The 300 members of the troop were divided into four platoons, each of which was on duty for a night. The commander was a Jew; his assistant a Russian.
On June 23 the rumor spread that Grigoriev was coming again, and on the 24th he entered the town by night. In his detachment it is said there were about 800 men. Grigoriev himself, Tereschenko, and Gorbenko (of his staff), with their wives, rode horseback at the head. Of the troopers there were in all about forty effectives on guard. They sustained a four-hour fight with the Grigorievists. Two or three communists also took part in the fight. Eleven troopers fell in it.
The most of Grigoriev's detachment at once started to rob and kill Jews. Grigoriev himself was apparently against pogroms and murders. He rode around on horseback and stopped the pillaging. According to the account of Mikhail Chverkin, who had been stripped naked and was about to be killed, Grigoriev saved him from the hands of the murderers. A part of the troop after the battle withdrew to the village of Abramovka, where the peasants killed six or seven. The total number of the slain was 43 Jews (including 18 troopers). Among the slain were old men and women.
Grigoriev plundered the arsenal, the Executive Committee, and the treasury, where he is said to have taken three millions, and went on to Novaia Praga and Verbliushka, having remained in Alexandria only a few hours in all. He took his own dead and wounded with him. According to what the transport convoy said, there must have been about 300 such.
Grigoriev was a second-captain (stabs-kapitan), owning many forests in the region of Alexandria and Znamenka, where he hid with his wife and two children.
After the occurrences of June 24 the Jewish youth of Alexandria began to leave town, fearing the vengeance of Grigoriev, who, according to rumors, had got hold of a list of the troop. Among those who left was the author of this testimony Nukhim Levin. But nevertheless a new troop was formed.
TARASCHA ( P KIEV) Testimony of Goldfarb, written in Kiev, June 27, 1919
Tarascha is a cantonal capital of 20,000 inhabitants, of which 7,500 are Jews (500 families), 22 versts from the railroad at Olshanitz. The city was not rich; for instance at Passover 30,000 rubles were distributed to the poor. The relations with the local bourgeoisie were peaceful but they were, of course, anti-Semitic. In November, 1918, the region of Tarascha was the starting point of the uprising against the Hetman.
On June 16, 1919, the city experienced its fifth pogrom. They were caused by the band of Yatzenko, a native of the village of Kerdan, three versts from Tarascha. All around are vast, thick pine forests, where it is easy to hide. Yatzenko is 24 years old and completed the course of the two-class school in Tarascha. In March he declared himself for Petlura and immediately started an anti-Semitic agitation, saying that "the Jews are all communists, they defile our sacred edifices, turn them into stables." In the Executive Committee of Tarascha were many Jews, all local. The Extraordinary Committee had
UKRAINE
shot six local counter-revolutionaries not long before the June pogrom. Although there was not a single Jew in it (the Extraordinary Committee), the gang spread the report abroad that they had been killed by Jews, their tongues and ears cut off, etc., and that for these six slain, six thousand Jews ought to be demanded. When the city was taken they ordered the bodies disinterred.