jews, pogroms, and the white movement

Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2(4): 1–23, Fall 2001.

Jews, Pogroms, and the White Movement:A Historiographical Critique*

Oleg Budnitskii

During the Russian Civil War (1918–20) Russian Jewry1 suffered a tragedycomparable to the period of Hetman Bohdan Khmel¢nytskyi and surpassed onlyby the Holocaust. Historians differ in their estimates of the number of victims ofanti-Jewish pogroms, the bloodiest of which occurred in Ukraine from 1919 tothe beginning of 1920. No statistics were kept, of course, and the numbers putforth in the literature range from 50,000 to 200,000 dead.2 To these we shouldadd tens of thousands who were maimed, raped, and robbed.

Despite the magnitude of these events, their circumstances and consequenceshave been insufficiently studied. The tragedy of Russian Jewry in 1918–20 hastended to exist “in the shadow” of the Holocaust. Some historians, not withoutbasis, see connections between the pogroms in the era of the Russian Revolution

* The author is grateful to Peter Holquist and Ben Nathans for comments on an earlier version ofthis article. It has benefited as well from discussion during the Maryland Workshop on NewApproaches to Russian and Soviet History, “Occupations and Liberations from 1812 to WorldWar II” (University of Maryland, College Park, 25–26 March 2000). I am also indebted to PeterHolquist for his efforts in editing the English-language version of this text. Support for the work inthis article was provided by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism.1 In discussing “Russian Jewry,” I mean the Jewish population of the former Russian empire,including Ukraine, Belorussia, etc.2 Salo Baron calculated that the number of victims “easily” exceeds 50,000 (The Russian Jew underTsars and Soviets, 2nd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1975], 184); Nora Levin gives the figure of50–60,000 (The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, vol. 1[New York: New York University Press,1988], 49); Shmuel Ettinger estimates 75,000 (in A History of the Jewish People, ed. Haim HillerBen-Sasson [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 954); Nahum Gergel (“The Pogroms inthe Ukraine in 1918–21,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 6 [1951], 251) and SergeiIvanovich Gusev-Orenburgskii (Kniga o evreiskikh pogromakh na Ukraine v 1919 g. [Petrograd:Izdatel¢stvo Z. I. Grzhebina, n. d.], 14) both speak of about 100,000 fatalities. Finally, the numberof 200,000 victims is given in Iurii Larin, Evrei i anti-Semitizm v SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad:Gosizdat, 1929), 55. See also Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 1995), 112. Gergel considered it possible to document 50–60,000 Jewish dead due topogroms, but noted that, considering the lack of precise data, the actual number could actually wellbe twice that figure. The author of a recent study accepts the relatively lower figures (HenryAbramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], 110).

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and the Nazi genocide. “In some ways,” writes Abraham Greenbaum about thepogroms of the Civil War epoch, “especially since killings were sometimes car-ried out as a kind of ‘national duty’ without the usual robbery – they bear com-parison with the Holocaust some twenty years later.”3 Richard Pipes writes, pos-sibly with some exaggeration, that “in every respect except for the absence of acentral organization to direct the slaughter, the pogroms of 1919 were a preludeto and rehearsal for the Holocaust.” The accusation of Jewish “involvement inBolshevism” and the “deadly identification of Communism with Jewry” pavedthe way for the mass destruction of European Jewry, and in this respect the“spontaneous looting and killings left a legacy that two decades later was to leadto the systematic mass murder of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.”4

It is true that Fedor Viktorovich Vinberg and other Russian rightists emi-grated to Germany and there disseminated to a German audience the “Protocolsof the Elders of Zion,” and Alfred Rosenberg had a distinct influence upon theemergence of Nazi ideology. However, the influence of certain Russian anti-Semites on the German scene should not be denied, and their influence shouldnot be treated as decisive. Pipes’ claim, following Walter Laqueur, that “the ra-tionale for Nazi extermination of the Jews came from Russian right-wing circles”is greatly overstated.5 Ultimately, the notion that the involvement of Jews inBolshevism (or, more precisely, the indissoluble link between Judaism andBolshevism) led to the destruction of European Jewry during World War II is nomore than a variation on the theme of Nazism as a “response” to Bolshevism.6

The importance of the “Jewish question” in the history of Russia’s Civil Warcannot be overemphasized, and the events of these years had an even greater sig-nificance for the fate of Russian Jewry (and, indeed, European Jewry in general)

3 Abraham Greenbaum, “Bibliographical Essay,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Rus-sian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992), 380.4 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 112.5 Ibid., 258; Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), 115.6 For a critique of these views, formulated most clearly in the works of the German historian ErnstNolte, see Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). As Evans rightlynotes regarding the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism, “Nazi anti-Semitism was gratuitous: it was notprovoked by anything, it was not a response to anything. It was born out of a political fantasy, inwhich the Jews, without a shred of justification, were held responsible for all that the Nazis believedwas wrong with the modern world” (40). Everything else was just Nazi attempts to rationalize theirrational. A study of events, and particularly of pogroms in the period of the Russian Civil War, issurely of more than “academic interest” – not so much because the Nazis learned anything fromthe Whites, but rather because the sources of the Whites’ anti-Semitism, its ideologicaljustifications (thereby providing it with a quasi-rational foundation), and the methods for “solving”the “Jewish question” may be comparable to the Nazis. It is precisely the degree to which this wasthe case that should, in my view, become the subject of specific historical investigation.

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in the 20th century. Before investigating this problem further, we must first ana-lyze the existing historiography on the “Jewish question” in the Russian CivilWar. This article critically explores the literature concerning one of its most im-portant aspects – the history of the relationship between participants in theWhite movement and the Jewish population of the former Russian empire. Anal-ysis of several of the more significant works demonstrates that these relationswere much more complex than has been hitherto recognized. They cannot be re-duced simply to a duality of executioners and their victims. I of course do notmean to “whitewash” the White movement; its participants so besmirched itsname that no objective historian could bleach it clean. Rather, my task is to for-mulate, on the basis of the existing literature, the essential questions that con-front historians examining the “Jewish question” in the Russian Civil War. Iwish to emphasize that my goal is not to cover all the existing literature on thetopic, but to consider those works that are both most significant andrepresentative.

However, the number of works devoted to these events is surprisingly mod-est. The vast majority were published in the 1920s and 1930s, and were primar-ily documentary collections rather than works of history.7 In addition, researchtended to localize its topic in both geographic and chronological terms: as a rule,studies focused on Ukraine in the years 1919–20. The reasons for this localiza-tion are easy to explain: the bulk of the pogroms occurred in 1919, and most ofthe Jews of the former Russian empire resided in Ukraine (and Poland). It wasnatural for authors of the first works dealing with Russian Jewry during the CivilWar – in particular, those preoccupied with the problem of how anti-Bolshevikforces related to the Jewish population – to focus primarily on the history of thepogroms. The major task of these historians, who themselves were mostly Jewish,was to tell the world the truth about the pogroms and their perpetrators.

The White army – often termed “Volunteers,” a title derived from thearmy’s first military contingent, the Volunteer Army – occupied an “honorary”position among the pogromists. Il¢ia Mikhailovich Cherikover [Tsherikover] wasnot far from the truth when he calculated in 1932 that “in relation to the totalnumber of pogroms in the Ukraine in those years the pogroms by the Volunteer

7 For example, Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York: Seltzer,1921); Gusev-Orenburgskii, Kniga o evreiskikh pogromah na Ukraine v 1919 g.; idem, Bagrovaiakniga: Pogromy 1919–20 gg. na Ukraine (Kharbin: Izdatel¢stvo Dal¢nevostochnogo EvreiskogoObschestvennogo Komiteta Pomoschi Sirotam–Zhertvam Pogromov [“Dekopo”], 1922); NahumI. Shtiff, Pogromy na Ukraine (period Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii) (Berlin: Izdatel¢stvo “Vostok,” 1922);Il¢ia Mikhailovich Cherikover, Anti-Semitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917–1918 gg. (K istoriiukrainsko-evreiskikh otnoshenii) (Berlin: Ostjudisches Historisches Archiv, 1923); Joseph B.Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii na Ukraine (k istorii antisemitizma na Ukraine v1919–1920 gg.) (Berlin: Ostjudisches Historiches Archiv, 1932), and others. For greater detail, seeGreenbaum, “Bibliographical Essay,” 380–82.

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Army constitute just one fifth.” But his total is for all the years from 1918 to1921, while the pogroms by the Volunteer Army lasted only several months. Inthose few months the Volunteers broke all records. Their pogroms were more in-tensive than the others, their blows sharper, and their numbers greater.8

These pioneering works attempted not only to register these tragic events,but also to find an adequate explanation for them. In March 1920 Nahum I.Shtiff, a member of the editorial board for collection and processing of materialsabout the pogroms in Ukraine, wrote the first “chronicle.” Two years later it waspublished in Berlin in an augmented edition under the title Pogromy na Ukraine(period Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii) (Pogroms in Ukraine: The Period of the VolunteerArmy). Shtiff pointed out that one part of his work was descriptive, based pri-marily on the stories of surviving witnesses of the pogroms, while the other part

sprang from the innate necessity to comprehend past events, to find akey to the origin of the described events … It was necessary to demon-strate the inherent organic connection of the pogroms, as a part of themilitary life, to the military, social, and political program of the Volun-teer Army … Its sociopolitical part manifested all the signs of restora-tion, a return to pre-revolutionary Russia. This affected the Volunteers’attitude towards the three main constituencies of Russian life: the peas-ants, workers, and peripheral nationalities. The return of the land toestate owners, the suppression of the workers’ movement, and overtRussification, contempt for the national needs of inorodtsy [non-Russianinhabitants of the Russian empire] – such were the three major parts ofthat program. The denial of rights to Jews and their enslavement werean inalienable, organic part of the program.9

In his introduction Shtiff set forth his views about the causes of the pogroms:“Pogroms were the reaction of the restorationists to the civic emancipation ofJews that had been obtained during the hated revolution; they were the first steptowards the enserfment of the Jews. Such is the main view, developed in the sec-ond part of my work, regarding the origin of the Volunteer pogroms.”10

Shtiff did not set himself the task of discerning different trends in the Whitecamp, or the nuances of White ideology. His work was simultaneously a testi-mony and an indictment. At the same time, Shtiff noted the attempts of the

8 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii, ed. Schectman, 26. ByGergel’s estimates, which Abramson accepts, Whites were responsible for 17% of the total numberof pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919, killing 5,235 individuals, or 16.9% of the overall total ofvictims. Given these figures, it is obvious that each tenth of a percentage point represents severalhuman lives (Abramson, Prayer, 115, 120).9 Shtiff, Pogromy na Ukraine, vii–viii.10 Ibid., viii. Emphasis in orig.


Volunteer command to put an end to the pogroms. However, as he correctlyobserved, these attempts were “languid and insincere.”11

Semen Markovich Dubnov [Shimon Dubnow] interpreted the Volunteerpogroms somewhat differently in his introduction to Cherikover’s 1923 bookAntisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917–1918 gg. (K istorii ukrainsko-evreiskihotnoshenii) (Antisemitism and Pogroms in Ukraine, 1917–1918: Towards a Historyof Ukrainian-Jewish Relations). In his introductory article, bearing the telling title“Tret¢ia gaidamakshchina” (“The Third Haidamak Period”), Dubnov wrote:

Many nations have inscribed their names into the Jews’ millennial mar-tyrology, but not many would measure up to such a prominent and, ofcourse, unenviable position as the Ukrainians. Since the middle of the17th century, this nation in times of disturbances has undertaken the“mission” of exterminating Jews with more zeal than its predecessors inthe centuries of the Crusades.

Dubnov made the reservation that when contemplating the “pogromist mission”of the Ukrainians in Jewish history, he meant “people” in a relative rather thanabsolute sense, i.e. “relatively large masses of people of a certain level of spiritualculture, exclusive of the layers of society that rose above that level of culture.”12

It is not hard to see that the “Volunteer” pogroms do not fit into Dubnov’sschema. The great Jewish historian realized this and tried to reconcile the con-tradiction. A footnote indicated that

“Denikiia” [Denikin’s domain], or the pogroms by the anti-BolshevikVolunteer Army, the most monstrous of all the pogroms of that time,seems to constitute an exception from our general thesis. Among theperpetrators were heterogeneous ethnic elements of Russia, from theformer tsarist Guards to Caucasian inorodtsy. But here the following cir-cumstances should be brought to mind: 1) the theater of military en-gagement was the territory of Ukraine; 2) the instigators of the butcheryagainst the Jews were for the most part Cossacks, who since the 17thcentury had been the precursors of the Haidamaks in such feats; 3) justas in the previous epochs, hard on the heels of the Cossack military po-groms follows “civilian” peasant butchery – the Haidamak looting, andtransport of the plunder from the cities to the countryside, etc.13

In this instance Dubnov’s thesis does not stand up well to examination. One hasonly to recall the extermination of the Jews by Konstantin KonstantinovichMamontov’s cavalry units during his famous raid through the rear of the Red

11 Ibid., 88–90.12 Semen Markovich Dubnov, “Tret¢ia gaidamakshchina,” in Cherikover, Anti-Semitizm, 9.13 Ibid., 14. Ironically enough, in Russian the word “civilian” also denotes “peaceful.”

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Army in the fall of 1919. In this case, the massacre of the Jews occurred on GreatRussian territory (Elets and other cities), and thus Ukrainian territory could havehad nothing to do with these slaughters.

The predominantly “Ukrainian” quality of the pogroms had earlier beennoted by one of their first chroniclers, Sergei Ivanovich Gusev-Orenburgskii,who compiled his 1922 Bagrovaia kniga (Crimson Book) from the materials of theCommittee for Assistance to the Victims of Pogroms under the Russian RedCross in Kiev. Gusev-Orenburgskii, like Shtiff, first wrote his book in Kiev, andthen moved to Rostov when the Whites were fleeing in panic. Gusev-Orenburgskii also incorporated descriptions of the Volunteers’ actions, yet hestressed that “the history of the Ukraine is a chronicle of anti-Jewish pogroms.…Before our very eyes passes the fifth [such] Ukrainian mass, bloody action – ahorrible bloody tide, surpassing all horrors of past times.”14

In 1932, ten years after the appearance of Shtiff’s book, Cherikover wrote anintroduction to a work Joseph Schechtman published in Berlin devoted to thesame topic, entitled Pogroms of the Volunteer Army in the Ukraine: Towards theHistory of Anti-Semitism in the Ukraine in 1919–1920. The work that Cherikoverintroduced was based upon a wider range of sources than earlier publications onthe same topic. Over the preceding decade numerous memoirs about the CivilWar had been published which touched upon the pogroms and Russian Jewry.Schechtman published some of the more important documents in his appendix,which amounted to a third of the book. In the introduction, Cherikover specifi-cally addressed the problem of the White movement and the Jews:

It is hard to understand the viciously anti-Semitic ideology and the po-gromist actions of the Volunteer Army without realizing beforehand thenature of the Volunteer White movement and its effective forces, thearmy and government in particular, without sizing up the roots of thatregime. The appearance in the emigration of a very rich memoir litera-ture enables this issue to be well illuminated. But it is also important toshed light upon it from the Jewish perspective, from the standpoint ofthe ordeal Ukrainian Jewry underwent under Volunteer authority.15

Cherikover emphasized that the founders of the Volunteer movement were “thegenerals of the tsarist army Kornilov, Alekseev, Kaledin, and Denikin, who man-aged to summon to the Don a large military force consisting of Russian officervolunteers, imbued with hatred not only for the October, but also for the Febru-ary, not only for the Bolsheviks, but for the Revolution altogether.”16

14 Gusev-Orenburgskii, Bagrovaia kniga, 3.15 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 7.16 Ibid., 8.


Cherikover’s interpretation, however appealing, does not correspond wellwith the facts. The generals he listed had certainly served in the tsarist army – inRussia there had been no other – but it was precisely those generals who, to alarge extent, can be considered the “creators” of the February Revolution, quitepossibly to a greater degree than some “professional revolutionaries.” It was thesegenerals, among them Alekseev and Denikin, who pressed in February 1917 forthe abdication of the emperor (who at the time was also their unsuccessful com-mander in chief), and their intervention largely determined the demise of a 300-year-old dynasty. In addition, all the generals Cherikover lists could boast very“democratic” social origins, since they had peasant or Cossack roots.

Nor did these generals ever manage to gather a “large military force” on theDon. From its formation in November 1917 through February 1918, when itwas forced by Bolshevik pressure to abandon the region, the Volunteer Armynumbered a paltry 4,000 men, including a student battalion and civilian follow-ers. According to Denikin’s own memoirs, among those Volunteers who partici-pated in the army’s first campaign, the storied “Ice March” from the Donthrough the Kuban steppes, there were several dozen Jewish officers.17 The Dec-laration of the Volunteer Army, published in November 1917, was written byPavel Nikolaevich Miliukov, one of the leaders of Russian liberalism. Miliukovwas a prime actor in the February Revolution, and was broadly identified ashaving Judeophilic views.

All these circumstances seem to rule out any intentionally restorationist andpogromist nature to “Volunteerism.” Indeed, Schechtman himself noted this factin his 1932 work, stating that anti-Semitism did not initially manifest itself inVolunteer circles. However, as the army expanded and inducted new officers,anti-Semitic tendencies grew. Had anti-Semitism, or in any case “official” anti-Semitism, been inherent to the White movement from its very beginnings, howare we to explain the “active gravitation” Schechtman observed “in certain Jewishcircles” towards the Volunteer Army in June–July 1918? Still, even in this earlyperiod, Jews were frequently refused admission not only into officer ranks ormedical positions, but even as soldiers.18

Schechtman relates a rather revealing episode. A renowned Rostov public ac-tivist, Abram Al ¢perin, met on 8 September 1918 in Ekaterinodar, then the seatof the White leadership, with General Mikhail Alekseev. He “had to draw thelatter’s attention to the facts of the refusal to accept Jews into the army and othermanifestations of anti-Semitism in the Volunteer Army. General Alekseev, how-ever, replied firmly: ‘I and all of the high command stand firmly on the groundsof equality for all citizens, and anti-Semitism is foreign to us. So long as I am

17 Anton Ivanovich Denikin, “Ocherki russkoi smuty,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1994), 104.18 Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 54.

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head of the Volunteer Army, there will be no anti-Semitism in it.’ But,” stressesSchechtman, “right after this … assertion followed an equivocal additionalphrase which in effect nullified the meaning of that programmatic statement:‘But, of course, history has its weight, and the sentiments formed over the yearscannot be overcome at once.’”19

Unfortunately, it seems evident that the former tsarist general had a more re-alistic understanding of the situation and public opinion at the time than theJewish historian did 15 years later. Not all White generals countenanced anti-Semitic sentiments, and even more so anti-Semitic actions, regardless of whateverpersonal opinions they might have held regarding Jews. Thus, Maksim Moisee-vich Vinaver recalled an incident that occurred while he was at Denikin’s staffheadquarters in Ekaterinodar in November 1918. He received a telegram fromthe Crimea about the fear of pogroms by Volunteers occupying the territory, andabout the panic reigning among the Jews. He went to General Abram Mikhail-ovich Dragomirov, one of the primary figures of the Russian anti-Soviet move-ment, and showed him the telegram. At that time, there was discussion ofpublishing a declaration clearly laying out the objectives of the Volunteer Armyto the population of Crimea. “Dragomirov himself,” recalled Vinaver, “proposedincluding a point in the declaration unequivocally warning against any national-istic ‘excesses’ and edited it in ‘the most decisive manner.’” The text of the decla-ration was sent by telegraph to the highest ranks of the Volunteer Army, and toVinaver as a member of the Crimean government, on 7 November 1918. Itsthird point read: “The Volunteer Army is highly indignant at the attempts to pitone nationality or one class against another.”20 Dragomirov was certainly no lib-eral. Most contemporaries considered him an outright anti-Semite. If Drago-mirov warned the “ranks of the Volunteer Army” against nationalistic excesses,and subsequently ordered the trial of several pogromists in Kiev, it was for purelypragmatic reasons. The general was a sensible man and realized that pogroms ledto the decomposition of the army. Had leaders of the Jewish communities be-lieved Denikin was conducting a deliberately anti-Semitic policy, they surelywould not have asked him during a meeting on 26 July 1919 not only to clearlyand resolutely condemn pogroms, but also to insist that Jews be accepted intothe Volunteer Army.21

Cherikover in 1932 correctly stressed that orders against pogroms alwayscontained qualifications and were issued too late. Such orders were certainly im-plemented in a lukewarm manner. The mere fact that orders were issued,

19 Ibid., 54–55.20 Ibid., 35–36; Maksim M. Vinaver, Nashe pravitel¢stvo (Krymskiia vospominaniia 1918–1919 gg.)(Paris: Imprimerie d’art voltaire, 1928), 52, 53.21 Denikin, “Ocherki,” 108.


Cherikover contended, did not matter much. Even so, Denikin issued fewer suchorders than, say, Simon Vasil¢evich Petliura, whose supporters in Paris even re-published a whole volume of them in a 1927 French translation.22 Yet was therea government that cared about its image abroad that did not issue such decrees?

Cherikover, who insisted on the restorationist and reactionary character ofDenikin’s regime, wrote that “the public groupings on which General Denikinleaned directly and that participated in his government were the Sovet gosu-darstvennogo ob≤edineniia [Council of State Unification] … headed by formertsarist minister Krivoshein, and especially the Natsional¢nyi tsentr [National Cen-ter], whose soul was the Constitutional Democrats.”23 In point of fact, the “gov-ernment,” or, to be more exact, Osoboe soveshchanie pri glavnokomanduiushchem(Special Conference under the Commander-in-Chief), was coalitionist. Krivo-shein did not participate in it. The Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) did in-deed play a decisive role in the Special Conference, but one can hardly accusemembers of that left-center “liberal” party of “restorationism.” Moreover, adver-saries considered the Kadets to be a “Jewish” party. The Kadets consistentlyspoke up for Jewish civic equality, and there are no grounds for suspecting them,at least in the pre-October period, of anti-Semitism.24

However, it is difficult to refute Schechtman’s assertion that the VolunteerArmy’s pogromist anti-Semitism “did not incubate in the special conditions ofthe Ukrainian environment, but they brought it to the Ukraine prefabricated.”25

The allegations cited above by historians writing in the 1920s regarding the mys-tical effects of the Ukrainian “soil,” which somehow provoked the pogroms, areunsound. So are the reflections of one recent Russian historian, Sergei Aleksee-vich Pavliuchenkov, who writes that while the Denikinites “were still within theboundaries of the Don, Kuban, Crimea and even Kharkov, everything was moreor less calm for the Jews …. But as soon as the White armies set foot in Ukraineproper and encountered the prepared ground (gotovuiu pochvu), they joined thepogroms fully and enthusiastically.”26 Other than the incomparable modifier“more or less calm,” what serves as this author’s criteria? It is most implausiblethat advancing several dozen or even hundreds of kilometers – even on thatmagical “Ukrainian soil” – could in the course of several weeks turn a regular

22 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, ed. Schechtman, 17;Documents sur les pogromes en Ukraine et l’assassinat de Simon Petlura à Paris (1917–1921–1926)(Paris: Comité Commémoratif Simon Petlura, 1927).23 Ibid., 12.24 See Oleg Budnitskii, “ V. A. Maklakov i evreiskii vopros,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta[Moscow and Jerusalem], no. 1 (19) (1999), 42–93.25 Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 33.26 Sergei Alekseevich Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm v Rossii: Vlast¢ i massy (Moscow: RKT-Istoriia, 1997), 258.

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military unit into a band of pogromists and murderers had there been nopreconditions, first and foremost ideological and psychological ones.

The American historian Peter Kenez devotes special attention to the place ofanti-Semitism in the ideology of the White movement. Proceeding from thestudy of “secret reports and contemporary correspondence of participants of theWhite movement,” he came to the conclusion that “anti-Semitism was neither aperipheral nor an accidental aspect of White ideology; it was a focal point oftheir world view.” As he elaborates,

the Russian officer corps had long been anti-Semitic in Imperial Russia… [Officers] identified Jews with liberalism and socialism, ideologieswhich they loathed. The great majority of them had no trouble at allcondoning tsarist policy, which regarded Jews as a hostile and alien mi-nority, whose very existence was somehow threatening to the Russianpeople … Yet their “normal” anti-Semitism was mild compared to themurderous obsession, which they developed in the course of the CivilWar. Seeing Jews in important positions in the Soviet regime no doubtcontributed to their hatred, but this cannot be the full explanation, forobviously most of the Soviet leaders and most of the workers of theCheka were as Russian as themselves.27

In other treatments Kenez writes even more boldly, comparing Russian Whiteofficers to the Nazis:

They always disliked Jews; now their anti-Semitism reached pathologicalproportion. This new and passionate anti-Semitism was born out of theneed to explain, not so much to others, as to themselves, why the revolu-tion had occurred. In the view of the reactionary officers it was the alienJews who were primarily responsible. They were the microbes that de-stroyed the healthy body politic of old Russia. As the officers becameeven more frustrated by the confusing world around them, their anti-Semitism became increasingly pathological. They murdered more andmore Jews and it was necessary to justify themselves by thinking up sin-ister Jewish conspiracies. Perhaps paradoxically, participation in po-groms increased anti-Semitism.… It alone enabled them to make senseof a world that to them seemed senseless. In this respect, at least, theWhite officers were precursors of the Nazis.28

27 Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1977), 176–77.28 Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Pogroms, ed. Klierand Lambroza, 310–11.


Kenez’s assertion that Denikin and some of his generals, like the notorious anti-Semite Vasilii Shulgin, were concerned with the pogroms primarily in the sensethat they undermined the military discipline is undoubtedly correct. “On theother hand, anti-Semitism was a trump card in the hands of White propagan-dists. Associating Bolshevism with Judaism harmed not only the Jews, but alsoSoviet power.”29 The Whites never managed to find a more effective means ofpropaganda.

In opposition to Kenez, Pipes considers i t absurd “ t o depict t h e Whitemovement as proto-Nazi, with anti-Semitism the “focal point of [its] world-view.”As discussed above, Pipes contends that the pogroms helped cement an influentialassociation of Jews with Bolshevism, not that the Whites paved the ideological wayfor Nazism. In Pipes’ opinion, this “focal point” w a s nationalism, not anti-Semitism. He agrees, of course, that “the White officer corps, not to speak of theCossacks, was increasingly contaminated” with anti-Semitism a s the Civil Warunfolded. “Even so,” h e writes, “it would b e a mistake t o draw any direct linkbetween this emotional virulence and the anti-Jewish excesses during the CivilWar.” On the one hand, notes Pipes, “most of the massacres were perpetrated notby Russian White troops but by Ukrainian irregulars and Cossacks.” On the otherhand, “the pogroms were inspired far less by religious and national passions thanby ordinary greed: the worst atrocities on the White side were committed by theTerek Cossacks, who had never known Jews and regarded them merely as objectsof extortion.”30 Following one of the authors of the renowned collection Rossiia ievrei ( Russia a n d t h e Jews), I o s i f Menassievich B i k e rman [Joseph M .Bikermann],31 Pipes contends that t h e anti-Jewish pogroms, despite having“certain unique features, in a broader perspective” were but a part of the all-Russian pogrom initiated b y t h e Bolsheviks. “Once pogroms a n d razgromy[destruction of property] became the order of the day, i t was inevitable that theJews would be the principal victims: they were seen as aliens, were defenseless, andwere believed rich.”32 Pipes takes the momentary, contagious spread o f anti-Semitism following the February Revolution to be the result of a fatal confluenceof circumstances, including the effective liquidation of the Pale o f Settlementduring World War I and the appearance o f the Jews i n the Russian hinterland.Then, after 1917, the widespread appearance of Jews in the halls of power createdthe impression that “whereas everybody else had lost from the revolution, theJews, and they alone, had benefited from it.”33

29 Ibid.30 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 105.31 Iosif Menassievich Bikerman, “Rossiia i russkoe evreistvo,” in Rossiia i evrei: Sbornik pervyi(Berlin: Osnova, 1924), 61.32 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 106.33 Ibid., 101.

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On the whole, these observations are indisputably correct, although it seemsto me that Pipes underestimates the historical and religious roots of Russian anti-Semitism. The picture that he draws is too schematic and some of his statementstoo categorical. For instance, it is hard to agree that “[t]he White movement inthe first year of its existence was free of anti-Semitism, at any rate, in its overtmanifestations,” and that everything changed in the winter of 1918–19 when“hostility towards the Jews … emerged in the Southern White Army.” Therewere, in Pipes’ opinion, three causes for this development. First, he points to theactive role of the Jews in the Cheka, which carried out the Red Terror. Second,he emphasizes the consequences following from the evacuation of the Germantroops. Contrary to White expectations, the Bolshevik regime, which in theiropinion was holding onto power due solely to German support, remained inpower after it had ended. Russian anti-Bolsheviks, naturally, searched for a newscapegoat, and found one in the Jews. Finally, the murder of the imperial family“was immediately blamed on Jews, who in fact played a secondary role in it.”34

It is hard to imagine that “the hostility towards the Jews,” which supposedlyemerged in the winter of 1918–19, could erupt so abruptly into monstrous po-groms as early as the spring–summer of 1919. Moreover, why should one sepa-rate the Southern Army, the supposed incubator for the Volunteers’ anti-Semitism, from other units in the Armed Forces in the South of Russia, whichwas the official title of Denikin’s troops? In any case, the population itself madeno distinction between discrete White military formations – they were all termed“Volunteers.” In attempting to distinguish the Southern Army from the Volun-teer Army, Pipes is in fact following General Denikin’s own “instructions” re-garding Shtiff’s book: “Identification of the Volunteer Army with the ArmedForces in the South of Russia, which also included the Cossacks and the moun-taineers, sometimes causes awkwardness. Shtiff’s book portrays the case in a verybiased manner. Besides, he mixes together the Volunteer Army with the South-ern Army – the organization of Duke Leikhtenberg, Akatsatov, and Semenov, as-signing to us the anti-Semitic declarations of the Southern Army.”35 Denikinseems to forget here that he had in fact been the “Commander in Chief of theArmed Forces in the South of Russia,” which encompassed the Southern Army.

Soviet historians of the Russian Revolution and Civil War cautiously orbashfully avoided the “Jewish question,” but it is now being fitted into its legiti-mate place in scholarly works. Pavliuchenkov, author of the highly acclaimedmonograph on War Communism, goes so far as to state that “without the Jewishquestion there is no history of the Revolution.” In his opinion,

34 Ibid., 105.35 Denikin, “Ocherki,” 120.


[a]ny serious analysis of the Russian Revolution and of the history ofcommunism in general invariably raises the so-called Jewish question. Itssignificance in the course of the revolution and the Civil War … was ex-ceptionally great, and there is no issue of any importance that was nottied to it to one or another degree. The attitudes of the peasantry andthe working class, terror, struggle in the highest levels of communistleadership, the speculative free market, etc. – all these problems focus at-tention on the Jewish question in the years of establishment of Sovietpower in Russia and its union republics.36

Pavliuchenkov attributes such prominence to the Jewish question that it iseven the subject of the essay that forms the conclusion of his book, “The JewishQuestion in the Revolution, or the Causes of the Bolsheviks’ Defeat in Ukrainein 1919.”37 However, it remains unclear why the author, who attaches suchprominence to the Jewish question, does not deal with it in other chapters of hiswork. His limited knowledge of the historiography is also surprising.Pavliuchenkov seems not even to suspect the existence of several books specifi-cally devoted to the history of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine during theCivil War, or to other aspects of the history of Russian Jewry.

Pavliuchenkov justifiably sees the reasons for the Jews’ active participation inthe revolutionary movement in the disabilities imposed on Jewish people “bytsarist legislation and Russian society,” restrictions that “clearly did not corre-spond to the cultural level, ambitions, and financial-economic power of a signifi-cant part of the Jewish community.” The author stresses that “the Jewish milieuduring the revolution was subject to a deep schism” between well-to-do, estab-lished traditionalists and “pretentious” younger “neophytes” in the shtetl.38

Pavliuchenkov’s reflections on the existence of divisions within the Jewish com-munity are in themselves not contentious. However, one can hardly state withsuch assurance that the split was determined by the degree of economic well-being and “establishment.” Indeed, most revolutionary leaders of Jewish descentcame from a relatively prosperous background, particularly from among familiesthat had managed to escape from the Pale of Settlement. One has only to recallthe son of nearly the sole Jewish estate owner, Lev Davydovich Trotskii (Bron-stein), or the children of the prominent Moscow entrepreneurs, the brothersMikhail Rafailovich and Abram Rafailovich Gots, or Il¢ia Isidorovich Bunakov(Fondaminskii), Iulii Osipovich Martov (Tsederbaum), etc. Evidently, the shtetlJewry was more conservative than the largely assimilated Jewish environment oflarge cities outside the Pale of Settlement. However, it was the Ukrainian me-

36 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 251.37 Ibid., 251–63.38 Ibid., 252–53.

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stechko Jews, often greeting their future tormentors and executioners with breadand salt as the bearers of order and liberators from the Bolshevik lawlessness, whohad to pay with its blood for others’ real or illusionary sins.

Pavliuchenkov correctly notes that the attitude of the peasantry was a crucialfactor in the Civil War. Speaking of the causes of the Red Army’s reverses inUkraine in the spring and summer of 1919, particularly the loss of support forSoviet power in the Ukrainian countryside, he points out that the decisive factorwas not only the agrarian policies of the Bolsheviks, who attempted to transformthe former noble estates, objects of the peasants’ longing, into collective farms.Possibly an even more important cause, he asserts, was the preponderance of Jewsin Soviet structures of authority. In January–February of 1919, when the RedArmy took over Left-Bank Ukraine and proceeded to create a Soviet and partyapparatus, the only source of “cadres” for the new ruling institutions were theJewish shtetl youth. The Ukrainian peasantry was illiterate and very negativelydisposed towards the idea of “kommuniia.” The Russian population of the citieswas either fighting in Denikin’s ranks or also had a negative attitude towardsSoviet power. Thus, the only group that remained loyal to Soviet power was theJews, and they comprised about half of the urban population of the formerWestern borderlands of the Russian empire.

On the basis of reports and letters to the Central Committee of the RussianCommunist Party, Pavliuchenkov depicts “Jewish dominance” and the growth ofmass anti-Semitism not only among the Ukrainian peasantry but also among theRed Army soldiers and party and soviet cadres. The documentary fragments hecites, most of them found in the former Central Party Archive, are rather dra-matic. For example, a high official in the Moscow soviet’s department of foodsupply, N. Materanskii, wrote after a trip to Ukraine that a population withlongstanding negative sentiments about the Jews was now certain that all powerwas in Jewish hands, and protested against subjection to “Yid authority.” Mater-anskii continues: “In addition to the aforementioned reasons, hatred for the Jewsis inflamed by a whole array of other causes, one of them being the role of Jewsin food speculation. In Ukraine Jews have been predominantly occupied in trade,and now almost all of the remaining private [trade] apparatus is in their hands.”Cagily, Materanskii observed:

I have no idea for what reason, but they are protected by the authorities toa great degree, and this gives them an opportunity to play a dominantrole in food procurement, purchasing and shipping of goods, raisingprices, and in the food supply problem (prodovolstvennyi vopros) in gen-eral … it is understandable that all the blame for the crisis falls on thesame unfortunate Jews, especially those in power, whom the populationfor the most part accuses of the most vicious speculation. Anti-Semitism


is well developed in all layers of the population. It can be observedamong the peasants, in the intelligentsia, and among the Red Guards,who accuse the Jews of unwillingness to go to the front and ability to“settle in” in the rear. Curiously enough, even among Russian Commu-nists the bitterness of some sort of enmity and unfriendliness towardsthe Jews is breaking out.39

On the basis of Materanskii’s report and “a whole range of other” sources (whichhe unfortunately does not cite), Pavliuchenkov concludes that “by the beginningof 1919 communist power had created favorable conditions in Ukraine for theformation of a kind of alliance between the structures of authority and specula-tive circles on the basis of nationality (po natsional¢nomu priznaku).”40

Possibly for the first time in the Russian historiography, Pavliuchenkov di-rects attention to “Soviet anti-Semitism.”41 In particular, he refers to two dra-matic documents: a 22 April 1919 dispatch by G. S. Moroz, a member of thecollegium of the Cheka, to the Central Committee of the Russian CommunistParty after a trip to the Ukraine, and an appeal to the Central Committee of aformer member of the Ukrainian party of borot¢bisty, G. Klunnyi, who consid-ered the root cause of Judeophobia in the countryside to have been the tradi-tional Jewish sphere of activity – trade. He wrote:

The countryside primarily knows the Jew-trader as someone who ex-ploited it by all means possible, especially by trade in grain. When apeasant fed the Jew with his produce, the Jew did nothing in return: theJew-artisan served the bourgeoisie (panstvo) and meshchanstvo [pettybourgeoisie] … and the Ukrainian countryside has almost never seen theJewish proletariat. Because the peasant does not consider trade to be la-bor, all Jews are not considered laborers. Such views of the Jews explainthe embitterment of the peasantry with “the commissar Yids” and apopular Ukrainian phrase: “Zhydy z nas ranish[e] tiahly, ta i teper khotiat¢sisty na shiiu .”42 The nation that stands aside from both the culture of

39 Ibid., 255–56, citing Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 1235, op. 94, d.143, l. 8. Emphasis in orig.40 Ibid., 256.41 In modern Russian historiography, the first to write about the pogroms carried out by thefamous First Cavalry Army in the period of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 was V. L. Genis, whoalso employed sources from RGASPI, the former Central Party Archive. See his article, “PervaiaKonnaia armiia: Za kulisami slavy,” Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (1994), 64–77.42 “The Yids have long taken advantage of us, but now they want to run us into the ground [lit: siton our neck].”

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the masses and the labor principle of economic construction becomesthe enemy of the masses, [and] is enlisted in the class of oppressors.43

In 1919, concludes Pavliuchenkov, “it was vain to hope that the Ukrainian peas-antry, armed almost to the last man, would tolerate the syndicate of Soviet func-tionaries and bourgeois speculators on its ‘neck’ … [I]n the space of a couple ofmonths of Soviet power the Jews managed to pit the Ukrainian muzhiki againstthem to such an extent that their vengeance was terrible.” In May–June 1919,writes the historian – evidently assuming he has at last uncovered their truecauses – a wave of severe pogroms broke out, but “the literature on the topic as arule simply establishes the fact of their occurrence and does not delve into theirorigins or the circumstances behind their outbreak.”44

Pavliuchenkov evidently follows his sources (almost all of them originate inthe archival collection of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party), butfails to provide any analysis of such issues as, for example, the identification oftrade with “speculation.” Following the logic of War Communism, any tradingat all was regarded as outright speculation. On this point, the views of the ideo-logues proclaiming the dawn of a bright new future for mankind coincided withthe archaic views of the peasantry. Regular features of anti-Semitic rhetoric intsarist Russia included depictions of Jewish exploitation of peasants, or of Jewishtavern-keepers seducing naïve and good-natured peasants into drink. The fearsthis rhetoric provoked even predetermined such “defensive” measures as the pro-hibition against Jews residing in the countryside and engaging in agriculture. Theideas of the newly-minted Communist Klunnyi were not new at all.

On the whole, I find Pavliuchenkov’s treatment overly indebted to a form ofsocio-economic and political determinism. In reality, the Jewish masses withinthe Pale of Settlement were materially destitute. Vladimir Prokhorovich Bulda-kov, the author of one of the most interesting recent books on the Revolutionand the Civil War, Krasnaia smuta (Red Time of Troubles), notes that the averageincome of a Jewish artisan in the beginning of the century was one-and-a-half totwo times lower than that of a peasant (150–300 and 400–500 rubles respec-tively), and that 19 percent of the Jews “found themselves in the position ofpaupers who owed their existence to the charity of their fellow Jews.”45 Thus,the most significant factor shaping the attitude of the Ukrainian peasantry

43 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 256, citing Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial¢no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI) f. 2, op. 1, d. 1190, l. 6.44 Ibid., 257.45 Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revolutsionnogo nasiliia(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 33; Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenii evreev v Rossii(St. Petersburg: Izdanie Evreiskogo kolonizatsionnogo obshchestva, 1903), vol. 1, 35–39; vol. 2,226.


towards the Jews was not the Jews’ actual economic role but myths about thatrole.46

Furthermore, it is hard to imagine that “a couple of months” of Soviet pow-er, together with the presence of a considerable number of Jews serving it, couldlead to such an outburst of bestial hatred towards them on the part of the localpeasantry. “The cruelty with which the rebels got even (raspravlialis¢) with Jewswho were Soviet and party functionaries was exceptional even for the Civil War,”writes Pavliuchenkov. A “communist soup” was made from Jewish Communists“boiled alive in a huge boiling pot on the central square of the shtetl,” whichthose Jews left alive were forced to eat. Others were buried alive or drowned,while those who tried to stay afloat were “put to rest by rifle butts,” or were “laidin rows on rails and then run over with a locomotive,” etc. Of course, among thevictims of such unprecedented cruelty and sadism, “functionaries” were a negligi-ble minority, all the more so in that, as the author himself notes, many of themhastened to escape to the Great Russian provinces, “closer to Moscow.”47

Buldakov to a certain degree agrees with Pavliuchenkov. In discussing theabominable acts of anti-Jewish violence cited by Pavliuchenkov, he writes that“the horrors of both the Red and the White Terror pale in comparison to thefierceness of the peasant masses…” Neither Whites nor Reds – or any movementthat set its sights on power on an all-Russian level – were “capable of such sadis-tic tactics of terror.” But Buldakov justifiably concludes that the atrocities cannotbe explained exclusively as retaliation for the consequences of Bolshevik rule inthe Ukraine. “In the Civil War one must distinguish between authorized (vlast-nyi) terror and the psychopathology of elemental (stikhiinyi) mass sadism. Therewere more victims of the latter.”48

Buldakov’s Krasnaia smuta is specifically devoted, as its subtitle indicates, to“the nature and consequences of revolutionary violence.” The history of the Rus-

46 It would be wrong, of course, to deny the socio-economic roots, or, rather, the socio-economiccomponent of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. Henry Abramson tends to overemphasize the role of theeconomic factor. Yet even he writes that “premodern anti-Semitism in Ukraine, which extended tothe beginning of the twentieth century in many regions, was primarily social and economic innature, reflecting the pressure points in the castelike division of labor as market forces wereincreasingly brought to bear in Ukrainian society. With the Ukrainian revolution, however, theconflict takes on unmistakably political overtones” (Abramson, Prayer, 32 [emphasis in orig.]). Atthe same time, it seems to me that Abramson has not sufficiently accounted for the religious rootsof Ukrainian anti-Semitism. The fact that the Ukrainian language lacked the terminologyemployed in Western European anti-Semitic literature (the author of a 1919 anti-Semitic pamphlethad to explain the very term “anti-Semitism” to his readers, notes Abramson), does not in itselfdemonstrate the absence of religiously-based anti-Semitism. Similar concepts could be expressed indifferent, oral forms.47 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 257–58.48 Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta, 237.

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sian Revolution, Buldakov writes, “is first and foremost the history of a drasticchange in relations of people to authority, to those like them, and to thosearound them, i.e., the history of violence from below.”49 The question, however, ishow spontaneous that violence was, and what role ideologists and leaders playedin cultivating it.

Buldakov’s general conclusion is unquestionably true: “the most atrociousside of the ‘White Terror,’ and of all the mutually repressive acts of the CivilWar, were the anti-Jewish pogroms.” I suppose he is also right in suggesting thatwere even “one-tenth” of the data about the Whites’ perpetration of anti-Jewishpogroms in the Ukraine 1919 true, it would still prompt the conclusion that theWhites “had no chances at all for victory in the struggle for Russian statehood(rossiiskuiu gosudarstvennost¢).”50 Bestial anti-Semitism led to the demoralizationand disintegration of the army, and definitively stained the already doubtfulpurity of the “White cause.”

However, I think the explanation for the phenomenon of anti-Jewish vio-lence is simpler and more frightening than the one offered by the author ofKrasnaia smuta: “that perception of one’s own powerlessness, the transcendenceof which requires sadistic forms of self-affirmation.”51 In this case the matter isnot simply centuries-old traditions of anti-Semitism, heated up by the indisputa-bly active role of revolutionaries of Jewish origin in Russia’s second great Time ofTroubles. The massacres were ideologically prepared. As Peter Kenez convinc-ingly demonstrates in his works, aggressive nationalism, most intensively mani-fested as anti-Semitism, became the surrogate ideology of the White move-

49 Ibid., 8. Emphasis in orig.50 Ibid., 236–37. In this respect, I find unconvincing Evan Mawdsley’s assertion that “pogromshad no effect on the outcome of the Civil War, although they perhaps turned some public opinionin the West against the White cause” (Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War [Boston: Allen and Un-win, 1987], 210). In addition to the loss of moral “credit” abroad, pogroms also caused the demor-alization of the armed forces, transforming battle-capable and relatively disciplined units into bandsof thieves and murderers. Perhaps the most glaring example is the infamous “Mamontov raid,”pushing deep behind the Red Army’s lines in the late summer and autumn of 1919. Instead of ex-ploiting this success by moving west, along the Kursk-Orel-Tula-Moscow axis, Mamontov’s corps,weighed down with wagons of plunder, turned south, occupying Voronezh. After returning fromthe raid in the autumn of 1919, at the moment of the Civil War’s decisive battles, Mamontov re-leased many Cossacks home on leave. By 2 December 1919 the erstwhile hero was removed fromhis command in the corps by General Wrangel for his “criminal negligence” (Petr NikolaevichWrangel, Vospominaniia, chast¢ 1 [Moscow: Terra, 1992], 437–38. As noted above, Mamontov’stroops executed Jews they came across in these central Russian provinces with the same enthusiasmas their compatriots in Ukraine. Judging by the amount of plundered goods, they looted everyonethey could.51 Ibid., 237.


ment.52 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was republished from Taganrog toKhabarovsk, and the idea of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy as the initial causefor all of Russia’s troubles traveled as far as Cossack villages on the upper Don,the population of which had never before encountered a single Jew.53

The pogroms carried out by the Volunteers were the most organized. Therewas almost no chance of surviving them: while one could fight off or evadearmed bands, it was next to impossible to hide from a massive regular army. Ofcourse, no one had any interest in the actual involvement of the shtetl populationwith Bolshevism. For tradesmen and artisans in the Pale of Settlement, theBolshevik regime was particularly burdensome. As noted earlier, the tragic para-dox was that mestechko locals not infrequently greeted the Volunteers with breadand salt as liberators. In certain cases, the delegations sent to welcome these “lib-erators” were the first to fall under their sabers. Kenez is absolutely right to notethat the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine in 1919 was extremely “modern” andentirely consistent with the “tradition” of the 20th century.54

Clearly, there are good reasons to situate the pogroms of the Civil War pe-riod in the historical perspective of earlier outbreaks of violence against the Jewsin Russia. The anti-Jewish violence of 1917–21 was at very least the third waveof pogrom violence directed against Jews in the late imperial period. The volumeedited by John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence inModern Russian History attempts to survey the entire phenomenon. Curiously,however, this valuable work devotes the least attention to the most bloody periodof pogroms, that of the Civil War. The relevant section contains an article byPeter Kenez that, while significantly expanded and revised, nevertheless remains areworking of his earlier studies. This is indicative of the current state of researchon the topic. In Kenez’s view, pogroms carried out by White forces “were thebest organized, carried out like military operations, and the most ideologicallymotivated.”55

Henry Abramson has also recently attempted to compare the pogroms of1917–20 with the preceding period. In his view, “comparison of the violence inthe revolutionary era to earlier pogroms reveals elements of both continuity anddiscontinuity,” although “elements of discontinuity are perhaps more strikingthan elements of continuity.” Abramson considers the similarity with the earlier

52 In addition to Kenez’s works cited above, see also his article “The Ideology of the White Move-ment,” Soviet Studies 32: 1 (1980), 58–83.53 Oleg Budnitskii, “The Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1918–1919,” Jews and Jewish Topics in theSoviet Union and Western Europe, no. 3 (19) (1992), 23–26.54 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 166–77.55 Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier andLambroza, 302.

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pogroms of 1881–84 and 1905–6 first in terms of their geographic localization:the majority occurred, as in earlier times, in Ukraine. One rule of thumb – themore Jews, the more pogroms – remained unchanged. This concept, however, isnot strikingly original. Abramson views the main feature distinguishing the firsttwo waves of pogroms from those of 1917–21 as the colossal rise in the numberof victims. As he notes, “the scale of the pogroms of 1919 dwarfed previous vio-lence.”56 Indeed, when we are speaking of dozens or hundreds (or, in relation to1905–06, perhaps several thousand) victims, on the one hand, and tens of thou-sands, on the other, this is already a qualitatively different form of violence. If inthe former case we can speak of disorders that are accompanied by the loss ofhuman life, in the latter we must speak of extermination. Of course, not all po-groms in the period 1917–21 resulted in large-scale murder of Jews, regardless ofage or sex. But this new type of “pogrom” appeared for the first time in modernRussian history, and indeed for the first time in 20th-century Europe. Abramsonemphasizes that a characteristic aspect of the revolutionary period was the ex-tended absence of central authority, leading to anarchy and violence.

Despite the importance of this observation, I would also emphasize anotherfeature of this period. For the first time, the authorities – or, rather, those forcesaspiring to the role of central authority – began to initiate anti-Jewish violence.For the first time, pogroms were conducted by units of a more or less regulararmy (the White troops more, and the Directory troops less). It is telling thatbetween them the Whites, the Directory, and its allies were responsible for morethan 50 percent of the total number of Jewish victims.57 Army units proved tobe much more “capable” at the task of mass killing.

One should note that in pre-revolutionary Russia anti-Jewish violence alwaysoriginated from below. (An exception was the deportations of the Jewish popula-tion during World War I, but that was a special case.) Police and army unitsmight have been passive, and even might have sympathized with those conduct-ing the pogrom, but they themselves rarely participated in them. Indeed, theauthorities always restored order eventually.58 By 1919, one could no longer ap-

56 Henry Abramson, Prayer, 109–10.57 Peter Kenez was undoubtedly mistaken when he wrote that “the Volunteer Army succeeded inmurdering as many Jews as all other armies put together” (“Pogroms and White Ideology,” 302);Directory troops and their allies in this case definitely took first place. The reason why “Volun-teers” were judged so severely lies in the fact that they were viewed as a regular army and were ledby graduates of the General Staff Academy.58 See Stephen M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1985); I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: TheOrigin of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press, 1990);Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press,1992), esp. 68–69, 139–40; Klier and Lambroza, eds., Pogroms.


peal to the authorities. More precisely, there was only one authority to which onecould appeal: Soviet power. The tragedy of the situation was that, at the veryleast, the White high command was opposed to pogroms – in principle. How-ever, White leaders wished to avoid any “disagreements” with their units, andtook no decisive measures for preventing pogroms. Nor did they seriously punishthose who committed them. Indeed, it is unclear whether the White commandwould have found forces that were both reliable enough and sufficiently free ofpogromist sentiments to carry out that task. Later, in 1920, Wrangel appeared todemonstrate that it was possible to prevent pogroms if one showed sufficient po-litical will to do so. However, he was in a special situation, with control overnothing more than Tauride province.59

Finally, anti-Semitic propaganda of a type hitherto unprecedented in Russiaemerged during the Civil War as a discrete phenomenon. This propaganda builtupon both the recent, officially-sanctioned participation of the armed forces inviolence against Jews during the 1914–15 deportations, as well as upon tradi-tional, primarily religious anti-Semitism, which was further incited during theCivil War by certain church leaders and popular preachers. Such propagandaprovided thieves and murderers with a quasi-ideological justification for theiractions.60

We are thus confronted by a paradox. The White movement began withJewish participation. Its leaders, former generals of the tsarist army, rarely madeopenly anti-Semitic declarations. On the contrary, they frequently declared (inmore or less resolute form) their repudiation of pogromist anti-Semitism. Theideology of the White movement, moreover, was to a large extent shaped by theConstitutional Democrats – a leftist, “liberal” party that consistently advocatedequality for the Jews. Kadets were well represented in General Denikin’s retinue– indeed, it was initially Kadets (at first Nikolai Elpidiforovich Paramonov, andthen Konstantin Nikolaevich Sokolov) who headed Denikin’s PropagandaAgency. It would seem that the Jewish population should have expected lesstrouble from the Volunteers than from any other anti-Bolshevik formation.

A series of questions thus present themselves for future research. Why, dur-ing the initial stage of the Civil War (and to some extent later as well, after theonset of the Volunteer pogroms) did a segment of politically active Jewry supportthe White movement and even participate in it to varying degrees? How and whydid the Whites, who began their struggle against the Bolsheviks under slogansthat were quite liberal, turn en masse into pogromists? What was the role of the

59 See the documentary publication “The Russian Ambassador in Paris on the Whites and theJews,” introduced by Oleg Budnitskii, Jews in Eastern Europe, no. 3 (28) (1995), 53–66.60 See Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 78–85, 105–07; “The Russian Ambassador inParis,” 61–64.

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Russian liberal intelligentsia – and especially the Kadet Party – in terms of ideo-logical support for the White movement? How did some members of that party,who were traditionally considered advocates of Jewish equality, ultimately cometo an effective acquittal of anti-Semitism?61 We could formulate a range of other,more specific questions, which ultimately converge into one: did Russian Jewshave a choice between the Reds and the Whites? Or, in other words, was thereany “proper” response for the Jews in a country split by internal contradictions,in which they were an unwanted and unloved minority?

To my mind, to begin to answer these kinds of questions requires, first andforemost, to cease viewing the Jews only in the capacity of victims. Jewish figureswere active political participants not only in the Red camp, as is well known, butalso on the other side of the lines. It is characteristic that the Jews on the Redside as a rule were internationalists and denounced their Jewishness, as did Trots-kii, while the Jews in the White ranks included practically no apostates. Alas,most of the fatalities were suffered by the shtetl Jews who adhered to neither side.Second, the “Jewish question” must be viewed in the context of the Russian CivilWar. More broadly, it must be viewed in the context of the Russian Revolutionas a whole, of which the Civil War was both an immediate continuation and anintegral part. Third, the problem of relations between Jews (I stress once againthat I mean Jewish political and public figures) and the leadership and ideologistsof the Whites should be viewed as dynamic, and examined from the outset of theanti-Bolshevik movement. Of course, a deeper understanding of the events of theCivil War – the part that pertained to the Jewish population of the formerRussian empire – is possible only inasmuch as new sources are uncovered. In thepost-Soviet period, this requirement for advancing scholarship on a neglected setof historical problems has become eminently possible to pursue. Finally, theseevents should be subjected to revision in light of the historical experience of theentire 20th century.

Trans. Eugene Budnitsky

Institut rossiiskoi istoriiRossiiskaia akademiia naukUl. Dmitriia Ul¢ianova, 19Moscow 117036 [email protected]

61 See the brief discussion of this issue in William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution:The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),426–27; Natal ¢ia Georgievna Dumova, Kadetskaia kontrrevoliutsiia i ee razgrom (Moscow: Mysl¢,1982), 313–14; Oleg Budnitskii, V. A. Maklakov i evreiskii vopros, 60–63.