Eichhorn received orders from the supreme military command to deliver grain, sugar, etc., to Germany. The peasants also gave up a good deal at the start for payment, but when they could not later buy anything for the money, for lack of industrial products, as the Germans had more important things to do with their war industry than to supply Ukraine with goods, they finally did not want to supply anything. Then the Germans began the requisition policy. The peasants still refused. They were threatened with force, and finally force was used.
Thus began the peasant insurrections 'against the armies of occupation. Although all this was officially done under the name of Skoropadski, it was clear that the Germans were the originators. Skoropadski's power in the Ukraine rested on German bayonets and machine guns. It was not Ukrainian soldiers but, principally, German and Austrian soldiers which suppressed the peasants. It was these soldiers who executed the death sentence over those peasants who offended against the proclamations of the state of war. Military law was declared all over Ukraine, and shooting and hanging was the order o/ the day. The traveler who visits Ukraine today has an opportunity to see many photographs where peasants by the hundreds hang on the gallows, in front of which stand Austrian officers or Ukrainian and Russian priests. The fury of the Central European soldiery was ,at its height in the summer of 1918. But the exasperation and the despair of the peasants was also at its height. During the rule of Eichhorn-Skoropadski a total of about 80,000 workers and peasants were killed.
Now the peasants began to rise against their tormentors everywhere. The party of the left social-revolutionaries remained true to their old terrorist traditions and one of their members killed general Eichhorn.
The death of Eichhorn was a signal for the peasants. The West-European soldiers, brutalized through the war, had learnt murder on a grand scale, and the naturally brutal peasants, without the gloss of European culture, continued this handiwork in still more barbarous forms. They started to arm themselves. Everywhere bands and little troops appeared, in the beginning primitively armed with pitchforks and flails, they started an insurrection, and killed the Austrian and German soldiers whereever they could get hold of them.
It is easy to understand that morals have suffered terribly through this. A human life had hardly any value any longer. One no longer negotiated with one's enemy, but beat him to death. The peasants finally succeeded in procuring modern fire arms, but, to begin with, in very small quantities. A revolutionary who lived through this state of affairs gives the following account of the terrible situation, and about the desperate courage of the peasants.