The pogroms of the tsarist period were almost exclusively confined to the cities. There were none in the Ukrainian villages. Insurrection, robbery and violence were done by the city hoodlums in the larger centers. Not so the massacres in the year 1919. Here the Ukrainian village played the main role, the Ukrainian peasants, the bands of military insurgents as well as the more or less organized bands of insurrectionists. The wave rolled from the village to the city and in concentric circles embraced the whole land. But the village occupied the center. The impulse and the radii proceeded from the village. The urban crowd played a subordinate role, and merely participated, actively to be sure, in the events. Large cities like Odessa and Kiev (before the invasion of Denikin) were overwhelmed by this wave, which spread over about 700 localities and almost annihilated the entire Jewish population in the Ukrainian villages and districts.
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This is not the first time in the history of the Ukrainian Jews that they had to suffer from persecution. Twice before have they been the object of horrible attacks and cruel murder, in the times of the Ukrainian period of storm and stress when the peasants rose against their Polish oppressors.
The Jews settled in Ukrainia at the end of the sixteenth century. The emigrants from Lithuania and Poland found here uncultivated land and sparsely populated villages. Gradually there grew up cities, castles and settlements. The Polish nobility attracted as colonists the petty nobility, the serfs and also the Jews as a class engaged in commerce and industry. Thanks to the Jewish spirit of enterprise there soon developed an extremely energetic commercial activity. The greatest variety of industries, the production of nitric acid and potash, fishing and hunting as well as the liquor business were in the hands of the Jews. Only a very small part of the Jews were rich. According to the investigations of Berschadski (Die litauschen Juden), the commercial and credit operations of the great majority of the Jews must be measured in dozens of rubles, and consisted merely in the granting of small loans to the peasants, the poorer middle class and the Tartars. But this is not all. The operations were carried on with the moneys which they themselves borrowed from the Christian clergy, nobility and poorer middle class. Often they borrowed this capital by pledging household articles, even body linen.
Is it true that the Jewish masses were guilty of abusing the Christian population? The Ukrainian historian Ivan Franko, points out that the sources of the Khmelnitzky period say nothing about the accusations that were later brought against the Jews, such as putting mortgages on the churches. "The unfair practices of the Jews, so far as there were such," says Franko, "are insignificant as compared with the abuses committed by the Polish government and the Polish military." To be sure, the Cossack population did not investigate with any degree of care as to who was really responsible for their enslavement. When the Ukrainian population rose in rebellion, with Khmelnitzky at their head, and freed themselves from the chains of political and economic enslavement, they swept away not only the lords, but also their agents, the Jews, who were their leaseholders and tenant farmers. The events of the years 1648-1658 with their heroes, Krivonos, Ganai, Morosenko, Timofei (son of Bogdan Khmelnitzky), Koloda and others, cost the Ukrainian Jews, according to the careful computations of Sabbatai Cohen, about 100,000 lives (the "Chronicler" speaks of a half million.) Several hundred Jewish settlements were completely destroyed.
One hundred years later, the Ukraine was again the scene of insurrections. The Gaidamaks (this was the name of the insurrectionary Cossack bands in the 1 8th century) were no whit inferior in savage cruelty to the Cossack rebels under Bogdan Khmelnitzky. All the hatred that had accumulated up to that time on account of the political and economic enslavement ot the people (introduction of serfdom, persecution of their faith, cruel practices of the administration, by state authorities as well as landed proprietors) was let loose in this moment. As formerly under Khmelnitzky, so a hundred years later, when the Jewish tenant farmer, the "inevitable attendant of the Polish lord" and the executor of his will in relation to the village, had again
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settled down, the fury of the peasants once more was directed against him. The rebellion of 1734 under the leadership of Griva adopted the following motto, "It is permitted to plunder the Jews and kill the Polaks."