Photo believed to show the victims, mostly Jewish children, of a 1905 pogrom in Yekaterinoslav (today's Dnipro)
Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire (Russian: Еврейские погромы в России; Hebrew: הסופות בנגב ha-sufot ba-negev; lit. "the storms in the South") were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that first began in the 19th century. Pogroms began occurring after the Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ottoman Empire during 1772–1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement"
by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly
permitted to live, and it was within them that the pogroms largely took
place. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia
(including Finland), unless they converted from Judaism
or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status.
Migration to Caucasus, Siberia, Far East or Central Asia was not
restricted.
Odessa, 1821
The first pogrom is sometimes considered to be the 1821 Odessa pogroms after the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch Gregory V in Constantinople, in which 14 Jews were killed.
The initiators of the 1821 pogroms were the local Greeks, who used to
have a substantial diaspora in the port cities of what was known as Novorossiya.
1881–84
The term "pogrom" became commonly used in English after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1884; during this time, more than 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, notably pogroms in Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa.
The trigger for these pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, for which some blamed "foreign influence agents", implying the Jews.
One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of
her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms
that followed; another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish.
The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging
perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.
Local economic conditions (such as ancestral debts owed to moneylenders)
are thought to have contributed significantly to the rioting,
especially with regard to the participation of the business competitors
of local Jews and the participation of railroad workers. At this time Russia was becoming more industrialized, causing Russians to be moving into and out of major cities.
People trying to escape the big cities carried their antisemitic values
with them, spreading these ideas throughout Russia causing more pogroms
in different regions of Russia. It has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.
These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a
trigger, and they drew upon a small kernel of truth: one of the close
associates of the assassins, Hesya Helfman,
was born into a Jewish home. The fact that the other assassins were all
atheists and that the wider Jewish community had nothing to do with the
assassination had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic
rumours and the assassination inspired "retaliatory" attacks on Jewish
communities. During these pogroms thousands of Jewish homes were
destroyed, many families were reduced to poverty, and large numbers of
men, women, and children were injured in 166 towns in the southwest
provinces of the Empire such as Ukraine.
There also was a large pogrom on the night of 15–16 April 1881 (the day of Eastern Orthodox Easter) in the city of Yelizavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi).
On 17 April, the Army units were dispatched and were forced to use
firearms to extinguish the riot. However, that only incited the whole
situation in the region and a week later series of pogroms rolled
through parts of the Kherson Governorate.
On 26 April 1881, an even bigger disorder engulfed the city of Kiev. The Kiev pogrom of 1881 is considered the worst one that took place in 1881.
The pogroms of 1881 did not stop then. They continued on through the
summer, spreading across a big territory of modern-day Ukraine: (Podolie Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate,
and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense
organizations started to form, the most prominent one in Odessa. It was
organized by the Jewish students of the Novorossiysk University.
For decades after the 1881 pogroms, most government officials had
antisemitic beliefs that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews
who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev
rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary
socialists and instead, he adopted the idea that they were a protest by
the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in
mind, he wrongly believed and spread the idea that pogroms had spread
from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural
peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began
in the towns and spread to the villages.
The new Tsar Alexander III initially blamed revolutionaries and the Jews themselves for the riots and in May 1882 issued the May Laws, a series of harsh restrictions on Jews.
The pogroms continued for more than three years and were thought
to have benefited from at least the tacit support of the authorities,
although there were also attempts by the Russian government to end the
rioting.
The pogroms and the official reaction to them led many Russian
Jews to reassess their perceptions of their status within the Russian
Empire, and so led to significant Jewish emigration, mostly to the United States.
These pogroms were referred to among Jews as the "Storms in the
South." Changed perceptions among Russian Jews also indirectly gave a
significant boost to the early Zionist movement.
Casualties
At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms during April to December 1881. Of these, 17 were reportedly killed while being raped. An additional 225 incidents of Jewish women being raped were reported.
British reaction
The leaders of the Jewish community in London were slow to speak out. It was only after Louisa Goldsmid's support following leadership from an anonymous writer named "Juriscontalus" and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle
that action was taken in 1881. Public meetings were held across the
country and Jewish and Christian leaders in Britain spoke out against
the atrocities.
1903–1906
A
much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an
estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to
arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. The 1905
pogrom against Jews in Odessa was the most serious pogrom of the period, with reports of up to 2,500 Jews killed.
Home at last by Moshe Maimon. The house's occupants return when it is safe, to find the house thoroughly looted. A rabbi is saying Kaddish for a member of the household who was killed.
The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia [modern Moldova], are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews", was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 [Note: the actual number of dead was 47–48] and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.
This series of pogroms affected 64 towns (including Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Kishinev, Simferopol, Romny, Kremenchug, Nikolayev, Chernigov, Kamenets-Podolski, Yelizavetgrad), and 626 small towns (Russian: городок) and villages, mostly in Ukraine and Bessarabia.
Historians such as Edward Radzinsky suggest that many pogroms were incited by authorities and supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana), even if some happened spontaneously. The perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.
Even outside of these main outbreaks, pogroms remained common;
there was an anti-Jewish riot in Odessa in 1905 in which thousands of
Jews were killed.
The 1903 Kishinev pogrom,
also known as the Kishinev Massacre, in present-day Moldova killed
47–49 persons. It provoked an international outcry after it was
publicized by The Times and The New York Times. There was a second, smaller Kishinev pogrom in 1905.
A pogrom on July 20, 1905, in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine), was stopped by the Jewish self-defense group (one man in the group killed).
On July 31, 1905, there was the first pogrom outside the Pale of Settlement, in the town of Makariev (near Nizhni Novgorod), where a patriotic procession led by the mayor turned violent.
At a pogrom in Kerch in Crimea on 31 July 1905,
the mayor ordered the police to fire at the self-defence group, and two
fighters were killed (one of them, P. Kirilenko, was a Ukrainian who
joined the Jewish defence group). The pogrom was conducted by the port
workers apparently brought in for the purpose.
After the publication of the Tsar's Manifesto of October 17, 1905,
pogroms erupted in 660 towns mainly in the present-day Ukraine, in the
Southern and Southeastern areas of the Pale of Settlement. In contrast,
there were no pogroms in present-day Lithuania. There were also very few
incidents in Belarus or Russia proper. There were 24 pogroms outside of
the Pale of Settlement, but those were directed at the revolutionaries rather than Jews.
The greatest number of pogroms were registered in the Chernigov gubernia
in northern Ukraine. The pogroms there in October 1905 took 800 Jewish
lives, the material damages estimated at 70,000,000 rubles. 400 were
killed in Odessa, over 150 in Rostov-on-Don, 67 in Yekaterinoslav, 54 in Minsk, 30 in Simferopol—over 40, in Orsha—over 30.
In 1906, the pogroms continued: January — in Gomel, June — in Bialystok (ca. 80 dead), and August — in Siedlce (ca. 30 dead). The Russian secret police and the military personnel organized the massacres.
In many of these incidents the most prominent participants were
railway workers, industrial workers, and small shopkeepers and
craftsmen, and (if the town was a river port (e.g. Dnipro) or a seaport (e.g. Kerch)), waterfront workmen; peasants mainly joined in to loot.
Organization of the pogroms
The pogroms are generally thought to have been either organized or at least condoned by the authorities. This view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, who couldn't find such sanctions documented in the state archives. However, the antisemitic policy
that was carried out from 1881 to 1917 made them possible. Official
persecution and harassment of Jews influenced numerous antisemites to
presume that their violence was legitimate, and this sentiment was
reinforced by the active participation of a few high and many minor
officials in fomenting attacks, as well as by the reluctance of the
government to stop pogroms and to punish those responsible for them.
Influence of the pogroms
The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration. Among the passed antisemitic laws were the 1882 May Laws.
They prohibited Jews from moving into villages in an attempt to address
the cause of the pogroms, when in fact, the pogroms were caused by a
different reason. The majority of High Commission for the Review of
Jewish Legislation (1883-1888) actually noted the fact that almost all
of the pogroms had begun in the towns and attempted to abolish the Laws.
Yet, the minority of the High Commission ignored the facts and backed
the anti-semitic May Laws. Two million Jews fled the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920, with many going to the United Kingdom and United States.
In reaction to the pogroms and other oppressions of the Tsarist
period, Jews increasingly became politically active. Jewish
participation in The General Jewish Labor Bund, colloquially known as The Bund, and in the Bolshevik
movements, was directly influenced by the pogroms. Similarly, the
organization of Jewish self-defense leagues (which stopped the
pogromists in certain areas during the second Kishinev pogrom), such as Hovevei Zion, led to a strong embrace of Zionism, especially by Russian Jews.
Cultural references
In 1903, Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote the poem In the City of Slaughter in response to the Kishinev pogrom.
Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God
depicts Jews fleeing a pogrom and setting up a fictitious "trial of
God" for His negligence in not assisting them against the bloodthirsty
mobs. In the end, it turns out that the mysterious stranger who has
argued as God's advocate is none other than Lucifer. The experience of a Russian Jew is also depicted in Elie Wiesel's The Testament.
A pogrom is one of the central events in the play Fiddler on the Roof, which is adapted from Russian author Sholem Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman stories. Aleichem writes about the pogroms in a story called "Lekh-Lekho". The famous Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof showed the cruelty of the Russian pogroms on the Jews in the fictional Anatevka in the early 20th century.
In the adult animated musical drama film American Pop,
set during Imperial Russia during the late 1890s, a rabbi's wife and
her young son Zalmie escape to America while the rabbi is killed by the
Cossacks.
In the animated film An American Tail,
set during and after the 1880s pogroms, Fievel and his family's village
is destroyed by a pogrom. (Fievel and his family are mice, and their
Cossack attackers are cats.)
The novel The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman
also deals with a family that is displaced after a pogrom in their home
country and who emigrate to Canada after losing two sons to the riot
and barely surviving themselves. The loss and murder of the sons haunts
the entire story.
Mark Twain gives graphic descriptions of the Russian pogroms in Reflections on Religion, Part 3, published in 1906.
Joseph Joffo describes the early history of his mother, a Jew in the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II,
in the biographical 'Anna and her Orchestra'. He describes the raids by
Cossacks on Jewish quarters and the eventual retribution inflicted by
Anna's father and brothers on the Cossacks who murdered and burnt homes
at the behest of the tsar.
In Bernard Malamud's novel The Fixer,
set in Czarist Russia around 1911, a Russian-Jewish handyman, Yakov
Bog, is wrongly imprisoned for a most unlikely crime. It was later made
into a film directed by John Frankenheimer with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo.
