Hand in hand with the anarchistic phrase and the attacks against the Kiev Soviet government, the anti- Semitic pogrom agitation moved through the land. The Soviet power was, according to their idea, a foreign government of Moscovitish- Jewish origin, which the village did not understand. The peasant knew only that they wanted to take everything out of the village and give him in return colored little papers, which were found in the village in plenty. He knew it was a government which proceeded against the village with armed force. In very many cases Jews were the agents of the Soviet government in the villages and districts. They often neglected the interests of the local population and had no regard for them. The mistakes, abuses and offences of the local agents of the Soviet power were noted and utilized in a definite way by the anti-Soviet powers, who represented them as characteristic qualities of the "Jewish nation," which ruled over the "orthodox" peasant. The poison of the anti-Semitic agitation flowed in a wide stream over the whole of the Ukraine. The Batki understood clearly the value of the Jewish pogrom as a political weapon, established by the Directory. They saw the real results of Jew baiting in the unruliness of the mob which was so necessary for them. Giving up the Jewish population to the village as booty seemed to the Batki advantageous in many respects.
In the first place those Jews in the cities and districts who had become rich during the German rule possessed objects which the Ukrainian peasant needed urgently, as for example household articles and, what was most important, clothing, linen and shoes, of which nothing could any longer be found in the village. Even a pair of old shoes of a poor Jew excited the attention of the village population, rich in grain and Kerensky money and poor in everything else. During the pogroms the Jewish population, those who were murdered as well as those who survived, were stripped of everything to the last shirt. The Batki in the neighboring villages successfully vied with each other in popularity by declaring the Jewish possessions as the property of the peasants and by distributing the plundered Jewish goods free of cost to the "most needy" or by instituting "cheap sales." This method of satisfying the needs of the village received wide imitation. In the second place national baiting was a means of uniting to a certain extent the heterogeneous peasantry.
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This was especially important at those moments when the middle peasants vacillated between the right and the left under the pressure of the danger threatening from the right. When the political program of the Batki at this or that moment did not correspond to the temper of the peasants, national baiting had to fill the lacuna in its reciprocal relations.
In the third place the identification of Jews and communists (which, however, did not hinder them from at the same time declaring the Jews to be bourgeois and thus summoning the population to murder and pillage) made it possible for them to carry on the fight against their dangerous enemies, the Soviet power. "Down with the communists, down with the Jewish commissars!" This was the motto of Shtogrin, a member of the left wing of the Ukrainian Social Revolutionists, who carried on simultaneously an anti-Soviet and a pogromophile agitation in Uman. At the hearing before the Extraordinary Commission he was charged with anti-Semitic propaganda. Asked if he did not know that he might have caused a Jewish pogrom, he replied that he had in fact incited the peasants to make pogroms, "for otherwise it was impossible to get the peasants to rise." Order No. i for the city of Uman which was issued after the pogrom and signed by Klimenko, the chief commander of the rebellious troops, says among other things, "The rule of the Jews has fallen, and the insurgents are instructed to pay no heed to Jewish agents and police spies."