Pogroms in the Russian Empire facts for kids
Pogroms in the Russian Empire (Russian: Еврейские погромы в Российской империи) were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that began in the 19th century. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia (modern Moldova), Lithuania and Crimea. 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 the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia was not restricted.
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1821
The 1821 Odessa pogroms are sometimes considered the first pogroms. After the execution of the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Gregory V, in Constantinople, 14 Jews were killed in response. 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.
1881–1882
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The use of the term "pogrom" became common in the English language after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through south-western Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1882; when more than 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, the most notable of them were pogroms which occurred in Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa. They changed perceptions among Russian Jews and indirectly gave a significant boost to the early Zionist movement.
To circumvent censorship, these pogroms were referred to in the Jewish press as the "Storms in the South" or "Storms in the Negev" (Hebrew: הסופות בנגב, Sufot BaNegev). The names are a reference to the prophecy in Isaiah 21:1. Variants of the translation of the prophecy: "...As storms in the South pass through, So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land." or: "Like whirlwinds sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror", and so on, with "Negev" meaning "South" in Biblical Hebrew and the pogroms in question happening in the south (south-west) of the European part of the Russian Empire.
The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March [1 March, Old Style], 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it. 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.
Local economic conditions, such as debt owed to Jewish 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. Russia's industrialization caused Russians to be moving into and out of major cities. People trying to escape the big cities carried their antisemitic values with them, spread the ideas throughout Russia, and caused more pogroms in different regions of Russia. That has been argued to have been actually more important than rumors of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar. Those rumors, 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 rumors, 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 south-western 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: (Podolia 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, which was organized by the Jewish students of the Novorossiysk University.
For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief 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 promulgated the notion 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.
Casualties
At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881.
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. Particularly, the 1905 pogrom stands as one of the most severe incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the time, both in terms of property damage and human casualties. In comparison, the pogrom wave that occurred between 1881 and 1882 resulted in fewer fatalities. According to police records in Odessa, a minimum of 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews lost their lives, while around 300 individuals, predominantly Jewish, were injured. Additionally, an estimated 1,632 residential and commercial properties owned by Jews sustained damage. These numbers are considered by some to be conservative estimates, particularly regarding the number of injured individuals. The violence against the Jewish community was extreme.
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 was 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 joined in mainly to loot.
Causes
Historian Bob Weinberg traces the roots of the pogrom to the complex social and political setting of Russia during that period. He contends that part of the explanation for the brutality lies in the realm of identity politics. For some individuals involved, their actions were not just acts of violence but also expressions of their Orthodox Christian beliefs and loyalty to the Russian monarch. The sense of eroding authority and changes in political structures seemed to amplify this sentiment, as exemplified by events like the vandalization of Tsar Nicholas II's portraits, which stirred animosity and rallied those resistant to change.
Weinberg further argues that the pogroms functioned as a safety valve for defusing mounting societal discontent that could have otherwise led to revolutionary uprisings. He posits that the Jewish community was selected as a strategic scapegoat to redirect popular frustrations away from opposing the autocratic regime and focus them on an internal marginalized group instead. This tactic was not an innovation of the 1905 Odessa pogroms but had historical precedents, such as the pogrom wave of 1881 that similarly victimized Jewish communities.
Organization
The pogroms are generally thought to have been organized or at least condoned by the authorities. However, that view was challenged by Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson and John Klier, who were unable to find such sanction to be 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. That sentiment was reinforced by the active participation of a few major and many minor officials in fomenting attacks and by the reluctance of the government to stop the pogroms and to punish those responsible for them.
Influence
The pogroms of the 1880s caused a worldwide outcry and, along with harsh laws, propelled mass Jewish emigration from Russia. Among the passed antisemitic laws were the 1882 May Laws, which prohibited Jews from moving into villages, allegedly in an attempt to address the cause of the pogroms (when, in fact, the pogroms were caused by an entirely different reason). The majority of the Russian 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. However, the minority of the High Commission ignored the facts and backed the laws. Two million Jews fled the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1920, with many going to the United Kingdom and United States. In response, the United Kingdom introduced the Aliens Act 1905, which introduced immigration controls for the first time, a main objective being to reduce the influx of Eastern European Jews.
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.
See also
- History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
