Pogroms in Ukraine during and after WW1

• In the spring of 1918, major pogroms against Jews started. The main perpetrators were the retreating Bolsheviks, who saw them as capitalists and thus worthy of eradication.
• The next wave of pogroms happened in the spring of 1919 and was carried out by retreating Ukrainian units of Petliura's army. The largest of these pogroms took 1,700 Jewish lives.
• Later that year, warlords plundered Jewish settlements.
• In the fall, Denikin's White Army came, conducting their pogroms with the slogan "Beat the Jews, Save Russia." The largest of these killed close to 1,000 innocents.
• In total, the Whites were responsible for 20 percent of the pogroms, the Reds accounted for 20 percent, the warlords for 25 percent, and Petliura's forces for 40 percent. The White Army was the only organized fighting force with a policy of conducting pogroms. The Galician units were the only force that steered clear of them whatsoever.
• Except for organizing their own self-defense units, the main strategy of the Jews was to join the Red Army, as it seemed the friendliest.
• These pogroms ended the Jewish-Ukrainian alliance which had held since the revolution. It also created the idea of Petliura as the symbol of Ukrainian anti-Semitism, which culminated in him getting assassinated in Paris in 1929, ostensibly as revenge for the pogroms.
• This idea is mostly wrong. Petliura himself saw Jews as natural allies against oppression:

"It is time we realize that the world Jewish population—their children, their woman—was enslaved and deprived of its national freedom, just as we were." – The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine, page 223

• continuing:

"I resolutely order that all those who incite you to carry out pogroms be expelled from our army and tried as traitors to the fatherland." – The Gates of Europe_A History of Ukraine, page 223

• The issue was that he rarely or belatedly punished those who actually went against this decree, due to his weak control of the army. Otaman Ivan Semesenko (who carried out the Proskuriv pogrom) was tried and shot on his orders only in March 1920—too late to change anything.
• His units were disorganized and uneducated, and many of them influenced by anti-Semitic propaganda spread by proponents of the Little Russian idea before the war. This is reflected in Right Bank Ukraine (which was a hotbed of Russian nationalism) encompassing some of the worst pogroms.