Pogroms in Russian History

Shortly after the eruption of mob violence in the spring and summer of 1881, contemporary observers scratched their heads in bewilderment in search of explanations.¹ How could pogroms break out simultaneously in so many places? While tsarist officials initially blamed the events on revolutionary elements and on the Jewish exploitation of Russian peasantry, contemporary journalists, historians, and communal activists saw dark and mysterious forces behind what was regarded as the most notorious antisemitic conspiracy in modern times. Men in Russia's most powerful governing circles, so it was argued, masterminded the waves of anti-Jewish violence that spread quickly along railroad routes, highways, and rivers to dozens of industrial towns.²

For well over five decades, this interpretation—based primarily on the awesome explanatory power of conspiracy theories—shaped the most influential histories of pogroms. The first generation of revisionist historians such as Hans Rogger, I. Michael Aronson, Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, and Charters Wynn, among others, shifted the analytical focus by considering a broad range of factors that fueled ethno-religious strife: the strains of Russia's uneven economic development, fierce antisemitic press campaigns, demographic fears, and a rootless, hard-drinking, lawless working-class culture. In prerevolutionary Russia, the vast majority of pogroms occurred in places where Jews were newcomers. As the steel and mining industries took off in the last two decades of the 19th century, tens of thousands of men came south to work in Russia's industrial heartland. The mass of this ethnically diverse, uneducated, and transient population was especially prone to violent behavior, much of which was directed toward Jews.³

There was, as Rogger argued in what remains the most insightful overview of the topic, nothing peculiarly Russian or Jewish about pogroms.⁴ Russia may have been memorialized as the birthplace of pogroms and Jews may have been the most visible victims, but Russia was neither the first nor the only place where ethnic riots occurred and Jews were by no means the only ethnic group targeted by pogromshchiks. One of the challenges of analyzing pogroms is coming to terms with the frequency, diversity, and dynamism of the events that we include under this heading. Scholars have used the term to label anti-Jewish violence that took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648 (the so-called Khmelnytsky massacres), in Odessa in 1871, in the southwestern borderlands after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in Łódź in 1892, in Kishinev and Gomel in 1903, during the revolutionary uprisings of 1905-6, and amid the 1914-21 continuum of war, revolution, and mass terror. As John Klier points out in his exhaustive new book on the subject, reviewed here, "Virtually the only common feature of these events was that Jews were among the victims, although they were not always the primary target" (59).

What, then, was a pogrom, and more important, what do we gain from analyzing a series of distinct historical events under this common rubric? According to David Engel, the term "pogrom" is an abstraction that helps scholars to "divide complex and infinitely varied social phenomena into manageable units of analysis."⁵ Much like the term "violence," which has been used to describe everything from the routine to the extreme, from the lawful to the illicit, and from the structural...