Steven, some more on Denikin, the Jews, and the Russian Civil War
You may recall that Emile's little squib had the following to say about General Denikin, the (White) Commander of the Volunteer Army:
Wherever General Denikin's authority could reach, protection was always accorded to the Jewish population, and strenuous efforts were made by his officers to prevent reprisals and to punish those guilty of them. So much was this the case that the Petlurist propaganda against General Denikin denounced him as the Protector of the Jews....
Would it were so. When Denikin's Volunteer Army, together with Petliura's Ukrainian Nationalists, took Kiev in mid-1919, a new wave of anti-Semitic pogroms was sweeping the Ukraine. And according to W. Bruce Lincoln, a prominent historian of the Russian Civil War,Denikin did not do much to control his men. (It should be noted that all sides -- and there were many sides -- to the conflict had been inflicting incredible atrocities on one another, and that the fighting men had become incredibly brutalized.) From Lincoln's Red Victory:
Although Denikin himself never approved of pogroms, he spoke out against them with caution, for there was dissension enough in the White camp without taking its officers to task for their blatant anti-Semitism...Unwilling to punish officers whose paranoid delusions about the Jewish threat made them obsessed with seeking out and eradicating "Jew-Communists", Denikin allowed the pogroms to continue as the Whites searched frantically for common ground upon which to construct a social base of support for their regime among the bitterly anti-Semitic people of the Ukraine. No longer spontaneous outpourings of racial and religious hatred, pogroms now became coldly calculated incidents of wholesale rape, extreme brutality, and unprecedented destruction. In a single day at the end of August in the Jewish settlement of Kremenchug, the Whites raped 350 women, including pregnant women, women who had just given birth, and even women who were dying.
Then, as the Reds began to challenge the Volunteer Army more effectively from the north and east that fall, the pogroms turned into orgies of mass butchery. At the end of September, a five-day pogrom destroyed two hundred buildings and slaughtered nearly two thousand Jews in Fastov....A few days later, the Jews of Kiev suffered a similar fate. Inflamed by articles in Shulgin's Kievlianin and its companion in anti-Semitism, Vechernie ogni, Denikin's men threw defenseless Jews from the upper stories of buildings, killed others with bayonets and sabers, and drowned still others in the river. "Gigantic five-and six-story buildings began to shriek from top to bottom," wrote Shulgin {who started it all - jbe] as he described how Kiev's Jews, "seized with mortal anguish," screamed "with inhuman voices" as the "men with bayonets" worked their way through the city's streets [to Shulgin's applause].
Bear in mind, of course, that these were not "revolutionaries," but mostly dirt-poor, uneducated Jews, who lived "beyond the Pale," forbidden to settle in Russia proper.
Petliura (with whom Denikin fell out) wasn't any better, of course. Here, too, the Jews were regarded as identical to the Bolsheviks:
Enraged by a Bolshevik attempt to seize the city [Prosukurov] Petliurist forces killed one Jew out of every fifteen, and then went on to nearby Felshtin, where they killed one in three. When the rivers thawed and navigation reopened, some of the anti-Bolshevik Ukrainian forces shifted their methods of execution from shooting to drowning and took particular pleasure in throwing Jews overboard from the steamers that plied the Dnepr River between Kiev and Chernobyl.
Plus ca change......
Eventually, of course, the Jews of Ukraine did look to the Bolsheviks to protect them. And life was generally safer for them in Bolshevik-held territory -- although here again there were occasional "outbreaks." Read Babel's Cossack stories in Red Cavalry, for example.
jbe
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