In this last case the regiment was disarmed by the Kiev communistic reserve regiment and dissolved.
An objective study of the investigations of the authorized agent of the relief committee of the Red Cross and of the annals of the Jews in the Ukraine leads to the conclusion that the Soviet troops preserved the Jews from complete annihilation. Retirement of the Soviet troops signified for the territory left behind the beginning of a period of pogroms with all their horrors. On the other hand the advance of the Soviet troops meant the liberation from a nightmare (Zhitomir, Yelisavetgrad, Novo-Mirgorod, Proskurov, Gorodische, etc.).
The watchword of the Jew-haters, identifying Judaism and communism, had terrible consequences for the Jews. On the retirement of the Soviet power the Jews abandoned their homes and possessions and followed the Soviet army, being exposed to an uncertain existence and the prospect of dying of hunger or meeting death in some other way in the civil war
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that was raging. At the time of the second pogrom in Zhitomir the Jewish youth followed the retiring Bolshevist army. In Tarascha (Government of Kiev) the retiring Soviet regiment was followed by almost the entire Jewish population (4,000 persons). The tragedy of the situation can only be fully realized when we consider that a very great part of the Jewish middle class are skeptical in their attitude to the Soviet power, and the Jewish bourgeoisie is decidedly hostile to it. Certain death forced the Jewish bourgeoisie to flee under the cover and protection of Bolshevist divisions.
In Lebedin (Government of Kiev) a Bolshevist armored car came in while a pogrom was being instituted by bandits, fetched the surviving Jews, who had concealed themselves in the cellars and lofts, and took them along, thus saving them from certain death.
It is no wonder therefore that the Jewish youth, especially in the pogrom districts, tried to enter the Red Army without regard to their sympathies otherwise in regard to the Soviet power. They entered their ranks, seeing therein the only possibility of saving the lives of their nearest and the honor of their wives and daughters.
CHAPTER V
THE Grigoriev uprising opened the gates wide to the Ukrainian volunteer army. The Ukrainian Red Army could not recover from the blow it received and was compelled to retire before the supreme power of the well equipped troops of the volunteer army. The internal front was becoming stronger, which meant that the Ukrainian cities were evacuated by the Soviet power, one after the other. Denikin occupied gradually Kharkov, Yekaterinoslav, Poltava and finally on the twentieth of September, Kiev. The Ukraine was "freed" from the Bolsheviki. The troops of Petlura remained inactive. Where they opposed the volunteer bands, they were disarmed. The number of Petlura's troops was small. Their position was somewhere on the Galician frontier. There was quiet for a while on the internal front. It seemed as if the peasants wanted to find out first what the new ruler, the representative of a "united and undivided Russia," would bring them. The peasants had no particular illusions in the matter. At any rate the transfer of power into other hands meant a slight breathing spell. Besides the men of the village hoped that they would be able to get wares, especially manufactured goods, from the Entente. It was otherwise in the city. The i UKRAINE
upper and middle classes who more than others were made to feel the Soviet rule; the intellectual classes, who for the most part stood aloof from the Soviet order and while securing positions in the Soviet organizations yearned for the coming of another power, closer and more akin to their ideas; the poorer citizens who dreamed of cheap bread and believed that the bayonet of the volunteer army would bring back the fivekopek loaf of white bread (instead of black bread at the price of 50 or 60 rubles a pound); the nationalistic part of the tramp-proletariat of the Ukrainian cities, recruited from the Black Hundred — all these set great hopes on the coming of the new government. The Jews, all except the workers, baited to death as the great majority of them were, awaited the new masters not without a feeling of unrest, but still in the quiet hope that instead of the unstable Soviet government there would finally come a government of permanent stability which would bring quiet to the village and conclude peace with the loyal portion of Jewry.
The memorial handed to General Denikin by the representatives of the Jewish communities of Yekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Rostov and Taurida (Bulletin du Comite des Delegations Juives aupres de la Conference de la Paix, No. 9), reads: