On Friday, May 16, the teachers of religion in the educational institutions published an address to the Christian population, adjuring them not to shed any more Jewish blood and to stop the pogrom.
Two cases are known of the killing of Christians. The sailor Straigorodsky was killed. He had been in the habit of traveling around at the head of a detachment through the villages, establishing "Kombeds" (Committees of the Poor), quelling the peasants, levying requisitions, and in general strengthening the Soviet rule. There was personal animosity against him. Davidenko (pseudonym Chalai) was also killed.
The rebels remained about ten days in Uman. They organized a government in the city, issued a newspaper and published proclamations. Under pressure from Soviet forces the rebels left Uman and scattered about the surrounding country. Now the Soviet regime in Uman is organized on different principles. The majority of the places in the Executive Committee are left to the peasants; many of the demands previously presented by the representatives of the rebels have been satisfied. The number of Jews in responsible positions is now notably less.
II. Report of an Assembly of Party Workers and People in,
Public Life in the City of Uman, called by the Regional
Director of the Head Mission of the Russian Society of the Red Cross, on the Question of the Course and
Proportions of Local Pogroms
At the assembly Comrade Kh. D. Proskurovsky read the following statement:
UMAN is a cantonal capital in the government of Kiev, with a population of approximately sixty to sixty-five thousand. Of these, in approximate figures, thirty-five to forty thousand are Jews, twenty to twenty-two thousand Ukrainians and Russians, and about three thousand Poles. The Jews constitute an overwhelming majority of the population, occupying the central streets and having entirely surrounded the central district, except for some small streets where live the well-to-do Polish inhabitants, the Ukrainian-Russian officialdom, and in general the local so-called Christian aristocracy. The suburbs are settled in an overwhelming majority by petty bourgeois. The Jewish population of Uman lived principally by small handicrafts and trade. The percentage of the liberal professions was rather large: physicians, lawyers, midwives, surgeons, etc.; middlemen in various commercial operations, so-called brokers, especially numerous those dealing in grain and various food-products; but there was also a considerable percentage of people living by harder labor; draymen, porters, water-carriers, sawyers, common laborers, etc. The larger part of the Jewish population lived in poverty and want. Exceptional were some tens of wealthy men, hundreds of men of means, a thousand or two of people in moderate circumstances, who had more or less constant earnings. The Ukrainians and Russians supplied the officials and employees in all state institutions; they were the ruling, governing class. The mass of Christians lived in the suburbs; their occupations were largely (1) traffic in food products and provisions, (2) production and sale of leather wares, (3) service (house-porters, domestic servants, firemen, policemen, wardens, etc.), work in the factories and workshops, and in the building trades, as pavers, plasterers, etc. The most of them owned property in the suburbs of the city: small houses, barns, small gardens, etc. The Polish population was the best provided for in the city, and consisted of landowners, professors, managers of estates, directors of sugar factories, the higher and lower personnel of agricultural-economic undertakings and factories, lawyers, physicians, officials, employees of the Polish unions and institutions, and some working at lower forms of service. During the war years the population greatly increased, as a result of the influx of refugees, migration from the villages to the city, and the natural increase of population. Mutual interrelations had really never been good, especially since 1902-03, the beginning of the persecution of the Jews for their "revolutionary ideas," and the events of October, 1905, when a mob in Uman, with the sympathy of the Christian officialdom and clergy, perpetrated a Jewish pogrom, in which three Jews fell victims, and the property of the Jewish inhabitants was partly plundered. The years from 1905 to 1917 were years of "bad peace" and ill-concealed antagonism in the Christian population against the Jews. The war of 1914 redoubled this antagonism, and the Jewish population felt that in the completion of the war and in the demobilization great misfortunes would appear for it. The revolution of 1917 at first tended to better relations, but later the general aggravation of the economic situation, the struggle
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]