Peasant-Jewish Relations, Insurgents` Anti-Semitism and the Birth of the Peasant Ukrainian Nationalism

The years of revolution and Civil War in Ukraine (1917-beginning 1920s) are usually discussed in a context of the Bolshevik rise to power or the Ukrainian nation building. The Jewish scholar tradition, on the other hand, concentrates on the pogroms committed by almost all sides of the Civil War. However, the Jewish perspective on the Civil War in Ukraine is not just a story of suffering and victimhood, but offers an insight into the story of the peasant autonomy, political activism and the specific emerging peasant Ukrainian nationalism.

While both Ukrainian nationalists and Bolsheviks failed to secure support of the broad masses of Ukrainian peasantry, the peasant communities achieved an unseen level of autonomy in economic, political and military respects. Living in remote villages, almost unreachable for the political centers, Ukrainian peasants conducted their own reforms of which their Jewish neighbours were not only witnesses but objects and victims too. The anti-Jewish violence committed by the rebellious Ukrainian peasants was not simply a continuation of the pogroms and massacres of the 17^th and 18^th centuries but an integral part and product of the revolutionary process that was taking place in the Ukrainian countryside.

Thus, the story of the Ukrainian-Jewish relations during this period is crucial to writing the history of revolution and Civil War in Ukraine outside the centers of Bolshevik or Ukrainian nationalist power and turn the attention to the countryside, where the majority of the population lived.