POGROMS

Retreat from the major cities in the south brought out the worst in the Whites, as the terrible massacre of 2,000 Jews in Ekaterinburg had shown earlier in the year. But the Whites were not the only perpetrators. It is estimated that there were some 1,300 anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50,000 to 60,000 Jews killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus as well, but they were not nearly as murderous as those in Ukraine. In total, a Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.

Petliura’s Ukrainian nationalists had led the way. ‘It had been quiet for a little while after the terrible Gajdamak pogroms,’ Konstantin Paustovsky wrote of Kiev in 1919. ‘And it stayed quiet for a while after Denikin took over. For the present they were not touching the Jews. Occasionally, but only at some distance from the busier streets, a few Junkers with drug-crazed eyes, prancing on their horses, would sing their favourite song: Black Hussars! Save our Russia, beat the Jews. For they are the commissars! But after the Soviet forces had retaken Orel and begun to drive southwards, the mood of the Whites changed. Pogroms started in the little towns and villages of the Ukraine.’ Outside their own territory, Cossacks acted all too often as if they were in an enemy country where anything was permitted.

Churchill was well aware of the effect of anti-Semitic pogroms on public opinion in the West and had already written to General Holman. ‘It is of the very highest consequence that General Denikin should not only do everything in his power to prevent massacres of the Jews in the liberated districts but should issue a proclamation against anti-Semitism. Considering that anti-Semitism is so much more pronounced among Petliura’s men than in the Volunteer Army, it ought to be possible to make a strong distinction between the methods of the two forces. The Jews are very powerful in England and if it could be shown that Denikin was protecting them as his armies advanced it would make my task easier.’

Churchill then wrote to Denikin himself. ‘I know the efforts you have already made and the difficulty of restraining anti-Semitic feeling. But I beg you as a sincere well-wisher, to redouble those efforts and place me in a strong position to vindicate the honour of the Volunteer Army.’ Denikin had issued a number of edicts against pogroms, but since some of his most successful generals refused to comply or even encouraged them, he did nothing more. Churchill may have finally realised that General Dragomirov, the governor of Kiev, was ‘the kind of military martinet who is particularly unfitted for civil administration’, yet he still seemed unaware that Dragomirov had allowed one of the worst anti-Semitic pogroms of the war to continue in Kiev for six days. The Times correspondent in South Russia, a New Zealander and extraordinary linguist called Dr Harold Williams, wrote to the Foreign Office and Churchill: ‘You can have no idea of the bitterness against the Jews right through Russia. Bolshevism is identified in everybody’s eyes with Jewish rule.’

Williams found that although Volunteer Army officers hated Jews, they were not the ones who started pogroms. ‘The Cossacks are bad and it is hard to restrain them. They are great robbers and they have a most violent antipathy to Jews.’ This was especially true of Ukrainian atamans, such as Grigoriev, but there are conflicting versions about Makhno’s followers, who included quite a number of Jews. Budyonny’s cavalrymen were also guilty. ‘The curious thing,’ Williams concluded, ‘although it is not curious if you understand the popular feeling—is that the Red soldiers pogrom when they get a chance. In Gomel they massacred about half the Jews in town (a tenth probably because the Jews and everyone else exaggerate the figures frightfully). And they often chalk up on their troop trains “Beat the Jews and Save Russia”.’

Antony Beevor, Russia (391-394). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.