It is comprehensible that many of those who were saved by some miracle, who lived through all those horrors, are not in a condition to give any sort of testimony. Furthermore very many of the eyewitnesses immediately, as soon as it was possible, fled pellmell, only to get away as far as possible from the nightmare. This and the time-limit of the work explain the insufficiency of the officially reported material evidence. Very many request that no publicity be given to their testimony.
CHERKASSY:
The photographs are monotonous, as groans and wails are monotonous. Bodies and tombs, tombs and bodies. And on them is a fearful inscription, an inscription which gives no rest: "Why and wherefore?"
/. Testimony of the ex-President of the Municipal Council, V. Petrov
I have lived in Cherkassy about six years and know little about life in the town in the past, but I know it very well for the past two and a half years. In spite of its favorable geographical position and nearness to large centers, Odessa and Kiev, the composition of the city's population and the general basis of life create the impression of an uncultivated provincial city. The most numerous group of the population is the petty bourgeois (meshchane}; small householders, renting pieces of city land and transferring it to peasants of neighboring villages, kitchen-gardeners, formerly construction-workers in the building of the railroads, and men who work for small contractors; some workmen in the local factories and industries. These groups, centering about the orthodox parishes, at the beginning of the revolution of 1917, played the part of a constant and hostile opposition to the Executive Committee of social organizations, the democratic council (Duma), and the Council (Soviet) of Workmen's Delegates. However, at the time when the Bolsheviki came into power (in February, 1918 and 1919), out of these groups there had split off some communists and sympathizers with them, who understood the war upon the bourgeoisie and the speculators as a punishment of the Jews.
At difficult moments in the state of provisions, in turn at the shops, at the bakeries, and in the crowds that indulged in unauthorized visits of search while looking for provisions, it was always possible to hear anti-Semitic opinions and expressions. But, nevertheless, during a whole series of changes of government— from the Rada to the Bolsheviki, from the Bolsheviki to the Germans, from the Hetman to the Directory, from the Directory to the Soviet regime — the tense atmosphere expressed itself in night robberies and attacks on the streets, but did not take on more serious forms. Though it must be said that in the period after the occupation of Cherkassy by the Petlurist forces (December- January, 1919), the actions of the guerrilla soldiers in the way of general searches, with removal of articles declared to belong to the state, and with arrests of "profiteers," took place by preference in Jewish streets from house to house.
UKRAINE
And the representatives of the Ukrainian authorities, both military and civil, treated the population's complaints and the municipal council's protests at this as something of no consequence, something that had its explanation, and a very natural one in their opinion, in the elemental frame of mind of the masses; they thought people were too much excited over such phenomena. This view of the local administrative authorities was entirely accepted by the militia, which in the period of the Soviet regime had encouraged the anti-Semitic feeling in the population, because of the setting of the bourgeoisie to forced labor, the searches for provisions, etc. The experiments of local communists had great significance as propaganda by "action"; such things as the taunting of the bourgeoisie when they brought in the levies, the beating of bourgeois hostages in prison by local communists, the shooting of "green" hostages from among Christian counter-revolutionaries taken at the beginning of the movement, the shooting of ten of them after the attack, which was not investigated afterwards, upon the assistant to the President of the Executive Committee (who was wounded in the finger), the arrest of two local clergymen, etc. The dark reactionary petty-bourgeois masses who even before then were pervaded with anti-Semitic feelings, had practical lessons in an attitude of levity towards human life and in the impunity of bloody experiments.
And so, what did not happen in Cherkassy throughout the series of earlier changes of government, but what the people in public life in the city (of whom there are very few) all the time expected with alarm, dreaded, and tried to avoid — this happened on the second entry into the city of Grigoriev's gangs, on May 16.