Khotyn Uprising
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An insurrection against Romanian rule in Hotin County, the far-northern tip of Bessarabia, from 7 January to 1 February 1919, led mainly by Ukrainian peasants. Partisans who crossed the Dniester from the territory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic took Khotyn on 23 January and formed a “Directorate”, but the Romanian army under General Cleante Davidoglu crushed the revolt by 1 February. Casualty figures range from a few hundred to more than 11,000 depending on the source.
In depth
Hotin County lay between Bukovina and Podolia, and by 1900 Ukrainians were likely a majority of its population; according to the historian Nicolae Enciu, in 1918 it had 121 all-Ukrainian villages, 52 all-Romanian and 16 mixed. On 22 October 1918 the Hotin zemstvo voted by majority for the county’s reunification with Russia, and in November Davidoglu’s Romanian troops replaced the departing Austrians. Besides Ukrainian peasants, the rising drew in Cossack deserters from the Ukrainian People’s Army, groups of Moldovans, local Bolsheviks and White Russians. The Directorate that led it aimed to change the status of the county, or of all Bessarabia, ahead of the Paris Peace Conference, but was divided into pro-UNR and pro-Bolshevik factions. It arrested Khotyn’s mayor and ordered the town to pay 1.5 million rubles within three days, a burden that fell mostly on its Jews. The UNR formally disowned the revolt; whether it covertly supported it remains disputed.
The toll of the repression varies by source. Romanian army records speak of seven rebel villages burned and as many as 5,000 insurgents killed; the Ukrainian historian Potylchak counts 22 villages destroyed and 11,000 victims, including the arbitrary execution of 165 railwaymen and 500 unarmed civilians, while judging estimates of 15,000 and more probably exaggerated. The figure of 11,000 was first publicized by International Red Aid in 1925. Romanian losses were 369, including 159 killed in action. Romanian generals, Ion Antonescu among them, criticized the random killing of civilians as giving Romania the image of a “country of savages”. Some 50,000 peasants and 4,000 to 10,000 armed rebels fled across the Dniester, and some veterans joined Grigory Kotovsky’s raid on Tighina. Romanian and Soviet historiography alike stressed the Bolsheviks’ role, which scholars such as Wim van Meurs dispute, seeing a local revolt.