Soviet-Ukrainian War: Second Invasion and Resource Depletion (1919)

A full-scale offensive by the Ukrainian Front of the Red Army in early 1919 to recapture Ukrainian cities after the withdrawal of Austro-German troops^[8].⏎In the summer of 1919 Ukraine was also under attack by the White army - the Armed Forces of South Russia led by General Denikin^[5]. The advance of Denikin's White army on Kyiv ran under the slogan of restoring a "united and indivisible Russia"^[8]. On August 30, 1919, Kyiv, abandoned by the Reds almost without a fight, was taken by the combined Ukrainian forces - the 1st and 3rd corps of the Ukrainian Galician Army (UHA) and the Zaporizhzhia Group of the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR) under the overall command of the Galician general Kravs; for 4 p.m. the next day, Sunday, August 31, Kravs scheduled a ceremonial parade of the Ukrainian troops on Khreshchatyk with the participation of Symon Petliura, head of the UNR Directory^[9]. The day after the Ukrainian armies entered the capital, Kyiv was also occupied by Denikin's troops under General Bredov, who forced the Ukrainian units out^[9]. The events of August 31, 1919 became known as the "Kyiv catastrophe"^[9][8]. A catastrophe this day was for the Ukrainian armies and for the statehood of the UNR: they lost the capital, taken the day before, within a single day; the armed clash on Duma Square left dead and wounded, and several hundred men were taken prisoner^[9]. Historians of the Institute of History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences conclude: "the initially successful operation of the Ukrainian forces turned into a painful defeat". Of the consequences they write: the catastrophe "had a demoralizing effect on the Ukrainian army and deepened the divergence in the strategic aims" of the two Ukrainian political leaderships - that of Dnieper Ukraine and that of Galicia^[9].⏎The course of the day is known from the diary of the Supreme Command - the staff of the Ukrainian Galician Army. The staff described the morning of August 31 thus: at 8 o'clock Denikin's units entered the city, "it seems - across the middle unoccupied bridge and also across the railway bridge, over which several armored trains crossed", and positioned themselves in the southeastern suburbs^[10]. The senior Galician commander, Otaman Vimetal, agreed with Denikin's commanders on a provisional demarcation line, but between 4 and 5 p.m. Denikin's general Stackelberg, with a delegation of officers and a detachment of 100-200 men, approached the City Duma, already held by the Galicians; Kravs demanded that they be withdrawn behind the agreed line^[10]. The staff recorded the denouement thus: the assembled crowd, "knowing of the presence of Denikin's troops in Kyiv, demanded that the Russian flag be hung on the Duma in addition to the Ukrainian one we had already planted there", and Kravs, "in order to calm the crowd, in which there were many former Russian officers", permitted it with the justification "as a banner of the common struggle of both armies against the Bolsheviks"^[10]. Units of the Zaporizhzhia Group passing by the Duma "tore down the Russian flag"; shooting broke out - Denikin's detachments attacked the Galician units scattered across the city, and of the fire from roofs and balconies the diary entry reads: "the civilian population also fired at our units"^[10]. The day's toll in the diary: "10 Cossacks killed", the disarmed staff of the III Galician Corps and eleven of its companies, the guns of the Zaporizhzhia Group abandoned in the city; Kravs estimated Denikin's forces at "at least two divisions"^[10]. There was no battle for the city: after the shooting at the Duma "great panic" set in - several units were disarmed, the rest fought their way out of the city; the staff summed up: "a unified resistance was impossible because of the panic mentioned"^[10]. Kravs set out to negotiate with Bredov and already on his way met "strong columns of volunteers [soldiers of Denikin's Volunteer Army]" marching on the city^[10].⏎Kyiv remained with Denikin's forces. On the night of September 1 Kravs signed with Bredov an agreement on the withdrawal of the Galician units; by September 2 the group's troops were already assembling on the Ihnativka - Vasylkiv line^[10]. The withdrawal was the command's decision: the riflemen of the group, according to the entry for September 1, "deeply dispirited by the recent events, demand a new offensive on Kyiv"^[10].⏎In the fall of 1919 the Red Army went over to a counteroffensive, now against Denikin's forces^[8].

Mezhlauk, deputy war minister of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR), telegraphed Lenin on 5 April 1919: Ukraine must not be looked upon "as a promised land" of inexhaustible reserves - its resources had to be counted among the all-Russian ones as soon as possible and used under a single plan^[11]. In the second half of April 1919 Lenin, head of the RSFSR government, proposed that the Petrograd organizations ship workers to Ukraine to replenish stocks of food and fuel: "Continue the mobilization of workers in Piter, extending it to Ukraine and the Don... I advise sending these workers en masse to Ukraine, the Don, the East for 3 months. It is foolish to starve and perish in Piter when bread and coal can be won back"^[3]. By a decree of 12 April 1919 this administration obliged every village to hand over to the state the amount of grain assigned to it^[12]. The grain was taken from Ukrainians by the administration's food ministry: it sent armed workers' detachments into the villages, and alongside them the grain was seized by detachments of the Bolsheviks' secret police - the extraordinary commissions (Cheka) - and by units of the Russian army^[12]. These detachments confiscated peasants' property and implements, took hostages, and made a whole village answer for a single inhabitant. Detachments of the same ministry and of the Cheka intercepted, on roads and at railway stations, Ukrainians carrying grain for barter or sale outside the state monopoly: the food was seized, and carrying grain was punished up to and including execution^[12]. Refusing to hand over property cost lives: in June 1919 agents of the Kherson district extraordinary commission detained Nykyfor Potachenko, a 24-year-old peasant of the village of Roksandrivka in Kherson district, "for unwillingness to provide horses"; by the commission's resolution he was shot on the night of 15 June (a local history publication gives 15 July) in the basement of the Tyulpanov house - twice he climbed out of the filled-in grave alive, and only the third execution killed him^[13].

On 14 June 1919 Lenin telegraphed Kyiv at three addresses at once - Rakovsky, head of the colonial administration, Shlikhter, its food minister, and Podvoisky, its war minister - shifting the supply of the Russian fronts onto Ukrainian grain: "In view of the utter impossibility of provisioning the Western and Northern fronts from the exhausted stocks of the Centre, the whole weight of this state task naturally passes to the delegation of Tsekomprodarm, led by Orlov and working under Trotsky's order for the entire Russian army as a whole"; in the same telegram he demanded that the administration's war ministry assist this delegation "so that it can immediately move food freight to the armies of the West and North"^[14]. A week later, on 21 June, Lenin sent Rakovsky a telegram marked "out of all turn" and "with verification of the exact time of delivery," setting a deadline: "The Western army absolutely needs three trainloads of bread within the coming days. I urgently request the most energetic measures to meet this need. The extremity is utmost"^[15].

On 1 June 1919 the central Soviet authority of Russia (the VTsIK) resolved to carry out "a close unification of 1) the military organization and military command, 2) the councils of the national economy, 3) railway administration and management, 4) finances and 5) the commissariats of labour" of Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Crimea - "so that the direction of the said branches of national life be concentrated in the hands of single collegiums." The resolution was signed by Kalinin, chairman of the VTsIK, and by secretary Serebryakov, while preserving the formula of independence word for word: the unification was carried out "standing fully on the ground of recognition of the independence, freedom and self-determination of the toiling masses of Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Crimea"^[16]. Ukraine's economy, railways, finances and labour passed under Moscow's management; independence remained a word on paper.

The food ministry was not on that list: Lenin, head of the RSFSR government, subordinated it separately and in secret. On 12 June 1919 he sent a note to Kyiv: the food ministry of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR) was passing under the all-Russian one in both money and management - without any announcement; at the bottom of the note stood the instruction to encipher the underlined part and transmit it immediately, and on 14 June the question was put before the plenum of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party^[17].

In captured Kyiv the occupiers shot hundreds of people over 1919: they killed at night, printed the names of the dead daily in a newspaper, and in the last week of August proclaimed a "week of red terror." An eyewitness - Kateryna Koval-Medzvedska, a Kyivan who lived seven months in the city under Moscow's occupation, from February to August 1919 - recorded that on 24 August 1919 "a 'week of red terror' was officially proclaimed - blood flowed in rivers. Peters, Voroshilov and Latsis, all-powerful that day, took no account of government members Rakovsky, Manuilsky and others who signed orders for releases from the Cheka, but ordered those people shot 'in the order of red terror.'" The shooting was done at night: "From 2 to 4 o'clock the sinister night silence of the unhappy, tormented city was broken by single shots and the piercing sounds of a car siren. People living near one of the 17 chekas scattered across the city understood that our brothers were being shot, their cries and groans drowned out by the red executioners with the shrill piercing sounds of sirens"^[18].

From 24 to 30 August inclusive the newspaper Izvestia - the organ of the Kyiv occupation authority - daily announced lists of dozens shot "in the order of red terror"; on 26 August "a list was announced of 167 persons shot 'in the order of red terror'" - among them people whose release order the eyewitness had read two days earlier in the chancellery of the central organ of the colonial administration (the VUTsIK). "And how many people perished without announcement, simply vanished without trace!"^[18]. One of those newspaper lists survived in a reprint: Shumakher, acting head of the Whites' Information Section, reproduced in "Summary of Information on the Atrocities and Lawlessness of the Bolsheviks" No. 25 a list printed in the Kyiv Izvestia of people shot by the occupiers: a professor, a gymnasium teacher, merchants, house-owners, attorneys, former Kyiv governor Sukovkin, former vice-governor Neklyudov, 80-year-old Slynko^[13]. The very form of the announcements came from Moscow: the RSFSR government's resolution "On Red Terror" of 5 September 1918, signed by justice minister Kursky and interior minister Petrovsky, required "publishing the names of all those shot, as well as the grounds for applying this measure to them" - the Kyiv lists with the formula "in the order of red terror" delivered names and grounds, exactly what the resolution demanded^[19].

The head of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine, Rakovsky, wrote to Lenin on 9 August 1919 that the Kyiv secret police had been carried away with executions by hastily drawn-up lists and that more than 300 people had been shot in Kyiv in total^[20], while Latsis, chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, gave his own statistics in his 1920 report book: "Shot by the Kyiv Extraordinary Commission jointly with the V.U.Ch.K. - 825" people in 1919 up to October^[21].

Units of the Volunteer Army (the "Whites") captured the town of Fastiv in Kyiv province on 25 August 1919 (7 September by the modern calendar) - and on the same day began robbing the inhabitants of the town's Jewish quarters. Pakhomov, the Whites' temporary commandant, having received 25,000 roubles from a Jewish delegation, promised to take measures but refused to stop the violence at once, explaining why: "since the troops are greatly embittered against the Jews." The Whites' garrison was commanded by Belogortsev. The Whites killed on a schedule: "Towards evening all the Cossacks, regulars and partisans separately, were usually assembled for roll-call. After roll-call and prayer they scattered in groups across the town 'to work.'" Those fleeing were caught on the railway: "Many were taken off trains along the way and led into the forest to be shot"^[22].

When a Russian delegation came to the commandant asking him to stop the pogrom, because the Russian population had begun to suffer from it too, he asked: "And who is doing the robbing?" - and, on hearing that the Russian population was also taking part, replied: "And later they will say it was the Cossacks who robbed"^[22]. On 23 September 1919 Kundo, the Whites' commandant in Fastiv, issued order No. 2 declaring everything settled: "I add that measures for the protection of order in the townlet were taken long ago, all apprehensions are entirely groundless. Of all cases of robbery, violence and requisitions I request immediate notification to the commandant's office"^[23].

Rabinovich, a commissioner of the Russian Red Cross, described the result of the three days thus: "The pogrom, like a tornado, destroyed, burned and scattered the greater half of the town... From the smouldering ruins of the fires bodies of those burned in the houses were still being recovered"^[24]. By 30 September 1919, 600 killed, 100 burned and 315 wounded had been counted in Fastiv - out of eight thousand Jewish inhabitants of the town, and the figure was incomplete: "there are far more killed, since to this day bodies are being found in the woods"^[22].

The resistance of the villages of captured Ukraine tied down troops for the whole of 1919. On 18 April 1919 Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of the RSFSR's Ukrainian Front, reported to Vatsetis, commander-in-chief of the RSFSR armed forces, that he would give no troops for the Southern Front: "Right now there is hard fighting at Shepetivka and Tiraspol and a hard struggle with kulak uprisings everywhere." Vatsetis wrote on the report: "Carry out the order and report back"^[4]. Two weeks later, on 3 May 1919, Antonov-Ovseenko repeated his refusal and named the scale: "30 versts from Kyiv there is a kulak uprising, up to three thousand well-armed men with 8 guns." Vatsetis answered as before: "I repeat that the order must be carried out"^[25].

For the command, the Ukrainian peasants who had risen against the seizures were not an adversary but a hindrance to supplying the front: it regarded the Ukrainian village as a rear area to be kept in order while the main forces carried out Moscow's tasks.

Naval artillery was turned on the risen villages too: on 2-5 May 1919 the armed steamers of the Dnipro river flotilla shelled Chornobyl, Pliuty and Trypillia, held by the insurgents - the vessels "Arnold," "Verny" and "Admiral" are named in the operational summary one by one^[26].

On 25 May 1919, summing up for the armies of the front the fighting against the Ukrainian units of commander Hryhoriv, who had risen against the Soviet authority, Antonov-Ovseenko laid down the order of the mopping-up: those who surrendered were to be handed to the military tribunals of the Soviet authority, "ringleaders and chiefs" singled out separately, and the villages in the armies' areas of operation disarmed with the taking of hostages; the order was signed with him by commissar Savitsky and chief of staff Babin^[27].

The refusal of the White commanders to recognize Ukrainian statehood. General Denikin, as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia, signed the programmatic address "To the Population of Little Russia" (August 1919), which declared the struggle for a Ukrainian state to be treason. Symon Petliura (head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People's Republic and chief otaman of its army) and his associates, the address ran, "having begun the dismemberment of Russia, continue even now their evil work of creating an independent 'Ukrainian State' and of fighting against the rebirth of a United Russia"^[5]. Denikin wrote in the first person: "declaring Russian the state language throughout the whole expanse of Russia, I consider entirely inadmissible and prohibit the persecution of the Little Russian folk language"^[5]. The promised "prohibition of persecution" did not recognize the language but assigned it the place of a vernacular. What remained for Ukrainian under the address were everyday life, private schools, and the first years of primary school - Denikin explained: "to ease the pupils' assimilation of the first rudiments of knowledge"; the "treasonous movement" for statehood he required to be "completely distinguished" from the permitted "love for the native region… and its local folk language"^[5]. Denikin allowed the people's existence and denied it political subjecthood: the striving for an independent Ukrainian state was declared treason, the language was left a vernacular. On the night of September 1, 1919, after four hours of negotiations, the Galician general Kravs and Denikin's general Bredov (according to the diary of the Supreme Command of the Ukrainian Galician Army - the commander of the Guards corps) agreed: the Galician units would withdraw from the city that same day "at least beyond the line of the Kyiv railway stations", then to the line Ihnativka - Vasylkiv - Hermanivka, while the Galician army guarantees that it "will make no moves against the army of the volunteers [Denikin's Volunteer Army]"^[10]. In the fourth point the Galician command renounced political subjecthood: "The commander of the Kyiv group of the Galician army declares that the Galician army operates independently of Petliura's army under separate Galician command, without any political aims, and solely with the purpose of fighting the Bolsheviks"^[10]. A day earlier, on August 30, at negotiations with the command of Denikin's 2nd brigade, its representatives demanded that the territory southeast and east of the Koziatyn - Fastiv - Kyiv railway be treated as "the operational zone of Denikin's troops", and that the strip between the line Fastiv - Volodarka - Saskiv - Buky and the line Bila Tserkva - Tarashcha - Lysivka - Zvenyhorodka be declared neutral; the diary records: "We did not agree to this demand"^[10].

On 3 August 1919 general Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration in Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, Kursk and Poltava provinces, issued in Kharkiv order No. 22, opening it thus: "I announce the basic provisions adopted by the Special Council on the question of 'Ukrainian schools.'" The first point was reversal: "All schools in which, before the appearance of the 'Ukrainian' authorities, instruction was conducted in Russian, and then, by order of the Ukrainian authority, the Little Russian language was made the language of instruction, must return again to instruction in Russian"^[28].

The history and geography of Ukraine the order struck from the curricula: "The teaching of 'Ukrainian studies' (the history and geography of Ukraine) is abolished"^[28].

Nine days later the commander-in-chief confirmed the same norm: in the address "To the Population of Little Russia" Denikin declared Russian the state language "over the whole expanse of Russia," leaving to Ukrainian the private schools and the first years of primary school - "to ease the pupils' assimilation of the first rudiments of knowledge"^[5]. In Kyiv order No. 22 was applied in the autumn as well: a summary of the Soviet side on the situation in the city records that "in all schools the Russian language is being introduced as the state language"^[29].

Denikin, commander-in-chief of the White army, vouched in his address "To the Population of Little Russia": "there will be no restrictions whatsoever in relation to the Little Russian language in print"^[5]. The ban came three weeks after the capture of Kyiv and was built as a system of permits: by order of general Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration, "all Kyiv newspapers and other periodicals appear only with the permission of the Kyiv governor," every publication is presented to the prosecutor and the governor straight from the printing house, "strict preliminary military censorship" is in force, and any deviation is punished with a fine of 20,000 roubles and six months in prison^[30][29].

To the Ukrainian press this system gave no permits. The Information Bureau of the UkrSSR Defence Council reported from captured Kyiv: the Whites' newspapers - Kievlyanin under the editorship of Shulgin, Ekho, Vechernyaya Gazeta "and a number of other sheets" - came out daily, but "not a single Ukrainian newspaper appears in Kyiv," and "in the streets of Kyiv Ukrainian speech is not heard at all"^[31]. Historians of the Institute of History of Ukraine confirm the outcome: under the Whites Ukrainian newspapers were closed down and Ukrainian books were removed from the shops^[7]. The promise not to touch the Ukrainian word lasted exactly until the Whites entered Kyiv.

On 10 September 1919 colonel Matveev, temporary head of the Whites' administration in the city of Mykolaiv, issued an ordinance: all unions and societies that had not submitted their charters or had not been confirmed by the circuit court were deemed closed^[32]. The Ukrainian enlightenment societies, grown up over the years of the revolution without confirmation under the pre-revolutionary procedure, fell under this condition wholesale: no separate order was needed to close them - it was precisely thus, by a formally neutral condition, that the Whites closed the Ukrainian societies. Historians of the Institute of History of Ukraine confirm the outcome: Ukrainian institutions under the Whites were liquidated, and Russian ones were set up in their place^[7].

On 28 November 1918 the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party (the CC RCP(b)) created in the Russian city of Kursk a puppet government for Ukraine, which named itself the "Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine" - political cover for the invasion by the troops of Soviet Russia into Ukraine. By a manifesto of 29 November it proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power in Ukraine, and on 29 January 1919 it was reorganized into the Council of People's Commissars of the UkrSSR on the Russian model^[2]. By a decree of 3 December 1918 - a month before the capture of Kharkiv - this government set up its own secret police: the All-Ukrainian Extraordinary Commission^[33].

In the summer of 1919 Moscow took even the punitive apparatus away from the front it had created. On 11 June 1919 Shishkov, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, telegraphed the CC RCP(b) that it had no organizational ties whatsoever with the Russian one and that all local commissions in Ukraine were subordinate only to the Ukrainian, not the Moscow one^[34]. On 22 July 1919 Dzerzhinsky, head of the Russian secret police, wrote to Latsis, head of the Ukrainian one, that the Ukrainian commission's business was to carry out in Ukraine the policy of the party's Moscow centre: "in relation to us You have become a samostiynik, become one objectively," and its task was "to be the conductor of the policy of the CC RCP [the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party] in Ukraine"^[35]. On 13 August 1919 the politburo of the CC RCP(b) resolved to dissolve the Ukrainian secret police, merging it with the Russian one, and charged Peters with the execution; on 14 August the politburo of the party's Ukrainian branch (the CC CP(b)U) submitted, and on 16 August Peters was appointed representative of the Russian commission attached to the colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR)^[36].

Don Cossacks of the White army of General Denikin killed Ukrainian Galician riflemen taken prisoner - the command of the Galician Army lodged a formal protest with the Whites' command, and the Galician Army's own military court confirmed that the killings of prisoners were fact. On 25 October 1919 the Supreme Command - the staff of the Galician Army (UHA) - sent, as recorded in its war diary, a mission to the Whites' command - otaman Lysniak, sotnyks Levytsky and Kurytsia - "who were to lodge a formal protest against the killings of our prisoners by the Don Cossacks"^[10]. In the delegation's written commission the task was recorded thus: "first, to protest against the killing of our prisoners by Denikin's troops, as took place in Haisyn, and second, to discuss the matter of an exchange of prisoners." Otaman Lysniak testified in court: "In Vinnytsia I received the commission to go to the Staff of the Volunteer Army [Denikin's, the 'Whites'], hand over the said protest and negotiate an exchange of prisoners"; the delegation was received by general Slashchov, who promised "to telephone Denikin"^[10]. In November 1919, at the military trial of UHA commander general Tarnavsky, sotnyk Kurdiak asked "whether the killings by the Don Cossacks were fact or fiction"; Tarnavsky replied: "It is fact. Witness - otaman Bukshovany, and indeed the 5th Brigade"^[10].

Retreating from Kharkiv in June 1919, the Bolsheviks' secret police killed its own prisoners and hostages - Ukrainians held in its jails without trial. By the count given in a summary of the Whites' Information Section, over the months of the Bolshevik occupation of Kharkiv more than 1,000 people were shot: 40-50 were killed daily, "and in the last days this figure rose sharply"; among the named dead were former governor Bantysh with his son, generals Nechaev and Kuskov, prince Putyatin^[13]. Excavations after the Bolsheviks left yielded 239 bodies; forensic medical examination established facts of burial alive, of torment and of torture. In the concentration camp the secret police had set up on Chaikovska street, 33 bodies of executed hostages were dug up^[13]. A witness from the camp hostile to the Whites - the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison - confirmed both the routine and the last day: Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, "usually shot all the condemned... with his own hand," and "on the last day of our stay in the Kharkiv prison... 120 people were shot in the back yard of our prison"^[37]. There were no sentences: Kharkiv secret police investigators Portugeis and Feldman, by the documents studied by the historian Melgunov, "in 1919 shot people without any protocols at all" - by a pencilled resolution, "Baeva, as an incorrigible criminal, to be shot"^[37]. Before leaving neighbouring Vovchansk the Bolsheviks shot 64 hostages, among them the headmistress of the girls' gymnasium^[13]. In the settlement of Velykyi Burluk in the same Vovchansk district the Bolsheviks executed the entire family of prince Vadbolsky - nine people, among them two 80-year-old women and an English governess; the compilers of the summary recorded: "they were stripped naked, led behind the house church, candles were lit, they were ordered to kneel and pray, and then, to whistling and shouting, their ears were cut off, they were hacked with sabres and, as the victims lost consciousness, finished off with shots"^[13].

The Bolsheviks' secret police tortured detained Ukrainians in the captured cities: interrogations with beatings and torture regardless of sex or age, closet-cells and cellars flooded with water, staged executions, staff executioners paid per person shot. In Kyiv this was put on record by the Red Cross: the report of the Central Committee of the Russian Red Cross Society on the activity of the Kyiv secret police, compiled from the observations of nursing sisters over February - August 1919 and signed by the committee's acting chairman, doctor Lodyzhensky, describes the interrogations: "As soon as a person fell into the power of the ChK [the secret police], he lost all human rights... From the very first interrogation the screaming began... cruel beatings began, accompanied by abuse. Neither age nor sex protected from them" - "the fourteen-year-old daughter of the actress E. K. Chaleeva was cruelly beaten before her mother's eyes, to extract more candid testimony from both daughter and mother"; an investigator beat 60-year-old Vorovskaya in the presence of her arrested daughter^[38]. The arrested Ukrainians were kept in a windowless cellar flooded with water and in a wall closet in which, according to the report, "one could only sit hunched." Interrogation was conducted by staged executions: Ustinsky "was led to the place of execution in the basement, undressed, laid on the floor... The shot did ring out, but calculated so that the bullet flew close but past. So close that... all the skin on Ustinsky's hands was scorched. Such shooting was repeated many times. In the end Ustinsky was shot dead"; Solntsev was forced to attend executions and locked in the basement as "the last living man among the still-warm corpses" - at a night interrogation he went mad, which, at the investigators' demand, was certified by the psychiatrist Kirichevsky, himself a prisoner. One of the sisters summed up seven months of observation thus: "there were no torn-out fingernails, no epaulettes nailed to shoulders, no flayed skin, no people scalded with boiling water. But their whole life was one continuous torture"^[38].

In Odesa an eyewitness who had been held under arrest in the Odesa secret police and published his memoirs there in 1919 under the pseudonym K. Alinin recorded, from the words of the staff executioner Abash, how one of the chiefs of that secret police conducted interrogation: he "'broke a person up by parts.' He would usually sit down before his victim and begin questioning him. - An officer? - he would squint... and, taking aim with his revolver, shoot through the martyr's hand. - A colonel, perhaps? - And the bullet would shatter the elbow"; for each person shot, by the same Abash's words, the secret police paid the executioner^[39].

In Kharkiv Saenko, commandant of the Kharkiv secret police, tortured the interrogated himself: his "favourite method," by testimony collected by the Whites' investigative commission, was this: "he would plunge a dagger a centimetre into the body of the person under interrogation and then turn it in the wound," and the torture went on "in the office of the investigator of the 'special department,' before the eyes of Yakimovich, his assistants and investigator Lyubarsky." The same was independently confirmed by the left SR Karelin, held in the Kharkiv prison: "Usually Saenko shot all the condemned with his own hand... In our presence in the Kharkiv prison he shot a sick man on a stretcher"^[37].

On 29 June 1919 the central organ of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the VUTsIK) resolved "to carry out a general mobilization of workers and peasants of call-up age, beginning at 19, and in the front-line zone at 18," and to draft the entire "non-labouring element" from 18 to 45 into the rear militia - captured Ukraine was to fight for its captor - and by the same resolution it declared: "All who resist the carrying out of the mobilization are to be deemed enemies of the people"; it was signed for the chairman of the organ by Polozov and by secretary Lapchinsky^[40]. On 26 July 1919 Skrypnyk, plenipotentiary of the same administration's Defence Council, reporting on the Trypillia district, where the army had just crushed the risen peasants, wrote: "there now remains the mobilization of the entire population of this district" - the men of villages that had just risen were taken into the very army that had crushed them^[41].

On 25 May 1919 Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of the RSFSR's Ukrainian Front, disarming the villages, ordered the armies: "beforehand, to take hostages from the kulak elements"^[27]. On 29 June 1919 the central organ of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the VUTsIK) legalized "the taking of hostages" by its resolution on general mobilization^[40], and on 11 December 1919 Trotsky, war minister of the RSFSR, included "the hostage system" in the list of means by which the armies "entering Ukraine" were obliged to disarm the population^[42].

In Zhytomyr, during the nine days of Soviet rule in March 1919, hostages sat in the secret police "until payment of the contribution" - until the town paid the sum imposed on it; so recorded Livshits, commissioner of the Central Committee for Aid to Pogrom Victims, noting that a considerable part of those arrested "as hostages" were Jews^[43]. So it was in Fastiv too: until the contribution imposed on the town was paid, Jews sat as hostages^[22]. The occupation secret police in Kyiv held hostages as well: Rakovsky, head of the Soviet colonial administration of Ukraine, wrote to Lenin on 9 August 1919 that after the proclamation of "red terror" over the Hryhoriv uprising it had shot 30 hostages - former members of the monarchist organization "Union of the Russian People," which staged pogroms, and former tsarist officials; when it prepared to shoot 15 more and Rakovsky with Latsis, chairman of the Ukrainian secret police, checked their biographies, only two turned out to be dangerous enemies^[20].

The removal of hostages from Kyiv during the evacuation at the end of August 1919 was described by the eyewitness Kateryna Koval-Medzvedska: "Doctors, engineers, topographers were put on record, and in the last days, under threat of execution, they were carried off by force to Moscow. Besides that, landowners and the bigger merchants were carried off by the hundreds as hostages"^[18].

On 29 June 1919 the central organ of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the VUTsIK) resolved: "To take the most energetic measures to suppress kulak uprisings and the actions of bands, applying the imposition of contributions on rebellious localities and the taking of hostages"; the resolution was signed for the chairman of that organ by Polozov and by its secretary Lapchinsky^[40]. Under this resolution it was not the one who rose who had to answer - in money and in hostages - but the whole locality at once.

By the end of the year Moscow fixed the practice for the entire army: on 11 December 1919 Trotsky, war minister of the RSFSR, and Kamenev, commander-in-chief of the RSFSR armed forces, signed secret order No. 579 - every army "undertakes, in its area of operations, to disarm the population with the help of all means at its disposal (agitation, agent intelligence, payment for surrendered weapons in money and in kind, house-to-house searches, fines in money and in kind, collective responsibility, the hostage system, the shooting of culprits, etc., etc.)," and the order, as stated in it, applies "first of all to the armies entering Ukraine"^[42].

On 26 July 1919 Skrypnyk, plenipotentiary of the same administration's Defence Council, telegraphed from the area of Zeleny's uprising - in the same words as the orders: "The uprising of the peasants of the Trypillia district has been suppressed... there now remains... the exaction from it of all the expenses borne by the workers' and peasants' state for the suppression," specifying: "It is necessary to carry out the exaction in produce, the exaction from the peasants of the expenses caused by the uprising"^[41]. In Mohyliv-Podilskyi, which Soviet troops captured on 5 April 1919 without a fight, the town was at once subjected to a forced payment - a telegram to the Bureau of the Ukrainian Press over the signature of Ivanitsky reported: "there is exemplary order in the town, with which even the bourgeoisie is content, despite the imposed contribution of one and a half million"^[44]. The reports of the Special Investigative Commission attached to the Whites' command (the AFSR) record of Odesa: "400 people have been sent to forced labour for non-payment of contributions," and of Izium in Kharkiv province: "eyewitnesses told of the wholesale robbery of families whose relatives had gone over to the 'Kadets'"^[13].

In Fastiv in Kyiv province the forced payment imposed on the town under the Soviet authority was paid by the Jewish community - Kh. Hofman, an officer of the Editorial Board, the body collecting testimony on the pogroms, recorded: "The entire imposed contribution was paid almost wholly by the Jews, notwithstanding that they are poorer and considerably fewer than the Christians. Many Jews were taken hostage, sat long in prison, many had to leave Fastiv altogether"^[22].

On 26 May 1919, at the height of the uprising of Ukrainian peasants under Hryhoriv against the Soviet authority, Lenin, head of the RSFSR government, telegraphed to Kyiv to Rakovsky, head of the colonial administration of Ukraine (the UkrSSR), and to Kharkiv to Mezhlauk, its deputy war minister: "Decree and carry into effect the complete disarming of the population, shoot on the spot mercilessly for any concealed rifle. The whole crux of the moment: a quick victory in the Donbas, the collection of all rifles from the villages, the creation of a solid army"; he ordered the telegram read "to all prominent Bolsheviks"^[45]. A day earlier Antonov-Ovseenko, commander of the RSFSR's Ukrainian Front, had ordered the armies "to disarm the local population" in their areas of operation^[27].

In secret order No. 579 of 11 December 1919 Trotsky, war minister of the RSFSR, named the goal in a single clause - "the unconditional and universal disarming of the village population" of Ukraine was declared "the basic condition of success"^[42].

On 26 July 1919 Skrypnyk, plenipotentiary of the same administration's Defence Council, telegraphed on the course of the disarmament from the Trypillia district: "The disarming of the population is carried out by searches; all those guilty of concealing weapons and war materiel are handed over to the field revtribunal [the Bolsheviks' military court]"^[41].

In the village of Tiutkovychi in Rivne district on 6 July 1919 an assembly of village representatives, in the presence of Soviet military commissar Senichkin, resolved to surrender "rifles, machine guns, cartridges" and asked "to leave the population 15 rifles and cartridges for the defence of the population against bandits"; in the same protocol the assembly complained that Soviet soldiers were taking property arbitrarily, without a warrant^[46].

On 18 November 1919 the Whites' city administration in Mykolaiv ordered preliminary censorship of printed publications^[47]. So it was in Kyiv as well: an order of general Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration, subjected all publications to military censorship - publishing only with the governor's permission, with every issue presented to the prosecutor^[30].

General Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration in Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, Kursk and Poltava provinces, by order No. 22 of 3 August 1919 returned the schools of Ukraine to compulsory instruction in Russian, leaving the native language the place of an elective: "The teaching of the Little Russian language and literature is permitted as non-compulsory subjects on general grounds" - Russian became the compulsory language of instruction, Ukrainian was studied only at will^[28].

General Mai-Maevsky, head of the Whites' administration in Katerynoslav, Kharkiv, Kursk and Poltava provinces, by order No. 22 of 3 August 1919 cut the Ukrainian school off from state money: "The release of credits from the treasury for the maintenance of educational institutions with instruction in the Little Russian language is not permitted"; the zemstvos - the organs of local self-government - and the towns he forbade to open or support such schools, and those already open he allowed to exist only "on condition of their being taken over for maintenance by private persons and societies." To the teachers the order closed off state standing as well: "the right of state service" was granted only to the teachers of schools recognized as "strengthening the idea of a single Russian statehood"^[28]. In Kyiv that same autumn, by a summary of the Soviet side, "the release of credit to schools for the teaching of the Ukrainian language is discontinued"^[29].