Persecution of the Jews in the Ukraine has a long and bitter history. When the Jews settled in the Ukraine during the period of Polish rule, they found themselves between hammer and anvil: under the arenda system the Jewish lessee administered the estate in the name of the Polish landowner, and, if living in the town, he found his customers among the nobility, officials, the Catholic clergy, and the local army garrison. To the enslaved peasants and rebellious Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Greek-Orthodox the Jewish lessee appeared both as an infidel and an alien - an emissary of the Polish Catholic noblemen who sought to dominate them. The Ukrainian townsman was jealous of his urban rival, the unbelieving Jew, whose success was due to the assistance of the foreign and hated Polish regime. In times of rebellion and war, this hatred and jealousy was vented in severe persecutions and horrifying massacres. such as the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648–49, when over 100,000 Jews were brutally killed and almost all the communities of the Ukraine were destroyed, and the persecutions of the Haidamaks in the 18th century, which were more limited in scope but even more terrible in their cruelty. These massacres, whose perpetrators were admired as national heroes, gave rise to a popular tradition of hatred toward the Jews in the Ukraine; it was nurtured by the increase of the Jewish population in the country, by its economic position, and later by the propagation of the Russian language and culture by Jews - an act which the nationalist Ukrainian intellectuals (the "Ukrainophiles") regarded as collaboration with the "Muscovite" Russian government in its campaign against their awakening as a separate nation. This tradition of hatred toward the Jews found its expression in both folk songs and literature (T. Shevchenko; N. Gogol), in historiography (N. Kostomarov), and in political thought (M. Dragomanov). The Nationalist and Socialist Party of the Ukraine was also imbued with anti-Jewish feelings. The pogroms of 1881–82 broke out and spread through the provinces of the Ukraine; after 1917, in the Civil War and under the regime of S. Petlyura (the "Socialist" government), about 100,000 Jews were murdered in the Ukraine (1919–20), as in the days of Chmielnicki and with the same cruelty. Two decades of Soviet regime did little to eradicate the hostility against the Jews: during World War II great parts of the Ukrainian population wholeheartedly collaborated with the Nazis in exterminating the Jews in the occupied Ukraine.

The period covered by this report was especially cruel, Somon Petlyura (1879–1926) a Ukrainian nationalist leader, is held responsible for not having stopped the wave of pogroms which engulfed the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 and 1920. Petlyura, who was born in Poltava, was active in the Ukrainian Social Democratic Workers' Party. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, he was one of the leaders who organized Ukrainian soldiers into nationalist battalions. When the Ukrainian puppet state, set up by the Germans, fell in November 1918, Petlyura was among those who established the "directorium" (provisional government) to protect the independent Ukraine against its many enemies. From February 1919 he was chairman of the government and also chief atamBn (commander) of its army. With the retreat of his forces before the Red Army in the winter of 1919, his units turned into murderous bands and perpetrated mass killings of Jews in the Ukrainian towns and townlets (Zhitomir, Proskurov, and else where). Petlyura did little to stop the wave of mob violence which became endemic within the Ukrainian army and the gangs of rebellious peasants, connected with his government. In October 1919 the remnants of Petlyura's forces fled to Poland. The following year he made a treaty with the Poles, set up his headquarters in Kamenets-Podolski, and joined in the Polish war against the Soviet Union. After peace was made between the U.S.S.R. and Poland, Petlyura continued to maintain his government and the remnants of his army in exile. In the summer of 1921, Vladimir Jabotinsky conducted negotiations with Petlyura's representative for the establishment of a Jewish militia to defend the Jewish population, should Petlyura's forces return to the Soviet Ukraine (the "Jabotinsky-Slavinsky Agreement"). From 1924 Petlyura was a political emigre in Paris, where he headed Ukrainian anti-Soviet organizations. On May 26, 1926, he was assassinated in the street by a Jew, Shalom Schwartzbard. In 1927, after a dramatic trial, in which the Jewish tragedy in the Ukraine was amply documented, Schwartzbard was acquitted by a court in Paris. Ukrainian nationalists consider Petlyura an outstanding leader and claim that he personally could not be held responsible for the pogroms, because of the anarchical conditions of the revolutionary period.