Jabotinsky and Ukrainian Nationalism: A Reinterpretation Israel Kleiner, From Nationalism to Universalism: Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian Question (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2000). 199pp. Foreword by Wolf Moskovich. Bibliography. Index. ISBN 1-895571-33-2 (paper)
A unique figure in the Zionist firmament Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of the Revisionist Zionist movement and the perceived father of the Israeli right, was all but forgotten, except by the faithful few, before the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister of Israel in 1977. He was best known as Begin’s teacher and mentor of Betar (Brit Trumpeldor), the right-wing Zionist youth group he headed. In the bitter ideological disputes of the 1930s, Jabotinsky was reviled by the left as a reactionary and proto-fascist and venerated by the right as the true heir of the Zionist leaders Herzl and Nordau. As Begin commented in 1965:
Above all, Ze’ev Jabotinsky was the bearer of the vision of the State in our generation. After Herzl, there was none but him to carry on high the vision of redemption – even in the face of renegades. This is the truth. There is no need to elaborate.1
But the appraisals of left and right are equally incorrect: Jabotinsky’s historical figure and worldview became blurred, in part, by the megaphone war conducted between Mapai, the leading Labour Zionist party, and Herut, the nationalist party founded by Begin in 1948 and forerunner of the Likud. The left used all means possible to blacken Jabotinsky’s name and thereby discredit the Revisionist opposition and ideology, among other counterideologies; the right reinvented him after his death in 1940 as a fellow traveller of the Jewish far right of the inter-war years and projected him as the instigator of the revolt by the Irgun Zvai Leumi against the British in 1944 (he technically headed the Irgun until his death).
In recent years a number of writers have attempted to revise the simplistic imagery of Jabotinsky as an unblemished Zionist icon, the father of the Revolt and a true believer from childhood, and to recast him as a complex fin-de-siècle intellectual, a writer for liberal newspapers who underwent a dramatic transformation to emerge as a convinced Jewish nationalist, but in maturity profoundly disagreed with his radical acolytes in Betar.2 Thus, for example, at the end of 1938, Jabotinsky set down in a private letter views which typified his political thinking throughout his life:
Are you interested in the revival of liberalism, the old fashioned creed of the nineteenth century? I feel its time is coming; I think in about five years it will have enthusiastic crowds of youth to back it and its catchwords will be repeated all the world over with the same hysteria as those of Communism used to be five years ago, those of fascism today; only the effect will be deeper as liberalism has roots in human nature which all barrack-room religions lack.3
On the literary level, Israel Kleiner cites the Russian poet and writer Kornei Chukovsky who had known Jabotinsky at the turn of the century: ‘There was something of Pushkin’s Mozart in him and perhaps something of Pushkin himself. I felt myself an ignorant mediocrity alongside him.’4 Others such as Alexandr Kuprin and Maksim Gorky commented similarly on Jabotinsky’s literary talent and indeed bemoaned what they saw as his infatuation with Zionism, while Konstantin Nabokov regarded him as the greatest Russian-language orator of his time.
Many works have focused on Jabotinsky’s pro-Zionist activities such as the formation of the Jewish Legion during the First World War and the establishment of the Union of Zionist Revisionists (1925) and the New Zionist Organization (1935). One disciple has even produced a 2,000-page biography.5 Jabotinsky was indeed a unique figure in the Zionist firmament. One of his closest associates in the Revisionist movement described him as someone who united ‘a first-rate logical mind with the soul of a poet dissatisfied with the daily humdrum’.6 Jabotinsky lectured in nine languages and was published in many more. His writings stimulated an entire generation to think differently about themselves – to believe that even the poorest and most downtrodden were princes, bearers of the crown of King David. It is significant that in the early days of the ‘refusenik’ movement in the USSR, long-forgotten articles by Jabotinsky about the early Zionist hero Iosif Trumpeldor were recycled as essential reading material in clandestine journals. Jabotinsky founded Betar in 1923 in Riga7 and the Baltic states were a stronghold of the Revisionists in interwar Europe. Jews in the region also possessed a more recent Jewish national memory compared with the USSR, where assimilation had been state policy since the Bolshevik Revolution. In turn, in the 197Os-8Os ‘refuseniks’ in Riga provided a totally disproportionate number of signatories of open letters which demanded the right to emigrate.
Even in the gulag, many Betari held on to their convictions in the most adverse circumstances. In the 1940s returnees from Siberia testified to having witnessed slogans such as ‘Remember Jabotinsky!’ on walls and billboards.8 Some prisoners recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, on the Hebrew date of Jabotinsky’s death, while others carried his photograph on their person – extremely serious offences in Stalin’s camps.
Yehezkel Pulerevitch, the de facto head of Betar in Lithuania, spent almost a quarter of a century in Soviet exile, including 17 years in the gulag, before emigrating to Israel in 1965 following the intervention of the Danish prime minister.9 Pulerevitch recalled meeting in Moscow in 1949 young Jewish communists fired by the establishment of a Jewish state who had discovered Jabotinsky’s early writings in Russian. Older Jews remembered Jabotinsky the Russian writer:
I didn’t know the ‘Russian’ Jabotinsky personally. I came to know him afterwards in the 1920s. I had not met any living witnesses from Russia until then, and here was one sitting in front of me. His face was not visible in the dark. I could only hear his voice. Who, I thought, was this speaking? It was not only he, the Jewish prisoner. An entire generation of Russian Jewry was speaking through him. I had prepared myself that night to tell this Jew about Jabotinsky. Instead I sat and listened in reverential awe and didn’t utter a word.’10
Jabotinsky and Ukrainian nationalism
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Jabotinsky has also been rediscovered in the city of his birth, Odessa, and throughout Ukraine. A Ze’ev Jabotinsky Foundation was established in Kiev – a product of the warm relations between the new Ukrainian state and Israel. In 1998 Israel Kleiner was the first winner of the annual Jabotinsky prize and medal for the Ukrainian-language edition of the reviewed book. Although it was written in the early 1980s, this book further distances the figure of Jabotinsky from the manufactured stereotypes and compliments new archival evidence from the former Soviet Union. Most importantly, it expands a hitherto little-known aspect of his political work – his support for Ukrainian nationalism before the First World War. Of particular importance for our purpose, it also closely examines the controversial 1921 agreement with Maksym Slavinsky.
Jabotinsky grew up in a Russified, nominally Jewish household in the cosmopolitan seaport of Odessa, only 10 per cent of whose population, according to the 1897 census, were Ukrainian. Jabotinsky credited the Greeks, Romans and Jews with building Odessa: the Ukrainians, Russians, French, Italians and Turks came later. He recalled that the 20 pupils in his class at school represented some 13 nations. The Ukrainians, he noted, provided the sailors, masons … and tramps – ‘the salt of the earth’.”
As a student in Berne, Switzerland, Jabotinsky notes in his autobiography, he made various pro-Zionist remarks after hearing the Zionist leader Nachum Syrkin – a statement questioned by recent research.12 Kleiner asserts that Jabotinsky became a Zionist as a result of the well-known Kishinev pogrom of 1903 – an explanation from which Jabotinsky distanced himself. His first article on Zionism – albeit as almost a disinterested outsider – was written in 1902 under the nom deplume Altalena.13 Jabotinsky’s interest in the Ukrainian national question was first noted in an article two years later.14 In this article he suggested that the Jewish national movement should ‘find and unite with allies whose interests overlap to some extent with ours. Herein lie our tasks in the general political area’. The co-operation of national movements was quite distinct from the coalescence of ideologies. Jabotinsky later proposed monism and the doctrine of ‘the sha ‘atnez [a biblical prohibition against wearing two kinds of material] of the soul’,15 which he formulated in order to concentrate Betari minds on achieving the breakthrough to the Jewish state rather than involvement in such ‘hybrids’ as mixing Zionism with socialism.
Jabotinsky understood that as the Jews were a minority within minorities, they were especially vulnerable to being used as unwitting agents of Russification in an attempt to undermine the Ukrainian national movement. Indeed, this is how many Ukrainians perceived such assimilated Russified Jews – a view Jabotinsky attempted to combat. Tsarist Russia’s tactic of playing one nationality against another was by no means novel. Russia had used Ukrainian nationalism to effect the defeat, partition and elimination of Poland in its sweep westwards in the eighteenth century. St Petersburg did not recognize Ukraine, only ‘Little Russia’. It was only in 1905 that the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences acknowledged Ukrainian as the distinct tongue of a distinct people. In 1897 almost 3 million Jews inhabited Ukrainian ethnic territories – some 28 per cent of world Jewry. It therefore made sense for Jabotinsky to work with the nascent Ukrainian national movement and identify common goals and aspirations. This conception prefigured his emphasis on working with Pilsudski’s Poland – although there were clear differences, especially with regard to his various evacuation plans in the interwar years.16
Prior to the First World War the Austrians oppressed the Poles, who in turn oppressed the Ukrainians.17 The attempts to Polonize both Polish and west Ukrainian territories affected Jews and Ukrainians alike. Jabotinsky thus supported the Ukrainians in the Polish-Ukrainian dispute over Galicia. But in Austro-Hungary and Russia he supported the Polish minority. His support for Ukrainian nationalism and other minority national movements between 1904 and 1914 must be understood in the context of his struggle against Jewish assimilationism and rival ideologies such as those advocating national-cultural autonomy in the Jewish diaspora.18 Thus Jabotinsky began to contribute articles to the nationalist publications Ukrainskii vestnik (in 1906) and Ukrainskaia zhizn’ (in 1912). The Vestnik’s editor was Mykhail Hrushevsky, who became president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918; the Zhizn’s editor was Symon Petliura.
Jabotinsky saw close similarities between the goals of the Ukrainian and Jewish national movements. Both peoples had been stateless for centuries but had attempted to keep alive their national and cultural identities. Both were systematically discriminated against by the empires in which they lived, though for different reasons and to differing degrees. Both suffered from reactionary enemies – the Black Hundreds in Russia and the Polonizers in the Russian and Austrian areas of Poland. National liberation for Ukrainians and Zionists alike could come about only through democratization. The fact that before the First World War the Ukrainian national movement adopted a positive attitude towards the Jewish national movement impressed Jabotinsky. Perhaps most important of all, the concept of co-operation between the two national movements was symbolic of an emerging independent Jewish national policy and a pragmatic understanding of Zionist aims.
In an exchange with the Russian liberal Petr Struve Jabotinsky took issue with the overt nationalism and latent assimilationism which characterized Russian liberalism. He argued in a series of articles that democratization and a liberal Russia would not automatically solve the nationalities question. For his part, Struve contended that the Ukrainians were part of the Russian nation while the Jews were unable to progress from their narrow societal base to create an evolving culture. While the Cadets continued to support an integral Russian Empire including the Ukraine and Poland during the years of revolution and civil war. The Jews, Kleiner argues, began to appreciate the Ukrainian national-democratic forces only in 1917 – and by then it was too late since Russification had become partially identified with the Jews.
Moreover, Jabotinsky’s views on the national question, his opposition to Russification and his support for the democratic forces of national minorities did not mean hatred of Russia, antipathy to Russian culture or a renunciation of his background. In 1926, in an affectionate rebuke to the songstress Ida Kremer, Jabotinsky wrote: ‘You are yourself an incarnation of all the fun, devilment and melancholy [of Odessa].’19 Almost 20 years after the Revolution, he still referred to his birthplace Odessa as ‘my beautiful toy of a city’.20
The Jabotinsky-Slavinsky agreement
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Kleiners’s book is his analysis of the Jabotinsky-Slavinsky agreement of September 1921 where it was concluded that Jewish gendarmes would accompany Petliura’s army in a new invasion of Ukraine to prevent further anti-Jewish atrocities. The agreement followed pogroms by nationalists in the war against the Bolsheviks. Although he does not come down on one side of the fence or the other, Kleiner questions the accepted wisdom that the Ukrainian government and Petliura in particular were totally – or even in part – responsible for the killings. He notes, for example, that in his last stronghold on Ukrainian territory between January and August 1920 Petliura’s forces put an end to ‘all attempts to carry out pogroms against the Jews’. Kleiner argues conventionally that many Ukrainians viewed Jews and Bolsheviks as interchangeable entities. He takes issue with the quote on the jacket of a book published in the mid-1970s which describes Petliura as ‘the Jew hating leader of a Jew hating people’,21 suggesting that this description dovetails nicely with the Soviet approach. He further notes that the fewer Soviet atrocities against the Jews such as in the town of Hlukhiv in February 1918 were conveniently airbrushed out of the history books. Arnold Margolin and Solomon Goldelman, prominent Jewish participants in these events, claimed that Petliura and the Ukrainian government actually attempted to combat the pogromists.
Joseph Schechtman, later Jabotinsky’s secretary and biographer and a member of the Central Rada and Small Rada, proposed the creation of selfdefence units in November 1917. Petliura agreed to this proposal in principle but the Jewish socialist parties deemed the idea overtly nationalist and counter-revolutionary, scuppering the idea with terrible results for the Jewish population. This was the background to Jabotinsky’s formal meeting with Petliura’s representative Maksym Slavinsky at the twelth Zionist congress in Karlovy Vary in September 1921. Slavinsky, a minister in Petliura’s government, was an old friend of Jabotinsky from Odessa. His wife was Jewish and he was a known ‘friend of the Jews’. In the elections to the second Duma in 1907, Slavinsky and Jabotinsky both ran for office in the same constituency, which boasted a large Jewish population. Slavinsky was elected, but, perceived as a pro-Jewish candidate, was blocked by anti-Semitic groups from reaching the Duma. The two men subsequently collaborated on the publications Ukrainskaia zhizn’ and the Moscow liberal daily Russkie vedomosti (which sent Jabotinsky to Western Europe following the outbreak of the First World War). In his message to the twelth Zionist congress, read out by Jabotinsky, Slavinsky stated:
The upheavals that made victims of them [Ukrainian Jews] wounded the Ukrainian people as severely as they did the Jewish people. That section of the Ukrainian people that is aware of its tasks can in no way be held responsible for this, since it rejects and condemns those criminal attacks, for which irresponsible elements must be blamed.
Slavinsky concluded with an appeal for brotherhood between the two peoples. However, all this did not go down well with the delegates, particularly the East Europeans and the Anglo-Americans, who laid the blame for the antiJewish atrocities firmly on the Ukrainian government. The accord itself did not commit the Jewish gendarmarie to participate in any military operations on behalf of Petliura’s forces and provided them with a great deal of independence and autonomy. Kleiner notes that whereas the pogroms in Ukraine had deeply distressed the Jewish world, the international community was less concerned. Both sides had an interest in preventing further atrocities. Jabotinsky also understood the iconic value of a Jewish army. This had been his raison d’être in his struggle to create the Jewish Legion. With its disbandment, resurrecting this symbol of the Jewish national movement in military guise had considerable symbolic and inspirational value. Only Weizmann supported Jabotinsky in his efforts to form the Jewish Legion and he encountered considerable hostility from fellow Zionists. This hostility, Kleiner claims, lingered despite the success of the Legion. Jabotinsky’s individualism, dynamism and intellectualism did not please everyone in the Zionist movement, least of all Poalei-Tsion22 and the Zionist left overall, who looked on the October Revolution with respectful ambivalence. The accord thus provided an opportunity to accuse Jabotinsky of allying himself with anti-Semites. Another objection was that Zionists should remain neutral in the conflict between Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik forces. This view resembled the majority view among Zionists against forming the Jewish Legion since it meant backing the British against the Germans and ditching a policy of neutrality. Some asked why it was necessary to seek Petliura’s agreement to create Jewish self-defence forces; others wanted to know why Jabotinsky had broken ranks by not consulting the leadership of the Zionist organization. All this became part of the staple criticism of Jabotinsky and his followers especially in the 1930s when Betar’s imagery of militarism and singlemindedness led to comparisons with the etatist states of inter-war Europe. Although the Ukrainian incursion planned for 1922 never took place, the vehemence of the reaction of the Jewish world took Jabotinsky aback. In a letter written in New York, several months after the agreement, Jabotinsky noted that he had certainly not forgotten the Slavinsky affair: he considered it a serious matter and planned to reopen it on his return to Europe.23 Clearly, he felt he had been judged unfairly. He returned to the subject on several occasions during the next 20 years but never renounced his original position.24
The assassination of Petliura
The positive Jewish reaction towards the assassination of Petliura in Paris in May 1926 and the public support for the assaillant, Shalom Schwartzbard, induced a cautious reaction in Jabotinsky. The Jews saw in the judicial investigation a trial of Petliura rather than one of his assassin. Kleiner writes that Petliura was ‘easily transferred in the national consciousness into the villain of the Jewish tragedy. In actual fact, he was the scapegoat’. In contrast, the Ukrainian press compared Petliura with Garibaldi – ironically Jabotinsky’s hero. In the Revisionist journal Rassvet, which was published in Paris at the time, Schechtman attempted to steer a middle course by distinguishing between the pogromists and genuine Ukrainian nationalists, accompanied by a plea ‘to establish the truth … and not to put the entire Ukrainian people in the dock’.25 Schechtman also recognized Jewish anger by condemning Petliura for tolerating the pogroms but did not accuse him of instigating them.
Kleiner raises a very pertinent question: why did Jabotinsky not write about the Petliura assassination in Rassvet?26 Indeed, he only began to write about it a year after it had taken place. Moreover, although he wrote about the Schwartzbard trial, he omitted any reference to Petliura.27 Kleiner has discovered that Jabotinsky did write about Petliura days after the assassination, but chose to publish in the New York-based Der Morgen Zhornal – and even then buried his views in a piece about Jewish colonization efforts in the USSR. In this article Jabotinsky reiterated his defence of the Slavinsky accord and commented that Petliura
was well acquainted with that type of Ukrainian intellectual nationalist holding socialist views. I grew up with them and conducted a joint struggle with them against antiSemites and Russifiers, both Jewish and Ukrainian. Neither I nor other thinking Zionists from southern Russia can be convinced that people of that type can be considered anti-Semites.28
However, a year later an article in Rassvet signed ‘lust’ (one of Jabotinsky’s pseudonyms) attacked the anti-Semitism of François Coty, the owner of the French newspaper Le Figaro. ‘lust’ went along with the widespread Jewish ‘understanding’ for Schwartzbard and his reasons for killing Petliura. Kleiner argues that this article is not in the style of Jabotinsky and that it employs uncharacteristic phrases such as ‘a crusade against communism’. Although the article does not condemn Petliura, Kleiner postulates that it was not Jabotinsky but someone close to him who wrote the piece. Jabotinsky clearly still held out hope that some vestige of Jewish-Ukrainian co-operation could be salvaged from the affair. On the other hand, he did not wish to associate either Rassvet or the newly formed Revisionist movement with his personal views in standing up to the full force of Jewish anger over the pogroms. Solomon Godelman visited Jabotinsky in Paris and asked him to testify as a witness in the trial if he was satisfied that Petliura had no hand in the pogroms. Jabotinsky, who was always ready to defend his views firmly, declined. On this occasion, he felt that ‘the Jewish community’s clear will’ could not be countermanded and that any opposition would assist his opponents who were attempting to strangle the Revisionist movement at birth.
This important book widens our understanding of Jabotinsky and his political thought – particularly with regard to Ukrainian nationalism.29 When Kleiner strays beyond his expertise on Ukrainian nationalism, he tends to be on less safe ground. For example, Jabotinsky’s evacuation policy emerged from his perception of the growing tragedy of 3 million Jews at the hands of the Poles30 rather than fear of the Nazis. The implication that he foresaw the Holocaust in detail does not hold water. His advocacy of a Ten Year Plan in the late 1930s, his belief in Jewish participation in a post-war peace conference in 1940 and his feeling in April 1939 that war would not break out31 all suggest that, like other Jewish leaders, he had no inkling of the terror to come. Moreover, there are some Revisionists who would disagree that the Revisionists were transformed into Begin’s Herut. Herut was the political reflection of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, whose military campaign was opposed by the official Revisionists. The two parties ran separate lists in the 1949 Israeli election. The Revisionists were decimated electorally and many eventually joined Herut. Others argued that Herut was not the true bearer of the Revisionist message. By then Jabotinsky had been dead for nearly a decade and his image could be remolded and his writings selectively reinterpreted.
NOTES 1 Menachem Begin, ‘Ze’ev Jabotinsky: What Did We Learn from Him?’, in Harry Hurwitz, Menachem Begin (Johannesburg, 1977), 49-50. 2 See Joseph Heller, The Stem Gang: Ideology, Politics and Terror 1940-1949 (London, 1995); Yaakov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement: 1925-1948 (London, 1988); Colin Shindler, Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream: Power, Politics and Ideology from Begin to Netanyahu (London, 1995); and Michael Stanislawski, Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky (Berkeley, 2001). 3 Letter to Mr Bartlett, 9 December 1938, Jabotinsky files 2/28/2, Jabotinsky Institute, Tel Aviv. 4 Rakhel Pavlovna Margolina i ee perepiska s Korneem lvanovichem Chukovskim (Rakhel Pavlovna Margolina and Her Correspondence with Kornei Ivanovich Chukovsky) (Jerusalem, 1978), 20, cited by Kleiner, 2-3. 5 Shmuel Katz, Lone Wolf: A Biography of Vladimir Ze ‘ev Jabotinsky, 2 Vols. (New York, 1996). Significantly, Katz has little to say on Jabotinsky’s interest in Ukrainian nationalism before the First World War. 6 Benjamin Aksin, Mi-Riga l’Yerushalayim (From Riga to Jerusalem) (Jerusalem, 1989), 157. 7 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Ha-Hashmonai Ha-Riga’ (The Hasmoneans of Riga), in Vladimir Jabotinsky, Reshimot (Articles) (Tel Aviv, 1958), 189-98; Rassvet, 28 February and 7 March 1926. 8 Joseph B. Schechtman, The Jabotinsky Story, Vol. 2 (New York, 1961), 400. 9 Jerusalem Post, 31 May 1999. 10 Yehezkel Pulerevitch, Short Stories of the Long Death (Tel Aviv, 1974), 291. 11 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Odessa: City of Many Nations’, Jewish Standard (London), 12 September 1941. 12 Vladimir Jabotinsky, Avtobiografia (Autobiography) (Jerusalem, 1947), 27. In Zionism and the Fin de Siècle, 131, Michael Stanislawski examines Jabotinsky’s early years in Russia through an analysis of now accessible archives in the former Soviet Union. He writes the following about Jabotinsky’s ‘first Zionist talk’ in Berne: ‘Although this recollection has been cited by Downloaded by [SOAS, University of London] at 02:08 09 March 2015 C. SHINDLER 131 many biographers and commentators to demonstrate the ostensible longetivity and innateness of Jabotinsky’s Zionism, there is no contemporary record of the event and none of those mentioned by Jabotinsly recall his speech in their own memoirs. It is thus impossible to know whether the actual event occurred, a problem exacerbated by the fact that, to his later embarrassment, he had garbled the names of two very different Syrkins active in Zionist circles – Nahum and Nachman Syrkin.’ 13 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘K voprosu o sionizme’ (The Issue of Zionism), Odesskiye novosti, 8 September 1902. This was a response to an attack on Zionism by Joseph Bikerman. Stanislawski, 154-56, argues that Jabotinsky wrote this piece in an aloof style and not ‘from the inside’, pointing out that Jabotinsky, although writing about Zionism, does not identify with it personally but defends it like any other nationalist movement 14 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘K voprosu o natsionalizme (otvet g. Izgoevu)’ (On Nationalism: A Reply to Mr Izgoev), Obrazovanie (St Petersburg), No. 10, October 1904, 87-98. 15 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Sha’atnez lo ya’ale alekha’ (Warsaw, 1933) in B’Derekh L’Medina (On the Road to the State) (Jerusalem, 1947), 71-75; Hadar (New York), November 1940. 16 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘De profundis’, Ha-Yarden, 17 April 1936. See also Laurence Weinbaum, ‘Jabotinsky and the Poles’, in Polin, Vol. 5, 1990, 156-72; Yaakov Shavit, ‘Politics and Messianism: The Zionist Revisionist Movement and Polish Political Culture Studies in Zionism’, Studies In Zionism, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1985, 229-46. 17 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Homo Homini Lupus’, in Uma V’Khevra (Nation and Society) (Jerusalem, 1947), 255-65; Odesskie novosti, 18 July 1910. 18 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Michtav ul Ha-Otonomism’ (A Letter on Autonomy) in Ketavim Nivcharim, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1936), 138-66; Evreiskaia zhizn’, June 1904. 19 Handwritten note on Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Ida Kremer’s City’, Jewish Tribune, 14 May 1926. 20 ‘Ul Tochnit He’evakuatsia’ (On the Evacuation Plan), address by Jabotinsky to the Warsaw Society of Jewish Physicians and Engineers, October 1936, Naumim, 1927-1940 (Speeches, 1927-1940) (Jerusalem, 1947), 197-212. 21 Saul S. Friedman, Pogromchik: The Assassination of Simon Petlura (New York, 1976). 22 In a letter to Richard Lichtheim dated 6 January 1922, Jabotinsky refers to Poalei-Tsion’s opposition to the accord with Slavinsky. This arose in a congress of Poalei-Tsion in Vilna on 27-30 December 1921. See Igrot Zeev Jabotinsky (Letters of Ze’ev Jabotinsky) ed. Daniel Carpi, Vol. 3 (December 1918-August 1923) (Tel Aviv, 1997), 273. 23 Letter to Yona Machover dated 9 March 1922, Igrot Zeev Jabotinsky, Vol. 3, 297. 24 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Vopros o Petliure’ (The Petliura Issue), Rassvet, 8 March 1925; Nahum Levin, ‘Jabotinsky and the Petliura Agreement’, Jewish Standard, 16 August 1940. 25 Joseph Schechtman, Rassvet, No. 37, 12 September 1926. 26 Igrot Zeev Jabotinsky, Vol. 5 (January 1926-December 1927) (Tel Aviv, 2000) contains no mention of Petliura in any of Jabotinsky’s published correspondence. This is in contrast to letters he wrote in 1921-22, the period of the agreement with Slavinsky. 27 In a letter to Chaim Belilovsky dated 24 October 1927 Jabotinsky comments on the prominence given to the Schwartzbard trial: ‘I am prepared to bet that they will acquit him’, Igrot Zeev Jabotinsky, Vol. 5, 265. 28 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Di “Krim” kolonizatsye’ (The Establishment of [Jewish] Colonies in the Crimea), Der Morgen Zhornal, 4 June 1926. 29 In his pamphlet Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Conception of a Nation (New York, 1946), 32, Oscar K. Rabinowicz mentions other nationalities but significantly omits any mention of Ukrainian 30 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Eleven O’clock’, Jewish Herald, 3 February 1939. 31 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Diary Notes’, Jewish Herald, 14 April 1939.
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