Petliura and Facebook

On May 25, 1926, Symon Petliura, the Chief Otaman of the Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), was shot by Sholom Schwartzbard while walking on rue Racine, near Saint-Michel, in Paris. It was a textbook assassination, long since having been proved that the assassin was a man of varying, unstable political affiliations and above all an agent of Soviet Russia’s secret police, the GPU. Likewise the story about Schwartzbard firing his revolver point-blank at Petliura to avenge the Jewish pogroms, in which his victim was allegedly involved, has long been proved to be another propaganda lie. Symon Petliura remains a symbol of Ukraine’s national liberation movement in 1918-21. In fact, Petliura’s murder clearly overshadows the carefully planned “medical treatment,” ending in the death, in 1934, of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, head of the Central Rada of the UNR, or the death, in 1951, of another prominent UNR figure, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, in terms of public/media response in Europe, let alone Ukraine.

The Bolshevik leadership, and the GPU as its obedient tool, realized that first it had to remove the motive force, the organization at the center of the international movement against the Bolshevik occupation of Ukraine. Symon Petliura, doubtlessly, was that driving force, a fact confirmed by Soviet print and oral propaganda to the effect that he was a bankrupt, a degraded politician, who represented no political forces. The Chekists had learned the lesson taught by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky: shoot your enemy in the head to make sure he is dead. They acted accordingly.

Today, 86 years after Petliura’s assassination in Paris, his name remains a symbol of national liberation for many Ukrainians in this country and abroad – as well as a symbol of evil incarnate for Soviet-minded ones – rather than a gifted politician, organizer, and military leader; in other words, another personality with all his advantages and shortcomings, victories and defeats.

One ought to take into account this peculiarity of Ukrainian mass consciousness: for all those who still believe in Mother Russia, Ukrainian national liberation movement leaders like Ivan Mazepa and Symon Petliura remain under an anathema; these people still believe Soviet propaganda’s Ukrainian-bourgeois-nationalist cliches. To them, everything should be approached on a black-and-white basis. This new Facebook page will show factual data, including the recently created www.facebook.com/pages/ Symon-Petlura/117788248234133 where visitors can learn the truth about this figure, including private correspondence, articles carried by newspapers and magazines, and recollections by contemporaries. Interestingly, all this serves as proof that for several years before his assassination Symon Petliura, unlike other UNR leaders, remained openly skeptical about Soviet Ukraine’s Ukrainization campaign.

Sad but true, today a large number of Ukrainians (fortunately not the majority) sincerely believe Putin-controlled Moscow media anti-UPA stories broadcast to Ukraine. For example, the Moscow-produced TV series Days of the Turbins, based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The White Guard, portrays Petliura’s officers as hysterical, drunken dimwits who torture their victims to death, but who grab their revolvers at the mere mention of Moscow or Russia. Further proof of this prejudiced, Soviet propaganda-influenced public attitude is the long drawn out legal process of renaming Komintern Street Symon Petliura Street in Kyiv (probably because for most bureaucrats the original name sounds so comfortably familiar).

There are at least two things that stand in the way of an unbiased analysis of Symon Petliura in today’s Ukraine: as Chief Otaman of the Ukrainian National Republic he suffered a defeat, even if it didn’t last long (one can only wonder about how many Ukrainians realize that Petliura’s personal failure didn’t mean that of his cause, even in view of the Weltanschauung changes since then). It is true that the man in the street doesn’t root for losers, anywhere. The wise and sarcastic popular Soviet Jewish poet Samuil Marshak wrote (shortly after Stalin’s death): “A rebellion cannot be a success, /Otherwise it becomes something else.”

Also, portraying the Ukrainian Revolution’s leader, Symon Petliura, as a legendary unerring knight without fear and beyond reproach appears to be the wrong approach. He made mistakes, even bad ones, like when he failed to determine the social basis of the newly established independent state, despite calls for uniting everyone. He concluded inadequate (mildly speaking) domestic and foreign political alliances, agreements and treaties. He was a sober-minded statesman, as well as an inveterate political romantic. The main reason behind the fiasco of the Ukrainian National Liberation Revolution in the early 20th century is not Petliura and his mistakes but the tragedy of an immature, disoriented Ukrainian society that did not have a nation-state. This gave rise to uncontrollable political jealousy, on the one hand, and social pride – a markedly revolting phenomenon. Add to this the denationalization of this society, when the Bolsheviks planned to eliminate its elite and then suffered the consequences of their calls to rob the rich and distribute the loot among the masses. Some kept telling themselves that what was happening was the lesser of two evils. Subsequent events – Bolshevik terror – served as hair-raising proof of who had guessed right or wrong.

The way Petliura struggled for Ukrainian independence, how effective his endeavors were, is a different story. He fought for it, not in words but in deeds. He acted so convincingly that he went down in history as a powerful symbol of the struggle for national independence.

PETLIURA AS A THEATER AND LITERARY CRITIC

Dr. Yurii SHAPOVAL, Ph.D. (History), head of the Historical Center of Political Science at the Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies under the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine:

“During the 74 years of communist regime the name of Symon Petliura was constantly mentioned in various utterly negative contexts. Above all, he was portrayed as a nationalist, although in reality he was a socialist. In the early 1990s the truth began gradually to become public knowledge until in early 2000 it became known that he was murdered on OGPU [Ukr./Russ. acronym for the Joint State Political Directorate] orders. In other words, the Soviet government at the time regarded him as a dangerous enemy and therefore he was assassinated. This information added to Petliura’s heroic image. Some – and I repeat some, not all – of the secret files have been declassified, so one can now analyze this personality. Two aspects should be considered: the personal one (now anyone can browse the Internet and try to figure out whether Petliura was a pogromist or if this is just another communist lie), and whether he was a socialist. This is a very important factor. The man was actually a Ukrainian Social Democrat who underwent a rather complex evolution. I would like people to see Petliura from different angles – for example, as a theater and literary critic, author of brilliant essays who founded the journal Ukrainskaia zhizn [Ukrainian Life] in Moscow – rather than only during the period of social conflict in 1917-20 and as an emigre. Solving this extremely important task now depends on the state and the kind of policy, in terms of historical memory, it has to wage after establishing the Institute of National Memory. I often visit Paris and each time I go to the Cimetiere du Montparnasse to lay flowers on his grave. There are always flowers from other visitors, so people remember him. Petliura was born in Poltava and there is an interesting Petliura study seminar. It has existed for a number of years, and its members study his biography and the tragic lot of his family that was destroyed for no fault of its own. This is a noteworthy project; we must honor our heroes.”

MAZEPISTS, PETLIURITES, BANDERITES

Dr. Stanislav KULCHYTSKY, Ph.D. (History), head of the 1920s-1930s Ukrainian history department at the National Academy’s Institute of Ukrainian History:

“Today there are many literary sources on Petliura, including monographs, reprinted Diaspora publications, and the Internet in general and Facebook in particular. Petliura is also part of the program of research at the Institute of Ukrainian History. In fact, one may well use the term ‘Petliuriana.’ There is every opportunity to study his activities objectively and at greater length. History textbooks for grade 10 and 11 have an adequate entry on Petliura that describes his failures and achievements. From the standpoint of the 19th century, there are three personalities in the history of national liberation: Hrushevsky, Vynnychenko, and Petliura. Each figures in hundreds of articles, numerous books (in which he is variously assessed), and collections of documents.

“Our national historical memory (I mean that of entire segments of the population) is markedly uneven. People who finished grade school before 1991 practically didn’t know Ukrainian history, because what history was taught was 95 percent Russian and only five percent devoted to Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and so on. Needless to say, Petliura figured there as a very negative symbol. Even during Soviet times there were several ideograms that revealed the historical meaning of certain personalities. In other words, history was personalized in the negative sense of the word. This, however, acknowledged a given person’s scope. There were Mazepists who were branded as nationalists and persecuted; during the national liberation movement, in the years between the world wars and until the Soviet Union’s collapse, there were Petliurites and Banderites (after WW II). These three individuals [Mazepa, Petliura, and Bandera] – and I can’t think of a fourth one – would be among the stigmatizing neologisms. Even Nestor Makhno, the most charismatic figure of the civil war, didn’t rise to a state-building level.”

Poems dedicated to Symon PETLIURA (from the Facebook page on Symon Petliura)

Yevhen MALANIUK

May 25, 1926 (on the assassination of Symon Petlura)

There was spring and blossom just a moment ago,
A strange May in a singing Sun…
But something black is now
covering the world.
Where are you, soldier friends?
A naive wave of winged arms –
No, you can’t stop the whistling
of bullets!
And a body is falling
on the cobblestone,
And the chest and shoulders
are trembling,
And death casts its deadly shadow on the eyes…
Seven predatory bullets,
Seven shots of evil
Were intended to hit the spirit,
But they hit the body.
Wings rose over the dead body,
And things blurred and flew away
Like a vain and past vision.
For the eyelids closed
the wavering view
Of a singing steppe, a song of wheat,
Poltava, flags, and Kyiv.
1936

Natalia LIVYTSKA-KHOLODNA

From the collection “Seven Letters” (1937)

2. WEST

III Montparnasse

I bowed to the beloved bones
That had lain down under an alien Montparnasse.
Tulips are blooming
And time is passing over them.
Not in vain did I expect a miracle,
Not in vain did the wind wailed
so hard:
France had become a Ukraine
And Notre Dame
is now St. Sophia’s.
And the tulips were not tulips
But the blood that was shed
near Zbruch.
Oh Otaman, you will rise one day
And walk across the steppes
with sword in hand.
The forty million chests
of your Ukraine
Will heave a sigh of relief,
And I know that this sigh
Will be nothing but Your name.

VI At the grave

I bowed to Your name
That shines on a gray marble slate.
And the heart that rang like
a full wineglass
Suddenly broke and spilled
over the wine.
Far away, in September darkness,
An alien and inhospitable
city thrives,
But a majestic and flowering history
Of bygone years is coming
to my mind.
And a miracle suddenly
shines again:
Instead of the boulevards
and bridges of Paris,
I can see the sparkling gold
church crosses
And the sky is putting
on a blue chasuble.
Flags flutter at the crossroads
of squares,
Soldiers are marching in closed
and mighty ranks.
And ancient Kyiv, a coveted goal
of battles and pilgrimages,
Is rising, reborn in the radiance
of glory.

Leonid POLTAVA

THE HELMSMAN

At the Montparnasse cemetery
in Paris,
There is a flower-covered grave
of St. Symon Petliura.
The tombs and crosses
are in the night’s murky light
Like ships that have lost
their way in the dark.
They still want to sail and live,
And breathe with at least
a stone chest.
Move on and on! All in vain:
Nobody will inspire them
Or throw into the blue high.
They won’t sail. They are in a port,
Where the earth holds
everything in place
With an eternal anchor.
Silent is the last port –
strewn with crosses,
Lost in thought, and mute.
The grass barely grows
Near the tomb slabs,
But the slabs also want
to rise with the grass.
But if there were at least
one surviving blade of it!
What other forces lie here,
hidden and suppressed forever!
Listen to the underground rumble and over-the-ground cries
That are ringing in the port at night…
Out of the group of ships,
one will pick up
The strength, the lust for life,
the call to rise and go.
It is wings, not arms or crosses,
that flutter over him,
So the ship could sail over
the universe and above the sky.
The helmsman will stand
on the bridge,
With dust and smoke on his face,
With marks of wounds,
like medals, on his body.
A tight green trench-coat,
with weapons at his side,
And the unbridled dreams
of his battlefield eyes…
He will swoop like a tornado,
He will thrust like a bullet
Into the pale skies of troubled
countries.
He will call upon and stand
above the crowd,
He will call upon a state and
the state will rise from the ruins!
Farewell, the last port,
the cold Montparnasse!
The roads and winds are faring
to the East,
Where the earth, the sky,
and the people roar:
The immortal Petliura
is among us!

Dmytro PAVLYCHKO

At the grave of Symon Petliura,
I take off my hat and listen
to silence.
I look at white clouds high
in the skies.
I can hear Poltava, although
Paris is around –
A Poltava, where janissaries sing.
There, under the wings
of a two-headed eagle,
Sweet-mouthed turncoats get together,
While the songs
of a faithful Ukrainian
Are poisoned like
an embroidered foot cloth.
There is a people, but there
is no nation,
There is a state, but there
is no fatherland.
There is a temple –
a revamped prison –
Where bows are taken
to the Muscovite God.
I know, Symon,
that you are not sleeping
And will never go asleep
in an alien country.
Rise and dress in gilded bronze,
Come back to the land
of your forefathers,
Come back to Kyiv, where you
had the time of your life,
Where your pains and victories lie!
Your hand of iron will bring up
The new regiments
of Cossacks again,
And the crossbreeds will fall
under your feet.
Paris, October 17, 2008