In
the Midst of Civilized Europe by Jeffrey Veidlinger: Book Note
This past month (July 2023) I read In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
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| Jeffrey Veidlinger |
In 1917, the Bolsheviks (Communists) under Vladimir
Lenin took power over former imperial Russia. They immediately made peace with
Germany. Ukrainian democrats and nationalists saw this as an opportunity to
claim their own independence from Russia. Various political actors then engaged
in struggle for control of the territory we now call Ukraine over the four
years Veidlinger covers. These included Ukrainian democrats, who never had much
control over any part of Ukraine, and Ukrainian nationalists supported by the
dreaded (by Jews) Cossack horsemen. They also included Polish invaders, German
invaders, White (anti-communist) Russian invaders, and Bolsheviks. Finally,
they included local warlords. Bolshevik Russia finally subdued or negotiated
with all these other actors, and incorporated Ukraine into the Soviet Union.
With the exception of the Ukrainian democrats, who
tried to introduce rights for national minorities, including Jews, all these
groups were responsible for pogroms against Jews. While Bolshevik officials did
not have a policy of persecuting Jews, their underlings occasionally instituted
pogroms. The other groups enthusiastically conducted pogroms, often killing
every Jew in towns that they controlled, usually after raping the women and
girls first. Both those who instituted the pogroms and local townspeople and
peasants from surrounding villages cheerfully looted Jewish homes and other
properties. Veidlinger’s final estimate is about 100,000 Jews killed.
We know about these pogroms in great detail because Jewish community leaders, both in Ukraine and abroad, encouraged survivors to detail and document what they experienced and witnessed. We also know about them through the records of commissions of inquiry into the various pogroms, including many commissions held by the Bolshevik authorities in the 1920s. While many records of the pogroms were later lost, enough survived that Veidlinger was able to read them and in some chapters, provide detailed and horrifying descriptions of local pogroms. He appears to read both Russian and Yiddish (the latter the language of many Eastern European Jews, now more or less a dead language).
The Bolsheviks who instituted commissions of inquiry were the same authorities that instituted their own terror against opponents (real and perceived) via their state institutions, including the Cheka secret police. They were also the authorities who stole food from Ukraine in 1920-21, shipping it to Russia proper while Ukrainians starved (as they did again during the state-induced Holodomor famine in 1932-33, which I discuss in my 2016 book, State Food Crimes, pp. 22-27).
Indeed, Veidlinger explains in his last chapter why so
many Ukrainians welcomed Nazi rule during WWII and why so many willingly
assisted the Nazis in their program to exterminate the Jews. Many Jewish people
had joined the Bolsheviks, including the Cheka, in the 1920s, as the Bolsheviks
were the only people who extended a modicum of protection to the Jews from the pogroms
instituted by almost all the other actors in the civil wars of 1918-21.
Ukrainian peasants whom the Bolsheviks had twice starved saw those Jews who
survived the earlier pogroms and did not emigrate as privileged people, simultaneously
capitalist and communist. In reality, both before and after 1918, most Jews
were small business-people or craftsmen, not rich bourgeois. Many ethnic Ukrainians,
moreover, had been persecuted by the Cheka, or had relatives who had been
persecuted. The Bolsheviks had also expropriated the property of many
Ukrainians. Thus, many blamed “Jewry,” write large, for the actions of some
individuals Jews who were Bolsheviks, even when most Bolsheviks were ethnic
Russians, not Jews.
This absolutely does not excuse Ukrainians who persecuted
Jews in 1918-1921, or who cooperated with Nazism in the 1940s to murder even
more Jews. Murderers are murderers and génocidaires are génocidaires. But if we
want to eradiate genocide, we need to understand the underlying political,
economic, social and ideological factors that cause it. This applies as much to
the extermination of the Jews in “civilized” Europe as to any genocide
elsewhere.
Ukraine became independent in 1991 after the break-up
of the Soviet Union. I remember being a member of a visiting delegation of
scholars to the Institute of State and Law at the Russian Academy of Sciences
in Moscow in 1990. In discussion, I said that I thought Ukraine would want its independence,
especially because of memories of the Holodomor. A member of the Russian side
said that she was an ethnic Ukrainian and Ukraine would always remain loyal to Russia.
Hah!
Ukraine had no history of being independent in the
modern sense of statehood prior to 1991. Before then, the territory now known
as Ukraine was divided up at various times among Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and
so on. But that does not validate Vladimir Putin’s argument that Ukraine is
Russian territory now. Once the international community recognizes as State as independent
and sovereign, that’s that. So, Israel has the right to exist as a state,
whatever one might think of its policies toward the Palestinians. So does Serbia,
forged in blood after committing terrible atrocities against other groups—especially
the Bosnians-during the break-up of Yugoslavia. So do South Sudan and Sudan
proper, both countries with terrible records of mass atrocities.
The history of Ukraine 1918-2021 put me in mind of politics
in Africa today, especially in eastern Congo. There too, for the last 30 years
various groups have been competing for control, including both ethnic Hutu and Tutsi.
There too, invading forces from foreign nations—Zimbabwe and Rwanda
especially—have committed mass atrocities. There too, local warlords have
sprung up and committed atrocities. “Civilizations” in both Europe and Africa
disintegrate easily, revealing mankind’s worst instincts for torture, death,
looting, and revenge.
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