Symon Petliura and Józef Klemens Piłsudski (right), Vinnytsa, 1920. Source: Wikipedia. Public Domain.This year, 15 February marks the centenary of the Proskuriv pogrom. On this day in 1919, a detachment of the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) massacred around 1,500 Jews in this West-Central Ukrainian town. The unit’s commander Ivan Semesenko employed the common antisemitic canard of “Judeo-Bolshevism” as justification, accusing Jews of disloyalty to the UPR and sympathy for the Bolsheviks.
The massacre was perhaps the bloodiest of the Russian Civil War, and it was part of a much larger wave of antisemitic violence in Ukraine between 1917 and 1921: soldiers serving the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the “White” Russian Volunteer Army, independent warlords, bandits and, to a lesser extent, the Red Army murdered, raped, assaulted, mutilated and dispossessed tens of thousands of Jews.
The army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic was perhaps the worst perpetrator. The UPR had declared independence from Russia in January 1918, becoming the focus of many nationally conscious Ukrainians’ desire for liberation. It spent the next three years trying to defend itself from various enemies before the Bolsheviks finally defeated it at the end of 1920. However, according to the most reliable statistical investigation, its troops were responsible for about two fifths of all pogroms and half of the total deaths.[1]
