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.[...]
On 14 October 2017, the recently created Day of the Defender of Ukraine, the municipal government of the city of Vinnytsia erected a statue to Symon Petliura. This created consternation among many Jews in Ukraine and abroad, not least because the statue was in Ierusalymka, Vinnytsia’s historical Jewish quarter. Yet it also provided the Kremlin with further ammunition to discredit Ukraine as a bulwark of fascism and antisemitism. “Petliura was man who had Nazi views,” reacted Vladimir Putin at the time, “an antisemite who massacred Jews during a time of war.” [...]
The pogroms were not UPR policy. They were outbursts of military indiscipline during which UPR troops and commanders, proceeding from the prejudice that Jews supported the UPR’s enemies, punished entire Jewish communities, brutally and without discrimination. Some perpetrators had only a very loose affiliation with the UPR.
However, the view of Jews as hostile was not simply held by a few rogue units or irregular peasant partisans. Representatives of the UPR in powerful positions singled out Jews for special punishment. For example, the commandants of the cities of Dubno and Kremenets’ exacted a extraordinary tax from the local Jewish community as a punishments for its perceived disloyalty to the UPR.
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