Down with the Commies, Long Live Soviet Rule

No reason in the Universe, why any of you should be inter ested in this. I just find the complexity of the russian-revolution kinda fascinating and kinda exhausting/unfathomable. Take this phrase — “Down with the Communists, Long Live Soviet Rule” Wtf.

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Ukraine:http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=413
Red Antisemitism: Anti-Jewish Violence and Revolutionary Politics in Ukraine, 1919
by Brendan McGeever

“…In his classic study, Gergel calculated that the Red Army was responsible for 8.6% of the civil war pogroms, while the Petliura and Denikin armies were culpable for 40% and 17.2%, respectively.2 In other words, the Red Army was the least prone to anti-Jewish violence of all the military forces in the civil war. Important though these statistics are, however, they do not capture the traction antisemitism often found among Red Army units during this period, including among those that did not participate in the pogroms….

…Ukraine on the Eve of the 1919 Pogroms

To understand how antisemitism found traction within the Bolsheviks’ social base in Ukraine in 1919, it will be useful to offer a sketch of the Ukrainian social formation during the revolutionary period.6 Ukraine in 1919 was a society markedly polarized by class and ethnicity. In urban regions, the working class was overwhelmingly comprised of Ukraine’s minority ethnic populations – above all, Russians and Jews.7 Moreover, those sections of the working class which were ethnically Ukrainian tended to be politically and culturally oriented to Russia.8 In sharp contrast, the vast rural regions were overwhelmingly Ukrainian.9 The first Soviet census of 1926 captured it well: while Ukrainians constituted 80 percent of the total population of Ukraine, they represented a mere 4 percent of the industrial working class. At the same time, they totaled 91 percent of the peasantry, and according to some historians, the corresponding figure may have been as high as 97 percent in 1917.10 Those who were Ukrainian by ethnicity thus frequently found themselves to be minorities in the major cities, and in no case did they ever constitute the majority of the urban population.11 These dynamics had significant implications for class relations. Nationality, ethnicity, and class frequently manifested as interlocking experiences; consequently, relations between urban traders and peasants were intersectional in character: they were simultaneously processes of class and identity formation. In Ukrainian peasant popular culture, the “city man” represented a ruthless profiteer, an oppressor of the poor Ukrainian toiler. The crisis of the revolutionary period frequently provided the foil for these representations to come to the fore, particularly when the breakdown of exchange channels left peasants without vital manufactured goods such as boots, cloth, nails, and ploughs.12 In Ukraine, the national question was keenly felt at the point of production, and in particular, in the realm of distribution and exchange.13.

Down with the Communists, long live Soviet Rule!

This had profound political consequences. Writing in early June 1919, the Bolshevik Nikolai Podvoiskii admitted that the Party’s only real semblance of governmental power was in the capital cities of Kharkiv, Ekaterinoslav, Poltava, and Chernihiv;14 all industrial regions located in the east and northeast of the country, heavily populated by so-called “non-Ukrainians.” These contradictions found expression in popular representations of Bolshevik rule, which, in the eyes of many Ukrainians, was “foreign” and “urban.”15 In the popular Ukrainian imaginary, “the Communist” was a construct defined by the intersections of class, ethnicity, and place: Communists were urban dwellers, non-Ukrainians who stood aloof from peasant life; they were “Russian oppressors” and, above all, “speculating Jews.”16

These representations were taken up in revolutionary politics, particularly among sections of the radicalized Ukrainian peasantry, which in 1919 began to mobilize around the slogans “We Are for Bolshevik Rule But without Communists!” and “Down with the Communists, Long Live Soviet Rule!” This emergent form of revolutionary subjectivity was closely connected to the politics of antisemitism. Internal Bolshevik security reports show that across Ukraine in mid-1919, sections of the peasantry and other social classes were deeply attached to the pernicious Jew-Communist conflation.17 The fight for the popular conception of “Soviet rule” often became associated with a fight against “Jewish communism.”18 In Poltava in late April, for example, peasants shouted “down with the Yids, down with this Moscow Communist government, long live Soviet rule!”19 The spring and summer of 1919 would reveal just how entrenched these sentiments had become, including within the Bolsheviks’ own social base….see link…or not