Following World War I, numerous armies tore Ukraine apart. All agreed on only one thing: the region’s greatest scourge was the Jews, who were humiliated, robbed, raped, and murdered – by their neighbors as much as by invading troops

In the spring of 1919, twenty months after the October Revolution had swept the Bolsheviks to power in the Russian capital of Petrograd, and eighteen months after the establishment of the socialist Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Volunteer Army of South Russia – better known as the White Army – began its march from the Don River basin toward Kyiv. The Whites, who sought to reunite the Russian Empire, weren’t the first armed forces to overrun the region during what was later termed the Russian Civil War. Within weeks of the Ukrainian declaration of independence, the Bolshevik Red Army invaded from the east, and by the spring of 1919, the area had also contended with a Polish invasion from the west and numerous insurrections from within. 

All were fighting to remake the remnants of the tsarist and Habsburg empires in their own images. All also agreed that the Jews, about 12 percent of the population, were in the way. Between 1918 and 1922, over fifteen hundred pogroms were perpetrated against the Jewish community of what subsequently became Ukraine, claiming the lives of over one hundred thousand people, forty thousand of them murdered in cold blood.

Most of these attacks were carried out by so-called warlords – hungry, disillusioned peasants and former soldiers with no clear political motivations. These insurgents periodically raided towns, where most Jews lived, plundering the food stores and leather and shoe workshops for supplies.

More deadly were the pogroms executed by state armies. The Ukrainian military, for instance, led by Symon Petliura, systematically murdered the Jews of Proskuriv, Zhytomyr, Ovruch, and elsewhere despite government-declared tolerance and multinationalism. The Red Army, too, committed atrocities against Jewish “bourgeois capitalists”.

 

Deadly Doctrine

Yet the most virulent Jew-haters were arguably those of the White Army. This army was responsible for fewer deaths than its counterparts, but at its most active in Ukraine – during the Whites’ rapid advance over the summer of 1919 and equally rapid retreat that December – it was the most lethal. Having inherited the Russian imperial forces’ distrust of Jews, the former tsarist officers commanding the White Army saw this population as the progenitor of Bolshevism and as an internal enemy whose perfidy had cost Russia the Great War.

The Whites’ propaganda tools allowed them to broadcast this narrative throughout the region and eventually around the globe. In addition to their own intelligence services and information agency, a network of sympathetic Russian-language newspapers and like-minded civic organizations spread their anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. During their three-month advance, for example, the Whites printed 1.5 million leaflets and over four million posters, reinforcing them with inflammatory lectures, brochures, and films screened in the mobile movie theaters that accompanied the troops.

Whereas many earlier pogroms were perpetrated by peasant soldiers or local toughs, the White attacks were instigated by Russian officers sworn to uphold law and order. These refined, well-bred men read philosophy and played classical music but were indoctrinated with the antiSemitism of the tsarist elites. As folklorist Shmuel Rubinshteyn put it:

The Jews had already lived through pogroms, but pogrom-mongers with university diplomas in hand, with noble titles, with French words on their tongues – this was new to them. […] These were people with manicured hands, with the noble faces of princes. (Shmuel Rubinshteyn, Between Fire and Sword: Memories of the Civil War in Ukraine, 1918–1920 [Warsaw: Emes, 1924], p. 61 [Yiddish])

Since April 1918, the Volunteer Army had been led by Anton Denikin (1872–1947), whose shaved head, prominent, black eyebrows, silver goatee, and handlebar mustache reflected the distinguished tsarist officer he was. A true Russian patriot, Denikin saw the Church, the tsar, and the army as a triptych holding the nation together. For him, the dissolution of the tsarist empire and the potential loss of what he called “South Russia” – the regions claimed by the Ukrainian People’s Republic – were the ultimate travesty. And those responsible for the Bolshevik Revolution, which had torn the empire apart, were the Jews – the “Pharisees, the leaders of the Russian Revolutionary Democracy” (Anton Denikin, The Russian Turmoil Memoirs: Military, Social, and Political [1920], p. 32).

According to John Ernest Hodgson, a British war correspondent embedded in Denikin’s army, the general and his officer corps had it all figured out:

The officers and men of the army laid practically all the blame for their country’s troubles on the Hebrew. They held that the whole cataclysm [i.e., the Russian Revolution and the tsar’s abdication] had been engineered by some great and mysterious secret society of international Jews, who, in the pay and at the orders of Germany, had seized the psychological moment and snatched the reins of government. (John Ernest Hodgson, With Denikin’s Armies: Being a Description of the Cossack Counter Revolution in South Russia, 1918–1920 [Temple Bar Publishing Co, 1932], pp. 54–55)