In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

2. The Scars of Revolution

30 S 2 “yoU can see a scar” When we met Nisen Yurkovetsky in 2009, he was ninety-one years old— still too young to remember the violence of the revolutionary years. But the physical and metaphorical scars of that violence were still very much with him when we sat down with him in his home in Tulchyn, ninety years after his parents, aunt, and grandfather were murdered by a crowd of Ukrainian nationalist fighters—the Lyakhovich gang—in his town. He broke down in tears as he rolled up the sleeve of his navy plaid lumberjack shirt to show us the long scar across his forearm that marks the path of the bullet that killed his mother, as it ricocheted off her and grazed his arm. Only a baby at the time, he was being carried in his mother’s embrace as the bullet felled her. “They killed my mother and father. The bandit shot and the bullet went up my arm—you can see the scar [simen]—a Pole, a priest took me in and saved me. . . . They killed my father—he was a barber—and my mother, and my grandfather—a tailor. . . . I didn’t know my mother. I didn’t know my father.” Later he added, “I was only one year and three months old. . . . When they shot them k The Scars of Revolution The Scars of Revolution 31 the bullet went off me and I fell into the grave. My mother was holding me.” Nisen was left an orphan with his two older brothers, Shumi and Zoye. The Polish priest who found him lying among the corpses brought him to an orphanage in neighboring Nestervarka. Nisen’s grandmother eventually took him in, and raised him, back in Tulchyn. Yurkovetsky, like many Jews born during the agonizing birth pangs of the Revolution, was weaned in violence and destruction. His story is, in many ways, the story of the revolutionary generation. As the Bolsheviks declared victory in faraway Petrograd, the fighting was only beginning in Right Bank Ukraine. Podolia was in particular turmoil, with a bulk of the violence and disorder falling along the path of the Dnieper. Most of this territory came under the control of the Central Rada, a Ukrainian parliament that established itself as the preeminent authority in Right Bank Ukraine after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution of 1917. Over the course of that spring, the Rada became increasingly adamant in its demands for Ukrainian autonomy within the new Russian state. The Provisional Government that ruled in Petrograd after the tsar’s abdication reluctantly negotiated with the Rada, but was unable to come to a definitive agreement on Ukrainian autonomy before the Provisional Government itself was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. The Central Rada responded to the Bolshevik takeover in Russia by declaring itself the supreme political authority in Ukraine and establishing the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR) as an autonomous entity within Russia, consisting of the provinces of Kiev, Podolia, Volhynia, and six other provinces within what had been the Western Provinces of the Russian Empire. A few months later, in January 1918, the UNR declared independence and requested German assistance in staving off Russian forces. But a group of communists in Ukraine who sympathized with the Bolsheviks formed the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, which met in Kiev as an alternative power to the Central Rada. Tensions between the Central Rada in Kiev and the Bolshevik authorities in Petrograd were exacerbated by the Bolsheviks’ vocal support for the rival Congress of Soviets. In December 1917, the Congress of Soviets established its own separate government in the city of Kharkiv, subordinate to the Petrograd Soviet. Ukraine was thus divided between two political entities: a Ukrainian National Republic, ruled by the Central Rada 32 in the shadow of the shtetl in Kiev in Right Bank Ukraine, and a Ukrainian Soviet government based in Kharkiv in Left Bank Ukraine. The clashes between the dual powers quickly led to civil war, first between the Bolshevik Red Army fighting for the Soviet state and the irregular forces that constituted the Ukrainian standing army under Semyon Petliura, and later between numerous other forces that joined in the fighting, including conservative monarchists (the White Guard) and anarchists (the Greens). Real power in the region—if there was such a thing during this turbulent time...