Лев Гунин - ГУЛаг Палестины

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)

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)

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.

Borys Martos Government Proclamation 12Apr1919 The scum of humanity

Above all the Government will not tolerate any pogroms against the

Jewish population in the Ukraine, and will employ every available means

for the purpose of combating these abject criminals, dangerous to the

State, who are disgracing our nation in the eyes of all the civilized nations

of the world.

Borys Martos (1879-1977) was a Ukrainian political

leader, co-operative organizer, and educator.

From a Government Proclamation

To the People of the Ukraine

Riwne, April 12, 1919

To preserve the peace and to maintain public law and order - as the first

condition of a free life for all citizens of the Ukrainian Democratic

Republic - the Ukrainian Government will fight with all its power against

violations of public order, will strike the brigands and pogrom

instigators with the severest punishment and expose them publicly. Above

all the Government will not tolerate any pogroms against the Jewish

population in the Ukraine, and will employ every available means for the

purpose of combating these abject criminals, dangerous to the State, who

are disgracing our nation in the eyes of all the civilized nations of the

world.

The Government of the Ukrainian Democratic Republic is certain that the

Ukrainian people - who themselves have suffered national slavery through

many years and are conscious of the worth of national freedom and

therefore proclaimed before all things the national-personal autonomy of

the minorities in the Ukraine - will support the Ukrainian Government in

eliminating these evil-doers who are the scum of humanity.

HOME DISINFORMATION PETLIURA 625 hits since 23Mar99

Arnold Margolin The Jewish Chronicle 16May1919 Interview on Petliura

The pogroms have been perpetrated by the people of the Black Hundred

and by provocateurs for the purpose of discrediting the Ukrainian

government.

An Interview with

Dr. Arnold Margolin in 1919

The Jewish Chronicle

London

May 16, 1919

Dr. Arnold Margolin, Head of the Ukrainian Diplomatic Mission in London,

Chairman of the "Jewish Territorial Society" in the Ukraine, was born in

Kiev (in 1877), attended Kiev University, and established himself in Kiev

as an attorney. Since 1903 he had been noted as a counsel for the

defense of the injured in pogrom excesses. Besides, he participated as a

counsel for the defense in many agrarian and political court trials. For

his revelations in the well-known Beilis case he was prosecuted by the

Minister of Justice of that time, Shcheglovitov, with the result that the

further practice of law was forbidden to him. He has taken part in the

Ukrainian Movement for many years, and has occupied himself with social