Problematising Pogroms: Reassessing Antisemitic Agency in Russia, c. 1881-1921

By the beginning of the 20^th century, Russia was the most antisemitic country in Europe. The hatred of Jews was manifested more violently and more frequently than anywhere else in the continent, through regular outbreaks of pogroms.

Why? While we might be tempted to blame an arch-reactionary, Jew-hating government under the last Tsars, we should also be wary of simplistic, monocausal explanations of Russian antisemitism and pogroms. On closer examination, the picture is much more complicated.

This post will make the case for us introducing a more complex, nuanced, and research-informed approach to teaching Russian and Soviet antisemitism and pogroms. It will pick through some historiographical developments that should be important to our teaching and present an approach to teaching the agency of antisemitism and pogroms in Russia from approximately 1881 to 1921. All teaching resources referred to can be found here.

A quick note – this post is primarily concerned with perpetrators of anti-Jewish violence. Subsequent posts will focus in much greater detail on the lives of Jews and Jewish agency. Addressing the topic of antisemitism in Russia inevitably brings teachers and students into contact with racially charged language and questions of diversity and inclusivity. These, and other, ethical questions about teaching Jewish history in a Russian/Soviet context are touched on in my SHP Conference presentation, which can be found with an explanation here.

 

In Context

Between 1881 and 1921, pogroms swept Russia in several waves: most notably in the aftermath of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (1881-1884), during and following the abortive revolution of 1905, following the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918), and during the Russian Civil War (1918-21).

These antisemitic attacks were, in some senses, distinctly Russian. The word “pogrom”, despite now existing as an English-language term in its own right, is indeed a Russian one in origin, deriving from the verb pogromit’ (to smash/to conquer). Pogroms happened with almost clockwork regularity. Every single major social and political upheaval in the period would be accompanied by massive anti-Jewish violence, focused especially in the Pale of Settlement, to which Jews had been largely confined since the late 1700s.

What caused such violence?

One reassuringly straightforward explanation is the Tsarist government. As a political and ideological system, late Tsarism was notoriously antisemitic, something epitomised by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor and advisor to Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, who famously argued one third of Jews should assimilate, one third emigrate, and one third die. The most ardent supporters of Tsarism on the Russian street after 1905, the “Black Hundreds” aligned to the far-right reactionary party, the Union of Russian People, orchestrated antisemitic violence alongside “patriotic demonstrations” exulting the Tsar.

But the picture, as always, is considerably more complicated than this. In fact, while it might be tempting to pin the blame on unpleasant reactionaries in the last Tsarist governments, historians since at least the 1990s have gone to some considerable lengths to move away from this interpretation.

In a groundbreaking edited collection published in 1992, John Klier, Shlomo Lambroza, and colleagues pointed out, amongst other things, that pogroms in this period actually presented a major security headache for the Tsarist regime, involving, as they did, huge popular unrest and violence.

As another historian, Charters Wynn, emphasised in a book published in the same year, much of this violence was carried out by lower-class Russians, including industrial workers who on another day might also participate in revolutionary unrest and strikes against the Tsarist government.

Not only were ordinary Russians deeply involved in pogroms, but intelligentsia circles that we would not normally mention in the same breath as pogroms or “Black Hundreds”, tacitly and sometimes explicitly condoned pogroms. Following the outbreak of pogroms in 1881, when Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, many liberals attempted to explain away pogroms as a legitimate protest against the exploitation of ordinary Russians by Jews. At the same time, astonishingly, some revolutionary populists – whose numbers included the People’s Will who had conducted the assassination of Alexander II – spoke in favour of pogroms as an indication of the potential of the masses to rise up in spontaneous protest. (This justification pushed many radical Jews away from populism and towards Marxism after 1881.)

After the pogroms of 1881-84, the abortive revolution of 1905 saw a further devastating series of pogroms. Then, World War One brought a new and disturbing development to antisemitic violence – pogroms carried out by the military. Eric Lohr, one historian who has examined these pogroms extensively, links the involvement of the military to both official suspicions of “enemy aliens” and the violent actions of rank-and-file soldiers.

Antisemitism did not go away with the overthrow of Tsarism, in 1917, when sporadic instances of anti-Jewish violence were seen across Russia. It was a year later, however, following the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, c. 1918-1921, that the largest wave of antisemitic violence yet seen swept Russia, claiming as many as 100,000-200,000 Jewish dead. Strikingly, as Brendan McGeever emphasises, while reactionary “White” groups in the Civil War were the main perpetrators of Civil War pogroms, the Communist Red Army also participated in a significant number.

This last fact should worry us – not just from a moral perspective, but also from an analytical one: the Communists, who believed in socialist universalism, were fundamentally anti-antisemites. In this case, why would they (or at least their followers) perpetrate antisemitic violence?

Considering both their recurrence and varying manifestations across Russia, pogroms and accompanying antisemitic attitudes are clearly complex, dynamic, and fluid phenomena. As Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew have argued about antisemitism in relation to the Holocaust, Russian and later Soviet antisemitism was a “transhistorical phenomenon”, changing in cause and manifestation from time to time.

So what might this do for our teaching?

After running through a few key considerations for teachers and vocabulary/concepts, I’ll set out one potential approach. Unlike previous posts, this will not present just one lesson, but rather a sequence of lessons and part-lessons that cover antisemitism in 1881-84, 1905, 1914-1917, and 1918-21.

 

Key Considerations for Teaching

1. Antisemitism in Russia involved a range of actors, meaning it is difficult and potentially misleading to argue it was exclusively or even primarily a result of antisemitic Tsarist officials.
2. Without the participation of multiple different groups in antisemitic actions, outbreaks of pogrom violence would have been unlikely, and perhaps impossible, on the scale seen during this period.
3. Pogroms and antisemitism did not disappear in 1917, following the fall of Tsarism, and in fact hugely intensified in 1918 following the outbreak of the Russian Civil War. This was in part a continuation of antisemitic violence committed by the Russian army in the Pale of Settlement during World War One.
4. Antisemitic violence was not carried out exclusively by right-wing groups (although they tended to be its main perpetrators) – in the Russian Civil War, even radical left-wing groups such as the Red Army participated in pogroms. Other left-wing groups, notably the “Black Army” of Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, were also implicated in pogroms.
5. Antisemitism was “transhistorical”, meaning that its manifestations and perpetrators shifted from one time to another.

 

Vocabulary and Substantive Concepts

Before tackling this topic, students should have a grasp of the following terms and their meanings.

• Pogrom
• Antisemitism
• Jew/Jewish
• Revolution
• Reaction
• Tsarism
• Socialism
• Communism
• Orthodox Church
• Civil War
• Total War
• Reds/White

 

Outline of Lessons and Resources

Lesson 1: The first lesson considers the outbreak of pogroms in 1881-84, asking the question “Who made Russia Europe’s most antisemitic country?” Students are given a narrative of the violence and asked to identify actors and their roles in pogroms. They then place these actors into a Venn Diagram comprising three categories – “Official antisemitism” (i.e. the Tsarist state, government, and its officials), “Popular antisemitism” (i.e. ordinary people), and “Intellectual antisemitism” (i.e. educated groups and individuals).

Lesson 1

Lesson 2: The second lesson focuses on the abortive revolution of 1905, which led to an outbreak of pogroms. Within the wider question “Who made Russia’s abortive revolution of 1905?”, students are again introduced to pogroms and their perpetrators, including not only pro-Tsarist “Black Hundreds”, but also ordinary workers.

Lesson 2

Lesson 3: The third lesson considers how Jews interacted with, and were impacted by, the Russian Revolution of 1917. Acknowledging that this formally liberated Russian Jews, it also highlights the continued prevalence of antisemitism through the contemporary account of antisemitic outbursts on the streets by Jewish Russian writer, Ilya Ehrenburg. Students are given a text describing the context in which Ehrenburg’s account was written and asked to identify causes for continued antisemitism in 1917.

Lesson 3

Lesson 4: The fourth lesson focuses on the outbreak of pogroms in 1918, during the Russian Civil War, leaning heavily on Brendan McGeever’s brilliant and terrifying book. Acknowledging the predominant role of right-wing “Whites” in perpetrating antisemitic violence during this period, it nevertheless focuses on the role of the Communist Red Army during the Hlukhiv Massacre of March 1918, in modern-day Ukraine. After being given a copy of McGeever’s account of the massacre, students are asked to prioritise possible reasons for this massacre taking place before returning to the Venn Diagram from lesson 1. If they were now to resize the circles (“Official Antisemitism”, “Popular Antisemitism”, or “Intellectual Antisemitism”), what would the main causes of these pogroms now seem to be, and how would they compare to those of 1881-84? 

Lesson 4

Further Reading (and Listening)

BBC Sounds (featuring Brendan McGeever), “Pogroms: Anti-Semitism, Revolution and Civil War” (2019): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0005mv3

Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal (eds.), Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, Indiana University Press (2010)

Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew, “Antisemitism and Holocaust Education”, in: Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew (eds.), Holocaust Education: Contemporary Challenges and Controversies, UCL Press (2020), 150-170

Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, Indiana University Press (2001)

Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I, Harvard University Press (2003)

Brendan McGeever, Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution, Cambridge University Press (2019)

Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905, Princeton University Press (1992)