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