In his 2016 book about anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire, the German historian Stefan Wiese pointed out that the word pogrom (along with steppe) was one of few Russian words that had entered the lexicons of virtually every European language. However, he noted, it was not until the April 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, Bessarabia, that this effect occurred, although the term had been in use in Russia at least since the wave of violence against Jews that spread across the southwestern region of the empire in the early 1880s.[1] If historical linguistics provide any evidence, the Kishinev pogrom had a greater impact than earlier, similar events. The details of the pogrom itself are well known. Following the discovery of a dead Ukrainian boy in the Bessarabian town of Dubossary and the promotion of a charge of ritual murder by P.A. Krushevan, the publisher of the local Russian-language newspaper Bessarabets (and later of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), the pogrom began on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1903.[2] The violence raged for three days, and when order was finally restored, 49 Jews had been killed, twice that many had been severely wounded, many women and girls had been raped, and hundreds of homes and businesses had been destroyed. In terms of lives lost, it was the deadliest single episode of violence against Jews on Russian soil in more than a century and the deadliest pogrom ever.
Based on geography and certain assumptions about the roles played in the pogroms by the tsars and high-level government officials, the events in Kishinev were initially viewed as closely resembling the pogroms of the wave of the 1880s and thereafter, with the sole difference being that the number of victims in Kishinev was greater. However, when multiple pogroms erupted in subsequent years as the result of the mobilization of soldiers for the Russo-Japanese War or as a reaction to the promulgation of the October Manifesto in 1905, among other reasons, it became common to see Kishinev as the beginning of a second pogrom wave extending through 1906. This interpretation was supported by the aforementioned higher death toll in the early 20th century pogroms, as well as the simple chronology of the events. However, a third possibility exists, which is that the Kishinev pogrom cannot truly be considered part of either of the major waves of pogroms.
By examining more closely the waves of pogroms in 1881-82 and 1905-06, determining their distinguishing characteristics, and comparing the events in Kishinev with these characteristics, we can see that the Kishinev pogrom bore sufficient differences from both the earlier and later waves to distinguish it from both. Rather, the events in Kishinev might be better understood as part of a larger trend in anti-Semitic violence sweeping Europe at the time, based on long-held anti-Jewish superstitions. Comparatively speaking, the extent to which the Kishinev pogrom was “Russian” might ultimately be best understood by the specific factors that contributed to the scale of the violence.
Literature Review
As with many topics in modern Jewish history, the scholarly study of the pogroms in Russia was first undertaken by the Russian historian Simon Dubnow. Before Dubnow, there had been several publications dedicated to examining the phenomenon of pogroms, a large number of which had been issued by Jewish organizations as part of appeals for support and intervention. Perhaps the most important of these publications was the two-volume Die Judenpogrome in Russland, published in Germany in 1910 in cooperation with the Zionist Aid Fund in London. Over these two volumes, edited by the Zionist activist Leo Motzkin, a number of authors contributed analyses of the pogroms of both the 1881-82 and 1905-06 periods and incidents in between, including the pogrom in Kishinev. The work is important in combining treatments of both major outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in Russia, as well as for introducing a key theme that would characterize much of the early historiography of Russian pogroms: the direct guilt of the government in the pogroms of the early 20th century. This guilt is contrasted with the situation in the 1880s, in which the government is characterized as merely ineffective in preventing and suppressing mass violence.[3]
While Dubnow did not write a distinct work on the pogroms, he did dedicate to them several portions of his multi-volume history of the Jewish people, the first volume of which appeared in the 1890s. Dubnow’s research applied the principles of Wissenschaft des Judentums in the tradition of the German-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. Like the Motzkin-edited volume, Dubnow’s work placed enormous blame on the government, particularly in the case of the Kishinev pogrom. He wrote, “From the fact that on the second day of the pogrom the governor was still waiting for instructions from St. Petersburg permitting him to discontinue the massacre it is evident that he must have received previous orders to allow it to proceed up to a certain point.”[4] Moreover, Dubnow assigned a very specific role to Minister of Internal Affairs V.K. Pleve, not only for allegedly allowing the pogrom but also for personally boosting the career of the propagandist Krushevan. Notably, this latter charge, which appears in virtually all of the contemporaneous accounts of the pogrom, is omitted from later studies, although a relatively recent article repeated the claim.[5]
A final important publication from the late imperial period is the pamphlet From Kishineff to Bialystok: A Table of Pogroms From 1903 to 1906, published in 1906 by the Jewish Publication Society (JPS). Although it is like most of the other works from the period in seeking to draw attention to and invoke support for Jewish communities under attack, the pamphlet made two major contributions to the study of Russian pogroms. First, it provided one of the initial comprehensive overviews of the pogrom cycle of the early 20th century, detailing each incident according to place, population, damage enumerated in lives and property, and context and/or perpetrators. Second, it was one of the first studies to group all of the pogroms from 1903 to 1906 into a single cycle, offering a precedent for later researchers.
For all the importance of the topic, much of the initial period following the collapse of the Russian Empire saw little in the way of new research on the pogroms. Although a number of works appeared during and immediately following the rash of pogroms that accompanied the Russian Civil War, constituting a third major wave, once the Bolsheviks had established firm control over the country, limited access to historical archives and the desires of Soviet officials to control narratives about Russian antisemitism prevented for the most part the generation of new scholarship in the area. Historians of Jewry such as Salo Baron and Louis Greenberg would include discussions of the pogroms in their books but would not dedicate monographs to the topic. A single dissertation by Mina Goldberg, finished in 1934 at Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin, was never published in its entirety, likely a victim of Nazi censorship.
When academic scholarship on the pogroms began to appear after World War II, it was largely the labor of two German-born historians: Hans Rogger and Heinz-Dietrich Löwe. Beginning in the 1960s, Rogger published several articles on the topic of Jewish life in late imperial Russia that offered new insights into the phenomenon of the pogroms. Seven of these articles, along with an eighth, new essay comparing Jewish emancipation in Russia to that elsewhere in Europe, appeared in 1986 as Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia. In this work, within a larger context of describing an ambivalent and often-oscillating Jewish policy over the 19th century, Rogger challenged the long-held belief that the tsarist government had orchestrated the pogroms in 1881-82. Löwe’s major work, Antisemitismus und Reaktionäre Utopie (1978; published in English in 1993 as The Tsars and the Jews), although it largely agreed with Rogger’s conclusions about the central government’s complicity in the pogroms, instead drew attention to the roles played by local officials and police. In addition, extending his analysis through the 1905-06 pogrom cycle, Löwe saw a major role played by reactionary politicians and organizations in orchestrating the later pogroms as a reaction to the modernizing effects of government reforms.
Within the context set by Rogger and Löwe, Shlomo Lambroza wrote his 1981 dissertation at Rutgers under the direction of Seymour Becker: The Pogrom Movement in Tsarist Russia, 1903-06. With his title, Lambroza recalled the chronological grouping of the aforementioned JPS pamphlet. In his literature review (which amounts to no more than eight pages — a testament to the dearth of scholarship available to him as a researcher), he characterized Dubnow, Baron, Greenberg, and the Socialist Revolutionary deputy-cum-Cornell Russian literature professor Mark Vishniak as a “traditional” school and Rogger and Löwe as “revisionists.” However, he also included the writing of the Austrian-born psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel, whose work falls far outside the boundaries set by the other historians cited in the review.[6] This strange citation notwithstanding, Lambroza contributed enormously to the scholarship on Russian pogroms. In a work heavily influenced by contemporaneous social-scientific research, Lambroza drew several counterintuitive conclusions, including that there was an inverse relationship between the Jewish population of a province and the number of pogroms that occurred there, while he confirmed other, more intuitive relationships, such as that the number of injuries caused by a pogrom was directly proportional to the amount of land owned by Jews. Lambroza was also instrumental in noting the extent to which pogroms between Kishinev and the wave that occurred following the October Manifesto could be correlated with soldier mobilization for the Russo-Japanese War.
Three years after Lambroza’s dissertation, the American historian John Klier published his first study of the Russian pogroms: The Times of London, the Russian Press, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882. Klier, who had written his doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois on the first forty years of Russian-Jewish coexistence, ultimately became the most important American scholar working on the topic of pogroms. In addition to the aforementioned monograph, he published collections of essays on the topic co-edited with Lambroza and Alexander Orbach, as well as two additional books on Russian-Jewish history, before his untimely death in 2007. Klier’s work was heavily influenced by Rogger, and his final work, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, published posthumously in 2011, argued that the complicated interrelationship between serf liberation and Jewish emancipation was a major driver in the first pogrom wave. Moreover, Klier provided invaluable details about the logistics of pogroms, discussing in detail how they began, spread, and were stopped.
A handful of additional works bear mention. Published in 1984, Stephen M. Berk’s Year of Crisis, Year of Hope addressed some of the questions evoked by the 1880-81 pogrom wave by focusing on the Jewish press reactions while, at the same time, less effectively examining the causes (specifically the Russian causes) of them.[7] More successful was I. Michael Aronson’s Troubled Waters, published in 1990, which built on the theory of the absence of central government complicity in the pogroms by extending this inefficacy to its inability to contain outbreaks of public violence.[8] The aforementioned study by Stefan Wiese admirably communicates much of the “revisionist” hypothesis in German while conducting case studies of anti-Jewish violence in Elisavetgrad, in Kherson province; the Volga region; Zhitomir; and Astrakhan.
In addition to these works, a few general studies also warrant our attention. A very recent study in the Review of Economic Studies eschews historical exegesis for purely economic analysis, while a monograph by Elissa Bemporad on the Civil War pogroms and Soviet anti-Jewish violence is due out shortly. More importantly, a collection of essays published by Indiana University Press in 2011 collected pieces on the Civil War-era pogroms, Jewish responses, and regional cases. The essays include a broad range of topics, periods, and regions, many of which are not directly relevant here; however, more interesting is the emergence of a theme of what Olga Litvak calls, in her review of the collection, the “dog that didn’t bark,” i.e., the absence of pogroms in places where they might have been expected (Siberia, Lithuania, Belorussia, and the Crimea).[9] In addition, the opening essay by David Engel examines the very nature of the term pogrom and its suitability for analyzing multiple forms of anti-Jewish violence. He writes, “What exactly is gained by grouping together under a single rubric such disparate occurrences as the killing of two Jews in Balta in March 1882, forty-five in Kishinev in April 1903, and upwards of fifteen hundred in Proskuriv in February 1919 — all episodes to which the label pogrom has been widely attached?”[10] This question and Engel’s entire analysis are useful adjuncts to any discussion of pogroms as a phenomenon.
Finally, studies of individual pogroms, beyond reportage and event-specific appeals, have appeared only sporadically. Typically, these studies have focused on the largest cities or best-known incidents, and many of these examinations of pogroms have been embedded within larger histories of these cities. For instance, studies have examined pogroms from all three major waves in Kiev and Odessa. (The studies of the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev have most closely resembled studies like these.) Occasionally, works have examined less commonly discussed incidents. For instance, Charters Wynn’s Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms investigated the interrelationships among labor violence, revolutionary and reactionary political organizing, and ethnic violence in the Donbas-Dnieper Bend area of Ukraine. Importantly, Wynn charted the extent to which violence committed against Jews in this time and place could be best understood as part of the actions of non-class-conscious masses of workers reacting to disappointment as a result of failed strikes and other setbacks. Certainly, it was significant that a substantial proportion of the victims in the Donbas-Dnieper Bend were Jews, particularly given the increasing antisemitism among Russian workers during the period. In addition, among these workers, there was stratification between the predominantly Jewish artisans and the Russian factory workers and miners. Finally, the significant proportion of Jews among the visible leadership of revolutionary organizations in the region made them an obvious target for rage arising from workers’ frustration. However, unlike the pogroms that followed the 1905 Revolution, the guiding hand of the reactionary right in the violence was largely absent until the very end of the period that Wynn examined.
Among studies of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, by far the most significant have been those by Edward Judge and Steven Zipperstein. Judge’s 1995 study, Easter in Kishinev, is firmly in the revisionist tradition, seeking to dispel long-held beliefs about the pogrom, such as the direct involvement of Pleve; nevertheless, he is resolute in pointing out that certain officials “foster[ed] the impression that anti-Jewish activity was viewed by the government as both permissible and patriotic.”[11] Judge relies heavily on the reportage of the Irish journalist Michael Davitt, who traveled to Kishinev in the aftermath of the pogrom and wrote one of the earliest accounts of events there, as well as on the personal writings of the major players in the pogrom and its aftermath. Far more recently than Judge’s book, Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History dedicates significant space to examining the characters of Krushevan; the Hebrew poet Hayim Nachman Bialik, whose poem “In the City of Slaughter” was written in direct response to the pogrom; and Davitt, whose account Zipperstein lauds as “first-rate journalism and reliable history.”[12] Although a collection of primary sources and essays on Kishinev was published in German in 2015, the focus of the collection was overwhelmingly literary, seeking to trace echoes of the pogrom in contemporaneous and post-pogrom literature, most importantly in the United States.
Kishinev in the Context of 1881-82
Understanding how some historians would consider the 1903 Kishinev pogrom to be most similar to the first major wave of pogroms in Russia requires some discussion of the key characteristics of this first wave and the similarities it shared with Kishinev. Here, Klier’s work is most instructive and provides much of the necessary context. First, however, it is important to establish that, before the outbreak of pogroms in the spring of 1881, pogroms were not a common occurrence, notwithstanding past episodes that involved violence committed against Jews, such as the Khmelnytsky Rebellion. Before 1881, Odessa was the only city in the Russian Empire to have experienced repeated outbreaks of violence against Jews — in 1820, 1859, and 1871; however, in the first two cases, the perpetrators came from the Greek community in the city, and even in the third case, the involvement of the Russians was preceded by attacks from Greeks. By 1881, anti-Jewish violence in Odessa was expected, particularly around Easter; thus, that the pogrom in Elisavetgrad that began the 1881-82 wave was not preceded by one in Odessa was the result of prevention by the authorities, who placed the garrison there on alert.[13] Beyond Odessa, a single pogrom in 1865 in the Bessarabian town of Akkerman (today Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi in Ukraine) was included in Die Judenpogrome in Russland but is otherwise poorly attested.
Popular belief has engendered the notion that the pogroms were the result of suspected Jewish collusion in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on March 1. However, it is generally agreed that the pogrom wave began in Elisavetgrad on April 15 — some six weeks later and thus not a spontaneous outbreak of violence in reaction to the assassination. Rather, the specific context of the assassination emerged in abbreviated Easter festivities having been ordered by the government because of the tsar’s murder; this decision transformed into a rumor that the Jews in Elisavetgrad had “bought” the holiday.[14] Further, the violence on the day of the pogrom was precipitated by a dispute between a Jewish tavern owner and one of his local customers; an examination of the pogrom literature clearly establishes that disputes between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens in marketplaces were common catalysts for ethnic violence.
Klier follows the spread of anti-Jewish violence from Elisavetgrad across Kherson province through the end of April until the initial violence ended, noting that “smaller disturbances radiated out from large, urban pogrom epicenters along means of communication, such as railways, main roads, and rivers.”[15] A second series of pogroms occurred in the Kiev, Tauride, and Ekaterinoslav provinces from April 26 to May 10, again precipitated by an ethnic dispute in a bazaar in Kiev; from there, “copycat” pogroms spread outward.[16] A final burst of violence raged from June 30 to August 16 in Poltava and Chernigov provinces, again beginning in a bazaar in Pereiaslav in Poltava province and spreading by the usual means but now in defiance of the presence of troops on the streets. As a result, the numbers of dead and wounded were significantly higher with these troops firing on crowds. A special ordinance signed by Tsar Alexander III ultimately mobilized sufficient force to stop the pogroms.[17] While major disturbances would occur in Warsaw, Balta in Podolia province, Ekaterinoslav, and Nizhniy Novgorod over the next three years, the worst of this wave of pogroms was over.
Like the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, the 1881-82 wave of pogroms involved a combination of religious and commercial disputes setting off ethnic tensions. Kishinev and the earlier wave also share in common, at least initially in 1881, an insufficient response on the part of the authorities to prevent or contain the violence. Commenting on the commonly held belief of Pleve’s complicity in the Kishinev pogrom, Rogger writes, “except in its magnitude and horror, Kishinev seemed to repeat the patterns of 1881-82: local anti-Jewish agitation, seemingly condoned by the permissiveness of local administrators who responded sluggishly to the riots it engendered.”[18] From this standpoint, then, it is primarily the high death toll in Kishinev that distinguishes it from the earlier pogrom wave: whereas the total number of Jews killed in the 1881-82 wave is not believed to have exceeded 60, nearly an equal number were killed in the single pogrom in 1903 in Kishinev alone.
However, in the 1881-82 wave, there were also larger socioeconomic pressures at play. Löwe, for instance, pointed to the roles of economic dislocation and the in-migration of Russian workers into the cities of the Pale of Jewish Settlement as major factors stoking ethnic resentments; many times, seasonal workers would arrive in the cities seeking work and find none, leaving them idle, angry, and often drunk.[19] These factors seem to have been lacking in Kishinev. For instance, Klier notes, “No attempt has been made by scholars to claim that the pogroms in Kishinev and Gomel (in Belorussia) in 1903 were the result of economic causes.”[20] He also comments that rape was far less common in the 1881-82 wave of pogroms than at Kishinev and that Kishinev did not set off a new wave of pogroms.[21] Finally and most vociferously, Klier writes, “The Kishinev pogrom itself lacked one of the main features of 1881-2: It did not provoke a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms.”[22] Isolated in time and place, the Kishinev pogrom was neither the start of a wave of pogroms nor part of one. In this regard, it is more similar to the aforementioned pogroms of 1881-83 in Warsaw, Balta, and Ekaterinoslav, so it is curious that Klier groups these three events with the major outbreak of 1881-82.
Considering the last example first, Wynn characterizes the Ekaterinoslav pogrom in 1883 as “a classic pogrom, the last big rampage in the wave of pogroms that rolled across southern Russia during the early 1880s.”[23] The perpetrators, he writes, were newly arrived Russian workers for the Briansk steel mill, and the pogrom itself was set off by a dispute in a marketplace on a religious holiday (St. Elias’s Day).[24] Thus, it closely resembled the dynamics of the 1881-82 wave, although it occurred in isolation. Returning to the Warsaw and Balta pogroms, Klier writes that they had “a number of unique features”[25]: for the Warsaw pogrom, it was that it occurred on the Roman Catholic Christmas and was committed Poles over the rumor of Jewish arson of a church; for the Balta pogrom, it was that it occurred in Podolia, where pogroms were rarer, that it was also occasioned by rumors of a church burning by Jews, and that it involved the first major allegations of rapes, including evidence Klier identified in Russian archives.[26] Therefore, we may conclude that the Warsaw and Balta pogroms resembled the Kishinev pogrom a bit more closely in terms of their specific one-off nature, the less common environments, and the sexual violence involved, although sufficient differences also exist to prevent grouping Warsaw and Balta with Kishinev.
Perhaps the strongest renunciation of grouping the Kishinev pogrom with the earlier wave comes from Aronson: “The conclusions arrived at in the present study have no application to these later, immensely more sanguinary and destructive events, which took place in significantly changed historical circumstances. Russia’s government, society, and economy after 1900 were vastly different from the government, society, and economy of 1881-84.”[27] Anderson’s treatment of events in Warsaw, Balta, and Ekaterinoslav in 1881-83 is far less intensive than Klier’s (he does not address the Balta pogrom at all), and he concludes that these events were “merely an echo of 1881.”[28] In summary, the majority of the current scholarship on Russian pogroms now excludes the Kishinev pogrom of 1903 from the earlier 1881-82 wave, which is a thoroughly defensible position.
Kishinev in the Context of 1905-06
As noted above, the grouping of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom with those that followed over the subsequent three years dates back at least to 1910. If, as noted, the chief difference between the 1881-82 wave and Kishinev was primarily one of scale, the extent to which Kishinev differed from the pogroms that followed it was far greater. With a few notable exceptions, the pogroms in 1904-06 fall into two broad categories: violence accompanying the mobilization of soldiers for the Russo-Japanese War; and anti-Jewish attacks orchestrated by the far right following the promulgation of the October Manifesto in 1905. Chronology alone disqualifies Kishinev in both these regards; chronology also disqualifies the Gomel pogrom from inclusion in this second major pogrom wave in the Russian Empire, although its political implications are less clear. Nevertheless, some researchers are resolute in placing Kishinev within this later context. Löwe, for example, refers to Kishinev and the subsequent September pogrom in Gomel as “preliminary skirmishes of the revolution.”[29] Moreover, the scale of the pogroms that followed Kishinev also claimed dozens of victims per event; in the cases of the larger events in Odessa and Kiev, the dead numbered in the hundreds.
The most thorough treatment of the pogroms of the first decade of the 20th century remains that of Lambroza. Despite the confusing title of his dissertation, which uses the period 1903-06 therein, Lambroza in fact does not include Kishinev in the movement of which his title speaks, writing, “It was only after Pleve’s death [July 15, 1904] that anything that might be considered a pogrom movement occurred.”[30] Lambroza supports the primary categorization of pogroms before October 1905 being related to mobilization for the Russo-Japanese War, which he dates from 1903 (in the lead-up to the war) to 1905, with 49 alone occurring after Kishinev but before the end of 1904. However, he attributes slightly less than half of the pogroms during this period to mobilization; of these, he says only that they “seemed to be a reaction to the confusion of the times,” citing well-established hostilities between Jewish and Christian communities and the application by local officials of policies that they believed were approved of by the central government.[31]
Of the 25 events that Lambroza treats at some length, one on Rosh Hashanah in 1903 in Sosnowiec, Poland, is notable for its being related to a ritual murder accusation. Two pogroms in Smolensk and Samara in October and November of 1904, respectively, were notable for occurring in Russia proper; in a later essay, Lambroza attributes the former to its proximity to the Pale and the latter to mobilization since it lies along the Trans-Siberian Railroad.[32] Otherwise, familiar precipitants, such as Christian religious holidays and commercial disputes, appear among the 25 pogroms that Lambroza does not attribute to mobilization. Moreover, the 49 pogroms, while bloodier than the 1881-82 wave, were less deadly than the Kishinev pogrom: 93 Jews were killed over 49 events, compared to 49 Jews killed in Kishinev alone. In addition, according to Lambroza, 22 pogroms occurred between January and October of 1905, which were mostly minor in scale and related to religious holidays and score settling among economic antagonists. Three stand out for being particularly costly in terms of lives lost: in Zhitomir in the spring; and in Kiev and Lodz in the summer. One hundred twenty-nine Jews died in Zhitomir and Kiev. It is more difficult to determine the death toll due to the pogrom in Lodz since it occurred at the same time as a major labor uprising there, in which 561 people were killed.[33]
The pogroms that followed the promulgation of the October Manifesto were of a greater magnitude than anything that had come before. First, the sheer number increased by at least an order of magnitude; compared to the 49 pogroms between Kishinev and October, there were 657 in just the remainder of 1905 and January 1906, according to Lambroza. The most important factor driving this wave of pogroms, he writes, was “the activities of the extreme Right, which frequently joined forces with police and troops in an attempt to destroy the revolutionary movement and put power back in the hands of the autocracy.”[34] Whereas there was generally a spontaneous character of pogroms before October 1905, with low levels of religious antagonism, ethnic tension, and economic grievances typically set off by a combination of religious fervor stoked by holiday services, drunkenness, and/or a precipitating incident in a public place, the pogroms following October were the result of a concerted effort by dedicated reactionaries to turn back the tide of the revolution and hold responsible that group that they believed to hold principal responsibility. Although the presence of particular personalities in Kishinev before the pogrom of 1903 had led some to posit a continuity between that event and those that followed the October Manifesto, too much time and too few politics ultimately play roles in Kishinev to bear out such a connection.
Before continuing, we should briefly consider the Gomel pogrom of September 1903 since it also was neither a mobilization pogrom nor connected to the October Manifesto of 1905. In addition, it is very commonly considered alongside the Kishinev pogrom because they are the only two major pogroms that occurred in Russia in 1903 and thus are thought of as potentially related. Lambroza links the pogrom in Gomel to a dispute between a store owner and customer.[35] Although, as noted, such events were common, there is reason to perhaps group it with events occurring as a result of the October Manifesto. Discussing this pogrom, Löwe reports that N.M. Klingenberg, the governor of Mogilev province, specifically pinned the blame for the violence in Gomel on Jewish self-defense groups and particularly their political organizers. Notably, after stating that the earlier pogroms of the 1880s “arose as a result of exploitation on the part of the Jews,” the violence in Gomel occurred because “the Jews are the leaders and instigators of all anti-government movements. The whole of the Bund and all the Social Democrats — are Jews.”[36] In addition, Lambroza notes that the official government report on the Gomel pogrom cited the Bund’s propaganda as instrumental in the outbreak of violence.[37] While such a belief about Jews and radical politics would have been common before September 1903, it had not before been so clearly enunciated by a government official within the context of ethnic violence. An important precedent was thus set for the future.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the increased presence of organized Jewish resistance beginning with Gomel explains much of the increase in the scale of violence in the pogroms that ensued since a significant focus of the Bund and the Zionist parties going forward would be self-defense. In this regard, both the presence of Jewish self-defense fighters and the inherent politicization of the pogrom itself mark Gomel as a different phenomenon from Kishinev and as closer in character to the pogroms of 1905-06. However, Jewish self-defense when unorganized could also have a multiplying effect on the scale of violence, as the Kishinev pogrom itself demonstrated. It is this aspect of the events in Kishinev, as well as other details, that mark it as separate from both the 1881-82 and 1905-06 waves.
Kishinev in a Third Category
Since the pogrom in Kishinev was distinct from the previous and subsequent pogrom waves, two final possibilities exist: either it was a sui generis event, or it can be grouped within some other group of incidents of mass violence. There are too many similarities of Kishinev with pogroms both before and after it that disqualify the event as entirely unique. Considered alongside one-off pogroms like those in Warsaw in 1881, Balta in 1882, Nizhniy Novgorod in 1884, Sosnowiec in 1903, Samara and Smolensk in 1904, and Kiev and Lodz in the summer of 1905, preliminary similarities — some already noted — emerge. For instance, like most of these one-off events, the setting of the Kishinev pogrom and the population that perpetrated it were atypical. In addition, like the events in Kiev and Lodz that followed it, the Kishinev pogrom was unusual in the number of lives lost for events preceding the 1905-06 wave. Finally, like the events in Nizhniy Novgorod and Sosnowiec, an allegation of ritual murder accompanied the pogrom in Kishinev. Thus, we might entertain the notion of a specific category of single-incident pogroms in the Russian Empire from 1881 to 1905 that, for the reasons enumerated, cannot be considered to be part of the 1881-82 or 1905-06 waves.
However, there might be yet another category of pogroms into which Kishinev fits even better. In a 2008 book primarily concerned with antisemitism in 19th century Germany, Helmut Walser Smith divided pogroms into his own system of waves: the first from 1881 to 1884; the second from 1898 to 1903; and the third beginning with Kishinev and ending with the 1905 Revolution-associated pogroms.[38] Importantly, for the first two waves, Smith did not limit his analysis to Russia but expanded it to pogroms occurring across Europe, including violence accompanying the Dreyfus Affair in 1898 (the precipitating event, in his opinion, of the second wave). Nevertheless, Smith’s first wave overlaps substantially with the 1881-82 wave elucidated elsewhere. The non-Russian events that he includes in this wave are limited to synagogue and church fires in Germany and Poland and the Tiszaeszlár blood libel case from Hungary.
What is most suggestive about Smith’s analysis is the extent to which charges of ritual murder were associated with pogroms. Of four pogroms in Russia in Smith’s first wave, two of them (Elisavetgrad in 1881 and Nizhniy Novgorod in 1884) involved a ritual murder allegation. We have already examined the Elisavetgrad pogrom briefly above, but we should note here that the blood libel allegation there is reported by Klier as the “curious, and unsubstantiated, story of a near-pogrom, triggered by the discovery of a jar of anatomical remains, being sent for an autopsy, which a crowd attributed to a Jewish ritual murder.”[39] The charge is not attested to elsewhere; moreover, although Klier includes the ritual murder charge in his 1995 book Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881, that he buries the charge in a footnote in the 2011 book is good reason to dismiss it as a key aspect of this pogrom.
The Nizhniy Novgorod pogrom is more important, and Klier discusses the event briefly in both the 1995 and 2011 books. In the earlier book, he dedicates several pages to a discussion of the ritual murder allegation, building on an earlier journal article. He records how the newspaper Novoe vremia reported that a Christian girl had been kidnapped, although he also notes that repetitions of the blood libel were “always subordinate to broader Judeophobe attacks.”[40] About the Nizhniy Novgorod pogrom, he writes, “Ten Jews were barbarously murdered with axes by a mob which was inflamed by the report that a missing child had been kidnapped by the Jews for her blood.”[41] The other truly notable aspect of the pogrom in Nizhniy Novgorod is where it happened, in Russia proper, although it coincided with the annual Makarayev Fair and thus could have easily involved non-Russians among the perpetrators. However, if the perpetrators in Nizhniy Novgorod were predominantly Russian, then it might say something important about the role of the ritual murder accusation in pogroms generally and its ability to ignite violence even in unlikely settings. In either case, it is clear that this pogrom involved the crossing of a threshold in the level of violence, and Klier saw the blood libel as instrumental in this elevation. Lest we criticize Klier’s connection as overly contingent or determinist, we should bear in mind that most of these allegations involve the murder of a child, amplifying outrage at the harm done to someone helpless and framing the subsequent events within the context of self-defense. Moreover, bearing in mind Engel’s analysis of pogroms and their causes, ritual murder accusations, when prosecuted at all, had typically resulted in acquittals for the accused, giving rise to what Engel identified as “a fundamental lack of confidence on the part of those who purveyed decisive violence in the adequacy of the impersonal rule of law to deliver true justice in the event of a heinous wrong.”[42]
Of the total of 31 pogroms that Smith enumerates in total between 1881 and 1903, 11 of them were connected to a ritual murder charge — the single most common “trigger” that Smith identifies in connection with these 31 events. Smith notes that, between the 1891 ritual murder trial of a kosher butcher in Xanten, western Germany, and the turn of the 20th century, more than 100 such allegations were made in Europe — more than in any other period during which such charges have been recorded.[43] Curiously, in comparing trends in antisemitism in Europe in the late 19th century, Smith writes that, in Russia, “archaic forms of anti-Semitism prevailed,” compared to France and Austria, which experienced more modern forms[44]; however, he does not note how new charges of blood libel were to Russia, compared to elsewhere in Europe.
Scholars of ritual murder allegations have noted a strong correlation between the presence of Catholic hegemony or exclusivity among religious communities and the frequency of blood libels. Klier posits that the annexations of Poland under Catherine the Great were instrumental in introducing the myth to Russia with the translation into Russian of Polish anti-Talmudic polemics; as a result, by 1800, the allegations had drawn the attention of the poet and statesman G.R. Dershavin, who investigated allegations in Belorussia and wrote reports on them for the government before his death in 1814.[45] Famous allegations of ritual murder subsequently occurred in Velizh in Vitebsk province in 1823; in the Volga port of Saratov in 1853; and in Kutaisi, Georgia, in 1879. Notably, Klier sees the Tiszaeszlár case as far more closely related to subsequent violence in the 1881-82 wave, mainly because the accusers of the defendant included one of his own sons, thus lending greater credence to the charge.[46] Finally, Klier also notes that the Tiszaeszlár case was closely monitored by the Russian press because it provided an opportunity to point a finger at a country outside Russia that also experienced episodes of anti-Jewish violence.
Perhaps most important of all is the persistence of the ritual murder accusation among the Bessarabian population itself. This point is not uncontroversial: after all, the majority of non-Jews in Kishinev were ethnic Romanians and thus not typical of a population perpetrating a pogrom, which tended to be ethnic Russians who had recently arrived in the cities of the Pale of Settlement. Nevertheless, Zipperstein writes, “Already on the first day, those counted as the fiercest were Moldavians — identified by the language they used or their accents — many hailing, it seems, from the agrarian edge of the city or adjacent villages.”[47] Although Russians and Russian speakers were also among the perpetrators and were most clearly the targets of Krushevan’s propaganda — the literacy rate among Moldavians was less than 20 percent — the predominance of Moldavians among those engaging in of violence has its own specific context. In his book Inventing the Jew, the Romanian historian Andrei Oişteanu writes, “In Walachia, and especially in Moldavia, charges of ritual murder were, more often than not, accompanied by violent rioting or even pogroms.”[48] He then reports multiple incidents on both sides of the Prut River (i.e., in both Romanian and Russian territory) beginning in 1710 before arriving at the Kishinev pogrom. As Judge notes, “Anti-Semitism, for the Moldavians, was a relatively safe pursuit […] encouraged by the Russian officials and condoned by the Orthodox clergy.”[49]
Remarkably, Oişteanu writes that Krushevan, the instigator of the pogrom, invited to Kishinev A.C. Cuza — the antisemitic Romanian ideologue and future cabinet minister who would significantly influence C.Z. Codreanu and the Iron Guard before dying in 1947. Cuza was to lecture in Kishinev and spread the message of antisemitism, thus laying the groundwork with Krushevan for violence: “They both agreed that St. Bartholomew’s Day was to be reenacted on Easter, 6-8 April 1903.”[50] The visit by Cuza is crucial to linking the written propagandizing of Krushevan to the actions of the Moldavians. Whereas few Moldavians would have been able to read Bessarabets, Cuza would have lectured in Romanian and been broadly understood. With the ritual murder trope successfully communicated to the population, it remained only for the familiar sparks of religious fervor and drunkenness to set off a powder keg of anti-Jewish violence. The inaction of the authorities — by now a familiar aspect of pogroms — allowed the violence to continue for as long as it did. The combination of the ritual murder charge, the abuse of alcohol among the perpetrators, and acts of armed (albeit unorganized) self-defense undertaken by the Jewish population resulted in a greater level of violence than was previously typical.
Conclusion
Despite many areas of similarity with pogroms that preceded and followed it, the Kishinev pogrom bears too many differences from these events to be considered a synecdoche for the Russian pogrom phenomenon. The largely non-Russian perpetrators and the general lack of correlation with the political events of 1881-82 or 1905-06 argue against such a representation. At the same time, the events in Kishinev bears sufficient similarities to events outside Russia to merit further consideration within the larger European context — and perhaps beyond. These similarities include the precipitating events and the superstitions held by the population about Jews and Jewish religious practice.
The extent to which our knowledge about pogroms in the Russian Empire has evolved over the past century is remarkable. That said, there remain significant areas that should be researched further. With specific regard to the Kishinev pogrom, placing the event within the larger context of antisemitism among ethnic Romanians has yet to be thoroughly undertaken. In addition, the topic of the emergence and evolution of antisemitism specifically in Bessarabia need exploring, particularly regarding whether any links exist between the Kishinev pogrom and the spectacular outburst of anti-Jewish violence in the region in June 1941. Considering the relative lack of antisemitic violence in Bessarabia before Kishinev, comparisons with other areas — including the Baltic states, where antisemitism was slow to develop but ultimately quite catastrophic — might be fruitful. More broadly, there is a need to consider anti-Jewish violence more holistically, “liberating” the topic further from specifically national approaches. Much has been written and said about Russian antisemitism, and there is a tendency to view both the Jewish situation and antisemitism in Russia as being unique. Whether anti-Jewish violence in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire might yield important comparisons should be more thoroughly investigated, not to mention comparisons with the Ottoman Empire, given its sovereignty over parts of Bessarabia before 1812. Finally, transnational approaches to the topic could afford the opportunity to contrast pogroms, including the one in Kishinev, with other forms of communal interethnic violence in a region characterized by a high degree of heterogeneity. Broader investigations of Kishinev could be undertaken on these bases; extracting the pogrom from its usual historical associations is an important first step.
[1] Stefan Wiese, Pogrome im Zarenreich: Dynamiken Kollektiver Gewalt (Hamburg, Germany: Hamburger Edition, 2016), p. 11.
[2] Dates are given according to the Julian calendar.
[3] Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (London, UK: Macmillan, 1986), p. 239, note 19.
[4] S.M. Dubnow, From the Accession of Nicholas II, Until the Present Day, With Bibliography and Index, translated by I. Friedlander, vol. 3 of History of the Jews in Russia and Poland (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1920), p. 78.
[5] Monty Noam Penkower, “The Kishinev Pogrom of 1903: A Turning Point in Jewish History,” Modern Judaism, 24, no. 3 (2004): p. 189.
[6] Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogrom Movement in Tsarist Russia, 1903-06” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1981), pp. 5, 7-9.
[7] John D. Klier, review of Year or Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881-1882 by Stephen M. Berk, Slavic Review, 91, no. 4 (1986): pp. 963-964.
[8] Robert Weinberg, review of Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia by I. Michael Aronson, Journal of Social History, 26, no. 1 (1992): pp. 181-182.
[9] Olga Litvak, review of Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal, Slavic Review 71, no. 3 (2012): p. 695. I am grateful to Jason Tingler of Clark University for pointing me to this review.
[10] David Engel, “What’s in a Pogrom?” in Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2011), p. 22.
[11] Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: NYU Press, 1995), p. 34.
[12] Steven J. Zipperstein, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (New York: Liveright, 2018), p. 106.
[13] John Doyle Klier, Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-82 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2011), p. 18.
[14] Klier, Russians, p. 26.
[15] Ibid, p. 25.
[16] Ibid, pp. 35, 37.
[17] Ibid pp. 40, 43.
[18] Rogger, Jewish, p. 31.
[19] Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, The Tsars and the Jews: Reform, Reaction, and Anti-Semitism in Imperial Russia (Langhorne, PA: Harwood, 1993), pp. 58-60.
[20] Klier, Russians, 65.
[21] Klier, Russians, 60.
[22] Klier, Russians, 60
[23] Charters Wynn, Workers, Strikes, and Pogroms: The Donbass-Dnepr Bend in Late Imperial Russia, 1870-1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992), p. 108.
[24] Wynn, Workers, p. 111.
[25] Klier, Russians, p. 25.
[26] Klier, Russians, p. 47.
[27] I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), p. 61, emphasis in original.
[28] Aronson, Troubled Waters, p. 234.
[29] Löwe, Tsars, p. 147.
[30] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” p. 85.
[31] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” p. 97.
[32] Shlomo Lambroza, “The Pogroms of 1903-1906,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, edited by John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (New York: Cambridge UP, 1992), p. 216.
[33] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” pp. 113-114.
[34] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” p. 114.
[35] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” p. 101.
[36] Quoted in Löwe, Tsars, 157.
[37] Lambroza, “Pogrom Movement,” p. 102.
[38] Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008), p. 135.
[39] Klier, Russians, p. 26, note 29.
[40] John Doyle Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855-1881 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 433.
[41] Klier, Imperial, p. 433.
[42] Engel, “What’s in a Pogrom?”, p. 24.
[43] Smith, Continuities, p. 149.
[44] Smith, Continuities, p. 134.
[45] John D. Klier, “The Origins of the ‘Blood Libel’ in Russia,” Newsletter of the Study Group on Eighteenth-Century Russia, 14 (1986): pp. 18-20.
[46] Klier, Imperial, p. 434.
[47] Zipperstein, Pogrom, p. 59.
[48] Andrei Oişteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, translated by Mirela Adăscăliţei (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 408.
[49] Judge, Easter, p. 24.
[50] Judge, Easter, p. 412.
Inevitable Historicity 