4 ideas
In "My First Goose," Lyutov is billeted with Cossacks who mock his spectacles and education. He tramples a goose, runs it through with a borrowed sabre, and orders his landlady to cook it; the Cossacks then make room for him at their pot. That night he dreams of women, and his 'heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over,' so acceptance is paid for with an act of cruelty he cannot forgive himself for.
In "The Death of Dolgushov," a mortally wounded telephonist begs Lyutov to shoot him before the Poles capture him. Lyutov cannot do it, and the Cossack Afonka Bida does it instead. What the Cossacks count as compassion is swift killing, so the intellectual's scruple reads to them as cowardice and cruelty, and it marks him as permanently not one of them.
Babel describes atrocity in lush, painterly imagery (a sunset like a severed head, a 'crossing of the Zbrucz' where Lyutov sleeps beside a murdered Jew). He does not comment on it morally. The unresolved gap between beautiful style and brutal content forces the reader to do the judging the narrator withholds. Detachment becomes a way of registering horror rather than excusing it.
In "Gedali," an old Jewish shopkeeper in Zhitomir asks where the 'sweet revolution' is when both the Poles and the Reds loot and kill the Jews. He argues that a revolution that must shoot people cannot be told apart from counter-revolution to those it tramples. He wants an 'International of good people.' The book defends the view that ideological ends do not change the experience of violence for its victims.