that was why leaders did nothing to alleviate the famine for five months.

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Concerned about the resistance and arbitrary brutality requisitioning generated, central Cheka officials issued circulars forbidding “excesses.” These had little impact. Three years later, Cheka reports and complaints from pro-Bolshevik Poor Peasant Committees note agents still engaged in “illegal actions.” In the wake of a drought in Podillia province “when it came time to pay the tax, they told us: pay, and if you don’t pay you go to prison.”129 Some reports are impossible to comprehend. One dated 18 November 1922 from Katerynoslav province, which as of March that year had over 500,000 starving peasants, reads, “The mood of the peasants is completely satisfactory, despite the famine that began in the southern districts … The food collection campaign is ending. Many districts have already met from 90 to 100 per cent of their quota. Famine in the province is intensifying. In the Kryvorizh district over 50,000 starving have been registered. Incidents of famine deaths are increasing …” One month later, in the same province, presumably the same persons wrote that poor peasants were dissatisfied with the food requisitioning, rich peasants opposed Bolshevik rule, as before, and peasants did not meet quotas because they had nothing to eat.130 Peasants in Ukraine could begin to improve their lot, keep surplus and legally sell only after May 1923 when a single tax in cash was introduced.131 Mykola Molodyk wrote that, in his village, noticeable improvement came in 1924: “That is how the new life began. Everybody was satisfied, workers and peasants.”132

chApteR 4

Violence Against Civilians: The Russian Bolshevik Government We live in the midst of unpunished barbarism and horror … Slogans vary – human brutality is all the same.

Volodymyr/Vladimir Korolenko (1919)

Bolsheviks and Whites exercised arbitrary violence and terror against Russians in Russia as horrifically as they did against Ukrainians in Ukraine. Each considered its government and its use of violence as legitimate, and its rivals as rebels to be treated as such. Maxim Gorky in 1922 wrote, “they [Reds and Whites] were the same; after all, both of them were Russian.”1 Some Bolshevik leaders opposed the absolute writ that Lenin and others gave the Cheka to arbitrarily arrest and execute whomsoever. That minority’s attempts to restrict their secret police – as western European, American, and the pre-war tsarist governments restricted theirs – had little impact in practice. Bolshevik leaders never denied culpability and made no secret of using terror against enemies prior to 1923. On 3 December 1917, a few days after they declared the Kadet Party enemies of the people, postponed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, and a few days before the creation of the Cheka, Trotsky called for a French Jacobin-style terror against enemies with its own guillotine “that shortens the length of a body by a head.” Stories quickly began to circulate that the Bolsheviks had invented an electric guillotine, that, at the press of a button, could lop off 500 heads at once.2 There was no electric guillotine. There were five Bolshevik organizations that perpetrated violence against civilians.3 Revolutionary Military Tribunals had the power to immediately execute the condemned. The secret police, besides having agents who could arbitrarily arrest and execute, also had special armed units for use against civilians. Armed requisition squads, both standing and ad hoc, also used force to confiscate goods and produce. In Odesa (population 450,000 in 1900) in June 1920, for example, local officials mobilized 4,000 police, troops, and party members who, for the next weeks, systematically

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searched every dwelling, often at night, and confiscated everything beyond a set maximum that included everything from sheets and underwear to teaspoons and saucers. Those who hid possessions were arrested and/or shot – many of whom were Jews.4 Red Army troops were, at times, ordered to attack civilians, or, as stragglers and deserters, they forced civilians to provide them with whatever they wanted. Finally, the Red Army included various “International Brigades” comprised of former prisoners of war of different nationalities, most often Hungarians, Latvians, and Chinese, declared “Soviet citizens.” These were used primarily for counter-insurgency operations that involved reprisals against civilians. The units ranged from company to divisional in size. In Ukraine in 1919, they numbered approximately 10,000 men.5 After the first Bolshevik invasion of Ukraine in January 1918, an arrested Ukrainian journalist in a Kyiv prison talked with his guards inquiring from where they came. He learned all but two were from Russian provinces.6 That summer, Menshevik leader Iulius Martov wrote, “Generally speaking, at present Bolshevism [in Russia] relies primarily on the lumpen proletariat, Latvian riflemen, detachments of prisoners of war, and the Chinese … In other words, the Bolsheviks rely on a hired gendarmerie.” This was confirmed later that year by a British agent: “In fact, the only troops the Bolsheviks can trust, are the Lettish, the Chinese and a few battalions of sailors … For any military offence there is only one punishment – death. Executions are done mostly by Chinese.” The foreign units were better paid than Russian Red Army men and enjoyed immunity for excesses against civilians.7 Excesses and atrocities can result either from government initiative or government breakdown. Mobs, and those prepared to exploit prevailing circumstances to steal or settle private scores, acted against an undercurrent of violence and cruelty manifested in 1905–06. By 1918, peasants, with no courts or police to protect them from threats to their livelihood, like horse theft, had no qualms about judging wrongdoers themselves, impaling or burying them alive in spectacular examples of punishment to deter others. Some radical village councils that year decided to kill any landowners owning more than fifty acres.8 Bolshevik leaders publicly condoned spontaneous mass violence that began before they took power in a given territory. Their agitators not infrequently instigated it. They never denied advocacy or culpability.9 In power, those same leaders faced mass violence directed against themselves and their agents. They created the Cheka, and later “International Units,” to deal with it. In theory, like the party and its government, the Cheka was supposed to be a centralized institution. In practice, the control central leaders had over their subordinates was shaky. Between 1920 and 1923, Bolshevik administration was chaotic. Overstaffed, overlapping offices with incompetent and corrupt officials, who usually spent a portion of their

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working hours searching for food and fuel because their wages and rations, if they did come, did not cover needs or costs, did not always efficiently implement central instructions. In Bolshevik territory, what control there was rarely extended beyond provincial capitals, rail-junction towns, and a few miles each side of rail lines. They faced serious partisan resistance from units loyal either to the UnR or to Makhno until the end of 1922. Unverified Bolshevik reports claim as many as one million armed insurgents were fighting in Ukraine in 1920. The situation in the southern rural district near Odesa that year was likely typical. When a special armed unit arrived from Moscow, peasants met their set quotas. As soon as the unit left, they stopped delivering. As of July 1921, thirty-four Jewish settlements there are known to have supported Ukrainian units.10 Bolshevik Revolutionary Military Committees/ Revkoms, for instance, were responsible for organizing the seizure of power and/or administering it in the wake of military occupation at local levels. In practice, they were neither hierarchic nor part of a hierarchy, but, rather, centres of clan-type, patron-client relationships, as were local branches of central commissariats. They were informal associations of acquaintances, often outsiders, not supervised central officials: “personal network ties were used in such ways to facilitate the development of a capacity for territorial administration at a time when the state’s formal administrative mechanisms were still not reliable beyond the central industrial region.” Moscow would send plenipotentiary agents who, using violence if necessary, tried to make Revkom personnel obey central orders. Sometimes they could. Sometimes they could not.11 Between August and December 1918 in Russia, the Cheka had grown from 1,000 to 30,000 men and women. That same year its leaders, alongside senior party members, were already condemning the organization and their inability to control it to Lenin. Complaints led to a few hundred Cheka men in Russia being shot through 1918. That December, the central committee formally forbade public criticism. Then, after the death of the Cheka’s foremost critic, Iakov Sverdlov, Feliks Dzierzhinskii no longer faced any serious attempts from other leaders to supervise his organization. In 1919, the number of recorded Cheka victims in Russia did decline noticeably from the previous year. But that was as likely the result of declining resistance from peasants in Bolshevik-controlled Volga and Urals regions, who had experienced White-rule and concluded that was worse than Bolshevism, as of criticism. Those same figures show the number of victims did not decline that year in Ukraine. There, party-member critics also complained to Lenin about Cheka excesses by venal, corrupt, local agents acting arbitrarily beyond their writ.12 It is unlikely anyone will ever know how accurate the total recorded figures are, or how many of those deaths resulted from sanctioned executions as opposed to random arbitrary killing.

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The Government and Violence After taking power in 1917, Lenin renounced the international treaties signed by the tsarist government. Implicitly this included the 1907 Hague Convention on the treatment of civilians and enemy soldiers, but there is no record of any formal withdrawal as required by the Convention. However formal recognition of the Convention might have restricted arbitrary violence and killing of civilians, weak central control provided broad scope for local agents to interpret broadly their writ to destroy and punish whomsoever they decided were enemies of the revolution. Bolshevik leaders amplified that institutional flaw by their frequent public reference to indiscriminate and justified mass killing, the “merciless destruction on the spot” of targeted enemy groups.13 In a May 1918 directive to a local subordinate, Dzierzhinskii, explained how to recruit Cheka agents: “just round-up all the resolute people you can, who understand there is nothing more effective than a bullet in the head to shut people up.”14 How he reconciled that opinion with earlier remarks that condemned the brutal rapacity of the Russian-Bolshevik troops who invaded Ukraine in January 1918 is unclear. At the secret trial of their commander, Mikhail Muraviov, who was ultimately acquitted, Dzierzhinskii stated that the Bolsheviks’ worst enemy could not have inflicted more harm on their cause than had the “nightmarish” deeds of Muraviov’s units that “roused the entire population against us.”15 Most tie the beginning of Bolshevik terror to the “Decree on the Red Terror.” Issued September 1918, it warned those who sought to overthrow their regime would be shot on the spot and opponents sent to concentration camps. The correct date that marks the beginnings of centrally sanctioned terror against enemies, in reality, was February 1918. That month, the “Socialist Homeland in Danger” decree stipulated that all enemies would be shot on sight. Shortly after the Red Terror Decree, as reported in Severnaia kommuna (19 September 1918), Grigorii Zinoviev in Petrograd told the city party conference that, “we must have 90 of the 100 million population of Soviet Russia [Rossii]. There is no need to worry about the rest, they must be destroyed (nishchit).”16 Zinoviev did not identify specific groups. In light of the two above-mentioned decrees, statements like his fanned opinion among followers and sympathizers that arbitrary violence against civilians was permissible and acceptable. Korolenko was shocked at the frequent appearance of articles in the Bolshevik press by top leaders, titled “Long Live the Red Terror” or “Be Merciless,” that advocated and justified killing. They bring to mind Kurtz’s phrase from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) – “exterminate all the brutes.”17 When exactly top central leaders used phrases like “elimination” or “destruction” of social classes in a figurative-metaphorical socio-economic

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Marxist sense, or in the physical-literal sense, was not always evident. The ambiguity allowed less-sophisticated, often semi-literate local followers, brutalized by war, to interpret them as they willed. They could easily understand these words in their physical-literal sense. Maxim Gorky characterized such lower-level party members as “old Russian nationalists, scoundrels, and vagabonds, who despise and fear the Jews.” In January 1918 he observed, “And when the People’s Commissars shout too eloquently and in a panic about fighting the ‘bourgeoisie,’ the ignorant masses take this as a direct call to murder, and this they have already demonstrated.”18 Central messages, in short, created a climate of opinion among lower-level Bolsheviks and sympathizers that plunder, theft, arbitrary executions, torture, and mutilation were necessary and acceptable – even if not directly ordered. As Gorky later noted that same year:19 Recently the sailor Zheleznyakov translating the ferocious speeches of his leaders into the crudely elementary language of the mass man, said that, for the welfare of the Russian people, even a million persons could be killed … This is what Russia is threatened with by the simplified translations of anarcho-communistic slogans into our plain backwoods language. The public statements about indiscriminately killing targeted groups, defined as enemies by top leaders, published in the press, and related by subordinates who told those with doubts about exterminating enemies to stand aside, set the context within which specific agents in specific places implemented what they considered policy.20 The public statements and preconceptions about Bolshevik centralized control led people, then and now, to presume all mass killing was controlled policy. In practice it was not necessarily so. Within such a climate, local agents could use official rhetoric to justify arbitrary violence – including that motivated by personal interests. Olga Engelhardt described the Bolshevik court she saw in Konotop when it summoned her June 1919. It was particularly frightening, she wrote, because the judges, made up of sailors, plumbers, “and other such types,” judged according to class hate – and sentences were bloody. The courthouse she described was filled with drunken soldier-torturers. “Vodka, debauchery, swearing, singing, gramophones [playing], depravity, half-naked [men], dishevelment, drunken scolding.” The condemned were shot on the first floor immediately after sentencing.21 Against this background, there can be little doubt that Bolshevik leaders were responsible for violence committed against civilians because they expressed the intent to do it. They were responsible not only in the sense that all governments are theoretically responsible for those they claim to

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rule. They were also legally guilty. Imperial Russian and Anglo-American law at the time distinguished between intent and motive, contrary to prenineteenth century practice that argued evil motive, not intent, proved guilt. As indicated by the above quotes, there is little doubt that Bolshevik leaders intended to kill specific groups of civilians. The Bolsheviks, however, rejected tsarist and Anglo-American law as “bourgeois.”22 They created their own legal system. Until they established a civil code in 1922, “peoples’ judges” and various tribunals made motive central to guilt. That meant anyone convicted of “exploitation” or “banditry” was subject to execution. Since Bolshevik leaders thought they were acting morally when they allowed officials to execute anyone so classified, according to their notion of justice, they were not criminally liable.23 In reaction to massive complaints against Cheka brutality in Russia at the end of 1918, leaders tried to introduce due process into their repressive apparatus. An article by a group of Cheka personnel in the Cheka newspaper in October 1918, arguing in favour of using torture, was condemned by the party’s central committee and disavowed by the editors. The Cheka actually issued instructions in December 1918 “not to terrorize peaceful citizens,” and, “in the recently taken provinces stop the terror against peaceful citizens.”24 In Ukraine, Bolshevik leaders established a commission in June 1919 in Kyiv, two months before their eviction from the city, that condemned, according to the December instructions, Cheka excesses in Kyiv province committed the previous six months. Using complaints they had received against the arbitrary brutality, the commission dutifully condemned Ukraine’s Cheka units for behaving as if they were independent of central control. “Unqualified hands,” one report noted disingenuously “create political terror as a means of fighting counter-revolution.” It linked the arbitrary violence to lack of central control and depraved personality.25 The report made no reference to central leaders’ exhortations about the use of terror, nor the summary execution that year of pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisan commanders.26 Nor was its content reflected in an 18 August article in Ukraine’s Cheka newspaper Krasnyi mech, where Ukraine’s Cheka chief Martin Latsis, who was not on the commission, wrote, “To us everything is permitted … Blood? Let blood be shed! Only blood can dye the black flag of the pirate bourgeoisie, turning it once and forever into a red banner, the flag of the Revolution.”27 The supposed reform included an issue that did not exist in Russia. The condemnation justified the takeover by and subordination to Moscow of Ukraine’s Cheka, which hitherto had been formally subject to Ukraine’s Bolsheviks.28 When the newly Moscow-appointed Cheka heads arrived in Ukraine in November 1919, they renamed the Cheka “Investigative Committee (Sledkom),” because the former term was so hated. A few weeks later, they re-adopted the original name. Local Cheka continued doing

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as they pleased, reasoning they did not have to obey Ukraine’s leaders because they were now subject to Moscow.29 Eyewitnesses confirm that in Ukraine, as in Russia, locals ignored instructions from Moscow intended to enforce some due process and limit arbitrary brutality.30 Few local agents were shot for malfeasance, venality, or corruption. In January 1920, Bolshevik leaders decreed death sentences could only be issued in territories with military operations. Thereafter, local agents either quickly shot whomsoever they chose before the decree was enacted or moved such victims to war zones. Subordinates did as they saw fit. In Petrograd, one such perpetrator explained, “We thought that if the People’s Commissars were getting converted to humanitarianism, that was their business. Our business was to crush the counter-revolution forever, and they could shoot us afterwards if they felt like it!” In Ukraine, a group of Ukraine’s top party leaders arrested the leadership of Poltava province’s Cheka and expelled them in January 1920 from the party for smuggling. Their patrons in a rival group intervened to have their criminal cases closed and party membership restored. They were reinstated to their positions.31 Lenin considered war in the name of socialism morally just. He asserted the revolution’s single goal was “to purge the Russian land of all harmful insects: fleas – thieves, bedbugs – the rich, and so on and so forth.” He condoned the revolutionary French-Jacobin terror, and considered terror the key to Bolshevik success. Gorky called him “a thinking guillotine.”32 Cheka newspapers include articles justifying the terror by reference to the French Revolution. Trotsky defended government use of terror in his Communism and Terrorism (1920), which, unlike Machiavelli’s The Prince, is impossible to construe as a satire on the politics of the day. That same year Lenin wrote a defence of dictatorship.33 Nikolai Bukharin listed ten groups to be subjected to “concentrated violence.” “Proletarian coercion in all its forms, beginning with shooting … is a method of creating communist mankind out of the human materials of the transition period.”34 Iakov Sverdlov, in 1919, instructed subordinates to “totally exterminate” rich Don Cossacks – leaving it to the locals to determine who was poor enough not to be rich. In 1920, the head of the Economic Council, Valerian Osinsky, explained, “the most important aspect of socialist construction is massive state coercion.”35 Gyorgy Lukacs defended arbitrary terror in his Tactics and Ethics (1919) – little known at the time because it was published in Hungarian only. Cheka publications reported executions with lists of names. In 1920, Martin Latsis published a book about its activities with a press run of 10,000 copies wherein he ensured “our citizens,” that the Cheka “carried with it [neset s soboi],” tens and hundreds of thousands of deaths.36 In July 1918, the Bolsheviks took the city of Iaroslavl. After a threeweek battle during which they pounded it with an artillery barrage using

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incendiary shells, the city looked like Berlin in 1945. The Red commander did not use poison gas only because Moscow was unable to supply it. During the last days of the siege, the air force dropped chemical bombs on the city. Red troops surrounding the town captured refugees and looked at their hands. Those with rough, dark, workers’ skin were sent to concentration camps. Those with soft, white hands were shot on the spot. They also shot all prisoners – some immediately after interrogation.37 All this occurred before the official proclamation of the Red Terror. How much was done on explicit orders from central officials is unknown. Of the city’s 190,000 population (including refugees) as of 1917, 40,000 remained in August 1918. Events surrounding the Bolshevik occupation the Ukrainian border town of Hlukhiv in January 1918 were probably not uncommon. Red troops included Hungarian and Slovak former poW s, and some 2,000 local Ukrainians drafted at gunpoint. These latter were placed in the front ranks as attacking units where almost all of them were killed. The troops rounded up all the nobility in the surrounding region who had not fled and unceremoniously shot them all. They also shot all those suspected of being “bourgeoisie” and linked in any way to any Ukrainian organizations. Whether this was done by central command or not is unknown. Forced out in March, they counterattacked, re-took the city of 35,000, and proceeded to massacre its defenders and kill any Jews they found. For the next eight days, they paid local Austrian poW s to carry out the corpses and bury them in mass unmarked graves. Meanwhile, troops sent to surrounding villages shot those suspected of association with the Ukrainian national movement. The eyewitness-author claimed leaders of local pro-Bolshevik local peasants were Russians or Russified.38 Civilians killed in 1918 by the Cheka only, including those before the formal declaration of the Red Terror, are today estimated at 50,000.39 In central Russia, Cheka violence against civilians apparently became less intense by the end of 1918, according to incomplete statistics. These indicate that during 1919 in central Russia, the number of recorded Cheka executions had fallen by three times from a 1918 maximum total of 9,000. In Ukraine, total deaths between 1918 and 1921 in Odesa, Kyiv, and Kharkiv cities only are estimated at 15,000.40 In 1921, the total recorded for central Russia as arrested by the Cheka was 47,500. The total that year for Ukraine was 63,000 – the highest among the twelve regions indicated.41 The latter total were civilians. Recorded Cheka figures do not include battle deaths, or those killed by armed punitive or requisitioning units. Whether they include prisoners shot en route after evacuation in the wake of withdrawals, or those simply taken into the nearest woods and shot, is unknown.42 As noted in the introduction, no one has yet reviewed church death registers for total Ukrainian deaths for the years 1918–22, while the few Bolshevik registers for those years do not

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indicate cause of death. Published statistics classified by republic indicate that, from 1921 to 1925, Ukraine consistently had the highest number of arrested in the USSR . Incomplete figures from 1921, which do not include shot or arrested Kronstadt insurgents, indicate Ukraine had the highest number of arrested (31 per cent of the total), highest number of prisoners shot (61 per cent of the total), and highest percentage of concentration camp prisoners (51 per cent). Cheka and later nkVD personnel, it must be remembered, did not always record all executed, and are known to have manipulated files they did not destroy to “prove” prisoners’ guilt. Exactly how many they killed will perhaps never be known. The most recent estimate is approximately 28,000 yearly on Bolshevik territories between December 1917 and February 1922.43 It is unknown if recorded deaths included the kinds of victims noted in a complaint by pro-Bolshevik peasants from a town in Podillia province in 1921. Agents of requisition units, they wrote, “introduced a system of shootings without trial or witnesses, based only on whether they liked the arrested’s appearance, or whether they had a good pair of shoes, or other articles of clothing, under the spurious pretext of ‘attempting to escape.’” Nor did they think that when they complained, a local Bolshevik should have shouted at them “we will shoot you like dogs.”44 In his memoirs, the commander of a partisan unit in 1921 recorded what Bolshevik troops did to Hryts Antoniuk, the captured father of four sons who had been fighting with him since 1919. To reveal the brothers’ whereabouts, the troops cut off his ears, nose, lips and tongue. They gouged out his eyes, pulled apart his arms at the joints, and killed him by shoving a sword down his throat. They left his body in a mud puddle and forbade burial. His sons later came secretly and buried him in their garden “without priest without cross. There are millions such incidents.”45 It is unknown if the perpetrators recorded such deaths. While such atrocities may not have been centrally sanctioned, perpetrators aware of the above-noted exhortations would have thought they were. The local populace presumably thought the depredations and atrocities were not. Otherwise, would they have complained? Cheka figures indicate that “War Communism” in central Russia was probably different from “War Communism” in Ukraine. Perhaps Bolshevik leaders realized that excesses committed in their name were alienating the Russians that had supported them in the months following their seizure of power. The 1917 Constituent Assembly elections showed the Bolsheviks had absolute majorities (56–60 per cent) only in four central Russian provinces: Moscow, Tver, Vladimir, and Kaluga. They got 51–55 per cent in Vitebsk, Minsk, and Smolensk provinces thanks to the soldier vote, which averaged 66 per cent of the army vote. In the ten provinces surrounding this core region of seven provinces, they got a sizable portion of the vote ranging

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from 36 to 48 per cent.46 Nonetheless, by mid-1918, even here, the hated Poor Peasant Committees and the Grain Monopoly shifted mass support to the Russian SR s and produced mass resistance. In March 1919, in the face of that opposition and the loss of south-eastern provinces to a White offensive, the Bolsheviks abolished the committees, tolerated free trade and markets, and stopped collectivization. In theory, “middle peasants” were exempted from forced requisitioning. In practice, that was not always so. In Ukraine, Bolsheviks retained Poor Peasant Committees until 1922. A circular sent by Ukraine’s party to members in April 1919, elaborating on a qualification in Lenin’s speech of that March, specified that because Ukrainian conditions were different from the Russian, the distinction between “middle peasants” and “kulaks” was not clear. This equivocation allowed local activists to determine who was whom. They would classify the rich who could pay bribes as middle or poor. They would classify the poor who could not pay bribes or meet quotas as “kulak,” then arrest and confiscate all their goods. In any case, Lenin, in November 1919, again classified any who produced a surplus as “middle,” and, thus, enemies.47 Russian peasants remained subject to forced requisitions by vicious armed brigades, but resistance subsided through 1919 in central Russia where it was most often urban workers and deserters involved in armed revolts.48 The largest Russian anti-Bolshevik uprising in 1919, the Chapan War (Chapannaia voina), which involved tens of thousands more insurgents than did the later Kronstadt or Tambov uprisings, was centred in Simbirsk and Samara, east of the Russian Bolshevik core.

Statements and Reception Sergei Zorin, secretary of the Petrograd party organization, at an April 1919 cpU cc meeting, said that people were starving in his city and then demanded Ukrainian grain: “We do not recognize any kind of nations.” If anyone opposed grain collections in Ukraine, he continued, “then send them to the other world, thousands, tens of thousands, and, if necessary, 100,000 of those idiots, fools, or villains [negodaev], but don’t waste time.” He got a round of applause. Opinion at the meeting was that the Bolsheviks had no need of Ukraine’s population – only its resources for use elsewhere.49 In his report submitted to the Directory, a Ukrainian prisoner of war, who had travelled through two hundred villages in Bolshevik-controlled Kyiv province during his escape in early 1920, wrote that the head of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the First Cavalry Army, a man named Latipov, told him that he didn’t care if 75 per cent of Ukraine’s population died of hunger. If they didn’t, they would be shot anyways. That would make the remaining 25 per cent obedient: “We need Ukraine, not its people.” The latter, allegedly, were Rakovskii’s own words. A comrade Turkin revealed

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to a local Ukrainian communist in the town of Pavoloch, in late 1920, that his food requisition unit would not stop at anything: “We will burn down these damned Kyiv, Podillia, and Volyn provinces, not leaving one stone on top of another and let all know just what the Communist party is.”50 In Kyiv in January 1918, besides Russians and Ukrainians, Red Troops shot Bolsheviks they took from hospitals where they lay alongside Ukrainians. These had no documents to prove they were not “counter-revolutionaries” and were summarily put out of their misery.51 A similar incident dates from 1920, when the above-mentioned officials were talking about ridding Ukraine of its people. That year, a rumour circulated in the Don region that Lenin had said, “90 per cent of the Russian nation can die if only 10 per cent live until the world revolution [breaks out].” There is no known document indicating that Lenin had ever made such a statement. This rumour, likely based on Zinoviev’s 1918 remarks noted above, perhaps circulated also in Ukraine.52 There are references to local Cheka commanders baiting and terrorizing peasants as it pleased them without reason – in presumably unsanctioned behaviour. An inspector’s report from the Myrhorod region in Poltava province in 1919 described the case of a commander who set up a “makework” project for himself. He divided his unit into two groups and sent one of them, posing as bandits, to raid Bolshevik executive committee offices. He then sent in the second group, as Cheka agents, to chase off the first group and punish those villagers he decided were complicit with the “bandits.”53 Similar behaviour, which may or may not have been sanctioned, is documented in other reports from 1919. In Krolevets, local Chekists would carry out mass shootings in the evenings, and then not bury the corpses until the next evening so people could see them. In Radomysk, the local unit had its shares of thieves and criminals who would shoot the poor at random, and steal whatever they had. Some reports clearly specify some such extreme behaviour was unsanctioned. In one, Cheka personnel in the Donbass region were described as scum. In Proskuriv in May 1919: “the Cheka controlled everything, but those in charge are alien to soviet power.”54 The atmosphere such personnel created was described by a resident of Bolshevik Katerynoslav in 1920: “Neither epidemic nor hunger affect people so distressfully as the knowledge of total absence of any rights, and that feeling of complete helplessness made us sick of fright and exceptionally obsequious in front of the smallest symbol of red power.”55 As the examples indicate, not all atrocities and excesses committed by local agents were necessarily centrally sanctioned. In an unknown percentage of incidents, local agents, for any number of motives, acted on their own initiative. There is no evidence that the Russian Central Committee ever issued an order directed at Ukraine, analogous to the secret directive of January 1919 to the head of the Don Revkom charged with suppressing the

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revolt there. He was explicitly told to exterminate “rich Cossacks … down to the last man.” In practice, he later explained, he carried out “an indiscriminate policy of massive extermination.”56 While there was no known single central command to exterminate Ukrainians, a series of disparate orders, in a climate of opinion formed by the exhortations noted above by men like Zorin, did have horrific consequences for Ukrainians. A policy recommendation report, sent to Rakovskii in the summer of 1919 by an official recently returned from an inspection tour of Ukrainian villages, recommended shooting five to ten kulaks for every communist killed: “Peasants must see the resoluteness of Soviet power and know that if they do not accept it they will either be treated as counterrevolutionaries or erased from the face of the earth.” The recommendation was apparently implemented. In late 1920, the man in charge of a Cheka anti-partisan unit in southern Ukraine reported, “We called village meetings and chose 5 kulaks or suspicious individuals and chopped them into pieces [rubit ikh shashkami] in front of the assembled. These measures had an impact on the peasants and induced them to reveal [the location] of bandits [in this case, Makhno’s men].”57 In the summer of 1921, Petliura’s government-in-exile, after the Bolsheviks declared an amnesty for all partisans who surrendered, requested Bolshevik leaders to release hundreds of arrested UnR soldiers and sympathizers. That August, Dzierzhinskii, in response, instructed his subordinate in Ukraine to immediately kill all of them: “They must be shot. Don’t play-around [uvlekatsia] with trials. Time is flying and they will be saved for the counter-revolution. Discussions about amnesties etc. will start. Please resolve this issue immediately.”58 In the fall of 1919, after the Whites had occupied central and eastern Ukraine, they established commissions that documented Bolshevik atrocities. These reports confirm that local agents were more likely to interpret their leaders’ remarks about exterminating enemies literally rather than metaphorically. The December 1918 instructions not to terrorize civilians seem to have been forgotten. In March 1919, Dzierzhinskii was writing that the Cheka reserved the right to “resort to the sternest measures.” In January 1920, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks declared terror would continue “until workers’ and peasants’ power was consolidated.”59 A UnR agent reported on what that meant: “At this time [winter 1920] the Bolsheviks show exceptional brutality towards Ukraine’s population and particularly towards Ukrainians. There are mass shootings of Ukrainian activists and massive robbery of the peasants.”60 In January 1920, Dzierzhinskii declared “the old methods” of mass arrests and repression were no longer appropriate. But local agents continued bloody counter-insurgency operations and looting through 1922. In July 1920, Lenin commanded the First Cavalry Army (15,000–20,000 troops and even more horses) to sweep through each Ukrainian county twice, to strip

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them of everything it could, and shoot whoever resisted.61 The order created a Frankenstein’s monster. Local party agents in Kyiv province that autumn reported its men killed and looted from everybody – Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, rich, poor, Bolshevik party members, and non-party employees. Peasants would ask them who they were: Poles or Makhno’s men. They replied they did not know, they were just fed up with the Bolsheviks. The violence alienated even pro-Bolshevik Ukrainians and observant Jews.62 Some villages were lucky. According to a member of the Poltava Food Supply Committee present at one such raid, up to 1,000 men would surround a village and subject it to machine gun and artillery fire for a few hours. Peasants would then emerge, barter, and the troops would agree to take a significantly smaller amount than originally demanded.63 Isaac Babel recorded the brutal depredations of the cavalry army in western Ukraine. He had no counterpart known to have recorded in a diary the same behaviour of those same men in eastern and central Ukraine and then publish stories about it.64 Local officials though 1921 were still specifically ordering terror against civilians and merciless enforcement of requisition norms – even though leaders in Moscow had declared nep in March 1921. That year, a UnR agent reported to the government-in-exile, “Every week as many as 50 men are shot. Prisons are overflowing with mainly Ukrainian peasants … The Cheka interrogators [there] are almost all Jews and the prisoner is judged on the basis of what impression he makes on the interrogator. Interrogators normally have little education and violently abused the arrested. There were instances where women interrogators pistol-whipped prisoners who refused to incriminate themselves.” Interrogations included pulling out hair by the roots and inserting splinters under fingernails.65 A Bolshevik agitator named Prykhodko reported that, in Janaury 1921 in Odesa province, “Ukrainians were afraid to admit they were Ukrainians.”66 Again, exactly where the line lay between centrally ordered sanctioned killing and local unsanctioned initiatives is unclear. Condemnations issued by central leaders that basically ordered local agents to control themselves bring to mind Heinrich Himmler’s orders to SS men to control themselves after he learned they were stealing from their victims and raping women. In January 1922, despite numerous past circulars ordering locals to restrain their behaviour, Dzierzhinskii’s deputy, Iozef Unshlikht, was still recommending to Lenin that there were arrested suspects who should be shot without factual evidence of guilt: “In certain conditions in the republics … it is necessary to take repressive measures of various kinds against those active in the anti-Soviet parties, even when we have no concrete evidence against them.”67 Nonetheless, in as much as partisan resistance had decreased by then, central leaders dismissed 30 per cent of Cheka personnel for malfeasance or criminality. As of March 1922, 16,000 of Ukraine’s 34,000 Chekists had been discharged.68

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Nationality and Class: Ukrainians, Russians, and Others In theory and propaganda, the Bolsheviks identified those to be killed or dispossessed according to socio-economic criteria. The enemy were bourgeoisie, landlords, nobles, wealthy peasants (called “kulaks”) and “bandits” – a term that included anti-Bolshevik insurgents. This was very different from western European government propaganda that classified enemies by nationality. The Bolshevik criteria were arbitrary. They made distinguishing between enemy soldiers and civilians, enemy and friend, difficult if not impossible. Aristocrats like Georgii Chicherin became commissars, while local agents, in practice, could use the socio-economic categories as political terms to designate whomsoever they considered to be anti-Bolshevik regardless of socio-economic status, or whether or not they wore a uniform. Someone without calloused hands, or who tapped their spoon against the side of a teacup after stirring, could find themselves arrested as a “bourgeois.” Workers or poor peasants could find themselves arrested if jealous neighbours denounced them as kulaks, or bandits. People using official terms to target personal enemies was not particular to the time but characteristic of all societies in time of breakdown. Thucydides wrote victims were often murdered during the Peloponnesian Wars not because they belonged to or sympathized with the enemy Athenians, but, “… on the grounds of personal hatred, or else by their debtors because of the money they owed.” One thousand years later, the Venetian Ambassador to France wrote of the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre: “If one man hated another because of some argument or lawsuit, all he had to say was ‘this man was Huguenot [Protestant] and he was immediately killed [by Catholics].”69 Bolshevik use of catch-all political categories like “counter-revolutionary gangs,” or “bandit,” to classify enemies, classified the targeted as criminals thus denying them status as agents of a political or national movement. Local Bolsheviks in 1918–19, for instance, knew they faced mass peasant-revolts, but central leaders could not publicly admit that. Lenin, in March 1919, specifically denied such a thing as peasant revolts against Bolshevik rule could occur. He explained his party faced only kulak revolts.70 In Ukraine, unlike in Russia, Bolsheviks had a category of enemies they labelled “Petliurite.” This ostensibly political category overlapped with ethnic-cultural distinctions. Ukraine’s pre-modern society, in 1914, was still a place where socio-economic functions were overwhelmingly done by, and identified with, different nationalities. The Ukrainian provinces had Russian bourgeoisie, Russian counter-revolutionaries, Russian bandits, Russian landlords, and some Russian kulaks. It had few Ukrainian landlords, some kulaks (kurkul – Ukr.), almost no Ukrainian bourgeoisie, and no Russian Petliurites. UnR intelligence reports indicate local commissars,

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Cheka agents, and Red Army troops in Ukraine, sometimes semi-literate or illiterate, spent little time contemplating the fine distinctions between these categories. Provincial prison inspector Krainsky, who witnessed the behaviour of such men in Chernihiv province through 1917–19, considered them no better than criminals, noting the worst were the Hungarians and Chinese. In fact, many had been criminals. Krainsky was taken aback at how many of his former charges he saw, after they had been amnestied, in the ranks of the Red Guards and Red Army, and as officials in Bolshevik offices. In 1919, not only Chekists, but any soldier or party member could arrest anyone they fancied on sight, rich and poor. Such men were not learned in sociological surveys. They did not carry charts and surveying instruments to locate the fine line that separated the “good” middle or poor peasant from the “bad” kulak. They decided on the spot who was poor enough not to belong to the latter, and who was or was not counter-revolutionary. A survey of agents in one rural district revealed that their criteria for listing a household as rich (kulak, kurkul) ranged from fifteen to ninety acres.71 Not infrequently, they decided on the basis of denunciations by neighbours who were more motivated by private interests than Marxist-proletarian consciousness. Ukrainians soon learned it was safer not to talk to such men in Ukrainian and risk being considered Petliurite. For such men, in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population was Ukrainian, and a sizeable portion of the town population observant Jewish, “Petliurite” and “kulak” inevitably became euphemisms for “Ukrainian” – also frequently labelled “honks” (khakhly). “Speculator” usually meant Jewish. In 1917–18, Krainsky wrote, “Ukrainians [in Chernihiv] were afraid most of all of the Bolsheviks who treated them with exceptional ferocity.” Eyewitnesses also specified that Bolsheviks targeted Ukrainians specifically in Kyiv.72 In Poltava, a Chekist by the name of Gurov supposedly boasted that in a few months he had managed to kill 250 honks.73 Residents of Mohyliv-Podilskyi, in the summer of 1919, reported to returning Ukrainian officials that under the Bolsheviks they, alongside the Whites, had also been targeted and shot en masse by the local Cheka, whose agents they claimed were overwhelmingly Jewish.74 In January 1918, an eyewitness recorded that after Bolshevik troops captured Hlukhiv and its environs, they systematically executed hundreds all night, beginning with the “bourgeoisie” and landowners, then all the Ukrainian activists they found. After retaking the town from Ukrainians in March 1918, the primarily non-Ukrainian Bolshevik force, which included pro-Bolshevik Jews, again began systematically killing its inhabitants, not sparing wounded Ukrainian soldiers, and specifically targeting local rich observant Jews. They killed the defending Ukrainian garrison to the last man – a unit that had not carried out reprisals against the Bolsheviks when they had defeated and evicted them some weeks earlier.

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It herded the local captured Austrian poW s, among whom was the author, to bury all the dead in mass graves of up to sixty each. A task that took eight days. Captured Cheka files from Kamianets indicated that as many of 90 per cent of those they executed there during May 1919 were activists in the Ukrainian movement.75 There are enough similar accounts from different places to prove the generalization. While such excesses and atrocities may well have been centrally sanctioned, it is doubtful anyone will ever know. In Ukraine, the frequency of incidents like those above show that, in practice, the average Russian/Russified Bolshevik and Bolshevik sympathizer was just as likely to understand “counter- revolutionary,”“speculator,”“kulak,” and “bandit” in ethnic as in socio-economic terms. Some thought Ukrainian to be a counter-revolutionary bourgeois language. That general association of non-Russian identity with disloyalty was not appreciably influenced by the presence of Jews or Ukrainians in the party. Pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian socialists and some of those same Ukrainian Bolsheviks duly documented that association in their publications.76 UnR situation reports confirm the association. Lists of executed in 1920, which the Bolsheviks then still published, included no bourgeoisie because there weren’t any left, noted one observer, “There were [only] Ukrainian peasants, Ukrainian intellectuals and Ukrainian workers.” UnR agents, in the summer of 1921, reported that Bolsheviks shot on the spot any man discovered to have been in the Ukrainian army. In a telephone exchange from June 1919 between a non-Bolshevik Ukrainian district Soviet representative in Podillia province and the district Cheka chief, the former told the latter they stood for a coalition of socialist parties and opposed the idea of a single ruling communist party. He specified his members regretted “the national Ukrainian pogroms perpetrated by some Red Army units in villages and some Ukrainian towns.”77 In Ukraine, nationality arguably led Ukrainians to perceive the same violence Bolsheviks perpetrated against Russians as particularly evil when perpetrated against them, because the perpetrators were foreign outsiders. This played a role in Russia where, in 1918, non-Russians in International Brigades, who averaged 19 per cent of the Red Army, were prominent in requisitioning and suppressing revolts.78 It was, after all, a time-honoured practice in all empires to post foreigners among locals as enforcers of central rule. Dzierzhinskii staffed his Georgian units with Armenians, and Russian units with Latvians, for instance. Since few, if any, such men spoke the local language, they would be isolated from, and have little sympathy for, locals.79 As foreigners, their loyalty was assured because they had nowhere safe to desert to – unlike local conscripts. Between 1918 and 1921, as many as 70,000 Chinese served in Bolshevik armed units – including special armed Cheka units. They were recruited from the hundreds of thousands of former migrant workers who could not return home after 1914. Exactly how many

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Hungarian, Chinese, and Latvian units were among the 7,000 Red troops attacking Iaroslavl is unknown.80 In Ukraine, the cultural-linguistic division between exploiter and exploited inclined Ukrainians to perceive Bolshevik terror and violence against them as particularly insidious because so many perpetrators were not Ukrainians. The overwhelming majority of the as many as 82,000 in food requisition units in 1919 were Russians.81 A White Army situation report from March 1921 claimed, “The attitude [in Ukraine] towards Russians is generally negative because in every Russian the populace sees a Bolshevik.” In the north-eastern provinces, that hostility was intensified by masses of hungry, armed Russians, who, with their wives and children, roamed the countryside looting what they could from Ukrainians.82 Non-Ukrainians predominated in most, if not all, of the hated armed requisitioning units and special Cheka punishment battalions. Like them, the Red Army “internationalist” units’ principal task was also not front-line combat but suppressing civilian resistance. Besides the 10,000 men in these units, Ukraine also was occupied by a 25,000-strong armed Cheka corps, and special Cheka detachments attached to individual army units – all primarily non-Ukrainians.83 In 1920, no more than 11 per cent of the million-strong Red Army in Ukraine were Ukrainian speakers. The following year it was 9 per cent. How many of those were front line is unknown. In 1919, 87 per cent of the Kyiv province punishment battalion were Russian speakers.84 In May 1920, Dzierzhinskii appointed 1,400 Russian Russians to reorganize Ukraine’s Cheka. There are no figures for the total number of Ukrainians in Ukraine’s 34,000-strong Cheka (as of 1921). Figures for Kharkiv province that year showed 59 per cent declared themselves Russian, 20 per cent Jewish, and 8 per cent Ukrainian.85 In Bolshevik-controlled territory, alongside Russians, Chinese, and Latvians in Red Army and Cheka units, were an estimated 80,000 Hungarians. These latter three nationalities composed the bulk of Ukraine’s internationalist units. Ukraine counted 21,000 Chinese, plus armed requisitioning units, plus a 25,000-strong armed Cheka corps, and additional special Cheka detachments attached to individual army units – all primarily non-Ukrainians.86 In 1920, the Red Army numbered approximately five million, of which approximately 10 per cent (500,000), were front-line troops. Adding various special formations, total front-line Bolshevik forces likely numbered 900,000. Of these, 300,000 were neither Russians nor Ukrainians and, of those, as many as 70,000 were Chinese. Assuming the majority of the almost one million troops in Ukraine that year were also rear-echelon formations would leave at least 100,000 in the front line – perhaps 25 per cent of front-line troops of the entire Red Army including special formations. Of those, an estimated 16,000 were Chinese – more than the number of front-line UnR troops

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in the fall of 1919 before it was devastated by typhus (12,000), and about as many as in Makhno’s army. The total number of Red Chinese troops fighting in Ukraine between 1917 and 1922, including reserves, would have been as high as 25,000.87 Bolshevik leaders knew the political and strategic importance of nationality and ethnic Russians to their regime. Lenin, in November 1918, for the first time identified Bolshevik rule with Russia to win the support of the previously vilified non-Bolshevik Russian intellectuals and petite bourgeoisie. He ordered that “suppression and terror” should no longer be directed toward those groups. He called on them to defend Russia (Rossiia – which in Russian means the entire empire and not just ethnic Russia) as patriotic Russians, and for party members to accept them because “Soviet power” guaranteed Russian independence. This initiative gave added reason for literate, educated Russians and Russified Jews, who had already, for various reasons, to conclude the Bolshevik regime would be in power for the foreseeable future and to support it as a Russian regime – not as the Marxist harbinger of world communism.88 Leaders as often presented themselves as the representatives of explicitly “Russian” (Russkii) as of “Soviet,” workers and peasants. They used “Russkii” and “Rossiiskii” as synonyms, in correspondence with countries beyond the borders of the former empire. In September 1918, foreign affairs commissar Chicherin wrote that the Second Congress of Soviets that ratified the Bolshevik seizure of power represented “the majority of the Russian [Russkogo] nation.”89 Polish communists in Russia, on 4 February 1920, published a declaration, signed by Dzierzhinskii among others, stating they would not introduce communism to Poland with the help of the “Russian” (Russkoi) army – not the Red, Soviet, or Bolshevik army. Three days later, in a declaration to Ukrainians, the leadership referred to a “Russian [Russko]–Ukrainian Red Army.”90 Among themselves, and initially even publicly, Bolshevik leaders frankly admitted they had conquered Ukraine. Muraviov did so in January 1918 when he proclaimed he had brought Red Power to Ukraine on the points of bayonets from the north (see chapter 4). Pravda (17 January 1919) wrote: “The Red Army paved the road to grain when it conquered Ukraine.” Only in face of massive resistance did leaders begin to justify their rule in Ukraine in Ukrainian national terms to educated Ukrainians. Only in 1923 did the “Indigenization” policy proffer the latter the possibility of supporting Ukraine’s Bolshevik regime as a Ukrainian regime representing national independence. Bolshevik leaders’ correspondence and dispatches show ethnic-cultural criteria much influenced their decisions. In a country where few Ukrainians were pro-Bolshevik, and where, in some places, apostate Jews composed more than half of party and government personnel, local officials repeatedly demanded, and usually got, not “workers,” but hundreds if not thousands of

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“Russians” from Russia to reinforce their ranks. Red Army commanders in 1919, anticipating an advance into Hungary, tended to send even Russians to their south-east front, and Hungarian, Chinese, Rumanian, and Latvians to Ukraine.91 Lithuanian-born American anarchist Aleksander Berkman noted the influx of outsiders on his trip to Ukraine in 1920. “But the policy of the Kremlin is to put its own men at the head of Ukrainian institutions and frequently a whole trainload of Moscow Bolsheviki [sic], including clerks and typists, are dispatched to the South to take charge of a certain department or bureau.” The imported personnel, ignorant of Ukraine and its language, “force Moscow views on the population with the result of alienating even the friendly disposed elements.”92 In late 1918, the leadership specifically refused to allow Ukrainians in Russia to join their army in Ukraine, sending, instead, non-Ukrainian International Brigades.93 In the spring of 1919, during their western offensive against the UnR , Trotsky ordered his pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisan units to the south-eastern front because he doubted their resolve. While they did fight against the UnR army, they could not be trusted to attack anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisans or villages. In April 1919, Ukraine’s Bolshevik government requested ethnic Russians for all its reserve civilian police and Cheka troop detachments.94 Faced with massive resistance, local commanders did not ask their superiors for more “proletarians” or “poor peasants” as reinforcements – they specifically demanded Russians. “It is necessary to implement all along the [rail] line the so-called Soviet colonization policy,” wrote an official, Moise Ravich, in late May 1919. “That is, to all stations along the Kazatyn – Uman [rail] line a unit must be sent composed exclusively of Russians and foreign communists supported by an armoured train … All Ukrainian units in this region must be sent to Russia and replaced by Russian ones.” cpU Central Committee member Ivan Kulyk, who was in the region at the time, concurred: “The only way to improve the situation, in my view, is to bring in Russian units.” On 6 August 1919, in response to a request from Trotsky to “radically purge” the recently annexed Ukrainian lands northeast of the Kherson–Odesa–Kyiv line, Lenin ordered hundreds of Russian Cheka troops south – “the best Cheka units.” Officers surrendering to the Red Army in Ukraine were to be sent to Russia and replaced by Russians.95 In 1920, Bolshevik leaders sent 25,000 Ukrainian conscripts to Russia, and 28,000 Russian troops to Ukraine to fight the partisans.96 Through 1919–21, besides spontaneous movement of Russians into Ukraine in search of food, the leadership systematically settled Russians in Ukraine by the thousands, while restricting, as much as possible, a spontaneous re-settlement movement of Ukrainians from Russia back to Ukraine. Party leader Iakov Iakovlev (Epshtein) in December 1919 complained about this flood of settler-migrants: “a huge mass of workers

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from Russia, not controlled, unregistered either on the spot or in the center, swarmed down like locusts, filling all the cracks inthe Soviet body, and pursued a [chauvinist] great-power policy.” Ukrainian white-collar professionals sent to Moscow were replaced by Russian/Russified professionals from Russia.97 The centrally assigned officials who brought their families to settle particularly infuriated local inhabitants. UnR reports from the autumn of 1920 relate Russians would tell the locals, “We conquered you honkies so shut-up and give us what we want.” Russian troops in Ukraine, for their part, saw Ukrainians as the cause of their misfortunes: “These honkies refuse to submit to us and live together with Russia but rebel, and because of them they [our superiors] don’t let us go home.” One Ukrainian report from 1921 noted incidents of villagers butchering Russian migrant-settlers to the last child.98 Another reported that this hostility led Bolsheviks to tell locals that rumours about Russian settlers in Ukraine were untrue, and the migrants were really returning Ukrainians who had settled around the Volga before the war – a claim no one believed.99 Leaders in Moscow sent Russian Russians to man punishment battalions, then gave these units Ukrainian names to hide their origins.100 According to one army inspector in the spring of 1919, whereas Russian troops from Russia were disciplined, those recruited locally were not. Some units were badly fed, clothed, and armed – some men had no rifles. The sent Russian civilian employees mentioned above that “inundated” Ukraine were incompetent or untrained, because their central agencies kept their best personnel and sent their worst south. In a note at the beginning of the report, Herikh Iagoda, the inspector’s superior, wrote in the margin that his report was to be disregarded and treated as exclusively the personal opinion of the man who wrote it.101 Like their White counterparts, Red commanders wanted their Ukrainian recruits sent to Russia and demanded Russians instead. That December, among Trotsky’s instructions to Red Army units in Ukraine, was a warning that commanders ensure they not permit any Ukrainians to go to their native villages.102 The Red Army’s military intelligence in Ukraine in April 1920 recommended a number of measures to deal with Makhno’s troops, among which was “The presence of a special well-disciplined military units comprised of those born in the north.”103 Among the many Russian units in Ukraine, such as the 13,000-strong 7th Vladimir Division sent to Poltava in 1921, was a 5,000-strong corps comprised of Russian peasants, sent in 1919 with the sole purpose of fighting Ukrainian peasant-partisans.104 The tactic represented a rational exploitation of national animosities, but was not always successful. Leaders learned that even Russians, showing true class-consciousness with their peasant Ukrainian brothers, could not always be trusted to shoot them. Not all of them saw any need either for Ukraine, or to fight “the honkies.” Local officials in 1919

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informed their superiors of instances when Russian troops either refused to repress peasants or joined, rather than fought, local partisan units. They protested: “We won’t go to beat our brothers in order to defend the Jews [i.e., Bolshevik commissars].”105 A White Army situation report noted Jews profoundly hated and feared the Bolsheviks. Because some Jews supported the UnR and Ukrainian partisans, Bolsheviks targeted them as a national group – regardless of official categorization of enemies according to class. A claim, which historians have yet to verify, specified that Red soldiers killed huge numbers of Jews on orders. It specified that Bolsheviks explained they had carried out a series of bloody pogroms “to root out of the Jewish masses petliurofillia [petliurofilstva – i.e., pro-Ukrainian sympathies].” Leaders allegedly sent special units to do the task from Kharkiv and Odesa, because they did not trust the local communists to do it.106 In January 1920, the UnR had been militarily defeated. In reaction to Ukrainian resistance and criticism of earlier policies – primarily, but not only, by Borotbists – Lenin, and Trotsky decided on concessions in matters of language and culture to give their regime in Ukraine a Ukrainian face. Besides establishing Ukrainian-language schools, this included an order to appoint Ukrainians to command Ukraine’s Red Army units, and to form Ukrainian units with Ukrainian as the language of command. These were to be directed against “Ukrainian kulaks.” Next month, in response to cpU leaders who wanted to mobilize Ukrainian-speaking communists in Russia for Ukraine, the Russian politburo took upon itself to send “Ukrainian activists.” Nonetheless, while Ukrainian partisans were surrendering and joining the Red Army, local Russian party leaders still impeded the transfer of declared Ukrainian party members to Ukraine.107 A 1921 UnR intelligence report noted such officials were refusing to appoint not only Ukrainians as commissars and executive committee heads, but also Ukrainian-born Russians.108

Nationality and Class: Jews Ukrainian Jews were mostly observant and apolitical. The sympathies of the minority involved in politics lay with non-Bolshevik parties: the Zionists, Mensheviks, and Russian Socialist Revolutionaries. Jewish pro-Bolshevik parties with observant members and supporters, which from March 1919 included leftist Bundists, Zionists, and Jewish SR s that did claim to represent Jews, were small. Ethnic Jewish Bolshevik party members were overwhelmingly apostates. Semen Dimanshtain was an exception. An ordained rabbi, he was head of the Bolshevik party’s Jewish Section (Evsektsiia). Ethnic Jewish Bolsheviks never claimed to represent all Jews or to act in the name of Jewish interests or aspirations. Observant Jews regarded them as renegades

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not representatives – apostate Jews were simply not Jews.109 Bolshevik propaganda issued in January 1918 and in May 1919, meanwhile, explicitly denied that leading Bolsheviks were all Jews.110 Against this background, White counter-intelligence produced a phony copy of the official paper of Ukraine’s communist party with an article claiming, “It must not be forgotten that the Jewish nation, oppressed by kings and tsars for centuries – is the true proletariat. Without exaggeration it can be said that the great socialist revolution was made by Jews. Could the oppressed dark Russian [Russkie] peasants and workers by themselves have thrown off the fetters of the bourgeoisie? No, it was the Jews who led the Russian proletariat … and now the Soviet project is in their competent hands.”111 While secular apostate Jews were disproportionately represented in the Bolshevik party, their total number was small. More significant politically and socially than secular apostate Jewish party members, were secular, usually apostate, non-party Jewish government officials. Lenin in 1919, like Maxim Gorky, identified these secular Jews, who had flooded into cities during the war, as the group that had played the decisive role in keeping his new government functioning as employees after he took power by “sabotaging the saboteurs [striking bureaucrats].” Lenin, in the words of Dimanshtain, to whom he confided, “stressed that we could take over the government apparatus … only thanks to this reserve of literate and more or less sober and competent new functionaries.”112 Lenin did not specify which cities or regions he had in mind, but presumably he was referring to the capital and Ukraine. In 1915, concessions and wartime deportations increased the number of Jews east of the front by at least 500,000. That year the tsarist government also allowed approximately 150,000 Jews to settle in central Russia alongside the craftsmen, wealthy merchants, and academics there since the 1860s. It raised Jewish entry quotas for state schools – thus ensuring that a substantial number of Jewish graduates would be looking for work during the first years of Bolshevik power. While the total population of the two imperial capitals dropped between 1917 and 1920, more Christians than Jews fled the cities. Thus, while 50,000 Jews averaged 1:50 of the population in 1917, by 1920, 30,000 Jews represented approximately 1:24.113 In March 1917, when the provisional government repealed all anti-Jewish legislation and restrictions, Jews became prime candidates for government jobs – though few seem to have been hired. In Petrograd on the morning of 26 October, after hearing that the Bolsheviks had overthrown the provisional government, and just as, or even before, they began advertising for administrators, hundreds of Jews began lining up in front of Soviet and government offices hoping for jobs. In the 27 October edition of their newspaper, the anti-Bolshevik Zionists expressed their disgust at the behaviour of their co-nationals “racing” for places in the

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queues. Others were surprised that they “showed no shame.” A Russian archivist in 1919 Petrograd observed, “We are governed by Jews … All the higher officials – Jews. All the lower ones – Russians. And they all steal.”114 Conservative Jews condemned their pro-Bolshevik countrymen as impudent, “human refuse,” opportunists, hooligans, scoundrels, and ignoramuses. “What especially struck us and what we expected the least [from such individuals], was the cruelty sadism and violence, which seemed to be alien to a people far removed from a physical and military life; those who yesterday could not handle a rifle, today turned up among cutthroat executioners.”115 Conservatives stressed the pro-Bolshevik minority in no way represented the law-abiding majority Jewish population, and that those few Jews who benefitted from the revolution did so at the cost of the persecuted Jewish majority. There was likely a similar rush of young apostate Jews into Bolshevik offices in Ukraine. Grigorii Moroz, an apostate Jewish member of the central Cheka Collegium, wrote the Rcp Central Committee, after an inspection trip to Ukraine, that he was shocked beyond description at how people identified Soviet power with all Jews and hated them as a result. He recommended that Jews be removed from responsible positions and replaced by Russians from Russia. In May 1919, the secretary of the party’s Kyiv province committee reported that the massive presence of Jews in Bolshevik organizations was “unhealthy” and “undesirable.” He noted how young Jewish workers from Uman, who had joined the Red Army, subsequently manned special punishment battalions that were sent to fight the local insurgent peasantry. The move reinforced the preconception that Bolshevism was a Jewish phenomenon and provoked more uprisings. Politburo member Lev Kamenev made a similar proposal to Lenin in August 1919.116 For Ukraine’s Bolsheviks, the socio-economic category “speculator,” as often as not, was synonymous with observant Jew.117 Nationalization criminalized private trade and business, and observant Jews predominated among the disenfranchised. They had hired labour, received income from sources other than employment, and worked as private entrepreneurs. As of 1925, while Jews were no more than 6 per cent of Ukraine’s total population, they accounted for 45 per cent of those disenfranchised because of their socio-economic function. Since almost no Jews, observant or apostate, farmed, they had no access to food during the revolutionary years other than what they could trade with Ukrainian peasants. Those who did not work for the Bolsheviks and got no rations, and those without family working for the Bolsheviks, faced starvation. Urban taxes under nep , meanwhile, were assessed at higher rates than rural taxes, which meant observant Jews, primarily urban, remained in poverty – as before 1917.118 Bolshevik leaders’ attempts to explain that class always should trump nationality – and that

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the latter was divided into good working people who were allies, and bad bourgeoise and landlords who should be repressed – had little impact in reality. Local agents decided who was whom.119 A situation report from the Proskuriv-Kamianets region in 1921 noted that the local Cheka considered all traders and factory and store owners “speculators” and subject to execution. In practice, given the link between socio-economic functions and nationality (see chapter 5), “speculator” encompassed most all observant Jews. This included Jewish workers, in as much as closed factories forced them to trade, buy, and sell on the black market to survive – all of which lent credibility to the above-noted phony White report. After the Bolsheviks were evicted from Kyiv in September 1919, the city’s Jewish committee recorded in a public announcement how a “small coterie” of Bolshevik Jews, with “medieval methods,” imposed terror on observant Jews, destroying their national life, property, and executing young and old indiscriminately – regardless of Bolshevik talk about class allies, decrees condemning violence against Jews, and the death penalty for pogrom perpetrators and instigators.120 Observers could write, “In general, the Jewish population suffers most from the communist terror.”121 In 1919, Bolshevik leaders had to deal with pogroms committed by nominally loyal troops.122 That year, most of their forces in Ukraine were Red Ukrainian irregular units mostly under Ukrainian-left SR (Borotbist) than Bolshevik influence. These who had not joined the invading Red troops that January directly fought in irregular pro-Bolshevik Borotbist units against the hetman, or were UnR army deserters. Before March 1919, none of them would have known the cpU took orders from Moscow, or that the Bolshevik Ukrainian republic was a facade. How many would have known afterwards is moot. Aside from the criminals in these units, were men whose families, in villages occupied by Bolshevik officials, began informing them about the vicious policies implemented by those primarily Russian and Russifiedagnostic young Jewish administrative personnel, their requisition squads, and secret-police detachments (see chapter 5). Fighters for Red rule, thus, soon lost sympathy for it once they heard about, saw, or experienced Red control. In mid-February, one such unit had already registered a complaint: “Appointed political and other commissars not elected by us, follow every step of local soviets, and ruthlessly punish those comrade workers and peasants who defend the peoples’ freedom.”123 Entering towns hungry and ill-equipped after battle, these men did not bother about distinctions between the innocent and the guilty, or all and some. Red irregulars and Red Army men had no qualms about taking revenge on all Jews in pogroms for what some Bolshevik Jews had done. Pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian partisans would shoot their unit party members and Cheka agents, regardless of nationality while fighting anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian forces.124 Some joined pogroms instigated by the

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warlord Hryhoriev, who was an antisemite. Whether in per capita terms Ukrainians or Jews suffered more as victims of Bolshevik violence is unknown. In July 2019, archaeologists in the vicinity of Zhytomir excavated a mass, unmarked grave near the former village of Shumsk (1906 population 994) of at least 190 people who died between 1919 and 1921. Well over half were children, the remainder, women and old men. The bodies were mutilated with gruesome injuries like heads cleaved in half. Local Cheka records from December 1919 to January 1920 show these were victims of Bolshevik requisitioning units. They were taken hostage and then, either when their villages did not surrender the required food quota, or their men who had joined partisan units did not surrender, the prisoners were killed – by cutting, hitting, and thrusting.125 How many such victims in all Ukraine there were, and whether central Cheka tallies counted all such persons is unknown. The unknown includes totals executed in their many prisons between 1917 and 1923. When the Whites controlled Kyiv in 1919, for instance, they excavated the graveyard of one such prison and discovered the prisoners had been shot with dum-dum bullets.126 Between 1918 and 1923, no one is known to have attempted to count how many Ukrainian peasants died specifically at the hands not only of Bolshevik units, but of warlords who could have been criminals, or military commanders of one or another party or government. Any attempt to redress this statistical lacuna to include total deaths in villages and small towns from Bolshevik hands would have to include all extant church death registers – something no one has yet done.127

Reasons Why It can be argued that, if the Bolsheviks had not taken power from a government unable to deal with the demands of three years of war and found themselves trying to rule a society verging on collapse, they might not have so vociferously advocated and justified the mass terror that was explicit in their version of Marxist theory. Analogously, had not leaders decided to expand their regime beyond the borders of central ethnic Russia, there probably would not have been a “Red imperialism” or “nationalist internationalism” resulting in offensive wars against non-Russians. Nonetheless, the Bolsheviks did claim to rule a society on the verge of chaos, they did publicly advocate mass terror as necessary to maintain power, and they did invade Ukraine in early 1918. Their subsequent predicament lent credence to those who cited the justifications of violence found in Marxist theory to justify the ensuing total mobilization and terror that included excesses and atrocities of which an unknown proportion was local and unsanctioned. Leaving aside the matter of not being able to control all of their local agents all of the time, there remains the question of why leaders continued

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to publicly condone and encourage mass violence against civilians after they realized the immense scale of the armed opposition their rhetoric and policies provoked. Situation reports through to 1921 clearly informed them of that. Reports explained how those who initially welcomed Bolshevik troops took up arms against them, due to the arbitrariness led by well-fed, well-clothed commissars, and reprisals perpetrated by their requisition units and the Cheka.128 While some of the brutal atrocities were quite likely unsanctioned, it is difficult to claim that those who committed them did not act in the spirit of leaders’ statements cited above – Lenin’s July 1920 order to his cavalry army, and his known opinions concerning terror war, and the Jacobins. Nikolai Bukharin’s claim that Lenin had wanted to rein in the terror in early 1919, but knew he could not, is dubious.129 In 1922, even after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their control over most of the tsarist empire, Lenin instructed that the Criminal Code include terror as a principle, justify it, and explain the need for it.130 Leaders might also have been less than zealous in punishing unsanctioned brutality because they had planned fallback options in case of defeat. This possibly inclined them to risk persisting with their terror regardless of the mass popular, armed resistance it provoked.131 In July 1918, when they formally proclaimed the Red Terror, Bolshevik leaders were terrified of being ousted from power. Leaders consequently secretly prepared passports for 5,000 of their party members to flee the country, and began organizing those chosen to remain into underground cells. These secret preparations continued through 1919.132 In 1918–19, leaders also hoped successful western European revolutions would provide them with the manufactured goods they needed to trade for foodstuffs from their own population and thus make forced expropriation unneccessary – goods whose absence in Russia provided a rationale for forced expropriation. As noted in chapter 3, Ukraine’s Bolsheviks did not ease trade restrictions or lower requisition quotas (which by 1920 usually involved seed grain, as peasants produced only for consumption, not surplus for sale) immediately after Lenin declared nep in March 1921, but nine months later. In this context, the resort to, and persistence of, terror can be seen as a necessary, rational, short-term expedient. A third consideration that might have rationalized the continued use of arbitrary violence against the civilian population appeared in January 1920. This was just after the Bolsheviks had defeated the Whites and the Allies lifted their blockade. These two events gave Bolshevik leaders access not only to huge amounts of captured White supplies, but also, as of that September, they could import vast supplies of most everything, including rolling stock, via Estonia from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland – which they paid for with the gold, jewels, and monies they had expropriated, confiscated, and stolen.133 Leaders now knew it would be only a matter of

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time before they could suppress all armed resistance. Through 1920–22, central leaders arguably would have known that Russian manpower, “internationalist” auxiliary troops, and foreign supplies would permit them to continue requisitioning arbitrarily determined quotas in Ukraine by force regardless of opposition. From 1921, as noted, 20 per cent of the Red Army (almost one million troops) supplemented by more than 206,000 men organized into punishment battalions and requisition squads, were stationed in Ukraine. There was no reason not to allow that force to use the most vicious counter-insurgency tactics to destroy Ukrainian-organized armed resistance and its civilian support base – which it did by 1923. Bolshevik troops had begun destroying entire insurgent villages using artillery in April 1919. Leaders, who realized indiscriminate destruction was unwise as it would kill Bolshevik supporters alongside everybody else, that same month forbade this tactic.134 Nonetheless, in April 1920, the “Short Instructions on the Struggle Against Banditry and Kulak Insurgency,” marked top secret, formally allowed commanders to destroy and totally eradicate villages mounting exceptionally strong resistance. That December, after they finally destroyed the UnR army and Whites under general Vrangel, leaders issued an instruction with the same title specifying only houses and property of partisans were to be destroyed – not entire villages.135 Whether troops actually stopped using the tactic when it was proscribed, and how many villages were totally destroyed, has yet to be determined.

chApteR 5

Violence Against Civilians: Ukrainian and Polish Governments … nothing is more fatal to morality and to the Republic than the continual shifting of rank and fortune among the citizens: such changes are both the proof and the source of a thousand disorders, and overturn and confound everything; for those who were brought up to one thing find themselves destined for another; and neither those who rise nor those who fall are able to assume the rules of conduct, or to possess themselves of the qualifications requisite for their new condition, still less to discharge the duties it entails.

Rousseau, Discourse on Political Economy (1755)

And when we say “all Ukrainians are pogromists” we become like those who claim “all Jews are Bolsheviks.”

Arnold Margolin (1922)1

In the wake of the 1918 German-Ukrainian spring offensive, Viktor Andrievsky returned to his native Poltava where he learned of the fate of his friend Colonel Vyshemirsky. In January, he had come home to return to civilian life. When retreating that April, the Bolsheviks wanted him to take command of their artillery. They took him prisoner when he refused and for the next few days no one knew his fate. Then, scattered along the train tracks heading toward Russia, local inhabitants found pieces of his body: a severed head with no eyes, severed arms and legs, and a torso with no guts. During his trip home, Andrievsky heard of another incident where the Bolsheviks skinned alive a Ukrainian soldier while rubbing salt into his flesh.2 Many such incidents are recounted in Red Cross accounts, newspaper reports, and memoir literature, but probably no one will ever know how many Col. Vyshemirskys there were. Reflecting on the fate of the tortured men when writing his memoirs three years afterwards, Andrievsky considered such behaviour normal for Russians. Not for nothing, he wrote, did Ukrainians call them “katsap” – from the Turkish “kasap” which meant butcher. He thought Ukrainians incapable of such behaviour. He was wrong. Like all other nationalities, Ukrainians included scoundrels, gangsters, thieves, killers, psychopaths and those ready to commit crimes of opportunity – acts done without premeditation in

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expectation of gain with little risk and knowing punishment would be unlikely.3 War did to Ukrainian men what it does to all men – it made the good better and the bad worse.

Pogroms Anti-Jewish pogroms were part of the looting, pillaging, and killing that began in 1917. Jewish witness testimonial descriptions of the horrors during the revolutionary years leave no doubt that Ukrainians were among pogrom perpetrators. These were usually irregulars, but also included regular troops and sometimes civilians. Reports compiled at that time allow historians to approximate the number of Jewish civilians killed, often by name, place, and date, as between 50 to 100,000.4 Jews in towns like Cherkassy, Korsun, and Borzna, which changed hands monthly or even weekly, faced possible pogroms at the hands of each successive occupier. These could range from looting to gratuitous brutality and murder. With regard to anti-Jewish pogroms, there are two associated issues. One concerns governmental culpability. The other is whether the violence was situational or ideological in nature. It was of little consequence to victims who were the instigators what the motivations were of perpetrators, and whether or not perpetrators killed all Jews because of who they were, or some Jews because of what they did. Historians, who must generalize about the past, cannot ignore such distinctions and let matters rest with trendy assertions about “multiple truths” – if only because it was unlikely those victims thought there were “multiple truths” about what was happening to them. Historians’ job is to critique, qualify, and distinguish between motivation and intent. They must dismiss facile monocausal explanations and generalizations: that all violence against Jews was inevitably motivated by modern antisemitism, that dislike was tantamount to intent to murder and must inevitably cause murder, or that all Jews were anti-Ukrainian communists. They must try to ascertain actual causes and accept they may never know how many labelled their victims a Jew, or a Bolshevik, or a kulak or a Petliurite, to justify killing or looting of someone who, in reality, was a personal enemy, or rival, or object of a grudge. They cannot assume all victims knew exactly who perpetrators and instigators were, or, that all instigators and perpetrators were necessarily always motivated by issues of identity as defined either by antisemitism, or nationalism, or Bolshevism. Not the least of historians’ problems is a structural bias in the documentary record that can lead to the impression that only Jews suffered at the hands of proindependence Ukrainians. This bias is a result of circumstances, not anyone’s intent. It results from committees recording and preserving accounts of anti-Jewish incidents whenever possible, and no Ukrainian government or

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organization systematically recording and preserving accounts of Red and White killings of civilian Ukrainians, or pro-independence Ukrainians killing civilian pro-Bolshevik or pro-White Ukrainians. Cheka lists of the executed did not indicate nationality. Otherwise, Bolshevik statistics on civilians counted the living not the dead. As noted in the introduction, church death registers have yet to be examined for listed Ukrainian dead. Historians who ignore these methodological matters and shortcomings in the documentary record risk making facile tendentious generalizations and accusations like “Ukrainian activists,” all Ukrainians always, or all warlords were antisemites, or that antisemitism was part of the Ukrainian national project.5 Those who make such generalizations rarely identify by name those who, indeed, were antisemites, such as Opanas Andrievsky, while ignoring those who were not.6 Mykola Mikhnovsky, who founded the Ukrainian National Party in 1902, for example, included Jews as a group, alongside Russians and Poles, among the enemies of Ukraine. But was this antisemitism if he qualified his accusation with the assertion they would be classified as such only for as long as “they rule over us”? The program included national and religious rights for all in the envisaged independent Ukraine. No other Ukrainian party program included such an accusation.7 Borys Hrinchenko and Central Rada member Serhyi Iefremov, for their part, wrote in defence of Jews. The former’s daughter was imprisoned and died in prison for helping to organize a Jewish-Ukrainian self-defence unit during the 1905 pogroms.8 The Ukrainian newspaper Nova Rada (7 March/22 February), just after the Bolsheviks fled Kyiv in March 1918, told readers it was wrong to condemn all Jews because some were Bolshevik commissars. Solomon Goldelman claimed it was the “dark masses” without national consciousness who committed the pogroms. Under the pseudonym S. Zolotarenko, he contributed regularly to a Jewish column in the official Ukrainian army newspaper Ukraina. Edited by Mykhailo Kovenko, it had Jewish assistant editors and writers. It carried articles condemning pogroms and explaining not all Jews were Bolsheviks. Such articles also appeared in the Ukrainian SD paper Robitnycha hazeta.9 Eyewitness testimonies that identify Ukrainians well disposed toward Jews cannot be ignored. An account from Uman noted the Russian urban educated were hostile toward the Jews, while Ukrainian national activists were not. Oleksandr Zhukovsky was a Ukrainian general who served as the UnR minister of war. Arrested by the hetman, he wrote his memoirs while in prison. There he relates a widely shared desire among his troops to instigate anti-Jewish pogroms during the joint Ukrainian-German advance on Kyiv in early 1918. He attributed that to the extremely confused political situation that even the educated, let alone demoralized soldiers following their base instincts, could fathom, and Black Hundreds propaganda. The latter originated from White officers who fought on the Ukrainian side

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because it was anti-Bolshevik, and the overwhelmingly Russified/Russian monarchist town councils. Hearing reports from Kyiv that Jewish political parties had not voted for independence (the Fourth Universal), and that most Bolsheviks there, “unfortunately,” were anti-Ukrainian Jews, inflamed these soldiers further. To avoid the feared pogrom that would “stain the idea of national liberation with innocent blood,” Zhukovsky decided to surround, and not to storm the city. That would force the Bolsheviks to retreat, and his troops could march in peacefully with bands playing. It took much effort, he re-called, but he did prevent a pogrom.10 In the towns of Lubny and Korosten in 1919, Ukrainian troops stopped a pogrom. During the struggle in the former, fourteen soldiers defending Jews were killed. In the town of Bohuslav in April 1919, the local-born Ukrainian commander of a partisan unit ensured his troops did not join a pogrom and kill Jews. He personally tried to save the life of the captured Jewish member of the town’s deposed Bolshevik council. Before the war, the Ukrainian had “a mass of friends” among the town’s Jews. He had been boyhood friends with the later Bolshevik commissar, politically active alongside him, and both had served prison time together in exile.11 Trofim Verkhola was a Ukrainian member of Proskuriv’s town council representing the Peasant Union. He condemned the pogrom that occurred there in 1919 as a blot on Ukraine’s honour, was arrested for it, and, were he not freed by intervention of other local Ukrainians, would have been shot by the commanding warlord.12 UnR commissar O. Vlasenko, sent to spy behind Bolshevik lines in May 1919, was appalled by the anti-Jewish pogroms he witnessed and made exhaustive efforts to convince people to stop.13 If all Ukrainian leaders had been antisemites, they would not have agreed to investigative committees nor have established Jewish ministries staffed by Jews.14 They would not have hired Jews to work in Ukrainian government offices, or as artisans and printers to work for the Ukrainian army; they would not have allotted millions in relief funding, or exempted Jews from conscription on the same grounds as Christians, or printed Hebrew texts on Ukrainian banknotes.15 While Ukrainians and Jews interacted in daily life before the war, necessity after 1917 drove some of their leaders into associations wherein interaction was not informal and transitory, but formal, predictable, and structured. This was an important development whose presence and frequency during the revolutionary years historians have yet to determine. In face of the circumstances, the important members of each group in a given settlement formed a single organization to collaborate with each other in maintaining peace. The town of Starokonstiantyniv, for example, saw twenty-seven changes of ruling groups claiming authority. Its local notables formed a citizens’ committee comprised of four representatives from each of the

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town’s four nationalities who agreed they would not persecute any group for supporting one or another claimant to power, not call on citizens to support one or other claimant, and to intervene with that claimant to try and stop it from arresting or killing members of one or other nationality. Until 1920, with each new claimant the committee was renewed by re-election. The committee had a small police force, but kept order primarily by virtue of its moral authority. There were no pogroms when the town was under Ukrainian control.16 Recent work on local history indicates village attitudes and behaviour much depended on local leaders. Through the revolutionary years in the pro-UnR village of Diakivstsi (Podillia province), for instance, the respected priest Mykola Radkevych stopped inhabitants from joining local extremists and criminals who tried to instigate pogroms. No one has yet determined how many Diakivstsis and Radkevyches there were.17 It is unknown how many village councils passed resolutions condemning pogroms, as did one in Berdychiv in late 1918 that condemned Black Hundreds as perpetrators, and called on the struggle of all democratic forces of all nationalities to bring to fruition Ukraine’s revolution.18 We do not know how many Ukrainian peasants shared an opinion recorded by UnR agents in Polish-controlled Ukraine in 1921: “Ukraine would have survived if the haidamaks and Petliurites had not butchered Jews. As if that [murdered] Jew did not want and have to live just like me.”19 Although in 1926, the Paris-based Committee of Jewish Delegations concluded that suppression of, and punishment for, pogroms was isolated, this issue remains to be examined in light of archives opened after 1991.20 In a village near Zhytomir in the summer of 1919, for example, Jews complained they were robbed by a local Ukrainian partisan unit. The inspector contacted the unit and learned they were all local men who knew who was whom and what they owned. The unit had taken back from Jews only what the Bolsheviks had given them from what they had confiscated from Ukrainians when they controlled the village.21 Historians overly influenced by various recent trendy theories are led by those theories not only to imagine there exist “multiple truths,” but also to ignore empirical reality because, according to those theories, it does not exist. In this instance, that reality involved not only grudges like “old Moisha down by the post office swindled my uncle – I’ll show him,” that could have motivated relatives to take revenge in time of chaos. That reality involved socio-economic context, charges against the behaviour of some Jews, and the overrepresentation of secular Russified non-Bolshevik Jews in Bolshevik government offices. Such historians thoughtlessly classify as antisemitism Ukrainian charges that Jews as a group did not support Ukrainian independence. They arbitratily dismiss Ukrainian criticism of the behaviour or function of some Jews as “prejudice,” or “myth.” They consequently fail

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to grapple with the empirical reality of such charges that, as historians, they should, while simultaneously and fashionably doubting the existence of that reality. This might be good theory, but it is bad history. Such historians incorrectly use the term antisemitism as a synonym for dislike of Jews, and do not consider that physical violence against, criticism of, or dislike of individual Jews could as well stem from issues of behaviour and function, as from issues of identity and ideology. They do not explain that between distrust stemming from Christian judeophobia and mass murder is a long distance to travel. They overlook the issue already noted in 1913 by Vladimir Zhabotinskii who, in his Felietony, deplored how Jewish activists identified with Russian instead of Jewish interests. A Jewish-Russian historian more recently reminded readers, “Ukrainian and Russian Jews involuntarily played the role of leader in Russifying centralism [in Ukrainian provinces] and was the object of Ukrainian discontent.”22 This complicated attempts by national activists to ally with Jewish leaders because the latter, like those of all minorities in empires, normally identified culturally and sided politically with central imperial authority, rather than the local nationalities among whom they lived, hoping to thereby ease their lot.23 Ukrainian national activists expressing hostility toward those opposed to their national movement are no different from any other national activists hostile toward their enemies. This hostility toward Jews as perceived enemies of national liberation appeared in recorded remarks voiced by Ukrainian soldiers and activists from early 1918. It was often invoked to justify the violence that Cherikover recorded. However, the recorded accusations included nothing on religion, race, conspiracy theory, or ritual murder. These men accused Jews as a group not for who they were, but for what they did – oppose the national movement. Such an accusation is not tantamount to antisemitism or an intent to murder. What those soldiers and activists are guilty of is assigning collective guilt to a group because of the actions of some who belonged to the group. This all-too-common notion that individual sin must be expiated by group punishment, as noted below, although fallacious, is a constant in human history. The variable is the target group – determined more by what people think that group does than by who makes up that group. Evidence, meanwhile, shows peasants were normally more motivated by desire for plunder, or revenge for imagined personal economic-based grievances, than nationalism or anti-Jewish race-conspiracy theories.24 The declared motives that underlay the violence against unarmed Jewish civilians, in short, as often stemmed from structurally based discontent involving political issues, socio-economic issues, or, sometimes, personal matters during a time of upheaval and war, as from ideology. Ideological-political issues can, but do not necessarily, trump personal enmities in times of crisis as motivation for violence at the local level. Those issues, in turn, are not synonymous with

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intent to murder. Civilians of all faiths before the war, for instance, were quick to hurl abuse at each other or engage in fisticuffs to settle disputes much more than are people today. Jews were as likely to beat up Ukrainians as Ukrainians were to beat up Jews. Death was rare as a consequence of such fighting. That kind of fighting did not constitute antisemitic pogroms.25 The Central Rada and various Ukrainian councils existed at local levels as of March 1917. A Ukrainian government formally claimed authority over all eight Ukrainian provinces that November. Pogroms during these months were usually led by deserters and Ukrainians did participate. Some eyewitness testimonies refer to local, nominally Ukrainian, government officials participating in, if not instigating, pogroms. No one has yet systematically reviewed all testimonies to determine frequency. Reviews of printed Ukrainian government propaganda from 1917, however, show it did not identify all Jews as enemies. Ukrainian language texts dating from 1918 that did make such assertions were not antisemitic inasmuch as they did not condemn Jews for who they were, nor advocate exterminating them. They condemned all for what some did, like the perpetrators who killed any Jew they could catch because of what some did, namely, aid and abet the enemy. Instigating and committing violence against civilians thought to have aided and abetted is common practice in war. Yet, even on those grounds, indiscriminate arbitrary killing of any and all non-combatants was not acceptable morally or legally. All instigators and perpetrators of violence against Jewish civilians, accordingly, were guilty of committing that violence – regardless of how they may have rationalized it. They were also guilty of blaming a group for the behaviour of individuals from that group. Although some perpetrators likely were motivated by antisemitism, whether or not they were is irrelevant in law, which required proving intent to determine guilt and punishment for such perpetrators. As noted in chapter 4, in imperial Russian and Anglo-American law at the time, perpetrators who clearly intended to kill non-combatants were guilty regardless of how they justified it. Motive was irrelevant to liability, which required proof of intent. Historians cannot ignore such details and must base credible generalizations on extant evidence of intent. With regard to the issue of governmental culpability, historians cannot ignore that the UnR did officially condemn pogroms and threaten punishment regardless of justifications, national or otherwise, perpetrators might have made. Ukraine at the time, it must be added, did not have its own legal code. The UnR passed citizenship laws in March 1918, but how they functioned in practice, and how many registered as citizens, is unknown. It is, therefore, moot, whether the UnR could legally execute civilians for treason. At the turn of the century, most Ukrainians, like other Christians, shared a latent distrust, if not dislike, of Jews. This stemmed from Christian Judeophobia. This pre-modern anti-Judaism, unlike antisemitism, did not

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advocate or condone killing all Jews because of their biological origins. Church teaching, Catholic and Orthodox, explicitly forbade it.26 It took crisis and war for that popular latent distrust to make the long evolution within some to hate, and then to kill. Modern antisemitism appeared in the 1870s. As defined in the 1901 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia, and later by Hannah Arendt, it is a “modern movement.” A modern secular ideology to be distinguished and categorically different from religious-based intolerance of Jews. Unlike pre-modern Judeophobia, antisemitism presumes racialbased behavioural traits and international conspiracy. It involves activists systematically vilifying and exploiting anti-Jewish sentiment to reduce or eliminate the pre-modern toleration of Jews within defined limits. In western Europe, in the wake of Jewish emancipation, it was among the middle class and professionals who faced competition from newly arrived Jewish rivals that such ideas found their most receptive audience. In Russia, laws still restricted Jewish mobility at the turn of the century. But lax enforcement, subterfuge, exemptions, and economic success within the limits imposed by the law also produced, by the 1880s, a rivalry between newly successful Jews and established Russian manufacturers, professionals, and bankers.27 Against that background, from within these groups appeared the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Russian translation, 1905). There is no known pre-1922 Ukrainian translation of this book, or of texts like Teodor Fritsch’s Antisemiten-Katechismus, which indicates the absence of any Ukrainian group interested in disseminating them.28 One group that did disseminate modern antisemitism behind Ukrainian lines in 1919 were the Russian Whites. They did so covertly and overtly, in particular during the Petliura-Denikin alliance, when they could roam freely in Ukrainian-controlled territory. How many they might have influenced is unstudied.29 The average person likely understood anti-Jewish messages. Whether or not they knew what antisemitism was is unclear. Black-Hundreds members, for their part, did not all call for violent expulsion of all Jews from the empire. Alongside this faction were others who condemned such violence and argued anti-Jewish activities had to be non-violent and legal only. For them, Jews were human political opponents, not demons or fiends.30 The Bolshevik Ukrainian-language pamphlet Chy vorohy Eivreii robitnykam i selianam (Kharkiv/Kyiv, 1919) included a definition of antisemitism as simply “anti-Jewish propaganda,” which suggests the average Ukrainian had never heard the word and did not know what it meant.31 Bolshevik leaders sought to discredit national movements by labelling them antisemitic in their propaganda. They publicly condemned antisemitism, but did not make public news of pogroms committed by their own subordinates.32 Dislike of Jews, as expressed in Christian Judeophobia or anti-Judaism, was present in daily life in pre-modern, pre-industrial society. Pre-war

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technological modernization in the Russian empire by 1914 had only begun to change popular attitudes and mentalities. A component part of these was status differentiation and, in societies with urban ethnic/national/religious minorities, the identification of socio-economic function with ethnic/ religious/national identity. The majority would see someone from a minority performing a function not considered proper to their station as a threat to the status hierarchy, and subject them to ridicule, to humiliation, or in extreme circumstances, to violence and even death – regardless of church teaching. This association of function with identity was common in pre-industrial Europe, where it underlay the customs and laws that defined and regulated interaction between different groups. Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida), summarized this Platonic based conception: “The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order … Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy [total strife].”33 Such restrictions on occupation according to birth or religion, alongside religious injunctions, were intended to mitigate socio-economic-based conflicts between groups. In peacetime, they normally did. In times of crisis, they usually did not. One consequence was that Christians targeted and massacred Jews. In sociological terms this was public punishment, reassuring and demonstrating publicly that the proper social order had been restored. Violence was punishment meted out to a group as punishment for the behaviour of individuals from the group for breaking the order. In modern Europe, only regions like Venice, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Lombardy, in pre-unification Italy, and then united Italy between 1870 and 1938, saw no mass violence against Jews before 1939 despite the presence of Judeophobic or antisemitic ideas. This was because, first, laws there did not exclude Jews either from landholding or any occupation. This precluded the association of identity with function that underlay the identification of Jews as agents of exploitation elsewhere, and meant any activity Jews engaged in were legal. Second, the mass participation of Jews in the Italian national movement meant Catholics could not accuse them of treason.34 The Russian empire in 1917 was still a place where, outside the circle of educated intellectuals, radical students, and some high officials, pre-industrial conceptions of social structure dominated. Men like Trotsky’s farmer father and Ukrainian sugar baron Mykhailo Tereshchenko were the exception. Jews were overwhelmingly merchants, tradesmen, craftsmen, and moneylenders. Ukrainians were overwhelmingly peasant producers, and in the decades before the war, made up an increasing number of lesser government officials and employees. There were almost no Jewish peasants, almost no Ukrainian capitalists, leaseholders, moneylenders, or bourgeois. There were no Jewish

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government employees. Ukrainian-Jewish relations, consequently, must be seen as much a socio-functional as a national-ideological issue – or perhaps even more so. Ukrainian producers, of whom few had any idea of interest, credit, capital, or investment to increase production, disliked and mistrusted but needed middlemen – agents of what Marx called the primitive accumulation of capital and Max Weber, “pariah capitalism.” If such a man was a Jew, he was disliked and mistrusted as a modernizing agent of capitalistaccumulation that could not be avoided, and not because he happened to be Jewish. The tension inherent in these relationships was aggravated because the average Ukrainian saw economics in terms of pre-industrial terms of “moral economy” and “just price,” not market economy and profit. He did not yet understand commerce in modern judicial terms. Profiteering was immoral. Peasants accepted the existence of leaseholders or middlemen, but distrusted them even if they honestly acted in accordance with capitalist practice – selling, lending, and renting for profit. If the person in question was Jewish, the distrust was greater. This was dislike based not on who Jews were, but on what they did. That pre-industrial function was imposed and maintained by the ruling imperial power. Russian law, additionally, prohibited Jews from owning or leasing land or related resources and facilities like mills and forests. But, as detailed in a 1907 secret police investigation, in practice, Jews figured in these positions. Landowners, including monastic estates, signed documents listing themselves as owners, while in reality, they made tacit deals with local Jews and left them to control those properties in return for lump sums or percentages of profit. The result was that local peasants in day-to-day dealings faced Jews not only as de facto rivals for land ownership, but as leaseholders and millowners who controlled all production on the territory and charged the highest prices and rates they thought they could to make profit from their illegally purchased rights and properties. As noted by a perceptive and knowledgeable member of the Imperial Economic Society who investigated the riots of 1905–07, peasant hostility toward Jews was often directed only against Jews who were leaseholders.35 This dislike based on what Jews did, not who they were, means that historians cannot ignore the overlap between function and identity when examining violence. The potential for conflict increased after the 1861 Emancipation, after which peasants faced Jews as rivals for land ownership. Peasants who moved to towns and tried their luck in trades found they had to compete with Jews as poor as themselves already established in those areas. Peasants who thought Jews swindled them in land deals or rents, or migrants in towns who worked at, or sought the same work as Jews, provided a receptive audience for the antisemitism promulgated by the Russian banker and manufacturer backers of the Black Hundreds, in competition with

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Jewish rivals. Ukrainian co-op activists competing with Jewish merchants would also be sympathetic to Black Hundreds antisemitism inasmuch as it justified their attempts to increase business. The fast post-1861 socioeconomic change that placed groups into new functions, both legal and illegal, was not matched by fast change in the mentality that identified groups with functions.36 This structural-political and economic-based tension did not inevitably result in violence in peacetime, let alone murder – regardless of the presence of either pre-modern anti-Judaism or antisemitism. Priests in control of the Volyn province’s Black Hundreds organization, most of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, it should be noted, despite their propaganda, neither encouraged boycotting Jewish merchants nor incited violence against Jews.37 As of 1917, modernization had not yet dissolved the pre-industrial order. Change had not yet displaced popular understanding of social relations in terms of caste – hierarchical, customary, and legal segregation according to group and function. Ukrainian leaders, like the Bolsheviks, declared all citizens equal before the law and eligible to hold government jobs. In practice, as radical modernizers, the Bolsheviks implemented this principle with respect to nationalities. As noted in chapter 4, secular, literate Jews flocked to take jobs previously closed to them. In the UnR , in practice, a majority of Jews definitely occupied most, if not all, administrative positions in specifically Jewish ministries. How many secular Jews occupied other government jobs is unknown and unstudied.38 Ukrainian leaders who created separate Jewish ministries acted in accordance with the pre-modern practice of autonomous selfadministration for different nationalities and/or religions, not the modern notion of legal equality and access for all without exemptions for groups. Such practice was not antisemitism. The primary source of antisemitic ideology in Ukrainian provinces before the war was imperial Russian Black Hundreds organizations. Their publications, like Gorit Rossiia or Ruskii Zhid, ignored the pre-industrial caste-based notions of segregation that regulated interaction, condemned Jews because of who they were, not what they did, and prohibited interaction with them.39 If Jews suffered restrictions and occasional violence as a result of Christian Judeophobic ideas, those ideas, at least, left them a place within which they were free to pursue the functions allotted them. Antisemitism deprived them even of that place. How significant a disseminator the Russian Orthodox Church was of antisemitism is unclear. On the one hand, clergy did support the Black Hundreds. On the other hand, as noted above, those who did, did not always and inevitably incite violence against Jews, and clerics were among those who made illegal deals with Jews to act as leaseholders on church lands. Moreover, the religious but anticlerical Ukrainian peasant distrusted the church as a government institution, and did not always understand

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sermons.40 The more significant source of antisemitism was the tsarist army, where millions of men were exposed to it. Senior generals, like Nikolai Ianushkevich, were modern antisemites. They allowed Black Hundreds agitators and publications into barracks and antisemitic articles into army newspapers and pamphlets. Even so, antisemitism, however learned, cannot be treated as the sole reason for Ukrainian peasant violence against Jews, if only because ideas by themselves are rarely the sole cause of behaviour. On the one hand, contemporaries before the war noted that, despite the propaganda, recruits retained traditional Christian views they had learned growing up. While these categorized Jews as inferior in the great scheme of things, they also included tolerance. It was not unknown for Ukrainians to learn trades from Jewish masters.41 Daily interaction between Jewish trader, lender, and innkeeper, and Christian producer, borrower, and drinker generated differences, tensions, grievances, and grudges. Neither side had a flattering opinion of the other. In popular Ukrainian opinion, Jews used monopolies to fix prices. “If a Jew doesn’t cheat, he won’t even have lunch.” In popular Jewish opinion, Ukrainians were ignorant drunks and thieves: “See the peasant run to the inn to snatch a drop of brandy – see the Jew run to the school to snatch a page of Talmud.” “Don’t whistle – you are not a peasant.” Sholom Aliechem characterized relations as a mutually contemptuous friendliness. Ukrainian writers, for their part, included in their work both sympathetic and disparaging descriptions of Jews.42 Most all Christians and Jews still understood the world as a place wherein each had their place and neither excluded the other from the commandment “thou shall not kill.” Christian theology did not call for mass killing of Jews. Christians could rationalize or justify hostility that stemmed from conflicts of interest, in terms of pre-modern anti-Judaism, but that did not inevitably lead to killing. In normal times, arguments and fights between Jew and Ukrainian did not inevitably generate mob violence – particularly as tolerance of quotidian civilian violence then was much higher than today, and usually not even recorded because much of it was not criminalized in law.43 An eyewitness in 1862 related an incident where a Jewish merchant began publicly beating a Ukrainian when he refused to sell firewood at the rate set by the local Jews who controlled the market. Ukrainian passers-by looked, crossed themselves, and kept going.44 In reference to the 1905 pogroms, the 1910 edition of the Jewish Encyclopedia noted peasants were interested “exclusively” in plunder: “there was no racial hatred or economic antisemitism. Often the same peasant who plundered Jewish goods sheltered Jewish fugitives.”45 Underlying relations between Ukrainians and Jews was the suspicion of strangers, like that which existed between any group of natives and foreigners in any society. Suspicion was the norm – acceptance unusual. When times were good and

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foreigners performed a useful role, they were tolerated and agitation to the contrary had little popular impact. When times were hard and there was competition for scarce goods, latent suspicions, grudges, and fear emerged that provided grounds for instigators to provoke violence – efforts which may or may not be successful. Tensions, deep social cleavages, stereotypes, and hatreds in themselves are insufficient preconditions for mass killing. It is not underlying opinions but specific conditions that lead men to gratuitous brutality or killing – even in the absence of deep hatreds or ideological motivation. Beliefs can as often prevent or inhibit mass killing as cause it.46 Just as not every Bolshevik necessarily agreed with the mass killing by Cheka and Red Army troops, not every Ukrainian necessarily agreed with the mass killings done by some warlords. Before 1917, pogroms were rare in Ukrainian provinces.47 The violence of the revolutionary years has led some historians to exaggerate the significance of pre-war differences and make no reference to the centuries of peaceful interaction before 1914. Historians who focus only on the one specific period of violence between 1917 and 1920 can lead readers to mistakenly conclude the historical exception was the historical norm.48 The past harmony is noteworthy, given that in 1897, on average in the Ukrainian provinces, of every twelve inhabitants, and for every nine Ukrainians, one was Jewish. In towns, Jews averaged one of every four inhabitants and one per every Ukrainian.49 “In Dubovo, the pre-1918 beneficial and practical economic relations smoothed religious and cultural differences, favoring tolerance and peaceful coexistence. No pogroms tarnished this equilibrium in 1881–82 or in 1905.”50 A Rada agitator in March 1917 observed no hostility toward Jews in Kyiv province villages, let alone any hint of possible pogroms. Some offered land to any Jew who wanted to farm.51 Proskuriv was another town where there had never been a pogrom before 1919. It took five years of upheaval for pogrom preconditions to emerge there. Jewish testimonies from Kyiv province in 1919 recorded that previously normal relations broke down when a local warlord arrived and spread “hate and spite against the Jews.” A Jewish account from Zhytomir in Volyn province noted normal relations between Ukrainians and Jews up to 1919 when antisemitic propaganda first appeared – allegedly introduced by Ukrainian army agitators. Yet, simultaneously, local western Ukrainian troops kept order. Criminals committed the first acts of violence against Jews, but the majority of the population opposed them, arrested them, and executed them.52 A UnR agitator in the summer of 1919 in Podillia province reported locals and men under partisan commander Iakiv Shepel in Lityn murdered any Jew they found, and that he did his utmost to convince people how destructive the notion that all Jews should be killed was to Ukrainian independence. Villagers in Volyn province that same summer, reported another agitator, specified to him

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why they disliked Jews: “Jews cannot be forgiven for what they did under the Bolsheviks.”53 Two important Jewish chroniclers at the time differed over peasant attitudes toward Jews after 1917. Specifically, whether they distinguished between “their” Jews, with whom they had interacted for generations as traders and craftsmen to whom they bore no particular malice, and foreign or outsider Jews, whom they identified as recently arrived agents of the much-hated Bolshevik commune – “komuna.”54 Behaviour varied. Ukrainians, who did not always see that the conservative “older and wiser Jews” disagreed with and condemned their secular, deracinated youth, victimized all Jews. Yet, alongside instances where young and old were both killed, were cases of Ukrainian troops and locals seeking revenge on Bolsheviks made distinctions. A western Ukrainian officer who traversed right-bank Ukraine in April 1919, just after the Bolsheviks had fled, observed that many made this distinction, and that mob violence could be as much situational as ideological in nature. In Zhytomir and in Volyn province, he wrote, the Bolsheviks filled administrative offices with nineteen- or twenty-year-old insolent, presumably apostate, Jewish students “who by their inexplicable behaviour,” had provoked the violent hostility of Ukrainians and Poles toward all Jews. These young, literate, atheist Jews, not all party members, fled with the Red Army, and left their observant elders to face the wrath of local Christians, who had suffered alongside Ukrainians because of the policies the fugitives had implemented. Another UnR official informed his superiors in August 1919, “It is unjust to accuse Jews of sympathy for Bolshevism. The Jewish population in all the towns I traveled (where there were no workers) – are antibolshevik and could not be otherwise because they are all involved in trade.” In the same report, he admitted how “many looters,” either in the army or pretending to be, committed horrific atrocities and that the army’s route from Kamianets to Zhmerynka is drenched in Jewish blood.”55 In the town of Ushomyr (Volyn province) in July 1919, local peasants protected local Jews from a pogrom by partisans. Similarly, a partisan group near Mohyliv-Podilskyi interceded to protect a Jewish family from Ukrainian troops looking for their Bolshevik son. In Uman in May 1919, troops arrested individual Bolshevik Jews, but the commanding warlord forbade any violence against local Jewish residents.56 Not all accounts of the 1919 Proskuriv pogrom, to take another example, describe it as an antisemitic–inspired massacre implicitly condoned by Petliura. In February 1919, an officer who refused to participate in the indiscriminate killing of all Jews the warlord Semosenko had blamed for an attempted Bolshevik coup, later wrote he was ordered to leave the city. The local Ukrainian counter-intelligence officer years later wrote that his Jewish contacts had informed him that local activists had told their Bolshevik

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contacts they would flee in case of failure – leaving the observant Jews to suffer for their attempted coup. This was also in Aleksandr Gillerson’s Red Cross report compiled that July. Pro-Bolshevik Jews who had taken part in the attempted coup were caught and were among the twenty shot. The intelligence officer then claims Semosenko disregarded him, and, despite having executed the captured guilty, ordered a mass killing of all Jews. Given he had allowed his troops to kill, Semosenko’s statement issued after the pogrom claiming the deaths of innocent Jews were a regrettable undesired side effect, is untrue. During a banquet the day after he had suppressed the coup, he is on record as saying all Jews had to be killed to save Ukraine.57 Yet, Gillerson reported that in the ten days that passed between when he had entered the town and the attempted coup, Semosenko had drafted an order forbidding pogroms and there was no anti-Jewish violence. Gillerson concluded that, while Semosenko was definitely the perpetrator, the ideological instigator was the region’s antisemitic military commander Col. Kyverchuk – who stopped publication of Semosenko’s order. After his arrest, Semosenko denied being antisemitic. He claimed he had ordered the pogrom as a conscious mass massacre; a tactical expedient in time of war, in the style of Bolshevik mass murders, with the purpose of terrorizing all Jews to stop supporting Bolsheviks – that is, aiding and abetting the enemy. This statement is credible in view of his above-noted order forbidding pogroms.58 The town of Khmilnyk was overwhelming Jewish. When Ukrainian troops recaptured it in August 1919, the Jews feared a pogrom at the hands of the surrounding Ukrainians. The incoming west Ukrainian commanding officer made inquiries and discovered that when the Bolsheviks had occupied the town some months earlier, some Jews exploited the situation to repay a slight they had received from a local peasant. They identified him as a bandit and the Bolsheviks shot him. The peasants decided to take their revenge on all the town’s Jews with the approach of Ukrainian forces. However, the battle raged for days, during which time the peasants stopped going to town for fear of the Bolsheviks. They killed any Jew who ventured into the village to buy food, while Ukrainian troops raiding the Bolshevik garrison inevitably killed Jewish civilians. Tensions threatened to come to a head a week later during the public burial of the Ukrainian dead. Thousands of the local peasants attended – many with axes, knives, and swords under their clothing. The situation was defused by the local priest and the commanding officer who told the assembled that it was neither the fault of the Jews nor the local Bolsheviks that innocent civilians were killed, and all now had to care for many orphans. It was the fault of the Ukrainians themselves, said the officer, who, the previous December, instead of fighting for Ukraine had joined the army for a few days only to plunder, and then went back home. The only

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violence that followed those speeches was experienced by the corpse of a dead Bolshevik, which the crowd spat upon and kicked as they dispersed.59 Khmilnyk remained under UnR control until August, garrisoned by west-Ukrainian troops and a thousand-strong local Jewish defence force, which had stopped Bolshevik troops from perpetrating a pogrom against “bourgeois speculators,” and refused to fight Ukrainian partisans. Presented with a desperate appeal by poor Jews for food and medical help, and in the absence of funding, the commanding officer assembled fifteen wealthy Jews and ordered them to collect one-half million karbovantsi for their co-religionists and the town. When they failed to deliver at the specified time, he raised the quota, arrested them, and threatened to shoot them. After an extended twenty-four-hour deadline, they delivered the amount. Thereupon the commander formally registered the cash, sent receipts to the Interior Ministry, and divided the total amount between the Jewish community and the needs of the city. His troops, with help from the local Jews, rebuilt the village.60 In territory under Directory control during the 1920 Polish offensive, Ukrainian and Polish troops were involved in pogroms in some towns. In others, observant Jews were not displeased by their arrival.61 There were instances of Ukrainian peasants and soldiers protecting captured Bolshevik office workers and Jewish commissars from the wrath of local Jewish militias.62 Volodymyr Vynnychenko, whose wife was Jewish, noted cases when peasants protected their local observant Jewish neighbours from perpetrators. This is confirmed by Jewish eyewitness testimonies that note some peasants either protected Jews or refused to join local pogrom mobs. Clearly, there were those who would have agreed with Oleksandrivk’s Jewish Committee that, in 1918, issued an appeal explaining the sins of individuals should not be blamed on groups: “Allow us Jews to have our scoundrels, and a nation that gave the world Moses, Christ, Marx and Lasalle, to have its Trotskys and Zinovievs.”63 Such evidence indicates antisemitism was not as pervasive as some imagine. Polish officers in 1919 saw the difference between young pro-Bolshevik and old anti-Bolshevik Jews. “Some of the very young [Jewish] men, however, were ardent preachers of the Bolshevik doctrines, and it was their actions and speeches which caused the general idea that the Jews were communists.”64 The same situation was reported by a Bolshevik officer in 1921, who had conversed with local Jews in the wake of pogroms in northern Ukraine. In the Odesa region in 1921, observant Jews supported Ukrainian partisan units.65 Evgenii Kulisher, a member of Kyiv’s Jewish Committee until the autumn of 1920, when he fled to Vienna, noted observant Jews’ hostility to Ukrainians had disappeared by that year, and that their leaders accepted

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the earlier violence should not be linked to the UnR government.66 Such similar statements from different individuals, from different sides and different places at different times, reveal reality was more complex than some historians imagine. Observant Jews, whose livelihoods had been shattered by Bolshevik policies, made a distinction between themselves and those with Jewish surnames who sat in Bolshevik offices. The Jewish doctor in the town of Talne noted that Ukrainians’ hatred was unbounded for such presumably secular, if not apostate, Jews who brought “the Jewish ghetto’s bad traits” into Bolshevik offices. People who had previously considered Jews beneath them on the social scale, but interacted with them daily as neighbours, were shocked to find so many in all levels of Bolshevik administration, the hated secret police, requisition squads, and food supply organizations.67 Solomon Goldelman, Jewish Social Democratic member of the Ukrainian government, foresaw the problem in March 1919. The mass influx of unemployed, literate, young secular Jews into Bolshevik government offices, noted in chapter 4, in his view, lacked what he described as the necessary tact for inter-ethnic relations. That “would immediately provoke hostility and antisemitism, thereby preparing hecatombs of victims and new pogroms with the change of government.”68 A similar opinion was voiced by British spy Paul Dukes: “One reason why there appear to be so many Jews in the Bolshevist administration is that they are nearly all employed in the rear, particularly in these departments (such as food, propaganda, public economy) … It is largely to … the arrogance some of them show toward the Russians whom they openly despise, that the intense hatred of the Jew and the popular belief in Russia that Bolshevism is a Jewish ‘put-up job’ are due.” Conservative Russian Jew Iosef Bikerman in Berlin recounted: “Previously Russians had never seen Jews in positions of authority … Now the Jew is on every corner and every rung of government … He [Russians] meets Jews at every step – not communists. People as hapless as himself, yet issuing orders, doing the work of Soviet power ….”69 The hetman’s secret police reported that the leadership of Ukraine’s worker unions was almost entirely Jewish. Most of these, probably, were all secular or apostate youth and politically/culturally Russophile rather than Ukrainophile – although the report does not specify this.70 In a still predominantly pre-industrial society, where function was linked to identity, most Christians would have found the reality of Jewish predominance in these institutions unprecedented and insufferable. This dislike had nothing to do with myth. A UnR agent in Kyiv in August 1919 reported, “Much can be heard even from women who say that if the kozaks [Ukrainian soldiers] don’t beat the Jews then we will. During the recent period … Jewesses in the Cheka did the shooting. Military [intelligence] agents are all Jews using foreign

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names …”71 Such agents, known feared butchers like Rozalia Zemliachka (Zalkind), Ansel Izvoshchikov, or Bella Shilman in Chernihiv, and other perpetrators born of Jewish parents, were not myths. These were real people. The irony was that by the time they joined the Bolsheviks, they were culturally and politically Russified atheists. Those who considered themselves “internationalists” expressed that identity in Russian, not Hebrew, or Yiddish, or Esperanto. They followed no Jewish rituals or observances – something presumably either ignored by or unknown to the outside observer. One of Izvoshchikov’s schoolmates could not imagine how he had become such a butcher. The schoolmate presumed Izvoshchikov’s cruelty was a subconscious reaction to his failure to rise in the world because he was a Jew: “And now he is taking revenge for himself, his family, and the entire Jewish nation.”72 Historians of revolutionary Ukraine must use the terms “all” and “some” very carefully. Evidence shows not all pro-Bolshevik Jews were necessarily the deracinated hirelings targeting Ukrainians and Cheka torturers that some claim. Ukrainian-born Central Committee member Serafina Gopner complained to Lenin in 1919 that the Cheka in Katerynoslav was “rotten to the core.” That it was filled with criminals and degenerates who shot whom they pleased and took huge bribes.73 Observant pro-Bolshevik Jew Isaak Steinberg, Lenin’s first Justice Commissar, a Russian SR , who urged Lenin in early 1918 against implementing terror as policy, famously recollected, “Then why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice. Let’s just call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it … Well put [said Lenin] that’s exactly what it should be … but we can’t say that.” The Bolshevik Jewish Section is not known to have instigated or participated in excesses against Christians. Their task was “the destruction of all the other Jews.”74 The only observant Jews who killed Ukrainians, as far as is known, were Jewish Red Army men who killed prisoners they thought responsible for pogroms. Some of them took part in looting their co-religionists or led their comrades to rich Jews.75 Apostate ethnic Jewish leaders like Zinoviev, Sverdlov, and Trotsky were ideologically committed – as were probably those subordinate to them in the Cheka and Bolshevik party. In absolute terms, this was a minority that common folk rarely saw in person. Party membership statistics before 1922 were not public, nor easily available to those interested.76 Who the average person did see, on a regular basis in person, were Jewish clerks, managers, directors, and lesser functionaries, who seemed to be ubiquitous in the mushrooming Bolshevik government offices and committees. Some such officials may have supported Bolshevik rule and held radical ideas. Some may have been party members. Many were likely apostates. Probably most took the desk jobs for the same practical reasons as did urban Christians: not

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because of political conviction, but to get rations, quarters, and exemption from conscription. Literate Ukrainians and Ukrainian Russians who had not been shot, placed in concentration camps, or fled, and were prepared to work for the Bolsheviks, were few. There remained only imported Russians and local Jews to fill vacancies. The observation by one historian, the Bolshevik seizure of power was both good for the Jews and bad for the Jews is apposite.77 With the highest literacy rate in Ukraine, Jews constituted a disproportionate share of candidates and incumbents for white-collar jobs. That was good for the Jews in light of their exclusion from government jobs under the tsars. Bolshevik leaders, very short of literate candidates for their ever-swelling bureaucracy, as noted in chapter 4, eagerly hired them. The cronyism and clientelism rife within the Bolshevik system made the disproportions worse. Inside the vast expanding Bolshevik ministries, all those appointed to positions placed their client co-nationals and/or kin within their bureaus if they could. Jews were no different. But more Jews were willing to work for the Bolsheviks during the first years of their rule and they occupied more administrative positions than Ukrainians and Russians because more of them, than Ukrainians and Russians, were literate and educated. They, accordingly, could place more of their co-nationals and kin in jobs than Russians or Ukrainians, and, thus, were more visible. As noted in a complaint from a local party member, “I witnessed the formation of the Kyiv Provincial Food Procurement Committee, in whose ruling collegium was … comrade Iudelevich … as a result, 120 of the Committee’s approximately 150 workers were Jews. Such phenomenon may also be seen … in a number of other Soviet institutions … protectionism is very strongly developed, thanks to which, given characteristic Jewish attributes, the institutions are filled only by Jews …” In another report we read, “… agitation against the Jews comes from the passive white-collar workers [intelligentsia] and the bourgeoisie. The reason for this is the huge number [bolshoe perepolnenie] of Jews in city offices.”78 Scattered surveys of individual departments or ministries and written accounts, indicate a predominance of young, literate non-party Jews, little interested in the Talmud or Marx, in local government and party offices during the first years of Bolshevik rule. Ukrainians’ necessary interaction with such non-Ukrainian officials was part of daily life, not a myth motivated by prejudice or preconceptions or ideology. It was a reality experienced by people who saw few leading Bolshevik party members, but many Jewish office staff and agents they could identify by name, physiognomy, accent, or prior acquaintance. Instigators did claim all Jews were communists – but that did not inevitably or necessarily motivate the average person to kill them.79 Antisemitism played a role in some instances, but the motive underlying

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violence could just as well have been the unprecedented reversal of the established ethnic hierarchy between ruler and ruled, and the prevailing image of who should do what in society that people witnessed in offices. That reversal shattered the self-esteem of Ukrainians and Russians who had considered themselves superior to Jews within that pre-1917 order.80 Bolshevik leaders quietly purged Jews from their offices through 1920. They could, because literate Ukrainians and Russians had begun slowly joining in increasing numbers as they concluded Bolshevik rule would not be overthrown. They made their peace with the Bolsheviks faced with the collapse of the UnR , the defeat of White armies, the promise of rations and lodgings as government employees, and, in the case of some Ukrainians, hope in the prospects of the pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian left-SR s, the Borotbists. There is no statistical data on the composition of Bolshevik Ukraine’s bureaucracy before 1922. That year, however, while declared Ukrainians made up 30 per cent of personnel, Russians and Jews each made up a disproportionately high 30 per cent each of personnel. That was why Central Committee member Iakovlev, during the 12th Russian Party Congress of 1923, described that bureaucracy as rife with “Great Russian chauvinism and nationalism.” He identified “Russians and Russified Jews” as “the most consistent conductors of Great Russian national oppression.81 Judeophobia underlay distrust of Jews, but that same Judeophobia had not motivated people to murder Jews in peacetime. Some perpetrators who killed non-combatant Jews in wartime intended to kill and were motivated by antisemitism. But not all perpetrators were necessarily antisemites, let alone associated with the Ukrainian national movement. Some joined pogroms to loot, others to settle personal scores. Others, because they were threatened to participate. Others, yet, were motivated by insulted dignity related to pre-modern anti-Judaism, not modern antisemitism. In the wake of the Red Army, the sons and daughters of the local tailors, moneylenders, milkmen, or innkeepers had abruptly appeared as officials imposing hated policies. This overturned the still-commonly shared pre-industrial perception of the world’s ethnic status hierarchy. Hated Bolshevik policies were made worse because the previously inferior had become the superior to whom locals had to humble themselves to obtain documents, permissions, exemptions, and dispensations. Bribing, lying, and scraping before Christian tsarist or Russian Bolshevik officials was demeaning enough, a kind of inevitable necessary evil. A Rada agitator in March 1917 was struck by how peasants’ blind hate of their local officials was expressed after the fall of the tsar, noting a slight incident could result in beatings and lynchings.82 An analogous bowing and scraping in front of nouveaux-arriviste Jewish Bolshevik officials was insufferable. Such hostility was not antisemitism – although antisemites could exploit it.

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Historians who claim all violence against Jews was motivated only by “images,” or mythical “antisemitic representations of Jewishness;” a “pernicious ‘Jewish-Bolshevik construct’ so widely perpetuated by the White army … ” ignore not only socio-economic context, but also the impact on Christians and observant Jews that overrepresentation of Russified secular non-communist Jews in Bolshevik agencies had.83 They additionally fail to consider that, in the pre-industrial world, religious ritual and rite was not something done in a place of worship once weekly, but defined daily life and what separated one group from another – a separation most, at the time, still considered right and proper. In this case, the separation of Jew from non-Jewish neighbour. Conversion, intermarriage, and assimilation happened but was proscribed. The ritual-based separation was reinforced by the specific economic functions of Jews and Christians in pre-industrial society. That separation was intended to minimize friction. Yet, it also added religious-ethnic aspects to tensions arising from economically related matters, which could escalate into resentment and violence. The dislike, and resulting violence, was not motivated by antisemitism, but could be exploited by antisemites. As noted by a Polish intelligence report from 1919, “Frequent numerous anti-Jewish pogroms [are caused] by the unprecedented speculation that the Jews are involved with.”84 What is important in this comment is not whether or not Jews really were speculators, but that it refers to behaviour and function as a motive, not ideology. A recent authoritative study of Polish anti-Jewish violence illustrates how daily interaction with predominately apostate, non-Bolshevik Jewish agents of Bolshevik rule, who were implementing hated policies, underlay pogroms sooner than did antisemitism. It concluded that antisemitism, as formulated by intellectuals, played much less of a causal role than “folkcultural wellsprings of grass-roots aggression.” The move from dislike to violence was provoked by the collapse of order, which then accentuated the general propensity of people to blame groups, rather than individuals, for problems. Christian Judeophobia and the rival socio-economic interests of peasant producers, who thought the only legitimate source of wealth was physical labour, and Jewish middlemen, who legally and illegally made wealth without physical exertion, exacerbated tensions. Likewise in revolutionary Ukraine, the “traditional wellsprings” based on socio-economic functions were reinforced by the disproportionate number of apostate non-Bolshevik Jews in Bolshevik administrative offices and Cheka units implementing hated policies. Under conditions of war, societal collapse, and the prevailing preconception of how society should be structured, the violence against the agents of the restructuring would have occurred without the printed antisemitism that did circulate.85 Another historian examining

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major pre-war antisemitic incidents and trials concluded, similarly, that antisemitism must be understood in context and that “it did not have an independent or self-generating power of its own to stimulate large numbers of people into action.” Pre-war antisemitism, in short, was not an ideology of great inherent or independent power.86 Evidence indicates that outside offices, Christian Ukrainians still tolerated observant Jews pursuing their traditional roles. Trading and interaction between Jew and gentile, as noted in chapter 3, continued after 1917 as it had before, only by 1919, in Bolshevik territory, much of it probably occurred at night because it was illegal. A December 1919 report by the Rcp Jewish Section admitted that, in the three provinces west of the Dnipro, Jewish handicraft workers were often the Bolshevik’s only supporters, but that relations between Jews in their traditional roles and Ukrainians were normal until December 1918. Peasants had even followed Jewish commissars against UnR troops. The party-member compilers of the report attributed the wave of anti-Jewish hostility not to anything done by local Jews, but to an influx of outsiders into offices, who “demoralized” the government from within; the presence there also of “petty-bourgeois” Ukrainians and Russians; and the policy of War Communism. They did not mention client-patron cronyism. These factors combined to change whatever initial acquiescence to the upturned social order that existed, into shock, hate, and, ultimately, murder. Antisemitism, the report concluded, was only a rationale – not a cause.87 As noted by a witness in a UnR investigation of pogroms in Volyn province, “The actions of one Jewish individual or group were attributed to the Jews as a whole.”88 This observation indicates that the human propensity to blame and generalize in terms of groups played its role in Ukraine, as did an August 1919 report by a UnR agent who arrived with Ukrainian troops in Kyiv that month. He noted people turned their intense hatred of the Bolsheviks, in whose institutions Jews predominated, against all Jews.89 Pitrim Sorokin made a similar comment in relation to the disproportionate number of Jews among those profiting from nep in Russian cities. “I know it is stupid to blame the entire Jewish nation for the guilt of some. I know the sacrifice of those Jews who died defending the interests of Russia. But the mass popular mind judges differently. It sees those shadows and forgets the bright glares. And if those shadows are broader and more frequent than the bright stripes, then one-sidedness is inevitable. The presence of anti-bolshevik Jews makes little difference to the people [narodu ne legshe ot togo].” The animosity generated among Russians by the “ugly predatory behaviour” of some Jews at the beginning of nep was similar to the kind generated among Ukrainians by the perceived disproportionate number of Jews among Bolshevik party and non-party personnel. Sorokin specified

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the behaviour of “a large number of Jews” led to antisemitism “infecting” all strata of “the previously Judeophile Russian [Russkii] nation.” It was the situation that produced the animosity, not an ideology.90 Psychologists tell us that hatred of entire groups because of the actions of a few is a common and constant human predisposition. The variable is the targeted group – which depends on time and place.91 The consequence of this predisposition in time of war is collective punishment for a group because of what an individual from it did. The deadly relentless logic is spelled out in an Austrian army order from southern Ukraine dated August 1918: “To prevent the [criminal] doings of individuals which in most cases cannot be proved, we must hold responsible the whole of Jewry … If decent Jews do not restrain the others [bad elements in its midst], they are accomplices and must suffer the consequences.”92 That Jewish observers differed among themselves when dealing with the pogroms confirms that blanket attribution of all pogroms to antisemitism is imprecise. Not all immediately accused all Ukrainians of being antisemites. Jews who supported or belonged to the Ukrainian government considered pogroms random, incidental, and spontaneous. In June 1919, Goldelman argued Jews were victims of their social structure and collectively responsible for the actions of their “antisocial” or “excessively revolutionary” coreligionists, because “the dark masses” made no distinctions between good or bad Jews. Anti-pogrom propaganda was insufficient. Ukrainians wanted to see Jews supporting their cause in daily life. The American Jewish Committee in 1920 concluded, “Pogroms [by regular troops] only commenced when the Directorate suffered defeat at the hands of the Communists who rose against them. The more decisive these defeats were … the more cruelly the defeated and irritated troops began to revenge their setbacks and hardships on the peaceful Jewish population, and the more often they began to treat [all] the Jews as Communists.”93 A report by the Odesa city Bolshevik Jewish Relief Committee analyses the motivations of pogromists from the Odesa region in 1921. It notes that while “national anti-Jewish hate” played a role, other factors predominated. It cites a general hatred of communists that, “for political reasons was useful to blame on the Jews.” For the general mass of pogromists, Judeophobia was more a sentiment or mood (nastroieniem) than a driving impulse. The primary motive was the desire for loot, as the Jews were thought to be well off. Soldiers did the killing, local inhabitants only robbed.94 Arnold Gillerson, heading the Jewish section of the Russian Red Cross, wrote that, throughout Ukraine before the February 1919 killings in Proskuriv, pogromists were interested first and foremost in looting – which soldiers regarded as just reward for services. Killing was incidental. His claim that, after February, the main aim of pogroms was “the utter destruction of the Jewish population” was a minority view at the time.95

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Morris Goldshtein, a Russian-Jewish lawyer from Petersburg, during the first six months of 1919 was supposedly the head of a Jewish Committee in Kyiv documenting pogroms. In 1926 he claimed that government publications called for massacres and pogroms were centrally organized, as did Heifetz.96 Cherikover changed his views. In his book he considered pogroms situational. Government leaders at times equivocated or failed to condemn pogroms, which military hard-liners interpreted as consent to commit them. In the 1926 trial of Petliura’s murder in Paris, he testified Petliura was responsible for the pogroms.97 Cherikover belonged to the Paris-based Committee of Jewish Delegations that was formed to defend Petliura’s murderer, and was the main compiler of the book it published on the pogroms. There he concluded Petliura and the Directory, not the Council of Ministers, implicitly condoned pogroms and never punished anyone involved.98 Antisemitism, in short, did not necessarily motivate all those who joined violent mobs, Edmund Burke’s “swinish multitude,” that made no distinction between anti-Bolshevik father and Bolshevik son – or between the guilty few and the majority.99 Did such men beat and kill because they were part of a mob, or because of whom their victims were?100 While some instigators likely were antisemites, much evidence shows that people most likely participated in the ensuing violence for situational, rather than ideological, reasons. Perpetrators were guilty in as much as they intended to kill, but they were not all necessarily motivated by antisemitism – a desire to exterminate all Jews because of who they were.101 Historians who assume antisemitism motivated all those involved in violence against Jews overuse the term antisemitism so much that they render it meaningless. By casting the past in a binary pro/ anti perspective based on racial criteria, they misinterpret the past.102 To this end, it deserves attention that the former Ukrainian minister and SR Pavlo Khrystiuk, unlike his former colleague Vynnychenko, and like some reports on pogroms, did not use the term antisemitism. He linked pogroms to socio-economic-based antipathy toward Jews stoked by “criminal agitation of reactionary elements” in the army under conditions of civil war. He explicitly named individual officers and warlords who provoked pogroms and, like Vynnychenko, identifies as instigators former tsarist officers who joined the Ukrainian army not because they were pro-Ukrainian, but because they were anti-Bolshevik.103 His observations are reinforced by Jewish eyewitnesses – Goldelman in June 1919, and Volodymyr Vynnychenko, who identified Ukrainian and Russian officers in the UnR army as the primary pogrom instigators in 1919.104 Evidence does not support the claim that all Ukrainians were antisemitic Jew-killers, or that antisemitism was the single cause of pogroms.105 What it does show, is that Ukrainians and the Russian minority can be divided into five groups. Of the perpetrators and instigators who did the killing and

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torture, some were antisemites. There were also bystanders and opportunists, who either did nothing, or took advantage of the chaos to steal Jewish property. A fifth group were rescuers, who tried to stop pogroms or protected Jewish neighbours. What the evidence is unlikely to ever reveal is how many belonged to each group. Local perpetrators who intended to kill are clearly guilty of murdering non-combatants. They were not all guilty of wanting to kill all Jews because of who they were. Motivations vary and are more difficult to establish than intent. They range from the personal to the political and economic. The reason that appears most often in the evidence was the claim that Jews, as a group, opposed Ukrainian independence. Such perpetrators rationalized killing as punishment for that. In socio-economic terms, others might be classified as agents restoring through violence customary pre-modern social boundaries. These were provoked by the young non-Bolshevik apostate Jewish officials in positions of authority, who had breached the bounds of the traditional order as agents of Bolshevik-style modernization. Kulisher and Goldelman noted this mechanism.106 Such men were motivated to kill all Jews because of what some did, not because of an ideology that condemned Jews for who they were. Perpetrators who intentionally killed innocent, non-combatant, observant Jews, people who had little to do with the apostate Bolsheviks who had broken with their communities and whom the observant did not consider to be Jews, ascribed collective guilt to all Jews. That killing was not always motivated by antisemitism.

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

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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.111 Unlike German troops, these various units, not bound by regulations or discipline, were exceptionally brutal in enforcing requisitions and/or restoration of property peasants had seized. One such officer recounted that prison wardens that year organized contests for who could imagine the cruellest punishment and torture. The winner got a bottle of pre-war vodka. “And what tortures did they not think of! … back then when all were blinded by malicious spite – this [behaviour] seemed normal and natural to all.”112 In southern territories, Austrian and Hungarian troops were particularly ill-disciplined and vicious.113 The government’s secret police force labelled its operations “liquidate,” but the word referred to the termination of a person’s or group’s activity by arrest, not to physical killing. Prisoners, as often as not, were then exiled to Germany as forced labour. There is no record of it shooting its captives.114

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Although the punishment units were overwhelmingly non-Ukrainian, peasants subjected to them blamed the Ukrainian government and associated independence with their brutality and confiscation of what they had seized from landowners. The Bolsheviks and Ukrainian SR s exploited this association in their propaganda. For this reason, Ukrainians in UnR forces would, at times, refuse to fight Red troops between December 1918 and February 1919, defect to join the invading the Red Army, or fight with the pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian left-SR s (Borotbist) partisan units.115 Yet government ministers had never actually condoned using indiscriminate violence, and by August the interior minister was condemning it. In some regions, as around Chernihiv, there were no repressions. Landlords not bent on exacting physical revenge, or extracting exorbitant penalties to be paid within days, came to terms without violence. Some peasants voluntarily returned what they appropriated and the landlord left it at that. Peasants reluctant to surrender grain for cash at fixed prices would trade for manufactured goods or liquor. Where officials provided the latter, there was rural peace. According to one eyewitness, there was no violence where Germans paid for what they took. In Kharkiv province, German officials would pay 10 per cent of grain purchase price in marks. In places, they offered one bottle of whisky for every 400 kilos of grain. A village headman who provided 160 tons of grain got ten litres of liquor.116 Serhyi Iefremov, as the editor of a newspaper, had good information about rural conditions. In July 1918, after visiting a village in Poltava province, he reported no incidents there. People had come to terms with the German garrisons. After one month “… not one chicken had disappeared, no window was broken, not one drunk [among the Germans], not one broken nose among the inhabitants.”117 By October 1918, incentives, repression, and mass arrests had significantly reduced the armed rural opposition to the hetman’s government that had not been so intensive as to threaten its survival.118 Except for the heavily forested north-eastern border region and parts of southern Ukraine under Austro-Hungarian control, most of the country was peaceful, and antihetman sentiment was not all necessarily pro-Bolshevik. The German general commanding, Wilhelm Groener, concurred that autumn.119 The secret police reported in August 1918 that, in Kherson province, people ignored socialist agitators and had a wait-and-see attitude. They wanted to see local officials impose law and order, something those officials could not do because many were incompetent, the report recorded.120 The then-new prime minister, Ihor Kistiakovsky, began dismissing officials responsible for the earlier violence and enacted a new land law favourable to peasant landholders. Aleksandr Iakovlev told Bolshevik leaders planning to invade in November 1918, that although the workers and peasants in Chernihiv province supported them, they should have no illusions. Without the presence of a powerful Red

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Army there would be no pro-Bolshevik revolution in Ukraine.121 One year later, little had changed. Local Bolshevik party leaders wrote the leadership that October: “a southern advance and establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine will be possible only with the backing of disciplined regular army units (that under no account should be of local origin).”122 The UnR , like its Bolshevik rival, was characterized by fragmentation and patron-client relations. At the very top, the fifteen to sixteen members of the Council of Ministers did not always control, or sometimes even know, what the five to six members of the Directory, a kind of inner cabinet, did. Individual ministers or parties were often patrons to military commanders. That meant when army intelligence or the Justice Ministry would arrest a warlord for what today would be called war-crimes, a minister would intervene to release him.123 Mykola Chebotariv, head of UnR intelligence, arrested seven warlords in early 1919 on the basis of verbal, not written, orders  – something historians did not know until his memoirs were published. Faced with total collapse by October of that year, the head of the Council of Ministers, Isaac Mazepa, released all of them. As government minister and then-leader, Simon Petliura was less able than Lenin and Trotsky to impose his will and enforce his own decrees. As the Central Rada’s Minister of War in November 1917, he ordered Ukrainian troops not to allow pogroms. The next November, in the first days of the anti-hetman uprising, he issued a leaflet that called on people not to permit pogroms “because the Jews help Ukrainians in Galicia and in Ukraine they should march together with us.” As head of the UnR Directory, on 18 January 1919, he published a decree condemning pogroms and threatening the death penalty for perpetrators.124 An article that identified all Jews as Bolsheviks, published in the army newspaper Ukraina in September 1919, was so uncharacteristic that the government’s pogrom investigation committee summoned its editors to answer for it – who refused to appear.125 Despite the various decrees and investigative committees, at the time his regular army generals thought him indecisive in the matter of warlords. In a 1922 letter, he claimed he was simply unable to stop the pogromist warlords.126 Some warlords and units formally subject to UnR in 1919–20, like the “Death Battalion,” committed pogroms. Like Cheka units, they summarily executed whoever they considered enemies. The warlord Sokolov, an ex-Cheka agent who later joined an anti-Bolshevik partisan unit, supposedly said, “Give me a Jew and I will wash in his blood.”127 Just as Bolshevik leaders condemned, arrested, and executed some of their agents responsible for brutal rapacity against civilians, so did Ukrainian authorities condemn, arrest, and execute some of those guilty of excesses. The UnR established a Commission to Determine Means of Struggling against Excesses Committed in the rear of the Field Army (Komisiia po rozroblennia zasobiv borotby zi

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slochyntsvom na tylakh Diievoi Armii UNR ).128 Lower ranks caught in the act were sometimes shot on the spot.129 As noted, officials also tried to bring some warlords to heel.130 Ukrainian army formations, as opposed to Ukrainianized tsarist army units, began committing pogroms in early 1918 while retreating from advancing Bolsheviks. Governmental printed materials did list White or Bolshevik Russians, Bolshevik Jews, or Poles (and after the alliance with Poland, Polish landlords only) as enemies. But this was no different from wartime British or French government propaganda that also identified entire groups as enemies. Otherwise, centrally sanctioned and controlled Ukrainian-printed materials that reflected policy condemned pogroms and did not classify all Jews as enemies.131 There are Ukrainian-language leaflets that assigned collective guilt on all Jews issued locally by pro-UnR officials. Some of them may have been antisemites. However, government agents or army officers who published such texts were not expressing policy. Blaming all Jews as a group for Bolshevism or disloyalty to Ukraine was wrong, but cannot be automatically dismissed as antisemitism. As noted above, people in general blame groups for the sins of individual members. In Ukraine, such texts expressed personal opinions of officials in a government that, unlike its Bolshevik rival, could not strictly control its propaganda. Such texts can be seen as inflammatory, but they did not constitute incitement to murder. Such texts can be a necessary condition for violence, but they are not a sufficient condition. It is a very long road from dislike to killing – even for soldiers. The average man does not move from dislike to murder immediately after reading a text. Other conditions must be present.132 A joint Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish Committee examining a pogrom in Zhytomir in January 1919, for instance, noted that simple dislike of Jews there did not cause pogroms after the Directory took the town. Only as UnR forces began to retreat in the face of the Bolsheviks did local officials, in particular officers, begin to ascribe the behaviour of individual Jews or Jewish organizations to all Jews. It was incoming troops under command of a warlord, not army officers, who put down a failed attempt by local Bolsheviks to take power that sparked that particular pogrom. The commander who ordered the pogrom did think Bolshevism was a Jewish plot.133 Alongside printed materials that classified all Jews as enemies, witnesses often referred to verbal incitement to violence, which could include antisemitism. An eyewitness wrote that a group of demobilized soldiers returning to Uman in February 1918, in the wake of fleeing Bolsheviks, told inhabitants, “See what is happening. The Jews with the Landlords wanted to stifle [dushyt] the peasants.” He noted peasants had a mind to commit a pogrom but made no mention of one. He wrote how terrible it was “for us,” that such stupid

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local peasants took a mind to “pacify [usmiriat] Jews and Landlords” only after the Bolsheviks had fled and it was safe to do it.134 Another eyewitness, in reference to that same moment, specified drunken peasants and soldiers looking for weapons did perpetrate a pogrom.135 Goldelman observed in June 1919 in Kamianets that verbal antisemitism, the idea that pogroms were tantamount to fighting Bolshevism, was widespread. The Russian Menshevik leader-in-exile, Raphael Abramovich, based his account of pogroms on witness testimonies that also claimed incitement to violence was verbal.136 Witness testimonies most often identified as perpetrators pro-UnR warlords who claimed they had verbal orders “to establish order.” Some Jewish accounts claim verbal incitement of violence against Jews as a group, which could have included antisemitism, was government policy – implemented by an alleged second “shadow government” of higher officers.137 Witnesses explained that some warlords interpreted alleged verbal orders to mean “kill all Jews,” because Jews were Bolsheviks – making no distinction between the observant, the apostate, the loyal, or disloyal. Warlord KozyrZirka, in January 1918, allegedly said, “I have the right to exterminate all Jews and will do so if even one Cossack [Ukrainian soldier] suffers.” The highest official on record as publicly claiming responsibility for orders to kill Bolsheviks on sight was Mykhailo Kovenko, Chebotariv’s deputy and head of army counter-intelligence in February1919. Jewish eyewitnesses that month wrote that, in their presence, he explained his actions were directed against Bolsheviks and that “we killed, we are killing, and will kill.” Jews are not mentioned here although the account did classify Kovenko as an antisemite.138 Civilians in UnR territory in 1919 were subject to frequent arbitrary violence. Its impact on the popular mood depended much on local circumstances,139 so much so that generalization is difficult. Local UnR officers and officials did use violence and threat of execution against Ukrainians to collect recruits and deserters. In February 1919, Petliura ordered his military commanders to shoot looters on sight.140 Ukrainian troops, in early 1919, raped and pillaged Ukrainian civilians. There were cases of civilians and soldiers killing each other. Yet, this same report noted, peasant attitudes ranged from support for the Ukrainian army, to indifference, and intense desire for peace and order.141 Whereas on the one hand the government would order troops to help with the harvest, on the other hand, local commanders frequently engaged in violent requisitioning. Peasants registered complaints against this arbitrary use of force, and sometimes responded with violence in turn.142 Officials who recorded widespread arbitrary requisitioning by troops that October made no mention of violent response.143 Civilian superiors explicitly instructed their subordinates not to use force to collect taxes except as a last resort. Officers who ignored civilian officials that autumn

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could, theoretically, do so because Petliura had decreed martial law seven months earlier. When, on 31 August, he ordered officers not to interfere in civilian administration without cause, he caused only more confusion.144 In October 1919, when the Directory was on the verge of collapse, central officials told provincial commissars not to overstep their authority unless absolutely necessary, and all lower-level commissars not to overstep their authority under any conditions whatsoever. Those opposed to Ukrainian independence, who aided and abetted the enemy, or engaged in passive or armed resistance, could invoke violent reaction – although how the scale of Ukrainian repression of civilian opposition compared with Bolshevik or White repressions remains unstudied.145 The Rada, in January 1918, allotted Kyiv city commander Mykhailo Kovenko dictatorial powers to quell the Bolshevik uprising in the city. During those weeks, Ukrainians, uniformed, appointed, and self-appointed, killed several hundred. The same happened again in December 1918. The Directory that month allotted dictatorial powers to Kyiv city commandant Evhen Konovalets. Within days, his enemies were blaming his troops for all the excesses committed against anyone suspected of supporting, or belonging to, the Bolsheviks.146 Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Volodymyr Chekhivsky, both ministers at the time, later testified at Bolshevik tribunals that they, as then-ministers in Kyiv, had been unable to stop any excesses, including pogroms, and that their rightist co-ministers tacitly endorsed them.147 The Bolsheviks dubbed those killings “Yellow Terror.” How many and where Yellow Terrors happened is unstudied. One of them was presumably in Hlukhiv, in the wake of a German-Ukrainian offensive, where Ukrainian troops systematically shot any Bolshevik they found in reprisal for the massacres of March 1918 – as noted in chapter 4. No Ukrainian police or military unit is known to have kept listings like the Cheka, which counted, registered, and published the names of at least some of its victims. Which killings stemmed from policy, and which from the inability of central leaders to control their subordinates, will perhaps never be known. What is known is that the intensity of the violence varied and did not always involve killing. Retreating, demoralized Ukrainian troops during February and March were inclined to execute Bolsheviks and sympathizers – primarily Russians and Jews. When Ukrainian troops took Poltava in March 1918, they rounded up a number of civilians, including Jews and Russians, who, apparently, were not Bolsheviks. They severely beat them, forced them to shout pro-Ukrainian slogans – and then released them.148 In the southern cities of Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Odesa, Russian SR -dominated councils ruled de facto. In March 1918, their councils considered Austro-German troops occupiers and refused to recognize Ukrainian authorities, none of whose resolutions decreed anything worse than prison or exile for such opposition – armed

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or otherwise. It was German and Austrian troops that suppressed armed Russian Red and White opposition however necessary.149 No Ukrainian governmental leader is known to have publicly advocated or endorsed dictatorship or made sweeping statements about mass extermination of targeted groups analogous to those by Bolsheviks, as noted in chapter 4. Government propaganda identified enemies according to ethnic-cultural criteria. Unlike socio-economic criteria, these allowed relatively simple identification. Jews could be identified by names, physiognomy, or dress. Anyone raised in Ukraine could easily identify Ukrainian-Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians because they spoke a Ukrainian variant of Russian with a pronunciation accent and vocabulary that differentiated it considerably from Russian-Russian. As indicated in folklore and songs, peasants knew the difference between themselves and Russians.150 This was much like in Britain, where Irish, Scots, and English could recognize each other by those same traits. The first and foremost enemy in Ukrainian government propaganda by 1919 was Bolshevik-Russians. As far as can be established, the enemy included Russian-Russians, not Ukrainian-Russians. Warlords and individual officers published antisemitic leaflets identifying all Jews as enemies, with some directly calling on readers to “beat the Jews.” In March 1919 in Rovno, the Jewish Committee reported to the local Ukrainian army commander that numerous leaflets were posted around the city calling for pogroms, while agitators in military uniforms were giving speeches calling for pogroms. Not all the leaflets they collected and submitted to him included an issuing body. Those that did listed no governmental agency. Army officers, however, could print anonymous exhortations to beat Jews and civilian officials could not prevent them from doing so because they had no authority over the military, and the printers were private businesses. There are examples of senior officers issuing orders to stop all such agitation after receiving complaints.151 Whether Ukrainian troops, police, or partisan units executed Russians en masse, or released captured Christian Bolsheviks, is unstudied.152 There are no known central government proclamations identifying all Jews as enemies to kill. There is at least one known warlord leaflet that does explicitly call on people to kill Jews. How many like it, signed and unsigned, were in circulation is unknown. Oleksii Boiko, (alias Kukhtinskii, Beik-Morrison, Ivan Biriukov) was an American-born Ukrainian who held key positions in the UnR government as Petliura’s close confidant and frequent personal emissary. When the UnR collapsed, he defected to the Bolsheviks in the summer of 1920, worked for the Cheka, and helped them arrest Ukrainian SR s. In a written testimony just after his defection, he claimed Petliura and other members of the government did give specific orders to murder Jews. Such written orders have yet to be found. He claimed

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Chebotariv had immense power and could make anyone disappear at will.153 Despite Boiko’s claims, and whatever other evidence they may have had, in January 1921, when the Bolsheviks sentenced seventy-five members of the UnR government, including Petliura, to death, the charges against them made no mention of Jews or pogroms.154 The strongest advocates of extending violence to greater numbers of civilians, and increasing punishments for ever-more kinds of behaviour, were army officers. This was the social group in all countries most committed to the idea of necessary blood-sacrifice. In countries with long-established governments, civilian control over the military set limits to such escalations – that involved a shift in focus from self-sacrifice to slaughtering enemies.155 But how that relationship between civilians and soldiers developed in the UnR is unstudied.156 What is known is that, in February 1919, one of Petliura’s commanding generals, Volodymyr Oskilko, urged him to establish a dictatorial terror. After pointing out that the entire staff of the army’s information bureau were radical leftists engaged in organized anti-government activity, he wrote, “… the internal situation requires decisive measures including the establishment of a total dictatorial terror [diktatury povnoho teroru] to sober-up the masses.” That April he led a failed attempted coup that, had it succeeded, might have resulted in a Ukrainian variant of the Red Terror. Semosenko was critical of Petliura for not implementing a policy of terror and intimated he would if he was able to take power.157 Ukrainian leaders were responsible for violence committed against civilians inasmuch as all government leaders are theoretically responsible for what happens to those they claim to rule. Unlike Bolshevik leaders, however, Ukrainian ministers cannot be considered legally guilty because there is no evidence of publicly published official statements targeting specific groups of civilians for murder or repression – Jews included. There is evidence of intent on the part of local perpetrators, but they acted contrary to, not in accordance with, policy. Such perpetrators may have claimed they were acting in the spirit of central declarations, but, unlike Bolshevik perpetrators, such claims are dubious if not unfounded. What often sparked pogroms in UnR territory in early 1919, where previously Jews and Ukrainians coexisted, were Ukrainian commanders who allowed troops to plunder and target Jews after deposing, or failing to depose, Bolsheviks who had seized power in local towns.158 Zhytomir’s chief of police in early 1919 wrote, “Official passivity on the one hand, and un-thought-out orders on the other, lead the mass of the population to conclude that the military authorities … are helpless in face of the evil-doers that tightly surround them, and the mass of soldiers beyond the confines of healthy discipline who are systematically corrupted by antisemitic propaganda ….”159

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Local pro-UnR warlords, or army commissars zealous in repressing any sign of Bolshevism, meanwhile, could turn Ukrainians against the UnR . Its retreat from Kyiv in February–March 1919 was caused, in part, by popular reaction to that kind of violence, supported primarily by Ukrainian-left SR s (Borotbists). A Jewish doctor with UnR troops that September reported the demoralized army was in total disarray, towns were totally devastated, and the populace, pro-Bolshevik. UnR regiments numbered no more than seventy to eighty hungry, half-naked soldiers who inevitably robbed whenever they could – usually from Jews.160 According to his account, a government order during the 1919 summer retreat forbidding requisitioning had little impact. From that August, a Bolshevik agent reported Ukrainian peasants in UnR territory regarded UnR troops, the Reds and the Whites, all as looters. They understood communism to be “Jewish rule,” but fondly remembered the Bolsheviks from the previous year – who had disappeared, to where they knew not.161 While Dzierzhinskii’s and Zemliachka’s Ukrainian counterparts were as prepared as they were to conduct merciless terror against civilians, and some generals would have supported them, Ukrainian political leaders did not proclaim a “terror.” In 1920, conservative monarchist thinker Viacheslav Lypinsky was critical of that reticence. He bemoaned the absence of a Ukrainian Jozef Pilsudksi or Lenin: “And here lies the tragedy of the Ukrainian republic – a tragedy whose roots lie in traditional Ukrainian democracy. Thanks to Ukrainian democracy a great Ukrainian revolutionary dictator could not appear.” The conservative Viktor Andrievsky, commissar of education in Poltava province for the three Ukrainian governments, who travelled often to Kyiv and knew many key personages, had a similar opinion. On the one hand, he accused Ukrainian socialist leaders of being unwilling to summarily execute those who, in time of war, should have been executed. On the other hand, he realized Ukrainians were executing whoever they considered enemies in Kyiv’s back streets at night, but did not know who was giving the orders. He considered such secretive political murder unwise. He thought Ukrainian leaders should have emulated the Bolsheviks and openly declared an equivalent of the Red Terror against them. He considered such unwillingness to use violence against the Bolsheviks the product of Russian-style socialist influence on Ukrainian intellectuals.162

Reasons Why Ukrainian political leaders were unwilling and unable to emulate Bolshevik methods. We know the majority shared liberal and moderate socialist convictions. They likely would have agreed with Taras Shevchenko who, in his Zapovit (1845), wrote Ukrainians should sprinkle their liberty with

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enemy blood. That was analogous to Thomas Jefferson’s call to sprinkle the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants (1787).163 That idea of salvation through violence was common in European thought, shared by leaders of nineteenth-century liberation movements prepared to fight and die for national independence. Only a few advocated the use of terror indiscriminately to that end. In 1900, Mykola Mikhnovsky, in an open letter to the Russian interior minister, wrote, “The Ukrainian nation must … attain its liberation from national and political slavery though rivers of blood would flow!” That same year he wrote in his pamphlet Samostiina Ukraina, “… that inhuman Russian attitude towards us [Ukrainians] sanctifies our hatred for them and our moral right to kill the oppressor while defending ourselves from oppression.” But this was exceptional in Ukrainian thought. Mikhnovsky published in western Ukraine before the war and was marginal to the events of 1917–23.164 There were no known pre-war Ukrainian counterparts to futurists Filippo Marenetti or Gabriele D’Annunzio who glorified death and destruction. No major Ukrainian leader is known to have written anything to compare with what Irish nationalist leader Patrick Pearce declared in 1913: “We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing.”165 The UnR constitution was published in December 1917 and approved in April 1918. It was never enacted, yet stands as an idealistic statement of principles in time of breakdown. Article 14 specified, “Neither UnR citizens nor anyone else residing in the UnR shall be put to death for a crime, endure corporal punishment, or any other acts that violate human dignity, or have their property confiscated as punishment.”166 Few national leaders shared the views of leftists in the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party who after 1917 did advocate terror. In October 1917, one of its organizers, Mykyta Shapoval, told a reporter from Kievksaia Mysl, “we Ukrainian revolutionaries” would use terror against Russocentrism just as Russian revolutionary democracy had used it against tsarism. “Terror in a free order [svobodom stroe] was just a means of struggle against anarchists and bandits.”167 Left-Ukrainian SR s in 1918 engaged in terrorism against the hetman’s officials. As of May 1918, they called themselves “Borotbisty” and in 1919 allied with the Bolsheviks. They allotted primacy to socio-economic, rather than national-cultural, classification categories; accepted dictatorship and the Red Terror; and participated in plundering and requisitioning. The peasant support they had when they led revolts against the hetman and the Whites subsequently faded. In May 1919, Borotbist Oleksandr Shumsky, then-member of the Bolshevik government, ruthlessly enforced requisitioning, and told officials in Poltava, “We will take everything from the villages and give them nothing.”168 UnR intelligence reports later confirmed that people regarded them as no better than the Bolsheviks despite their advocacy of Ukrainian national-cultural issues.169

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Along with philosophical beliefs, which precluded UnR leaders from resorting to mass violence against civilians, were practical reasons. They, unlike the Bolsheviks, had no fallback options that might have swayed them to risk mass repression of civilians. They are not known to have made secret plans to flee en masse, as had their Bolshevik counterparts. They made no claims beyond Ukrainian ethnic territory, which meant they could only mobilize resources within that territory.170 Germany supplied the hetman with manufactured goods, and then the new German government provided some military supplies via Romania. Otherwise, until the May 1919 agreement with Poland, there was no foreign source from which they could have expected support with much-needed goods. Alongside some items that arrived via Romania, leaders had only what they could salvage from wartime depots they managed to capture, and what they could obtain from Ukrainian co-ops and Jewish tradesmen. Ukrainian leaders knew the Whites and Reds alienated peasants by using violence to extract resources. Likely because of that, they forbade Bolshevik-style mass forced requisitioning. In practice, officials could not always enforce the prohibitions and the ensuing violence did alienate Ukrainians and Jews from the UnR . Yet, conversely, while on the one hand, the inability of officials to enforce order through terror did alienate some, it led others, for precisely that inability, to regard the UnR as a lesser evil compared to the Bolsheviks or the Whites. “Maybe Petliura will establish some kind of order, because under those Bolsheviks and their order it was impossible to live.”171 A White Russian spy reported that, in 1919, the army’s inspector general had a personal guard of former captured Chinese Red Army men he had bought for money out of a poW camp that engaged in mass shootings. Non-Ukrainians served as individuals in the Ukrainian army, like Swedish Col. Iuryi Otmarshtain, and Latvian Col. Karlis Broze.172 Otherwise, there is no record of foreign mercenary counter-insurgency units in UnR service that would not defect or mutiny if ordered to shoot Ukrainians. The UnR did not have a large secret police network, nor did it have equivalents of the Bolshevik armed requisition units or Military-Revolutionary Tribunals. The UnR secret police and gendarmerie fulfilled repressive, surveillance, interrogation, and spying tasks and these units likely had their share of criminals and degenerates. Yet, men like Cheborativ or Kovenko, whose job included sordid tasks associated with all secret-police organizations, and who did not share their superiors’ qualms about torture, mass repression, and intimidation through fear, could not do that job well. They could not, because the UnR did not control a sizeable territory for long enough to let them organize the manpower to do it. The Bolsheviks had controlled central Russia for one year by 1919. During that time, they had organized enough people to intimidate, execute, and torture systematically, routinely, and repeatedly through most, if not all, of

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that territory. They established in each province, alongside a provincial Cheka with armed units, additional special regional groups with their own armed units formed to fight insurgents. By the end of that year, they had set up covert surveillance and informant networks, able to investigate, arrest, and execute throughout central Russia. By 1919 in Bolshevik-controlled Russia, the Cheka numbered 30,000 personnel. Chebotariv commanded 500 men in the summer of 1919. A civilian political information department formed in January 1919, as of September, according to its head, had done nothing except report marketplace rumours. As of June 1920, it had twenty-nine people in its central office.173 The UnR collapsed that November. The few hundred men in UnR police, army, or counter-intelligence units could have been as ruthless as their Bolshevik or White counterparts. However, there is nothing to indicate such units matched them either in number of victims, effectiveness, or coordination. How many special Cheka troops committed excesses and pogroms masquerading as Ukrainian units is unstudied.174 The scope for arbitrary violence and terror in UnR territory was broad because ministerial control was as weak as was Bolshevik control over their territory. Central Ukrainian control over its counter-intelligence organizations was much weaker than was Bolshevik control over theirs. While the Bolsheviks had only two such organizations, the Cheka and army counter-intelligence, in the UnR , besides the central secret police and intelligence organizations, each military, and even some warlord units, had their own “counter-intelligence” personnel of a few dozen, or perhaps hundred, subject only to the unit commander. These self-appointed men did as they pleased – inevitably leaving the impression they represented the government. Some were arrested by special military courts created in July 1919 empowered to invoke the death sentence for murder and looting.175 Chebotariv’s enemies nicknamed the head of the central UnR secret police “Petliura’s chekist” and “the torturer.” They disliked him because he attempted to centralize counter-intelligence and thought all those in ad hoc units should be court-martialed as they were little better than criminals.176 He failed. Plans drawn up in 1920 to establish an intelligence department on western European models, including the creation of a concentration camp, remained on paper.177 Warlords like Ananyi Volynets, acting in the name of the UnR , perpetrated violence against civilians they considered disloyal or hostile, as did army stragglers and deserters. Historians have yet to find any written orders from Hrushevsky, Vynnychenko, or Petliura analogous to those Lenin sent his food-supply chief in Saratov in August 1918: “Immediately I advise you to appoint your officials and shoot the conspirators and waverers, without asking questions or permitting idiotic procrastinating.”178 In January 1919, the UnR allowed the army to use force against civilians involved in armed rebellion. That March, one of its generals, like Trotsky,

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ordered soldiers who refused orders to attack to be shot on the spot: “Better to have no one at all than such bastards [svoloch], shoot all of them and promote new ones [officers] from the ranks and those will prove worthwhile.”179 UnR military units following government orders destroyed recalcitrant armed “village republics” on its territory in the summer of 1919. The first-known order from Petliura, as head of the government, to “brutally punish” hostile villages dates from November 1919: “It is better that one or two [such] villages die, than a thousand die because of that one.”180 Theoretically, this order might be compared to the above-noted Bolshevik “Short Instructions on the Struggle Against Banditry.” In reality, it cannot, inasmuch as when it was issued, the UnR was on the verge of collapse and the order referred to provinces it no longer controlled. The degree to which either of these instructions differed from those enacted by the German and Austrian armies remains to be determined.181 While not necessarily involving atrocities, such orders did set the stage for them. Sources differ about the role of terror in UnR territory. A White Russian spy claimed Petliura ruled in right-bank territories only thanks to terror. Another, referring to the same months, from the Ukrainian army’s inspector general, reported peasants in southern Ukrainian UnR territories sympathized with and supported the Ukrainian government.182 Other reports claim UnR agents collected tax and supplies with minimal or no violence. An American journalist who travelled UnR territory in 1919 reported the UnR had support. “The farmer goes ahead with his daily business of reaping his crop and living off the fat of the land.” Behind the front, “order reigns.” That fall also saw a bumper harvest. A Polish agent that August also reported that peasants were well off. But he noted they had little faith in Petliura and made no reference to “order.”183 The government arrested Ukrainian soldiers who used excessive violence against civilians, and local officials were reluctant to use force to enforce legitimate authority. In January 1919, the troops of one UnR commander looted Ukrainian villages after they had successfully destroyed a local Bolshevik strongpoint. The commander was put on trial, where it emerged his soldiers were hungry and ragged because they had not been paid or issued supplies. The incident highlighted a dilemma the UnR faced until its demise. On the one hand, it issued orders to brutally suppress all armed anti-government resistance – as did all governments. On the other hand, it ordered those same commanders, regular army, and warlords to avoid using the excessive force that repressing armed resistance required, although it could not adequately supply or pay troops. When senior officers secured the acquittal of the above-mentioned officer in the early days of the UnR ’s existence, it set a precedent of the army overruling the judiciary. That confused local officials and discredited the government.184 In August 1919, in another example of

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contradictory instructions, the Podillia provincial council informed its superiors it needed troops to collect taxes. The finance minister instructed them a few weeks later that they could use the police if problems arose, but only as persons “who represent the local authority.” They were not to be used “as an armed force.”185 The situation was further complicated by warlords who appointed their own men to administer territory they controlled, then told them to ignore local UnR civilian officials.

Western Ukraine Western Ukraine was the site of major battles from 1914. Civilians there endured material destruction four years longer than in eastern Ukraine. Like farther east, it was not always evident which unnatural civilian deaths were or were not state-sponsored. In 1918, the newly formed Polish and Ukrainian governments declared their respective minorities would not suffer persecution or discrimination. However, neither side recognized the other’s claim to western Ukraine, nor was it evident who was or was not a citizen of which country. ZUnR proclaimed its citizenship law in April 1919, approximately one month before it collapsed. Poland did so seven months later, in January 1920. In legal terms, this made the concept of treason obscure. It meant that each side could regard the other’s fighters as rebels, not combatants, hence, not subject to the 1907 Hague Conventions. In any case, neither government was signatory to the conventions during the war.186 In Paris, Polish representatives explained they were not fighting a war in eastern Galicia, but only conducting operations against Bolshevik gangs.187 In February 1919, both governments signed a bilateral agreement on humane treatment of civilians and poW s. In practice, neither side always observed the agreement. Regular troops, irregulars, and vigilantes on both sides conducted brutal campaigns of terror, looting, destruction, rape, and torture against civilians. Both targeted Jews.188 The first recorded civilian deaths happened in early November in Lviv when, in response to shootings by persons unknown, Ukrainian troops executed persons caught in the vicinity. The first recorded atrocities date from 14–15 November, when an eastern Ukrainian unit shot some Polish poW s, and then an irregular Polish unit comprised of urban lowlifes shot some Ukrainian poW s.189 The Bolshevik variant of Marxism played only a marginal role in western Ukraine. At the time, Polish behaviour in western Ukrainian was not, as today in Ukraine, merely of local concern. On 2 July 1919, in its note of protest against the Allied decision to give Poland control of western Ukraine, the UnR delegation in Paris declared that Polish accusations of Ukrainian atrocities only bore witness to the hate that drove Ukrainians to commit them. “For the Polish occupation all means are justified to destroy the Ukrainian element.”190

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Mykyta Shapoval, a former UnR minister-in-exile, noted in his diary on 15 July 1919: Yesterday Polish newspapers came by chance. What horror! Total ukrainophobia. I was disgusted after reading these bestial [zvirski] papers. It seems the Polish vampire is the worst of all history created. I saw the Russians, the Germans, heard about the Turks, Romanians and others, but could not imagine anything like the Poles. Terrible and rapacious beast! What they are doing in Galicia will never serve to reconcile us and obviously the Ukrainian nation will take revenge.191 Shapoval did not mention which papers he had read. Most likely they included left-wing publications with articles on Polish internment camps like Robotnik or Nowiny Poniedzialkowe. The former was cited by another eastern Ukrainian socialist that November:192 In the Labour Press in England has appeared many articles and news of the extermination war against the South African natives. The terrible facts appeal to every Socialist the world over. Here we would like to give some facts about the war of extirpation made by the so-called “liberated Poland,” with the help of French and English capital, not against the Mexicans or Africans, but on the “natives of Central Europe” in Eastern Galicia, Chelm, and Wolhynia. We were so much touched by the sufferings of Belgium that we are a bit puzzled by the silence of the humanitarians in France and England, and should like to say a word or two in defence of the “liberated by the sword of democracy” peasants and workers of North-Western Ukraine … lately we got some correspondence in the Polish Socialist paper, Robotnik, which is the first of the kind in the whole Polish press (Obozy jencow, Robotnik, 16/x), and that runs as follows: Two months ago there were 6,000 prisoners in this camp, and every day from 50 to 100 men died of hunger. It was dysentery that killed the starving men. In one hospital the dead corpses were lying three weeks unburied, and rats set about and ate some of them. Up to now the dead are buried in such shallow graves that corpses stick out of the ground; in consequence, the soldiers who watch the prisoners are catching the dysentery and typhus and spreading the disease all around them. The appearance of the Ukrainian prisoners is so horrible that they look like death … Britain’s Manchester Guardian, like Prime Minister Lloyd George, had little sympathy for Polish nationalists. It observed in editorials (16, 30 November,

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12 December 1918: p. 6) that pogroms committed by Poles were an expression of the “disease nationalism” of the “Polish oligarchy.” “Polish nationalism is at its most jingo in Galicia, because there the Poles are seeking to trample upon the rights of two other peoples, the Ruthenians as well as the Jews, and hope to prevent them from claiming their rights by massacre and terrorism.” According to the UnR Paris delegation, Polish representatives abroad did not conceal that their countrymen showed no mercy toward the Ukrainian population of eastern Galicia: “Is that not perhaps why they invented the notion of ‘Bolshevik gangs’ in eastern Galicia in order to justify their cruelty?” Recorded testimonies of Polish atrocities and excesses against Jews indicate those same Poles meted similar treatment to Ukrainians: “Pilsudski’s state and its armed forces implicated themselves in the hellish bloodshed raging in the east [western Ukraine and Volyn].”193 As noted in the introduction, today, Polish documentary publications on Ukrainian excesses against Polish Christian civilians are readily available. Compiled by editors who see no parallel between Polish responses to German rule in Silesia and Ukrainian responses to Polish rule in Galicia, their criteria of selection recalls the opinions of Roman Dmowski. In 1902, he condemned moderate Polish politicians who sought compromise with western Ukrainians on the grounds that Ukrainians were oppressed by “us [Poles].” Explaining that the Polish-speaking western Ukrainians he referred to as an “element [zywiol]” were not “real” Poles, although they spoke Polish and had adopted certain Polish traits, Dmowski classified them as “half-Poles.” He concluded his article with the phrase, “That race of ‘half-poles [pol polacy]’ must die.”194 Dmowski used “death” here metaphorically. Because Polish nationalists assumed Ukrainian culture was inferior, for them it followed that the superior Polish Catholic culture would ultimately assimilate it. Nonetheless, although he did not mention or hint at physical death, it is possible to imagine zealous followers familiar with the phrase interpreting his words literally in time of war. The introductions to these collections documenting Ukrainian atrocities present Poles as victims only. Authors do not explain that both sides had victims and perpetrators or why that was so. They do not explain that Polish actions may have sparked Ukrainian reactions. They make no references to Daniel Beauvois’ findings about the brutal, demeaning, exploitative nature of Polish landlord rule in Ukrainian lands, nor to Ukrainian grievances against the ruling Polish minority in pre-war eastern Galicia.195 Ignoring historical context, these authors do not analyze Ukrainian-Polish relations in terms of social history, national liberation, or vengeance motivated by denigration, perceived injustice, and desperation. They make no mention of the mass strikes of 1902 and 1906 that linked rival socio-economic interests with rival nationalisms, nor the divide between Polish manor with its Roman

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Catholic parish, and Ukrainian hut with its Greek Catholic parish. They ignore the impact of the 1914 imperial decree extending forced labour to all government-works and private estates – almost all of which in Galicia were owned or run by Poles.196 By 1918, that labour duty had reached four days weekly in some districts. Ukrainian peasants, for whom, until then, serfdom was only a memory, now found themselves working for Polish lords without compensation, as had their grandparents. Polish editors make no mention of wartime anti-Ukrainian measures carried out by Polish officials in western Ukraine under Russian as well as Austrian rule, or the spectacular decline in living standards after two decades of rising expectations – all which provided necessary preconditions for anti-Polish atrocities. The published documents, however, do contain passing references made at the time by Polish leaders about the unacceptable behaviour of some of their countrymen. Roman Catholic Archbishop Bilczewski, for example, noted and was critical of Polish excesses and atrocities against Ukrainians – albeit he considered them “petty” when compared with those of Ukrainians. He rationalized the issue in terms of political expediency rather than Christian morality. He hoped that Polish commanders would “stop the excesses because Ukrainian complaints in the foreign press do us considerable harm.”197 Some of the documents also show how convoluted reality was at the time. Local events depended as much upon the degree to which local Ukrainian officials did or did not hold extreme anti-Polish sentiments, as upon whether or not local educated Poles remained passive or held extremist views and engaged in anti-Ukrainian subterfuge, in what a majority of Poles imagined were “native Polish lands.”198 While some of the published items explicitly deny reports about Polish atrocities as rumours, or report that nothing particularly nefarious had occurred in one or other place, others include orders issued after the fact condemning excesses.199 General Thadeusz Rozwadowski was commander of Poland’s eastern army in December 1918. In one of his orders, circulated as a leaflet in Peremyshl (Przemysl) in December, he included two commands forbidding actions that had occurred. The orders included rigorous imposition of controls and requisitioning in recently conquered Ukrainian territories, as any occupying army would do – except that they stipulated different standards for Ukrainian and Polish peasants. The latter were to be paid in cash for anything taken. “Unfriendly peasants,” were to be left enough food and grain to live on and given receipts for requisitioned items that would be honoured only if they did not engage in hostile activity. The orders stipulated such measures were to be implemented justly, without brutality or malice. All those arrested were to be allotted due process in court. Priests were to be arrested only if they could be considered guilty beyond any doubt. Peaceful Ukrainian peasants, identified as “Rusini,” were to be treated

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“like our own Poles.” Second, they forbade burning entire villages except when specifically ordered.200 Such orders would have been unnecessary had such behaviour not occurred. Rozwadowski’s use of “Rusini,” instead of Ukrainian, was not fortuitous. In 1919, most educated Poles distinguished between good, happy, hard-working “Rusini,” which they considered a Polish tribe, and evil, fanatical, bloodthirsty “Ukrainians,” who were all Bolsheviks and invented by the Germans. A pamphlet at the time expressed this opinion: “Eastern Galicia is not a Rus country because it is inhabited by over 40 per cent Poles.” The anonymous author wrote: “send such an army there that could liberate the Polish and Rus people from German-Austrian-Ukrainian slavery.” Another pamphlet claimed the territory was ethnically Polish historically, and that the Rusini were invader-occupiers. Because the Poles ranked higher on all socio-economic and cultural indicators than did the Rusini, they represented progress and the Polish state was justified in extending as far east as did Polish settlement.201 Official documents implicitly condoned violence against Ukrainians. A circular marked strictly confidential sent to civilian governors charged with establishing administration in the newly occupied territories specified, “Ukrainian agitators and those who provoke national hostility [prowokatorów walki narodowściowej] must always be separated from the peaceful citizens of Rusin nationality.”202 Reference to Polish excesses and atrocities may be found in published Polish memoirs and diaries. Henryk Pietrzak, a Polish officer who served in the Austrian army and then fought the Ukrainians, wrote in his diary that both sides committed atrocities and took few prisoners alive. The mutual hate was horrific: “There had never been such a war.”203 Jerzy Maciejewski was a sergeant in the Polish army fighting in western Ukraine in 1919. Marching through one Ukrainian village after another, he reflected in his diary, “We often doubted the legitimacy of our cause – is this country really Polish? Why are there only Rusins [Rusiny] everywhere you look?” He wondered why the peasants assaulted Poles with such fury and whether Polish soldiers were really innocents: “Oh the peasants must have really gotten it [sadla za skóre zalać] for them to go so far as to commit mass murder.” Depending on which army controlled territories, locals exploited the moment to take revenge for past wrongs and slights on their neighbours. The most outstanding features of the war, he noted, were the frequent murder of prisoners and the widespread practice of stripping them of everything in their possession.204 Jozef Beck was in Polish military intelligence (Dwójka) during the war. In 1918, like many Polish officers, he fought as a mercenary for Polish landlords in Ukraine exacting retribution on Ukrainian insurgents. In 1930 he told a friend, “We murdered each and all in villages and burned everything at the slightest hint of insincerity. I set a personal example by my actions.”205 The

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Lviv-based National Committee for the Defense of Lviv (NK Obrony Lwowa) printed leaflets and pamphlets telling Poles that non-ethnic Polish-claimed territories belonged to the Polish state and no non-Poles, “elements inimical to our nation,” could be allowed to live there.206 Individual Poles at the time not only noted, but, like the radical socialists, condemned the brutality of Polish reprisals and atrocities. However, no important group of the ruling Polish establishment did – a phenomenon in stark contrast to what happened in Britain in 1919–20 when British troops were fighting in Ireland. Like their Polish counterparts who had decidedly uncomplimentary opinions about Ukrainians, the English ruling elites did not hold sympathetic views on the Irish. Nonetheless, when they learned of brutal atrocities committed by special British reprisal units called the Black and Tans, leading persons mounted a vociferous public campaign condemning them, which played a key role in the British withdrawing from Ireland and recognizing its independence. The former prime minister Lord Asquith wrote, “Things are being done in Ireland with the knowledge and approval, if not under the direction of, government officials, which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism of Europe.” The Archbishop of Canterbury complained, “What is being done in Ireland is exactly what we condemned the Germans for doing in Belgium [in 1914].”207 Unbiased historians today know excesses and atrocities cannot always be reduced to black and white. Evidence from both sides, for instance, shows accusations of government culpability existed alongside evidence of government agents mitigating or trying to alleviate the consequences of violence. While some Ukrainians and Poles did kill and torture each other, others were bystanders or helped each other. Ethnic Ukrainians supported the Polish side and ethnic Poles, the Ukrainian, as in the case of Ukrainian and Polish women’s committees who organized assistance for poW s and internees.208 Attitudes among Poles differed. Galician-Polish volunteers and troops from western Poland appeared in reports through to 1920 as exceptionally undisciplined, violent, and hostile toward Ukrainian civilians.209 Those from the Warsaw region were apparently less so. According to an escaped Ukrainian policeman’s report to the ZUnR government-in-exile in August 1919, officers from Warsaw had told captured Ukrainian soldiers, “We will treat you well, when you fall into the hands of our Galician brothers it will be the worse for you because they treat prisoners like criminals or animals and not like soldiers.”210 The first known orders by the central Polish government forbidding pogroms and arbitrary violence against civilians were issued on 5 May 1919. Generals also tried individual soldiers for what today are called war crimes.211 But the chaos and willfulness of local agents should not be underestimated, nor should central government control in the territories it claimed

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be overestimated. On the Ukrainian side, apart from the Sich Riflemen, irregular units did most of the fighting until the Galician army was finally organized in March 1919. Polish troops through 1919 remained more like para-military militias and vigilantes than an army, because there was no strict chain of command yet established. There was political indecision. Polish leaders initially differed over how to deal with ZUnR . General Rozwadowski, who sympathized with the anti-Ukrainian nD s, countermanded General Roja’s orders, who opposed the Ukrainian war and was critical of the nD anti-Ukrainian propaganda campaign.212 Roja issued a notice 23 November asserting that Polish claims of Ukrainian excesses and atrocities were false – a stand he later maintained in the face of critics.213 A final issue complicating the study of excesses and atrocities in western Ukraine is that of propaganda. In November 1918, except for ideologically mobilized students and intellectuals, few Poles wanted more war. Volunteers for the new Polish army were not forthcoming.214 To mobilize the war-weary to back their claims to Ukrainian ethnographic territory, the nD s, from November 1918, launched a massive propaganda campaign including accounts of anti-Polish incidents in their newspapers.215 They distributed such materials also to foreign governments in Paris. The first references to alleged Ukrainian atrocities in a note to the Entente powers appeared three days after Ukrainians took Lviv: “Ukrainian gangs bringing death and destruction, with Prussian and Austrian forces, have occupied part of eastern Galicia and its capital Lviv.”216 The nD s were not averse to including false reports about what they labelled Ukrainian atrocities. One such travelling agitator, Boleslaw Eustachiewicz, a junior officer and member of an nD  military organization (PKW – Polskie Kadry Wojskowe), claimed before a mass audience in Warsaw on 19 November that he had witnessed Ukrainian atrocities in Lviv that month, although he had left the city on 25 October – before the Ukrainians took power.217 Polish military intelligence reported in February 1919, meanwhile, that prior to 24 November, throughout western Ukraine, there had been no “mass systematic repressions” against Poles.218 Ukrainian witness accounts refer to staged incidents: “To demonstrate Ukrainians allegedly committed atrocities against Poles, Poles themselves dressed Ukrainian corpses in Polish Legion uniforms intentionally disfigured the bodies and photographed them. On the basis of that, they then widely disseminated articles about the horrible atrocities Ukrainians committed and illustrated the articles with these photos.”219 ZUnR government-in-exile reports submitted from Berne to the League of Nations can be found in French, Ukrainian, and Polish archives. One example, from late 1920, was documents intercepted by Polish agents, which they then sent to their superiors in Lviv. They were translated and

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stamped: “top SecRet . To be kept under lock and key.” The Ukrainian briefs explained Poles had militarily conquered western Ukraine, contrary to the decisions of the Allied powers. They listed examples of “murder and torture,” and claimed occupying Polish authorities, instead of trying to cope with raging epidemics, did “everything they could to ensure the death of as many Ukrainians as possible.” The ZUnR government accused the Polish government of “systematically physically destroying the Ukrainian nation.” Among the named victims were three composers, including Ostap Nyzhankivsky who wrote popular carols still sung today. Poles tortured them, covered them with gasoline, and burned them alive.220 Unpublished UnR documents in Kyiv archives mention atrocities. A note dated 18 October 1919 from the Interior Ministry’s Kamianets provincial section of the Political Information Department (see figure 19), for instance, reported, According to agent reports there exists a so called “Section of Death” consisting solely of Polish women. They serve as nurses to wounded soldiers and interned Ukrainians and add strychnine poison to food or medicine and consequently our soldiers and interned die en masse. In the village of Shupartsi, Polish soldiers on the orders of Polish officers impaled [vbyli na pal] a Ukrainian officer.221 Ukrainian leaflets mention Polish atrocities, but they are an unsatisfactory source because not all indicate date, issuing body, or place of publication. They deserve attention, nonetheless, because they can direct research either to named villages and towns, and, in some instances, specific individuals. One of two such texts, for instance, addressed to soldiers, is signed, “Those who witnessed how Polacks [liakhy] kill innocent Ukrainians.” It lists horrific deeds Poles committed and states: “Remember the Polack is the worst kind of creature that exists in Europe and this bloodsucker will always oppose you no matter how you warm to it.” It instructs readers to treat the Polack “just like they treat us.” The second text relates how Polish courts martial immediately hanged all captured Ukrainian soldiers. It asserts Poles murdered the wounded in hospitals and turned a church in Domazhir into a public toilet. It names seven Ukrainians, including priests, arbitrarily murdered by Polish troops in the Lviv region in May–June 1919.222 Volume 1 of the governmental booklet Krivava Knyha estimated 250,000 incarcerated by Poles as of late 1919. That was approximately one of every eight Ukrainians in western Ukraine. Of those, 20 per cent died due to horrific conditions. The editors named “Polish civil and military authorities” as the perpetrators. They wrote, “Massed planned systematic destruction

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against which the Balkan or Armenian massacres and Bolshevik terror pale in comparison.” 223 Ukrainian leaders, in short, accused Polish leaders of extermination and annihilation of Ukrainians. A non-governmental book was published by Osyp Megas, a Ukrainianborn Canadian citizen, who travelled through Poland and western Ukraine in 1919 as an accredited American journalist. He spoke to Polish officials he met only in English or French, and met Ukrainians secretly in KamianetsPodilskyi in November and December. His 252-page book is the most substantial of the Ukrainian publications. It contains hundreds of places, dates, and names of victims or witnesses. He named few perpetrators, but did blame the Polish government and army frequently, unequivocally, and explicitly: “The Polish military and civilian authorities set as their goal to exterminate [vyhubyty] as many Ukrainians [as possible], primarily intellectuals, to thereby have a voting majority [in eastern Galicia].” He compares western Ukraine to colonized Africa.224 Megas’s book includes a section of extended excerpts from Polish left-wing newspapers on the horrific conditions faced by Ukrainians interned in Polish camps and prisons.225 Prophetically, he wrote, “The day of armed reckoning between Ukrainians and Poles will soon come. The Ukrainians themselves will judge the Poles. Then it will be the Poles’ turn to answer to the Ukrainian court for the barbarism and torture they practiced on the innocent Ukrainian people in eastern Galicia and other western Ukrainian provinces.”226 Before the break between the UnR and ZUnR , in December 1919, UnR newspapers carried information on western Ukraine. Visti UNR (16 July 1919), for instance, reported Ukrainians in the area surrounding Lviv under Polish rule suffered “horrible terror.” This included brutal beatings and placing interned Ukrainians in old prison basements rather than available houses or army barracks. Newspapers reported Polish troops burning entire villages and throwing infants into the flames. “Poles are systematically destroying everything Ukrainian.” In April 1919, one newspaper reported Poles went so far as to requisition two cows from a Ukrainian orphanage in Brest, thus depriving eighty children of milk and cheese.227 Three published regular columns on the issue – Republika, Pokutskyi vistnyk, and the émigré Ukrainskyi prapor. Some of the newspaper accounts, like the government publications, include places, dates, names of perpetrators, and their commanding officers. UnR officials published documents, separate from their western counterparts, protesting to Warsaw about Polish behaviour in December 1919. The UnR diplomatic mission in Warsaw ordered their officials, then residing under Polish protection in Kamianets-Podilskyi, to form a committee under Ivan Ohienko to investigate and document incidents.228 Reports began arriving in Warsaw, and Ohienko presented to Petliura a memorandum

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on arrests, unimaginable conditions in internment camps, excesses, and plundering, with accompanying documentation, on 22 January 1920. These described Polish troops and local officials between the Bug and Zbruch rivers as treating Ukraine not as an allied, but a conquered, country. Polish officials replied they would see to the matter “tomorrow” and did nothing. Throughout late 1919 and early 1920, UnR leaders received reports of Polish atrocities from their local officials. Those that were published illustrate how Polish rule created grim circumstances for some in Ukrainian lands. Like the Ukrainians, who fired all Polish government employees who would not swear an oath of allegiance, Poles fired, without pay or pension, all Ukrainian government employees. But whereas dismissed Poles in ZUnR were supported in cash and kind openly, and clandestinely by private Polish organizations and foundations, dismissed Ukrainians under Polish rule had no such alternative sources of income. If they had no relations in the countryside and had nothing to sell, those who refused to take the oath faced death from starvation.229

Conclusion The sufferings which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same; though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms, according to the variety of the particular cases.

Thucydides, 400 Bc

It is the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow.

Thomas Paine, 1776 AD

In the English-language historiography of the wars and revolutions that raged in Europe between 1912 and 1923, Ukraine figures marginally despite its size. Ukraine does not figure in comparative imperial and colonial studies. Those who examine Ukrainian issues focus overwhelmingly on political history, the pogroms, or the causes of violence. They overlook or only mention socio-economic background, the horrendous demographic catastrophe engendered by wars and revolutions in this part of Europe. Ukraine’s forgotten first catastrophe of the twentieth century, followed by the better-known horrors of the 1933 famine, World War II, and Stalinism, together explain why Ukraine’s total population in 1937 was the same as in 1897.1 Why, as of 1991, there were approximately as many ethnic Ukrainians living on the territory of their former tsarist provinces as there were a century before. The scale of the catastrophe might justify dating the applicability of Timothy Snyder’s term “Bloodlands,” not from 1933, but from 1917.2 This book offers a preliminary survey of the socio-economic background to the political history of the revolutionary years. Its focus is the plight of civilians in a country that simultaneously experienced an anti-colonial national-liberation war, foreign invasions, socialist revolution, and civil war. It draws attention to the mundane realities that were not marginal to, nor discrete and separate from, the portentous events of the time to those who lived through them. It considers the question of governmental culpability for violence against civilians, examines the situational and ideological reasons for that violence, for anti-Jewish pogroms specifically, and describes some of the consequences of that violence.

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It is unlikely that civilian health and sanitation conditions in Ukrainian-, Bolshevik-, White-, or Makhno-controlled territories differed. Disease recognized no borders. Like Ukrainian leaders, Bolshevik leaders issued orders, established medical departments, and organized personnel. These efforts had limited impact. While levels of consumption for the rural population declined somewhat after 1917, medical, health, and sanitary conditions declined more and did not begin to improve until 1924. Conditions stagnated even afterwards, because, in the autumn of 1921, the government stopped financing health. It shifted the task to local authorities, which then cut services and shut down medical centres.3 Newly established rural medical centres normally lacked supplies, medicines, and trained staff. By 1917, non-military-related unnatural deaths from the consequences of food shortages, cold, and filth were already affecting, primarily, the urban populations, of whom in some places as many as half were not Ukrainian. Their plight so worsened during the revolutionary years that many left in search of food. Of twenty-one Ukrainian towns for which there is data for 1917 and 1923, thirteen showed a population decline. Nine showed an increase, primarily due to Jews fleeing pogroms.4 In the decades before the war, government and individual initiatives had improved public health and sanitation standards throughout the empire. Worsening living conditions by 1916 began to nullify those improvements. Mass mob violence, worse or no medical care, bad living conditions, and malnutrition caused unnatural civilian deaths. Paradoxically, the more success authorities had in keeping trains running, they better they ensured contagion spread. The rail network attracted, concentrated, then dispersed among the still healthy, masses of disease and lice-ridden people. These millions included not only refugees, but Bolshevik requisition-brigades and urban “bagmen” travelling from village to village taking what foodstuffs they could and leaving the bacteria they carried. Surveys taken during the early 1920s, before backwardness could no longer be publicly studied and discussed, show how life had become nastier than it had been before 1914 for most all except black marketeers and the estimated 10,000 in Ukraine’s nomenklatura (approximately 20 per cent of total party membership) with their families, who enjoyed better ration status, housing, and medical services than the rest of the population.5

The Towns Life went on despite the collapse of services and infrastructure, disruptions, absurdities, and horrors. But it was not a life anyone had known before. Some theatres and restaurants functioned. Demonstrations and parades occurred. Government officials sat in offices, albeit not always for as long

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as they were supposed to, just as workers sometimes still went to work, albeit not always for as long as they were supposed to. Newspapers were published and some schools and institutes functioned. But by 1919, the air that surrounded all activities reeked of the dead animal and human bodies, garbage, excrement, and sewage that lay for days or even weeks in piles or randomly dug, uncovered pits. After human corpses were gathered, they were not always immediately buried. They were stacked in huge piles in rail cars, train stations, morgues, or graveyards, because there were not always enough men to do the burying. Frozen in winter, in the wake of the spring thaw, the holes and piles of garbage, excrement, and corpses were soon covered with flies, maggots, and rodents. Only in 1923, when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had finally departed Ukraine, could the Bolsheviks begin rebuilding the urban medical system.6 As a rule, before the war, the larger the settlement, the more services and infrastructure it had. Much of that had declined or disappeared by 1923. Those urban dwellers who remained in their place of residence and had no rural relatives ate less and worse than did peasants, but had some advantages over their rural neighbours. Workers could steal raw materials or finished goods from their factories to sell on the black market. Clerks and officials could augment their salaries and rations by taking bribes. Urban union members had relatively easier access to the medical care that was available. Those in the 70 per cent of towns with power stations had electricity sometimes. Some cities still had public baths. Some urban dwellers averaged one to three visits there annually. In some towns, the average was one visit every three to five years. As of 1925, 43 of Ukraine’s 608 urban settlements had piped water. How many of the 43 had functioned before 1921 is unknown. Thereafter, no more than 40 per cent of inhabitants got the amount stipulated in health regulations. In small towns, that figure dropped to fewer than 10 per cent. Service was often restricted to a few hours daily. A sixty-eight-mile train ride from Chernihiv to Kruty in March 1923 took nine hours and cost thirty million rubles. That June, the price had risen to fifty-three million rubles. A sack of potatoes sold for twenty-five million. Stores in the provincial capital, as of 1923, still had no windows and remained shuttered. Streets were filthy. What sidewalks were left were so rutted they were dangerous to walk on. Fuel for heating was either unavailable or outrageously expensive. Theft of wood or coal risked death. A Chernihiv diarist in April 1923 recorded his indoor temperature as 6 Celsius. However dirty urban, private dwellings may have been by 1923, communal residences were worse. Up to 1927, infection and death rates in some areas and towns remained higher than before 1914. By 1923, while the number of typhus infections had fallen dramatically, malaria and flu replaced it as

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the most prevalent recorded diseases. Scabies infected an estimated 4 per cent of Ukraine’s total population. However bad the shortage of hospitals was before 1921, it became worse afterwards, when financing was shifted to municipal governments, which usually then closed facilities because they did not have the money.7 By 1919, Ukraine had few, if any, suitably equipped hospitals. Health care and public sanitation barely existed, as did the municipal governments that were supposed to run them. Although the number of hospital beds per person overall had risen by 1923, as compared with 1910, Ukraine (245:1) had considerably fewer hospital beds in its 154 urban settlements, per person, than did Russia (137:1). While the number of doctors and medics in large urban settlement had fallen from their 1910 averages, it rose in smaller towns – presumably due to massive flight from cities.8 Detailed figures from Kyiv province indicate its total urban population in 1923 was approximately 20,000 fewer than it had been in 1897. Recorded daily deaths in Kyiv city were consistently higher among men than among women, and sometimes double. The highest daily average was in 1920 (men, forty-five; men and women seventy-six). As of August 1920, the city had 106,000 fewer people than in January 1918.9 Kyiv city reached its 1917 population total in 1926.10 From 1923 only did services and facilities in Kyiv province approach pre-war levels. In one surveyed district in Kyiv province, the population reached its pre-1917 total in 1923.11 The number of Ukrainians in Kyiv city rose from 77,000 in November 1917, to 134,000 in March 1919, and then fell to 52,000 in August 1920. The total number of declared Russians declined after 1917. The total number of Jews increased from 19 per cent of the population in 1917, to 32 per cent in 1920. That year, for every 1,000 women in the twenty to twenty-nine age group, only 546 men were still alive. Anywhere between 15 to 21 per cent of the province’s men aged seventeen to forty-nine had died by 1920.12 Figures from Kharkiv province show that, in 1920, the total population was approximately 500,000 fewer than it should have been according to 1897 birth rates. As of 1920, there were an estimated 21,000 fewer rural infants under age one than in 1897, and 34,000 fewer than there should have been according 1897 birth rates.13 A study of Kharkiv province which accounted for border changes indicated its total urban population between 1917 and 1920 had declined by approximately 51,000 to 469,944. Kharkiv city’s population declined by 52,107. However, in the province’s other thirteen towns, the total population rose slightly from 185,351 to 186,377. The rural population had declined drastically: from 2,062,484 to 1,856,955. Particularly striking was the recorded fall in total rural children under the age of one – from 60,836 in 1897, to 39,946. By the 1897 birth rate, the number should have been 74,278.

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In towns, the number of newborns fell from 8,975 to 7,227 in 1920. In 1920, the death rate was 32 per 1,000 and the birth rate 22 per 1,000.14 Between 1917 and 1920, the town of Vynnitsia lost approximately 10,000 people. Of 27,000 men, not more than 10,000 were left three years later. Totals had risen to slightly above pre-war averages in 1923.15 In the town of Nizhyn (Chernihiv province), city registers indicated the following totals between January and October 1920: births, 492, deaths, 1,439. For Nizhyn district, the respective totals were 1,256 and 1,225.16 The great flu epidemic was not as lethal in Ukraine as farther west, even in 1918 when the most cases were recorded. In its place, typhus raged. In 1919, 90 per cent of the western Ukrainian Galician army was infected with typhus, which ultimately killed up to 25,000 soldiers, almost half its fighting force. Between 1919 and 1922, typhus infected anywhere between three to ten million of former tsarist-Ukraine’s total population. No more than 11 per cent of the Red Army in 1922 was infected due to mass vaccination. Syphilis rates in the army, however, had increased from 37 per 10,000 in 1913, to 300 by 1920.17

The Countryside In villages, total food production fell, but peasants probably ate as much and possibly more, if less varied, fare after 1914 than before. Between 1918 and 1922, those who managed to hold on to their farms and livestock, hide and or lie about what they had, and by hook or crook avoid the worst of the requisitioning and destruction, kept more of the smaller amount they produced. They acquired paper money and manufactured goods from trade at town bazaars until their customers ran out of money and goods to trade. Once that happened, peasants had no particular reason to produce surplus. Families produced only for consuming, sowing, and moonshining. In light of reports that, as of 1920, peasants ate relatively well, it would seem that most rural deaths before the 1921 famine likely resulted from military operations and excesses. Soldiers, urban migrants, and refugees contributed to raising the total number of pre-1921 rural deaths by bringing external diseases into villages. Most likely, the majority of the rural population that died from non-battle-related causes, died of diseases contracted between August and October – although this has yet to be demonstrated. During those months, field work was most intense, food stocks were at their lowest and spoiling, and the harvest was not in yet. The resulting malnutrition during those months lowered immunity during a time of intense labour.18 Surviving records of requests for exemption from conscription in the White Army from Berdiansk district in late 1919, which list remaining family

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members, give some sense of the magnitude of losses of young men aged eighteen to thirty.19 A survey of young adults aged 20–24 in Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, and Chernihiv provinces counted 209,319 women and 89,368 men – an average of three men per seven women. The scale of losses is also illustrated by the fate of twenty-two partisan commanders in central Ukraine – whose average age was twenty-nine. Nine died in battle, eleven were captured and shot. Only one survived in emigration to die a natural death.20 In small towns and villages, where most Ukrainians and Jews lived, improvement after 1923 was slower and minimal as compared with cities. As of 1926, the rural infant death rate, for example, was almost twice that of urban infants – whereas before 1914 it was approximately the same.21 As most rural areas remained short of medical personnel, clinics, and medical transport, most villagers continued resorting to self-help and traditional healers.22 A survey in Podillia province showed alternative services were provided by the same people who had done them before 1914 – various healers, “barber-surgeons,” midwives, phony dentists, and medics. Some of these had their own illegal stores of medicines and did a brisk business administering them. The quacks among them often crippled or killed the patient. Because neither their victims, nor those of other local healers, were counted in early 1920s medical statistics, official death totals must be regarded as minimums.23 Soap was still a luxury in 1925, and as many as 60 per cent of peasants simply did not use it. Up to 80 per cent of rural households were still infested with lice, fleas, bedbugs, and cockroaches.24 However slow improvement was for the majority Ukrainian rural population, apparently no improvement appeared in remaining Jewish settlements.25 As of 1923, the rural infant death rate per one hundred had fallen, but was higher than that for the total population in 1910.26 Shortages of everything persisted after 1923 in rural medical centres. The incapacitated were responsible for their own food, for instance. Outpatients had to bring firewood to get treatment – which was no simple matter because few peasants had horses. Lack of transportation also meant hospitals could not be adequately supplied, and doctors and medics could not make rounds as they had before 1914.27 Medicine was almost impossible to obtain, with no more than 600 pharmacies in the entire country as of 1924 – down from a 1913 total of 1,096. What medicine was available, was in towns. Importation of medicines from German and American charities stopped in the summer of 1923. In Bolshevik Ukraine’s 1922 borders, peasants constituted a higher percentage of the population than in 1917 (respectively 76 per cent and 73 per cent), but their absolute number had remained much the same – 20.2 and 20 million. The rural birth rate reached its 1913 level by 1925, when the death

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rate fell to sixteen – fewer than in 1913 (24.5).28 Kyiv city included districts on the left bank of the Dnipro, today called Darnytsia. In 1917, the rural population in six of those districts was 11,540. In 1926, it was approximately the same – 11,880.29 By 1922, it was estimated that 10 per cent of the peasant population had lost land, 60 per cent had gained land, and 30 per cent had the same amount as they had in 1917. Many did not farm what land they had, or take more when possible, because they lacked implements and livestock and could not pay the associated taxes. Statistics indicated a precipitous contraction of land sown, an average decline of over 50 per cent in yields, and a decline in livestock. According to those official figures, after one year of nep , farmsteads with enough land for subsistence could not produce enough to be self-sufficient. In 1923, no more than 8 per cent reported a surplus.30 That year, the number of working livestock totals in Kharkiv province had not reached 1913 levels (see table 8). For all Ukraine, the 1916 total of working farm horses was reached in 1928. In general, as of 1922, official figures indicated an equality of poverty. Those considered middle peasants that year would have been listed as poor in 1914. Before the war, reported statistics indicated a self-sufficient peasant household averaged fifteen acres and five head of cattle. With 2,000 rubles savings, it could buy commodities available for purchase from peddlers or local stores. By 1922, reports indicated that same fifteen-acre household had only two head of cattle, savings equivalent to 500 pre-war rubles, and little possibility of buying anything anywhere.31 Approximately 40 per cent of all households reported no oxen or horse – rising in some areas to 50 to 60 per cent. Those without plows had to make arrangements with neighbours. Approximately one-third of rural households reported no cow, which meant they did not have their own milk or cheese – or an animal to hitch to a plow. Thirty of every one hundred peasant families in Ukraine claimed they could not provide milk for infants. The pre-war population growth rate of eighteen per 1,000, had fallen to seven.32 In 1913, 8 per cent of conscripts were rejected as medically unfit. In 1924, that had risen to 15 per cent. The major cause of rejection was tuberculosis, an illness that had not figured as a listed cause in 1913. Overall, in 1924, approximately 30 per cent of all conscripts, even if healthy, were physically underdeveloped for their age. Incomplete data comparing pre-war and post-revolutionary reported rates of infection for various diseases and conditions showed only slight improvement. Respiratory and digestive conditions remained the most frequent causes of sickness. Reported rates of tuberculosis had increased almost three-fold. Recorded syphilis rates remained approximately the same – although Ukraine’s rate of syphilis infection was, on average, ten times lower than in Russia. Reported rates of some infectious diseases, like typhus and smallpox, had fallen from pre-war levels by 1923.33

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Victims and Violence During those years, all civilians faced the threat of plundering, destruction of property, malnutrition, arbitrary summary execution, torture, and mutilation. Many who survived lived with trauma. That violence occurred during the “wars after the war” in eastern Europe, which were more brutal and engulfed more civilians than did the earlier war farther west. To explain that violence, historians must specify whether they are dealing with all or some of a given group. They must know the difference between motive and intent, and must describe context of behaviour. That context was a modernization that had begun not long before the war, and was continued during war by goverments mobilizing their peoples. That effort included novel ideas about equality, justice, identity, and politics that did always coincide with established, popular, deep long-held customary behaviour and beliefs about those issues. The still prevailing pre-industrial norms shaped popular reactions to events, alongside local interests, rivalries, and particularities. Concerning the subject of violence against Jews specifically, this context meant that it could have been situational as much as ideological in origin. While antisemitism undoubtedly explains why some Ukrainians killed Jews in pogroms, it was not the only cause of pogroms – that in the thousand years of Jewish settlement in Ukraine had been much the exception. Historians must also be aware of structural bias in the evidence about violence against civilians – a bias that is a product of circumstances, not anyone’s intent. In particular, this concerns the availability of fewer known documents recording terror and violence against Ukrainians than documents recording terror and violence against Jews. What does exist about Ukrainians has yet to be compiled and collated, as were Jewish pogrom testimonies in the immediate aftermath of events. This lacunae includes records of those who either refused to participate in violence or helped victims. It has yet to be determined how many towns there were like Starokonstiantyniv that had no pogroms. As a result, historical inquiry inevitably focuses on killings of Jews disproportionately because there is abundant evidence about it, while leaving the killing of Ukrainians beyond similarly detailed scrutiny because there is much less evidence about it. This smokescreen thickens with time. With each month of war and the disintegration of policing, thresholds of acceptable behaviour fell. Revulsion at shootings and beatings evolved into a grudging partial acceptance of some attacks against some people, until finally extreme violence in daily life was accepted as normal. In addition, wars in Ukraine included military commanders with new armies and weak central governments, who disregarded established conventional rules of warfare normally followed in western Europe. Among these commanders were those who behaved as did western European regular and irregular units

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in overseas colonies. From the perspective of imperial and colonial studies, the Ukrainian case disproves those who claim that Europeans slaughtered non-Europeans in overseas colonies more readily and brutally than they did each other, and in ways they did not slaughter each other, because their victims were not white. In Ukraine, white civilians of all faiths, social groups, and nationalities suffered and committed atrocities and brutal acts on each other comparable to those that happened in Africa and Asia. Events in Ukraine demonstrate there is no necessary relationship between race and levels of violence.34 The Polish, Ukrainian, and Bolshevik governments all issued decrees and orders condemning and threatening punishment for excesses and arbitrary violence against civilians. All executed some perpetrators. But none of them could effectively control their subordinates – regulars or irregulars. In Polish and Ukrainian territories, excesses were more the result of breakdown of order than of official policy. Bolshevik leaders, on the other hand, unlike their Ukrainian and Polish rivals, publicly declared that civilian socio-economic groups were legitimate targets of violence: landlords, speculators, capitalists, bourgeoisie, and rich peasants. Between 1917 and 1923, they never publicly withdrew or denied their calls for, or justifications of, terror. Laws and regulations intended to restrain Cheka arbitrariness were not matched by leaders writing articles titled “Dizzy from Success.” Subordinate perpetrators, accordingly, could believe, or credibly claim, they were implementing government policy. Against the background of public exhortations to exact brutal violence against targeted groups, orders to subordinates “not to terrorize peaceful citizens” only confused those subordinates. As noted in chapter 4, the number of reported Cheka victims in Ukraine did not fall as it did in Russia, but continued to rise after 1918. As noted in chapter 4, the estimated total of those killed by the Cheka alone is available only for three cities (20,000), and for all Ukraine in 1921 (63,000) – with an additional 50,000 in the Crimea only in 1920. These totals do not indicate nationality. In Ukraine, moreover, although Bolshevik leaders targeted socio-economic groups by word, by deed, local agents as often as not targeted by nationality: overwhelming Ukrainians and observant Jews. Of all Ukraine’s nationalities, relatively exact numbers of dead are available only for Jews – who were almost always counted separately. By the end of 1919, Bolshevik and Ukrainian agents both were submitting similar reports to their superiors. After experiencing the rule of one government or another, they wrote, people became disillusioned. They anticipated the next incumbent hoping for better. That expectation was stronger in areas where frequent changes in governments led people to think they were all transient in any case. “You don’t know who to listen to or who to believe, how many times have various delegates come to us. They all gave

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nice speeches and called the other liars. And while the first told us to elect a committee, others told us to annul them, or arrested and tortured them.”35 An eyewitness resident of Uman was struck by how quickly local peasants changed sides. They adapted to whichever power controlled their territory, until some initiative implemented by the new authorities drove them to fight.36 In places, use of force to implement a clear government order did not intimidate, alienate, or frighten people, but impressed them favourably. This popular reaction reflected not only war-weariness, but also, the popular pre-war conception of government. People judged it to be good if it was strong – able to enforce its authority.37 A Directory commissar in June 1919 reported from the Kamianets district that peasants were tired of war and politics and only wanted order so that they could harvest their crops. They wanted a firm and just, but not harsh, government “that would use force when necessary and not appeal to human conscience as the Ukrainian authorities have been doing up to now.”38 Agents in Podillia and Katerynoslav provinces in the summer of 1919 reported people supported anyone who could provide “vodka, sugar, calico, nails, salt and kerosene.” Popular attitudes by 1919 were much influenced by which side could provide salt and manufactured goods.39 That September, a UnR inspector reported peasants in a village in western Kyiv province approved the use of force to round up conscripts and deserters because it showed officials could establish order. “[This official use of force] influences the peasants much and leads them to reflect upon the fact that there is an authority able to punish to the full extent of the law.”40 In the Zhytomir area in May 1920, in the wake of the Polish-Ukrainian offensive, peasants greeted Ukrainian troops not because they were Ukrainian, but because they saw them as harbingers of stability and order. Politically, they wanted a tsar, or that Petliura become tsar or president: “… it is best if one man rules us.” In Podillia province, in the autumn of 1919, an agent reported peasants wanted a strong, just, authority, but warned the former Bolshevik Poor Peasant Committee should not be arrested as that would dissuade people from taking any kind of administrative positions. Peasants in one village told a UnR agent what impressed them about the Bolsheviks was their monarchist-like decisiveness.41 A western Ukrainian officer confirmed the currency of such opinions in his recollections. In March 1919 he was at the rail junction in Pidvolochynsk where, waiting for a train, he sat down at a cafeteria table with a group of soldiers, westerners, and easterners. They were talking about the political situation after having drunk more than a few bottles. One wanted Vynnychenko as a president, another wanted to see a Ukrainian emperor, and a third wanted a Ukrainian Lenin or Trotsky. As the liquor flowed and tempers rose, one of the participants cooled passions by calling for a toast to all of them: Vynnychenko, Lenin, Trotsky, and emperor Franz Joseph.42

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In the fall of 1919, just after the Bolsheviks occupied Podillia province, an agent reported, “The communist party is tolerably popular in villages, not as a party, but as an authority.”43 Another Bolshevik agent reported that summer that peasants opposed all sides: that those under the Bolsheviks or Whites awaited Petliura, while those in UnR territory “were also dissatisfied.” People supported Soviet power but feared Russian armies like the plague. While they would have liked Petliura to ally with the Bolsheviks, in the final analysis, they regarded Petliura as a lesser evil.44 It is unknown what impact such reports had on leaders. Among the Bolsheviks, they possibly reinforced the opinion that, sanctioned or not, the killings were working. Among Ukrainians, as noted, were those who thought more killing would further their cause. A Russian Red Cross report compiled in White-controlled Kyiv in the summer of 1919, and presumably based only on events in the city, contrasted Bolshevik and Ukrainian treatment of perceived enemies. The former, it noted, was arbitrary but systematic, official, and public. UnR units acted unsystematically, usually unofficially, and clandestinely.45 Those who perpetrated violence against civilians ranged from common criminals, warlords, and various vigilante or self-defense groupings, to soldiers and agents claiming to represent one party or government or other. “International” units played a decisive role in the Bolshevik victory as outsiders were little-inclined to pity locals totally foreign to them. Perpetrators included men who honestly believed in the cause they were fighting for, and those who fought to avenge slaughtered kin and destroyed homes. Others may have been forced to join by one side or another under threat of death to themselves or family, and then forced to prove their loyalty by killing members of some targeted group. There were also the opportunists who would use the rhetoric of one side or another only to justify intent to plunder – not murder. The hundreds of thousands of civilians who died as result of violence represent only one category of victims. But because such deaths were immediately horrific, writing about them attracts more attention and arouses more passion than the slow, lethal consequences of bad living conditions, no medical care or facilities, disease, malnutrition, and hunger, which caused as many, if not more, civilian deaths as did armed conflict. In Kyiv city, as far as could be established, no more than 1 per cent of recorded deaths for those years were listed as caused by “war wounds.”46

Body Counts For Ukraine between 1917 and 1923, unlike western European countries, statistics are sparse and imprecise. Between 1914 and 1918, neither Austrian

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nor Russian officials identified war-dead by nationality. Extant Bolshevik death registers for the years 1919–23 almost never list cause of death. Estimated population and death totals during those years vary and should be regarded as minimums.47 In Ukrainian-controlled territory in 1919, almost no comprehensive civilian medical statistics at all were collected.48 Some of the Bolshevik totals, as noted in chapter 3, were so improbable in light of 1913 figures that they are ridiculous. Although statisticians and demographers in Bolshevik-controlled areas managed to compile some significant materials in 1918–21, it is often unclear whether those figures include or exclude territories outside their control. In 1921, for example, Russian doctors attempted to verify the total infected from typhus on Bolshevik territory between 1918 and 1921. They determined a maximum figure of thirty million – twenty-three million more than in government registries. Assuming a minimal death rate of 10 per cent, they concluded at least three million had died from typhus alone. A similar review done in Ukraine for the years 1920–22 concluded the real number of typhus cases was almost five million – four times higher than in the submitted registries. The review estimated total deaths from typhus at 560,000 – noting it was impossible to determine total deaths for 1918 or 1919.49 Those that recovered but had residual medical complications, ranging from migraines to paralysis, and died as a result of them, were not listed as typhus victims. The only city for which there are reliable figures on causes of death is Kyiv.50 Some doctors simply did not bother to keep records. Within their allotted territories, enumerators did not always have enough forms or even paper to write on. Some could not always reach all inhabitants. Those they did reach would often lie to hated officials, either overreporting or underreporting, depending on the matter at hand.51 Counting was not easy. In general, under the Bolsheviks, the fewer possessions, food, land, and cattle people reported, and poorer they looked, the better they lived – until a neighbour denounced them. To survive it was prudent to conceal possessions, as was the practice from the 1890s. The relatively precise 1926 census counted 2.4  million peasants fewer than did a regular annual spring questioning done earlier that year.52 In 1923 Poltava province, in figures compiled by two different agencies, there was a 10,788 difference in total births and 14,305 difference in total deaths.53 Besides the above-noted issues, another reason why totals must be regarded as approximate minimums was that, between 1920 and 1923, the Bolsheviks changed administrative borders. Pre- and post-revolutionary provincial totals and trends, accordingly, cannot always be compared. In short, recorded disease and death totals do not reflect the actual reality because data collection was incomplete and did not include the entire rural

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population. The available data, nonetheless, leaves no doubt as to the scale of Ukraine’s demographic catastrophe. It should be noted that people develop antibodies and immunities related to their living conditions. Someone from the twenty-first century transported to the seventeenth century, for instance, would likely soon die of something the locals were immune to. Someone from the seventeenth century transported into the twenty-first century, would likely soon die from the petrochemicals in food to which we are accustomed. That inherited immunity to dangerous micro-organisms in the environment functions while people maintain a steady, regular diet. Death rates rise and birth rates fall sharply when immune systems fail as a result of eating less food of worse quality for long periods of time.54 That is likely what underlay nonmilitary, non-atrocity related unnatural deaths in Ukraine. Poltava province, for example, produced an average annual grain surplus of 830,600 tons (46 million poods) before the war. Using that norm, Bolsheviks planned to requisition 433,000 tons in 1919 and 524,000 tons in 1920. However, destruction, loss of livestock, and reduction of tillage resulted in a reported surplus of 217,000 tons for 1919. The actual harvested total was probably higher, but nevertheless below the Bolshevik target. Given requisition squads were a law unto themselves and took whatever they saw fit from whoever they pleased, not only to meet their quotas but also for their own use, their depredations left most families with little for survival through to 1923 – particularly if they failed to hide production, had no nearby partisan unit that could keep squads at bay, and if the Bolsheviks concerned refused bribes not to see stocks. It was not unusual for squads unable to coerce quotas to burn down entire villages.55 Those who ate less inevitably had lower resistance to illnesses and infections they otherwise would have survived. As the number of ill increased, so did the likelihood they would infect the healthy. Former tsarist-Ukraine’s estimated 1924 population was between 27.3 and 27.9 million of all nationalities. The figure was basically the same as in 1914 (27.9 million), as was the birth rate per 1,000 (42.5 and 42.8) (see table 3). Why the population total remained basically the same after ten years emerges upon closer examination. By the pre-war average birth rate of 42.5, the total population in 1924 should have been at least thirty-three million. The number of males had fallen by 2 per cent from the 1914 total, while the number of females had increased by 2 per cent. The 154 towns, on average, had 4 per cent more women than men. The average births per two women, meanwhile, had fallen from fifteen in 1897, to ten in 1925. Half of all urban, pregnant women chose to abort – with a recorded average for the entire country of sixty-nine for every one hundred births. As of 1923, seven of every ten newborn children died. The death rate of children under age one (30 per 1,000 between 1920 and 1922) was three to four times higher

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than western European rates, while the average death rate (33) was almost three times higher. Death rates were particularly high during the early ’20s among young men who, although they survived the revolutionary years, had less resilience due to malnutrition, privations, or injuries.56 Between 1919 and 1922, collected data indicated the lowest birth rates in Ukraine were in Donetsk and Katerynoslav provinces, which before the war had the highest rates.57 The 1923 survey of the urban population indicated an overall 7.6 per cent decline from the 1913 total.58 The number of declared Russians had dropped from 33 per cent in 1897 to 23 per cent, and Jews from 27 per cent to 26 per cent. The number of urban-declared Ukrainians rose from 32.5 per cent to 46 per cent. An estimate made in 1924 of total deaths in Ukraine between 1914 and 1921 of all nationalities and from all causes ranged from 4.5 million to almost 6 million.59 In Podillia province in 1927, there were 5,600 fewer men and women per one hundred settlements than there had been in 1917, and 2,400 fewer men of working age.60 A 1923 estimate that, between 1914 and 1920, 5.5 million of the rural population only of the nine tsarist-Ukrainian provinces had died from all causes, has since been confirmed. In the 1923 estimate, total deaths of all nationalities from all causes was listed as high as 7.5 million. By adding urban dead, deaths from the partisan warfare that continued until 1923, emigration, anti-Bolshevik activists, and soldiers shot between 1923 and 1937, one million famine and famine-related deaths, total population loss could have been as high as nine million.61 The total would rise again if the number of unborn due to the drastic fall in birth rates are added.62 The 1914 death rate co-efficient of 26.7 per 1,000 births rose to 40 in 1920, and dropped to below the pre-war rate only in 1923, when it was recorded as 16.3.63 In 1922, statisticians attempted to compare rural population totals in Kyiv province. They had minimal totals for 3,076 of its 3,195 small rural towns and villages. Of the 119 settlements for which there was no data, 68 were abandoned villages that had been totally destroyed. Figures estimated how many were present or absent on enumeration day both in 1917 and in 1920 – presumably after Red Army demobilization. The findings are not conclusive but are the only ones available. They suggest the province’s rural population (including those absent), was at least 318,142 fewer in 1920 than it had been in 1917. Because men kill men in war and revolution, the ratio of male to female inevitably falls. In 1917 (including only those present), the province counted approximately 474,000 fewer men than women. In 1920 (including only those present), there remained a difference of 220,000 (see table 10).64 More recent estimates of total deaths of all nationalities and all causes in the former tsarist-Ukrainian provinces between 1913 and 1923 range from

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four to nine million. The large majority were rural Ukrainians – particularly between 1921 and 1923.65 The two famine years saw an estimated one million fewer births. These figures include a maximum of 150,000 Jews killed in pogroms.66 Depending on which estimated total is used, it appears that of every 70, 80, 90, or 100 dead (all nationalities, all causes), 1 was Jewish killed in pogroms. Assuming 100,000 total pogrom deaths would suggest that of the approximate two million Ukrainian Jewish population in 1914, 1 of every 20 was killed in pogroms. Another way of comprehending the scale of demographic disaster is to indicate how long it took Bolshevik-Ukraine’s population to recover to its pre-war total. It took Italy and the Uk , for instance, ten years to recover to their pre-war totals. It took Germany and France twenty years. In Russianruled Ukraine, where population growth resumed pre-1914 averages in 1923,67 it took ten years for the number of Ukrainians only to again equal their 1917 total. Tsarist-Ukraine’s population in 1914 was just under twenty-eight million of all nationalities – excluding the Crimea and western Volyn province, that, after 1921, were not in the Ukrainian SSR . As of 1938, the republic’s population had still not reached the 1914 total of the nine tsarist provinces from which it was formed (see table 1).68 There were three million fewer Ukrainian-speakers counted in 1923 than there were in 1914. This would suggest that perhaps one of every ten Ukrainians alive in 1914 had died or fled during the revolutionary period. In absolute figures, Kyiv and Podillia provinces in 1926 still had fewer people than in 1914. Katerynoslav’s population had only just reached its pre-war total.69 A population of thirty million (including western Volyn and eastern border regions later annexed by Russia) in 1917, would mean approximately one person in seven of all nationalities alive that year had died or fled by 1924.70 The total number of the two biggest minorities, Russians and Jews, both reached their 1897 totals in 1926. Figures for the Jews suggest that, by 1924, one of every six alive in 1897 had died or fled.71 Per capita, former tsarist-Ukraine lost anywhere between 16 and 25 per cent of its total 1914 population – almost as much as Serbia, the country estimated to have lost the highest number of people per capita between 1914 and 1918.72 Total civilian deaths during the Polish-Ukrainian war are unknown. Besides those who died as result of atrocities, torture, and excesses, were victims of hunger and typhus that ravaged western Ukraine afterwards. Between December 1919 and March 1920, contemporaries estimated 5,000 people died weekly and the average death rate hovered around 25 per cent.73 The only reliable population totals for the area are from 1910 and 1921 census data – both of which likely understate the number of Ukrainians. In 1921, additionally, many Ukrainians refused to be counted and not all refugees had yet returned. A comparison of those totals indicates that, as of 1921, western

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Ukraine’s total population was perhaps 457,000 fewer than in 1910, the total number of declared Poles by that year had increased in western Ukraine, and the total number of Ukrainians had decreased.74 Estimates vary. In one, Poles had increased by approximately 56,000 while the number of Ukrainians fell by approximately 369,000. Another estimate indicated that in 1921 there were approximately 311,000 fewer Greek Catholics (492,000 fewer declared Ukrainians), and approximately 622,000 more Roman Catholics (438,000 more declared Poles), than in 1910. The number of Jews, as classified by religion, had fallen from approximately 659,000 in 1910, to 587,000 in 1921.75

Psychological Consequences Population decline was matched by a disastrous decline in all socio-economic indicators, ranging from number of livestock and area of land sown, to yields and harvest totals. These remained below those of 1916 often until 1927, and were underlying causes of stress inasmuch as people were worried about going hungry.76 More women than men survived, but their burdens, physical and mental, increased. Mothers, wives, sisters, daughters had their homes raided, they could have been raped, and perhaps witnessed male members of households tortured and killed. Women had to take on heavy fieldwork previously done by their men and the entire task of child care. They had to care for the broken bodies and minds of veterans. Although, describing the impact of horrendous conditions on Jewish survivors, a Bolshevik report from 1922 could also apply to Ukrainian survivors: “[T]he general shattered condition of the nerves and the slovenly and destitute state caused by the secretive life of hiding in cellars and dens, led to an epidemic of illness in the devastated shtetl. The experience of terror and shame intensify the chance of disease, increase the death rate and the panic …, and all this drives the population to deep pessimism verging on despair.” The lasting trauma of the masses of raped women, Jew and gentile, can only be imagined.77 Living in horrific surroundings month after month, with no prospect of immediate improvement, people eventually become inured to those surroundings and to regard the abnormal as normal. Some became heroes by helping others. Of those who helped themselves, raped, stole, plundered, and murdered, or became rich speculators and clientele for restaurants and brothels, some built patron-client mafia-type organizations parallel to the Bolshevik party patron-client system. Bribes could obtain most anything. One eyewitness account claims those who had the means could buy entire trains with crews, load them with manufactured and luxury items in towns, trade for foodstuffs in villages, and then return to sell at profit.78 Patronclient networks delivered benefits and protection for loyalty. Outside them, shortages and depravation produced beggar-thy-neighbour attitudes.

208

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

On the one hand, shortages narrowed horizons as they forced people to spend more time thinking about how to obtain for their kin or community what was no longer easily obtainable, than about politics. This reflected and reinforced underlying social and family bonds. On the other hand, survival strategies to cope with ordeals and whatever formal rules, officials, and institutions did function, often had to be imaginative and go beyond the tried and tested. “The turbulence became a familiar and natural thing, almost a way of life; it was a new element within which the routines of everyday existence were conducted.”79 As noted by a Rada agitator in Poltava province, already in the autumn of 1917, initially indifferent or hostile urban inhabitants had accepted the Central Rada’s authority that August. But, in general,“urban residents were mostly lazy citizens” who cared primarily about their private interests.”80 Demobilized soldier Ivan Iaroshenko noted in his native Mirovaia (Katerynoslav province) that by November 1919, “the people had no trust in anyone and believe in nothing and no one.” When one of Makhno’s agitators appeared, no one paid attention: “they are so disillusioned they believe nothing that anyone says.”81 Not the least of the social problems was the explosion of criminality. This was sparked in 1917 by the provisional government which declared a general amnesty and released some five million former prisoners. Dmytro Krainsky, an ethnic Ukraine of the loyalist “Little Russian” persuasion, was the Chernihiv province prisons inspector from 1917 through to 1920. He wrote in 1917, “We knew these people and that we were releasing them to pillage like wild animals escaped from a cage.”82 A diarist in the Chernihiv region observed, in 1919, that shortages, disease, high prices, and the unsettled times had profoundly changed people. In 1922, at the town market, he noted that acquaintances he saw daily selling the last of their goods to survive, had so changed that they were hard to recognize. At Christmas that year, he observed that the custom of large groups of people of all ages caroling from house to house the entire day had almost disappeared. When the rare small group of children appeared at a door they were usually sent away: “Now they say is not the time to be merry and sing carols.” Unlike before the war, all now cursed at everyone else and everything, using the most vulgar profanities as swearing had become commonplace. “The people have become coarse. They have lost all feelings, they have gone wild … All are dissatisfied, the former rich as well as the former poor.” Moonshine and heavy drinking were rampant and ubiquitous. The old, friendly relations between people had disappeared, he continued, as everyone occupied themselves only with their own affairs. The pre-war custom of the better-off sharing their surplus produce with the poor had also disappeared.83 Already, from March 1918, there is a similar description of orgies, drunkenness, theft, venereal disease, and women using profanities publicly in Katerynoslav province villages.84

Conclusion

209

There is weariness in the village. All around there is unpleasantness … There are no neighbourly relationships between people and no good relations whatsoever. There is distrust among people and distrust of the authorities. Everyone lives for themselves and only bothers about their own needs. No one is bothered by human needs and suffering which evoke no sympathy. There are no longer any kindly brotherly relations between people as there once were … Many have gone bankrupt. Faced with collapse and violence, people, urban and rural, lied, cheated, and stole to withhold for themselves as much as possible. In the Mohyliv region under the UnR , records indicated tons of grain collected – but government rations allotted for teachers, hospitals, and the poor existed only on paper. An eyewitness employee account of a Podillia province sugar mill in 1920, under the Bolsheviks, described how clerks normally grossly underreported total production and used the secreted amount to pay the workers – who then might not have been as bad off as one might assume. Sugar was a desired commodity that fetched a high price on the black market where the workers traded it for what they needed. Visiting inspectors were bribed to produce reports as fictitious as the mill’s accounts. The mill’s doctor, in another example, could not obtain medicines through the formal channels and in desperation went to the provincial commissariat. The officials there told him to buy on the black market, which was illegal, and note in the accounts the money was spent for milk – which meant there might not have been as many sick and dead if the doctor did manage to procure the medicines.85 Such reports confirm there is reason to doubt generalizations derived from the statistics of the time. Unprecedented shortages, brutality and killing, east and west, left millions dead and an almost stagnant birth rate by 1923. Urban populations, without infrastructure and services, experienced ruralization – which included rural standards of sanitation. Because peasants before and after 1914 usually regarded things like clean public spaces a useless luxury, they were less troubled by garbage, dead carcasses, and excrement on streets, than third-generation urban dwellers – and took that attitude with them to cities.86 Year after year of invasion, occupation, exactions, atrocities, reprisals, migrations, massacres, and deportations led survivors to regard violence as commonplace and normal. Yet, excesses, witnessed or known by all, and normally publicized by rival sides to demonstrate the barbarity of their enemy, were then, as often as not, forgotten and repressed afterwards by victim and perpetrator. Where such trauma was studied, survivors were shown to have developed internalized feelings of guilt, inferiority, shame, fear of self-assertion, and an impulse to remain silent. People learned how

210

Life and Death in Revolutionary Ukraine

to survive but forgot how to live normally.87 Those bereaved by death who had a body to mourn were lucky. In Bolshevik Ukraine, only dead Bolsheviks could be commemorated. Their rivals could not, which meant thousands had to grieve in dreadful solitude. In towns the Bolsheviks controlled, inhabitants found their policies psychologically unbearable. As noted by Kyiv resident Serhyi Iefremov, one could live with the cold and hunger. “But the endless continuous regimentation, this eternal threat of intrusion into all of the most intimate corners of your life, that unceremonious shoving of a boot into the soul, this endless ‘recording,’ ‘registration,’ ‘mobilization,’ – lay on the soul like a stone and made a gray vegetating existence simply insufferable.”88 The full psychological impact of war and revolution in Ukraine and on Ukrainians will perhaps never be known or understood. Memory repressed and denied in one generation was forgotten by the next. The victorious Bolsheviks did not allow their victims and opponents to be remembered. They actively endeavoured to obliterate that memory. There was no Ukrainian counterpart of Otto Dix or George Grosz to record this onerous legacy for later generations. It was only dimly reflected in the third panel of Fedir Krychevsky’s 1927 Tryptych (see figure 20). No director then, or since, has made a film about this subject. Because of the nature of the Bolshevik system, anti-social habits and behaviour among young and old engendered by upheaval and destruction did not totally disappear after 1923. The old passed on those habits, in less extreme forms, to the young as necessary survival techniques in a society where arbitrariness, patronage networks, and shortages persisted after 1923. Behaviour traits developed between 1917 and 1922, and the demographic scar, were reinforced by Stalinist Terror, the 1933 famine and World War II. They lingered after 1991. The struggle to survive underlay the continuation of pre-war, pre-industrial, patrimonial clan, patron-client systems through to 1991. They still linger today.89 Finally, it must be remembered that among the heroes of the time and the dead, alongside soldiers and politicians and generals, were doctors and nurses who, at the cost of their own lives, did what they could in unimaginable circumstances to ease pain and suffering, often without pay, promised funds, or supplies from governments. They lived much like soldiers: periods of inactivity and boredom interspersed with periods of horror, fatigue, and exhaustion. During major battles they had to cope with streams of often horribly mutilated, stinking, half-dead torsos that would sometimes keep arriving for days on end when there was no more room for them even on floors. Personnel would work, without food or sleep, in dressing stations or hospitals for up to forty-eight hours non-stop.90 In UnR -controlled Kamianets-Podilskyi in 1919, twenty-two of the city’s one hundred doctors

Conclusion

211

died from typhus alone. In territories under Bolshevik control in 1919, the average death rate was 5 per cent. Of 258 doctors and 172 medics and nurses in Odesa city whose deaths were recorded between 1914 and 1923, 68 per cent of the doctors and 82 per cent of the medics and nurses died in the four years between 1919 and 1923.91 Among doctors and medical personnel, the rate was 22 and 12 per cent respectively.92 In that city between 1912 and 1926, 314 doctors died. Of them, 198 did so between 1918 and 1923, with 60 in 1922 alone – ten times more than in 1913.93 Although written by a Bolshevik official, the following description of Chernihiv province in October 1920 could well apply to any part of Ukraine. After noting the total destruction and plundering of medical facilities and a rise of 15,000 in the number of infected with typhus since the previous year, the report continued, “Due to the lack of medicine, insufficient hospital beds and space and inability to keep themselves clean, the often-hungry medical personnel are left with only one option: to die at their posts; which they do. Incomplete data show 18 doctors and 11 medical assistants have died [in 1919?].”94

AppenDIx 1

Orphans

Large-scale, unnatural, premature deaths of adults left huge numbers of orphans. An unknown number were taken in either by relatives or kindly neighbours. Hundreds of thousands of less-fortunate others lived in appalling conditions, like refugees or prisoners. By 1918, the zemstva and private foundations that had funded orphanages could no longer do so. Under the Rada and hetman, their controlling boards appealed for funds from government ministries. These letters referred to lack of food, soap, fuel, clothing, staff, as well as run-down machinery, diseases, criminality, and exhausted unpaid staff faced with ever-increasing children to care for. Besides lack of heating and bad food, or no food, in which case the children stole from local stores, there were no shoes, so the children could not go outdoors when the weather cooled. A letter from a children’s shelter in Podillia province from November 1918 began simply, “The children … are dying.” In response to an earlier request for funds, the shelter had been able to buy food, but the onset of cold weather was causing widespread diseases because there was no fuel for heating, nor warm clothing, nor space to isolate the sick. Nor did the children have a permanent residence. First the Bolsheviks, and then the local authorities, evicted them from their lodgings. Then, they shifted from one building to another until they ended up in the local schoolhouse – which annoyed the local population because no classes could be held for their children. The orphans realized what people were doing to them, staff noted. It had an adverse psychological impact as it left them with a grudge against society. Since there was insufficient staff, “these innocent children loiter among adult animals.” The board of one orphanage warned that because its wards were all “corrupted” and deserved to be sent to reform school, another orphanage that was considering transferring its wards there, should not.1

214

Appendix 1

Under the hetman, the death rate among orphaned babies under one year of age in Kharkiv province, as of June 1918, had risen to 64 per cent, from 38 per cent in 1914. Seventy-five per cent of those newborns were infected with syphilis.2 An inspection of fourteen orphanages, dated September 1918, noted that conditions there were not what those in charge had claimed in official reports. Children were cold, sick, undernourished, badly clothed, dirty, and unkept. The orphanages lacked dishware and had no soap. There was no familiarity between staff and children, who, consequently, were ignored and fended for themselves.3 One orphanage, located in Kyiv, with 750 children, seems to have been particularly horrible as it became the subject of a press exposé in September 1918. Located near today’s Lukianivska metro station, it was nicknamed “the angel factory.” Health Ministry reports noted its children “died like flies” and that the death rate was 80 per cent. Six children there were diagnosed with syphilis.4 Another inspection tour of twelve Kyiv orphanages (500 children) was not as depressing. It indicated that, although conditions were not ideal given the circumstances, they were tolerable, being somewhat better in the smaller institutions than in the bigger ones.5 However bad conditions were for the average child and adult, they were considerably worse for the hundreds of thousands of orphans in Bolshevikcontrolled territory. As of 1914, there were no more than 8,000 orphans registered in established orphanages in the tsarist-Ukrainian provinces. Before the 1921 famine, the total registered in orphanages was 100,000. By the end of 1923, that had risen to 750,000. If an estimated million street children are added to that total, it would appear that as many as one of every eight children in Ukraine was an orphan. It is unclear if these totals include anywhere between an estimated 50,000 to 120,000 Jewish orphans – normally taken care of by Jewish organizations.6 Unimaginable conditions in overcrowded, badly funded and supplied orphanages were made worse in 1919 when, besides wounded Russian soldiers, the Bolsheviks decided to send tens of thousands of Russian children to Ukraine, where officials thought they could be easier fed. In 1921 alone, almost 90,000 arrived. Whether the arriving Russians received better care than local children by already overburdened staff with few resources is unknown. Ukrainian peasants in Poltava province did not take kindly to the “Russkie-Soviet” children. Some refused to accept them and sent them back. Evacuated Russian children made up as much as 80 per cent of some Ukrainian orphanages by 1921.7 The norm was represented by institutions like the “Kollontai Children’s Home” outside Poltava in 1921, not the model institutions’ leaders showed visiting foreigners. The Kollontai home had no functioning water system, drains, electricity, or baths. Staff and orphans both used the surrounding grounds as a toilet. Ukraine’s orphans died by the tens of thousands. Those

Orphans

215

who survived became moral cripples, living, as they did, amidst brutality, vice, chronic want, disease, and malnutrition.8 As the numbers of orphans increased and conditions in ever-fewer orphanages worsened, urban juvenile criminality kept pace with the overall rise in criminality. In the Urals region, inhabitants in the vicinity of orphanages feared their amoral, violent, young inmates like the plague. That could well also have been the case in Ukraine. A report from Mykolaiv province, in the spring of 1922, noted how, in the midst of hunger, shortages, and disease, children robbed from their teachers or supervisory personnel. They formed gangs to rob neighbouring schools or orphanages where they gagged victims and stripped them naked. In Zaporizhzhia province during the famine, spoiled or badly cooked food resulted in high death rates among children.9 Negligence made bad situations worse. In December 1921, for instance, a hospital train with eighteen sick children arrived in Kyiv. On 22 December, the official in charge was told to immediately isolate them. He did it four days later, during which time another 162 had become infected.10 The results of syphilis-infected troops who had returned to their homes in 1917 began to emerge in the early ’20s. As of 1922, there was only one institution in Ukraine, in Kharkiv city, that cared for infants and children infected with syphilis. In 1919 in the city orphanage, 17 per cent of all children had the disease and 7 per cent of the newly born. As the numbers rose in 1920, separate facilities were established for them. Tests taken between 1920 and 1922 on an average of 1,000 orphans in Kharkiv each year, showed the number afflicted with the symptoms had risen from 10 to 29, and the number who tested positive for the disease had risen from 72 to 100.11 Sorokin relates a case of a doctor friend who treated a syphilitic boy from an orphanage near Petrograd wherein all were infected with gonorrhea. The boy gave the doctor a million rubles (1921) after one visit and explained where he got it: “All of us have a girl, and each of them a commissar-lover.” The central Petrograd office in charge of registering arrived orphans in 1920–21 recorded 3 per cent of the girls under sixteen as virgins. In 1902, a doctor who surveyed students in Kharkiv university found that most girls had their first encounter at age seventeen.12 Sorokin observed that the amoral behaviour of adults trying to survive hardly served to beneficially influence the morality of their malnourished young. Others wondered if children would have been better off dying quickly in the streets than of slow starvation in orphanages. Average death rates were 50 per cent and staff would steal what meagre supplies they obtained – which often left their wards with only two or sometimes one cold meal daily. A detailed 1923 survey of schools and orphanages showed over 50 per cent either had broken-down toilets or none at all. Almost 50 per cent had no piped water. An average 40 per cent had overflowing cesspits and standing piles of rotting, rodent-infested garbage. Seventy per cent of surveyed children had no

216

Appendix 1

shoes. Fifty per cent had no bedding. Food was bad and frequently amounted to little more than half of the 3,000 calories daily deemed necessary for good health. Death from malnutrition was frequent. These percentages were higher in Donbass and Katerynoslav provinces. Only 12 per cent of orphans in these two latter regions slept in single beds. The majority slept two to three per bed. Four per bed was not unknown, as was sleeping on floors. Of the 35,383 examined orphans, 6,200 had genital herpes. Of 400,000 children the Bolsheviks classified as mentally or physically defective in 1922, 5 per cent or fewer, depending on the condition, were getting medical care.13 Into 1922, death rates from cholera and measles averaged 50 per cent for children. Seventy to 80 per cent of all urban children had tuberculosis.14 These figures probably did not include the tens of thousands of orphans still roaming the streets. Finnish Boris Cedeholm, former tsarist officer then businessman, wrote about orphans not in orphanages who “swarmed” the streets of 1923 Petrograd, and there is little reason think the situation was much different in Ukraine’s big cities. Special colonies for juvenile offenders and the ordinary prisons, he wrote, were filled with young criminals. Little girls engaged in prostitution in daytime, and boys aged twelve or thirteen took cocaine openly. In the alleys of Petrograd and Moscow, he continued, child criminals in regular gangs fell upon any at-all decently dressed women and extorted money from them by threatening to pour acids on their face or to bite them in order to infect them with venereal disease. “A lady of my acquaintance was set upon at 11 o’clock one night near the Alexandrovsky market by a crowd of small girls and boys, who threatened to let loose typhus germs, specially preserved in a small box, on her fur coat. She ransomed herself for five rubles and thought she had got off very lightly.”15

AppenDIx 2

Tables

Table 1

Estimated total populations in millions 1911–31* Tsarist and Soviet Ukraine Total

1897 1911 1914 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1923 1926 1931

22.0 32.0 31.0 29.7 27.0 26.0 25.6 25.9 26.5 29.0 31.2

Declared Russia Ukraine 15.8 2.0 23.3 22.6

19.3 23.0 24.6

3.0

2.3 3.1

Jews

Germany France

Uk

Italy

1.6 32.0 1.6†

65.0 67.1

41.1

41.4 41.7

35.1 35.5

61.5

39.1

43.7

38.7

62.8 65.4

40.5 41.5

45.2§ 44.9§

39.5 41.1

1.5 1.7

* Post 1919 Ukrainian totals do not include western Volyn or Crimea † Estimated – between 1897 and 1914 the Jewish birth rate approximated their emigration rate § Includes Northern Ireland Sources: Lahmeyer, J., “Population Statistics.” http://www.populstat.info/populhome.html; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 9; Bruk, Kabuzan, “Chislennost i rasselenie Ukrainskogo etnosa,” 23–4; Eberhardt, Przemiany narodowosciowe na Ukrainie, 59, 70, 118–19; Trianin, SSSR i natsionalnaia problema. 56; Suchasna statystyka naselennia Ukrainy, 23–25.

218 Table 2

1922, 1924

Appendix 2 Total civilian doctors, medics, and hospitals Ukrainian Provinces 1893, 1914, Doctors

Medics

1893 Urban Total

Hospitals

1,855 2,733

982 4,216

1914 Urban Total

3,547 5,174

2,018 5,946

1,697

1922 Urban Rural Total

6,431 1,208 7,639

8,845

1417

1924 Urban Rural Total

4,276 2,054 9,044§

2,878†

593

849*

* 1890 † 1923 § Of 9,044 doctors, 2,714 were unemployed, in private practice, or not among the 6,330 registered in the Health Commissariat Sources: Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, 2–5; Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli. 18, 33, 48, 147, 151–2.

Table 3

Total and urban population by province 1897 and 1917

Province Kyiv Volyn Podillia Chernihiv Poltava Kharkiv Katerynoslav Kherson Total

Total 1897 3,527,208 2,939,208 2,984,615 2,929,761 2,766,938 2,477,660 2,106,398 3,094,815 22,826,603

Total 1917 4,439,185 3,418,400 3,873,900 2,822,045 3,873,900 3,569,829 4,158,663 3,528,900 29,684,822

Urban 1897 431,508 204,406 204,773 205,520 264,292 353,594 234,227 765,800 2,664,120

Urban 1917 1,139,000 362,000 355,000 429,000 450,000 638,000 1,221,000 1,148,000 5,742,000

Sources: Gaponenko, Kabuzan, “Materialy selskokhozaistvennykh perepisei 1916–1917 gg.,” 97–115, 102, 114; Bruk, Kabuzan, “Chislennost i rasselenie Ukrainskogo etnosa,” 23–4.

111

32

161

0.9

1.1

113

28

184

0.7

0.9

1.5

2.1

282

65

595

Kyiv 26 2 5 1 25/26

Source: Statisticheskii iezhegodnik Rossii 1912 g., pt. V 4–6; pt III 1–4.

* Average

Podillia 21 0 0 0 21/20

Volyn 13 1 1 0 13

Services, doctors, hospitals, pharmacies (1904, 1910)

Towns with: Electricity Piped water Sewers Doctor and pharmacies Doctors town total Pharmacies town total Hospitals province total (1910) Doctors per 10,000 – province (1910 ) Medics per 10,000 – province (1910)

Table 4

2.4

1.3

169

50

234

Kat-slav 22 3 5 0 20

1.6

0.7

121

40

83

Chernihiv 26 2 2 0 24/25

1.9

0.9

155

32

152

Poltava 18 2 1 0 18

2.8

2.3

217

56

460

Kharkiv 25 2 1 0 24/23

1.8

3.2

172

106

812

Kherson 18 2 4 1 29

1.75*

1.5*

1,461

409

2,560

Total 169 14 19 2 174

Tables 219

220 Table 5

Appendix 2 Doctors, medical centres per province and head of rural population 1913.

Province

Doctors total

Kyiv Volyn Podillia Chernihiv Poltava Kharkiv Katerynoslav Kherson Total/Avg

1,304 319 389 230 360 872 573 1,220 5,267

Doctors rural

Pop. per rural Doctor

294 169 220 112 152 195 294 240 1,676

15,900 20,900 16,300 23,900 22,100 15,600 10,000 11,800 17,062

Pop. per med. centre

Avg. radius of med. centre service (miles) 7.5 9.0 7.5 7.5 6.5 7.0 7.5 8.5 7.5

37,800 31,900 41,800 23,300 23,000 23,200 21,700 23,200 28,275

Source: Kagan, D., “Selskaia uchatskovaia set na Ukraine za desiat let,” 90

Table 6

Hospitals and clinics in select provinces and cities in 1920 Kharkiv 6,448 9,964 163,112 39%

Urban Rural Total Urban

Poltava 2,736 99,162 126,198 21%

Katerynoslav 2,833 80,100 108,133 26%

Kyiv city 3,935

Odesa city 2,864

3,935

2,864

Source: t sDAVo f. 342 op 35 no. 13

Table 7

Estimated rural population per medical centre, hospital, and bed 1923

Province Kyiv Volyn Podillia Chernihiv Poltava Kharkiv Donets Odesa Katerynoslav Total/Avg

Rural hospitals 79 47 53 78 84 53 69 100 98 661

Per centre 30,000 15,250 23,200 11,500 15,500 17,700 17,000 15,590 14,400 17,790

Per hospital 45,000 34,000 51,700 21,000 35,700 44,700 33,700 41,500 29,100 37,377

Per bed 2,670 3,430 3,090 2,100 1,865 3,000 1,840 1,130 1,840 2,329

Source: Gurovskii, “Mediko-sanitarnoe stroitelstvo i obshchestvennaia meditsina,” 127, 129

Tables Table 8

221

Livestock per one hundred households in Kharkiv Province 1913–24 1913 113 40 88

Horses Oxen Cows

1917 95 26 71

1924 50 34 63

Source: Khvorostanskii, Glavnieshie itogi vyborochnoi sanitarno-demohraficheskoi perepisis v Kharkovskoi gubernii, 2

Table 9 1913.

1902 1913

Total reported ill of twenty-two diseases in nine Ukrainian provinces 1902, Urban

Rural

504,229 1,780,097

1,692,152 1,136,549

Total (excluding sexual related cases) 2,196,381 (1,929,876) 2,916,646 (2,546,381)

Source: Ptukha, ed., Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy 1876–1914 rr. vol. 3 table 13. VD , syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancre were listed separately

Table 10

Estimated rural population Kyiv province 1917–20

1917–present Absent Total

Men 1,561,269 366,624 1,927,893

Women 2,035,419 21,447 2,056,866

Total 3,596,688* 388,071 3,984,759

1920–present Absent Total

1,687,314 56,511 1,743,825

1,906,569 16,223 1,922,792

3,593,883 72,734 3,666,617

184,068

134,074

318,142

Loss (incl. absent)

* Total in printed chart given incorrectly as 3,596,800 Source: Kyivske huberniialne statystychne biuro, Poperedni pidsumky demohrafichnoho perepysu 1920 r. po Kyivshchyni. iii

Notes

Introduction 1 Scientific Monthly, no. 5 (November 1917) 398. 2 Overview: P. Gatrell, “Wars after the War,” in Horne ed., Blackwell Companion to the First World War, 558–75; Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse. 3 Bruce-Lincoln, Red Victory, 302. 4 On wartime health matters and horrors: Mackenbach, A History of Population Health, 121–48; Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction; Bergen, Before My Helpless Sight; Heyman, Daily Life During World War I; Wall, Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War in Europe. Perhaps the first description of civilian suffering: Bogart, Direct and Indirect Costs of the Great World War. Councell, “War and Infectious Disease,” 548–65, is notable because it includes all Europe and notes that imperial Russian totals at the time were grossly underestimated. 5 In the wake of the great flu epidemic, pathological changes in behaviour among survivors, which often led to death after recovery, were classified as “encephalitis lethargica.” It can seriously affect behaviour. Woodrow Wilson reversed his position on the Twelve Points and the Versailles Treaty after a serious case of influenza. Barry, The Great Influenza, 381–92. 6 Audoin-Rouzeau, Becker, 14–18 Understanding the Great War, 34, 48–54; Gross, The Forgotten Front. 7 Snyder, Bloodlands, 20. 8 The Bolsheviks held nineteen of the forty seats in the Kharkiv city soviet executive in early December 1917, when they got it to drop its earlier support for Kyiv and align with Moscow. Iarmysh, ed., Istoriia mista Kharkova, 161. As of October 1917, Ukraine had 15,000 Red Guards. Moscow and Petrograd sent 31,000 Russian Red Guards into Ukraine before the Bolsheviks declared war on the Rada. They shipped arms and

224

9

10

11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Notes to pages 5–7

munitions to the major Ukrainian cities on 30 November (11 December). Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution, 270; Dashkevych ed., Istoriia Ukrainskoho viiska 1917–1995, 49. Frenkin, Zakhvat vlasti Bolshevikami v Rossii, 339; Zdorov, Ukrainskyi zhovten, 152–3, 156. Only 82 of Ukraine’s 240 soviets sent representatives to the Kharkiv meeting. Bachynsky, ed., Dokumenty trahichnoi istorii Ukrainy, 63: “We never recognized the Ukrainian National Republic as totally sovereign (nezavisimaia) but only as a more or less independent unit tied federally with the all-Russia workers-peasants republic.” Dashkevych, “Ukrainizatsiia,” 57–9. Iurchuk ed., Komunistychna partiia Ukrainy v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniakh, I: 24. Butsenko, U dni Pershoho ziizdu bilshovykiv Ukrainy, 42–3. Lenin supervised its creation personally. Meijer, ed., The Trotsky Papers, I: doc. no. 309. Klimecki, “Polskie struktury panstwowe w bylym zaborze austriackim,” in Ajnenkiel, ed., Rok 1918: Odrodzona Polska w Europie, 119; Levytsky, Velykyi zryv, 134–5. Within three weeks, returning demobilized regulars had increased the total number of troops at the disposition of the new government to roughly 6,000. Chubaty, “Derzhavnyi lad na Zakhidnyi oblasti,” in Luzhnytsky, Padokh, eds., U Poshukakh istorychnoi pravdy, 18; Lytvyn, Ukrainsko-polska viina, 44, 74. Krysiak, W dni grozy we Lwowie, 30, 136–41; Milinski, Pulkownik Czeslaw Maczynski, 83, 112, 127. Of the city’s approximate 100,000 Roman Catholics and 18,000 Polish Greek-Catholics, 1,502 volunteered to fight the Ukrainians during the first weeks of November. Of these, 474 were accepted for front-line duty. In mid-November, Polish forces listed 3,354 men drawing rations but only 1,884 on the front line. Leaders relied on some troops who happened to be in the city and on inexperienced, enthusiastic teenagers. By chance, an earlier planned congress of Polish youth organizations had brought hundreds of student activists to Lviv. Poles conquered western Ukraine in July 1919. The government moved to Kamianets-Podilskyi. The day after 15 November, when Petliura allowed Poland to occupy the last territories around the city held by the UnR , the ZUnR government evacuated to Vienna. The UnR remained formally in charge of remaining former tsarist-Ukrainian territories controlled by the Polish army until November 1920. It surrendered western Volyn in April 1920. Slovo (Kyiv), 2 October 1920. Korostowetz, The Rebirth of Poland, 218. Alsberg, “The Allied Dog in the Ukrainian Manger,” 392. Cited in: Kokh, Dohovir z Denikinom, 6. Then-Captain Kokh was present at the briefing. Marzeev, “Itogi vyborochnogo sanitarno-demograficheskoho obsledovaniia selsogo naseleniia Ukrainy,” 98. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 240 no. 45, 54. Mazepa, Ukraina v ohni i buri revoliutsii, II: 228. Verstiuk, Antonovych eds., Ievhen Chykalenko Shchodennyk, 220–1.

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21 Wood, “Outliving the Past”; Lange, Dawson, “Dividing and Ruling the World?” 785–817. Walter, Colonial Violence; Dwyer, Nettelbeck, eds., Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World. 22 Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse; Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars. Velychenko, “The Issue of Russian Colonialism in Ukrainian Thought,” 323–66; idem, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red. 23 Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia, 1. 24 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 34. 25 In Berlin, already in 1916, people had begun queuing for food at midnight. That year, German ersatz wurst was basically a tube of slime comprising 70 per cent water. Watson, Ring of Steel, 330–40. 26 Delis, “Violence and Civilians during the Balkan Wars,” 547–63; Biondich, “The Balkan Wars,” 389–404; Hakan-Yavuz, Blumi eds., War and Nationalism; Daglar, War, Epidemics and Medicine in the late Ottoman Empire; Mojzes, Balkan Genocides; Kevonian, “L’enquete, le delit, la prevue,” 13–40. 27 Authors normally compare population figures of the 1897 and 1926 census. The latter do not reveal the enormity of the losses because they reflect the rise in birth rates and decline in death rates that happened between 1923 and 1925. For a comparison that considers intervening losses: Khomenko, Naselennia Ukraine 1897–1927 r.r. 28 Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe. Budni naseleniia Urala, 130–49, 197–240. 29 Heifets, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919, 134. Cherikover, Istoriia pogromnago dvizheniia na Ukraine. 30 Okopenko, A. “Ozdorovlennia Ukrainy,” Volia (Vienna) I, no. 12 (1920) 575–80. 31 Levytsky, M. “Strashna zahroza,” Nova Ukraina no. 13–15 (1922) 57–9. Levytsky blamed “the communist socialist utopian experiment” for Ukraine’s ills. See also: Soloviev, “Iz proshlogo i nastoiashchego po borbe s epidemiamy na Ukraine,” 43–5. His observations bring to mind William Wilde’s description of the consequences of the Irish Potato Famine and emigration, which left behind a population disproportionately “poor, weak, old, lame, sick, blind, dumb, imbecile, and insane.” W. Wilde, Ireland Past and Present, (Dublin, 1864). 32 Sorokin, Sovremennoe sostoianie Rossii, chap.1, np. Sorokin estimated the wartime death rate among educated professionals was as much as seven times higher than the pre-war rate. 33 A good selection of Russian materials are published in Arkhiv Russkoi revoliutsii. Unpublished Bolshevik memoirs collected and written in the 1930s and later are in Fond. 5 Tsentralnyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromadskykh Obiednan Ukrainy (t sDAho ). Those I looked at contained nothing on pre-1923 living conditions. 34 Morenets, Shevchenko eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky. Shchodennyky, and Krainskii, Zapiski tiuremnogo inspektor, are valuable sources about daily life in Chernihiv province by well-informed men not given to exaggeration or unlikely claims. The latter’s published diaries cover the years 1919–23. The

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38 39 40

41

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years 1917–18 are unpublished and are today in t sDAho f. 5 op 1 sprava 21. Also: Leontovych, Spomyny utikacha; Bilokin, “Hlukhivska trahediia. Iz zapysok Illi Rohatynskoho,” reprint of 1930 publication, 159–67; Turkalo, Tortury. (Avtobiohrafiia za bolshevytskykh chasiv); Nesvitskii, Poltava u dni revoliutsii ta v period smuty 1917–1922 rr.; Pogoda, Popruga eds., Dnevnik prikazhchika Matveia Titovicha Boboshko; Torhalo, Harbuzova eds., Uman i Umanshchyna ochyma P.F. Kurinnoho; Makagonova ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko. Dnevniki i zapisnye knigi; Conliffe, “Poltava in Revolution and Civil War,” in Lindenmeyer et al., Russia’s Home Front in War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: 455–74. The most recent published Polish work is: Bzhezinsky, Kurpish, eds., Boliuchi spohady 1917–1919. Sergei Maslov opposed the Bolsheviks, was arrested, but then worked in their land and railways commissariat before fleeing in 1920. He settled in Prague and collected information and documentation from his former commissariat associates via messengers smuggled out of Russia. Pavel Miliukov, through his friendship with Edvard Benes, arranged government funding for him. Rossiia posle chetyrekh let revoliutsii saw four printings including a condensed English translation: Russia After Four Years of Revolution (London, 1923). Stalin’s secret police shot Maslov in 1945. Ukraine’s institute of demography was shut down in 1938 and its archive moved to the Academy of Sciences Economics Institute. Local officials burned the entire collection in 1941 before retreating. Bilokin, Masovyi terror iak zasib derzhavnoho pravlinnia, 144. International Red Cross situation reports were closed at the time of research. Ukrainian-related materials are in collection Mis 25.5, 27.5, and 37.5 in the Red Cross Archive in Geneva. The Danish Red Cross had offices in Kyiv 1916–20. Its materials are now in the Danish foreign ministry archives. The site “Europeana” contains hundreds of thousands of digital copies of letters, photos, and diaries covering 1914–18 only. The few items relating to Ukraine are primarily by Germans. Loboda, Petrova, “Korotenko pisni (chastushka) rokiv 1917–1925,” 22–36; V. Bilyi, “Opovidannia selianyna pro te, iak vin prava dobyvsia u denikintsiv,” ibid. 37–40. Bilyi, “Avtobiohrafiia chy spomyny revoliutsii,” 63–77. These recount violent acts but contain nothing on health and sanitation. After 1991, historians from Zaporizhzhia National University began publishing memoirs from the period in the series Dzherela z istorii Pivdennoi Ukrainy. Memuary ta shchodennyky, published in Zaporizhzhia. See also: Romanych, Korchak, “Selo sukhovolia ta ii zhyteli,” 58–70; Kuzmenko, “‘Hei iabluchko nalyvaietsia,” 8–44.  Podobied, “Chervonyi slid chervonykh. Khto koho ubyvav u 1919mu.” Registers did not record all deaths. Kyiv Oblast Arkhiv (DAko f. R5634). Bilokin, Masovyi terror, 143.

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42 Iliukhov, Zhizn v epokhu peremen: Materialnoe polozhenie gorodskikh zhitelei; Mironova, Iaroslavl v koltse epidemii; Velikaia epidemiia; Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe; Gnusarev, Povsednevnaia zhizn gorodskogo naseleniia penzenskoi gubernii v period grazhdanskoi voiny. Also Argenbright, “Lethal Mobilities,” 259–76. 43 Popov, Mizh vladoiu ta bezvladdiam; Boiko, Narysy zhyttia Kyiva. 1919 rik. Vilshanska, Povsiakdenne zhyttia mist Ukrainy kin. XIX–poch. XX st. For a list of all her works: http://resource.history.org.ua/cgi-bin/eiu/history. exe?&I21DBN=HIST&P21DBN=HIST&S21STN=1&S21REF=10&S21FMT= hist_all&C21COM=S&S21CNR=20&S21P01=0&S21P02=0&S21P03=HIS= &S21STR=35; Onishchenko, “Vplyv Pershoi svitovoi viiny ta revoliutsiinykh podii 1917 roku na povsiakdenne zhyttia,” 217–26; Herasymov, Mista pravoberezhnoi Ukrainy i persha svitova viina. Kompaniets, Morozov, “Influence of the Typhoid Pandemic on the Vital Activity of the Population of Ukraine,” 58–65; Bailema, “Vysvitlennia zakhodiv shchodo likvidatsii vohnyshch infektsiikykh zakhvoriuvan naselennia Podillia v 1919–1920 rr.,” 3–12. 44 Chopard, Le Martyre de Kiev. 45 On eastern Ukraine: Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli; Oliinyk, Transformatsiini protsesy na Podilli; Kotsur et al., Ukrainske suspilstvo v umovakh radianskoho ladu; Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia Radianskoi Ukrainy; Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna v do kolhospnyi period; Borysenko, Zhytlo ta pobut miskoho naselennia Ukrainy; Kravchenko, Sotisalno-pobutovi umovy na industrialnykh novobudovakh Ukrainy. On western Ukraine: Korolko, “Sanitarno-epidemichna sytuatsiia na Pokutti u roky natsionalno-vyzvolnykh zmahan zakhidnykh Ukraintsiv 1918–1919,” 62–7. 46 Nankivell, Loch, The River of a Hundred Ways. Grinberg et al., Wielka Wojna poza linia frontu; Sierakowska, Smierc Wygnanie w dokumentach osobistych. Ziemie polskie w latach Wielkiej Wojny; Mieszkowski, “A Foreign Lady,” 195–229; Schramm, Skubisz eds., Jak Polacy przezywali wojny swiatowe; Kuca, O Wojnie i pokoju w Jaroslawskiem 1867–1918. Rzecz o codziennym Zyciu mieszkancow. For a comparative perspective see the sections on public health and sanitation in: Blobaum, A Minor Apocalypse. 47 There is no comprehensive history of UnR medical services during this period. Excerpts from a typescript whose whereabouts is today unknown by V. Trembitsky, Ukrainskyi likarskyi svit u budovi Ukrainskoi derzhavy 1914–21, appeared in the journal Visti kombatanta between 1972 and 1974. Recent articles on organizational history: Piniazhko, “Z istorii orhanizatsii medykosanitarnoi sluzhby Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky,” 125–30. Hotsuliak, “Orhanizatsiine zabezpechennia sanitarnoi spravy v Ukraini,” 247–57. On Ukraine’s Bolshevik medical services: Adamska, “Partiino-Derzhavna polityka v haluzi okhorony zdorovia v Ukrainskyi SRR ”; Tsiborovsky, Na varti zdorovia: Istoriia stanovlennia sotsialnoi medytsyny. 48 For an overview of Russian accounts of daily life in Petrograd and Moscow: Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 335–58; Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 603–8,

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53 54

55 56

57

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774–5; Bruce-Lincoln, Red Victory, 362–74. English language surveys of public health in the empire and USSR focus on high politics, Russia, and post-1923 years only: Hutchinson, Politics and Public Heath in Revolutionary Russia 1890–1918; Bernstein et al., Soviet Medicine. On conditions in Bolshevik Russia during the revolutionary years: Khwaja, B., “Health Reform in Revolutionary Russia,” www.sochealth.co.uk/2017/05/26/healthreform-revolutionary-russia. Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe 1890–1945. t sDAVo f. 1604 op 2 sprava 1 no. 33. Ukraine’s former kGB archive (Arkhiv SBU ) has no record of any such units. Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, 299. Plekhanov eds., F.E. Dzerzhinskii-predsedatel VC hK -OGPU , 145. The units are mentioned in: Dukelsky, Ch K na Ukraine, 26. Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 789–840; Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia; Felshtinskii, Cherniavskii eds., Krasnyi terror v gody Grazhdanskoi voiny; Litvin, Krasnyi i belyi terror v Rossii. Doikov, Krasnyi terror Rossiia Ukraina, 353–69, 563–634, focuses on urban victims. Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii; Volkov, Krasnyi terror glazamy ochevidtsev; Golub, Belyi terror v Rossii; Ryan, Lenin’s Terror; Suny, Red Flag Unfurled, 247–302. Shlapentokh, The French Revolution and the Russian Anti-Democratic Tradition, 213–82. A detailed survey of the historiography of the Bolshevik secret police to 1941: Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov VC hK -GPU-OGPU-NKVD (1917– 1941 gg.). Werth, “A State against its People,” in: Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, 39–108; Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. On Ukraine: Bilokin, Masovy terror, 93–107; Zinukhov ed., Provintsialnaia ChK; Sidak, Natsionalni spetssluzhby v period Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 241–5; Lytvyn ed., Politychnyi terror i teroryzm v Ukraini XIX–XX st.; Danylenko, Chervonyi terror v Ukraini. Arkhiiereisky, “Instytut viiskovykh narad iak instrument karalnoi polityky,” 127–76. Tronko et al., Reabilitovani istoriieiu u dvadtsiaty semy tomakh. Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv. It is unclear what was the relationship of the UnR Special Investigative Commission (Osoblyva slidcha komissiia), established in May 1919, to the Main Liquidation Investigative Commission (Holovna likvidatsiina-slidcha komisiia) established that November. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Zvity Departmentiv Derzhavnoi varty ta Politychnoi Informatsii, 375. The Bolsheviks used Ukrainian troops against Russians in Russia, and Russians and non-Slavic troops in Ukraine against Ukrainians. NonSlavic “international units” played a decisive role in the Bolshevik victory: Karpenko, “Kitaiskyi legion” Uchastye kitaitsev v revoliutsionnykh sobytiiakh na territoriii Ukrainy. Hud, Zahybel Arkadii, 243–318; idem, Ukrainsko-Polski konflikty novitnoi doby, 308–17. Hud surveys events in Volyn, Kyiv, and Podillia provinces, the historiography of Polish-Ukrainian relations there, and the contemptuous, often vicious, Polish landlord behaviour toward Ukrainian peasants. UnR

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59 60

61 62 63 64

65

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newspapers reported Polish excesses and atrocities in western Volyn, Podillia, Kholm, and Polissia provinces. Abramson, A Prayer for the Government; Dekel-Chen et al., Anti-Jewish Violence; Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites; Khiterer, Jewish Pogroms during the Russian Civil War; Navall [pseud. Dietrich Neufeld] A Russian Dance of Death. Kovalchuk, Bez peremozhtsiv. povstanskyĭ rukh v Ukraïni proty bilohvardiiskykh viĭsk, 222. Ferro, Cinema and History, 37–8. The documentary precedes a film “Days of Terror at Kiev.” The reels today are in Britain’s National Film Archive. As a graduate student in London in the seventies, I inquired about the films. I was told they had not been restored and if placed in a projector would disintegrate. For a bibliography: Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 228–32. Hrynevych, “‘Provesty naishyrshe v svidomist mas, shcho zdiiani zlochyny ne zalyshatsia bez kary,’” 54–73. t sDAVo f. 2432 op 1 sprava 56 no. 23. Huba, “Periodychna presa pro pohromy,” 24–32. The article covers all nationalities. The Cheka made annual reports listing totals executed that must be regarded as minimums: “Otchet tsentralnogo upravleniia chrezvychainykh komissii pri Sovnarkome Ukrainy” are in Ukraine’s former kGB archive. Only now have Ukrainian archivists begun to collate known Cheka documents to determine how many Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians were involved in armed opposition to Russian Bolshevik rule during the revolutionary years it formally executed before and after 1923. Vasylenko, “Politychni represii uchasnykiv antybilshovytskoho rukhu v Ukraini,” 113–315. Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny, 210. What is perhaps the first attempt to collate reports of Russian-Bolshevik excesses and atrocities against Ukrainian Christians in one province between 1914 and 1917 is: Pankiv, “‘Starshi braty’ chy nasylnyky, gvaltivnyky, hrabizhnyky.” Sidak, Natsionalni spetssluzhby, 144. Some reports now in the t sDAVo are published in the volumes edited by Kavunnyk under the title Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respuliky. Part of the archives of one of its heads, Mykola Chebotariv, were lost during the German bombing of Warsaw in 1939, more items disappeared after his death in 1972. Part of his memoirs written in 1960 are published: Sidak ed., Vyzvolni zmahannia ochyma kontrrozvidnyka. Iulian Chaikivsky, another top UnR intelligence officer, surrendered to the Bolsheviks in 1920. He disappeared and the whereabouts of his debriefing file is unknown. See also: Skrypnyk, Taiemnyi lehion Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 126–32. The Central Rada had only begun to organize a secret police force when it collapsed. The hetman based his secret police on former tsarist agents. Its records survived and are in t sDAVo .

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69 Skaradziński, Polskie lata; Kozłowski, Między Sanem i Zbruczem; Klimecki, Polsko-ukraińska wojna; Markowski, D., Dwa powstania, 339–46. Markowski lists none of the Ukrainian publications issued at the time on Polish excesses in his bibliography. The most important pre-1991 Ukrainian publication on western Ukraine, Stakhiv, Zakhidna Ukraina. Zbroina i dyplomatychna oborona, noted Polish atrocities only. Karpenko ed., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, passingly noted only Polish excesses. Makarchuk, Ukrainska respublika Halychan; Lytvyn, Proekt “UKRAINA .” Halychyna v Ukrainskyi revoliutsii note atrocities on both sides. 70 Conditions in Polish and Ukrainian camps were equally horrific. Ukrainian camps were closed with the collapse of ZUnR . Polish camps held people until 1922. On Polish camps: Pavlenko, Ukrainski viskovopoloneni i internovani u taborakh, 43–62. Polish atrocities are noted in: Arkhiiereisky, et al., Politychnyi terror i teroryzm v Ukraini, 177–90, 548–55. Documents concerning the subject are included in: Karpenko, Mytsan eds., ZakhidnoUkrainska Narodna Respublika, Vol. 3. On de facto “death camps”: Wiszka, Brześć Litewski. Obozy jeńców i interowanych. 71 Kuchabsky, Zakhidna Ukraina u borotbi (Ukr. translation of the 1934 Berlin edition) 117. 72 Fan, Istoriia eivreiskoi natsionalnoi avtonomii, 106–21, 191, 240. 73 An Internet search with the words “Polish atrocity, Galicia, western Ukraine 1919” in Polish and Ukrainian, might result in a few references. A search for “Ukrainian atrocities, western Ukraine 1919” in Polish, will result in hundreds. In Ukrainian, the results deal with the 1930s and ’40s. 74 The subject is absent from: Lytvyn ed., Politychnyi terror i teroryzm v Ukraini; L. Ivshyna ed., Viina i myr abo ukrainstsi – poliaky braty/vorohy, susidy 2nd ed., (Kyiv, 2007); M. Kuhutiak ed., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika 1918–1923. Iliustrovana Istoriia (Lviv, 2008); V. Kipiani, ed., Viina dvokh pravd. Poliaky ta Ukraintsi u kryvavomu XX stolitti (Kyiv, 2017). It does not appear in a 1,500-page anthology published in 1999 devoted to formerly Polishruled lands, in any issue of Karta, eleven volumes of Polska-Ukraina: Trudne Pytania, or in a special edition of the Biuletyn instytutu Pamięci narodowej (July–August, 2010) devoted to “Poles and Ukrainians. A difficult Past.” The subject is not studied by the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory. 75 In Ukraine, those prepared to study Polish atrocities lack the funding to work and publish on anywhere near the same scale as Poles do on Ukrainian atrocities. The Polish Institute of National Memory has over 2,000 personnel. Its Ukrainian counterpart has fewer than 100. 76 S. Krysiak, Z dni grozy we Lwowie: od 1 do 22 listopada 1918 roku: kartki z pamiętnika: świadectwa, dowody, dokumenty: pogrom żydowski we Lwowie w świetle prawdy (Cracow, 1919). Gella’s book saw five printings and Krysiak’s, six in 1919. 77 Reproduced in: Wolczański ed., Nieznana korespondencja, 152, 164. This version is missing the first and last four pages. Wolczański included them in a later publication: Folia Historica Cracoviensia vol. 10 (2004) 453–5, 469–72. That same year, Tarnawski also published a polemic against the Ukrainian

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80

81

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Greek Catholic (Uniate) church: Cerkiew unicka we Wschodniej Małopolsce w czasie inwazyi rosyjskiej (1914–1917): fakty i refleksye. Hunczak ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, I: 131–2. Collections made by the Polish church at the time are published in Wolczański ed., Kościół rzymskokatolicki i Polacy w Małopolsce Wschodniej podczas wojny ukraińsko-polskiej. Collections of Polish witness testimonies are in the Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe (cAW ) zespol 400, as are the secret intelligence Komunikaty Informacyjne reports. In Kyiv, there is a collection in the t sDAVo f. 3505. Government officials compiled the latter in the wake of the Polish invasion and then archived them in Lviv (Akta Ukraińskie). The Bolsheviks took this collection to Kyiv in 1947. Polish documents from Lviv, taken in 1940, are also in the Russian State Military Archive. Polak ed., Walki o Lwów i Małopolskę Wschodnią. Vol. 6 covers “Ukrainian repression of Polish prisoners and civilians.” There is no volume 7 on Polish repression. Wolczański ed., Kościół rzymskokatolicki i Polacy w Małopolsce Wschodniej, has references to anti-Polish atrocities only. Grott, ed., Materiały i studia z dziejów stosunków polsko-ukraińskich. Gałuba, Niech nas rozsądzi miecz i krew …, Konflikt polsko-ukraiński o Galicję Wschodnią, 228–9, 251, gives passing mention of Polish excesses. He claims that Polish incidents were not state sponsored, Ukrainian accusations were mostly false, and that Polish perpetrators were punished. These editors still, today, share the opinion of General Mączyński: “szalona i niezrozumiała nienawiść ukraiństwa ku nam.” Mączyński, Boje Lwowskie, I: 22. On Polish right-wing views of Ukraine: Khakhula, Rizuny chy Pobratamy. The Polish right since 1991 centres on various “borderland (kresowiacy)” groups that consider western Ukraine Polish territory. None today have explicitly denied Poles committed atrocities as did the right-wing group “Klub Pracy Konstytucyjnej,” in October 1919. Hunczak ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents II: 385. L. Wenerski, M. Kacewicz, Russian Soft Power in Poland (Budapest, 2017). The Internet site Kresy.pl is explicitly pro-kremlin politically. It is unclear what relation its organizers and other explicitly anti-Ukrainian pro-kremlin organizations have to the kresowiacy – umbrella group: Kresowy serwis informacyjny https://ksi.btx.pl/index.php. In a public response to an accusation made in 2016 of being a Russian Fifth Column, the spokesman for the latter did not clearly deny the charge. http://wolyn. org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=896:haniebny-artykuqgazety-wyborczejq-szkalujcy-kresowian&catid=18:publikacje&Itemid=7 Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies; Malesevic, The Rise of Organized Brutality. Klimecki, “Ojczyzna dwóch narodów. Polsko-Ukraińska wojna o Galicję Wschodnią,” 14. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 1969, 114–58; Watson, Ring of Steel, 151–5. Reports ranged from short notices to long articles with names, dates, and

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places and published affidavits. E.g., Pokutskiy vistnyk (Kolomyia) 1919: 2, 26, 30 January; 13, 20 February; 6, 16, 20 March; 3, 10, 20, April; 4, 15 May. Kozatskyi Holos (Kaminka Strum) 1919: 16, 27 March; 4 May. Holos z nad Buha (Sokal) 1918:12, 26 December; 23 January 1919; 14 April 1919. Narod (Stanyslaviv) 2, 9, March 1919; Strilets (Ternopil-Stanyslaviv-Stryi-Kamianets) 3, 27 April; 9, 14 May 1919; 5, 8, 11 July; 21, 24, 31 August. Republika (Stanyslaviv)15, 25 February; 1,4, 12, 13, 15 March; 13, 15, April; 4 May 1919. Holos Podillia (Ternopil), 12 November 1919, reported that Poles wearing Jewish-Zionist insignia hid among civilians and shot at Ukrainian soldiers. Almost every issue of Ukrainsky Prapor (Vienna) in the fall of 1919 contained an item on Polish atrocities. Kozatskyi Holos, 27 March 1919. Government involvement in the collection and storage of evidence on excesses and atrocities ensured the physical survival of text documents and involved possible court testimonies. When testimony was given under oath, it was less likely those involved would deliberately lie. Whether Polish testimonies were made in court is unclear. The 1907 Hague Convention required governments to pay compensation if its personnel violated its provisions, but since Poland did not recognize the ZUnR , there was no one from whom Poles could claim compensation. Historians have not yet examined how western Ukrainian peasant folklore presented the Polish Ukrainian war. Lviv archives have fonds specifically titled or relating to “Ukrainian atrocities,” but none titled or relating to “Polish atrocities.” Information about the latter can be found in other fonds; in particular Tsentralny Derzhavny Istorychnyi Arkhiv Lvova (t sDIl ) f. 581. Also see: Karpenko, Mytsan eds., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika Vol. 3; Wiszka, Brześć Litewski, 165–6. t sDAVo f. 3505 op 1 sprava 11 contains some reports on Polish atrocities. Polak ed., Walki o Lwow, vol. 3: 177–80. The commander of the unit in question denied all accusations noting that Ukrainian prisoner testimonies could not be trusted. Elsewhere, he claims looters were bandits wearing Polish uniforms. Four days later, General Iwaszkiewicz, commanding Polish forces in western Ukraine, rejected his subordinate’s explanations and ordered him to enforce discipline among his troops (193, 210). Smirnov, “Mykhailo Tyshkevych, holova nadzvychainoi dyplomatychnoi misii UnR pry Apostolskomu Prestoli,” 230; Khoma ed., Apostolskyi Prystil i Ukraina, 111. [Lozynsky, ed.], Krivava Knyha. Chastyna I; Chastyna II. English version of vol 1: The Book of the Bloody Cruelties; French ed.: Pages sanglantes; Ukrainian edition reprint: Drohobych, 1994. Temnitsky, Burachinsky, Polish Atrocities in Ukrainian Galicia. Megas, Tragediia Halytskoï Ukraïny: materialy pro polsku invaziiu, polski varvarstva i polsku okupatsiiu Skhidnoï Halychyny. Among unpublished materials yet unexamined are French, British, and American

Notes to pages 18–21

93 94 95

96

97 98

99

100 101

102

103

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foreign office and intelligence reports, left-wing Polish newspapers, ZUnR local-officials’ reports, Polish and Ukrainian military-police situation reports, Bolshevik agent reports, and the records of the Polish Socialist Party and the Austrian State Archives. Hornykiewycz ed., Ereignisse in der Ukraine 1914–1922. Krivava Knyha. Chastyna I, 7. Hentosh, Vatykan i vyklyky modernosti, 307. Khoma, ed., Apostolskyi Prystil i Ukraina, 24–33, 44–65. It is unknown if the memorandum was published. It is not mentioned in Grott, ed. Materialy, 43–64. Some of Papal Nuncio Archbishop Ratti letters are reproduced in Wolczanski ed., Kosciol. Vatican archives might hold the ZUnR collection of witness testimonies. Hentosh, “Vatican Policy on the Ukrainian-Polish War,” 106–7. The most recent bibliography does not include foreign archival sources: Kuhutiak ed., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, 510–23. Hunczak ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, I: 11–19. Most of these materials were compiled in Vienna where Oleksa Kushchak was in charge of ZUnR press and information. Until ZUnR collapsed, this body received its information via Budapest. Afterwards, it relied mainly on Ukrainian papers from Lviv. Kost, Narysy z istorii Zakhidnoukrainskoi presy, 32. Cited in: Wolff, Woodrow Wilson and the Imagining of Eastern Europe, 213. Most recently: Wróbel, “The Seeds of Violence,” 125–49; Bloxham, Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe; Gerwarth, Empires At War; Bohler, et al., Legacies of Violence. The most recent work contains a bibliography including important German-language works: Bohler, Civil War in Central Europe, 1918–1921. Yekelchyk, S., “Bands of Nation Builders?” in: Gerwarth, Horne, eds., War in Peace, 107–25; Gilley, “The Ukrainian Anti-Bolshevik Risings of Spring and Summer 1919,” 109–31. The standard English-language survey is Reshetar, The Ukrainian Revolution. Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 9, 503–4: “Placed in comparable situations and similar social constituencies, you or I might also commit murderous ethnic cleansing … We are humans capable of evil.” The Russian Red Cross worked in White territories. The Whites had a medical section attached to its Military Governorship and established separate commissions to deal with disease in its territories. Posadskii, “Meditsina Belogo Iuga,” 315–26. In the nineteenth century, European thinkers condemned unauthorized random violence, terror, and massacres as barbarism destined to vanish. This illusion had disappeared by 1919. Today, such behaviour continues. It is justified by those who claim that the violence of those who regard themselves as oppressed against governments or corporations they regard as oppressors is always legitimate, if not necessary. Mayer, The Furies, 71–140; Whahnich, In Defence of The Terror, xii. Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism, 38–54. King, Extreme Politics, 55–76.

234

Notes to pages 23–5

Chapter One 1 Goubert, The Conquest of Water, 58, 213. 2 Cited in Ward, The Clean Body, 15, 34, 37, 147. Also: Mackenbach, A History of Population Health. Thomas, The Pursuit of Civility, 41, 66, 122. Children normally shared beds and did not undress to sleep. Until the end of the eighteenth century, while the aristocracy had begun to perform the “necessaries” in “places of retirement,” commoners still performed them in public whenever nature called. 3 A filled bucket could weigh as much as 25 lbs. Ward, The Clean Body, 95. Starks, The Body Soviet, 128–9. 4 Jackson, Dirty Old London, 1, 27. Classic contemporary descriptions of health and living conditions in pre-war London and New York include: C. Booth, Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, 3rd ed. (London, 1886–1903); J.A. Riss, How the Other Half Lives (New York, 1890). Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London, 1903) noted a difference of twenty years between average life expectancy of the urban rich and urban poor (102, 122). 5 Reay, Rural Englands, 106–7; Johnson, The Ghost Map. 6 Those who share the dubious opinions of Michael Foucoult consider all attempts at enlightened improvement or benevolence as conspiratorial pretexts reformers use for extending their power and maintaining social inequality. Doctors are people who like to order others about and malevolently form hospitals to “dominate the other.” Taking medicine is submitting to control. Treatment is an application of power to the body. Healing and pain relief is incidental. Disease, a “cultural definition of exclusion.” 7 As of 1914, except for London, only the dwellings of the urban rich were connected to water and sewer networks. Others had to walk to pumps and sewer grates. Goubert, The Conquest of Water, 3, 62, 196, 216–17. On improvement in British cities: Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society, 152–96. 8 Romein, Watershed of Two Eras, 197–225; MacLachlan, “A bloody offal nuisance,” 227–54; Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink; Bernhardt ed., Environmental Problems in European Cities; Bettmann, The Good Old Days; Brunton, ed., Medicine Transformed; Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs; Diner ed., Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives. 9 Szreter, “The Prevalence of Syphilis in England and Wales on the Eve of the Great War,” 508–29. Including those infected with gonorrhea, the total would rise to an average of one-third the entire male population under forty. Metchnikoff, The New Hygiene, 77. 10 Kruhliak, “Stateve pytannia i prostytutsiia v zhytti studentstva pidrosiiskoi Ukrainy,” 85. 11 Beliaev, “Sanitarnoe sostoianie Stalinskogo okruga,” 109–11. Water was rationed at the few available wells at one pail per person.

Notes to pages 25–7

235

12 Fudelia, ed., Sobranie sochinenii K. Leontieva, I: 306. 13 Lohovsky, “Robota mistsevykh orhaniv vlady … po zapobihanniu ta likvidatsii epidemii kholery,” 158. 14 Tomilin, Sproba sanitarnoho opysu Ukrainy, 9, 11. Tomilin demonstrates Ukrainian infant death rates were considerably higher than in western European countries before and after the war. Soloviev, “Iz proshlogo i nastoiashchego po borbe s epidemiamy na Ukraine,” 39–41. 15 Frenkl, Ocherki zemskogo vrachebno-sanitarskogo dela; Igumnov, Ocherk razvitiia zemskoi medetsiny v guberniiakh voshedshikh v sostav USSR . The province with the highest population growth rate on the eve of the war was Katerynoslav; the lowest was Kherson. Pustokhod, “Demohrafichni osoblyvosti liudnosti Ukrainy,” 1–68. 16 Lohovsky, “Robota mistsevykh orhaniv vlady ta zemstv Kharkivskoi hubernii,” 41. 17 Pokhlebkin, Chai, ego istoriia, 64–7. The position of the samovar is significant because among the officer guests was the commander of the Sich Rifleman regiment, Austrian Grand Duke Wilhelm. Mytrofanenko ed., Roku Borotby 1917–1922 na Ielysavetchyni, 102. 18 Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 84. 19 In villages, cholera, not dysentery, declined. Ptukha ed., Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy 1876–1914 rr., Pratsi Demohrafichnoho instytuta, Statystyka Ukrainy. Seriia XV Statystyka narodnoho zdorovia 3: 57. 20 Chorny, Po livyi bik dnipra: Problemy modernizatsii mist Ukrainy, 35. 21 Shifman, R.I., “Dinamika chislennosti naseleniia Rossii za 1897–1914 gg.,” in: Vishnevskii ed., Brachnost, rozhdaemost smertnost v Rossii i v SSSR , 63, 66. Lichkov, “K voprosu o reforme ofitsialnoi statistiki,” 1–34; Iefremov, “Vne zakona,” 81. 22 Liubchenko, V., “Etnosotsialnyi sklad miskoho naselennia ukrainskykh hubernii,” in: Rient, et al., Vid muriv do bulvariv: tvorennia modernoho mista v Ukraini, 188–228. Velychenko, “Ukrainians and Cities 1861–1917,” 49–64. 23 Sakharov ed., Rossiia v nachale XX veka, 635. This sloppy comparative categorization is commonplace in English and Russian language historiography. Vyshnevskii, ed., Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii; Mironov, Rossiiskaia Imperiia: ot traditsii k modernu. The invaluable collected data in Statisticheskie materiialy po sostoianiiu narodnoho zdraviia i organizatsii meditsinskoi pomoshchi v SSSR za 1913–1923, were not broken down by republic. 24 Pre-war cartoonists in London, New York, and Kyiv sometimes drew similar pictures depicting similar predicaments. Some reproduced in: Bettmann, The Good Old Days; Jackson, Dirty old London. 25 Andrievsky, Z Mynuloho, I: 74, 107. On Chernihiv, a typical non-industrial town (with photos): A. Ostrianko, I. Askirova, “Chernihiv u XIX – na pochatku XX st.: Formuvannia miskoho seredovyshche,” Kraieznavstvo no. 3 (2012) 5–19. 26 Herasymov, Mista pravoberezhnoi Ukrainy, 48–9; Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, 342.

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Notes to pages 28–33

27 Bolderew, Spoleczenstwo Krolestwa Polskiego wobec patologii spolecznych, 21–40. The most comprehensive single-volume survey of public health conditions in pre-war Ukrainian provinces is in Ptukha ed., Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy 1876–1914 rr. vol. 3. 28 Afanasiev, “Ekologiia bolshykh gorodov Rossiiskoi imperii,” 184–92. Hamm, Kiev: A portrait, 44. Makarov, Blagoustroistva starogo kieva, 71–7. 29 Bolebrukh, ed., Dnipropetrovsk: vikhy istorii, 99, 103–5. The main cause of death was tuberculosis. 30 Seventeen were built between 1869 and 1900; sixteen between 1900 and 1915. Donik, “Vodopostachannia ta elektrotransport,” in: Reient, ed., Vid muriv do bulvariv, 339. 31 Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia Radianskoi Ukrainy, I: 285. The highest percentage was in Kyiv and Odesa – 40 per cent. Donik,“Vodopostachannia ta elektrotransport,” ibid., 340. Yalta and Sevastopol also had sewer systems. 32 Donik, “Vprovadzhennnia merezh tsentralizovanoho vodopostachannnia,” 90–1. Chorny, Po livyi bik dnipra, 183–7. 33 Cited in: Kashin, Pollack, “Public Health and Bathing in Late Imperial Russia,” 68. Kharkiv had one bath directly opposite a cesspit. 34 Jackson, Filthy Old London, 103. 35 Osipov, Popov, Kurkin, Russkaia zemskaia meditsina, 64. Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy, 16, 65. 36 Bohatsky, ed., Arkhivy, 261–3. 37 Robak, Orhanizatsiia okhorony zdorovia v Kharkovi za imperskoi doby, 52–4, 227. All publicly funded hospitals were usually full or overcrowded while private institutions always had beds available. 38 Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set na Ukraine,” 89. Poltava had the most of each. 39 Ptukha, Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, 2–5. 40 Rusov, Opisanie Chernigovskoi gubernii, II: 309; Bolebrukh ed., Dnipropetrovsk: vikhy istorii, 104. 41 Ievselevsky, Kremenchuchchyna u XIX – na pochatku XX st., 99. 42 Rossiia ee nastoiashchee i proshedshee, 214–27. 43 Tymoshyk, Selo, I: 277–8; Nikitin, Terekh, “Osoblyvosti zemskoi medychnoi reformy v Konotopskomu poviti Chernihivskoi hubernii,” 213–17. 44 Tymoshyk, Selo, I: 279–80, 45 Ptukha, Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, tables 11–18. In 1913, after bad eyesight, the major causes of rejection were hernias and weak hearts – consequences of strenuous field work. 46 Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, 2–5. Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set na Ukraine,” 90, gives a total of 5,267 – excluding Taurida province. 47 Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky, 2–5. 48 Zhvanko, Ukrainska derzhava. Okhorona zdrovia ta sotsialnyi zakhyst naselennia, 52, 176; Sakharov ed., Rossiia v nachale XX veka; Table 1. See also: Vyshnevskii ed., Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii, 23. Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Moscow, 1977) 24 bk. 2: 273.

Notes to pages 33–8

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49 Robak, Orhanizatsiia okhorony zdorovia v Kharkovi, 37–8. Table 6. 50 Bergen, Before My Helpless Sight, 24–5. In Britain, doctors were not drafted. The wartime ratio was 1:2,350; the pre-war 1:1,300. 51 Rossia v mirovoi voine 1914–1918 goda, 23. Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia, 48. 52 Borshchuk et al., “Istorychnyi genesis rozvytku aptychnoi spravy v Ukraiini,” 30; Conroy, Pharmacy in Pre-Soviet Russia,” 115–37. See also the 1920s journal Farmatsevticheskii zhurnal. 53 Boichenko, “Osnovni prychyny ta faktory smertnosti naselennia Chernihova,” 48–52. 54 Afanasiev, “Ekologiia bolshykh gorodov Rossiiskoi imperii.” One such “barrel” was as large or larger than the standard wine barrel and held anywhere from 38 to 140 gallons. 55 The Russian empire centralized slaughterhouses somewhat slower than western European countries. London banned all slaughter within city limits in 1927. 56 Robak, Orhanizatsiia okhorony zdorovia v Kharkovi, 74. 57 Chorny, Po livyi bik dnipra, 187–8, 191. 58 Paris streets were relatively clean because suburban market gardeners removed manure for their fields. Bettmann, The Good Old Days, 3. Ward, The Clean Body, 73. 59 Robak, Orhanizatsiia okhorony zdorovia v Kharkovi, 10; Donik, “Vodopostachannia ta elektrotransport,” in: Reient ed., Vid muriv do bulvariv, 350. 60 Robak, Orhanizatsiia okhorony zdorovia v Kharkovi, 72; Lohovsky, “Robota mistsevykh orhaniv vlady Kharkivskoi hubernii,” 69. 61 Bagalii, Miller, Istoriia goroda Kharkova, II: 72–8, 93–113. 62 Bilenky, Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands, 214, 331. 63 Fedynsky, “Mirgorod – kurort na Ukraine,” 74–5. 64 Cited in: Perott, ed., A History of Private Life, IV: 390, 651. 65 Podolynsky, Zhyttia i zdorovia liudei na Ukraini. On the basis of his work in Kyiv province, he concluded that in villages, next to malaria, syphilis was the most widespread malady alongside digestive ailments. In towns it was tuberculosis (120, 122). 66 Podolynsky, Zhyttia i zdorovia, 190–2, 239. 67 Merkov, Narys sanitarnoho stanu suchasnoho Podillia, 28. 68 Diptheria was the most widespread children’s disease in towns and villages. The Ukrainian rate of infection was twice that of Russia. The author claims that incidence of reported diseases was not related to the presence of zemstva. Reporting and recording was not necessarily better in provinces where zemstva had existed since the 1860s, or worse where they were established after 1905. Iekel, Infektsionnye zabolevaniia na Ukraine, 6. 8. 10–11. 69 Prysiazhniuk, Ukrainske selianstvo XIX–XX st., 213 n. 34. 70 Tomilin, Demografiia i sotsialnaia gigiena, 243–4. 71 Rates were slightly higher among men than women – except for syphilis where the rate was considerably higher (50 per cent and 26 per cent),

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79 80

81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88

Notes to pages 39–42

and for tuberculosis where it was considerably lower among literate men (9 per cent), than literate women (28 per cent). No more than 32 per cent of the literate and 16 per cent of the illiterate knew the causes of cholera. Khvorostanskii, Glavnieshie itogi vyborochnoi sanitarno-demohraficheskoi perepisi v Kharkovskoi gubernii v 1924 g., 16. Tomilin, “Rasprostranenie samogona sredi selskogo naseleniia Ukrainy,” 183–5. Moonshining appeared to have been most widespread in Podillia and Chernihiv provinces, and least in Donbass province. Tomaszewicz, Ze wspomnien lekarza, 9. Kuzmina, “Diialnist likarni sv. Borysa v s. Horodok Volynskoi hubernii,” 122. Rusov, Opisanie Chernigovskoi gubernii, 317. Podolynsky, Zhyttia i zdorovia liudei na Ukraini, 142. A Russian memoirist noted the profound impression made on viewers who had never seen such a thing, of the large pictures of lice. Mironova, Iaroslavl, 126. Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 48–51, 153–5. Kovalova, Seliany, pomishchyky i derzhava: konflikty interesiv, 102–5; Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 92–115. Ulianov, “Naseleniia Ukrainy,” 81–9; Aleksandrovskii, “Osnovy profilektychnoe pratsi na seli,” 87–94. Rybak, “Podilskyi selianyn u povsiakdennomu zhytti v dokolhospnyi period: hihiiena kharchuvannia, pratsia,” 351–65, discusses rural daily life in mid-twenties without comparing it with the pre-1914 period. Podolynksy, Zhyttia i zdorovia, 207–8. Because walls were not airtight, during winter, the leaking air provided ventilation. The inside became unbearable only in the summer. Podolynsky, Zhyttia i zdorovia liudei na Ukraini, 138. Bronnikova, ed., “‘… Sudy togo bezumnogo vremeni …’ Vospominaniia izgannoi iz rodovoi usadby na Ukraine,” 90, 95–6. The article is the memoirs of noblewoman Olga Engelhardt, written in the early twenties in Leningrad. She had kept a diary, subsequently lost, for the years 1917–22, when living at her family’s estate in Chernihiv province. Kniazev, “Otchet o deiatelnosti sanitarnogo vracha po Pereiaslavskomu uiezdu za mai-noiabr 1913 goda,” 120. Tomilin, L’hygien publique dans la population rurale de L’Ukraine, 49–50. By 1925, flu and malaria had replaced typhus and dysentery as the most prevalent diseases. Mosquitoes bred in the ubiquitous village fish ponds. Berzin, “Sostoianie selskogo kolodeznogo vodosnabzheniia,” 82–97. Kniazev, “Otchet o deiatlenosti sanitarnogo vracha,” 117; Lohovsky, “Robota mistsevykh orhaniv vlady Kharkivskoi hubernii,” 67. Shingarev, Vymeraiushchaia derevnia, 53–4. Merkov, Narys sanitarnoho stanu suchasnoho Podillia, 18. Rusov, Opisanie Chernigovskoi gubernii II: 151–2. Bondarenko, Higiiena zvychainoho selianskoho zhyttia, 20–5. Berzin, “V silskii khati,” 6. Thousands of photos from the turn of the century are reproduced in a multi-volume series published by the Ivan Honchar Museum:

Notes to pages 42–7

89 90 91

92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99

100 101

102

239

I. Poshyvailo ed., Ukraina ta Ukraintsi (Kyiv: 2006– ). There is no record of who the photographers were. It is impossible to know whether photographers sought to illustrate the romantic image of villages thencurrent among intellectuals. A sign of well-being was that almost all the photographed women and children wore shoes. On Jewish life in the early twenties: Bogoraz ed., Evreiskoe mestechko v revoliutsii. Ocherki. Cited in: Johnson, Pogroms Peasants Jews, 189; Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl, 342–52. Roshwald, “Ghetto, Shtetl, or Polis?,” 22–34. Epstein, Caring for the Soul’s House. Grachova, “Pathologies of Civility.” A number of Jewish doctors in the years before the war compared sanitary practices of Jews and Ukrainians and concluded Jews were cleaner. Fifty years earlier, the opinion was the opposite: Grachova, “Pathologies,” 130–8. Eiger, “Fizicheskoi razvitie i sanitarnoe sostoianie ievreiskago naseleniia v Rossii,” 2–29. Rokhlina, “O ievreiskikh lechebnykh zavedeniiakh v Rossii,” 8–16. Rosenthal, D., “Confronting the Bacterial Enemy,” in: Rozenblit, Karp eds., World War I, 131–50. Prysiazhniuk, Ukrainske selianstvo, 547–8. Kaiun, “Zhyttievyi riven nepryvileiovanykh staniv Poltavshchyny i Chernihivshchyny,” 88. Burlakov, “K voprosu o zavisimosti zabolevaemosti i smertnosti ot ekonomicheskogo blagosostoianiia krestianskogo naseleniia,” 825–8. Graziosi, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine, 1918–1919 gody, 29. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 79, 85–8, 100–9. Noll, Transformatsiia hromadianskoho suspiltsva, 46, 85. Boiko et al., Dzherela z istorii Pivdennoi Ukrainy, 324–5, 333–6. Samoilenko, ed., Istoriia ta kultura livoberezhzhia Ukrainy, 76–9. The increase would be notable even assuming part of it was due to more precise registration. Volkoslavskaia, “Zabolevaemost sifilisom v Ukraine v XX veke,” 197–8. Reporting may also have been more precise in towns. Messarosh, “K voprosu o rasprostranenii sifilisa v Rossii,” 53–9; Tarnovskii, Potrebiteli prostitutsii, 3. A.G. Ge, Sifilis i selskoe naselennie (St Petersburg, 1882); Letnik, Borba s prostitutsiei i mery k umensheniiu sifilisa i venericheskikh boleznei sredy gorodskogo naseleniia. Martynenko. Reglamentatsiia prostitutsii v Rossii. Ptukha, “Evoliutsiia smertnosti na Ukraini do pochatku persho piatylitky;” Iekel, “Smertnost grudykh detei na Ukraine,” 148. Rashin, Naselenie Rossii za sto let, 194–8. One ethnic Russian province had a death rate less than the imperial average. Russian agronomist Aleksandr Engelhardt, in the 1880s, claimed that Russian peasants fed their calves better than their children. Tikhonova ed., Pisma iz derevni, 351–2, 353, 355. Otchet o sostoianii narodnogo zdraviia i organizatsii vrachebnoi pomoshchi v Rossii, v-vi, 2–3, 42–3. Ransel, “Mothering Medicine and Infant Mortality in Russia.” Ptukha ed., Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky, 3: 50–63. That year, doctors recorded 2.9 million (1.8 million urban) ill from twenty-two diseases.

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108 109

110 111

Notes to pages 47–51

The four sexual diseases – VD , gonorrhea, syphilis, and chancre – were listed separately. Ptukha, Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, 3: 50–63. Cases reported in 1914 were likely closer to the actual total of infected, than were the 1889 figures. Kononenko, Ukraine and Russia, 228. Vlaikov, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee selskoi lechebnoi seti v Kievskoi gubernii,” 123–4. Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set na Ukraine za desiat let,” 88. Overall, between 1897 and 1914, Ukraine’s birth rate, marriage rate, and death rate declined. Tratsevsky, M., “Narodzhennist liudnosty na Ukraini,” in: Ptukha ed., Demohrafichnyi zbirnyk, 80. Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set na Ukraine,” 89. The highest average male life-expectancy at the time was fifty-two in the Nordic countries. Sakharov ed., Rossiia v nachale XX veka, 624–51; Markuzon, “Sanitarnaia statistika v gorodakh predrevoliutsionnoi Rossii,” in: Ptukha ed., Ocherki po istorii statistiki SSSR , 121–62. Entsiklopedicheskyi slovar Brokguaz i Efrona (St Petersburg, 1899) XXVII: 221–5. Mironov, Rossiiskaia Imperiia, II: 601, 607, 618. Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, 130. Kuca, O Wojnie i Pokoju w Jaroslawskiem, 165–70. Rolling mills were replacing stone mills at the turn of the century, but most peasants were still using stone-ground flour that included grit. Over the years, eating foods made from it wore down teeth and produced painful abscesses. It also led to dietary problems as the older the person and worse the teeth, the less efficiently could they chew. Volkoslavskaia, “Zabolevaemost sifilisom v Ukraine v XX veke,” 199. Dolata, Rozwój ruchu higienicznego w Galicji, 58–75. Hoff, Mieszkańcy małych miast Galicji Wschodniej, 87–90, 100–1. Kompaniets, Stanovyshche i borotba trudiashchykh mas Halychyny Bukovyny ta Zakarpattia, 74–6. Dolata lists thirty-nine public hospitals for all Galicia in 1909. Frenkl, Zemskaia meditsina na Drezdenskoi mezhdunarodnoi gigienicheskoi vystavke, 169, 179. Zhbankov, Sbornik po gorodskomu vrachebno-sanitarnomu delu v Rossii, 1–3, 16–27.

Chapter Two 1 2 3 4 5

Nalyvaiko, “Spomyny likaria z Ukrainskoi viiny 1918–1920 rr.” Blobaum, A Minor Apocalypse, 233–44. Adams, Cadillacs to Kiev, 10. Nalyvaiko, “Spomyny likaria,” 115. Ukrainian Health Ministry reports for 1918 are in t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 2. Many were published at the time in Ukrainski medychni visti (Kyiv). 6 Rient, Serdiuk, Persha svitova viina i Ukraina; Rient, ed., Velyka viina 1914– 1918 rr. i Ukraina; Zhvanko, Bizhentsi pershoi svitovoi viini. On the impact of the war on the empire as a whole in English: Bruce-Lincoln, Passage Through Armageddon; Gatrell, A Whole Empire Walking. Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse. 7 Sarancha, “Sotsialno-demohrafichni protsesy u Poltavskyi hubernii,” 81–3.

Notes to pages 51–9

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

241

Adamsky, ed., Podillia v dobu Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 170.

t sDAVo f. 1604 op 2 sprava 13 no. 45.

Fisonovich, “Krestianka v svoem bytu,” 177–82. Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 79. Chorny, “Velyke misto v roky Pershoi svitovoi viiny,” 54–9. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 56 no. 22–3, 98; sprava 57 no. 6, 23, 76; sprava 60 no. 1. Idem. sprava 119, 120, 122, 123. Navall, A Russian Dance of Death, 59. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 82 no. 85. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 61 no. 22. Popov, Mizh vladoiu ta bezvladdiam, 227. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 82. no. 29–31, 50, 42, 58, 73. Rient, ed., Velyka viina 1914–1918 rr. i Ukraina, I: 378–535; 2: 343–519. Nova Rada (Kyiv), 27 March (9 April) 1917; Bzhezinsky, Kurpish, A., eds., Boliuchi spohady, 31; Korolenko, Dnevniki i zapisnie knizhki, 209; Bohatsky, ed., Arkhivy, 260–1. Herasymov, Mista pravoberezhnoi Ukrainy, 261–316, 323, 327–9; Bezuhyi, Herasymov, “Problemy zhytlovo-komunalnoi sfery m. Vinnytsi za doby Hetmanatu P. Skoropadskoho,” 19–25. The situation improved slightly after fines were increased. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 60 no. 62, 69. Halyn, “Sposterezhennia i vrazhinnia viiskovoho likaria,” 189. Halyn was a Ukrainian doctor and general in the Russian and then-Ukrainian army medical corps. He was in Kyiv at the time and knew those involved. He claimed Whites around the hetman had specifically backed the appointment to ensure their forces would have medical supplies. Oskilko, Mizh dvoma svitamy, 41; Mazepa, Ukraina v ohni i buri revoliutsii, I 192–3. Zhvanko, Sotsialni vymiry Ukrainskoi Derzhavy, 57. “Dopysy,” Ukrainski medychni visti no. 8 (July 1918) 242–6; Ibid., no. 14 (October 1918) 432. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 82 no. 17. The infection in Kyiv province was centred in the town of Obukhiv. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 57 no. 104. Idem 59 no. 92, 95. Zhvanko, 102. Kochepasova, “Psykhonevrozy voine v nachale 1920-kh godov,” 401. The rate after one year of service was 10 per cent. Binshtok, Kaminskii, Narodnoe pitannie i narodnoe zdravie, 65–6. The prewar infection rate among Siberian garrisons was three times per 1,000 higher (125 to 45) than in garrisons stationed west of Moscow. Egorysheva, Honcharova, “Problemy organizatsii borby s sifilisom,” 63–5. Hladun, Rudnytsky, Kulyk, “Demohrafichni vtraty,” 20. A German doctor invented Salvarsan to treat syphilis in 1909. It was sold in imperial Russian cities but was expensive. Russian scientists produced a cheap, generic substitute in 1914 that was widely advertised by 1917. Chernigovskaia zemskaia gazeta, no. 17, September (1917). t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 28 no. 50. t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 57 no. 49–59; sprava 59 no. 57, 92–100; sprava 60 no. 12.

242

Notes to pages 59–63

34 t sDAVo f 1604 op 2 sprava 13 no. 60. 35 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 26 no. 16–100. 36 t sDAVo f. 1038 op 1 sprava 28 is a collection of related correspondence. A Leonid Dzuibenko, unpaid from September 1917, got an account opened in his name in May 1918. Ibid., no. 4–10. 37 Ibid., sprava 82 no. 83. Rates were determined by rich fugitives from Russia who paid high prices for rooms at the hospital. 38 Zhvanko, Sotsialni vymiry Ukrainskoi Derzhavy, 59–67, 79, 84, 87. 39 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 26 no. 10–13, 206. 40 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 118–25. Total central personnel in the UnR ’s Health Ministry shrank from 489 in January 1919, to 49 that October. t sDAVo f. 1604 op 2 sprava 4 no. 305. 41 t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 436 no. 28–30. 42 Visti UNR (7 August 1919), contains a long, unsigned critical article: “Public Health and the Military Authorities.” It includes a list of depots Ukrainians lost in 1919. 43 Morenets, Zemliaky Mykoly Mikhnovskoho v borotbi za Ukrainsku derzhavnist, 256. 44 Bailema, “Vysvitlennia zakhodiv shchodo likvidatsii vohnyshch infektsiinykh,” 8. 45 Levytsky, Halytska armiia na Velykyi Ukraini, 38–9. Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 118–20. The author related that of all the horrors she witnessed that year, what she saw that day at the station never stopped haunting her. t sDAVo f. 1604 op 3 sprava 3 no. 21. 46 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Spravozdaniia guberniialnykh starost i komisariv, 28–30. Writing his report that October, the governor (commissar), noted the population supported the UnR and favoured strong central authority. 47 Bilozor, “Prychynky do istorii epidemii na shliakhu Ukrainskoi Halytskoi Armii,” 64–6; no. 11–12: 73–5. Bilozir was a ZUnR army doctor. 48 t sDAVo f. 1604 op 2 sprava 13 no. 4. 49 Nalyvaiko, “Spomyny likaria,” 135–7. 139. 50 Volia (Kamianets-Podilskyi), 5 Dec. 1919. 51 t sDAVo f. 2007 op 1 sprava 2 no. 63. 52 Den (Kyiv) 23 May 1920; Slovo, 14 Oct. 1920. 53 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 207 no. 47. 54 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 60 no. 36–8. 55 Demchuk, “Sanitarna misiia dlia poborennia poshestei na Ukraini. Spomyny,” 8–14, claims seventy-two wagons arrived. The mission functioned until the summer of 1920 when it retreated with the Polish army. Reprinted in: V. Trembitsky, “Sanitarna blokada Ukrainy 1919 roku,” Visti Kombantanta (Toronto) no. 4 (1973) 8–14; no. 5–6: 59–66. The American Red Cross mission functioned in Poland and Polish-occupied western Ukraine: Cornebise, Typhus and Doughboys; Adams, Cadillacs to Kiev.

Notes to pages 64–71

243

56 Mykytiuk, ed., Ukrainska halytska armiia, II: 218. Lederrey, “La situation sanitaire en Ukraine,” 1–21. 57 Volia (Vienna) January 1920, vol.1 no. 3 108–11. 58 t sDAVo f. 1903 op 1 sprava 4 no. 23–5; ibid. sprava 2 no. 5–7. 59 t sDAVo f. 2537 op 2 sprava 34 is one of a number in this collection containing situation reports and descriptions of station conditions in 1919. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 175. 60 t sDAVo f. 1109 op 1 sprava 11 no. 144, 149, 179. 61 Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 20. 62 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 1 no. 11–15. 63 t sDAVo f. 1109 op 1 sprava 5 no. 19, 23, 26–8, 83–9; sprava 11 no. 11 no. 383. 64 Tymoshenko, ed., Na shliakhakh i rozdorizhzhiakh: spohady, nevidomi tvory, np. 65 t sDAVo f. 1903 op 1 sprava 4 no. 99–100. 66 t sDAVo f. 1109 op 1 sprava 5, no. 36, 139, 221, 241. On one train, sick staff left one doctor and one nurse to care for 250 wounded. One train with twenty-four wagons was completely refitted on 1 September. 67 t sDAVo f. 1604 op 3 sprava 1 no. 8. The hospital’s chief medical officer subsequently wrote the ministry not to conduct investigations without his authorization, as it was difficult enough running the institution because of its many non-Ukrainian personnel. 68 t sDAVo f. 1109 op 1 sprava 7 no. 192. 69 Morenets, ed., Sim spohadiv Vyzvolnoi viiny, 169. An image of nurses as dissolute was widespread by 1917. Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy, 290–1. 70 Vyslotsky, Spomyny rozvidnyka z chasiv pershoi svitovoi viiny, 48, 57, 122, 165. Verstiuk, Antonovych, eds., Ievhen Chykalenko, Shchodennyk, 149. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 294, also in Uman, 302. 71 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 416. 72 Bolshevism in Russia, 25, 54. Dr Girsa was shocked by White atrocities, which he also reported to the British. Glanders is an animal disease that can spread to humans. 73 t sDAVo f. 3154 op 1 sprava 5 no. 4, 18; sprava 9 no. 2, 3, 26. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliky … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 294. 74 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 82 no. 17; sprava 57 no. 23. Cited in: Motta, The Great War against Eastern European Jewry, 200. 75 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 240 no. 39–42. It is unclear what period of time the figures refer to. 76 Berest, Persha svitova viina na zemliakh skhidnoi Halychyny i zakhidnoi Volyni; Kuca, O Wojnie i Pokoju, 211–13. 77 t sDAVo f. 3982 op. 1 sprava 2 no. 32. 78 t sDAVo f. 1601 op 1 sprava 72 no. 2–3; f. 1109 op 1 sprava 15 no. 66. 79 Fan, Istoriia Ievreiskoi natsionalnoi avtonomii, 190–5, 200, 213–15.

244

Notes to pages 90–3

Chapter Three 1 t sDAVo f. 1604 op 2 sprava 4 no. 121–2. 2 t sDAVo f. 3204 op 1 sprava 11 no. 33. In April 1921, during the famine, government-in-exile officials told foreign representatives the plight of the peasants was miserable. Idem sprava 12. 3 Bronnikova, E.V., ed., “‘… Sudy togo bezumnogo vremeni …’,” 91. 4 General sanitary conditions in Ukraine were likely the same as in Russia. In Iaroslavl, for example, patients in urban hospitals did what they could to stay as long as possible because bad food and marginal conditions there were better than no food and worse conditions outside. Peasants in rural hospitals, on the other hand, would leave before they were allowed to, because food was better at home. Mironova, Iaroslavl v koltse epidemii, 30–7; 104–12. 5 Polikarpov, ed., Etapy bolshogo puti, 402. 6 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 812 no. 158–9. 7 Krainskii, Zapiski, 191. 8 Demidova, ed., “Preterpevshyi do kontsa spasen budet.” Zhenskie ispovedalnye tektsty o revoliutsii i grazhdanskoi voine v Rossii, 170–1. 9 Kulchytsky, ed., Holod 1921–1923 v Ukraini, 158. 10 On urban living conditions: Kondratiev, “Tipy rabochykh zhilishch,” 86–92; Shoikhet, “Rabochie zhilishche v Donbasse,” 81–8; Postnikov, “Zhilishche gornorabochykh Grishevskogo raiona Donetskogo baseina,” 2–22; Kobrin, “Ocherki zhilishchago i sanitarno zhilishchago dela v Kharkove,” 91–102. Tkachenko, “Sanitarnyi pobut Ukrainskoho naselennia,” 341–3. 11 Lebedev, “Podvalnye kvartiri goroda Kieva,” 102–15. That same year the figures for basement dwellers per 1,000 of population in Munich and Liepzig were 1.5 and 6 respectively. The figure for Moscow was 60. 12 Turkalo, Tortury, 10, 13–14. 13 Iliukhov, Zhizn v epokhu peremen: Materialnoe polozhenie gorodskikh zhitelei, 132–7. Bagmen could form bands of up to one hundred with weapons, or would make deals with gangsters to defend them from inspections and confiscations. Factories organized their workers into groups, armed them, and sent them to look for food only for the factory. These were legalized in August 1918 with the obligation to give half of collected goods to the government. A Russian survey from 1918 indicated about 50 per cent of these groups returned with an average of 350 pounds of grain – after losses en route from bribes and theft. 14 Bogoraz, ed., Evreiskoe mestechko v revoliutsii, 101. The reference is to the Vitebsk region of Belorus. The situation in Ukraine has not been studied. 15 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 213. 16 Ibid. 453, 456, 458, 475. Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine, 314–15. 17 Lebina, Passazhiry kolbasnogo poezda. Etiudy k kartine byta rossiiskogo goroda, 247–51. 18 Lebina, Passazhiry kolbasnogo poezda, 265. In Petrograd, some top officials gained weight, while non-party civilians were malnourished.

Notes to pages 93–7

245

19 In 1923, 24 per cent of the 50,000 Bolshevik party members in Ukraine declared themselves Ukrainian. The higher the office, the fewer Ukrainians. Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine, 163. Seventy-five per cent of Ukraine’s nomenklatura were Russian or Russified secular Jews. Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 352, 355. Doroshko, Nomenklatura. Kerivna verkhivka, 106. It is unknown if higher officials feared being infected by their surroundings. 20 No one has yet determined whether peasants who could produce and hide enough for consumption ate as well as nomenklatura personnel. 21 Paustovsky, Story of a Life. IV: 29. 22 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 431–2. 23 The school was cleaned by German troops later that month. Nesvitskii, Poltava u dni revoliutsii ta v period smuty, 43, 48, 65. 24 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 32, no. 8–9. 25 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 199 no. 160, 126. 26 t sDAVo f. 342 no 1 sprava 175 no. 39. 27 t sDAVo f 343 op 1 sprava 325 no. 325. 28 Lohovsky, “Robota bilshovytskoi vlady po borotbi z epidemiieiu tyfu,” 195, 197. Figes, “The Red Army,” 194. 29 Bronzov ed., Medyko-sanitarna sprava, 17, 33. 30 Nesvitskii, Poltava u dni revoliutsii i smuty, 143, 151–2. Among Nesvitskii’s patients was Petliura’s family. 31 Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set,” 92. 32 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 135 no. 7, 9, 11, 13; sprava 41 no. 27. No specification if rural figures referred to villages or counties. Most likely it was to those villages with a doctor or medic or nurse. Towns listed were county capitals. Data from the early 1920s for Podillia, Kremenets, and Odesa (formerly part of Kherson) provinces allow estimates of the size of the rural medical infrastructure: Podillia (eight towns): 19 doctors, 10 medics, 10 nurses; (thirty-eight villages) twenty-four, fifty-one, thirteen respectively. Kremenets (thirteen towns): 4 doctors, 12 medics, 12 nurses; (twenty-one villages): nine, twenty-six, one, respectively. Odesa (eleven towns): 21, 24, 17 respectively; (fifty-two villages): fifty-seven, seventy, thirty-one, respectively. Poltava city in February1919: nine hospitals. In 1920: 164 doctors, 231 medics, 340 nurses. 33 For a general survey of conditions organized in 1920 by the Worker Peasant Inspectorate (RabKhrin): Otchet otdela Kulturno-Prosvetitelnoi inspektsii za 1920 god. 34 Desiatyrichchia radianskoi medytsyny na Kyivshchyni, table no. 1. New city borders were established in 1913, shortened in 1919, then returned to prewar limits in 1923. 35 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 36 no. 569; sprava 41 no. 88. 36 t sDAVo f. 343 op1 sprava 305 no. 175; idem sprava 324 no. 268. 37 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 345, no. 137–43; 241–4. 38 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 36 no. 570–1.

246

Notes to pages 97–9

39 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 312 no. 67. 40 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 82 no. 83–5. 41 The documentation about this hospital and the affair is incomplete. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 79 no. 25–8. 42 Oliinyk, “Stan okhorony zdorovia na Podilli,” 40, 42. Excluding Vinnytsia (1923 pop. 51, 315), with 102 of the province’s 487 doctors (1:503), the provincial ratio would fall to 1:8,848. Including with doctors, 109 medics and nurses residing in Vinnytsia, and 725 in the rest of the province (pop. 3,457,700), the ratio of medical personnel to population for the province would be 1:2,616; for Vinnytsia town 1:243, and for the province, excluding Vinnytsia, 1:4,698. 43 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 324 no. 137–42, 148–50, 155–9; sprava 325 no. 343–5. 44 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 322 no. 66. 45 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii, XII: 130. 46 t sDAVo . f. 343 op 1 sprava 247 no. 23, 165, 239–42, 285; sprava 325 no. 326–9, 345–55, 661–4. 47 Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, 299; Gnusarev, “Povsednevnaia zhizn gorodskogo naselenie,” 112. 48 Gurovskii, “Mediko-sanitarnoe stroitelstvo i obshchestvennaia meditsina,” 132, 134. 49 Makh, “Sostoianie kvalifitsirovan medpersonala na Ukraine,” 109–10. 50 Table 2. Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli, 48, 69, 168. Khorosh gives no figures for total hospitals after 1921, except noting that in 1925, there were sixty-six fewer rural hospitals than in 1913. Some were likely larger than in 1913. Centralization meant hospitals likely had more beds each on average. As of 1923, the Red Cross ran five hospitals in Ukraine. 51 Reported sick here included in-patients, out-patients at hospitals, clinics, and those who visited private residences of doctors and medics. No death rates are listed, nor were diseases identified. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 134 no. 7, 20–8, 83–7. Zmiiv town (pop. 6,083), had fifty-seven medics and thirteen doctors, of whom four were in the town, one hospital, and one clinic. The minimal number of reported sick in 1919 for the district was 146,027 (86,338 rural) – over half the population. In 1920, that had risen to 153,921 (80,191 rural). In 1919, of 774 reported urban sick, 262 had venereal disease. Of 5,673 reported rural sick, 405 had venereal disease. For these, there were 47 hospital beds in towns and 288 outside. For 1920, towns with 5,243 ill (666 venereal), and villages with 7,761 ill (666 venereal), had a total of 451 beds. In Sosnits (estimated maximum 1921 urban pop. 15,000), there were five urban and thirteen rural doctors, seventy-three medics, one urban hospital, one clinic (65 beds), and eleven country hospitals (203 beds). The minimal reported cases of all diseases in 1919 was 60,778 (rural 240,501). In 1920; 50,116 (villages 253,053). Cases in that district had 65 beds available in town and 203 in villages. During both years the entire population was infected with something.

Notes to pages 99–105

247

52 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 199 no. 98–101. 53 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 199 no. 5v-11, 33, 38, 60–5. 54 Kalinichenko, Selianske hospodarstvo Ukrainy v dokolhospnyi period, 97; Brodskii, “Pitanie selsko-khoziaistvennykh rabochikh,” 12. How those who compiled reports dealt with the thousands of tons of foodstuffs illegally traded, or dumped at various depots where it then was either stolen or rotted, is unknown. 55 Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 119, 125–6, 145. In 1917, 43 per cent of all peasants reported they did not have all the implements they required. Forty-six per cent reported no horse or ox. That figure dropped to 24 per cent without tools and 19 per cent without animals in 1920. The respective figures for 1922 were 30 per cent and 34 per cent. 56 Verstiuk, Borotba trudiashchoho selianstva Ukrainy, 77. Totals summarized in Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 239. 57 Nesvitskii, Poltava u dni revoliutsii i smuty, 20, 107, 157. 58 Tomilin, Sproba sanitarnoho opysu Ukrainy, 35, 41, 55–60. Marzeev, Zhilishcha i sanitarnyi byt selskoho naselenniia; idem, Zdorova silska khata. Parts of these works are summarized in: O. Lukomsky,“Zhytlo iak odyn z osnovnykh kryteriiv iakosti povsiakdennoho zhyttia selianyna 20-kh rokiv XX st.,” Problemy istorii Ukraine: fakty, sudzhennia, poshuky, no. 12 (2004) 257–76. Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna. For a very detailed 1924 survey of syphilis in the Zhytomir region: Shein-Fogel, “Materialy po obsledovaniiu na venerizm,” 108–22. 59 Bronnikova, “‘… Sudy togo bezumnogo vremeni …’,” 90. 60 Khvorostanskii, Glavnieshie itogi vyborochnoi sanitarno-demograficheskoi perepisi v Kharkovskoi gubernii, 20. The villages, on average, were six to ten miles distant from the nearest town or train station. 61 Marzeev, Zhilishcha i sanitarnyi byt, 70. Khvorostanskii, Glavnieshie itogi, 18. 62 Kalinichenko, Selianske hospodarstvo Ukrainy, 35, 78–9. A household had to have labour, animals, implements, and at least twenty-four acres of land to produce a surplus. 63 Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 131, 139–40, 143, 158, 376. Kalinichenko, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 79. The reported average number of Ukrainian households planting thirty-six acres or more had fallen from 11.5 per cent in 1917, to 5 per cent in 1923. In Kharkiv province, the average fell from 9 per cent to 3 per cent. 64 [Polonskii, et al.], Kak zhyvet ukrainskoe selo, 11. The number of households increased from 6,507 in 1917 to 8,233 in 1923. 65 The survey was organized by a Dr O. Isaks and does not seem to have been published. It is summarized in: Merkov, Narys sanitarnoho stanu suchasnoho Podillia, 20–2, 29–30. 66 Higher press runs after 1923 of printed materials explaining preventive measures partially compensated for the continuing shortages of services, personnel, and facilities. The former could be produced cheaply and quickly. The latter could not. Starks, The Body Soviet. 55–68.

248

Notes to pages 105–7

67 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 301 no. 8–53 for an example of wrangling over quotas among health, party, paper, and press agencies. Also, ibid. no. 122–55. 68 Leinwald, Czerwonym mlotem w orla bialego, 60–1. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 177 no. 65, 135, 184, 225, 268–9, 293, 305. 69 Breznitskii, “Polozhenie vrachebno-sanitarnogo dela na sele,” 132. 70 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 308 no. 1, 27. Ptukha, ed., Materiialy sanitarnoi statystyky Ukrainy, 50–63. The total recorded ill from twenty-two diseases that year was almost three million. 71 Kuzminets, “Okhorona zdorovia v Ukraini v pershyi polovyni 1920-kh rokiv,” 49. 72 Chopard, Le Martyre de Kiev, 220–1. 73 Ibid., 224. 74 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 327 no. 268. 75 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 339 no. 68–9. Kharkiv in August 1919 apparently had the highest typhus rates. f. 342 op 1 sprava 41 no. 29. 76 t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 435 no. 49. A commission in the summer of 1919 had recommended the country needed 20,000 beds, an ideal ratio of one doctor for every thirty to forty patients, one medic for every twenty to thirty, and one nurse for every twelve to sixteen. Ibid., no. 101–2. Hladun, Rudnytsky, Kulyk, “Demohrafichni vtraty,” 20. 77 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 804 no. 117, 144, 378. These relatively detailed reports did not include syphilis among the recorded infectious diseases. It was included in UnR medical statistics: ibid. f. 1109 op 1 sprava 17 and 19. 78 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 207 no. 43; f. 343 op 1 sprava 305 no. 15–17. 79 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 94, no. 10, 45. 80 Mardershtein, Pravda pro sheptuniv (10 000 copies). 81 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 803 no. 293. Prevalence was as high in Russia. Penza province, before 1914, with the highest syphilis rates in empire, kept its position after 1917. In 1919, the disease there averaged 70 cases of every 1,000 sick, while in the rest of Russia the norm was 40. Apparently 60 per cent of clients were workers. Gnusarev, “Povsednevnaia zhizn,” 190–1. 82 Idem, sprava 328 no. 161–4. 83 The rate was sixty-three in 1906 – likely because the army was in the far east fighting Japanese. Burshtyn, “K voprosu o borbe s venerizmom v Armii i naselenii,” 103–5. 84 Aleksandrovsky, “Medychna sprava na Ukrainskomu seli,” 129–30. 85 Volkoslavskaia, “Zabolevaemost sifilisom v Ukraine v XX veke,” 199. The rate fell to 101 in 1927. 86 Sorokin, Sovremennaia sostoianie Rossii, np. Pt. 6. 87 Morenets, Shevchenko, eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky. Shchodennyky, 609; Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 416. 88 Frenkel, “Venerizm na sele i borba s nim,” 104; Shein-Fogel, “K voprosu o postanovke dela borby s venerizmom na sele,” 103–5. 89 No treatment at all was available for gonorrhea. Its infection rate of 22 per 10,000 was rising as of 1924, while the syphilis rate was falling. Fedorovskii, “Zabolevaemost venericheskimi bolezniamy naseleniia Ukrainy,” 89–94.

Notes to pages 108–12

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90 Shein-Fogel, “Materialy po obsledovaniiu na venerizm,” 116–21. 91 Kvasnitskii, “Zabolevaiemost tuberkulezom v voiskakh Krasnoi armii na Ukraine i v Krymu,” 159–64. Lenin, Collected Works, 35: 349. The word in the original is “spivaiushchikh soldat” which might also mean “who make the soldiers drunk.” 92 Dashkevych, ed., Istoriia ukrainskoho viiska, 132–7, 163–4, 245–7. Hrynevych, “Dynamika natsionalnoho sklad chastyn i ziednan Ukrainskoi voienoi okruhy,” 351–2. 93 Maiorov, “Glazurovannaia ‘polivennaia’ posud i svintsove otravlenie,” 71–6. The study only covered Poltava province. 94 Maslov, Rossiia, II: 9–22; 190–1. Maslov names Sklanskii, Zinoviev, Rykov, Bonch-Bruievych, and Steklov. 95 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 312 no. 213–18. 96 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 247 no. 242; idem sprava 325 no. 350. 97 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 35 no. 128. 98 Morenets, Shevchenko, eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky. Shchodennyk, 384. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 186, no. 15, 83, 85; idem sprava 224. 99 Leontovych, Spomyny utikacha, 113–15. 100 Vlaikov, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee selskoi lechebnoi seti v Kievskoi gubernii,” 127–8. 101 January 1919: Viddil Okhorony zdorovlia. February 1919: Narodnyi Komitet Okhorony Zdorovlia. December 1919–February 1920: VseUkrainskyi Komitet Okhorony Zdorovlia. February 1920: Narodnyi Komitet k Okhorony Zdorovlia. Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli. Ukraine’s 800 pharmacies (600 urban) were nationalized in March 1920; idem, Pervye gody ravitiia zdravookhraneniia na Ukraine, 111. 102 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 32 no. 21, 37. 103 t sDAVo f. 3421 op 1 sprava 32 no. 21, 37; f. 343 op 1 sprava 305 no. 1–10. 104 In April 1919, the Bolsheviks ordered the Red Cross to leave. t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 18 no. 28–9. t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 283. In May 1920, the Russian Health Commissariat ordered the Bolshevik-controlled Ukrainian Red Cross to disband and surrender all its personnel and equipment to the central commissariat. This sparked a complaint from Ukrainian communist Iury Mazurenko, who complained to Rakovskii that the decision was totally illegal. Rakovskii agreed and rescinded the order. t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 320 no. 8–11. 105 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 305 no. 140–3; f. 2 op 1 sprava 436 no. 139. 106 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 196 no. 47–52, sprava 240 no. 72–7 contain summaries of work reported done in Poltava and Katerynoslav provinces. 107 Maslov, Rossiia, II: 13. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 2nd ed., II: 348. 108 Rubach, ed., Radianske budivnytstvo na Ukraini, 599–601. 109 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 324 no. 231–41. 110 t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 436 no. 24. 111 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii, XII: 126. 112 t sDAVo f 343 op 1 sprava 327 no. 741–75. 113 Tymoshyk, Selo. U dvokh tomakh, II: 474–6.

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114 115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123

124 125 126 127

128 129 130 131

132

Notes to pages 112–16

t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 328 no. 40. t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 327 no. 442.

Idem sprava 325 no. 114–28, 341. t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 305 no. 177–9; idem sprava 324 no. 143. I found no record on how these situations resolved. Kremenchuh city authorities, faced with a Central Committee inspector, claimed they had not implemented any orders because they did not know the committee had plenipotentiary powers – almost one year after its formation. t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 436 no. 155–7. Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, vol.1 bk 1: 740; bk. 2: 321. t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 305 no. 127; sprava 308 no. 36; sprava 312 no. 133–7. t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 312 no. 88–9, 106–27. Idem, sprava 328 no. 150. Marzeev, “Sanitarnaia organizatsiia na Ukraine,” 15. Kagan, “Selskaia uchatskovaia set,” Profilakticheskaia meditsina, no. 12 (1928) 90–1 does not note whether these 8,664 included army doctors. Of the 5,932, 45 per cent were in the four largest cities, 22 per cent in the remaining cities, and 32 per cent in rural areas (where at least 80 per cent of the population lived). Figures from 1921 record Ukraine had 5,896 doctors (1,397 rural) – approximately 700 fewer than in 1914. The 1914 total of 1,627 rural doctors was surpassed in 1924. As of April 1919, doctors in Bolshevik territory were forbidden to leave the country and all medical personnel had to serve in the army. Figures broken down by province and categories: Vasiliev, “Itogi perepisi medpersonala na Ukraine v 1922 godu,” Profilakticheskaia meditsina, no. 1–2 (1924) 47–51; pt 2 no. 3–4 (1924) 63. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 60 no. 41–4, 53, 61–7. t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 85. The collection includes fourteen individuals who listed their nationality as “orthodox,” one who listed himself as “Little Russian,” and one as “peasant.” Seven cannot be identified. Berelovich et al., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VC hK -OGPU . Tom 1, 40, 48. Nakai, “Soviet Agricultural Policies in the Ukraine and the 1921–1922 Famine,” 43–61; Serbyn, ed., Holod 1921–1923 i Ukrainska presa v Kanadi; Kulchytskyi, Movchan, Nevidomi storinky holodu 1921–1923 rr.; Kulchytsky, ed., Holod 1921–1923 rokiv v Ukraini; Zbirnyk dokumentiv i materialiv. Dukelsky, ChK na Ukraine, 123; Kulchytsky, ed., Holod 1921–1923 rokiv, 51. Kulchytsky ed., Holod 1921–1923, 9 – 10, 32–3, 49, 128, 136. Vitkovsky, Na vistri chasu, 70–6, 85, 101–3, 127, 135. Berelovich et al., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VC hK -OGPU , I: 587, 712, 716. Doroshko, Nomenklatura. Kerivna verkhivka radianskoi Ukrainy, 254–60. Isakov, “Spivvidnoshennia tsin ta realnykh dokhodiv hromadian v Ukrainskomu seli,” 138–45; Kulchytsky, Komunizm v Ukraini. Pershe desiatyrichchia, 193–9. Lytvyn, et al., Vidnosyny derzhavy suspilstva i osoby pid chas stvorennia radianskoho ladu v Ukraini, II: 172–6. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 321. Boiko et al., Dzherela z istorii Pivdennoi Ukrainy, V bk. 1, pt. 1, 337–8.

Notes to pages 117–21

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Chapter Four 1 Gorky, On the Russian Peasantry. Translated: The Journal of Peasant Studies no. 1 (1976) 17. 2 Delo naroda, 3 December 1917. Kievskaia mysl reported the rumour on 10 December. Nadezhda Lokhvitskaia (pseud. Teffi) wrote a savage satirical short story on the basis of this rumour in 1918. “The Guillotine,” translated in: B. Dralyuk, ed., Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (London, 2014) 129–35. 3 On organizational structure of army requisition and secret police units: Arkhiiereisky, “Instytut viiskovykh narad iak instrument karalnoi polityky,” 127–75. 4 Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 230–5. Squads were supposed to register everything in triplicate. Superiors sometimes shot agents who had taken what they pleased, but private theft was common. 5 The Chinese were former workers, not poW s. These units are comparable, in terms of their repressive function, with the German Friekorps and Black and Tans in Ireland. Mykhailychenko, Polityka ‘voiennoho komunizma’ i ukrainske selianstvo, 153–5. 6 Bilokin, Masovyi terror, 237. 7 Brovkin, ed., Dear Comrades, 102–3; Bolshevism in Russia, 37, 57. 8 Graziosi, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine, 73. 9 Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov, 300, 304–8. 10 Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 262, 304. Map: Insurgent Movement in Bolshevik Ukraine 1920–21 https://www.istpravda. com.ua/articles/2020/11/2/158381/. 11 Easter, Reconstructing the State, 84; Yaney, The Urge to Mobilize, 478, 498, 503; Rigby, Lenin’s Government. Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine, 4–6. 12 Tepliakov, “Olitsetvorenie chekizma: k istoricheskoi otsenke M.I. Latsisa,” in: Bazhan, Podkur, eds., Radianski orhany derzhavnoi bezbeky v Ukraini, 353–4, 358–60. In Russia: Ratkovskii, Khronika krasnogo terrora VC hK . Karaiushchyi mech revoliutsii, chap. 5. 13 Golinkov, Krushenie antisovetskogo podpolia v SSSR ,134–40. 14 Cited in: Courtois et al., Black Book of Communism, 68. 15 Hrynevych, ed., Slidcha sprava M.A. Muraviova, 97. 16 Full text of the newspaper reproduced in Felshtinskii ed, VC hK -GPU . Dokumenty i materialy, 72. Also: Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov, 303–8. 17 Makagonova, ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko, 86, 107–10. 18 Cited in: Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 750; Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, 134. 19 Gorky, Untimely Thoughts, 131. 20 Zolotariov, V., C hK -DNU-NKVS na Kharkivshchyni, 10. Influential British men during the war, like Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, and the Bishop of London, talked about killing all Germans to make the world a better place. Unlike Lenin, none of them controlled an organization to do it. Hochschild, To End all Wars, 151 and passim.

252

Notes to pages 121–3

21 Bronnikova, ed., “‘… Sudy togo bezumnogo vremeni …’,” 94. 22 On the idea there is a “socialist” as opposed to “capitalist” and “universal” morality, and that the latter two cannot constrain a “socialist” state: Schedler, “The Soviet View of the Moral and Legal Obligation of States,” 341–61. 23 Their position was analogous to that of Nazi leaders, who could not be considered legally guilty for their persecution of Jews because they acted in accordance with their own Nuremburg Laws (1936). Anglo-American jurists now again argue that motive should be central to guilt. Binder, “The Rhetoric of Motive and Intent,” 1–96; Maslova, “Preemstvennost subektivnogo vmeneniia v rossiiskom ugolovnom zakonodatelstve,” 315–16. 24 Vinogradov, ed., Sekrety spetsialnykh sluzhb. VC hK upolnomochena soobshchit 1918 g., 11. This book reproduces the full texts of Russian Cheka newspapers from 1918. Articles on shortcomings, excesses, and errors classify them as unfortunate consequences of a policy of terror forced on the Bolsheviks by their enemies. Golinkov, Krushenie, 260–1. 25 t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 18 no. 48, 61. Nationality is not mentioned in the Bolshevik report. 26 Shapoval, “Gilotina Ukrainy,” 18. 27 Cited in: Courtois, et al., Black Book, 102. In Kyiv in May 1919, Trotsky allegedly compared the city to a radish. Red outside and white inside, it had to be made completely red. Latsis apparently took this as leave to begin a massive wave of arrests and executions throughout Bolshevik-occupied Ukraine. Volkov, Krasnyi terror glazami ochevidtsev, 68. 28 Dzierzhinskii was annoyed that his subordinates in Ukraine were making decisions without informing him. That summer, central leaders had decided to incorporate Ukraine directly into the Russian Republic. Podkur, “‘VUc hk raskassirovat …’,” in: Bazhan, Podkur, eds., Radianski orhany derzhavnoi bezpeky, 83–106. 29 Shapoval, Gilotina Ukrainy, 31–32. 30 Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia, 184–88, 252–3; Volkov, Krasnyi terror glazami ochevidtsev, 60–1, 72–3, 114–22. 31 Cited in: Serge [Victor Kilbachich], Memoirs, 116. Shapoval et al., C hK-GPUNKVD v Ukraini: osoby, fakty, dokumenty, 203. 32 Doubts Lenin initially had about the Jacobins ended as of December 1917. In 1918, he commissioned the first statues built anywhere to Robespierre. A few days after they were unveiled, they were vandalized, destroyed, and not re-built. Bergman, The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, 158–69. 172–7, 222. 33 Lenin, Collected Works, 31: 340–61. 34 Cited in: S. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. (Oxford, 1980), 92. 35 Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution. Bernstham, “Storony v grazhdanskoi voine 1917–1922,” 316–18, estimates the Bolsheviks killed at least one million in the Don area. 36 Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov, 13.

Notes to pages 124–6

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37 The city’s White commander, a former artillery officer on the German front, wrote he had never before witnessed such a bombardment as he had lived through in Iaroslavl. Vasylenko, Iaroslavskyi miatezh, 184, 202, 204, 251, 254, 316. 38 Rohatynsky, “Hlukhivska trahediia: iz zapysok Illi Rohatynskoho,” 229–33. 39 The totals include only Bolshevik territory and not deaths carried out by the Military Tribunals. Ratkovskii, Krasnyi terror i deiatelnost VC hK , 233; Litvin, Krasnyi i belyi terror, 88–9, 282. Litvin (table 5) lists executions by province for 1918. No one studying Cheka policies in 1919 has determined which were in response to issues in central Russia, which the Whites never controlled, and which were in response to events in non-Russian territories. A January 1919 decree ordering that rich Cossacks be physically exterminated was directed only at the Don and Kuban regions. Holquist, “Conduct merciless, mass terror,” “Decossackization on the Don, 1919,” 127–62. Courtois et al., Black Book, 78. 40 Courtois et al., Black Book, 106. City totals do not include killings by troops immediately after they had occupied a city. Historians now consider Melgunov’s totals inflated. Ratkovskii, Krasnyi terror, 89–90; idem, Khronika krasnogo terrora VC hK , 203–30, reviews figures for Russia only. As far as is known, the total officially recorded Cheka executions for Odesa province between 1919 and 1922 are no higher than 2,500. Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 351. 41 Mozokhin, Pravo na repressii, 336–52, 360. Total executed in 1921 is not divided by region. These are minimum totals. They do not include all provinces, but are the only ones based on Cheka archives. Ukraine had the highest number of recorded arrests in 1922 and 1923. Mozokhin estimates a total of 50,000 Cheka victims in Bolshevik-controlled territory 1918–21 – not including the Kronstadt and Crimea massacres, nor those executed by military tribunals. 42 That year in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks estimated their troops opposed a minimum 40,000 partisans. Faizulin, Skalsky, Perelohy Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 13. 43 Mozokhin, Repressii v tsyfrakh i dokumentakh, 59, 66, 70, 73, 77, 81, 84, 93, 362–7. There are no Ukrainian figures for 1919–20. Bilokin, Masovyi terror, 14–84. Ryan, Lenin’s Terror, 2. 44 Palamar, ed., Politychni repressii na Podilli, 57–8. They also wrote about Red Army men looting at gunpoint and their commanders threatening to shoot those who complained. 45 Cited in: Sidak, Natsionalni spetssluzhby, 245. 46 In Moscow and Petrograd, they averaged 45–48 per cent of the vote. Radkey, Russia Goes to the Polls; Dando, “A Map of the Election to the Russian Constituent Assembly of 1917,” 314–19. Bolsheviks received no more than 15 per cent of the vote in any Ukrainian province – including the soldier vote. 47 Bilas, ed., Represyvno-karalna systema v Ukraini, Knyha 2, 18. Frenkin, Tragediia krestianskikh vosstanie v Rossii, 24–5, 68.

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Notes to pages 126–9

48 Cheka situation reports note central Russian peasant hostility increased during the autumn harvest collection period, but rarely escalated into armed uprising in 1919. As of April 1920, reports list two of the six Russian provinces with peasant uprisings in central Russia, and four Ukrainian provinces with serious uprisings. As of June 1920, three of eight reported Russian uprisings were in central Russia. This collection contains no situation report reviewing all Bolshevik provinces prior to September 1920. Berelovich, Danilov, eds., Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VC hK-OGPU-NKVD , 1: 243–52, 259–60, 270–1. 49 t sDAVo f. 1 op 1 sprava 10 no. 98 and nos. 113–17. 50 t sDAho f. 8 op 1 sprava 40 no. 61; t sDAVo f. 1113 op. 2 sprava 200 no. 4. Published in: Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 181. 51 Strilko-Tiutun ed., Chervonyi terror. Politychni represii na Boryspilshchyni, 682. 52 As far as is known, this association with Lenin was first recorded as fact in his diary by White sympathizer Andrei Terne, in Krasnodar at the time. Published as: V tsarstve Lenina. Ocherki sovremennoi zhizni v RSFSR (Berlin, 1922). Zinoviev did not use the word exterminate (znishchit) – assuming no typographical error and the reporter was close enough to the podium to hear well. The Monty Python film Life of Brian shows how distance can change meaning. Those distant from the orator on the mount thought he said, “blessed are the cheesemakers.” 53 t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 447 no. 10. Werth, Black Book, 103. 54 “nikuda ne goditsia merzost, gnil, i gadost.” t sDAho f.1 op 20 sprava 11, no. 7–8; sprava 35 no. 21, 44. 55 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii XII: 108. Zolotariov, C hK-DNU-NKVS na Kharkivshchyni 17. 56 t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 233 no. 91; Werth, Black Book, 99. 57 t sDAVo f. 2 op 2 sprava 293 no. 7–8. 58 Plekhanov, ed, F.E. Dzierzhinskii-predsedatel VC hK-OGPU , 325. 59 Golinkov, Krushenie antisovetskogo podpolia v SSSR , 340–1, 410. Unlike in Russia, the death penalty in Ukraine was not abolished. 60 t sDAVo f. 1078 op 2 sprava 210 no. 55. 61 Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 51: 245–6. First published in 1942. Stalin was in charge of the operation. Lenin specified he could import thousands of Russian workers into each party cell in every military formation to ensure it took the maximum amount of grain from peasants. Tronko et al., Reabilitovani istoriieiu. Kyivska oblast bk.3: 197–200. 62 Bolshevik tribunals did shoot hundreds of soldiers. They blamed the chaos on “makhnovites.” Strilko-Tiutun, ed., Chervonyi terror. Politychni repressi na Boryspilshchyni, 689–93; Prisiazhny, Pervaia konnaia armiia na Polskom fronte, 13–20; Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 391–402. Budnitskii did not mention Lenin’s order. 63 Russian Red Army units in Ukraine in 1921 behaved much the same toward civilians. Tronko et al., Reabilitovani istoriieiu. Poltavska oblast bk. 1: 21–33. t sDAVo f. 3205 op 1 sprava 11 no. 16.

Notes to pages 129–33

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64 Today Babel’s accounts shock. In 1924, the Cavalry Army commander wanted him shot for his exposé. Gorky published and defended Babel. In 1928, he wrote that the depiction of the army aroused in him love and respect for the troops, whom he labelled real fearless heroes. 65 t sDAVo f. 1078 op 2 sprava 210 no. 65. Not all Ukrainians distinguished between observant and apostate Jews. 66 Cited in: Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 328. The man could have been either Ukrainian or Jewish. 67 Cited in: Yakovlev, A Century of Violence, 64, 71. 68 Vitkovsky, Na vistri chasu, 111. The author does not specify if these were agents or office personnel. 69 Warner, trans., Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, bk III: 81–5; Diefendorff, The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 90. 70 Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov, 18. 71 Zakharchenko, Zemziukina, Nesterov, U pokhodi za voliu, 87. 72 Krainskii, Zapiski tiuremnogo inspektora, 29–30, 82–7, 112–14. t sDAVo f. 5 op 1 sprava 21, no. 94, 105–6; Danylenko, Chervonyi terror v Ukraini, 68, 73. 73 Mazepa, Ukraina v ohni i buri revoluitsii, II: 9 74 t sDAVo f. 2432 op 1 sprava 102 no. 27. 75 Bilokin, “Hlukhivska trahediia,” 164–5; Strilets (Stryj) 13 June 1919. 76 Velychenko, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red, 104, 110–15. Lenin’s celebrated “Letter to the workers and peasants of Ukraine” of December 1919 led to changes in central policies. Russian Bolshevik behaviour at the local level changed little until 1923 and the introduction of “Indigenization.” 77 t sDAho f.1 op 20 sprava 21 no. 47–8. 78 Karpenko, “Kitaiskyi legion,” 252. 79 Whether Dzierzhinskii intentionally posted foreigners and Jews to enforce Bolshevik policies in Ukraine to inflame inter-ethnic hostility and forestall possible co-operation in the face of a common enemy, or because too few Ukrainians were willing to join the Cheka, remains unstudied. Leggett, The Cheka, 263. Whatever the case, after they had consolidated their rule, leaders forbade mention of the key role non-Slavs had in repressing opposition and establishing their rule. 80 Bernstham, “Storony v grazhdanskoi voine 1917–1922,” 332–3. Vasylenko, Iaroslavskyi miatezh, 280. 81 No one has yet made a detailed comparison of Bolshevik policies in Ukraine and Russia. It is mentioned in Graziosi, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine. A higher proportion of Ukrainian than Russian lands were owned as estates. The Bolsheviks in 1919 allotted no more than 30 per cent of their area to redistribution. They excluded their implements, as well as the horses and ploughs of wealthy farmers, from expropriation to centralize production and maximize exports. Ukrainian peasants revolted within weeks of the Bolshevik takeover rather than within months as did Russian peasants the year previous. That Russian peasants were supposed to get goods equivalent of up to 40 per cent of the value of the grain they delivered at fixed prices, while Ukrainians got no more than 30 per cent,

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82 83 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

Notes to pages 133–5

also suggests harsher policies in Ukraine than in Russia. Zakharchenko, Zemziukina, Nesterov, U pokhodi za voliu, 37–50. Izvestiia T sK KPSS , no. 12 (1989): 136; Figes, Peasant Russia Civil War, 258; Lih, Bread and Authority in Russia, 260; Osipova, Rossiiskoe krestianstvo; Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 239. Bilas, ed., Represyvno-karalna systema v Ukraini, 87, 90. The report also noted mass desertions of Ukrainians from the Red Army to partisan units. Zinukhov, ed., Provintsialnaia ChK, 5–6; Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, vol. 1 bk. 2, 271. Krutsyk, ed., Narodna viina, 82–3. Dashkevych, ed., Istoriia Ukrainskoho viiska, 132–7, 163–4, 245–7. Hrynevych, “Dynamika natsionalnoho sklad,” 351–2. In 1919, Red Army strength in Ukraine was 188,000. There is no known record of how many Ukrainians this figure included. In 1920, the Red Army in Ukraine numbered 1,200,000; 48,000 declared Ukrainian Red Army men served in Russia. Shapoval, “Gilotina Ukrainy,” 44; Vitkovsky, Na vistri chasu, 59. Zinukhov, ed., Provintsialnaia ChK, 5–6; Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, vol. 1 bk. 2, 271. Karpenko, “Kitaiskyi legion.” Karpenko, “Kitaiskyi legion,” 313, 319. Figes, “The Red Army,” 184, The appeal to Russian nationalism and patriotism was phrased as opposition to the German “imperialism” that deprived the tsarist empire of its non-Russian territories in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, then to the “AngloAmerican imperialism” behind the Whites. He consistently used the term “Rossiia,” that in Russian means the Russian empire – not central or ethnic Russia. The Germans occupied no Russian territories in 1918. Nonetheless, Stalin that February, in a telegram unpublished until 1954, wrote to the party’s Ukrainian branch as if Russian ethnic territory was at issue and its liberation required a national war: “we [Russian Bolsheviks] have fallen temporarily into the trap of foreign imperialism against which we must now begin to organize forces for a fatherland war …” He also used the term “holy war.” Agursky, The Third Rome, 203–20; Lenin, Polnoe sobranie, 37: 191–4, 207–32; Velychenko, State Building, 156–8. Golinkov, Krushenie antisovetskogo podpolia v SSSR , 202. Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, II: 538, 708–9, 721, 731. Krasnaia kniga: Sbornik diplomaticheskikh dokumentov o russko-polskikh otnosheniiakh, 40, 44, 58, 86–9, 92. 106. Karpenko,“Kitaiskyi legion,” 258–59, 377–80, lists “international units” in Ukraine. Berkman, The Bolshevik Myth, (Diary 1920–1922), 163. Karpenko, “Kitaiskyi legion,” 217. t sDAVo f. 3204 op 1 sprava 6, no. 7. t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 234 no. 165. Lenin’s decision was not included in the published Rcp Politburo protocols: “Deiatelnost tsentralnogo komiteta partii v dokumentakh,” Izvestiia T sK KPSS , no. 2 (1990) 151. t sDAVo f. 2 op 1 sprava 233; “Deiatelnost tsentralnogo komiteta partii v dokumentakh,”

Notes to pages 135–8

96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111

112 113

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Izvestiia T sK KPSS , no. 12 (1989): 153. Kovalchuk, Bez Peremozhtsiv: povstanskyĭ rukh v Ukraïni proty bilohvardiiskykh viĭsk, 217. Frenkin, Tragediia krestianskikh vosstanie v Rossii, 209, 214. t sDAVo f. 3205 op 1 sprava 11 no. 14. N.N. Popov ed., Vosmaia Vserossiiskaia konferentsiia RKP (b). Protokoly (Moscow, 1934) 77, 84. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 155, 313, 422, 431, 440, 465, 467, 490–2. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 154. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence Archive (DAMoU ) f. 3796, op 2 sprava. 6 nos. 85–9. Krutsyk, ed., Narodna viina 1917–1932, 82–3. Online: http://www. narodnaviyna.org.ua. Danilov et al., Nestor Makhno, 132–5. Tsvetkov, Belye armii iuga Rossii 1917–1920 gg., 51–2. Senior Red Army commanders also distrusted their Polish troops because they were Polish. They sent them to fight the Polish army with extreme reluctance in early 1919 only because they were desperately short of troops. On the western front, Polish troops were mutinous and unreliable. That summer, they were relocated to the southern front to fight the Whites. They were not among the Red Army units invading Poland in 1920. Miodowski, Polityka wojskowa radykalny lewicej polskiej 1917–1921. Danilov et al., Nestor Makhno. Krestianskoe dvizheniie na Ukraine. 343. Tronko et al., Reabilitovani istoriieiu … Kyivska oblast knyha 3: 191; ibid., Poltavska oblast knyha persha, 21; Mykhailychenko, Polityka ‘voiennoho komunizma,’ 154–5. Cited in: Kovalchuk, “Dokumenty z istorii antybilshovytskoho povstanskoho rukhu,” in: Papakin et al., Systemni zminy v Ukrainskomu suspilstvi, 69–70; Graziosi, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine, 149–50 Bilas, ed., Represyvno-karalna systema v Ukraini, 86 Korolivsky, ed., Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, vol.2: 675–6. Kulchytsky, Komunizm v Ukraini, 80–1. A Borotbist arrived from Russia at the time, reported that local authorities were preventing declared Ukrainian Bolshevik party members from going to Ukraine, while simultaneously sending native Russians who had never before lived there. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 377. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 99; McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 141–7. Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 87; McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 122–3, 128–9. Cited in: Vinberg, Krestnyi put, 21–22. Allegedly from Kommunist (Kharkiv), 12 April 1919. The article appeared when left-wing Bundists and Jewish Social-Revolutionaries had decided to support the Bolsheviks which made it credible. Budnitskii, Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 193. I could not find a copy of this issue of Kommunist in Ukraine. Cited in Budnitskii, Rossiiskie evrei mezhdu krasnymi i belymi, 97–8. Budnitskii, 101. By 1923, the number of Jews in Petrograd had increased by

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117 118 119 120

121

122

123 124 125

126 127 128

Notes to pages 139–42

three times their pre-revolutionary total, and in Moscow by ten times – to over 80,000. Velychenko, State Building in Revolutionary Ukraine, 22, 159–60. Cited in Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 115–16. Budnitskii, 93–4. Kniazev, “Iz zapisnoi knizhki,” 5 (1994) 184, 186. Bikerman et al., Rossia i Ievrei, 97–121. See also articles by émigré conservative Jewish leaders published in the Paris based Obshchee delo through 1919. Bilokin, Masoyi terror, 101. t sDAVo f. 2 op. 1 sprava 241. Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm v Rossi, 256, 259. Tronko et al., Reabilitovani istoriieiu … Kyivska oblast knyha 3: 186. Bolsheviks classified Jews as a nationality. They made no distinction between observant and apostates. Sloin, “Speculators, Swindlers and Other Jews,” 112. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 354. McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 185–6. Serhiichuk, ed., Pohromy v Ukraini, 351; McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 114. McGeever does not address the issue of antisemites among Bolshevik agents and party members existing alongside the disproportionaly high number of Russified-secular Jews who staffed their administrative offices. Huba, “Periodychna presa pro pohromy,” 26; Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv derzhavnoi varty, 149, 181, 191, 327, 357, 367. This generalization does not apply to pogroms instigated by overwhelmingly Russian/Russified Red Guard units in the spring of 1918, when there was no Bolshevik government control or secret police in Ukraine. Their motivation was apparently antisemitism. McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 41–51. McGeever, Antisemitism, 100–10, 138, 150–1. McGeever records that pogroms motivated observant Jews to join the Red Army. He dismisses as irrelevant the circumstances that motivated secular Russified Jews to join Bolshevik government agencies en masse. t sDAVo , f. 2. op 1 sprava 249 no. 3. Mykhailychenko, Polityka ‘voiennoho komunizma’ i ukrainske selianstvo, 1919, 161–8. http://euromaidanpress.com/2019/08/03/mass-graves-of-victims-ofcommunist-regime-found-in-zhytomyr-region-photos/. Shumsk and its neighbouring villages, from whence the victims came, no longer exists. The excavations were in progress at the time of writing. The majority, if not all, probably were Ukrainians. The local Cheka reports on the killings are in the Zhytomir Provincial Arkhiv (f. R.1820 op 2 sprava 281, and R.1487 op 1). Spisok naselennykh mest Volynskoi gubernii (Zhytomir, 1906) 26. Bilokin, Masovyi terror, 114. Mykhialiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 324, 356–7. Not all Ukrainian peasants necessarily supported all anti-Bolshevik partisan units all the time. t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 39 no. 83, 176; Kovalchuk, “Dokumenty z istorii antybilshovytskoho povstanskoho rukhu v Ukraini v 1919 r.,” 65–69.

Notes to pages 142–6

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129 Tepliakov, Deiatelnost organov, 320. 130 Slezkine, The House of Government, 151–54, 162; Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, 79; Lenin, Polnoe, 45: 190. 131 Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 68. 132 Baiguzin, Gosudarstvennaia bezopastnost Rossii, 395. As noted, Bolshevik terror in Russia dates, in fact, from the “Fatherland in Danger Decree” of February 1918. Bolshevik troops perpetrated terror even before then against civilians in the non-Russian territories of the empire they invaded. Graziosi, Bolsheviki i krestiane na Ukraine, 47. 133 McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, 157–59, 165. 134 Zakharchenko, Zemziulina, Nesterov, U pokhodi, 50–51. 135 t sDAVo f. 3204 op 1 sprava 41 no. 5–6. The April 1920 decision reproduced: Из “Краткой инструкции по борьбе с бандитизмом и кулаческими восстаниями.” – Українська історія – LiveJournal. (https://history-ua. livejournal.com/331183.html) The December 1920 Instruction: ibid., f. 3204 op 1 sprava 3 no 24–7. Reproduced: Из «Краткой инструкции по борьбе с бандитизмом на Украине, утвержденной председателем СНК Украины Х.Г. Раковским, командующим всеми вооруженными силами Украины М.В. Фрунзе, секретарем ЦК КПУ В.М. Молотовым в г. Харькове от 8 декабря 1920 г.». 8 д … (historyrussia.org).

Chapter Five 1 Margolin, A., Ukraina i politika Antanty (Berlin, 1921) 321 2 Andrievsky, Z mynuloho, I pt. 2: 203–6. This incident was also reported in the local press. Danylenko, Chevonyi terror v Ukraini, 75. 3 As expressed by Francis Bacon (1561–1626): “Opportunity makes the thief.” 4 Historians of Jews in revolutionary Ukraine normally focus on poor and middle-class Jews. No one has yet studied the relationship between Ukrainian national leaders and the rich Jewish business dynasties, the Ginzburgs, Poliakovs, Vysotskiis, and Brodskiis, and powerful bankers like Jakob Schiff and Arthur Raffalovich. In emigration, Lev Brodsky financed Petliura. This subject is also unstudied. 5 Gilley, “Beyond Petliura.” 56, and “Beat the Jews,” 121, 134. Gilley does not distinguish between critical opinion about some Jews, pre-modern anti-Judaism, modern antisemitism, or motivation from intent. He fails to consider that governments in wartime assign collective guilt and punishment to groups, and do not offer safety to the disloyal. The Allies, like the Ukrainians, classified enemies according to national criteria. 6 Taras Shevchenko signed a statement in 1858, organized by leading reformist intellectuals of the day, condemning tsarist Jewish policies and calling for legal quality for them (p. 244 of the German edition). The statement was published in 1891. It was forbidden and 900 of the 1,000 copies burned. Bakst, ed., Russkie liudy o Ievreieakh. German translation: Juden in Russland.

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Notes to pages 146–8

7 Shevchenko, Ukrainski politychni partii, 75, 158. His party was small and not influential. The program was published in western Ukraine. In 1917, he changed its name to the Ukrainian Party of Sovereignist Socialists. It had members in the Central Rada. Its program specified national and religious rights for all and made no mention of Jews. 8 Levitas, Kovbasenko, Salata, “Reprezentatsiia ukrainsko-ievreiskykh vidnosyn u trvorakh Sholom-Aleikhema ta B. Hrinchenka,” 77–84. 9 Petrova, The Jewish Question in the Ukrainian Revolution, chap. 4. There is no biography of Kovenko, who disappeared without trace in Romania in the ’20s. He should not be confused with Vasyl Kovalenko, who was head of army intelligence. 10 Goldelman, Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata pro Ukrainu, letter #5 (n.p.). Also: Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 136, 194, 236, 486–7; Hai-Nizhnyk, ed., Oleksandr Zhukovsky. Vspomyny chasiv epokhy Velykoi Skhidnoi Revoliutsii, 122–3, 141, 158. Zhukovsky either disbanded or dispatched to the front irregular troops that did loot and kill Jews (151). 11 Margolin, Ukraina i politika Antanty, 312–13; Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 113. 12 As reported by Red Cross agent Aleksandr Gilleson in July 1919. Reproduced in: Serhiichuk et al., Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, 68–71. 13 Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny 1917–1921 rr., 205. 14 Russian Black Hundreds circulated some Ukrainian-language antisemitic texts in the decades before the revolution, primarily in Volyn province. Russian-language newspapers translated and published articles by Artur de Gobineau, Wilhelm Marr, Eduord Drumont, and Houston StuartChamberlain. 15 t sDAVo f. 2007 op 1 sprava 1 no. 75, 114. Jews were subject to the draft. Their families requested exemptions as did others. Ibid., 89. How many Jews served as UnR bureaucrats in other than its Jewish ministries is unexamined. Velychenko, State Building, 84, 91, 114, 132. 16 Trembitsky, “Starokonstiantyniv,” 178–9. 17 The role of Ukraine’s orthodox clergy in the White and national movements, and the pogroms, is unstudied. A number of Ukrainian former Black Hundreds members, including bishops, supported Ukrainian independence after 1917. Black Hundreds in Ukraine supported Ukrainian cultural demands and political autonomy for individual Ukrainian provinces until the publication, in 1907, of the uncensored version of Shevchenko’s poems. This included his anti-Russian works of which they had previously been unaware. Fedevych, Za Viru, tsaria i kobzaria, 265–77. 18 Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny 1917–1921 rr., passim. The village recorded only isolated cases of individual Jews murdered in criminal incidents; Verstiuk, ed., Serhyi Iefremov. Publitsystyka revoliutsiinoi doby Tom 2, 293. 19 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv Derzhavnoi varty, 371.

Notes to pages 148–51

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20 Motzkin, ed., Les Pogroms en Ukraine sous les Gouvernements Ukrainiens, 92–8. The committee concluded the UnR controlled the anti-Bolshevik partisan movement. Recent archive research had shown this was not so. 21 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 241. 22 Frenkin, Tragediia krestianskikh vosstanii v Rossii, 180. 23 Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace. 24 Cherikover, Istoriia pogromnago dvizheniia, 121, 161, 134–6, 161. Cherikover notes some villages ordered Jews to leave, but not why they did so. 25 Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl, 152–3. 26 The Bible (Genesis 4:15), specifies the Lord wanted Cain, whom some identified as Jew, marked but not killed, otherwise: “vengeance will be taken on him [the killer] sevenfold.” In 1568, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Metrophones III, in regard to Jews declared that, “Injustice … regardless to whomever acted upon or performed against, is still injustice. The unjust person is never relieved of the responsibility of these acts under the pretext that the injustice is done against a heterodox and not to a believer.” During the 1905 pogroms, some higher clergy condemned them and sheltered Jews. Others condoned and blessed the perpetrators. Curtiss, State and Church in Russia, 267–5. In Orthodox practice, priests could act as they saw fit (Kerygma) in matters not defined either by dogma or councils. 27 Tens of thousands of Jews lived illegally in cities. On the economic importance of Jews: Bauer, “Jan Gottlieb Bloch,” 415–29. On anti-Judaism and antisemitism: Engel, “The Concept of Antisemitism in the Historical Scholarship of Amos Funkenstein,” 113; Davies, Europe East and West, 226; Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 190; Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism; Levy, ed., Antisemitism in the Modern World, 2–8; Marcus, The Definition of Antisemitism; Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, 225–7. 28 Balatz, “Une Version Ukrainienne ‘Protocols des Sages des Sion,’ ” 1–7. It is unclear if Balatz is referring in the article only to antisemitic publications that appeared in White-occupied Kyiv when he was there, or to the language of the item. He noted that the items he discussed were not the Protocols. They seem to have been leaflets by some Ukrainian group that linked anti-Ukrainian politics to the international Zionist conspiracy. His claim that the Protocols were unknown in Ukraine before 1917, outside a small circle around the court and secret police, is confirmed by French nobleman Armand DuChayla, who lived for a time with White forces in southern Russia and in Kyiv in 1918. The Whites sponsored mass publication and dissemination of the Protocols. DuChayla remarked its ideas likely circulated among Ukrainians. La Tribune Juif, 14 May 1921 https://phdn.org/antisem/protocoles/duchayla.html. 29 Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny, 231–3; Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina, 450. One such spy, a Col. Makohon, listed anti-Ukrainian government propaganda disseminated among Ukrainians in 1919 as one of his important achievements. He does not mention if this included antisemitic

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33

34

35

36

37 38

39

40

Notes to pages 151–5

texts. As noted below, Goldelman and Vynnychenko also claim White Russian officers were among pogrom instigators. Lindemann, The Jew Accused. 189. Abramson, “The Scattering of Amalek,” 42–3. Gusev-Orenburgskii, Bagrovaia kniga, 92–3 listed Bolshevik pogroms. The Bolshevik edition of this book, titled Kniga o Evreiskikh pogromakh na Ukraine v 1919 g. (Petrograd, 1923 – reprinted 1972, 1983, 1989), omitted one hundred pages from the original that covered the subject, along with an introduction by Gorky about Red Army pogroms. Agurskii, ed., Maksim Gorkii, 304 The first Christian theologians elaborated the Aristotelian-Platonic idea of a graded universal order. It became commonplace in church teaching. It is not found in the Bible that teaches earthly inequality and submission to authority does not nullify equality of all before God. Rousseau dwells upon the importance of graded hierarchy in his Emile (1762). Plato was known in Ukraine from Kyivan Rus times. Lamakina, Platonizm; Miroshnichenko, “Platon i platonizm.” On pre-nineteenth century Ukrainian thought: Iakovenko, Dzerkala identychnosti. Nineteenth-century popular Ukrainian conceptions about society are little studied. The Habsburg government re-imposed restrictions on Jews in its Italian lands between 1814 and 1870. The Rothschilds supported Italian unification and the new Italian kingdom. Sarfatti, The Jews in Mussolini’s Italy. Borodii, Zavalniuk, “Slidamy odnoho anonimnoho lysta,” 65–74. None of this activity was documented because it was illegal. What the secret police did uncover suggested the practice was widespread. One estimate is that 20,000 Jews illegally owned or leased 20 per cent of all noble land in RightBank Ukraine in the 1880s to ’90s. Almost all Russians who settled in Ukraine, other than workers and government employees, traded and lent, rather than farmed. Prysiazhniuk, Ukrainske selianstvo, 395–476, 432. Co-ops were increasing, but were few in Ukraine. Circa 1900 Ireland, with 4.5 million population had 960 co-ops. Volyn province, with 6 million population, where Black Hundreds were particularly strong, had 5. Fedevych, Za Viru, tsaria i kobzaria, 210–14. Klier, “Christians and Jews and the ‘Dialogue of Violence.’” Velychenko, State Building, chaps. 3, 5. The hetman’s secret police uncovered a Jewish woman, Eliza Alter-Ivinskaia, who had worked in Ukrainian government offices since June 1917, as a Bolshevik agent. How many others there were like her is unknown. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi, 17–18. Between 1905 and 1916, the government sponsored dissemination of approximately 15 million copies of some 3,000 antisemitic Russianlanguage texts. The tsar contributed twelve million rubles toward their publication. Baron, The Russian Jew, 61. For a list of works: Kolsto, “Sources of Russian Antisemitism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” 45–7, 53–7. Prysiazhniuk, Ukrainske selianstvo, 219–49.

Notes to pages 155–7

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41 Noll, Transformatsiia hromadianskoho syspilstsva, 44, 81. Pictured at his machine in 1912 is the photo is Herasko Chuchupak, a relation of the warlord Vasyl Chuchupak. 42 Nomis [Matvei Symonov], ed., Ukrainski prykazky, pryslivia i take inshe, 80–1; Samuel, The World of Sholom Aliechem, 185, 287. Poltava province was the setting for Aleichem’s famous stories of Tevye the milkman. Shkandrij, Jews in Ukrainian Literature. 43 The subject of civilian violence in pre-war Ukrainian society is unstudied. 44 Prysiazhniuk, Ukrainske selianstvo, 317. 45 Ievreiskaia entsiklopediia (St Petersburg, 1906–13) XII: 620. Ukrainians are not mentioned specifically. The entry only notes that, “nationalities that considered themselves oppressed did not participate in the pogroms.” 46 Valentino, Final Solutions. 47 Naiman, Istoriia ievreiv Ukrainy, 187–320. From the 1880s radical populists and the extremist right advocated violence against Jews. Officials condoned it. The instigators were usually Black Hundreds activists. The perpetrators were mostly migrant unemployed or part-time peasant workers – among whom ethnic Ukrainians were not necessarily either a majority or supporters of the national movement. Pritsak, “The Pogroms of 1881,” 9–43. 48 This reinforces the human psychological predispostion to remember the exceptional rather than the daily mundane, and conclude the exceptional was the norm in the past. The exceptional comes to mind quicker as the imagined norm in the past not because it was common – but because it was uncommon. Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 216–22. 49 Total pop. 23 million (towns – 3 million). Jewish, 2 million (towns – 830,000), Ukrainian, 16 million (towns 937,000). First noted in: I. Zhytetsky, “Ievrei na Ukraine,” Kievskaia starina no. 1 (1901) 79. In all Europe, only Russia’s Polish provinces had a similar high proportion of Jews. Also: Rowland, “Geographical Patterns of the Jewish Population in the Pale of Settlement of Late Nineteenth-Century Russia,” 207–34. 50 Bemporad, Legacy of Blood, 15. 51 Nova Rada (Kyiv) 28 March 1917. That year, he writes, hate was directed against local zemstvo incompetence. It was hated because it was the institution that imposed hated quotas and requisiting. Its agents, at times, took what they fancied. Also, people saw their collected produce and livestock left to die or rot at depots and train stations, or be sold on the black market at higher prices than they got. Local councils would include Jews, but not any zemstvo personnel. 52 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 395. 53 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 242, 246. The earliermentioned priest Radkevych met with Shepel, the day after the pogrom. Shepel told him he had tried but could not stop the pogrom. Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny, 203. 54 Heifets, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine, 134; Cherikover, Istoriia pogromnago dvizheniia na Ukraine, 62, 133–6, notes army agitators turned peasants against their Jewish neighbours. Heifetz, who sympathized

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57

58 59

60

61

62 63

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with the Bolsheviks, specifically accused regular UnR troops of pogroms “organized by the Directory,” 26–27, 53. Cherikover writes government leaders at times equivocated or failed to condemn pogroms, which some officers interpreted as consent to commit them. 77, 112, 124. Velychenko, State Building, 194; Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 313. The official thought Jews were sympathetic to the Whites due to rumours that they did not commit pogroms! Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 171; Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 112–16; Torhalo, Harbuzova, eds., Uman i Umanshchyna ochyma P.F. Kurinnoho, 194–202, 230. A few days later, locals did rob and kill Jews, but the author did not detail why that occurred. That July, another warlord took Uman and did foment a pogrom. Serhiichuk, ed., Pohromy v Ukraini, 202–8, 461; Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 54. Gillerson’s report: Serhiichuk et al., Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, doc. no. 10; also online: https://vilnacollections.yivo.org/?ca=((item. php!id__rg-80-s1-f180*col__v. Gilley misrepresents Lysiuk’s report. He ignores his comments about anti-Bolshevik Jews being the majority. “Beat the Jews, Save … Ukraine,” 122–3. Serhiichuk et al., Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, 194. In another incident that threatened to escalate into a pogrom was also defused by the commander Volodymyr Klodnytsky and the town rabbi. A Jew, who was infuriated that his daughter had converted and married a local Ukrainian, burned down the man’s house. The fire spread and the entire village went up in flames. Klodnytsky and the rabbi decided the father had to be executed – a decision that satisfied the Jews who recognized his guilt, and homeless Ukrainians who had wanted to perpetrate a pogrom on the entire Jewish community. Finkelshtein, Za dela ruk svoikh, 107–25; Trembitsky, Zavalniuk, eds., Otaman Iakiv Shepel, 141–5. The account is based on Klodnytsky’s memoirs written in the 1950s, and those of one of his junior officers, written in 1920. Finkelshtein, Za dela ruk svoikh, 107–25; Trembitsky, Zavalniuk, eds., Otaman Iakiv Shepel, 145–7. A third account claims the commander publicly beat the delegation of rich Jews when they initially refused to collect the money. t sDAVo , f. 1092 op. 2 sprava 165 nos. 312–17. Bolsheviks extorted huge levies from the rich regardless of nationality and religion. They publicly shot prisoners. Aleksander Berkman, who travelled southern Ukraine in 1920, reported that Bolsheviks also publicly beat hostages. The Bolshevik Myth, 265. Taking references to Jews welcoming incoming troops of whatever army as evidence of loyalties is problematical. Fearing pogroms at the hands of all sides, it was rational to show support for all in the hope of avoiding anticipated violence. t sDAVo , f. 1113 op. 2 sprava 213 no. 74; sprava 197 no. 184. See also: Rafes, Dva goda revoliutsii na Ukraine, 164; Makagonova, ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko, 21. Cited in: Velychenko, State Building, 191. Vynnychenko, “Ievreiske pytannia na Ukraini,” 119. The article was written in 1923.

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64 A.L. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races (New York, 1920) 52. 65 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii, XVI: 206, 209; Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv Derzhavnoi varty, 436. 66 Volia (Vienna) vol. 4. no. 2 (October 1920) 66–7. 67 Bilinkis, “Hromadianska viina na Ukraini ta Evreii: Fragmenty,” 234–51. The distinction is also noted by Kurinnyi. Torhalo, Harbuzova, eds., Uman i Umanshchyna ochyma P.F. Kurinnoho, 27–30. Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews, 8–9. Thus, observant Jews apparently also shared what McGeever termed “antisemitic representations of Jewishness.” 68 Goldelman, Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, letter #3, #5 (np). Accounts from Slovechno (Volyn province) and Lityn (Podillia) also describe how this phenomenon transformed earlier peaceful cohabitation into hostility and violence. Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 173, 314. 69 Fluent in Russian, Dukes travelled throughout, in and out of, Bolshevik territory between 1917 and 1920. Dukes, Red Dusk and the Morrow, 218; Bikerman et al., Rossiia i Evreii, 22–3. 70 The report does not specify how many were Bolsheviks. It listed 54,000 “active members” in Ukraine. Of 20,871 in Kyiv, 18,231 were Jewish. Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 18. 71 t sDAVo f. 1078 op 5 sprava 2 no. 5. 72 Krainskii, Zapiski tiuremnogo inspektora, 32. 73 Courtois et al., Black Book, 103. Also: Tepliakov, A., “Olitsetvorenie chekizma,” in: Bazhan, Podkur, eds., Radianski orhany derzhavnoi bezbeky v Ukraini, 358–9. 74 Steinberg, In the Workshop of the Revolution, 145; Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, 165–6, 286. Politburo member Lev Kamenev allegedly made the remark about destruction in 1920. Whether he spoke literally or figuratively is unclear. Evsektsii members did beat up observant Jews. 75 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 126. The witness noted the volunteer Jewish Red Army unit in question had its share of criminals. The unit contained a large proportion of Jewish volunteers but was called the 8th Soviet Ukrainian Regiment. 76 As of 1922, Ukrainians and Jews constituted 5.9 and 5.2 per cent respectively of total Bolshevik party membership. For every 1,000 persons in Bolshevik Russia, 2.9 were members. Per 1,000, the highest membership were Latvians (78). Ukrainians were 1 and Jews 7 per 1,000. Russians 3.8. In Ukraine, 53.6 per cent were Russians, 13.6 Jewish, 23.3 Ukrainians. Trainin, SSSR i natsionalnaia problema, 26; Abramson, A Prayer for the Government, 29. 77 Budnitskii, Russian Jews, 411–12. Bemporad, Legacy of Blood, 34–5. Bolshevik leaders did not publicize this overrepresentation as an example of how their seizure of power benefited the previously excluded. Vynnychenko, “Ievreiske pytannia na Ukraini,” 122; McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, 206. Velychenko, State Building, 190–3; Heifets, The Slaughter of the Jews, 8–9. The subject of violence against local Russian officials has not been examined.

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78 t sDAho f. 57 op 2 sprava 280 no. 11–12; t sDAVo f. 5 op 1 sprava 17 no. 64 v. 79 Christians’ antipathy to non-Bolshevik party local Jewish officials had little to do with a “Judeo-Bolshevik myth.” Provisional government supporters initially promulgated the idea of a Jewish conspiracy behind the overthrow of the tsar in their Petrograd press in the summer of 1917, which they then circulated to the Allied governments. Whether and how many of these publications reached Ukraine is unstudied. Poliakov, A History of Antisemitism, IV: 180–4, 231. Germans and White émigrés formulated the final version of the myth in Berlin no earlier than 1920. Hanebrink in his A Specter Haunting Europe focuses on the post-war years, as does Gerrits, “Antisemitism and Anti-Communism,” 49–72. Historians like Gilley uncritically apply these findings to pre-1920 Ukraine. 80 Poles also reacted violently to Jews occupying positions of authority previously held by Poles in western Ukraine during the Bolshevik occupation of 1939–40. J. Kopstein, J. Wittenberg, Intimate Violence (Ithaca, 2018). 81 Velychenko State Building, 191–2, 201–3; Dvenadtstyi sized RKP (b), 596. 82 Nova Rada (Kyiv), 29 March 1917. 83 McGeever, Antisemitism, 189–90, 195, 200, seems unaware of Jewish Bolsheviks who reported that Ukrainians had followed Bolshevik Jewish leaders before they began implementing what is now called “War Communism.” Local Bolshevik officials noted: “agitation against the Jews comes from the passive white-collar workers [intelligentsia] and the bourgeoisie. The reason for this is the huge number [bolshoe perepolnenie] of Jews in city offices.” t sDAVo f. 5 op 1 sprava 17 no. 64 v. 84 Hunczak, ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, 355. 85 Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 513–17. Engel, D., “What’s in a Pogrom?” in Dekel-Chen et al., Anti-Jewish Violence, 30–3. Also: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War. There is no equivalent of Hagen’s study for Ukraine. 86 Lindemann, The Jew Accused, 276, 280. 87 t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 89 no. 66. The report appears to have been printed as a leaflet for circulation. 88 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 17. 89 t sDAVo f. 1078 op 5 sprava 2 no. 5. 90 Sorokin, Sovremennaia sostoianie Rossii, chap 9. Sorokin saw a rise in Russian nationalism at the time as a defensive reaction to Bolshevik violence inflicted in the name of internationalism. That “inevitably” took on a zoological aspect and, together with the socio-economic reality, created a ready audience for antisemitic ideology. 91 Allison, Messick, “The Group Attribution Error,” 563–79; Corneille, Yzerbyt, Rogier, Buidin, “Threat and the Group Attribution Error,” 437–46. 92 Motzkin, ed., Les Pogroms en Ukraine sous les Gouvernements Ukrainiens, annex p. 6. 93 Goldelman, Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, letter #5 (n.p.). The Massacres and Other Atrocities Committed Against the Jews in South Russia (New York, 1920) 5.

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94 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 492. 95 Serhiichuk et al., Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, 88. He wrote “pogroms in Ukraine.” He did not specify an agent. 96 Goldshtein is not listed as a committee organizer in: I. Miliakova, “Le travail d’enquête des organisations juives sur les pogroms d’Ukraine, de Biélorussie et de Russie soviétique pendant la guerre civile (1918–1922),” Le Mouvement Social no. 222 (2008), 61–80. Friedman, Pogromchik, 237–47. Heifez, The Slaughter of the Jews, 26–7, 53. 97 Cherikover, Istoriia pogromnago dvizheniia I: 77, 112, 124; Friedman, Pogromchik, 289. 98 It identified senior officers, not the entire nation, as the main culprits. Motzkin, ed., Les Pogroms en Ukraine. Also: Engel, ed., The Assassination of Symon Petliura. 99 People in groups are inclined to act contrary to their normal moral standards. Cikara et al., “Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup competition,” 36–43. Rude, The Face of the Crowd. 100 It is unknown how frequently mobs attacking hated Bolshevik officials after Red troops had been evicted spared the non-Jewish ones. 101 Chopard, “Ukrainian Neighbours,” 150–2, 166, claims that hatred of Jewish Bolshevik officials implementing forced requisitioning and collective punishments was not “the impetus for exterminating local Jews.” He notes it was often younger peasants, rather than the older ones, who called for violence and that these men had usually been in the tsarist army where they had been exposed to antisemitism. As local officials or deserters, they feared a return of Bolsheviks rule and might well have been antisemites. Yet, he then concludes, it was the recent Soviet experience, not antisemitism, that motivated others to join them. 102 Friedman, Pogromchik, 1, 3. Friedman considered the history of Ukraine’s uniquely bloodstained and antisemitism endemic to Ukraine, a “pathological hatred of Jews … of the native Ukrainian populace.” 103 Khrystiuk, Zamitky i materiialy, IV: 163–70. 104 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 17, 94; Vynnychenko, “Ievreiske pytannia na Ukraini,” 119; idem, Vidrodzhennia natsii, III: 265; Goldelman, Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, #5 105 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 99–101. Also: Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 106–7, 113–14. 106 Volia (Vienna) vol. 4. no. 2 (October 1920) 66–7. Goldelman wrote that Jewish Red Army units particularly infuriated Ukrainian troops. Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, letter #5. 107 Lozovy, Ahrarna revoliutsiia v nadniprianskyi Ukraini, 369 108 On 6 August, Trotsky received permission to conduct a “radical purge” in Ukraine, and a detachment of 500 special Cheka troops to do it. Trotsky probably ordered the arrest and/or execution of seven pro-Bolshevik Ukrainian commanders. Velychenko, Painting Imperialism and Nationalism Red, 28.

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109 Cherikover, Antisemitizm i pogromy, 158–9; Komarnitsky, “UkrainskoIevreiski vzaiemyny,” 58–65. 110 Pogoda, Popruga, eds., Dnevnik prikazhchika Matveia Titovicha Boboshko, 131. 111 Doroshenko, Moi spomyny pro nedavne mynule, 632. Vynnychenko, Vidrodzhennia natsii, pt III: 76–9, blames local officials exclusively for such policies, claiming they consciously specified to people their units acted in the name of the Ukrainian State in order to discredit it. 112 Cited in: Miroshnychenko, “Hlukhiv v Ukrainskii revoliutsii,” 262. 113 Dornik, Lieb, “Military Operations,” in: Dornik, et al., Ukraina mizh samovyznachenniam ta okupatsiieiu, 214–33. German troops were forbidden to destroy entire villages, impose collective responsibility, to punish or arrest women and children, or to shoot hostages. 114 Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 144, 151. 115 A December 1918 UnR general-staff analysis observed that its troops fought the Bolsheviks unenthusiastically, as they sooner supported a confederation arrangement with Russia than independence. They also feared alliance with the western powers would force the UnR to reinstate the hetman’s land laws. Soldatenko, Vynnychenko i Petliura, 264. Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, tom 1 kniga 1, 676–88. 116 “No one complained about anything concerning the Germans.” Morenets, Shevchenko, eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky. Shchodennyky, 22. Semenenko, Istoriia Skhidnoi Ukrainy, 93; Markova, Suspilno-politychni zminy v Ukrainskomu seli, 102–5; Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii, XI: 97. 117 Verstiuk, ed., Serhyi Iefremov. Publitsystyka, Tom 2, 100. 118 Recent research indicates the scale of rural opposition was less than historians previously claimed. Lobodaev, ed., Viina z derzhavoiu chy za derzhavu?, 59–99. Dornik, Lieb, “Misconceived Realpolitik in a Failing State,” 116. How German Ukrainian policies compared with those in the Ober Ost is unstudied. 119 It is now estimated that anti-hetman partisan detachments included no more than 80,000 men. Very few of those could stand against German units. Germans incurred 22,000 dead, and the hetman’s gendarmes, 30,000. Savchenko, Pavlo Skoropadsky. ostannyi hetman, 223–4. Medrzecki, Nemiecka interwencja militarna na Ukrainie, 244, 248. 120 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 46. 121 Skoropadsky, Spohady, 292. Antonov-Ovsienko, Zapiski, III: 12. Bolshevik raiding units not infrequently were hated by the local population from whom they requisitioned, and who then suffered reprisals on the grounds that they were pro-Bolshevik. Romanenko, “Z partyzanskoho rukhy v ‘neitralniy zoni,’ ” 225. Danilov et al., Nestor Makhno, 58. 122 Lapchinskii, “Gomelskoe soveshchanie,” 47. 123 Mytrofanenko, Ukrainska otamanshchyna, 186–7, 193–4. Sidak, ed., Vyzvolni zmahannia ochyma kontrrozvidnyka, 31–2. 124 Hunczak et al., Symon Petliura, I: 220; II: 353, 518. t sDAVo f. 3809 op 2 sprava 6 no. 8.

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125 t sDAVo f. 2060 op 1 sprava 40 no. 252; Petrova, The Jewish Question, 58. 126 Abramson, like Cherikover, concluded that Petliura in 1919 would not enforce his decrees because he feared his army, already in retreat and demoralized, would fall apart if he punished pogromist warlords that thereby provided troops with supplies. Petliura’s rival, Vynnychenko, after he was ousted from government, explicitly called him an antisemite Vidrodzhennia natsii, pt. III: 366. 127 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 206. 128 t sDAVo f. 2432 op 1 sprava 45 no. 21–3, contains the transcripts of one of its meetings from September 1920. When this commission was established is unknown. 129 Margolin, Ukraina i polityka Antanty, 270–95. 130 Slyvenko, “Poshyrennia posadovoi zlochynnosti sered spivrobitnykiv VUnk ,” 66–71. Most of those tried and executed in this sample were lowerand middle-level personnel, who did not get special pay or rations, and rarely had more than primary education. 131 Velychenko, Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine. 132 D. Grossman, On Killing. 2nd ed. (New York, 2009). Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, 27–39. 133 The commander thought that he was brilliant and could arrest anyone he wanted, including the entire Directory. Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 14–18, 29, 32–3. 134 Torhalo, Harbuzova, eds., Uman i Umanshchyna ochyma P.F. Kurinnoho, 27. There is a break in the text at this point. 135 Posadskii, “Umanshchina v 1918–1919,” 167. 136 Goldelman, Lysty Zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, #5 (n.p.). He wrote that Ukrainian SD s were the most committed to fighting anti-Semitism. Trahediia dvokh narodiv, 28–35 137 Engel, ed., The Assasination of Symon Petliura, 91–3. This was the opinion of Russian Menshevik leader-in-exile Raphael Abramovich. He based his account of pogroms, given in 1928, on witness testimonies that named specific commanders who incited pogroms. His claim that Kovenko was responsible for antisemitic propaganda is at odds with his function, noted above, as editor of Ukraina. Trahediia dvokh narodiv, 28–35. 138 Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 38. Trahediia dvokh narodiv, 33–4. 139 Described in: Lozovy, Vnutrishnia ta zovnishnia polityka Dyrektorii, 98–152. 140 t sDAVo f. 1078 op 1 sprava 6 no. 75–7 141 t sDAVo f. 1604 op 3 sprava 3 no. 24. f 1429 op 1 sprava 23 no. 10–12, 36. 142 t sDAVo f. 2007 op 1 sprava 2 no. 124; f 1429 op 1 sprava 23 no. 10–12. A reply to a complaint from Podillia province, in January 1919, noted it would be duly investigated. Whether or not it was is unknown. 143 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Spravozdaniia guberniialnykh starost i komisariv, 49, 146, 164; Idem, Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 268–74. 144 Nash shliakh, 22 May 1920. t sDAVo , f. 1902 op. 2 sprava 62 nos. 72, 73; f. 1075 op. 2 sprava 3 no. 82.

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145 Komarnitsky, Podilski mistechka v dobu Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 106–7. 146 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii, II: 67; VI: 340. Konovalets rejected all accusations of excesses allegedly committed by his troops. He reminded readers that, at the time, Ukrainian authorities had seven separate intelligence or counterintelligence organizations, besides his own, each independent of the other. Prychynky do istorii Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 23, 31–2. 147 Vynnychenko, in 1920, travelled to Ukraine hoping for a government position. Chekhivsky, in 1921, was under arrest. Shubin, “Direktoriia pered sudom tribunala,” 81–2; Ostashko, Kokin, eds., Vyrok Ukrainskyi revoliutsii, 388–9. Goldelman confirmed internal governmental opposition to Kovenko’s appointment. Lysty zhydivskoho sotsial-demokrata, letter #3. 148 Makagonova ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko. Dnevniki, 291–3. The incident sparked a debate in the press. In reply to a Ukrainian officer who wrote repressions were a justifiable response to Bolshevik excesses, Korolenko wrote that an atrocity was an atrocity even if motivated by revenge. 149 Shyshko, Politychnyi terror voienno-politychnykh rezhymiv, 133–7. 150 Vynarchuk, “Rosiany ta imperske panuvannia v uiavlenniakh Ukrainskykh selian,” 95–9; Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 33. 151 Velychenko, Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine, 94–5; Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 93, 103–5. 152 Allegedly, when Makhno captured Red or White Russian troops, he would line them up and his commanders would approach each man and tell him to say “palianytsia.” This was a variety of Ukrainian wheat flatbread. No native-born Russian can pronounce that word correctly. They would invariably say “palanitsia,” whereupon they were shot. 153 His case in Ukraine’s former kGB archive: Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Sluzhby Bezpeky Ukrainy, f. 69270 t . 4, p. 113–14. A White Russian spy on Petliura’s staff at the time characterized Boiko as very dangerous. Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina 1919 roku, 460. He likely told the Bolsheviks what he thought would enhance his value to them. It did not work. He was shot in 1921. Ostashko, “Radianska represyvna polityka,” in: Verstiuk, ed., Studii z istorii Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 370–2. The Bolsheviks incorporated his claims into their anti-Ukrainian propaganda. Semen Dukelskii, then head of army counter-intelligence in Ukraine and present at his interrogation, was perhaps the first: Itogi deiatelnost ukrainskoi kontrrevoliutsii (tak nazyvaiemogo ‘pravitelstva UNR ’ … 1917–1920) (Kharkiv, 1921). Reproduced in: Istoricheskii vestnik, vol. 24 (June 2018). 154 Ostashko, Kokin eds., Vyrok Ukrainskyi revoliutsii, 310–11. Either Cheka officers knew they could not credibly condemn leaders for acts of subordinates, or, according to the policy of the time, they did not mention Jews or pogroms in indictments against persons even if they had undoubtedly murdered Jews. On the one hand, Bolshevik leaders themselves were unable to prevent subordinates from killing Jews. On the other, identifying perpetrators by group would have revealed they represented all groups and nationalities, and thus made nonsense of the idea of “proletarian” and “internationalist” solidarity. Bemporad, Legacy of Blood, 63–5, 69, 84. Black humour reflected the issue. Teacher: “Give me an

Notes to pages 176–8

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156

157 158

159 160 161 162 163 164

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example of the international solidarity of working people.” Pupil: “That is when a Latvian, Ukrainian, Russian, Armenian, and Georgian all-together beat-up a Jew.” Hull, Absolute Destruction. British leaders were divided over how to deal with the Irish between 1919 and 1921. The generals wanted martial law and unrestricted repression – not unsystematic covert reprisals by paramilitary units as the government was doing. The chief of the imperial general staff, Henry Wilson, argued, “If these men [IRA and supporters] ought to be murdered, then the government ought to murder them.” He condemned the British declaration of truce in July 1921 as “rank, filthy, cowardice.” Cited in: Ilahi, Imperial Violence and the Path to Independence, 131, 157. Khlobustov, Gosbezopasnost ot Aleksandra I do Putina, 145. Chebotariv later related one incident when civilian judges forbade him to execute a group of convicted Bolshevik saboteurs. Sidak, ed., Vyzvolni zmahannia ochyma kontrrozvidnyk, 53. t sDAVo f. 1078 op 1 sprava 22 no. 172; Serhiichuk et al., Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, 194. To his surprise, he was arrested and sentenced to death. Forced requisitioning is noted in Bolshevik agent reports. t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 39 no. 99, 146. Serhiichuk ed., Pohromy v Ukraini 1914–1920, and Proskurivskyi pohrom 1919 roku, contain numerous documents illustrating governmental condemnation of pogroms, and willingness to investigate and compensate, was matched by its inability to effectively enforce its prohibitions and punish malefactors. Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 86. Miliakova, ed., Kniga pogromov, 268–75. Danilov et al., Nestor Makhno. Krestianskoe dvizhenie, 202. V. Lypinsky, Lysty do brativ khliborobiv (Vienna, 1920) 40–2. Andrievsky, Z mynuloho, II pt.2: 80–5. Andrievsky did not specify who he thought were executing Bolsheviks and sympathizers at night. P.I. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1904) V: 362. Moloda Ukraina (Lviv), no. 9–10 (1900). Shevchenko, ed., Ukrainski politychni partii, 36. Mikhnovsky’s role in the failed coup attempt in Kyiv of July 1917 is unclear. The idea of violence justified in the name of independence appears in the Bible (Deuteronomy 7: 2, 16): “And when the loRD thy God shall deliver them [the tribes of Canaan] before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them … And thou shalt consume all the people which the loRD thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them.” F. Martin, ed., The Irish Volunteers 1913–1915 (Dublin, 1963) 65. Also: S.F. Moran, “Patrick Pearse and the European Revolt against Reason,” Journal of the History of Ideas, no. 4. Oct–Dec 1989, 625–43; J. Augusteijn, Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary (London, 2010). The Rada in June 1917 formed a commission of one hundred members including representatives of Ukraine’s minorities to write the draft. Alongside Hrushevsky, one of its authors was Ukrainian-born GermanLutheran Otto Eichelmann. Pyzhyk, Sliusarenko, “Proekt konstitutsii UnR .”

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Notes to pages 178–81

167 Cited in: Makagonova, ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko, 216. 168 Makagonova, ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko. 2: 221. 169 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Zvity Departmentiv Derzhavnoi varty, 181, 420. Ukrainian communists had no impact on health and sanitation issues because they never held power. There is no evidence the Borotbists had any influence on these matters. Borotbist participation in Cheka repression of UnR officials and sympathizers is unstudied. 170 This issue is discussed in relation to post-war guerilla movements: Collier, Hoeffler, “Greed and Governance in Civil War,” 563–95; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion. 171 Cited in: Lozovy, “Vlada dyrektorii,” 344. 172 Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina, 456. 173 Sidak, ed., Vyzvolni zmahannia ochyma kontrrozvidnyka, 51; Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 148, 330. 174 Vitkovsky, Na vistri chasu, 43–5 cites an account by one such covert operative-imposter. 175 t sDAVo f. 2432 op 1 sprava 60, for example of charges against four army counter-intelligence officers arrested for excesses against Jews. There is no record of a trial. 176 Sidak, ed., Vyzvolni zmahannia ochyma kontrrozvidnyka, 50–1. A White Russian spy in Petliura’s headquarters met the top Ukrainian intelligence personnel and thought they all deserved to be shot for what they did – which implies they were as ruthless in doing their jobs as were their White and Bolshevik counterparts. Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina, 454. 177 Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 77–8, 117–26, 140. The army opposed attempts made to centralize during the Polish campaign. Ibid., 138. 178 Lenin, Polnoe, 50: 165. 179 Korolivsky, et al. Grazhdanskaia voina na Ukraine, vol. 1 bk. 1: 667. 180 Cited in: Kovalchuk, Bez Peremozhtsiv, 196. Volynets was charged for one of his excesses, but never arrested due to intervention of senior officers. 181 Germany signed the Hague Convention but its generals interpreted its provisions selectively. They issued orders to kill civilians in Belgium in 1914. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, 20–7. 182 Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina, 329, 258. 183 Shukhevych, Spomyny, II: 73; Alsberg, The Nation, (1 November 1919) 569; t sDAho f. 1. op 20 sprava 39 no. 88. In western Ukraine, Polish intelligence reported Ukrainian peasants were tolerably well off relative to the Poles. Hunczak, ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, I: 355, 367, 381. 184 Rient, Rekrut, Narysy zhyttia Litynshchyny 1917–1921 rr., 170–200. Peasants in UnR -controlled territory considered its land reform left too much acreage in large estates and decided to take what they considered theirs. A local agent with a revolver could not oppose forty to fifty villager-veterans with a machine gun – and had to call for troops. Outcomes depended on the sympathies and abilities of local activists. Opinion turned against the Bolsheviks when people realized that their depredations were worse

Notes to pages 182–5

185 186

187 188

189 190 191 192

193 194 195

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than those of UnR personnel, and that they in addition were usurping or destroying local representative institutions. t sDAVo , f. 1092 op. 2 sprava 62 nos. 56, 57, 14, 15; f. 543 op. 1 sprava 8 no. 25. In response, the local board requested the minister to reconsider his decision (no. 27). Poland signed in 1922. Elected Ukrainian representatives to the Austrian parliament declared independence of western Ukraine in Lviv on 18 October. A provisional secretariat, formed on 13 November, declared the independence of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. Hunczak, ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, I: 139. French and American newspapers accepted and disseminated the Polish interpretation. Hunczak ed., Ukraine and Poland, 155. On Ukrainian anti-Jewish pogroms: Pavlyshyn, “Ievreiske naselennia skhidnoi halychyny u 1918–1919 rr.: sotsialnyi aspekt,” 103–17; Fan, Istoriia eivreiskoi natsionalnoi avtonomii, 106–21, 207–12. On Polish and Russian anti-Jewish pogroms: Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland Ethnicity; Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland; Gauden, Lwow. Kres iluzji. Kozlowski, Między Sanem i Zbruczem, 169. Cited in: Lozynsky, Halychyna v rr. 1918–1920, 145. Shapoval, Shchodennyk vid liutoho 1919 r. do 31 hrudna 1924 r., 33. The major Polish newspapers did not mention Polish atrocities. Figura, Konflikt polskoukraiński w prasie Polski Zachodniej, 124–8, 326–27. The Socialist (Glasgow), 20 November 1919. The author, Hryhory Tovmachiv (pseud. G. Pidubny), was a Ukrainian SR and editor of Trudova respublika. Between 1919 and 1920 he was a member of the independent “Foreign Group of the Ukrainian Communist Party” and the Ukrainian section of the Communist Party of Austria. Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, 102–6. Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence, 491. Dmowski. Pisma, III: 103–8. As of 1900, 4,000 landowners held 2.5 million hectares (6.2 million acres); 650,000 peasant households had 3 million hectares. Forty-seven declaredUkrainian landlords held 44,000 hectares – significantly less than the total held by the Greek and Roman Catholic churches combined. Before the war, Polish lords were increasingly selling their estates to Jews or banks. Almost all owners were absentee. Estate managers and overseers were normally Polish Catholics. Peasants with no relatives working abroad able to send money home lost land because of debt. Kompaniets, Stanovyshche i borotba trudiashchykh mas, 31–4, 62–3. Huk, Ukraina. Polskie jądro ciemności, sees antiPolish Ukrainian acts as the anti-colonial violence of the colonized. Eastern Galicia was the stronghold of conservative landlords and right-wing nD s. Before the war, Polish politicians and administrators imported Polish peasants to colonize already overpopulated Ukrainian land, and excluded the Ukrainian urban educated from government jobs. During the war, they claimed all Ukrainians were pro-Russian “Muscophiles” so Austrians

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201

202 203 204 205 206

207 208 209

Notes to pages 185–7

would arrest and intern as many as possible. P. Sviezhynsky, “Vplyv velykoi zhovtnevoi sotsialistychnoi revoliutsii na pidnesennia ahrarnoho rukhu v skhidni Halychyni v 1918 r.,” Ukrainsky Istorychnyi zhurnal, no. 10 (1965) 84– 9. S. Hryniuk, Peasants with Promise. (Edmonton, 1991); J.P. Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988) 56; Velychenko, State Building, 210. S. Popyk, Ukraintsi v Avstrii (Chernivtsi, 1999). Wolczański, ed., Kościół rzymskokatolicki, I: 249, 225–56, 286–8; II: 464. Wolczański, ed., Kościół rzymskokatolicki, I: 240, 358. t sDAVo f. 3505 op 1 sprava 33 no. 97. Polak, ed., Walki o Lwów, includes items referring to Polish looting, serious indiscipline, use of dum-dum bullets, and shooting at Red Cross vehicles and stations. General Maczynski included some references: “In a word, Polish gangs behaved like invading brigands to the degree that even Poles greeted our [regular troops] units as saviours from fear and theft.” Boje Lwowskie II: 67. Military police reports on Polish excesses against Ukrainians admit local provosts were too few to enforce discipline or procedure. Gendarmes often led pogroms. Looting, drinking, and random night shooting was daily commonplace. Most Ukrainians were interned solely on the basis of one, usually anonymous, denunciation. Kania, W Cieniu Orląt Lwowskich, 225, 233, 296–7. “INSTRUKCYA dla pacyfikacyi gmin nieprzyjaznych lub wrogich,” Derzhavnyi Istorychnyi Arkhiv Mista Lvova (DIAMl ) – leaflets. Other commanding generals, including Pilsudski, issued similar orders. None referred to Ukrainians specifically, only “the civilian population.” Polak, ed., Walki o Lwów, 3: 268, 355, 372; vol. 4: 32, 48. Dlaczego Galicya wschodnia aż do granic Romana Dmowskiego musi należyć do Polski (np. 1919) Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Lvivskoi oblasti (DAlo ) f. 257 op 1 sprava 432. E. Romer, S. Zakrzewski, W. Pawlowki, W Obronie Galicji wschodniej (Lviv, 1919) 23, 105. Hunczak ed., Ukraine and Poland in Documents, I: 131. Cited in: Skaradziński, Polskie lata 1919–1920, I: 227. Maciejewski, Zawadiaka. Dzienniki frontowe, 141, 153, 171. Farys, ed., Dziennik Juliusza Zdanowskiego, VII: 106: “mordowali wsie do nogi … własnoręcznie kolbą pracował.” One such publication unavailable to me at time of writing was titled: Dziesięć przykazań dla Polaków na wschodnich kresach Rzeczypospolitej. I am grateful to Andryi Zayarniuk for bringing my attention to this document. Zaklad Narodowego Ossolinskich Rkps.13500/III Papiery różne związane z działalnością Komitetu Obrony Narodowej we Lwowie z lat 1918–1920. Cz. III. Praca w sekcjach, 38–45. Cited in: S. MacManus, The Story of the Irish Race. (New York, 1922) 708. Wiszka, Brześć Litewski, 48. Zajączkowski, Trudne sąsiedztwa. Polska i Ukraina a Rosja i Niemcy, II: 233–4; Eichenberg, “The Dark Side of Independence,” 235. Pilsudski complained in

Notes to pages 187–90

210 211

212 213

214 215 216

217

218 219

220 221 222 223 224

275

1920 that troops from the Poznan region were scum (tymi draniami), that only provoked anti-Polish insurgencies. Hud, Zahybel arkadii, 305. t sDAVo f. 2192 op 1 sprava 6 no. 39. Bohler, The Civil War in Central Europe, 65, 164–6; Hagen, Anti-Jewish Violence, 311–14, on Polish courts martial of soldier-pogromists. I am grateful to Jochen Bohler for providing me with a transcription of the asyet-unpublished May 1919 order signed by Pilsudski (Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, sygn. cAW I.123.1.324). Apparently not all were aware of this order. Goodhart, Poland and the Minority Races, 142. Roja, Legendy i fakty, 70–2, 161, 217. Reproduced in Roja, Legendy, 48. Maczynski, Boje, II: 69. Karpenko, Mytsan, eds., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, vol. 3, bk.1: 46. In 1925, the general staff held an inquiry about his assertion. It concluded that Roja, who had just arrived as commander of Polish forces, issued it for purely tactical reasons and did not have sufficient information at the time to make it. In his 1931 book, the general maintained that Polish claims of Ukrainian atrocities were false (194–200, 328–31). Milinski, Pulkownik Czeslaw Mączyński, 164. J. Eichenberg, “Consent, Coercion and Endurance in Eastern Europe,” in: Bohler, ed., Legacies of Violence, 250. M. Kwiatkowski, “‘Bóg i Ojczyzna,’ czyli prawica idzie do wyborów w 1919 roku,” “Bóg i Ojczyzna,” czyli prawica idzie do wyborów w 1919 roku | Portal historyczny Histmag.org – historia dla każdego! Deruga, Politika wschodnia Polski, 53. Telegraph linked Paris, Warsaw, Lviv, and Cracow. Whether evidence about an incident from a provincial town in western Ukraine could reach a government brief in Versailles within two days is moot. Kuzma, Lystopadovi dni 1918 r., 325–35. Pavlyshyn, “Polske naselennia Skhidnoi Halychyny,” 209. The meeting is noted in Mączyński, Boje I: 296–8, II: 231, who claimed a verbal report by a Lt. Stec is what convinced Pilsudski to send troops. Jablonowski, ed., O Niepodlegla i Granice Tom 2, 75. [Lozynsky ed.], Krivava Knyha, I: 91. Other instances of Poles disguised as Ukrainian troops committing excesses in: Megas, Tragediia, 169–73; Karpenko, Mytsan, eds., Zakhidno-Ukrainska Narodna Respublika, vol. 3, bk 1: 107. DAlo f. 1 op 52 sprava 2856 no. 4–8. Published in: Hunczak, ed., Ukraine and Poland, II: 270–96. See also ibid., I: 139. t sDAVo f. 538 no 1 sprava 102 no. 108. t sDAVo f. 3505 op 1 sprava 33a no. 968. Krivava Knyha, 4, 21. Megas, Trahediia, 25–6, 31, 33, 38. In the introduction he explains he conducted interviews and collected materials in secret and his claims could be corroborated by international and Czech Red Cross reports. Some testimonies are reproduced. He provided no bibliography or

276

225 226

227 228 229

Notes to pages 190–5

footnotes. He did not indicate where he deposited his documents or transcribed interviews. Some of his papers are in the Public Archives of Canada (Woycenko Papers). Megas also advocated the Ukrainian case in Paris, where he worked as a translator for the Ukrainian delegation: N. Kazymyra,“Ukrainian Canadian response to the Paris Peace Conference, 1919,” F. Swyripa, Thompson, J.H., eds., Loyalties in Conflict. (Edmonton, 1983) 125–41. Ibid., 127–40. Ibid., 243. Some of the above-noted Ukrainian publications with their accounts of requisitioning, destruction, rape, torture, and killing are available on the Internet. Incomplete collections of western Ukrainian newspapers may be found in Warsaw and Lviv collections. Republika, 13 April 1919. Dotsenko, ed., Litopys Ukrainskoi Revoliutsii, vol. 2 bk 5 85. Ibid., 79, 129–65, 206–17, 293–324.

Conclusion 1 Markova, Suspilno-politychni zminy v Ukrainskomu seli, 509. 2 Schnell, Räume des Schreckens: Gewalt und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine took 1905 as starting date. 3 The contraction, collapse, and condition of services in a rural region near Tahanrih: Breznitsky, “Polozhenie vrachebno-sanitarnogo dela na sele,” 121. 4 Goroda Soiuza SSSR , table 1. Seventy-eight towns were listed. 5 Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 352, 355; Borys, The Sovietization of Ukraine, 163. Doroshko, Nomenklatura. Kerivna verkhivka radianskoi Ukrainy, 104–31. 6 Malaria cases had declined to 1914 levels in 1927. It is not specified if recorded deaths include only Bolshevik-controlled territory. Iekel, Infektsionnye zabolevaniia na Ukraine, 29. The highest figure recorded was for February 1920. The lowest, November 1922. Marzeev, “Deiatelnost sanitarnykh organizatsyi,” 89. Gurevich, “Sostoianie selskoi medikosanitarnoi seti na Ukraine,” 115–26. Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli, 48, 71, 168. Zaslavsky, “Zdravookhranenie na Ukraine,” 114–17. 7 Tkachenko, “Sanitarnyi stan ta borotba z epidemiiamy,” 352–70; Hladun, Rudnytsky, Kulyk, “Demohrafichni vtraty,” 20. 8 Bronzov, ed., Medyko-sanitarna sprava, 17, 33. 9 The male rate peaked in February 1920 when it stood at 113. Ptukha, ed., Materiialy … Pomerli v misti Kyivi, 8–9, 29. 10 Desiatyrichchia radianskoi medytsyny na Kyivshchyni, table no. 1. 11 Vlaikov, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee selskoi lechebnoi seti,” 127–8, 133–4. As the zemstvo system collapsed and governments changed, medical personnel migrated to villages or small towns to survive. They charged fees in kind for services. To claim maximum resources, in their reports to successive governments, doctors would claim they ran more facilities than they did.

Notes to pages 195–8

277

12 Table 1. In 1926, the urban population was still approximately 400,000 fewer than it had been in 1917 (5.7 million). Ptukha, Naselenie Kievskoi gubernii, 23, 29, 55. Particularly complete records of cause of death for the years 1918–22 indicate few died by shooting. 1918 (all causes: 15,504; unnatural deaths including shooting: 1,614); 1919 (all causes: 21,794; unnatural deaths including shooting: 2,250); 1920 (all causes: 27,673; unnatural deaths including shooting: 748); 1921 (all causes: 12,611; unnatural deaths including shooting: 661). Pomerli u misti Kievi. Table V. 13 Igumnova, “Naselenie Kharkovskoi gubernii,” 84. 14 Igumnova, “Naselenie Kharkovskoi gubernii,” 83–6. Figures from one town in 1917 are missing. Figures for 1920 include refugees. Nonetheless, the author estimates a population loss of approximately 260,000 between 1917 and 1920. Khorosh, Pervye gody ravitiia zdravookhraneniia. 197. 15 Jews and Ukrainians each averaged 35 per cent of the total population. “Naselenie Ukrainy po dannym perepisi 1920,” Statystyka Ukrainy. Seriia 1: Demohrafiia vol. 1 vyp. 11 no. 28: 6, 9. “Naselennia v mistakh Ukrainy za danymy miskoho perepysu 15 bereznia 1923 r.,” Statystyka Ukrainy. Seriia 1: Demohrafiia, vol. 2. vyp. 3. no. 77: 2–11. 16 Rubach, ed., Radianske budivnytstvo na Ukraini, 400. 17 Marzeev, “Itogi vyborochnogo sanitarno-demograficheskoho obsledovaniia selsogo naseleniia Ukrainy,” 98; Tkachenko, “Sanitarnyi stan ta borotba z epidemiiamy,” 352–5. Hladun, Rudnytsky, Kulyk, “Demohrafichni vtraty,” 20. 18 Turkalo, Tortury, 10. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 214–40, 272–7, 305. 19 t sDAVo f. 2133 op 1 sprava 50. 20 Kompaniiets, Morozov, “Collective biography of the leaders of the rural rebellion movement,” 22. Markova, Suspilni-politychni zminy, 82. 21 Statystychna khronika. Derzhavna statystyka USRR , viddil demohrafichnoi statystyky T sSU , 12 January, 3–4. 22 Gurevich, “Sostoianie selskoi mediko-sanitarnoi setu na Ukraine v sredine leta 1923 goda,” 115–26; Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna, 81–4. 23 Margulis, “Podpolnaia meditsina,” 90–3. The author assumed the phenomenon existed throughout the country. 24 Miloradovich, “Zhytye-bytye lubenskogo krestianina,” no. 4: 110–35, no. 6: 392–434, no. 10: 62–91. Bondarenko, Higiiena zvychainoho selianskoho zhyttia. Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 284–6, 303. In 1860s England, annual per capital use of soap rose from an averaged eight pounds in the 1860s to fifteen by 1914. Ward, The Clean Body, 110, 112. 25 Husev, “Ievreiske mistechko,” 159. 26 Iekel, “Smertnost grudnykh detei na Ukraine,” 148–9. 27 Aleksandrovsky, “Medychna sprava na Ukrainskomu seli,” 125–6. 28 Kalinichenko, Selianske hospodarstvo Ukrainy, 17, 20. 29 Hudzenko et al., Darnytsia. Roky, podii, liudy, I: 90, 117. 30 Kalinichenko, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 35, 78–9. A household had to have labour, animals, implements, and between twenty and twenty-seven acres of land to produce a surplus.

278

Notes to pages 198–203

31 Kalinichenko, Selianske hospodarstvo Ukrainy, 35–6, 58–69; Kovalova, Seliany, pomishchyky i derzhava, 341–4. 32 Tomilin, L’Hygiene publique, 48. Kak zhivet Ukrainskoe selo (Kyiv, 1924) 8–9; Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 262–8. 33 Tomilin, Sproba sanitarnoho opysu Ukrainy,18–19, 28, 31, 35, 42; Burshtyn, Krasnitskii, “Fizicheskoe sostoianie Ukrainskoi molodezhi po dannym prizyva rodivshchikhsia v 1902 g.,” 77–86. Volyn province had the highest rejection rate (18 per cent). Odesa province had the lowest (12 per cent). Self-inflicted wounds or conditions were presumably less frequent than before 1914. 34 This is implicit in Sanborn, Imperial Apocalypse. 35 Kavunnyk ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 322. 36 Posadskii, “Umanshchina v 1918–1919 gg.,” 167–9, 180. 37 Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy., 180, 305–8. 38 t sDAVo , f. 538 sprava 89 nos. 8–9, 25–7. 39 t sDAho f. 1. op 20 sprava 21 no. 6–10, 53. Idem, sprava 55 no. 23–5, 4–10; idem sprava 16 no. 70v. Kavunnyk ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 318 40 t sDAVo , f. 1092 op. 2 sprava 62 nos. 56, 57, 14, 15; f. 543 op. 1 sprava 8 no. 25. In response, the local board requested the minister to reconsider his decision (no. 27). 41 Kovalchuk, Nevidoma viina, 362; t sDAVo f. 1115 op 1 sprava 20 no. 25; Kavunnyk ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 285, 306. 42 Kurakh, “Tost,” 39. 43 t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 21 no. 18v. 44 t sDAho f. 1 op 20 sprava 39 no. 88. 45 Arkhiv Russkoi Revoliutsii VI: 339–40. 46 Ptukha, ed., Materiialy shcho-do smertnosty na Ukraini. Pomerli v misti Kyivi, 25, 31–7. Kyiv is the only Ukrainian city for which there are statistics for the entire period 1917–23. 47 Former imperial central statistical offices after 1917 were filled by provincial zemstvo statisticians. The Bolsheviks, in 1918, formed a national committee they merged into the Central Statistical Agency in October 1921. Zemstvo statisticians conducted the censuses of 1917, 1920, and 1923. No Ukrainian governments had a comparable statistical organization. 48 Bilozor, “Prychynky do istorii epidemii na shliakhu Ukrainskoi Halytskoi Armii,” 64. 49 Patterson, “Typhus and its Control in Russia 1870–1940,” 377–8. 50 Ptukha, ed., Materiialy … Pomerli v misti Kyivi, 8–9. I have not seen any references to Bolsheviks before 1923 intentionally manipulating data. Data that subsequently emerged to be false was more likely the result of statisticians working in highly unfavourable circumstances having to produce something to justify their rations. 51 Demographers at the time knew about problems of data collection. Marochko, “Professor demohrafii Arsen Khomenko, ” 353. Leontovych, Spomyny utikacha, 66–7, provides examples of how peasants in Poltava province under-reported holdings and circumvented quotas.

Notes to pages 204–6

279

52 Kulchytsky, ed., Narysy povsiakdennoho zhyttia, I: 135–6. Kalinichenko, Selianske hospodarstvo, 16. 53 Korchak-Chepurkivsky ed., Pryrodnyi rukh naselennia Ukrainy v 1924 rotsi, vii. 54 Cage, ed., The Working Class in Glasgow, 64–6. The generalization is based on data from Glasgow and my inquiries to doctors. G.T. Keusch, “The History of Nutrition,” The Journal of Nutrition, no. 1 (January, 2003) 336–40. 55 Revehuk, Selianstvo Poltavshchyny v dobu Ukrainskoi revoliutsii, 203–9. As of 1922, besides the province’s armed requisition squads and Cheka units, were also billeted tens of thousands of Red Army troops that peasants had to supply. These included a 400-man detachment of pro-Bolshevik-Ukrainian left SR s (Borotbisty) 206–7, 314–15. 56 Birth rates were higher in villages than in cities, but higher for both in Ukraine than in other European countries. Tomilin, “Osnovnye demograficheskie pokazateli Ukrainy,” 81–3. Ulianov, “Naselenie Ukrainy,” 82, 85. See also Markova, Suspilini politychni zminy, 237–43. Ukraine had the highest divorce rate in the USSR . 57 Tomilin, Marzeev, Materialy o sotsialno-gigienicheskom sostoianii ukrainskoi derevni, 34–5, 43. Marzeev, “Itogi vyborochnogo sanitarnodemograficheskoho obsledovaniia selsogo naseleniia Ukrainy,” 92. Binshtok, Kaminskii, Narodnoe pitannie, 55. For the empire west of the Urals, it was estimated that by 1917, at the 1913 rate, there should have been almost five million more children. 58 Kotsur et al., Ukrainske suspilstvo v umovakh radianskoho ladu, 12. 59 Tomilin, L’hygien publique dans la population rurale de L’Ukraine, 40. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy v pershi desiatylittia XX st., 269. Total deaths by nationality in Ukraine between 1917 and 1923 will perhaps never be known. Not included in Ukraine’s population were approximately 500,000 Ukrainians in border territories annexed by Russia between 1919 and 1928, and 1.7 million in Kursk and Voronezh provinces as of 1922. 60 Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna, 9. 61 Pyrozhkov, Perkovsky, “Ekstremalni sytuatsii i demohrafichni katastrofy v Ukraini,” 105–9. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy v pershi desiatylittia XX st., 269. Probably more died during the Bolshevik-Ukrainian war of 1919–23 than did in 1914–17. Historians have begun to publish the trial records of activists and soldiers arrested and shot between 1922 and 1937. E.g., StrilkoTiutun ed., Chervonyi terror, and numerous volumes edited by Roman Koval. 62 Erlikhman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke, 18–19, 34. He estimated a total dead of 3.1 million – 8.8 million including western Ukraine. The total dead in the entire Russian empire from all causes between 1914 and 1922 he estimated at 14.2 million. Others estimated up to 20 million dead, with the territory of the former empire in 1923 having 70 million fewer people than it should have had, had there been no war or revolutions. Andreev, Darskii, Naselenie sovetskogo soiuza 1922–1991, 118. 63 Marochko, “Professor demohrafii Arsen Khomenko,” 360. 64 It is unknown if other provinces published similar tables. Totals given include estimated absent on enumeration day.

280

Notes to pages 206–97

65 Laver, “Statystyka vtrat naselennia u viinakh i konfliktakh 1900–1924 rr.,” 3–23. Melnychuk, Shpytalenko, “Demohrafichnyi rozvytok ukrainskoho sela,” 59; Hladun, Rudnytsky, Kulyk, “Demohrafichni vtraty,” 15, 24. It is not always clear whether authors are referring to Ukrainians only or to all inhabitants of Ukraine. 66 Prociuk, “Human Losses in the Ukraine in World War I and II,” 28–34. Typhus infection rates per 10,000 rose from 20 in January 1919, to 120 in December 1919, to 200 in January 1922. Romaniuk, Gladun, “Demographic Trends in Ukraine: Past, Present and Future,” 332. 67 Tomilin, Sproba sanitarnoho opysu Ukrainy, 7. 68 All figures rounded-off. In Polish-ruled eastern-Galicia in 1921 there were approximately 311,000 fewer Greek Catholics (492,000 fewer declared Ukrainians), and approximately 622,000 more Roman Catholics (438,000 more declared Poles), than in 1910. In western Volyn, in 1921, the total population had declined by approximately 400,000 from the 1913 total. Approximately 70 per cent of the population were Ukrainian. The differences continued in 1923: Shapoval, Misto i selo, 14. Makarchuk, Etnosotsialnoe razvitie i natsionalnye otnosheniia na zapadno-ukrainskikh zemliakh, 48–9, 124–7. 69 In the seventeen years preceding the war, tsarist-Ukraine’s population increased by 32 per cent. In the thirteen years following, it increased by 3 per cent. Khomenko, Naselennia Ukrainy, 20, 22. The population of neutral Spain, where the flu killed at least 250,000 in 1918–19, increased from 20 million in 1911, to 22.6 million by 1926. Figures on deaths in Ukraine: Adamets, Guerre civile et famine en Russie. The population of the ten Polish tsarist provinces exceeded the 1915 total by 1921. 70 Poliakov, Sovetskaia strana posle okonchaniia grazhdanskoi voine, 220, notes Ukraine lost 1.7 million as of 1920, from a 1914 total of 27.7 million – one dead or fled of every sixteen alive in 1914. He notes 5.5 million died or fled in Russia (excluding Siberia) between 1917 and 1920 (one dead of every thirteen alive in 1914). 71 Zinger, Evreiskoe naselenie SSSR . Dvizhenie za vremia 1897 po 1923 g., 8, 15–16. Zinger gives only Jewish urban totals for only eighteen towns in 1910 (599,701). These show one of every thirteen alive there had died or fled by 1923 (46,033). 72 Including military and civilian dead. Germany and France averaged 4 per cent each of their populations. F. LeMoal, La Serbie du martyre a la victoire (1914–1918) (Paris, 2008) 231; L. Hersch, “La mortalite cause par la guerre mondiale,” The International Review of Statistics, vol. 7 (1927) 65–7. 73 Vasiuta, Politychna istoriia zakhidnoi Ukrainy, 100. Sexual diseases were rampant. Sixty to 80 per cent of all hospitalized Polish troops in western Ukraine had syphilis. Kania, W Cieniu Orlat Lwowskich., 200, 208. 74 Population decline by province: Moroz, Zlupko, Ukrainske selianstvo pershoi polovyny XX stolittia, 41–2. 75 All figures rounded-off. Makarchuk, Etnosotsialnoe razvitie i natsionalnye otnosheniia, 48–9, 124–6. Dudiak, “Dynamika chyslennosti polskoho

Notes to pages 207–11

76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87

88 89 90 91

281

naselennia skhidnoi halychyny,” 292, excludes from totals nine Polish majority districts that belonged to Lviv province. Skorowidz miejscowości Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej: Opracowany na podstawie wyników pierwszego powszechnego spisu ludności z dn. 30 września 1921 (Warsaw, 1923). vols. 13, 14, 15. Chentsov, Selsko-khozaistvennaia geografiia Rossii, 78, 356–7, compares statistics from 1916 and 1923. He did not group the tsarist-Ukrainian provinces into one unit. He did include some data on Ukraine under three regions: “southwestern,” “Little Russian,” and “New Russia.” Southern Ukraine appears to have suffered the most decline in livestock, and central Ukraine the least. Details on declines in Podillia province: Oliinyk, Transformatsiini protsesy na Podilli, 113–66. Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna, 27–62. Cited in: Bemporad, Legacy of Blood, 32–3. One Bolshevik report estimated an average of as many as ten men could have perpetrated rape on one Jewish female. Mykhailivska-Tsymbal, Z viiskovoho hnizda, 117. Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom, 23. t sDAVo , f. 1115 op.1 sprava 46 no. 14, 62 (based on personal observations in the twenty-eight towns of Lebedivka povit). Boiko et al., Dzherela z istorii Pivdennoi Ukrainy Tom 5 Knyha 1 Memuary ta shchodennyky, V bk. 1, pt. 1, 292. t sDAho f. 5 op 1 sprava 21 no. 94. Morenets, Shevchenko, eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky. Shchodennyky, 140, 430, 462, 476, 487–8, 500, 520, 632, 789. The behaviour of boys toward girls had become loutish and coarse as compared to pre-war times. Abortions, divorce, pre-marital sex, and illegitimate births, rare before 1914, became much more common (707). Morenets, Shevchenko, eds., Kostiantyn Sambursky, 140, 430, 462, 476, 487–8, 500, 520, 632, 789. A description of a similarly dirty Nizhyn: 537. Mykhailiuk, Selianstvo Ukrainy, 299. Martynov, “Moi ukrainskie vpechatleniia i razmyshleniia,” 165–8. On peasant reluctance to meet UnR quotas: Kavunnyk, ed., Arkhiv … Dopovidi dyrektoriv, 273. Rybak, Povsiakdenne zhyttia podilskoho selianyna, 79. Markova, Suspilno-politychni zminy v Ukrainskomu seli, 278, 284. 290. Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, studies this issue in Russia. On the somewhat similar social effects of hunger, shortages, and deprivation in Germany: Watson, Ring of Steel, 359–74. On social-psychological issues in general: AudoinRouzeau, Becker, 14–18 Understanding the Great War; Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 283–7. Verstiuk ed., Serhyi Iefremov. Publitsystyka Tom 2, 487. D. Leitch, Assisting Reform in Post-Communist Ukraine 2000–2012. (Stuttgart, 2003). Stoff, Russia’s Sisters of Mercy and the Great War, 123. Daile, Rozenblat, “Smertnost medpersonala g. Odessy,” 35–44. The most frequent causes of death were contagious diseases, primarily typhus.

282

Notes to pages 211–16

92 Khorosh, Rozvytok okhorony zdorovia na seli, 166. 93 Dailis, Rozenbalt, “Smertelnost medpersonala g. Odessy,” 35. Bailema, “Vysvitlennia zakhodiv shchodo likvidatsii vohnyshch infektsiinykh zakhvoriuvan naselennia Podillia,” 7. 94 t sDAVo f. 342 op 1 sprava 224 no. 139.

Appendix One 1 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 62 no. 95–6, 157–8, 126–8. 2 Zhvanko, Sotsialni vymiry Ukrainskoi Derzhavy, 122. In 1917, the rate was 73.5 per cent. 3 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 75 no. 48. 4 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 61 no. 75; sprava 62 no. 95–6. 5 t sDAVo f. 1035 op 1 sprava 88 no. 12–25. The location of a survey of 130 orphanages in four provinces done in 1918 is unknown. idem sprava 87 no. 11. 6 Visti VUT sVK (Kyiv), 20 March 1923. Triputina, “Dytiacha bezprytulnist ta borotba z neiu,” 161–74. Bohler et al., Legacies of Violence, 199; Alroey, “Sexual Violence, Rape, and Pogroms, 1903–1920,” 3. 7 Triputina, “Dytiacha bezprytulnist,” 163. Diptan, “Problema dytiachoi bezprytulnosti na Ukraini,” 52–9. By 1928, 45,000 had returned to Russia; 35,000 stayed in Ukraine. Makagonova ed., Neizdannyi V.G. Korolenko, 80. 8 Conditions were equally horrendous in Russian and Ukrainian orphanages by 1920. Mironova, Iaroslavl, 30–7; 104–12. Maslov, Russia, 106–14. 9 Narskii, Zhizn v katastrofe, 165; Kulchytsky, ed., Holod 1921–1923 rokiv v Ukraini, 127, 166. 10 t sDAVo f. 343 op 1 sprava 322 no. 40 v. The man responsible got three days jail time. 11 As of 1922, only one institution in Ukraine, in Kharkiv city, cared for infants and children with syphilis. Fedotova, “O sifilise v detskikh uchrezhdeniiakh Kharkovskoi gubernii,” 102. 12 Kruhliak, “Stateve pytannia i prostytutsiia v zhytti studentstva pidrosiiskoi Ukrainy,” 85. 13 Zeiman, “Psikho-fizicheskaia konstitutsiia detei Ukrainy,” 70–80; idem, “Sanitarnoe sostoianie detskikh uchrezhdenii,” 150–5. 14 Siatynia, “Aptychnoe delo v Ukraine v 20-kh godakh,” http://www.provisor. com.ua/archive/1998/N10/apt_delo20.php 15 Cederhom, In the Clutches of the Tcheka, 27–8.

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Index

alcohol, 34, 51, 56, 93, 101 alcoholism, 23, 38, 42–3 Aliechem, Shalom, 155 Andrievsky, Viktor, 65, 144, 177 antisemites, 146–7, 155, 163–4, 166–9, 172 antisemitic, 150–2, 154–8, 164–5, 167, 175–6 antisemitism, 148–51, 153–5, 159–60, 163–8, 172–3, 199 bagmen, mishochnyky, 54, 92, 193 Balkans, 3, 9, 190 bandits, 18, 130, 132, 158 bania, 29 basement, 24, 61, 79 basements, 30, 92, 190 bathtubs, 36, 39, 102, 111 bazaars, 57, 92, 97, 99, 196 bedbugs, 41, 48, 53–4, 96, 123, 197 Berdiansk, 107, 114, 196 Berdychiv, 52, 94, 148 Bila, 52, 57 Bilczewski, Archbishop, 16, 185 Birzul, 68 Black Hundreds, 146, 148, 151, 153–5 Bohuslav, 147 Bolshevik Ukraine, 5, 7, 12, 98, 106–7, 109, 163, 197, 206, 210

Borotbists, 4, 137, 163, 170, 177–8 Borzna, 145 Bourgogne, 24 Brest, 4, 190 bribes, 71, 126, 161, 194, 204, 207 Brody, 65 bronchitis, 37 brothels, 29, 32, 68, 93, 207 Bukharin, Nikolai, 123, 142 burial, 14, 107, 125, 158 bystanders, 56, 168, 187 carriages, 109–10 cars, 35, 48, 194 Catholics, 18, 130, 152, 207 cattle, 34–5, 62, 102, 198, 203 cavalry, 98, 126, 128, 129, 142 cemeteries, 43, 52, 91, 112 census, 27, 203, 206 cesspits, 30, 36, 70, 92, 215 Chapan war, 126 charities, 32, 44, 96, 197 Chebotariv, Mykola, 171, 173, 176, 179, 180 Cheka, 12–4, 116–20, 122–5, 127–9, 131–3, 135, 139–42, 146, 156, 160–1, 164, 171, 174–5, 180, 200 Chelm, 183

310

Index

Cherikover, Elias, 149, 167 Cherkassy, 113, 145 Chernihiv, city, 5, 22, 99, 101, 112, 161, 194, 211; province, 31–3, 100, 114, 131, 170, 196–7, 208–9 Chinese, International Brigades, 118, 131–5, 168 cholera, 22, 24–6, 28, 30, 36–9, 44, 47, 53–4, 58, 64, 70, 94, 105–6, 112–13, 216 Chortkiv, 17, 49, 70 cocaine, 56, 93, 216 cockroaches, 41, 54, 96, 197 coffins, 42, 50, 91 colonial, 7–8, 15, 135, 192, 200 colonies, 7, 200, 216 Commissariats, 5, 94, 98, 105, 109–14, 119, 161, 209 communism, 123, 125, 134, 165, 177 confiscation, 20, 71, 115, 170 Congress, 8th Rcp , 5; Ukrainian Women’s Congress, 58; Second Congress of Soviets, 134; 12th Rcp , 163 conscripts, 33, 132, 135, 198, 201 courtyard, 30, 64, 70 cows, 24, 35, 104, 190 crimes, 144, 171, 187 cronyism, 162, 165 cruelty, 3, 118, 139, 161, 184 customary, 45, 154, 168, 199 customs, 22, 152 dairy, 24, 45, 55 Danyna, 112 Darnytsia, 198 debauchery, 67, 121 Denikin, Anton, general, 96, 151 deportations, 3, 138, 209 depravation, 3, 13, 42, 207 depravity, 121, 122 depredations, 125, 129, 204 destitute, 13, 207 destitution, 20, 24 diarist, 107, 194, 208 digestive, ailments, 32, 37, 39, 198

Dimanshtain, Semen, 137–8 diphtheria, 41, 47 dishware, 111, 214 disinfected, 25, 29, 43, 65, 111 distilleries, 31, 56 distilling, 92 Dix, Otto, 210 Dmowski, Roman, 15, 184 Dnipro, river, 27–8, 36, 42, 61, 105, 107, 165, 198 Dnipropetrovsk, 28 Domazhir, 189 Don, river, 28, 57, 123, 127 Donbass, 92, 107, 127, 216 Donetsk, 25, 91, 102, 106, 205 Dora, 97 drunken, 108, 121, 173 drunkenness, 7, 208 drunks, 45, 56, 155 Dubovo, 156 Dunaevtsi, 62 dwellings, 20, 23, 45, 47–8, 53, 61, 69; urban, 28–9, 36, 42, 91–2, 98, 194; rural, 40, 102, 104, 106, dysentery, 26, 37, 62, 64, 105–6, 183 Dzierzhinskii, Feliks, 119–20, 128–9, 132–4, 177 effluent, 29, 35 eggs, 45, 55, 64, 93 Engelhardt, Olga, 91, 101, 121 Entente, 7, 9, 63, 188 Epshtein, Iakov (Iakovlev), 135, 163 executions, 118, 119, 121, 123–4 exterminate, 120, 123, 128, 161, 167, 173, 190 extermination, 121, 128, 150, 175, 183, 190 eyewitnesses, 13, 31, 123, 131, 167, 173 famine, 3, 12, 91, 100, 103, 109, 115–16, 192, 196, 205–6, 210, 214–15 farmers, 92, 152, 181 farmsteads, 13, 41, 198 fieldwork, 51, 207 fleas, 40–1, 48, 54, 86, 110, 123, 197

Index

flophouses, 35 flour, 51, 55, 67, 93 flu, 8, 47, 57–8, 94, 106, 194, 196 fodder, 55, 63, 97 footwear, 69, 91, 104 fugitives, 52, 155, 157 Galicia, 5, 49, 171, 182–6, 188, 190 Galician, 6, 14–5, 68, 187–8, 196 germs, 22, 216 ghetto, Jewish, 42–3, 49, 160 girls, 46, 56, 85, 215–16 Girsa, Vaclav, 69 Goldelman, Solomon, 146, 160, 166–8, 173 gonorrhea, 43, 58, 80, 215 Gorky, Maxim, 117, 121, 123, 138 gravediggers, 94 graveyards, 91, 93, 141, 194 Grosz, George, 210 groundwater, 30, 34, 37 guillotine, 117, 123 habits, 39, 100, 210 Habsburg, 5, 70 Hague Convention, 7, 16, 120, 182 handwashing, 22 Hasidic, 43–4 healers, 37, 39, 43, 70, 106, 197 Hlukhiv, 124, 131, 174 homeless, 53, 97 homes, 70, 202, 207, 215 horror, 3, 24, 117, 183, 210 horrors, 3, 8–10, 12, 14, 61, 145, 192–3 hostels, 35, 97, 113 Hungarian, International Brigades, 118, 124, 131–3 Iakovlev. See Epshtein Ianushkevich, Nikolai, general, 155 Iaroslavl, 70, 123, 133 Iefremov, Serhyi, 146, 170, 210 illiterate, 21, 30, 38, 131 imperialism, 7, 21, 141 infestations, 41, 63, 102

311

influenza, 58 insects, 36, 40, 123 intent, in law, 10, 121–2, 149–50, 156, 168, 176 instigators, 140, 145, 150, 156, 158, 162, 167 International Brigades, 18, 118, 131–5, 143 irregulars, 13, 140, 145, 182, 200 Italy, 8, 33, 152, 206 Iuzivka, 25 Izvoshchikov, Ansel, 161 Jacobins, 13, 117, 123, 142 Jews, apostate, 13, 134, 137–9, 157, 160–1, 164, 168, 173 Jews, observant, 13, 92, 129, 131, 137, 139–40, 157–9, 161, 164–5, 168, 173, 200 Judaism, 150–1, 154–5, 163 Judeophobia, 149, 150–4, 163–4, 166 Kamenev, Lev, 139 Kamianets-Podilskyi, 4, 6, 27, 51, 62, 65–9, 71, 132, 140, 157, 173, 189–90, 201, 210 Katerynoslav, city, 28–9, 31, 38, 106, 109, 111, 114, 127, 161; province, 7, 46, 69, 94, 98–9, 102, 112, 116, 201, 205–6, 208, 216 Kazatyn, 135 Kharkiv, city, 4–5, 7, 14, 28–9, 31, 35–6, 52, 65, 94, 106–7, 109, 111–14, 124, 137, 151, 197; province, 25–6, 33, 38, 41, 46, 54, 58–9, 95, 99–100, 103, 133, 170, 195, 198, 214–15 Kherson, 46, 60, 113, 135, 170, 174 Khmilnyk, 63, 158–9 Kobyliaky, 169 Kolomiia, 18 Konotop, 121 Konstantinohrad, 109 Korolenko, Vladimir, 11, 117, 120 Korosten, 147 Korsun, 145 Kovenko, Mykhailo, 146, 173–4, 179 Kovno, 57 Kozyr-Zirka, warlord, 173 Krakow, 5

312

Index

Krasnyi, 122 Kremenchuh, 32, 63, 96–7, 111, 114 Kremlin, 135 Krolevets, 127 Kronstadt, 125–6 Kruty, 194 Kryvorizh, 99, 116 kulaks, 126, 128, 130–2, 137, 145 Kyiv, city, 12–13, 25, 28–9, 36, 50–6, 59–60, 65, 69, 91–3, 95–6, 98, 105, 108, 118, 124, 127, 131, 140–1, 146–7, 160, 165, 174, 177, 195, 198, 202; province, 4, 6–7, 12–14, 31, 33, 47, 56–9, 65, 69, 72–81, 91–3, 95–6, 98, 104–6, 108-–12, 114, 122, 124, 129, 131, 139, 156, 159–60, 195, 201–3 Latvians, 118, 132–3, 135, 179 laundry, 29, 70, 84, 100–1 leaseholders, 152–4 Lebediv, 66 Lederrey, Major, 63–5 Lenin, Vladimir, 90, 108, 115, 117, 119–20, 123, 126–30, 134–5, 137–9, 142, 161, 171, 177, 180, 201 lice, 23, 39–41, 50, 53–4, 58, 63, 66–7, 69–70, 86, 90–1, 96–7, 110–11 liquor, 35, 52, 56, 68, 170, 201 literate, 38, 131, 134, 138, 154, 157, 160, 162–3 Lityn, 156 lodgings, 108, 163, 213 looters, 56, 157, 173, 177 Lubny, 147 Luhansk, 106 Lviv, 5–6, 17, 48–9, 182, 187–90 Makhno, Nestor, 4–6, 19, 45, 115, 119, 128–9, 134, 136, 193, 208 malaria, 36, 38, 47, 194 malnourished, 40, 48, 55, 59, 104, 215 Marx, Karl, 153, 159, 162 measles, 216 meat, 32, 45, 55, 100 Melitopol, 99 Menshevik, 81, 118, 137, 173

Mikhnovsky, Mykola, 146, 178 mob, 155, 157, 167, 193 modernization, 39, 152, 154, 168, 199 Mohyliv, 52, 61, 63, 131, 157, 209 moonshine, 7, 38–9, 55–6, 65, 67, 93, 208 morality, 10, 185, 215 morally, 10, 20, 122–3, 150 Morna, 58 morphine, 93 mortality, 26, 42, 54, 103, 106 mortuaries, 91, 94 motive, in law, 122, 150, 199 motives, 127, 149, 162, 164, 166 Muraviov, Mikhail, 120, 134 Mykolaiv, 106, 174, 197, 215 Myrhorod, 37, 127 myth, judeo-bolshevik, 148, 161–3 nationalism, 16, 145, 149, 163, 184 nationalists, 50, 121, 183–4 National Democrats, Polish (nD ), 15–16, 165, 188 nep , New Economic Policy, 115, 129, 139, 142, 165, 198 nightclubs, 93 nightlife, 50 Nikopol, 100 Nizhyn, 32, 112, 196 nomenklatura, 93, 101, 193 Novomoskovsk, 69, 99–100 Odesa, 25, 28–9, 31, 34, 36, 48, 91, 94, 97–9, 103, 113–14, 117, 119, 124, 129, 135, 137, 159, 166, 174, 211 offal, 23–4, 34, 36 Oleksandrivsk, 45, 159 orderlies, hospital, 62, 64, 96, 99 orphanages, 98, 190, 213–16 orphans, 20, 93–4, 158, 213–16 Orthodox, 61, 151, 154 outhouse, 24, 30, 41, 102–4 overcrowding, 30, 43, 53, 57, 97 oxen, 44, 51, 198 Pavlohrad, 98

Index

Pavoloch, 127 Pereiaslav, 40–1 Peremyshl, 5, 185 pestilence, 3, 86 pests, 54, 104 Petersburg, St, 28, 30–2, 167 Petliura, Simon, 4, 128, 151, 157, 167, 171, 173–6, 179–81, 190, 201–2 Petliurites, 130–31, 145, 148 Petrograd, 4, 11, 93, 107, 120, 123, 126, 138–9, 215–16 physicians, 59, 67, 106 Pidvolochynsk, 201 Pilsudski, Jozef, 18, 177, 184 pneumonia, 37, 62 Podillia, province, 4, 6, 13–4, 31, 38, 40, 53–4, 57, 59, 62–4, 66, 97, 101, 116, 125, 127, 132, 148, 156, 182, 197, 201–2, 205–6, 209, 213 Podolynsky, Serhyi, 37–9 pogroms, 12–5, 18–19, 132, 137, 140, 145–8, 150–1, 155–6, 158–61, 163–9, 171–6, 180, 184, 187, 192–3, 199, 206 Pohrebyshi, 94 Poltava, city, 27, 58, 94–8, 129, 131, 136, 144, 169, 174; province, 40, 44, 51, 101, 108–9, 112, 123, 127, 170, 177–8, 203–4, 208, 214 priest, 16, 18, 125, 148, 158 priests, 25, 61, 154, 185, 189 prisons, 60, 129, 141, 190, 208, 216 Proskuriv, 50, 60, 62, 65, 67, 127, 140, 147, 156–7, 166 prostitution, 23, 51, 90, 216 Przemysl, 5–6, 185 Rada, Central, 4–5, 13, 15, 50–1, 57, 59, 146, 150, 156, 163, 168–9, 171, 174, 208, 213 Radomysk, 127 Rakovskii, Kristian, 110–13, 115, 126, 128 Rcp (b), Russian Communist Party (bolshevik), 5, 139, 165 refugees, 51–4, 65, 91, 94, 106, 109–10, 124, 193, 196, 206, 213

313

Revkom, 119, 127 rheumatism, 37 Rivne, 65 rodents, 40, 102, 194, 215 Roja, Boleslaw, general, 188 Rovno, 175 Rozwadowski, Tadeusz, general, 185–6, 188 RSFSR , 115 Rusini, 185–6 scabies, 32, 47, 195 scurvy, 47, 105 Semosenko, Ivan, warlord, 157–8, 176 sewage, 24–5, 28, 30, 43, 47, 55, 92, 194 sewers, 23–4, 28–31, 36, 37 shootings, 125, 127–8, 179, 182, 199 Shtetl, 42, 104, 207 Shumsk, 141 Shupartsi, 189 Skoropadsky, Pavlo, hetman, 4, 57, 169 smallpox, 26, 41, 47–8, 61, 85, 105–6, 198 Sorokin, Pitrim, 10, 165, 215 Sosnits, 99 Stanyslaviv, 49 Starokonstiantyniv, 147, 199 starvation, 24, 92, 139, 191, 215 starving, 115–16, 126, 183 stench, 37, 64, 67, 109 stoves, 47, 92, 97, 99 Sverdlov, Iakov, 119, 123, 161 syphilis, 7, 10, 25, 28, 35, 38, 42–3, 45, 49, 58–9, 67, 80, 98, 106–8, 196, 198, 214–15 syphilitics, 29, 46, 59, 68, 107, 215 Talmud, 43, 155, 162 Talne, 160 Thucydides, 20, 130, 192 toilets, 24, 30, 32, 35–6, 50, 57, 60, 63–5, 68, 70, 94, 96–7, 110–12, 189, 215 torture, 20, 121–2, 168–9, 179, 182, 187, 189–90, 199, 206 tortured, 12, 144, 189, 201, 207 torturers, 121, 161, 180 transportation, 97, 100, 105, 197

314

Index

trauma, 20, 199, 207, 209 treason, 150, 152, 182 Trotsky, Lev, 42, 117, 123, 135–7, 152, 161, 168, 171, 180, 201 tuberculosis, 10, 23–5, 35, 38, 43, 47, 105, 107–8, 198, 216 typhoid, 30, 47 typhus, 7, 22, 35–8, 47–8, 53–4, 57–8, 60–2, 64–5, 67, 77, 94–5, 97–8, 105–11, 134, 183, 194, 196, 198, 203, 206, 211, 216 Uman, 135, 139, 146, 157, 172, 201 underwear, 67, 102, 118 unhealthy, 36, 41, 43, 103, 139 unheated, 41, 110 unhygienic, 40, 47 UnR , 4, 6, 10, 12, 14–5, 17–8, 57, 60–1, 63–9, 71, 87, 90, 93, 97, 109, 19, 128–30, 132–3, 135–7, 140, 143, 146–8, 150, 154, 156–7, 159–60, 163, 165, 167, 170–3, 175–84, 189–91, 201–2, 209–10 Ushomyr, 157 USSR , 12, 125 vaccination, 22,85, 196 venereal, 47, 58, 106–7, 208, 216 Verkhnodniprovsk, 69, 105 Verkhola, 147 vermin, 47, 63, 64, 109

Vinnytsia, 15, 53, 56–7, 59, 61–2, 104 vodka, 121, 169, 201 Volyn, province, 4, 13, 31, 38, 40, 53–4, 57, 61, 63, 106–0, 127, 154, 156–7, 165, 184, 206 Vynnitsia, 196 Vynnychenko, Volodymyr, 4, 11, 159, 167, 174, 180, 201 warlords, otaman, 5, 18, 60, 141, 147, 156–7, 167–8, 171–2, 175, 180, 181–2, 202 washbasins, 39, 55 wastewater, 23 whisky, 170 wives, 29, 51, 133, 207 Zaporizhzhia, 45, 112, 115, 215 Zemliachka, Rozalia, 161, 177 Zhmerynka, 60–2, 65, 68, 157 Zhytomir, 68, 108, 141, 148, 156–7, 172, 176, 201 Zinoviev, Grigorii, 120, 127, 161 Zionists, 137–8 Zmiiv, 99 ZUnR , West Ukrainian National Republic, 5–6, 15, 17–18, 60, 63, 71, 182, 187–91 Zviahel, 61