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toward Jews, and the reality that they are getting even better, 60 Minutes seemed bent on
encouraging their deterioration.
And, if 60 Minutes had wanted personal testimony concerning Ukrainian attitudes toward Jews to
bolster the dry facts coming from the opinion poll, then it could have consulted any number of
Ukrainian Jews who would have been happy to correct 60 Minutes' biases. The above-mentioned
Iosep Zissels, for example, would have offered observations such as that "There was a time when
the leaders of Pamiat [or "Pamyat" - the Russian anti-Semitic organization] would travel from
Russia to recruit supporters in Ukraine. They didn't find any. We are well aware of this fact"
(Ukrainian Weekly, January 26, 1992, p. 4)
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Is there any? Of course there is. Jewish Ukrainophobia is universal. Ukraine has some, just
as does the United States or Canada or Israel. But is there more Jewish Ukrainophobia in
Ukraine than elsewhere? Don't ask 60 Minutes - to ask such a question is to violate rules of
political correctness.
One thing missing from the above discussion of Ukrainian anti-Semitism, then, is any mention of
the reciprocal attitude of Jewish Ukrainophobia (or more generally of Jewish phobic responses
toward Gentiles or peoples of any other creed). But perhaps we would be able to evaluate
statistics on the rate of Ukrainian anti-Semitism more intelligently if we were able to put them
side by side with statistics on Jewish Ukrainophobia. If Ukrainian anti-Semitism shows a
declining trend over some interval, would this fact not be enriched by a comparison with the
trend of Jewish Ukrainophobia over the same interval? In a discussion of Ukrainian-Jewish
relations, how is it conceivable that the attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews is deemed relevant
and susceptible to quantification, but the attitudes of Jews toward Ukrainians is not? Here, as
in several other instances above, we see a curious paralysis of the comparative function, a
puzzling Ukrainian passivity in allowing the Jewish side to set the agenda for discussion and to
limit its parameters. Ukrainian motes are put under the microscope and measured and analyzed,
but Jewish beams are not.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Mailbag
60 Minutes' Mailbag comment on October 30, 1994 - the Sunday following the original The Ugly
Face of Freedom broadcast - was inadequate. It failed to retract or correct any of the
misinformation noted above. It failed to present the other side of the story. It continued to
pour fuel on the fire.
Of what possible relevance is it that - as 60 Minutes reports a letter as saying - a fraction of
Ukrainians refuses to admit that they collaborated with the Nazis? Possibly, some minuscule
fraction does irrationally refuse to admit this (60 Minutes offered no data, of course) - but so
what? The same might be true of every other group. Possibly some minuscule fraction of Jews
irrationally refuses to admit that Jews collaborated with the Nazis (I don't have any data
either), and yet 60 Minutes does not seem to find the existence of this group noteworthy enough
to broadcast.
The following Sunday, November 6, 1994, 60 Minutes continued to focus on the Ukrainian reaction
to the original broadcast, but without correction, without retraction, without apology. 60
Minutes is willing to go as far as admitting that Ukrainians are upset, but not as far as
divulging that the cause of that upset is irresponsible and negligent reporting.
As of November 21, 1997, 60 Minutes has not broadcast any correction or retraction or apology.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
A Sense of Responsibility
Jews have lived with no other peoples as intimately and for as long as they have with
Ukrainians. In this shared history, there have been bright periods and dark episodes. It is
possible to imagine a shared future in which the bright periods predominate and the dark
episodes are banished. This is the future that Ukrainians and Jews should strive toward, this
is the image that should guide them in their dialogues and that should have guided Mr. Safer in
his broadcast. Perhaps it is already the attitude that inspires the majority of both Ukrainians
and Jews.
The Jewish claim to a share of the newly-created nation of Ukraine is as tenable as that of the
ethnic Ukrainians and of the ethnic Russians and others who reside there. At present, all three
of these groups are beginning to mine that claim in relative peace. Differences are being
overlooked, cooperation is the norm, a bright future is possible.
Into this scene burst immature and undiplomatic people like Morley Safer needing a sensational
story, Simon Wiesenthal desperate to retain his relevance in the modern world by having it
believed that 1941 is repeating itself, and Yaakov Bleich disoriented by having been plucked
from the United States to fill this exotic role of rabbi of Ukraine and these three show no
grasp of the political situation, no comprehension of the complex world that they are
simplifying into their stereotypes, no sympathy for impulses toward reconciliation that are
manifest on all sides, certainly no sense of responsibility for nurturing these impulses. This
gang of three has no stake in Ukraine - Mr. Safer leaves for home immediately after reading his
lines into the camera, Mr. Wiesenthal lives in Vienna (where needing to get along with Germans
but not Ukrainians, he expediently concludes that Germans weren't as bad as Ukrainians), and
Yaakov Bleich - unhappy in his discovery that in slinging mud he has become muddied, every day
more deeply convinced that he has been miscast in this role of rabbi of Ukraine - we may expect
will shortly be catching a plane for home. What do any of them care if they are stirring up a
hornet's nest in Ukraine?
The Jews who are left behind in Ukraine, who have a stake in Ukraine, who need to get along - to
these 60 Minutes does not give air time. It's the irresponsible ones with nothing to lose who
are able to offer the more sensational testimonials.
And not only does 60 Minutes' trio of provocateurs have nothing to lose from chaos erupting in
Ukraine, they have this to gain - that if chaos does erupt, they will be able to play the role
of prophets who foretold its coming, and they will do this quite overlooking that they helped it
come.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
What 60 Minutes Should Do
(1) 60 Minutes owes its viewers a detailed correction, a retraction, an apology. The product
was defective, it is dangerous, it must be recalled.
Acknowledging that Ukrainians are upset or that they are protesting is not a correction, it is
not a retraction, and it is not an apology. Directing attention to Ukrainian feelings is 60
Minutes' way of deflecting attention away from its own negligence.
60 Minutes has valiantly investigated and exposed hundreds of corrupt, or merely erring, people
and institutions - the time has come to turn the focus inwards and to investigate and expose
itself. Of course this can only be done objectively by an external investigator relying on his
or her own independent staff. Inviting such an external investigator to do a 60 Minutes story
is the right thing to do; it will be appreciated and admired; it will raise 60 Minutes'
integrity from its currently lowered position to a new pinnacle. Damage control won't work. If
60 Minutes really wants respect, it should broadcast a story on itself and call it "The Ugly
Face of 60 Minutes."
As the misinformation that was planted in the original twelve-minute segment will take longer
than twelve minutes to uproot, 60 Minutes should devote an entire nominal sixty minutes to its
correction, retraction, and apology - only such a substantial allocation of time can begin to
undo the damage. At the other extreme, a correction, retraction, and apology confined to
Mailbag will be next to worthless.
(2) 60 Minutes should upgrade its research library by acquiring at least the two-volume
Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, the five-volume Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Orest Subtelny's
Ukraine: A History, and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. This seems a
modest investment to plug a huge and dangerous gap in awareness.
(3) But books are nothing if they are sitting on the shelves of biased researchers. Find out
who contributed to the travesty of "The Ugly Face of Freedom" and get rid of them. And don't
worry about their careers - with their special talents, they will be able to get good jobs with
supermarket tabloids writing about sightings of Elvis Presley and UFO landings.
(4) 60 Minutes should examine with a more skeptical eye materials concerning Ukrainians, and
concerning Eastern Europeans generally, that come from biased sources. As a minimal step, 60
Minutes could adopt the rule of thumb that anyone who considers Eastern Europeans to be
sub-human might better be assigned to some other topic.
(5) 60 Minutes should not be afraid to consult sources capable of balancing a biased story.
There are a large number of historians and other academics (some of whom are Ukrainian or East
European, some of whom are Jewish, some of whom are both, some of whom are neither) that could
have told 60 Minutes at a glance that "The Ugly Face of Freedom" was bunkum.
(6) 60 Minutes should rethink its heavy-handed reliance on the gimmick of interviewing by
ambush by means of which the side favored by 60 Minutes is apprised in advance of the nature of
the interview, has a chance to organize his thoughts, and comes out looking good whereas the
side ambushed is misled into believing that the interview will be supportive, but then is hit
with questions that are hostile and for which he is unprepared. The ambushed interviewee is
discomposed, flustered, fumbles in trying to collect his thoughts, the camera zooms in on his
confusion, and he appears duplicitous. It may be a tried-and-true formula, but it doesn't fool
every viewer and constitutes poor journalism in the case where the interviewee is innocent,
where he would have granted the interview even if he hadn't been misled as to its intent, and
where nothing more damning is extracted from him other than his consternation at having been
betrayed.
(7) In order to permit the viewer to verify the accuracy of a 60-Minutes translation, the
original statement should remain audible and not be muted to the point of unintelligibility, and
transcripts provided by 60 Minutes should include the original of any statements that had been
broadcast in translation.
(8) 60 Minutes should rely on professional translators with accredited competence in the
original language who might be counted on to provide an undistorted translation. Particularly,
60 Minutes should expect that if it relies on a Russian who merely claims that he understands
Ukrainian, it is inviting the sort of biased mistranslation that it did in fact get in its
broadcast.
(9) 60 Minutes should not tackle a complex, multi-faceted story unless it is willing to invest
sufficient resources to get it right. In a typical 60 Minutes story say the exposing of a
single corrupt individual - the number of issues involved, and the amount of data that is
relevant, is small, can be gathered with a modest research outlay, and can readily be contained
within a 12-minute segment. "The Ugly Face of Freedom," in contrast, presented conclusions on a
dozen topics any one of which would require the full resources of a single typical 60 Minutes
story to present fairly - and so, little wonder that most of these conclusions turned out to be
wrong.
(10) 60 Minutes should heighten its awareness of the distinction between raw data and
tenth-hand rumor. A hospital administrator examining a document and explaining how he knows
that it is a forgery is raw data from which 60 Minutes might be justified in extracting some
conclusion; that Symon Petliura slaughtered 60,000 Jews is a tenth-hand rumor which 60 Minutes
is incompetent to evaluate and which might constitute disinformation placed by a
special-interest group intent on hijacking a story and forcing it to travel in an unwanted
direction.
(11) 60 Minutes should ask Mr. Safer to resign. Mr. Safer's conduct was unprofessional,
irresponsible, vituperative. Mr. Safer has demonstrated an inability to distinguish impartial
reporting from rabid hatemongering and as a result has no place in mainstream journalism. He
has lost his credibility.
Mr. Safer, too, will be welcomed by the supermarket tabloids where he will find the heavy burden
of logic and consistency considerably lightened, and the constraints of having to make his words
correspond to the facts mercifully relaxed.
(12) 60 Minutes should do a story on Simon Wiesenthal and assign it to a reporter and to
researchers who have the courage to consider objectively such politically-incorrect but arguable
conclusions as that Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are self-contradictory and fantastic, that his
denunciations have sometimes proven to be irresponsible, and that he spent the war years as a
Gestapo agent.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
PostScript
A discussion relevant to the above critique concerns third-party attempts to incite
Ukrainian-Jewish animosity and can be found within the Ukrainian Archive at Ukrainian
Anti-Semitism: Genuine and Spontaneous or Only Apparent and Engineered? The relevance lies in
the fact that The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes which you have just read above has been the target of
a crude attempt at anti-Semitization, and at the discreditation of the author, myself, as is
documented particularly at Lubomyr Prytulak: Enemies of Ukraine anti-Semitize The Ugly Face of
60 Minutes.
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES
HOME DISINFORMATION PETLIURA 1441 hits since 23Mar99
Symon Petliura An Introduction
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.
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)
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)
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)
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
problems in the Ukraine. After the Revolution he was a member of the
Central Committee of the Socialist-Federalist Party, and for a time he
was Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the spring of 1919 he went
to Paris as a member of the Ukrainian Peace Delegation. Since January
1920 he has been the head of the Ukrainian Diplomatic Mission in London.
What is the attitude of the Jews toward the new Ukrainian State?
On the question of independence of the Ukraine the Jews
were split into two camps. On the one side there were the
assimilated Jews who having been brought up in the
All-Russian political spirit took a stand hostile to the
new Ukrainian State. On the other side there were the
majority of the Jews - the nationalists, Zionists and the
Jewish Socialist Parties - who declared their sympathy for
Ukrainian endeavors. The Jews who were themselves an
oppressed nation welcomed with sympathy the national
struggle of the Ukrainians.
The Jews were also split as to their attitude toward the
socialist program of the new state. The left wing of the
Bund and Poalej-Zion went hand-in-hand with the left
Ukrainian parties that were for the exclusion of the
bourgeoisie from the government. The majority of Jews were
on the side of those Ukrainian parties that interceded for
the West-European political system. But in spite of these
differences, almost all Jewish parties and organizations
recognized the right of the Ukrainian nation to its
independence.
What is the attitude of the Ukrainian government toward the Jews?
In the Ukraine which together with Galicia has a population
of 40 millions there live 3 1/2 million (8%) Jews. After
the Revolution the ruling power in the Ukraine rested in a
parliament in which all parties of the country, including
Jewish, were represented. That parliament ("Tsentralna
Rada") granted the Jews more freedom and rights than they
had anywhere in Europe at any time. All national
minorities, of course Jews too, were granted autonomy. It
must be stressed also that the Central Council (the
Parliament) set up a Supreme Court to which those lawyers
were appointed as judges, who had had courage to take a
stand against the Russian government during the Beilis
trial.
Here Margolin narrated the fate of the Ukraine after the overthrow of the
Tsentralna Rada and during the rule of Hetman Skoropadksy, and then
continued:
Hetman's rule lasted only eight months. [After its
overthrow] the Petlura Government renewed the autonomy of
national minorities and again appointed Jewish ministers,
viz. Mr. Goldelman and myself. Jews belong also to the
diplomatic missions which have been sent abroad by the
Ukrainian government. The noted Jewish historian, Dr.
Wischintzer, one of the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia,
is the secretary of the Ukrainian legation in England.
How does this government's attitude agree with the fact of anti-Jewish
pogroms?
There is a difference between pogroms which, unfortunately,
have occurred now in the Ukraine, and pogroms in Russia
during the tsarist regime. While the tsarist government
had itself instigated and organized pogroms, the Ukrainian
government is in no way responsible for them. In November
1918 I myself saw the proclamations of the government in
the Ukrainian villages and cities which very vehemently
condemned the pogroms and explained to the Ukrainian people
that the Jews are Ukrainian fellow-citizens and brothers to
whom full rights are due. When, however, demoralization
had set in the units of the Ukrainian army, its worst
elements began to plunder. Again the Ukrainian government
rose vigorously against the pogroms, punishing with death
the perpetrators of the pogroms and expressing its sorrow
for the victims. To my regret, I must state that the
latest pogroms which, as far as I know, took place during
the months of February and March were exceedingly serious.
They have been perpetrated by the people of the Black
Hundred and by provocateurs for the purpose of discrediting
the Ukrainian government.
These occurences made a shocking impression upon me, and at
the end of March I tendered the government my resignation.
I recognized that fact that the government was blameless; I
found it, however, hard to occupy an official post in a
country in which my brothers were slaughtered. My
resignation was not accepted and the government requested
me to continue in my official duties, at least abroad. Now
I am one of the four representatives of the Ukraine at the
Peace Conference. There is no anti-Semitic tendency in the
Ukrainian government.
Margolin denies that Jews are playing an important role in the Bolshevist
movement, as it is generally assumed. To be sure, there are also Jews
among the Bolshevists, but among Jews in general the Bolshevists
constitute merely an insignificant minority. The Jewish Zionist and
other patriotic organizations received 70% of the votes at all
elections. There were no Jews at all among the Russian sailors who
played such an important part in the Bolshevist revolution.
The fact that there are seemingly so many Jews among the Bolshevists,
Margolin attributed to the circumstances that Jews distinguish themselves
in all activity by their great energy, and hence the impression arises
that there are many Jews in each political party.
(The Jewish Chronicle, London, May 16, 1919, in F. Pigido (ed.), Material
Concerning Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Years of the Revolution
(1917-1921): Collection of Documents and Testimonies by Prominent Jewish
Political Workers, The Ukrainian Information Bureau, Munich, 1956)
HOME DISINFORMATION PETLIURA 539 hits since 25Mar99
Symon Petliura Jewish delegation 18Jul1919 Provocation of reactionaries and imperialists
The delegation asked for granting of an opportunity to Jewish intellectuals
to work toward strengthening Ukrainian statehood, and for protection of
the Jewish population against the excesses which have taken place as
the result of provocation on the part of various Russian reactionaries and
Polish imperialists who thus wish to discredit the whole Ukrainian cause in
the eyes of Europe.
Reception of a delegation
of Jewish citizens
by Petlura.
On July 17 of this year the Commander-in-Chief Petlura received a
delegation of Jewish citizens at the Office of the Directorate in
Kamenets-Podolsk. The Delegation included: Dr. Meier Kleiderman, the
representative of the Jewish community; Alterman, the representative of
the Zionist organization; Gutman, the representative of the rabbis;
encouraging their deterioration.
And, if 60 Minutes had wanted personal testimony concerning Ukrainian attitudes toward Jews to
bolster the dry facts coming from the opinion poll, then it could have consulted any number of
Ukrainian Jews who would have been happy to correct 60 Minutes' biases. The above-mentioned
Iosep Zissels, for example, would have offered observations such as that "There was a time when
the leaders of Pamiat [or "Pamyat" - the Russian anti-Semitic organization] would travel from
Russia to recruit supporters in Ukraine. They didn't find any. We are well aware of this fact"
(Ukrainian Weekly, January 26, 1992, p. 4)
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Is there any? Of course there is. Jewish Ukrainophobia is universal. Ukraine has some, just
as does the United States or Canada or Israel. But is there more Jewish Ukrainophobia in
Ukraine than elsewhere? Don't ask 60 Minutes - to ask such a question is to violate rules of
political correctness.
One thing missing from the above discussion of Ukrainian anti-Semitism, then, is any mention of
the reciprocal attitude of Jewish Ukrainophobia (or more generally of Jewish phobic responses
toward Gentiles or peoples of any other creed). But perhaps we would be able to evaluate
statistics on the rate of Ukrainian anti-Semitism more intelligently if we were able to put them
side by side with statistics on Jewish Ukrainophobia. If Ukrainian anti-Semitism shows a
declining trend over some interval, would this fact not be enriched by a comparison with the
trend of Jewish Ukrainophobia over the same interval? In a discussion of Ukrainian-Jewish
relations, how is it conceivable that the attitudes of Ukrainians toward Jews is deemed relevant
and susceptible to quantification, but the attitudes of Jews toward Ukrainians is not? Here, as
in several other instances above, we see a curious paralysis of the comparative function, a
puzzling Ukrainian passivity in allowing the Jewish side to set the agenda for discussion and to
limit its parameters. Ukrainian motes are put under the microscope and measured and analyzed,
but Jewish beams are not.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
Mailbag
60 Minutes' Mailbag comment on October 30, 1994 - the Sunday following the original The Ugly
Face of Freedom broadcast - was inadequate. It failed to retract or correct any of the
misinformation noted above. It failed to present the other side of the story. It continued to
pour fuel on the fire.
Of what possible relevance is it that - as 60 Minutes reports a letter as saying - a fraction of
Ukrainians refuses to admit that they collaborated with the Nazis? Possibly, some minuscule
fraction does irrationally refuse to admit this (60 Minutes offered no data, of course) - but so
what? The same might be true of every other group. Possibly some minuscule fraction of Jews
irrationally refuses to admit that Jews collaborated with the Nazis (I don't have any data
either), and yet 60 Minutes does not seem to find the existence of this group noteworthy enough
to broadcast.
The following Sunday, November 6, 1994, 60 Minutes continued to focus on the Ukrainian reaction
to the original broadcast, but without correction, without retraction, without apology. 60
Minutes is willing to go as far as admitting that Ukrainians are upset, but not as far as
divulging that the cause of that upset is irresponsible and negligent reporting.
As of November 21, 1997, 60 Minutes has not broadcast any correction or retraction or apology.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
A Sense of Responsibility
Jews have lived with no other peoples as intimately and for as long as they have with
Ukrainians. In this shared history, there have been bright periods and dark episodes. It is
possible to imagine a shared future in which the bright periods predominate and the dark
episodes are banished. This is the future that Ukrainians and Jews should strive toward, this
is the image that should guide them in their dialogues and that should have guided Mr. Safer in
his broadcast. Perhaps it is already the attitude that inspires the majority of both Ukrainians
and Jews.
The Jewish claim to a share of the newly-created nation of Ukraine is as tenable as that of the
ethnic Ukrainians and of the ethnic Russians and others who reside there. At present, all three
of these groups are beginning to mine that claim in relative peace. Differences are being
overlooked, cooperation is the norm, a bright future is possible.
Into this scene burst immature and undiplomatic people like Morley Safer needing a sensational
story, Simon Wiesenthal desperate to retain his relevance in the modern world by having it
believed that 1941 is repeating itself, and Yaakov Bleich disoriented by having been plucked
from the United States to fill this exotic role of rabbi of Ukraine and these three show no
grasp of the political situation, no comprehension of the complex world that they are
simplifying into their stereotypes, no sympathy for impulses toward reconciliation that are
manifest on all sides, certainly no sense of responsibility for nurturing these impulses. This
gang of three has no stake in Ukraine - Mr. Safer leaves for home immediately after reading his
lines into the camera, Mr. Wiesenthal lives in Vienna (where needing to get along with Germans
but not Ukrainians, he expediently concludes that Germans weren't as bad as Ukrainians), and
Yaakov Bleich - unhappy in his discovery that in slinging mud he has become muddied, every day
more deeply convinced that he has been miscast in this role of rabbi of Ukraine - we may expect
will shortly be catching a plane for home. What do any of them care if they are stirring up a
hornet's nest in Ukraine?
The Jews who are left behind in Ukraine, who have a stake in Ukraine, who need to get along - to
these 60 Minutes does not give air time. It's the irresponsible ones with nothing to lose who
are able to offer the more sensational testimonials.
And not only does 60 Minutes' trio of provocateurs have nothing to lose from chaos erupting in
Ukraine, they have this to gain - that if chaos does erupt, they will be able to play the role
of prophets who foretold its coming, and they will do this quite overlooking that they helped it
come.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
What 60 Minutes Should Do
(1) 60 Minutes owes its viewers a detailed correction, a retraction, an apology. The product
was defective, it is dangerous, it must be recalled.
Acknowledging that Ukrainians are upset or that they are protesting is not a correction, it is
not a retraction, and it is not an apology. Directing attention to Ukrainian feelings is 60
Minutes' way of deflecting attention away from its own negligence.
60 Minutes has valiantly investigated and exposed hundreds of corrupt, or merely erring, people
and institutions - the time has come to turn the focus inwards and to investigate and expose
itself. Of course this can only be done objectively by an external investigator relying on his
or her own independent staff. Inviting such an external investigator to do a 60 Minutes story
is the right thing to do; it will be appreciated and admired; it will raise 60 Minutes'
integrity from its currently lowered position to a new pinnacle. Damage control won't work. If
60 Minutes really wants respect, it should broadcast a story on itself and call it "The Ugly
Face of 60 Minutes."
As the misinformation that was planted in the original twelve-minute segment will take longer
than twelve minutes to uproot, 60 Minutes should devote an entire nominal sixty minutes to its
correction, retraction, and apology - only such a substantial allocation of time can begin to
undo the damage. At the other extreme, a correction, retraction, and apology confined to
Mailbag will be next to worthless.
(2) 60 Minutes should upgrade its research library by acquiring at least the two-volume
Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, the five-volume Encyclopaedia of Ukraine, Orest Subtelny's
Ukraine: A History, and Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews. This seems a
modest investment to plug a huge and dangerous gap in awareness.
(3) But books are nothing if they are sitting on the shelves of biased researchers. Find out
who contributed to the travesty of "The Ugly Face of Freedom" and get rid of them. And don't
worry about their careers - with their special talents, they will be able to get good jobs with
supermarket tabloids writing about sightings of Elvis Presley and UFO landings.
(4) 60 Minutes should examine with a more skeptical eye materials concerning Ukrainians, and
concerning Eastern Europeans generally, that come from biased sources. As a minimal step, 60
Minutes could adopt the rule of thumb that anyone who considers Eastern Europeans to be
sub-human might better be assigned to some other topic.
(5) 60 Minutes should not be afraid to consult sources capable of balancing a biased story.
There are a large number of historians and other academics (some of whom are Ukrainian or East
European, some of whom are Jewish, some of whom are both, some of whom are neither) that could
have told 60 Minutes at a glance that "The Ugly Face of Freedom" was bunkum.
(6) 60 Minutes should rethink its heavy-handed reliance on the gimmick of interviewing by
ambush by means of which the side favored by 60 Minutes is apprised in advance of the nature of
the interview, has a chance to organize his thoughts, and comes out looking good whereas the
side ambushed is misled into believing that the interview will be supportive, but then is hit
with questions that are hostile and for which he is unprepared. The ambushed interviewee is
discomposed, flustered, fumbles in trying to collect his thoughts, the camera zooms in on his
confusion, and he appears duplicitous. It may be a tried-and-true formula, but it doesn't fool
every viewer and constitutes poor journalism in the case where the interviewee is innocent,
where he would have granted the interview even if he hadn't been misled as to its intent, and
where nothing more damning is extracted from him other than his consternation at having been
betrayed.
(7) In order to permit the viewer to verify the accuracy of a 60-Minutes translation, the
original statement should remain audible and not be muted to the point of unintelligibility, and
transcripts provided by 60 Minutes should include the original of any statements that had been
broadcast in translation.
(8) 60 Minutes should rely on professional translators with accredited competence in the
original language who might be counted on to provide an undistorted translation. Particularly,
60 Minutes should expect that if it relies on a Russian who merely claims that he understands
Ukrainian, it is inviting the sort of biased mistranslation that it did in fact get in its
broadcast.
(9) 60 Minutes should not tackle a complex, multi-faceted story unless it is willing to invest
sufficient resources to get it right. In a typical 60 Minutes story say the exposing of a
single corrupt individual - the number of issues involved, and the amount of data that is
relevant, is small, can be gathered with a modest research outlay, and can readily be contained
within a 12-minute segment. "The Ugly Face of Freedom," in contrast, presented conclusions on a
dozen topics any one of which would require the full resources of a single typical 60 Minutes
story to present fairly - and so, little wonder that most of these conclusions turned out to be
wrong.
(10) 60 Minutes should heighten its awareness of the distinction between raw data and
tenth-hand rumor. A hospital administrator examining a document and explaining how he knows
that it is a forgery is raw data from which 60 Minutes might be justified in extracting some
conclusion; that Symon Petliura slaughtered 60,000 Jews is a tenth-hand rumor which 60 Minutes
is incompetent to evaluate and which might constitute disinformation placed by a
special-interest group intent on hijacking a story and forcing it to travel in an unwanted
direction.
(11) 60 Minutes should ask Mr. Safer to resign. Mr. Safer's conduct was unprofessional,
irresponsible, vituperative. Mr. Safer has demonstrated an inability to distinguish impartial
reporting from rabid hatemongering and as a result has no place in mainstream journalism. He
has lost his credibility.
Mr. Safer, too, will be welcomed by the supermarket tabloids where he will find the heavy burden
of logic and consistency considerably lightened, and the constraints of having to make his words
correspond to the facts mercifully relaxed.
(12) 60 Minutes should do a story on Simon Wiesenthal and assign it to a reporter and to
researchers who have the courage to consider objectively such politically-incorrect but arguable
conclusions as that Mr. Wiesenthal's stories are self-contradictory and fantastic, that his
denunciations have sometimes proven to be irresponsible, and that he spent the war years as a
Gestapo agent.
CONTENTS:
Preface
The Galicia Division
Quality of Translation
Ukrainian Homogeneity
Were Ukrainians Nazis?
Simon Wiesenthal
What Happened in Lviv?
Nazi Propaganda Film
Collective Guilt
Paralysis of the Comparative
Function
60 Minutes' Cheap Shots
Ukrainian Anti-Semitism
Jewish Ukrainophobia
Mailbag
A Sense of Responsibility
What 60 Minutes Should Do
PostScript
PostScript
A discussion relevant to the above critique concerns third-party attempts to incite
Ukrainian-Jewish animosity and can be found within the Ukrainian Archive at Ukrainian
Anti-Semitism: Genuine and Spontaneous or Only Apparent and Engineered? The relevance lies in
the fact that The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes which you have just read above has been the target of
a crude attempt at anti-Semitization, and at the discreditation of the author, myself, as is
documented particularly at Lubomyr Prytulak: Enemies of Ukraine anti-Semitize The Ugly Face of
60 Minutes.
HOME DISINFORMATION 60 MINUTES
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Symon Petliura An Introduction
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.
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)
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)
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)
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
problems in the Ukraine. After the Revolution he was a member of the
Central Committee of the Socialist-Federalist Party, and for a time he
was Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs. In the spring of 1919 he went
to Paris as a member of the Ukrainian Peace Delegation. Since January
1920 he has been the head of the Ukrainian Diplomatic Mission in London.
What is the attitude of the Jews toward the new Ukrainian State?
On the question of independence of the Ukraine the Jews
were split into two camps. On the one side there were the
assimilated Jews who having been brought up in the
All-Russian political spirit took a stand hostile to the
new Ukrainian State. On the other side there were the
majority of the Jews - the nationalists, Zionists and the
Jewish Socialist Parties - who declared their sympathy for
Ukrainian endeavors. The Jews who were themselves an
oppressed nation welcomed with sympathy the national
struggle of the Ukrainians.
The Jews were also split as to their attitude toward the
socialist program of the new state. The left wing of the
Bund and Poalej-Zion went hand-in-hand with the left
Ukrainian parties that were for the exclusion of the
bourgeoisie from the government. The majority of Jews were
on the side of those Ukrainian parties that interceded for
the West-European political system. But in spite of these
differences, almost all Jewish parties and organizations
recognized the right of the Ukrainian nation to its
independence.
What is the attitude of the Ukrainian government toward the Jews?
In the Ukraine which together with Galicia has a population
of 40 millions there live 3 1/2 million (8%) Jews. After
the Revolution the ruling power in the Ukraine rested in a
parliament in which all parties of the country, including
Jewish, were represented. That parliament ("Tsentralna
Rada") granted the Jews more freedom and rights than they
had anywhere in Europe at any time. All national
minorities, of course Jews too, were granted autonomy. It
must be stressed also that the Central Council (the
Parliament) set up a Supreme Court to which those lawyers
were appointed as judges, who had had courage to take a
stand against the Russian government during the Beilis
trial.
Here Margolin narrated the fate of the Ukraine after the overthrow of the
Tsentralna Rada and during the rule of Hetman Skoropadksy, and then
continued:
Hetman's rule lasted only eight months. [After its
overthrow] the Petlura Government renewed the autonomy of
national minorities and again appointed Jewish ministers,
viz. Mr. Goldelman and myself. Jews belong also to the
diplomatic missions which have been sent abroad by the
Ukrainian government. The noted Jewish historian, Dr.
Wischintzer, one of the editors of the Jewish Encyclopedia,
is the secretary of the Ukrainian legation in England.
How does this government's attitude agree with the fact of anti-Jewish
pogroms?
There is a difference between pogroms which, unfortunately,
have occurred now in the Ukraine, and pogroms in Russia
during the tsarist regime. While the tsarist government
had itself instigated and organized pogroms, the Ukrainian
government is in no way responsible for them. In November
1918 I myself saw the proclamations of the government in
the Ukrainian villages and cities which very vehemently
condemned the pogroms and explained to the Ukrainian people
that the Jews are Ukrainian fellow-citizens and brothers to
whom full rights are due. When, however, demoralization
had set in the units of the Ukrainian army, its worst
elements began to plunder. Again the Ukrainian government
rose vigorously against the pogroms, punishing with death
the perpetrators of the pogroms and expressing its sorrow
for the victims. To my regret, I must state that the
latest pogroms which, as far as I know, took place during
the months of February and March were exceedingly serious.
They have been perpetrated by the people of the Black
Hundred and by provocateurs for the purpose of discrediting
the Ukrainian government.
These occurences made a shocking impression upon me, and at
the end of March I tendered the government my resignation.
I recognized that fact that the government was blameless; I
found it, however, hard to occupy an official post in a
country in which my brothers were slaughtered. My
resignation was not accepted and the government requested
me to continue in my official duties, at least abroad. Now
I am one of the four representatives of the Ukraine at the
Peace Conference. There is no anti-Semitic tendency in the
Ukrainian government.
Margolin denies that Jews are playing an important role in the Bolshevist
movement, as it is generally assumed. To be sure, there are also Jews
among the Bolshevists, but among Jews in general the Bolshevists
constitute merely an insignificant minority. The Jewish Zionist and
other patriotic organizations received 70% of the votes at all
elections. There were no Jews at all among the Russian sailors who
played such an important part in the Bolshevist revolution.
The fact that there are seemingly so many Jews among the Bolshevists,
Margolin attributed to the circumstances that Jews distinguish themselves
in all activity by their great energy, and hence the impression arises
that there are many Jews in each political party.
(The Jewish Chronicle, London, May 16, 1919, in F. Pigido (ed.), Material
Concerning Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during the Years of the Revolution
(1917-1921): Collection of Documents and Testimonies by Prominent Jewish
Political Workers, The Ukrainian Information Bureau, Munich, 1956)
HOME DISINFORMATION PETLIURA 539 hits since 25Mar99
Symon Petliura Jewish delegation 18Jul1919 Provocation of reactionaries and imperialists
The delegation asked for granting of an opportunity to Jewish intellectuals
to work toward strengthening Ukrainian statehood, and for protection of
the Jewish population against the excesses which have taken place as
the result of provocation on the part of various Russian reactionaries and
Polish imperialists who thus wish to discredit the whole Ukrainian cause in
the eyes of Europe.
Reception of a delegation
of Jewish citizens
by Petlura.
On July 17 of this year the Commander-in-Chief Petlura received a
delegation of Jewish citizens at the Office of the Directorate in
Kamenets-Podolsk. The Delegation included: Dr. Meier Kleiderman, the
representative of the Jewish community; Alterman, the representative of
the Zionist organization; Gutman, the representative of the rabbis;