The Peoples of Dnieper Ukraine

Like most parts of Europe, Dnieper Ukraine was inhabited by peoples of various national and religious background. The Ukrainians, who represented nearly three-quarters of the total population, were by far the numerically largest group living in eight of the nine provinces that made up Dnieper Ukraine.

TABLE 27.1

total 23,833,000 99.9

The non-Ukrainian population was not distributed evenly.

Irrespective of their numbers and geographic location, some of these other peoples maintained distinct ways of life, with their own laws, schools, customs, and cultural forms, in some instances completely divorced from and even alien to

TABLE 27.2

Nationality composition of Dnieper Ukraine’s urban population, 1897²

that of their Ukrainian neighbors, whether in the countryside, the towns, or the cities. Nonetheless, these peoples inhabited Dnieper Ukraine, and together with Ukrainians they were part of what had become in the course of the nineteenth century a rich multicultural civilization.

The Russians

Russians first began to enter Ukrainian territories in substantial numbers during the second half of the seventeenth century. This first wave was composed prima­rily of military officers and soldiers (as many as 11,600, according to an agreement signed in 1663), who were stationed in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine after the incorporation of these territories into the tsardom of Muscovy. After 1709, when the gradual elimination of Cossack autonomy began, numerous Russian nobles (such as Rumiantsev, Golitsyn, Dolgorukii, Menshikov, and lusupov) were granted large estates, to which they often brought enserfed Russian peasants.

It was not uncommon to find that after a generation or two the Russian peasants would become assimilated to the local Ukrainian population. This did not happen to the nobility, however. They maintained a social and cultural distance from Ukrainians and all others who were not of their status, through their aristocratic way of life and use of the imperial language, Russian, or, even more often, foreign languages like French and German. Nevertheless, as landowners, several nobles developed a sense of local patriotism toward ‘Little Russia,’ whose particular rights and privileges they at times defended against the encroachment of the central government, especially when the latter wanted to introduce new taxes. Such ‘economic patriotism’ was particularly marked during the eighteenth century.

That same century also witnessed an increase in the number of Russian mer­chants in the cities of Left Bank Ukraine, as well as an influx of Russian religious dissenters, in particular the Old Believers, who settled in large concentrations in rural areas around Chernihiv and Starodub. Russian settlers came in even larger numbers to the Steppe Ukraine, where by 1782, in the newly acquired territories known as New Russia, they numbered close to 10,000.

It was during the nineteenth century, however, that massive immigration of Rus­sians to Dnieper Ukraine took place. Initially, rural areas in the southern provinces of Kherson and Taurida were the primary goals of settlement, but with the indus-

trialization of the Dnieper-Donbas region after the 1880s it was to industrial cities of the Donets' and lower Dnieper River valleys that Russians flocked. By 1897, Dnieper Ukraine had 2.9 million Russian inhabitants, making up 12.4 percent of the total population. The Russians were particularly well represented in Ukraine’s urban areas. In the first half of the century (1832), they comprised a disproportion­ately high percentage of factory owners (44.6 percent), merchants (52.6 percent), and city dwellers (35.5 percent).

As a result, most cities in Dnieper Ukraine were Russian in flavor, not simply because they were part of the Russian imperial framework, but because they were in fact inhabited to such a substantial degree by ethnic Russians and russified Ukrainians. The holders of the highest administrative and governmental posts, the owners of factories and other enterprises, and the workers in mines and facto­ries (68 percent in Katerynoslav in 1897) in Dnieper Ukraine were Russians. Sev­eral Russians, russified Ukrainians, and russified Jews who had been born or who worked in Dnieper Ukraine played an outstanding role in the region’s cultural life as university professors in the humanities (Izmail Sreznevskii, Timofei Florin- skii, Vladimir Ikonnikov, Stepan Golubev, Vladimir Peretts, Mikhail Rostovtsev), the medical sciences (Ivan Sikorskii), and the natural sciences (Sergei Reformat- skii, losef Kosonogov, Aleksander Fomin). The empire’s cultural life was enriched by a host of Russians who were born or who worked in Ukraine. Among the best known were the writers Kondratii Ryleev, Aleksei Tolstoi, Mikhail Nekrasov, Vladimir Korolenko, and Nikolai Leskov; the enormously popular naturalistic painters Ilia Repin and Ivan Aivazovskii; and the radical modernist painter and founder of the Supremacist movement Kazimir Malevich. Kiev was also the home of the conservative political activists Vitalii Shul'gin and Vasilii Shul'gin, who on the pages of their newspaper Kievlianin (1864-1917) tried to protect what they considered to be the best interests of the Russian Empire.

The Poles

While Russians played a dominant role in the Left Bank and steppe regions of Dnieper Ukraine during the nineteenth century, Poles continued to be the most important group in the Right Bank, or so-called Southwestern Land (Volhynia, Kiev, and Podolia provinces). The total number of Poles in the Right Bank increased from approximately 240,000 in 1795 to 322,000 in 1897. Their relative numerical strength declined, however, slipping from 10 percent of the population in 1795 to 3.5 percent in 1897.

Despite the relative smallness of their group, the Poles played a particularly influential role in the Right Bank, because when the area was incorporated into the Russian Empire, the Polish and polonized Ukrainian szlachta was immediately granted the status of nobility (dvonanstvo). Initially, in 1795, this meant that as many as 260,000 persons - as much as 7.7 percent of the area’s population - were nobles. Despite their legal status, the vast majority of Polish nobles held no land and, in many cases, were economically at the same level as or worse off than towns­people and state peasants. In effect, only 30,000 could actually be considered part of the Right Bank’s elite, that is, nobles who had both hereditary status and a suf­ficient amount of land to allow them voting rights in noble assemblies. This smaller elite, however, enjoyed numerous privileges. They retained title to their estates and control over the serfs living on them, and they came to dominate the administra­tion, courts, and schools in the Right Bank, all of which remained Polish.

It was the Roman Catholic church, however, that was most successful in main­taining a sense of Polishness among the broadest segment of the population, even after the group’s intellectual and social elite had been weakened or driven into exile following the periodic failure of its conspiratorial and revolutionary activi­ties.

In effect, the Right Bank, together with the Russian Empire’s other ‘Polish’ provinces, located farther north than Dnieper Ukraine - Vilna, Grodno, Vitsebsk, Mogilev, and Minsk - became a stronghold of Polish national feeling. This charac­ter was due largely to the educational system, which from 1803 to 1823 was under the direction of Prince Adam Czartoryski. As curator of schools in the empire’s ‘Polish’ provinces, Czartoryski had a free hand in managing education. As a result, Polish culture among younger generations was preserved by the Polish uni­versity at Vilnius (in Polish, Wilno) and by the lyceum in a town which Poles dubbed their ‘Volhynian Athens’ - Kremenets' (in Polish, Krzemieniec). Conse­quently, the Polish nobility was not russified, and the whole area was filled with Polish patriots who became involved in several underground societies, such as the Kiev branch of the Society of the United Slavs (Towarzystwo Zjednoczonych Slowian, est. 1818) and the Southern Society (est. 1821), a republican group which called for the emancipation of the serfs. More conspiratorial in nature were the branches in Kiev of the Association of the Polish People (Stowarzyszenie Ludu

What Ukraine Means for Poland

As well as an inspiration for literary works, Ukraine became for many Poles the very place where the spiritual regeneration of Poland was to take place. For that reason, the Ukrainian people were worthy of respect and even emulation, although the lands they inhabited - in particular the Right Bank — could not be imagined in any other way than as an integral part of Polish territory. This point of view was summed up best in 1842 hy Scwcryn Goszcyhski. a member of the ‘Ukrainian school’ of Polish literature, in a critique of the poetry' of another member, Jozef Bogdan Zaleski.

The part of Poland called Ukraine received a calling which within the general [Polish] national calling has not yet been fully understood or explained; it has, along with its history, unique spiritual features which distinguish it and elevate it above the other parts [of Poland]; in short, it is there that the spirit of freedom of the Polish people abided and showed itself most energetically in battle with oppression, and immortalized with bloody features both its wrongs and its protes­tation against them. If we look at the entire life of the Polish people we will not find this phenomenon existing anywhere else with such force, tenacity and conse­quences so decisive and terrible for the Fatherland....

This feeling of freedom among the Ukrainian people showed itself in a guise that is perhaps too wild for the present age; it led to fratricidal crimes... we do not justify this.... Nevertheless, despite all the charges that Poland can make against Ukraine, it is certain that its Cossack life afforded beautiful deeds for the nation’s glory, and even in its horrors, it was a historical, palpable warning for the nation of the sources of its downfall. It also foretold in its bright, Polish aspect the future which our regeneration will develop, and which we are already entering in spirit. It is for this reason that we have such poetry about Ukrainian history and its land, and it is for this reason that the heart of the [Polish] nation has such love and admi­ration for it. Yes, the spirit of the Polish people sensed the truth in the idea of Ukraine; in the sufferings [of the Ukrainian people] it saw the apotheosis of its own martyrdom, and in the spectre of its past it saw its foe to whom it now' pays its respect through its love. In this homage the [Ukrainian] people and the [Polish] gentry are united.

source: George G. Grabowicz, ‘The History and Myth of the Cossack Ukraine in Polish and Rus­sian Romantic Literature’ (unpublished PhD dissertation. Harvard University 1975), pp. 107-108.

Polskiego), founded by Polish students at the University of St Vladimir in the wake of the abortive 1830-1831 revolt, and the Provincial Committee in Rus' (est. 1862), which was responsible for planning an uprising in the Right Bank as part of the 1863 Polish revolt against tsarist rule.

In the economic sphere, the Polish nobility was active in Dnieper Ukraine’s textile, porcelain, glass, metallurgy, and, especially, sugar processing industries. In agriculture, there were negative repercussions following the abortive Polish revolts of 1831-1832 and again 1863 (which led to the confiscation of many Polish estates). Polish-owned industries also felt the loss of serf labor in factories both before and after the era of reforms. Nevertheless, the Polish nobility continued to be one of the most influential social estates in the Right Bank until the outbreak of World War I. Indicative of this influence was the landholding pattern: in 1909, 46 percent of private landholdings, or 15 percent of all land, in the Right Bank was still owned by Poles.

The socioeconomic changes during the second half of the nineteenth century also contributed to an increase in the number of Poles in Right Bank cities, espe­cially Kiev, whose population by 1874 was 8.2 percent Polish. As a result, Polish culture continued to flourish in the Right Bank. Kiev (in Polish, Kijow) in particu­lar had its Polish schools, theater, newspapers, publishing house, cultural organi­zations, sports clubs, and legal and illegal political societies. The Right Bank was also the home of and source of literary inspiration for the leading Romantic poet and dramatist, Juliusz Slowacki, and several other members of the so-called Ukrainian school of Polish literature (Michal Czajkowski, Jozef Bogdan Zaleski, Seweryn Goszczyhski, and others).

It was, however, another Polish author, the Nobel Prize laureate Henryk Sien­kiewicz, who, although not a native of the Right Bank, was to have the greatest impact on the mind-set of Poles in the Russian Empire and elsewhere. In 1884, Sienkiewicz published the initial volume of what became his enormously popular trilogy on seventeenth-century Poland. Entitled Ogniem i mieczem (With Fire and Sword), this first novel of the trilogy was a panegyric to Polish civilization, which was being threatened in the ‘wild steppes of Ukraine,’ where the defender of the Commonwealth and magnate of steel on his white stallion, Prince Jeremi Wisnio- wiecki, was pitted against the cunning and often drunkenly enraged Cossack het­man Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi. Because the trilogy subsequently became required reading for Polish schoolchildren (and remains so to the present day), Sienkie­wicz’s powerful if distorted stereotypes are what generations of Poles most readily remember when they think about Ukraine and Ukrainians.

The Jews

Although Russians and Poles represented a numerical minority in Dnieper Ukraine, members of both these groups occupied the leading strata in the politi­cal and socioeconomic life of both the Left and the Right Banks. There were, however, other peoples who enjoyed neither numerical nor political strength in nineteenth-century Dnieper Ukraine. Historically, the Jews were the most impor­tant in this category.

Since the late sixteenth century, the Jews had enjoyed municipal self-govern­ment within a framework known as the Council of Lands, and in the rural coun­tryside they became an integral part of the arenda economic system that was established throughout Ukrainian territory under Polish rule (see chapter 11). As middlemen in the arenda system between the Polish landlords and the Ukrainian peasants, the Jews before long were perceived by Ukrainians as their oppressors. The result was that during periods of social upheaval such as those in the mid­seventeenth century (the Khmel'nyts'kyi revolution) and the second half of the eighteenth century (the haidamak revolts), Jews often suffered material and phys­ical destruction at the hands of the rebellious peasants. With the slow disintegra­tion of the Polish state in the eighteenth century, the self-governing Council of Lands ceased to exist; then, in 1844, the tsarist government abolished the kahal (Yiddish: kehile), or Jewish self-government at the local level.

Despite the decline of their self-governing status and their loss of life and prop­erty in the eighteenth century, the Jews remained an integral part of Poland’s economy on the Right Bank. Their numbers, moreover, grew steadily in Dnieper Ukraine, from over 300,000 at the end of the eighteenth century and over 900,000 in the middle of the nineteenth century to over 2 million in 1897. The last figure represented 8.5 percent of the total population in the nine provinces (including the Crimea) of Dnieper Ukraine.

Although Jews were found in all parts of Dnieper Ukraine, nearly three-fifths (1.2 million) lived in the Right Bank. Their continued high concentration in the Right Bank was due to the Russian imperial government’s restriction on their movement farther eastward. The tsars generally preferred that Jews living under their rule remain on territories that had been acquired from the partitioned Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These territories, which came to be known as the Pale of Settlement, included the tsarist provinces in Poland, Lithuania, and Belarus as well as all provinces of Dnieper Ukraine with the exception of Kharkiv.

Within this so-called Pale of Settlement, the vast majority of Jews lived in small towns and cities. According to the 1897 census, 27 percent of the urban popula­tion in Dnieper Ukraine consisted of Jews. In the Right Bank, 72 percent of the Jews lived in towns with over 1,000 persons, and in 59 percent of these towns they represented at least 40 percent of the population. In the Left Bank, 65 percent of the Jews lived in towns with over 1,000 persons, and in the Steppe Ukraine the fig­ure was 76 percent. In Dnieper Ukraine as a whole, 26 percent of all Jews lived in twenty cities, each of which had over 10,000 Jews.

Being an urban population, the Jews engaged primarily in trade, banking, and industry and in operating small shops and businesses. By 1832, they comprised 17 percent of the factory owners and 21 percent of the merchants in Dnieper Ukraine, although in the Right Bank, where Jews were concentrated, the percent­ages were significantly higher (93 percent of factory owners and 96 percent of merchants in Volhynia) ? Jews were especially well represented in certain indus­tries, and by 1872 they owned 90 percent of the distilleries, 57 percent of the saw­mills, and 49 percent of the tobacco industry. A few Jewish-owned companies based in Ukraine came to play a dominant role in the empire as a whole. Among them was the Aleksander Sugar Refinery, founded in 1876 in Kiev by Israel Brod­ski. Before the end of the century, this company accounted for about one-quarter of the entire sugar production in the Russian Empire. Following in the industrial and philanthropic interests of his father, Brodski’s son Eliezar expanded the com­pany and made donations to several Jewish and non-Jewish cultural and welfare institutions. In his will, Eliezar left funds for the construction in Kiev of the still-

Memories of the Shtetl

The shtetl was the epitome of Jewish life not only in Dnieper Ukraine but also in the w'cstcrn Ukrainian lands under Austro-Hungarian rule - Galicia, Buko­vina, and Transcarpathia. The following description by Joachin Schoenfeld, who grew' up before World War I in the Ukrainian tow^rn of Sniatyn in far south­eastern Galicia, reveals the hold the shtetl continued to have on the imagina­tion of those w'ho grew' up in it.

1 was born and raised in the shtetl of Sniatyn. Since the life of the Jews in all the shtetls of Galicia, and indeed throughout eastern Europe, was, with slight devia­tions, more or less the same, my picture of life in Sniatyn reflects that in hundreds of other shtetls as well and can be taken as an approximate description of all of them.

Although 1 never returned to my shtetl after the First World War, all my love and my most fervent feelings go back to that era. Even today, although thousands of miles away from it, after having fought in many trenches on different battlefields during the First World War, after having survived Hitler’s concentration camps, and after having traveled through many countries, happiness overcomes me w'hen I think back to those days and manage to recapture some of the tableaus of former years.

This happiness, however, is soon overshadowed by sadness and sorrow that this, our past, doesn’t exist anymore. With affliction and grief I mourn the desola­tion of the Yiddish shtetl.... Actually it may be w'rong to call the place a shtetl. and not a city as it really was. However, having in mind the core of the city, where the Jews lived on a kind of isle, surrounded by a sea of Gentiles, I call it the shtetl*

The degree to w'hich the shtetl. while economically and physically insepara­ble from its surroundings, still functioned in a spiritual w'orld of its own, is summed up in the following description of a young Jewish child growing up in the late nineteenth-century Russian Empire.

He could not tell you a thing about Russia, about Poland, about Lithuania and its people, laws, kings, politicians.... But you just ask him about Og, King of Bashan, and Sihon, King of the Emorites, and Nebuchadnezzer, King of Babylon! Ask him about the Euphrates and the Jordan. He knew about the people who lived in tents and spoke Hebrew or Arabic.... He knew nothing concerning the fields about him, nothing about rye, wheat, potatoes, and where he got his bread from.... But he knew about vineyards, date palms, pomegranates, locust-trees... he lived in another world/

•Joachim Shoenfeld. Shtetl Memoirs: Jeteish life in Galvin under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in the Reborn Poland, 1898-1939 (Hoboken, XJ. 1985), p. I.

Meyer W. Weisgal and Joel Carmichael, eds., Chaim W'eizman: A Biography by Several Hands (London 1962), p. 68. functioning Bessarabian Covered Market (the Bessarabka, 1910-12), the income of which was originally intended for Jewish charities.

Despite the achievements of individual Jews in the uppermost echelons of Dnieper Ukraine’s economy, the vast majority lived a modest existence that often bordered on poverty. They were spread throughout villages and small towns, each of which had its own sub-community, known in Yiddish as the shtetl or shtetele. The shtetl had an atmosphere of its own that was governed by two basic values: (1) humaneness (Yiddish: menshlikhkeyt), which made it an environment in which economic and psychological support could be found in times of crisis as well as on an everyday basis; and (2) Jewishness (Yiddish: yidishkeyt), a religious environ­ment, both at home and on the streets, that provided daily spiritual sustenance in the midst of an otherwise alien Christian world. Daily life in the shtetl revolved around the synagogue, the home, and the market, which was also the place where Jews interacted with their non-Jewish neighbors (goyim). The attractiveness of small-town life in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century shtetl has been immortalized by numerous writers and artists, among the most famous of whom was the Ukrainian-born Shalom Aleichem (Rabinowitz), whose stories were later used as the basis for the popular American musical Fiddler on the Roof. In fact, it was the psychological comfort afforded by shtetl life that made many Jews reluctant to leave their centuries-old homes in Dnieper Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe even in times of economic hardship and physical danger.

Dnieper Ukraine, especially the Right Bank, also became a fertile ground for Jewish culture. It was there that some of the most important cultural and political movements in all of modern Jewish history arose. These movements may have begun as the direct result of catastrophe in the community. Thus, after suffering the destruction of the Khmel’nyts’kyi era, Jews throughout Ukraine - and, for that matter, in other parts of Europe - began to believe that their only hope lay in the imminent arrival of the Messiah. This belief produced a cultural environment that allowed for the widespread acceptance of Shabbateanism, that is, the belief that the Messiah had actually come in the person of Shabbatai Zevi.

Shabbateanism reached Ukraine and other eastern parts of Poland-Lithuania during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and there it became part of the largest messianic movement in Jewish history since the second century ce. The eighteenth century, with its haidamak and peasant disturbances in the Right Bank, produced a social and psychological instability within Jewish commu­nities that in turn set the stage for the birth of Hasidism in Podolia. Founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (usually referred to by the initials BeShT), Hasidism was a mystical movement which stressed the mercifulness of God and encouraged joy­ous religious expression in music and dance. While following Jewish law, the movement represented a reaction to the academic formalism and rigidity of the rabbinical Talmudists, who placed a much greater emphasis on intensive study of the Talmud (the authoritative book of Jewish law and tradition) than on other, less intellectual forms of religious expression. Because of its popular appeal, Hasidism spread rapidly, and it would remain the dominant variety of Judaism among Ukrainian and other eastern European Jews until the twentieth century.

At about the same time that Hasidism appeared in Podolia, this region also witnessed the appearance of Jacob Leibowitz, known as Jacob Frank, who, follow­ing in the tradition of Shabbatai Zevi, proclaimed himself the Messiah. Later, however, he converted to Roman Catholicism, and his followers, known as Frank­ists, eventually rejected Judaism entirely, and some became leading members of the Roman Catholic church.

The nineteenth century produced new movements which had emigration as their goal. The desire to emigrate was a direct result of the upheaval in Jewish communities in the wake of pogroms in 1881-1883 and 1903-1906. The first pogroms were prompted by a rumor that the Jews had assassinated the ‘reform­ing’ tsar Alexander II in March 1881, and that as a result the government suppos­edly had authorized attacks on Jews. The pogroms at first received the support of some Russian revolutionary circles, including the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia) organization. It was this organization that actually had carried out the assassina­tion of the tsar, in the hope that its action would awaken the masses to revolt, destabilize society, and eventually bring down the tsarist regime. For their part, the Russian governmental authorities, at least during the initial pogroms of April and August 1881, did not interfere, but permitted the violence and robbery to take place. The ‘Russian pogroms’ of 1881-1883 were concentrated in Dnieper Ukraine, first in lelysavethrad (Kirovohrad) in Kherson province, and then in all provinces of Dnieper Ukraine except Volhynia and Kharkiv. The perpetrators generally confined their actions to beatings and the looting of property, although two lives were reported as lost. When the imperial government finally got around to the matter, it blamed the pogroms of the early 1880s on the inept reaction of provincial governors, who subsequently intervened with force to stop further pogroms.

Two decades later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new wave of pogroms began, in 1903, at Chi§inaii (in Russian, Kishinev), in the empire’s far southwestern province of Bessarabia. These outbreaks were much more violent, and in addition to the widespread material damage an estimated 800 Jews were killed in pogroms reported to have occurred in over 600 towns and villages throughout Dnieper Ukraine and Bessarabia. Among the most violent were those of 1905 in Zhytomyr (May), Odessa (October), and Katerynoslav (October). This latest wave of pogroms, between 1903 and 1906, was directly related to the tsarist government’s struggle against the growing revolutionary movement. The right­wing press blamed the revolutionary activity on the Jews, and the authorities stood aside as monarchist organizations, popularly known as the Black Hundreds, moved throughout the countryside instigating disturbances and inflaming the passions of the local population against the Jews.

Although not part of a pogrom, the most infamous manifestation of anti­Semitism occurred in 1911, when Black Hundred pressure led to the arrest in Kiev of a Jew named Menahem Beilis. Many Christians believed the myth that Jews needed human blood for ritual purposes, and Beilis was therefore accused of hav­ing carried out the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old Christian boy. When Beilis’s trial finally took place, in October 1913, it attracted attention around the world.

Pogroms

In the most general sense, the term pogrom refers to an attack on the persons or property of the members of any religious or ethnic minority group by the members of the presumed or actual dominant group in a society. The attacks may include some or all of the following: looting, the destruction of personal, religious, and business-related property, beating, rape, and murder. Although pogroms have been - and still are - committed against minority populations in various parts of the world, the term is associated primarily with attacks against Jews living in the western regions of the Russian Empire (the so-called Pale of Settlement, including Dnieper Ukraine), especially between 1881 and 1921.

Historians still debate several questions concerning the pogroms, including (1) how much physical and material damage was done; (2) whether the pogroms occurred primarily in urban areas or in the countryside; and (3) whether they broke out spontaneously, reflecting pent-up anti-Semitic atti­tudes on the part of the local population, or were the result of organized efforts on the part of local officials, national governments, or specific political groups who often used outsiders (such as migrant Russian workers) to carry out their destructive work. Regardless of the ongoing debate about motivation and damage, for the potential and actual Jewish victim the very term pogrom awak­ened an instant fear and sense of helplessness at the prospect of danger to life and limb. The following passage provides an insight into what a pogrom meant for an ordinary Jew in early twentieth-century Dnieper Ukraine:

The pogrom began with us Tuesday night. The first looting took place then. On the next morning we learned that six were slain. The whole day of Wednesday robberies continued in the town. On Thursday again five or six people were killed, but the most terrible day for our town [Slovechno] was Friday, when the most fiendish murders and atrocities took place. On Friday morning we came out of our house and fled wherever our legs took us. Wherever we went we were met with shots. The peasants encompassed the town with firing and drove the fleeing Jews into one place. Several hundred of us found ourselves in the house of Avrum- Ber Portny, and there we were all piled and heaped up on one another. It was close in the house, and terror and anguish reigned among us. When a certain peas­ant (Kosenko, from Slovechno) appeared and declared that he was the head of the insurgent forces, we began to entreat him and offered him money. He answered that since we had disobeyed his orders to leave the town he had decided to kill us all. Immediately the firing began through the windows of the place where we were gathered. Then the peasants began to beat us up; they beat us with whatever came handy, trampled on us with their feet, and threw bombs. How many killed, it is hard to be sure at present, but very many.

Many corpses remained at home and in the streets. The summer heat caused a stench of putrefaction from the bodies. Everywhere were pools of human blood.

At evening we hid again, since looting and killing were still going on. All the Jews hid, and cowering each in his hole in a cellar or garret or in the bushes, expected death.

source: Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jesus in the ('traine in 1919 (New York 1921), pp. 382-383.

After a month of deliberation, the jury of Ukrainian peasants found the defend­ant not guilty.

Both waves of pogroms had a profound effect on Jewish life, in forcing secular leaders in particular to reassess the future of their people in the Russian Empire. Was there a future for Jews in Russia? Or was emigration the only sensible option? Following the pogroms of the early 1880s, Dnieper Ukraine saw the rise of some of the earliest movements to propagate the idea of emigration {aliyah) for Jews to Palestine (Eretz Israel). Among the promoters of these movements - which pre­dated the worldwide Zionist movement, which also had as its goal emigration to Palestine - were the Hibbat Zion (Love of Zion) and the BILU organization, BILU, an acronym for the biblical phrase ‘House of Jacob, come, let us go,’ was founded in 1882 by Jewish students in Kharkiv and was the first Zionist pioneering movement. Its goals were undermined, however, by opposition from the Ottoman government, which controlled Palestine at the time. Another movement which began in Dnieper Ukraine was Am Olam (Eternal People), which urged Jews to become agriculturalists in preparation for their return to Israel. However, Am Olam succeeded only in establishing a few Jewish farming colonies in the United States (New Odessa, Oregon, 1883, and two settlements in South Dakota, 1882). After the 1880s, the opposition of the Ottoman government, combined with the uncertain hardships of becoming pioneer farmers in Palestine, prompted those Jews who decided to leave Dnieper Ukraine to go instead to the rapidly expand­ing industrial regions of the northeastern United States. By the end of the nine­teenth century, Jews were emigrating to the United States in large numbers. For instance, during the two decades between 1894 and 1914, which marked the height of the immigrant flow from eastern Europe to the United States, Jews made up as much as 59 percent of all immigrants from the Russian Empire.

Most Jews, however, did not leave their centuries-old homes in Dnieper Ukraine, but remained and continued to play an important role in the economic, the cultural, and, eventually, the political life of the country. In many ways, edu­cated Jews faced the problem of multiple identities, as did educated Ukrainians (see chapter 28). Attracted by the possibilities for social and economic mobility, many Jews assimilated into Russian culture and in certain cases even rejected entirely their Jewish heritage. Such rejection was quite common among those who joined the socialist movement, such as the Ukrainian-born Marxist Pavel Aksel'rod and two activists destined to play leading roles in the Russian Revolu­tion and civil war: Evgeniia Bosh, a Bolshevik official in the first Soviet govern- ment in Ukraine, and Lev Bronstein, the political ally but longtime ideological opponent of Lenin (and then Stalin) and the theoretician of the idea of ‘perma­nent revolution’ who is better known to the world as Leon Trotskii.

Many others remained loyal to their ancestral heritage and worked to promote Jewish culture in Dnieper Ukraine. It was not long, however, before a debate arose over the form in which, and the language in which, Jewish culture should be propagated. The native spoken language of virtually all Jews in Dnieper Ukraine and elsewhere throughout the Russian Empire was Yiddish. Since it was not yet a standard literary language, this Germanic form of speech (heavily mixed with Slavic elements) was often subjected to denigration and scorn by intellectuals, who felt that Hebrew or Russian would be the appropriate medium for Jewish sec­ular as well as religious culture. It was often the Zionists who favored Hebrew, and in Dnieper Ukraine the most active figures were the essayist Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Hirsh Ginsberg) and the outstanding Hebrew poets Hayyim Nachman Bialik and Saul Tchernichowsky. While not eschewing Hebrew, other Jewish activists were concerned to ensure that the rich 'Yiddish culture and language be preserved for future generations. Important work on behalf of Yiddish in Dnieper Ukraine was carried out before World War I by the ethnographer Sh. An-ski (Shloyme Zainvil Rapaport) and the writers Mendele Mokher Seforim (Shalom Abramowitsch) and Shalom Aleichem. The debate as to whether Hebrew or Yiddish was the more appropriate language for secular Jewish culture was to continue into the 1920s.

The Germans and Mennonites

German colonization in Dnieper Ukraine began when Empress Catherine II (herself of German origin) issued the first of several imperial manifestos (1763) inviting Germans to settle in underdeveloped and sparsely inhabited lands in the European part of the Russian Empire. They included the recently acquired south­ern Ukrainian steppe lands known at the time as New Russia. To encourage immi­gration, the Russian government offered the German newcomers several incentives: land gratis or at a nominal fee, guarantees for freedom of religion (including the right to proselytize among the Muslim population), the right to local self-government in agricultural communities, exemption ‘in perpetuity’ from military and civil service, and exemption from taxes for a period of up to thirty years. Initially, only a few Germans took advantage of Catherine’s decrees to settle in Dnieper Ukraine. They included about 1,100 Mennonites, who settled in 1789-1790 near Khortytsia Island, the former Zaporozhian Cossack stronghold in the lower Dnieper River opposite the new town of Oleksandrivs'k. Most of the early German colonists instead went farther east to the steppe land along the mid­dle Volga River.

It was as a result of a new decree, issued by Tsar Alexander I in 1804, that the largest number of Germans began to settie in Dnieper Ukraine. These immi­grants came primarily from the German states of Baden, Württemberg, and the Palatinate and from the Germanic province of Alsace in France, that is, those areas near the Rhine River which had suffered most during the Napoleonic Wars. Most settled in areas near the Black Sea and Sea of Azov which had only recently been acquired from the Ottoman Empire - the southern Kherson and Bessarabia provinces between the Dnieper and Danube Rivers, the areas along the Dnieper River south of Katerynoslav, the territory north of the Sea of Azov (especially along the Molochna River, where 1,200 Mennonite families settled), and the Cri­mea. These German colonists in the Steppe Ukraine came to be known as Black Sea Germans (Schwarzmeerdeutsche). According to the 1897 census, they numbered 283,000, representing 4.6 percent of the population of the provinces of Kherson, Taurida, and Katerynoslav. By 1911, German sources put their number at 489,000, of whom 43 percent were Evangelical Lutherans, 37 percent Roman Catholics, and 20 percent Mennonites.

Other concentrations of Germans were found in Volhynia, where they arrived in large numbers between the 1860s and the 1880s. Local Polish landowners, deprived of part of their serf work force after the emancipation act of 1861, invited German colonists to run their estates or sold them their land outright. If in i860 there were at most 5,000 Germans in Volhynia, by 1897 their number had risen to 171,000. Almost all the Volhynian Germans were Evangelical Lutherans.

By the outbreak of World War I, there were close to three-quarters of a million Germans living in Dnieper Ukraine, concentrated primarily in the steppe area near the Black Sea and in Volhynia. They lived in compact rural colonies that in 1914 numbered 966. They were engaged almost exclusively in agriculture, and their villages were regarded as providing models of farming and husbandry tech­niques. The Germans had little contact with the Ukrainian population that sur­rounded them, and for that matter little with co-ethnics of different religious backgrounds. In other words, Catholics, Evangelical Lutherans, and Mennonites lived in separate communities. Each community had its own local self-governing body (Schultz) and even regional assemblies, and its own German-language schools and churches (often built in the Gothic style). Many also had their own newspapers and journals, the most important of which was the Odessa daily Odes­sauer Zeitung, which appeared uninterruptedly for over half a century (1863­1914). These privileges stemmed from the tsarist decrees of 1763 and 1804 that were originally intended to attract new colonists to settle in the empire. During the reform era, however, which attempted to respond to public criticism against the special status of certain sectors of tsarist society, many of the privileges given to the original colonists were rescinded. The new decrees passed between 1871 and 1884 were related to land administration, the tax system, education, and mili­tary service. All Germans were now required to pay new taxes, to study Russian in their previously all-German-language school system, and to perform military service. The abolition of what had been ‘perpetual’ privileges was resented by many Germans, who in the 1870s began emigrating to the United States and Canada.

The Mennonites, in particular, were troubled by the imposition of the military service requirement, since they viewed the previous exemption not as a privilege but as a right corresponding to their religious commitment to pacifism and non­violence. Driven by what they considered a violation of their religious beliefs, nearly one-third of Dnieper Ukraine’s Mennonites (18,000) emigrated abroad in the 1870s. Those who stayed behind eventually worked out an accommodation

with the tsarist government, whereby their young men would perform four years’ service in special forestry camps. '

The Mennonites were distinguished from other German-speaking peoples in Dnieper Ukraine on the basis not only of their religious beliefs but also of their origins. Almost all had come from the Baltic city-state of Danzig and nearby West Prussia, to which their ancestors had immigrated from the Netherlands in the mid-sixteenth century. They spoke a distinct language known as Low Ger­man or Mennonite Platt (Plaut-Dietsch), which was used in writing and taught in their schools. After Danzig and West Prussia were annexed by Prussia following the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Prussian government placed certain re­strictions on Mennonites, who before long were attracted by the privileges being offered by Catherine II and her successors to settlers in the Russian Empire.

In their new homes, which in New Russia (southern Ukraine) were centered in the ‘Old Colony’ around Khortytsia Island and along the Molochna River north of the Sea of Azov, the Mennonites established a series of flourishing agricultural communities that gained a reputation throughout the Russian Empire for innova­tions in soil cultivation, stock raising, afforestation, and related trades such as wagon building, tool making, and, especially, the milling of flour. To sustain their agricultural prosperity, they operated their own banks and mutual credit associa­tions. Taking advantage of the right of self-government, the Mennonites estab­lished an extensive system of compulsory education for boys and girls (an exception at the time in the Russian Empire), with instruction entirely in their version of Low German and, after the 1840s, in literary High German. When the reforms of 1881 abolished educational autonomy and called for instruction in Russian, the Mennonites opened German-language private secondary schools for the Khortytsia (1895) and Molochna (1907) colonies.

Mennonites believed that their successes were due to the favorable policies of the Russian imperial government and to their own ability to avoid interacting - except in the most formal sense - with Ukrainians and other peoples, including the German Catholics and Lutherans who lived in their midst. By practicing what they called Absonderung (avoiding associating with people not of their faith), the Mennonites were able to preserve an exclusive group identity. Tsarist govern­mental practices before and, to a degree, even after the reform era contributed favorably to Mennonite self-maintenance, with the result that the community in Dnieper Ukraine, despite the emigration of the 1870s, had grown to nearly 100,000 strong by World War I. Not surprisingly, later Mennonite historians have looked back with great fondness on life in tsarist Russia, which enabled this dis­tinct religious community to build ‘a state within a state’ - a virtual ‘Mennonite Commonwealth.’⁴

The Crimean Tatars

In contrast to other peoples in Dnieper Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars had a unique history with their own state structures on Ukrainian territory. The Tatar presence was owing to Mongol rule in eastern Europe. By the fourteenth century, the Tatars had established their own khanate, which existed first as an independ­ent state and then as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire (see chapter 14). The Crimean state was not incorporated into the Russian Empire until 1783. Because of Muscovy’s and, later, Russia’s efforts to control the lands north of the Black Sea, there developed a long heritage of friction between the Muslim Tatars and the Christian Ukrainians and Russians, who for many centuries had been at the mercy of nomadic Tatar raiding parties. Not surprisingly then, when the Russian Empire finally acquired the Crimean Khanate, it was anxious to liquidate the Tatar heritage as an unwanted reminder of the former ‘Mongol yoke.’

Fearing the impending consequences of tsarist rule, Tatars began to emigrate en masse to the Ottoman Empire, with the result that by the end of the eight­eenth century an estimated 80,000 had left the Crimea. Of the 170,000 Tatars that remained in 1793, 88 percent were free peasants, 5 percent were Muslim clergy, 5 percent were nomads (Nogay Tatars), 1.6 percent were merchants, 0.8 percent were servants, and 0.6 percent were nobles. The exodus of Tatars continued dur­ing the first decades of the nineteenth century, when another 30,000 departed. Subsequently, between 1820 and i860, Russian, Ukrainian, German, and other colonists were brought to the Crimea. Whereas before Russian rule the Tatars had made up close to 90 percent of the Crimea’s population, by 1854, when the penin­sula’s inhabitants numbered 250,000, the Tatar proportion had dropped to 60 percent. Tatars emigrated once again after the Crimean War of 1853-1855, with the result that their absolute and relative numbers declined even further. By 1897, the Crimea had 188,000 Tatars, who represented only 34 percent of the penin­sula’s population.

Besides their decline in numbers, the Tatars underwent a loss of social and political status during the nineteenth century. The Tatar elite (mirza) was given the option to enter the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo), but very few chose to do so. The Tatar peasantry was enserfed after 1796. This state of affairs lasted until 1861, when, as in other Ukrainian lands, personal serfdom was exchanged for a kind of economic serfdom. Tatar culture also suffered. Many monuments constructed under the Crimean Khanate were destroyed or left in ruins. Mosques, in particu­lar, were demolished or remade into Orthodox churches.

In part as a reaction to such developments, the Crimea became the birthplace of a Tatar national revival that began in the 1880s under the leadership of Ismail Bey Gaspirali. Under his direction, the nationalist movement rejected the tradi­tional clerical aspects of Tatar society, called for use of the Turkish language in Tatar writings, and sought to introduce reforms into the antiquated Tatar educa­tional system and social structure, including the emancipation of women. The his­toric Crimean capital of Bakhchesarai (in Tatar, Bahfesaray) became the home of a newspaper edited by Gaspirali (Tercuman, 1883-1914), who hoped the organ would serve the Crimean Tatars as well as other Tatars and Turkic peoples in the Russian Empire.

Despite his popularity, Gaspirali’s views on the use of Turkish in publications prompted a debate about national identity. Did the Crimean Tatars form a dis­tinct nationality that should have its own literary language? Or did the adoption of Turkish imply that they were only a branch of a single pan-Turkic people? By the beginning of the twentieth century, a new generation of intellectuals known as the Young Tatars had begun to challenge openly Gaspirali’s pan-Turkic views and to call for the creation of a distinct Crimean Tatar literary language. One of their leaders, Abdurre§it Mehdi, was elected to the Second Duma on a program committed to struggle against tsarist autocracy and to the national liberation of the Crimean Tatar people. The question of Crimean Tatar particularism versus pan-Turkic unity and the related issues of an appropriate literary language and national identity remained unresolved until the 1920s.

The Romanians

The Romanian presence in southwestern Ukraine dates back long before the nineteenth century. In addition to the province of Bessarabia, the region between the Prut and Dniester Rivers where Romanians traditionally formed the vast majority of the population, they inhabited lands east of the Dniester (in Roma­nian, Nistru) River, which they called Transnistria. Ninety-three percent of the 187,000 Romanians/Moldavians recorded in Dnieper Ukraine (1897) lived in the provinces of Kherson and Podolia, primarily along the eastern bank of the Southern Buh River.

Traditionally, the Romanians were known either as Moldavians or as Vlachs, names which derived from their homeland territories, the Danubian principali­ties of Moldavia and Walachia. By the nineteenth century, the term Romanian had replaced Vlach, although in Romanian and East Slavic sources the term Moldavian continued to be used in the sense of a Romanian from Moldavia.

Relations between Ukraine and the two Romanian principalities were tradi­tionally very close, both when Moldavia and Walachia were independent entities and after the early sixteenth century, by which time they had become vassal states of the Ottoman Empire. One important reason for the good relations was the fact that Romanians and Ukrainians were Orthodox, and that although the Romani­ans spoke a Romance language, it had many Slavic borrowings and was written in the Cyrillic alphabet until the mid-nineteenth century. Romanians from Transnis­tria were among the many peoples who joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks, some of whose otamans and hetmans - Ioan Nicoara Potcoava (Ivan Pidkova), Ioan Gri- gore Loboda (Hryhorii Loboda), Ioan Sircu (Ivan Sirko), and Danila Apostol (Danylo Apostol) - were of Romanian origin.

Moldavian-Ukrainian relations were particularly close during the seventeenth century, the time when Petru Movila (Petro Mohyla), the son of Moldavia’s ruler, in 1632, became metropolitan of the Orthodox church in Kiev; when a Cossack, Dumitru Hunu (Dmytro Hunia), led the 1638 anti-Polish revolt; and when the Zaporozhian hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and his son Tymish during the 1640s and 1650s tried to forge an alliance with their neighbor to the southwest. It was also during the last three decades of the seventeenth century that large num­bers of Romanians began to migrate from Moldavia to Transnistria. The move­ment of people began when the Ottoman Empire controlled Podolia and the southern Right Bank, and was initiated during the short-lived rule (1681-1685) of Gheorghe Ducu, the voevoda of Moldavia whom the Ottomans designated as their ‘Hospodar of Ukraine.’

Romanian settlement of Transnistria continued during the eighteenth century and was directly related to the many wars between the Russian and Ottoman empires. For example, in the wake of the war of 1735-1739, tsarist troops return­ing from their invasion of Ottoman Moldavia brought with them nearly 100,000 Romanians. At the end of the century, when Russia acquired Jedisan (Ottoman territory between the Dniester and Southern Buh Rivers), a new wave of Romani­ans settled the area, this time as peasant-serfs on the large landed estates awarded by the Russian government to several Moldavian boyars (nobles) of the Cantacu- zino, Sturdza, Catargiu, and Rosetti families.

Initially, Romanians were allowed to use their own language in public affairs, in the few schools that existed, and in their Orthodox churches, which until 1828 were under the jurisdiction of a Romanian metropolitanate at Ia§i. That same year, however, the Romanian parishes in Dnieper Ukraine were placed under the authority of local bishops of the Russian Orthodox church, and the Romanian language was replaced by Russian. Effectively, for the rest of the nineteenth cen­tury there was no organized Romanian cultural life in Dnieper Ukraine. Neverthe­less, most Romanians did not lose their national identity, largely because they remained illiterate and therefore ‘protected’ from assimilation to a foreign lan­guage (Russian) they could not understand.

It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that Romanians in Dnieper Ukraine became interested in the cultural survival of their people. The early stages of a national revival took the form of discussions among university stu­dent groups and more popular efforts to have Romanian reintroduced into the Orthodox church. This was the so-called Movement from Balta, led by a monk from that town in Podolia, leromonah Inochentie. Despite these efforts, the status of Romanians and their language in Dnieper Ukraine had not changed by the time World War I broke out in 1914.

Other peoples

There were also several other peoples living in Dnieper Ukraine. Numerically, the most prominent were the Belarusans (222,000). Nearly 70 percent lived in rural areas in northern Chernihiv province, and the remainder were spread through­out the new industrial cities in the southeast, in particular in Kharkiv and Kate- rynoslav provinces. Other peoples included Greeks (80,000), along the Sea of Azov near Mariiupol' and in towns along the Black Sea coast of the Crimea; Bul­garians (68,000), also along the Sea of Azov and in southern Bessarabia; Czechs (37,000), mosdy in rural villages in Volhynia; and Armenians (14,000), in the coastal cities of the southern Crimea.

Some of these groups, such as the Belarusans and Bulgarians, did not develop a distinct cultural life in Dnieper Ukraine. This is because for the most part they did not live in cities, were of the Orthodox faith, and, aside from their native lan­guages, were indistinguishable from the Ukrainians among whom they lived. In contrast, the numerically much smaller group of Czechs in Volhynia and the Kiev region, although they had converted to Orthodoxy, maintained formal structures to preserve their culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they estab­lished two Czech-language newspapers in Kiev, which was to become a center of the Czechoslovak liberation movement during World War I.

The Greeks, too, had their own cultural and political life in Dnieper Ukraine. Their greatest concentration was in the region along the Sea of Azov around Mariiupol', which Greek setders from the Crimea had built in the 1780s. There they had their own self-governing district and Greek-language schools, which flourished until they were abolished during the reforms of the 1870s. Greeks were especially influential in international trade, and certain family-owned commercial dynasties in Odessa (the Serafino, lannopulo, Marazli, Paleologos, and Ralli) operated throughout most of the nineteenth century some of the wealthiest firms of their kind in the entire Russian Empire. Odessa also became an important center in the early stages of the Greek national independence movement. In 1814, the Philike Hetaira (Society of Friends) was founded in the city, and six years later its wealthy Greek merchants arranged for a visit by the national patriot Alexander Ypsilantes, whose anti-Ottoman activities were encouraged by the tsarist Russian government.

The cultural diversity of the cities in Dnieper Ukraine was increased as a result of industrialization during the second half of the nineteenth century. The new industrialists and some of their managers in places like Kharkiv, lelysavethrad (Kirovohrad), Katerynoslav (Dnipropetrovs'k), and luzivka (Donets'k) came from England, Wales, France, Belgium, and Germany. The business practices and cultural attitudes of these well-to-do newcomers may have influenced a small segment of the indigenous economic and social elite. Most, however, did not establish long-lasting roots in Dnieper Ukraine and therefore did not have a cul­tural impact on their imperial Russian surroundings.

Odessa was the exception. There, even some of the smallest groups made their cultural presence felt. French culture, for instance, flourished in the uppermost echelons of Odessa society, not because of the presence of a few thousand French residents in the city, but because of the generally positive attitude of imperial Rus­sian society toward French culture and specifically because of institutions like the Richelieu lycee (secondary school), founded in 1817 and named after the former governor-general of New Russia who was later prime minister of France, Armand- Emmanuel de Richelieu. The Italians, who by mid-century numbered around 30,000, left an even, greater mark on Odessa: Italian opera, a Roman Catholic church, and popular cafes where Italian had once been spoken remained long after the Italians themselves, who numbered less than a thousand in 1897, had left the city.

Thus, Dnieper Ukraine was the homeland not only of the Ukrainians who made up the vast majority of the population, but also of several other peoples. They included the Russians and Poles, who played a disproportionately influential role in the political, social, and economic life of the country, as well as Jews, Ger­mans, Tatars, and other smaller groups, who for the most part followed rather dis­tinct paths of economic and cultural development largely oblivious to the mass of the Ukrainian population among whom they lived.