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Before the new czar had been on his throne three months, Russia was drenched with Jewish blood. There began saturnalia of rape, plunder, and murder, the like of which had been witnessed nowhere in Europe. The Black Hundreds of the nineteenth century put to shame the Haidamacks of the eighteenth and the Cossacks of the seventeenth.
In the delineation of the hideous figure of "Zhyd Yankel," a mercenary, soulless, dastardly creature, Gogol, the descendant of the haidamacks, gave vent to his inherited hatred of the Jew, the victim of Khmelnitzki and the haidamacks. In these dismal historic tragedies, in the figures of the Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable, terror-stricken creatures."
Even more shocking, if possible, was the frequent extermination of whole communities by the brigand bands known as Haidamacks. They added the "Massacre of Uman" to the Jewish calendar of misfortunes, the most terrible slaughter, equalled, perhaps, only by that of Nemirov in 1648.
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