Jews in Ukraine
The 13th century Mongol invasion started a series of events which are still evident in the population of Ukraine. The invasion broke up the loosely-organized Kieven state, bringing some lands under direct Mongol control, while others continued precarious existence as Mongol vassals. One of the most important was the Galician-Volyhnia Principality in western Ukraine. The principality suffered several punishing raids by the Mongols, but retained its independence. By the mid 14th century, two events converged to end the independence. The male line of the local ruling dynasty died out, and Polish principalities were unified by Casimir III the Great.
Taking advantage of the chaos, Casimir, with the help of Hungary, conquered Galicia. Lithuania conquered the northern portion of the principality, Volyhnia. During the next several centuries, the Polish state continuously expanded eastward, especially after the establishment of the Commonwealth with Lithuania.
Polish occupation brought many Poles and Jews to Ukraine. The growth of the Polish population resulted from migration and assimilation. The assimilation was more rapid among the nobility and the urban population, as towns turned into Polish enclaves surrounded by Ukrainian countryside. Jews came from Poland, as in the late Middle Ages, vicious pogroms and expulsion of Jews occurred in various parts of Western Europe. At the same time, the Polish Crown encouraged migration to expand commerce and industry. The two events brought many Jews to Poland, and as the Polish state expanded eastward, Jewish migrants followed.
The Jews settled in Ukraine at the end of the sixteenth century. The emigrants from Lithuania and Poland found here uncultivated land and sparsely populated villages. Gradually there grew up cities, castles and settlements. The Polish nobility attracted as colonists the petty nobility, the serfs and also the Jews as a class engaged in commerce and industry. Thanks to the Jewish spirit of enterprise there soon developed an extremely energetic commercial activity. The greatest variety of industries, the production of nitric acid and potash, fishing and hunting as well as the liquor business were in the hands of the Jews. Only a very small part of the Jews were rich.
As for the Russian people, an impenetrable wall continued as theretofore to keep it apart from the Jewish population. To the inhabitants of the two Russian capitals and of the interior of the Empire, the Pale of Settlement seemed as distant as China, while among the Russians living within the Pale the sparks of former historic conflagrations, the prejudices of the ages and the unenlightened notions of days gone by were still glimmering beneath the ashes.
The Cossack population did not investigate with any degree of care as to who was really responsible for their enslavement. When the Ukrainian population rose in rebellion, with Khmelnitzky at their head, and freed themselves from the chains of political and economic enslavement, they swept away not only the lords, but also their agents, the Jews, who were their leaseholders and tenant farmers. The events of the years 1648-1658 with their heroes, Krivonos, Ganai, Morosenko, Timofei (son of Bogdan Khmelnitzky), Koloda and others, cost the Ukrainian Jews, according to the careful computations of Sabbatai Cohen, about 100,000 lives (the "Chronicler" speaks of a half million.) Several hundred Jewish settlements were completely destroyed.
Taras Bulba, by Nikolai F. Gogol (1839) is a story of Cossack life in the 17th Century. This is a tale of the Zaphorizhian Cossacks of the Ukriane and their struggle for independence from the domination of the Cathlic Poles. In Gogol's "Taras Bulba" the Jew bears the well-defined features of an inhuman fiend. In the delineation of the hideous figure of "Zhyd Yankel," a mercenary, soulless, dastardly creature, Gogol, the descendant of the haidamacks [the Ukrainian rebels who rose in the seventeenth century against the tyranny of their Polish masters], gave vent to his inherited hatred of the Jew, the victim of Khmelnitzki1 and the haidamacks. In these dismal historic tragedies, in the figures of the Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable, terror-stricken creatures." Thus one of the principal founders of Russian fiction set up in its very center the repelling scarecrow of a Jew, an abomination of desolation.
One hundred years later, Ukraine was again the scene of insurrections. The Gaidamaks [or haidamacks] (this was the name of the insurrectionary Cossack bands in the 18th century) were no whit inferior in savage cruelty to the Cossack rebels under Bogdan Khmelnitzky. All the hatred that had accumulated up to that time on account of the political and economic enslavement ol the people (introduction of serfdom, persecution of their faith, cruel practices of the administration, by state authorities as well as landed proprietors) was let loose in this moment. As formerly under Khmelnitzky, so a hundred years later, when the Jewish tenant farmer, the "inevitable attendant of the Polish lord" and the executor of his will in relation to the village, had again settled down, the fury of the peasants once more was directed against him. The rebellion of 1734 under the leadership of Griva adopted the following motto, "It is permitted to plunder the Jews and kill the Polaks."
In the 1740s, the "leader and great Hetman of the Gaidamak troops," Wasski Washchilo, shows clearly in his proclamation that the purpose of the rebellion was to destroy the Jewish people for the protection of Christianity. "Guided by zeal for the holy Christian religion, and anxious that the anger of the Lord for all these crimes may not fall upon innocent persons, I have decided, so far as it lies in my power, together with other good people who love Christianity, to exterminate the accursed Jewish people. I have already with God's help killed the Jews in the communities of Krichev and Propoisk, and although the Jews succeeded in having government troops sent against me, the just God gave me his protection in all cases. Trusting in the grace of God, I shall bring to end this holy war against the traitors."
The year 1767 in which the insurrection under Zhelezniak and Gonta took place was pregnant with fate for the Jews. A terrible massacre of the Jews took place at Uman. There were also excesses against the Jews in Fastov, Granov, Zhivotov, Tulchin and Dashev. According to the reports of eye witnesses, 50,000 to 60,000 Jews lost their lives at the time of the Gaidamaks.
The tsarist regime endeavored to divert the attention of the socially and politically discontented masses in another direction, the direction of least resistance. This they did by inciting the ignorant and intimidated lower classes against the defenseless Jews, who, they alleged, were responsible for the misery of the people. The Jews were represented as the exploiters of the people, as leeches, who sucked the blood of the peasant and robbed him of the fruits of his economic activity.
The pogroms of the eighties correspond to the revolutionary movement of the intelligentzia organized as "Narodniki" ("Zemlya i Volya," "Narodnaya Volya"). Those in the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the first revolution (1903-1905), correspond to the great revolutionary strikes in the south of Russia. Finally, the third pogrom wave, which came right after the revolution (end of 1905 and 1906), corresponds to the outbreak of the first revolution itself. The aim of the pogroms in the eighties was mainly the destruction of Jewish possessions. There was robbery and plunder, down and feathers were scattered to the wind, furniture was broken to pieces, valuables and money were taken away. In many cases women were violated, men beaten, but "with moderation," not to death. The pogroms, however, in Kishinev (1903), Gomel (1903) and Zhitomir (April, 1905), already began to assume a bloody course. Jews were murdered, the victims numbered many dozens. After the revolution (1905 and 1906) the pogroms expanded both in space and in time, with about a thousand victims.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Ukraine, within its current boundaries, had a population of just under 30 million. Ukrainians comprised about 72 percent, Jews- 9 percent, Russians- 8 percent, Poles over 4 percent, and the remaining groups almost 7 percent. Wars, revolutions, and famines inflicted heavy but uneven losses on all groups, and some barely survived. Western Ukraine saw World War I fighting, causing grievous, war-related losses. Revolution, famine, and typhus inflicted heavy losses in the east.
During the Great War neighborly relations were somewhat disturbed under the German occupation. The well-being of the population both Christian and Jewish had increased considerably. It was the time of unlimited speculation in goods and money, of smuggling in and out of Soviet Russia and the neutral zone. The peasants, however, could not increase their earnings in the same measure as the others. The products of the land were taken from them by force, at low prices, and carried to Germany. On the basis of exaggerated reports of "the wealth of the Jews," there developed among the peasants a feeling of envy and a desire for city products (manufactured goods, shoes), of which there was nothing in the Ukrainian village, rumor having it that the Jews in the larger centers enjoyed a superfluity of such things.
The Rada became an important political power, maintaining its independence of the Russian Provisional Government, which had not the slightest influence in Ukraine. The tendency of the Central Rada to favor separation from Russia forced the Jewish parties into opposition. The anti-Semitic agitation increased after the Ukraine was reconquered by the Central Rada with the help of German bayonets. It was necessary to find a scapegoat to bear the national disgrace and carry away on his back the anger and hate of the army and the peasants. The Jews were made the scapegoat, on the ground that they had caused the occupation of the Ukraine by German troops and were in the service of the Bolshevist government.
Gradually, step by step and at critical moments, they began to take up the method of pogroms. First they addressed threats to the Jewish leaders, warning them of the people's wrath in case they did not exert the proper influence on the Jewish masses. Then followed the actual application of the method in question, first in the form of organized excesses and demonstrations, and then at the most critical moment in the form of a systematic and uninterrupted series of organized blood baths and horrible devastations. Forced back by the Soviet government to the frontier of the Ukraine, the leaders of the Ukrainian Republic, as represented by the Directory and its responsible agents, never again let go of this bloody weapon by which they expected to secure victory.
The terrible Jewish massacres in the Ukraine in the year 1919, which set the whole land aflame, can not be compared with the pogroms in the eighties and during the first decade of the 20th century. The pogroms of the tsarist period were almost exclusively confined to the cities. There were none in the Ukrainian villages. Insurrection, robbery and violence were done by the city hoodlums in the larger centers. Not so the massacres in the year 1919. Here the Ukrainian village played the main role, the Ukrainian peasants, the bands of military insurgents as well as the more or less organized bands of insurrectionists.
Jewish families were exterminated in numerous villages and hamlets, or were killed during their flight from their ruined homes as they wandered from place to place, or were pulled out of railway trains and beaten to death, or were drowned by being thrown out of steamers, or were killed in the woods and the highways. Great numbers of those who succumbed to their injuries and fell victims of contagious and other diseases which they contracted during their imprisonment in dark rooms without food, drink or clothing.
The entire number of persons who perished during the first period of the pogroms at the time of the Directory and the Batki amounts to at least 70,000. The number of those killed in the second period of the pogroms wass 50,000. To assume that 120,000 deaths were due directly to the pogroms, would not be exaggeration. To these must be added the injured and wounded, those suffering from nervous and mental shock and the violated women. The pogroms swept the Ukraine like a hurricane, and it was impossible to undertake a census of such cases. The number, however, must be prodigious, running into the tens of thousands.
After the revolution, restrictions confining Jews to the Pale of Settlements, basically eastern boundaries of the Polish state in the 18th century, were lifted and many Jews moved to large eastern cities, while others migrated to Russia, especially Moscow and Petrograd (later Leningrad, and now St. Petersburg). The 1930s famine was confined largely to the villages, and losses fell mostly on Ukrainians who were then predominantly rural.
World War II inflicted huge losses on all, but some groups were singled out for special treatment. Soviet occupation of western Ukraine in 1939, which was under Poland between the wars, precipitated extensive arrests and deportation. All groups were affected, but Poles suffered the most. Former Polish officials and community leaders were arrested, killed, or deported with their families. The Soviet government also signed a population exchange agreement with Germany. Some Germans migrated to Germany under this agreement, and a small number of Ukrainians in the German zone went to Ukraine. At the outbreak of Soviet-German hostilities in 1941, Germans from the Black Sea steppes were deported to the interior, especially Kazakhstan. Many Jews fled before the advancing German army; those who remained were almost completely exterminated. Reconquest of Ukraine brought another wave of deportations for disloyalty, real and imagined, to the Soviet regime. In the east, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, and Armenians were deported, and insurrection in western Ukraine resulted in massive deportation of Ukrainians after the war. The so-called voluntary exchange of population between Poland and Ukraine began the expulsion of Poles from Ukraine, and a small number of Jews, who had been Polish citizens before the war, chose to go to Poland as well.
The first post-war census, in 1959, showed a far different ethnic composition than had been the case earlier in the century. Ukrainians now comprised 77 percent of the population of almost 42 million. Russians increased to 17 percent, Jews dropped to 2 percent, Poles to 1 percent, and other nationalities to 3 percent. Between 1959 and 1989, Ukraine's population grew annually at 0.6 percent, Ukrainians at 0.5 percent, and Russians at 9.1 percent, due to migration and assimilation. As the Soviet Union started disintegrating, additional changes occurred; Crimean Tatars were permitted to return, and Jews were allowed to emigrate. The two trends continued since independence.
While most foreigners do not encounter problems with violent crime in Ukraine, there is significant concern with racially-motivated attacks carried out by individuals associated with neo-Nazi groups and extreme nationalist groups. Over the past few years, hate crimes directed against non-Slavic and religious minorities, particularly members of the Orthodox Jewish community, have increased. Victims have reported verbal harassment and discrimination as well as physical assaults resulting in serious injuries and sometimes death. Many reported attacks have occurred in well-known areas in downtown Kyiv commonly frequented by tourists.
