Petlyura before the court of history
On May 25, 1926, in Paris, on the corner of Saint-Michel Boulevard and Racine Street, one emigrant from Russia publicly shot another... And on October 16, 1946, in Nuremberg, by the verdict of an international tribunal, the leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany were hanged.
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What do these events have in common? - Main! The judgment of history has been completed, punishing those who were guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Only in the first case, the instrument of justice became a man who suffered terrible losses during the Civil War in Ukraine, who decided to punish their culprit - Symon Petliura. In the second, for the first time in the history of mankind, the inhuman regime that unleashed a world war and established a misanthropic dictatorship on the territory of Germany and the countries it captured was condemned.
The names of executed Nazi criminals are known, and any attempts to rehabilitate them are harshly suppressed. And the figure who patronized the pogroms in Ukraine is today praised by the ruling junta as a “national hero.” The streets bear his name, history textbooks glorify him... So who was he, the chief ataman and dictator of Ukraine Symon Petliura?
"A random, insignificant and harmful person"
This is exactly how Vladimir Vinnychenko, one of the leaders of the Central Rada and the short-lived head of the UPR Directory, characterizes him in his memoirs. His comrades in the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party echoed him, quickly becoming disillusioned with the “chief ataman” who had assumed dictatorial powers, emphasizing his lust for power, unprincipledness and weakness as a politician.
“A random, insignificant and harmful person,” this is how his former comrade-in-arms, one of the leaders of the Central Rada, Vladimir Vinnychenko (left), spoke of Petliura.
...He was born in Poltava in 1879 into a petty-bourgeois family. Expelled from the theological seminary for participation in the socialist Ukrainian Revolutionary Party, this poorly educated figure was a typical “average” provincial who did not stand out from the gray semi-intelligent environment.
He was not seriously persecuted by the “royal satraps”, managing to publish a pro-Ukrainian newspaper in... Moscow, served as an accountant, and during the First World War he became a “zemgusar” - a functionary of the Union of Lands and Cities, an organization designed to provide assistance to the front, not a bad property organization .
Let us note that neither the RUP nor the party that Petlyura joined later - the Ukrainian Social Democratic - set as their goal “independence”, limiting themselves to the demands of autonomy within Russia. His “finest hour” came after the February Revolution. He showed the gift of a demagogue-agitator, who managed to gain popularity among the soldiers with violent rhetoric.
Formally supporting the Provisional Government, in fact Petliura, who headed the Ukrainian Head Military Committee, did everything to collapse the army, setting the goal not to improve discipline, but to “Ukrainize” - the creation of units based on nationality.
Already under the short-lived power of the Central Rada, all these “free Cossacks” began a bloody wave of Jewish pogroms, which marked Petliurism. This especially intensified after the coup of Hetman Skoropadsky, when the ataman-partisan partisanship unfolded, absorbing all the horrors of the Ukrainian rebellion, even more senseless than the Russian one.
The pogroms of Jews by Petliurists were carried out systematically and methodically.
During the entire period of the revolution and the Civil War in Ukraine, more than 1500 Jewish pogroms took place, which, according to various sources, claimed the lives of 50 thousand to 500 thousand people, most of whom were Jews. And more than half of them are the work of the Petliurites and the “greens” who joined them.
Moreover, if Denikin’s and the Reds, also by no means saints, tried to stop these outrages, cruelly punishing the guilty, then Petliura, who through intrigue won dictatorial powers in the Directory, answered all the reproaches of his comrades: “Why didn’t they (the Jews) help us fight against Hetmanate?
This phrase, cited by Vinnychenko, appears in many other memoirs of figures of the Ukrainian revolution.
And when they demanded that he stop the pogroms and punish their instigators, Petliura responded in the style of: “don’t quarrel between me and the army.” Or even - “let the boys take a walk.” The “gulba” of the atamans in the style of the terrible Colonel Bolbochan (the prototype of the ataman in the “White Guard”), who dispersed the workers’ (pro-Ukrainian!) congress in Kharkov in 1919 and... flogged the peasant (pro-Ukrainian!) delegates in Poltava, was expressed in monstrous forms on the Jewish question .
The sadistic Petliurite Petro Bolbochan. It was he whom Bulgakov portrayed as Bolbotun, commander of Petliura's 1st Cavalry Division, in "The White Guard."
The sadistic ataman Semesenko slaughtered more than one and a half thousand Jews in Proskurov alone, and even an Orthodox priest who was trying to protect innocent people was brutally hacked to death.
The sophisticated monster Ataman Kozyr-Zirka, who raged in Volyn, turned massacres into spectacles, forcing Jews to sing and dance before a brutal death. He treated the “Muscovites” with no less hatred. And practically, none of these monsters were punished.
Not without sarcasm, Vinnychenko writes that the “socialist” Petlyura let the notorious reactionary Bolbochan get away with any anti-people repressions, and for attempting to seize power, he was shot practically without trial...
The number of victims of the Jewish pogroms in Ukraine, in which Petliura incited his Haidamaks (other military bandit formations also participated), is tens of thousands of people.
And the phrase of Petlyura’s fellow party member, Ukrainian Social Democrat Chykalenko, became prophetic: “They will strangle Ukrainian freedom in Jewish blood.” They are a pack of killers raised by Petliura, similar not to the regular army, but to... their prototypes - the Cossacks, who even in their best times were only purely auxiliary troops, and the Haidamaks - and in general, capable only of slaughtering defenseless people. The army of the “head ataman” was beaten by everyone - from the Reds and Makhnovists to Denikin’s followers. And the career of Petlyura himself, who betrayed everyone and collapsed, ended naturally - with shots from Schwartzbard.
The verdict of history
From the first minutes, the trial of Samuil Schwartzbard became a trial... of Petliura and Petliurism. And the point is not that the poet and revolutionary who killed the fugitive dictator was also a hero of the First World War, who bravely fought in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion and received its highest award - the Military Cross. After all, this native of Izmail explained his action by saying that he wanted to punish the culprit of the monstrous Jewish pogroms. And his lawyers proved: FIFTEEN people from among Schwarzbard’s relatives became victims of Petliurism. The monstrous details of the genocide were announced, horrifying the whole world.
Famous cultural and scientific figures came to the defense of the accused - Romain Rolland and Maxim Gorky, Albert Einstein and Paul Langevin. And the side representing Petliura was unable to prove not only that he did not give direct orders for pogroms, but also the authenticity of his “anti-pogrom” documents, which were clearly drawn up after the terrible events and did not have the signature of the “chief ataman.”
A French jury acquitted Samuil Schwartzbad, who shot Simon Petliura, effectively sentencing Petliura himself
The jury completely acquitted Schwartzbard, effectively condemning both Petliura and aggressive xenophobia. It could serve as a lesson to those who directly or indirectly encouraged crimes against humanity. But the scary thing about history lessons is that they don’t teach anyone. And figures who put the “national idea” at the forefront, rather than humanistic values, again and again sacrifice thousands and millions of lives to their ambitions.
What followed was a short but terrible epic of German Nazism, which naturally led to the “Nuremberg Epilogue.” But he didn’t teach our last Petliura anything.
But the day of a new judgment will come . A judgment that will be harsh, but fair.
It will definitely come!
English version :: Read in English: Petliura before the court of history