LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

of Poles and Jews had fled for their lives. The place was crowded with refugees to such an extent that the newly-arrived could find no room in the town itself, and had to camp in tents outside. Uman belonged to the estate of the Voyevoda of Kiev, a member of the famous Pototzki family, and was commanded by a governor called Mladanovich. Mladanovich had at his disposal a Cossack detachment of the court guard under the command of Colonel Gonta. Despite the fact that Gonta had long been suspected of sympathizing with the haidamacks, Mladanovich saw fit to dispatch him with a regiment of these court Cossacks against Zheleznyak, who was approaching the city. As was to be expected, Gonta went over to Zheleznyak, and on June 18, 1768, both commanders turned around and, at the head of their armies, marched upon Uman.

      During the first day the city was defended by the Polish pans and the Jews, who worked shoulder to shoulder on the city wall, fighting off the besiegers with cannon and rifles. But not all Poles were genuinely resolved to defend the city. Many of them merely thought of saving their lives. Governor Mladanovich himself conducted peace negotiations with the haidamacks, and was reconciled by their assurances that they would not lay hands on the pans, but would be satisfied with making short work of the Jews. When the haidamacks, headed by Gonta and Zheleznyak, had penetrated into the town, they threw themselves, in accordance with their promise, upon the Jews, who, crazed with terror, were running to and fro in the streets. They were murdered in beastlike fashion, being trampled under the hoofs of the horses, or hurled down from the roofs of the houses, while children were impaled on bayonets, and women were violated. A crowd of Jews to the number of some three thousand sought refuge behind the walls of the great synagogue. When the haidamacks approached the sacred edifice, several Jews, maddened with fury, hurled themselves with daggers and knives upon the front ranks of the enemy and killed a few men. The remaining Jews did nothing but pray to the Lord for salvation. To finish with the Jews quickly, the haidamacks placed a cannon at the entrance of the synagogue and blew up the doors, whereupon the murderers rushed inside, turning the house of prayer into a slaughter-house. Hundreds of dead bodies were soon swimming in pools of blood.

      Having disposed of the Jews, the haidamacks now proceeded to deal with the Poles. Many of them were slaughtered in their church. Mladanovich and all other pans suffered the same fate. The streets of the city were strewn with corpses or with mutilated, half-dead bodies. About twenty thousand Poles and Jews perished during this memorable "Uman massacre."

      Simultaneously smaller detachments of haidamacks and mutinous peasants were busy exterminating the Shlakhta and the Jews in other parts of the provinces of Kiev and Podolia. Where formerly the hordes of Bogdan Khmelnitzki had raged, Jewish blood was again flowing in streams, and the cries of Jewish martyrs were again heard. But this time the catastrophe did not assume the same gigantic proportions as in 1648. Both the Polish and Russian troops co-operated in suppressing the haidamack insurrection. Shortly after the massacre of Uman, Zheleznyak and Gonta were captured by order of the Russian General Krechetnikov. Gonta with his detachment was turned over to the Polish Government, and sentenced to be flayed alive and quartered. The other haidamack detachments were either annihilated or taken prisoner by the Polish commanders.

      In this way the Jews of the Ukraina became a second time the victims of typical Russian pogroms, the outgrowth of national and caste antagonism, which was rending Poland in twain. The year 1768 was a miniature copy of the year 1648. A commonwealth in which for many centuries the relationship between the various groups of citizens was determined by mutual hatred, could not expect to survive as an independent political organism. A country in which the nobility despised the gentry, and both looked down with contempt upon the calling of the merchant and the burgher, and enslaved the peasant, in which the Catholic clergy was imbued with hatred against the professors of all other creeds, in which the urban population persecuted the Jews as business rivals, and the peasants were filled with bitterness against both the higher and the lower orders—such a country was bound to perish. And Poland did perish.

The first partition of Poland took place in 1772, transferring the Polish border provinces into the hands of the three neighboring countries, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Russia received the southwestern border province: the larger part of White Russia, the present Governments of Vitebsk and Moghilev. Austria took the southwestern region: a part of present-day Galicia, with a strip of Podolia. Prussia seized Pomerania and a part of Great Poland, constituting the present province of Posen. The annexed provinces constituted nearly a third of Polish territory, with a population of three millions, comprising a quarter of a million Jews.170 The great Jewish center in Poland enters into the chaotic "partitional period" (1772–1815). Out of this chaos there gradually emerges a new Jewish center of the Diaspora—that of Russia.

      FOOTNOTES:

120 [Pronounced Ookraïna. The spelling "Ukraine" is less correct. The meaning of the word is "border," "frontier."]

121 [The author refers to the compulsory establishment of the so-called Uniat Church, which follows the rites and traditions of the Greek Orthodox faith, but submits at the same time to the jurisdiction of the Roman See. The Uniat Church is still largely represented in Eastern Galicia among the Ruthenians.]

122 [A contemptuous nickname for Pole.]

123 [The word "Cossack," in Russian, Kazak (with the accent on the last syllable), is derived from the Tataric. "Cossackdom"—says Kostomarov, in his Russian standard work on the Cossack uprising (Bogdan Khmelnitzki, i. p. 5)—"is undoubtedly of Tataric origin, and so is the very name Kozak, which in Tataric means 'vagrant,' 'free warrior,' 'rider.'" Peter Kropotkin (Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition, vii. 218) similarly derives the word from Turki Kuzzãk, "adventurer," "freebooter."]

124 [Derived from the German word Hauptmann.]

125 [From the Russian word Za porogi, meaning "beyond the Falls" (scil. of the Dnieper).]

126 [Literally, "cutting," i.e. the cutting of a forest. Originally the Cossacks entered those regions as colonists and pioneers.]

127 According to legend, the chief of the district had pillaged Khmelnitzki's tent, carried off his wife, and flogged his son to death.

128 [In Polish, Pokucie, name of a region in the southeast of the Polish Empire, between Hungary and the Bukowina. Its capital was the Galician city Kolomea.]

129 The clause in question runs as follows: "The Jews, even as they formerly were residents and arendars on the estates of his Royal Majesty, as well as on the estates of the Shlakhta, shall equally be so in the future."

130 [See p. 98, n. 2.]

131 [Allusion to Amos v. 19.]

132 ["Mire of the Deep," from Ps. lxix. 3.—The Hebrew word Yeven is a play on Yavan, "Greek," a term generally applied to the Greek Orthodox.]

133 See p. 130.

134

Скачать книгу