in the campaign “Soviet-Ukrainian War: Second Invasion and Resource Depletion (1919)”
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[1]. 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"[2].
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"[3]. 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"[4]. 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'"[5].
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"[6].