The civil war pulled down the last remains of the liberal veil which covered the lean forms of the "Party for the Freedom of the People." The People's Socialist, N. Tchaikovsky, member of the Russian delegation in Paris (of the foreign representatives of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak), said in an interview with the correspondent of the "Moment," the Jewish paper of Warsaw (No. 15, Jan. 18, 1920), that the Cossacks "merely" committed robbery, and had no part in murders; that the horrors committed by, Makhno and Grigoriev as well as by the insurrectionary freebooters were unjustly charged against the volunteer army and General Denikin, while it was the former whose aim it was to exterminate all Jews. Tchaikovsky declares categorically that Denikin and Kolchak were against pogroms and that they had even issued an order prohibiting all anti-Semitic agitation. The Bolsheviki, he says, utilize all excesses and give exaggerated accounts of the pogroms. (In this respect his statements completely agree in method with those made by the foreign representatives of the Petlura government, who denied that the pogroms were made by them and pointed to the deeds of horror committed by the volunteer army, remarking at the same
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time that the Bolshevik! grossly exaggerated the pogrom excesses.)
Under the influence of "foreign opinion" Admiral Kolchak gave the following "liberal" interview to an American journalist: "You may be assured that in Siberia there is no anti-Semitism and no so-called Jewish question. Those Jews who have lived long in Siberia are regarded as having the same rights as other members of society. In so far as anti-Semitism is to be met with there, it comes from the outside, from Russian fugitives. In any case the influence of anti- Semitism is very insignificant in that part of the world. When we have conquered Bolshevism, the senseless charges that all Jews are Bolsheviki will disappear. The average Jew is more loyal and more conservative than the Russian middle class. And if the Jewish people are to be made responsible for the deeds of Trotsky, Sverdlov, Joffe, etc., then the whole Russian people must answer for the activity of Lenin, Krylenko and Lunacharsky." ("Dalnevostotchnoye Obozrenye"— "View of the Far East," of Sept. 21, 1919; taken from "Le Temps" of Dec. 14, 1919).
Kolchak could easily express himself on the "Jewish Question" for there are no Jewish masses in Siberia and there could be no pogroms there. Deeds of violence were committed there also, and some of them were perpetrated against the pure Russian peasants. The matter of pogroms was not so simple as the explanation of General Denikin and other responsible leaders of the volunteer army would make us believe. News about pogroms reached the foreign press which could not be passed over in silence. The chief of the Kiev precinct, General Dragomirov, had a conversation with representatives of the military and administrative authorities in which, among other things, he said: "Excesses have taken place in a whole series of localities in which the Jews had to suffer. The chief commander has taken decisive measures to prevent a repetition. All those whose guilt has been discovered were handed over for court martial, and the same will be done in the future. But repressive measures alone are not enough. Preventive measures are no less important. The ignorant masses must be made to understand that the Jewish nation cannot be held responsible for crimes of the Jewish Bolsheviki, that innocent persons must not be punished for the sins of other guilty persons. Care must be taken that the Jews should separate themselves from the Bolsheviki and their sympathizers and that the ideas propagated by the volunteer army should be circulated among them."
This conversation was published in "Svobodnaya Rech" (Free Speech), a paper appearing in Rostov, and had apparently taken place a short time before. Directly after the conversation, when the Bolsheviki had held Kiev in their hands for two days, this was laid to the charge of the entire Jewish population, which had to expiate this offence under an organized slaughter of the "men with the bayonets." And this massacre was not prevented by the telegram sent by Denikin in Odessa to the chief commander of the Kiev military district. The telegram read as follows: "I have received new reports of violence perpetrated by the troops against the Jews. I order that proper measures be taken to suppress the excesses. Most severe penalties must be imposed upon the guilty. Signed: Denikin." ("Svobodnaya Rech," Rostov, October 16, 1919). This telegram did not, however, prevent the
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