Pogroms

POGROMS

Pogrom, a Russian word that originally had several meanings, such as "beating," "defeat," "smashing," or "destruction," has come to be identified with violent attacks on the persons and property of one ethnicity by large crowds of other ethnicities, in particular, attacks on Jews by ethnic Russians. The first occurrence that historians generally agree was a pogrom took place in Odessa in 1821, and pogroms against Armenians took place in Azerbaijan in 1988 and 1990. Most pogroms in Russian history, however, took place in three major waves: 1881–1884, following the assassination of Alexander II; 1903–1906, following the announcement of the October Manifesto; and 1919–1921, during the Russian Civil War. In the first wave, more than 250 pogroms were recorded, mostly within the Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine. Beginning in April 1881, the largest and most violent were in the large cities, but then radiated out through the countryside, often along the railroad lines. Most pogroms occurred in the spring and summer of 1881, with ever smaller numbers in the next three years. These were less violent than later waves, with probably only forty deaths in 1881. The next wave began in 1903 with the infamous Kishinev pogrom, accelerated through the dislocations of war and revolution, and reached a great crescendo at the end of 1905. In the two weeks after the October Manifesto, it is estimated that seven hundred pogroms occurred throughout Russia, leaving nine hundred dead and eight thousand wounded. Unlike other waves, pogroms occurred at this time in many places outside of the Pale of Settlement, including small cities with an insignificant or nonexistent Jewish population; in the latter cases, students and political activists were often the major targets.

The classic explanation of these pogroms was that either the tsarist regime, or forces close to and supportive of the regime, encouraged these pogroms as a way of directing popular discontent away from the government and onto a visible minority group. While still widely held today, this explanation has been convincingly challenged in recent years by historians who have pointed out the complex and varied reactions the regime had to pogroms, the lack of archival evidence for such a conspiracy, the regime's deep fear of any sort of popular violence, and a general belief that the Russian government was incapable of organizing such widespread and, in the case of October 1905, simultaneous disturbances. However, if the old conspiracy theory is breaking down, no consensus explanation has emerged to replace it. The last great wave of pogroms, in 1919–1921, was the bloodiest and the most atypical, occurring after the fall of the imperial regime and during conditions of bitter strife in which violence of every kind was unrestrained. Concentrated in Ukraine, all parties to the conflict carried out pogroms at one point or another, but the most organized and bloodiest were perpetrated by the White Volunteer Army. Condoned by officers and carried out by Cossacks, with some looting by peasants, these pogroms may account for 150,000 deaths.

See also: civil war of 1917-1922; jews; nationalities policies, tsarist; october manifesto; pale of settlement

bibliography

Aron, I. Michael. (1990). Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Judge, Edward H. (1992). Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press.

Klier, John D. (1993). "Unravelling of the Conspiracy Theory: A New Look at the Pogroms." East European Jewish Affairs 23:79–89.

Klier, John D., and Lambroza, Shlomo, eds. (1992). Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

David Pretty