On Khmelnitsky, Ukrainian Nationalist Icon

(Letters)

6 April 2014

Dear Comrades,

In the excerpt of his 1920 Baku Congress speech printed in “Soviet Power and the Liberation of Ukraine” (WV No. 1042, 21 March), Bolshevik Party member Mikhail Pavlovich stated: “All the Cossack revolts, the whole struggle of the Zaporozhian Camp, of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, were fundamentally a fight of the Ukrainian peasants against the yoke of the Polish landowners, against the Polonizers, the enemies of the Ukrainian national language and Ukrainian culture.” A Cossack nobleman, Khmelnitsky led the Ukrainian uprising of 1648, uniting Tatar cavalry regiments, Cossacks, peasants and burghers against Polish domination. However, he has also gone down in history as the commander of forces that carried out ghastly anti-Jewish pogroms that have come to be known as the Khmelnitsky massacre.

Following the defeat of Cossack and peasant rebels in 1638, the Polish lords had begun to intensify their exploitation and oppression of the peasant masses, instituting a system of serfdom that would subjugate formerly unburdened peasants. As a result, peasants were compelled to provide their lords with three or four days of work every week, perform personal services for the landowners and pay a tax to the royal treasury on their homes and farm animals.

Meanwhile, the Polish szlachta (feudal nobility) had resorted to the hated practice of arenda, a leasing arrangement by which the arendar (leaseholder) could profit from deepening the exploitation of the peasants. Since many arendars were Jewish and over half the crown lands in Ukraine had been leased out to Jewish entrepreneurs by the early decades of the 17th century, the peasants considered the Jews their mortal enemies. Moreover, Jews often held leases on the production and sale of alcohol and tobacco, further inflaming tensions. Thus, the stage was set for the horrible pogroms to follow.

A people-class in medieval and early modern Europe with a distinct culture and religion, the Jews performed a range of occupations that often forced them to act as middlemen between the ruling feudal lords and the oppressed peasant masses. Within this economic division of labor, Jews frequently filled such positions as merchant, moneylender, royal treasurer, peddler, tax collector and arendar. This situation served the rulers’ political interests by enabling them to deflect plebeian anger from themselves onto the “outsider”—an oft-repeated stratagem in the history of class societies.

In Ukraine: A History (2009), historian Orest Subtelny explained that many peasants and Cossacks used the opportunity of the Ukrainian uprising to vent pent-up hatred against those whom they saw as their oppressors—not least the Jews: “Within a few months, almost all Polish nobles, officials, and priests had been wiped out or driven from Ukraine. Jewish losses were especially heavy because they were the most numerous and accessible representatives of the szlachta regime. Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.”

In the introduction to Pavlovich’s report, WV mentions the notorious anti-Jewish massacres committed over 250 years later by Simon Petlyura’s Ukrainian peasant forces, which were at war with the Soviet power issuing from the October 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia. A member of the Jewish Bund in Ukraine expressed the sentiments of the Jewish masses at the time: “The armed carriers of socialism, the Bolsheviks, are the only force which can oppose the pogroms.... For us there is no other way” (see “Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Jewish Question,” Spartacist [English edition] No. 49-50, Winter 1993-94). As that article noted: “In its struggle to defend and consolidate the new proletarian state power against the White counterrevolutionaries, the Red Army necessarily had to sweep away the pogromist old order.”

Comradely, Bert Mason