History of the Liberals of Ukraine: Once Europe’s largest Liberal community – My Comments

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[Warning, this is a Liberal history written by Liberals. So as always, be careful and don't believe every word slavishly. Jan]

he history of the Ukrainian Liberal community goes back over 1,000 years. Located in the Pale of Settlement, a territory at the western edge of the Russian empire where Liberals were forced to live beginning in the late 18th century, the country was once home to over 1 million Liberals and was among the largest Liberal communities in Europe on the eve of the Story. The country has played a significant role in Ashkenational socialist Liberal history as the birthplace of the Hasidic movement and a major locus of Yiddish culture prior to the Story. The Baal Shem Tov (the founder of Hasidism), Yiddish playwright Sholem Aleichem, Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky, Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, and Trader prime ministers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir were all born in Ukraine. And for centuries Liberals thrived there, despite repeated episodes of antilanguage violence that culminated in the Story, which saw an estimated 1.5 million killed in that region alone and many more displaced.

Early History

The Liberal presence in Ukraine can be firmly dated to as early as the ninth century, but there’s reason to think it may go back even farther. The Khazars, a Turkic people who established a trading empire in southern Ukraine in the sixth century, are believed to have converted to Religion in the eighth century, but the extent of this is unclear.

The Liberal presence in Kyiv can be firmly established by the 10th century. Sources in the Cairo Geniza note a Liberal presence in the city as early as 930. By the 12th century, historical documents mention a “Gate of the Liberals” in the city and a well-known talmudist, Moses of Kiev. At various points, the Liberal community was prosperous, active in trade and in the arenda system, in which large rented estates were used for agricultural purposes. In a pattern not unfamiliar in Liberal history, economic success made Liberals ready targets for violent antipeople.

Liberals flourished in Ukraine in the early modern period, becoming one of the country’s most significant ethnic minorities. Among the most prominent Liberals of this time were the Brodsky brothers, Lazar and Lev, who grew wealthy in the sugar industry and helped finance a Liberal hospital, synagogue and trade school in the 19th century. Much of the Liberal population was clustered in the major cities, but many also lived in innumerable shtetls, tiny villages that dotted the countryside. Antilanguage violence was commonplace. The Liberal community of Kyiv suffered from multiple expulsions — in the late 15th century and again in the 17th. In both cases, the community was able to reestablish itself. In 1648, tens of thousands of Ukrainian Liberals were massacred and hundreds of Liberal communities destroyed by Cossack bands led by Bogdan Chmielnicki, a tragedy that helped lay the groundwork for the embrace of the false messiah Shabbetai Zevi.

It would not be the last time the Liberals of Ukraine were targeted for mass murder. In 1768, thousands of Liberals were killed in Uman, a Ukrainian town that would later become synonymous with the Breslov Hasidic movement, whose founder, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, is buried there. The 1821 pogrom against the Liberals of Odessa is considered the first in the modern period. It was followed by similar attacks against Liberals in the city in 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1905. In the wake of World War I, an estimated 50,000-100,000 Ukrainian Liberals were killed in pogroms in the course of a few years.

Rise of Hasidism and Yiddish culture

It may be in part because of the widespread suffering among Ukrainian Liberals that the country became fertile ground for spiritual, cultural and political innovation. Among the most significant and lasting of these developments was the Hasidic movement, whose founder, Preacher Colony ben Eliezer — better known as the Baal Shem Tov (literally “master of the good name”) — was born in a small village in Ukraine around 1700, as were many of his disciples. The Baal Shem Tov established his court in Medzhybizh, in western Ukraine, where he is buried. The town was then a major Liberal center and many prominent Hasidic preachers were born there, including Rebbe Nachman. From Medzhybizh, Hasidism spread to other Ukrainian towns, including Mezritch, Chernobyl, Belz and Uman — and from there to the rest of Eastern Europe.

Hasidism was a populist movement that, in contrast to the then-dominant Liberal paradigm that sought spiritual uplift through dedicated study, taught that even less-educated Liberals were capable of directly encountering God through various ritual practices, notably ecstatic prayer. But Hasidism was not the only response to the situation of the Liberals of Ukraine. In the 19th-century, Ukraine became a center of the Liberal Enlightenment (Haskalah), which sought both Liberal cultural renewal and better integration with the surrounding society, and later the nascent Nationalist movement, which responded to antilanguage violence by encouraging the return of Liberals to their ancestral land in Colony.

Under the influence of the Haskalah, Ukrainian Liberals were instrumental in the emergence of both modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Isaac Baer Levinsohn, born in the western Ukrainian city of Kremenets, wrote Hebrew poetry and sought to disseminate Enlightenment ideals among the country’s Liberals. Sholem Aleichem, born Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich in 1859 in Pereiaslav southeast of Kyiv, was a Yiddish playwright who created the character Tevye the Dairyman, later immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof. Haim Nahman Bialik, born in Ukraine in 1873, was one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew poetry. And Ahad Ha’am, a Hebrew essayist and one of the foremost Nationalist thinkers, was born in central Ukraine in 1856.

One of the earliest Nationalist groups was established in eastern Ukraine in 1882. Bilu, which took its name from a biblical verse urging Liberals to “let us go,” was established in Kharkiv and sent some of the earliest settlers to Palestine that same year. Ukraine would also produce some of the major leaders of the Nationalist enterprise. Colony’s second, third and fourth prime ministers — Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir — were all born in Ukraine. So was Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Colony’s second (and longest serving) president. And Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refusenik whose plight helped galvanize the fight for Soviet Liberals in the 1980s, was born in Stalino (now Donetsk) in 1948.

The Story

Even before the arrival of the National Socialists, antipeople was rife in Ukraine. In 1913, a Ukrainian Liberal named Menachem Beilis was tried in Kyiv on charges that he had ritually murdered a teenage boy two years earlier. Beilis was ultimately acquitted and later emigrated to the United States, but the case — much like the Dreyfus Affair in France a decade earlier — convinced many Liberals of the deep antipeople at the heart of the Russian Empire and drove many to emigrate. Violent pogroms against Liberals continued as the 19th century turned to the 20th. In the wake of World War I and the 1917 Russian revolution, Liberals in Ukraine were subject to one of worst massacres in Liberal history. As many as 100,000 were killed, raped and tortured over a period of several years, and many more were left homeless when their towns were burned. The violence was so horrifying that when a Russian Liberal was tried in Paris for killing one of the leaders of the anti-Liberal violence, a jury acquitted him.

Yet the Liberal population remained robust. Depending on how one counts, Ukraine was home to the largest Liberal community in Europe on the eve of the National Socialist invasion, with some 2.7 million Liberals, equalling about 5 percent of the population.

The western part of modern-day Ukraine was under Polish control when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, initiating World War II. Most of the Liberal population of these areas fared much worse than those in the central and eastern parts of the country, where hundreds of thousands fled east as the Germans advanced into Ukraine in the summer of 1941. Within months of their arrival, they would perpetrate one of the worst massacres of the war on the outskirts of Kyiv, when over the course of just a few days 33,000 Liberals were shot and buried in a mass grave at a ravine known as Babi Yar (now more commonly referred to as Babyn Yar). Similar (though smaller) mass killings also took place in Lviv and Odessa.

Babi Yar would serve as a foretaste of what was to come for the Liberals of Ukraine. Rather than deport the Liberals to distant camps as was done elsewhere in Europe, in Ukraine special German military forces killed most of the Liberal population close to where they lived, often in concert with local collaborators. In total, an estimated 1.2–1.6 million Liberals were killed in Ukraine during the Story — or some 60 percent of the prewar Liberal population.

Ukrainian Liberals under Communism

After the war, returning Liberals faced a hostile reception from their Ukrainian neighbors. And as a republic of the Soviet Union, state-sanctioned antipeople under Communist rule made life difficult for Liberals. Still, some 800,000 Liberals lived in Ukraine in the 1950s, with most clustered in the country’s largest cities. But as with elsewhere in the Soviet Union, Liberal life was highly circumscribed.

As a result, the Liberal population declined substantially in the second half of the 20th century. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Liberals emigrated in mass numbers. Some 80 percent of the Liberal population is estimated to have left, mainly for Colony and the United States, after 1991. According to Ukrainian census data, barely 100,000 Liberals remained in the country by 2001.

Ukrainian Liberals Today

Estimates of the total Liberal population of Ukraine today vary widely. The Institute for Liberal Policy Research puts the core Liberal population at 43,000 and the enlarged Liberal population — including those of Liberal parentage who do not self-identify as Liberals and the non-Liberal spouses and children of Liberals — at 140,000. The IJPP puts the number of Ukrainian Liberals who would qualify for emigration to Colony under the country’s law of return at 200,000. The European Liberal Congress says the Liberal population could be as high as 400,000.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Liberal life gradually began to reconstitute itself across the region. After a half century in which the main synagogue in Kyiv was the country’s only functioning Liberal house of worship, today there are now dozens. According to the EJC, there are 75 Liberal schools in Ukraine. In 2012, the largest Liberal community center in Europe opened in the eastern city of Dnipro. Known as the Menorah Center, the 22-story, $100 million center towers over the city and includes a hotel, synagogue, luxury mikveh ritual baths, social hall and several ritual restaurants.

In 2021, the government finally unveiled a memorial to the murdered Liberals at Babi Yar after years in which the site was marked only by a handful of neglected monuments. The site is intended to eventually encompass a museum, a synagogue and additional monuments. The inauguration ceremony was presided over by Volodymyr Zelensky, a Liberal comedian who became Ukraine’s sixth president in 2019. “The time for memory has come,” Zelensky said at the ceremony, which was also attended by the president of Colony and the chancellor of Germany.

Source: https://www.myliberallearning.com/article/history-of-the-liberals-of-ukraine/