ГУЛаг Палестины

nowadays does not even include the protection of the fundamental

rights of life of the natural allies of the West in the fight against

the common Russian Bolshevist world danger.

(The Central Committee of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN),

Munich, December 1961, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura

Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.

65)

(3) True-believer assassins. If an assassin is sent by the Kremlin, then is it

necessary for the Kremlin to find one who is personally committed to the

assassination? The answer is yes. This is because a Soviet assassin sent to Paris

has some opportunity to defect and to seek political asylum. He might choose to do

so to escape totalitarianism, to raise his standard of living, to avoid going through

with the assassination, and in the Petliura case to avoid the punishment that was

being anticipated from the French courts. On top of that, he must realize that once

he has carried out the assassination, he becomes a potential witness against the

Kremlin, and so might find the Kremlin rewarding him with a bullet to the back of his

head for the success of his mission.

Thus, it is essential for the Kremlin to ensure that the assassin be energized with a

zealous committment to his mission. One way to achieve such committment is to hold

his family hostage. Another way is to incite in him a thirst for revenge based on

wrongs done to his people. Thus, even if the Kremlin did order the assassination of

Petliura, and even if the Kremlin's selection of a Jew to perform the assassination

was for the political reasons outlined in the quotation above, it may nevertheless be

true that a Jewish thirst for revenge played a useful role, and that all the Kremlin

had to do to inspire the requisite motivation was to propose the disinformation that

Petliura was the appropriate target of that revenge.

Pogromist or fighter for independence? The Encyclopedia of Ukraine entry ends

with:

[S]ince the mid-1920s he has personified, perhaps more than any other

person, the struggle for Ukrainian independence. The personification

seemingly also extends to the issue of the pogroms that took place in

Ukraine during the revolutionary period of 1918-1920, and Petliura

has frequently been invested with the responsibility for those acts.

Petliura's own personal convictions render such responsibility highly

unlikely, and all the documentary evidence indicates that he

consistently made efforts to stem pogrom activity by UNR troops. The

Russian and Soviet authorities also made Petliura a symbol of

Ukrainian efforts at independence, although in their rendition he was

a traitor to the Ukrainian people, and his followers (Petliurites)

were unprincipled opportunists.

(T. Hunczak in Danylo Husar Struk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ukraine,

1993, Volume III, p. 857)

A continuing threat to the Kremlin. Petliura's leadership of the fight for

Ukrainian independence did not end with his withdrawal from the field of battle:

Long after Symon Petlura had gone into exile and was living in Paris,

armed resistance broke out again and again in his name in Ukraine.

Indeed, even today his name is still regarded by the Ukrainian masses

as the symbol of the fight for freedom [...].

(Dr. Mykola Kovalevstky, in Anonymous, Murdered by Moscow: Petlura

Konovalets - Bandera, Ukrainian Publishers Limited, London, 1962, p.

28)

However real the continuing resistance that was carried on in Petliura's name, the

Russian and Soviet authorities - in order to justify Cheka executions

indiscriminately cited Petliura as the author of real and imagined anti-Soviet

actions. For example, summarizing the year 1921 alone, historian Sergey Petrovich

Melgunov relates:

Particularly large was the number of Petlura "conspiracies" then

discovered. In connection with them sixty-three persons (including a

Colonel Evtikhiev) were shot in Odessa, batches of fourteen and

sixty-six in Tiraspol, thirty-nine in Kiev (mostly members of the

intelligentsia), and 215 in Kharkov - the victims in the latter case

being Ukrainian hostages slaughtered in retaliation for the

assassination of certain Soviet workers and others by rebels. And,

similarly, the Izvestia of Zhitomir reported shootings of twenty-nine

co-operative employees, school teachers and agriculturalists who

could not possibly have had anything to do with any Petlura

"conspiracy" in the world.

(Sergey Petrovich Meglunov, The Red Terror in Russia, London, 1925,

pp. 88-89)

Thus, if the impression gleaned from the Shapoval volume is correct (to the effect

that the control of the Cheka-GPU-NKVD lay overwhelmingly in the hands of Jews), then

the situation might be summarized by saying that even while Jews were in reality

pogromizing Ukrainians throughout Ukraine (as we saw in the Melgunov quotation

immediately above), they were simultaneously pogromizing Ukrainian leaders in the

diaspora, as by the assassinations of, among others, Symon Petliura (1926) in Paris

by Cheka agent Schwartzbard employing a handgun, of Colonel Yevhen Konovalets (1938)

in Rotterdam by GPU agent Valyukh employing a package bomb, of Lev Rebet (1957) as

well as Stepan Bandera (1959) both in Munich and both by KGB agent Bohdan Stashynsky

employing a poison pistol loaded with cyanide. This same Bohdan Stashynsky