Symon Petliura:
An Introduction
Is Symon Petliura the man who "slaughtered
60,000 Jews"? Symon Petliura is relevant to the
Ukrainian Archive primarily because he led the fight for Ukrainian
independence at the beginning of the twentieth century, and secondarily
because Morley Safer in his
infamous 60
Minutes broadcast of 23Oct94, The Ugly Face of Freedom,
summed him up this way:
| Street names
have been changed. There is now a Petliura Street. To
Ukrainians, Symon Petliura was a great General, but to Jews, he's
the man who slaughtered 60,000 Jews in 1919.
| Or is Symon Petliura a fighter for Ukrainian
independence? But as the documents in this PETLIURA section will begin to suggest,
Safer's contemptuous dismissal is not quite accurate and does not quite
tell the whole story. We can begin with a few short excerpts to
provide background on Petliura from his entry in the Encyclopedia of
Ukraine:
Petliura, Symon [...] b 10 May 1879 in
Poltava, d 25 May 1926 in Paris. Statesman and publicist;
supreme commander of the UNR Army and president of the Directory of
the Ukrainian National Republic.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Ukraine, 1993, Volume III, p. 856)
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After the
signing of the UNR-Polish Treaty of Warsaw in April 1920, the UNR
Army under Petliura's command and its Polish military ally mounted
an offensive against the Bolshevik occupation in Ukraine. The
joint forces took Kiev on 7 May 1920 but were forced to retreat in
June. Thereafter Petliura continued the war against the
Bolsheviks without Polish involvement. Poland and Soviet
Russia concluded an armistice in October 1920, and in November the
major UNR Army formations were forced to retreat across the Zbruch
into Polish-held territory and to submit to internment.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Ukraine, 1993, Volume III, p. 856)
|
In late 1923,
faced with increased Soviet demands that Poland hand him over, he
was forced to leave for Budapest. From there he went to Vienna
and Geneva, and in late 1924 he settled in Paris. In Paris he
founded the weekly Tryzub, and from there he oversaw the
activities of the UNR government-in-exile until his assassination by
a Bessarabian Jew claiming vengeance for Petliura's purported
responsibility for the pogroms in Ukraine (see Schwartzbard
Trial). He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Ukraine, 1993, Volume III, p. 856)
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The above reference
to Petliura's assassin being motivated by Jewish vengeance can be taken in
two ways: literally or as part of Kremlin-manufactured
plot.
Assassinated by a Jew? In
the first case, if the assassination was indeed the work of a lone Jew
longing for vengeance, then it might not be amiss to wonder whether there
has ever been any great Jewish leader who has been assassinated by a
Ukrainian for wrongs committed by Jews against Ukrainians, or for any
other reason for that matter. If not, and I think not, then one
might wonder also what the respective statistics might be for all
cross-ethnic assassinations of leaders and officials of not only the
highest rank, but of any rank as well, and to wonder finally whether any
differences in such statistics might be attributable to a differential incitement to vengeance
within Jewish and Ukrainian cultures.
Or assassinated by the Kremlin?
However, crediting Bessarabian watchmaker, Yiddish poet, and assassin
Shalom Schwartzbard's claim that he murdered Petliura to satisfy a Jewish
longing for vengeance is possibly to be taken in by Kremlin
disinformation, as the following passage explains (where the spelling
becomes "Schwarzbart"):
According to
Bolshevist misinformation, the Jews are to blame for the murder of
Petlura. [...]
The choice of the person who was to
commit the murder has always served as the basis for the invention
of lies and legends about the actual murder itself. They have
always chosen persons to whom — in the event of their arrest —
credible tales about motives other than the orders of the Kremlin,
motives of a personal or political character, could be imputed, so
as to conceal the fact from the court that the order to murder was
issued by Moscow.
In the case of Petlura, a Jew, Schwarzbart,
was instructed by Moscow to carry out the murder. He received
orders to give himself up of his own accord to the police as a
Communist agent, in order to start a political trial in this
way. Thus there was a two-fold purpose behind this murder: to
murder Petlura who was a danger to the Bolsheviks, and to direct the
political trial of this murder in such a way that the person of
Petlura and the Ukrainian government which he represented, as well
as the national liberation movement, which was a danger to Moscow,
could be defamed from the political point of view. It was
Schwarzbart's task during this trial to conceal the part played by
the Russian GPU in this murder and to pose as a national avenger of
the Jewish people for the brutal pogroms committed against them by
various anarchist groups, who operated in Ukraine during the years
of the revolution, that is from 1919 to 1921, and in the interests
of Russia also fought against the Ukrainian state. The blame
for the pogroms carried out by these groups was to be imputed to
Petlura. By planning the trial in this way the Russians
managed to gain a two-fold success. In the first place, they
succeeded in winning over most of the Jews in the world for the
defence of the Communist agent Schwarzbart and in arousing
anti-Ukrainian feelings, which, incidentally, persisted a long time,
amongst the Jews, and, secondly, as a result of the unjust verdict
of the Paris court, the Russians and other enemies of an independent
Ukraine were able to obtain "the objective judgement of an impartial
court in an unprejudiced state," which could then be used in
anti-Ukrainian propaganda. For years the Russians made use of
this judgement in order to defame Petlura in the eyes of the world
and to misrepresent the Ukrainian state government which he
represented and the Ukrainian liberation movement as an
anti-Semitic, destructive and not a constructive state movement,
which would be capable of ensuring human democratic freedoms to the
national minorities in Ukraine. The jury of the Paris court,
who consisted for the most part of supporters of the popular front
at that time and of socialist liberals, refused to believe the
testimony of the numerous witnesses of various nationalities, which
clearly proved that Petlura had neither had any share in the pogroms
against the Jews, nor could be held in any way responsible for
them. They ignored the actual facts of the murder, and by
their acquittal of the murderer rendered Bolshevist Moscow an even
greater service than it had expected. Thus Moscow scored two
successes. But it did not score a third, for the Paris trial
did not help Moscow to change the anti-Russian attitude of the
Ukrainians into an anti-Semitic one or to conceal its responsibility
for the murder of Petlura from the Ukrainians.
(Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura — Konovalets —
Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, pp. 8-9)
|
Three reflections
arise from the Schwartzbard assassination:
(1) Juror
historians. One wonders whether the jurors in a
criminal case are competent to arrive at a fair determination of
historical truth, or whether they are more likely to bring with them
personal convictions of historical truth which are likely to be unshaken
by the evidence.
(2) French justice. The
acquittal of a self-confessed assassin might be an outcome peculiar to
French justice. Other Western states might more typically require
the conviction of a self-confessed assassin, and consult his motives only
to assist in determining the severity of sentence. A comment which
in part reflects on the French acquittal:
It is a strange
paradox that the once so sacred right of asylum, even for the
spokesmen of hostile ideologies and political trends, nowadays does
not even include the protection of the fundamental rights of life of
the natural allies of the West in the fight against the common
Russian Bolshevist world danger.
(The Central Committee of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),
Munich, December 1961, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura
— Konovalets — Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London,
1962, p. 65) |
(3) True-believer
assassins. If an assassin is sent by the Kremlin,
then is it necessary for the Kremlin to find one who is personally
committed to the assassination? The answer is yes. This is
because a Soviet assassin sent to Paris has some opportunity to defect and
to seek political asylum. He might choose to do so to escape
totalitarianism, to raise his standard of living, to avoid going through
with the assassination, and in the Petliura case to avoid the punishment
that was being anticipated from the French courts. On top of that,
he must realize that once he has carried out the assassination, he becomes
a potential witness against the Kremlin, and so might find the Kremlin
rewarding him with a bullet to the back of his head for the success of his
mission.
Thus, it is essential for the Kremlin to ensure that the
assassin be energized with a zealous committment to his mission. One
way to achieve such committment is to hold his family hostage.
Another way is to incite in him a thirst for revenge based on wrongs done
to his people. Thus, even if the Kremlin did order the assassination
of Petliura, and even if the Kremlin's selection of a Jew to perform the
assassination was for the political reasons outlined in the quotation
above, it may nevertheless be true that a Jewish thirst for revenge played
a useful role, and that all the Kremlin had to do to inspire the requisite
motivation was to propose the disinformation that Petliura was the
appropriate target of that revenge.
Pogromist or fighter for
independence? The Encyclopedia of Ukraine
entry ends with:
[S]ince the
mid-1920s he has personified, perhaps more than any other person,
the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The personification
seemingly also extends to the issue of the pogroms that took place
in Ukraine during the revolutionary period of 1918-1920, and
Petliura has frequently been invested with the responsibility for
those acts. Petliura's own personal convictions render such
responsibility highly unlikely, and all the documentary evidence
indicates that he consistently made efforts to stem pogrom activity
by UNR troops. The Russian and Soviet authorities also made
Petliura a symbol of Ukrainian efforts at independence, although in
their rendition he was a traitor to the Ukrainian people, and his
followers (Petliurites) were unprincipled opportunists.
(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of
Ukraine, 1993, Volume III, p. 857)
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A continuing threat to the
Kremlin. Petliura's leadership of the fight for
Ukrainian independence did not end with his withdrawal from the field of
battle:
Long after Symon
Petlura had gone into exile and was living in Paris, armed
resistance broke out again and again in his name in Ukraine.
Indeed, even today his name is still regarded by the Ukrainian
masses as the symbol of the fight for freedom [...].
(Dr. Mykola Kovalevstky, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow:
Petlura — Konovalets — Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited,
London, 1962, p. 28)
|
However real the
continuing resistance that was carried on in Petliura's name, the Russian
and Soviet authorities — in order to justify Cheka executions —
indiscriminately cited Petliura as the author of real and imagined
anti-Soviet actions. For example, summarizing the year 1921 alone,
historian Sergey Petrovich Melgunov relates:
Particularly
large was the number of Petlura "conspiracies" then
discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons
(including a Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa, batches of
fourteen and sixty-six in Tiraspol, thirty-nine in Kiev (mostly
members of the intelligentsia), and 215 in Kharkov — the
victims in the latter case being Ukrainian hostages slaughtered in
retaliation for the assassination of certain Soviet workers and
others by rebels. And, similarly, the Izvestia of
Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine co-operative employees,
school teachers and agriculturalists who could not possibly have had
anything to do with any Petlura "conspiracy" in the world.
(Sergey Petrovich Meglunov, The Red Terror in Russia, London,
1925, pp. 88-89)
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Thus, if the
impression gleaned from the Shapoval volume is correct
(to the effect that the control of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD lay overwhelmingly
in the hands of Jews), then the situation might be summarized by saying
that even while Jews were in reality pogromizing Ukrainians throughout
Ukraine (as we saw in the Melgunov quotation immediately above), they were
simultaneously pogromizing Ukrainian leaders in the diaspora, as by the
assassinations of, among others, Symon Petliura (1926) in Paris by Cheka
agent Schwartzbard employing a handgun, of Colonel Yevhen Konovalets
(1938) in Rotterdam by GPU agent Valyukh employing a package bomb, of Lev
Rebet (1957) as well as Stepan Bandera (1959) both in Munich and both by
KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky employing a poison pistol loaded with
cyanide. This same Bohdan Stashynsky eventually defected to the West
where he confessed to the two above assassinations, thereby demonstrating
the reasonableness of the distrust that the Kremlin might feel toward its
own assassins, as well as the reasonableness of the unease that the
assassins might feel concerning being distrusted.
Cause and
effect. As is often the case with respect to
historical events, the thread of cause and effect is difficult to
untangle. When Petliura makes the following statement in his Army Order No. 131, he
assumes that pogroms cause an opposition to Ukrainian
independence:
| Our many
enemies, external as well as internal, are already profiting by the
pogroms; they are pointing their fingers at us and inciting against
us saying that we are not worthy of an independent national
existence and that we deserve to be again forcefully harnessed to
the yoke of slavery.
|
However, it is also
plausible that causality proceeds in the opposite direction — that Jewish
opposition to Ukrainian independence causes pogroms. Of course, the
causal link can act in both directions simultaneously, with pogroms and
opposition each fuelling the other in an escalating spiral. Who
might start such a spiral and who might encourage it? Petliura views
the pogroms not as spontaneous, but as incited by "adventurers" and
"provocateurs." If he is right, then we may ask who might have sent
these adventurers and provocateurs? Who might have been paying them
to do their work? Perhaps the answer is those who might have
preferred to absorb chunks of a dismembered Ukraine rather than coexisting
with an independent Ukraine — most particularly, Russia and Poland.
And perhaps those who wanted to increase emigration of Jews out of Ukraine
— the Zionists. Russia, Poland, and Zionism benefitted from pogroms
on Ukrainian territory. All who wanted to live peacefully in Ukraine
— whether they were Ukrainians or Jews — suffered from the
pogroms.
To see the links to the documents in the Petliura section,
please click on the PETLIURA link
below.
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