Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920 by Oleg Budnitskii (review)

The years 1917-1920, the period that marked the breakup of the Russian Empire and the Civil War that followed, were horrific for the East European Jewish communities located in the path of the fighting. Estimates of the number of Jews killed by outright violence range from 50,000 to as high as 200,000. Counting also those wounded, displaced, traumatized, and orphaned, the number of Jews directly affected was likely close to one million. The level of violence against Jews was at times so extreme and orchestrated that it rendered the term "pogrom" insufficient to describe it, and helped set the stage for the genocidal assaults that occurred two decades later.

Due to technological innovations in journalism, Jewish communities around the world were able to study reports of the violence. In the years immediately afterward, East European Jewish scholars conducted several major investigations into the violence. The most significant of these was conducted by Elias Tcherikower, whose research became the basis of Sholem Schwartzbard's successful defense in his internationally watched trial for the murder in Paris of the Ukrainian national leader Symon Petliura. Petliura's forces were responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, including fourteen members of Schwartzbard's own family.

The genocidal assaults on those same Jewish communities in the Ukraine, Poland, and Belorussia during the Holocaust have largely overshadowed this prior period, however, and the details of the earlier destruction have since faded from popular memory and scholarly investigation. As Oleg Budnitskii demonstrates in the Introduction to his methodically researched and much-needed analysis of the situation of Jews during the Russian Civil War, contemporary scholars often have tried to make sense of these years through misguided comparisons to the Nazi Holocaust. The scholar David G. Roskies, for example, has referred to the murder of Jews in the Civil War as "the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jewry"—a historical mischaracterization that is a disservice to the specificity of the Civil War as well as the latter part of the World War II period (1941-1945) (p. 1). Budnitskii, a historian at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, has written a highly detailed and welcome study that demonstrates that such backshadowing obscures the important fact that Jews not only were victims of the various armed forces involved in the conflict, but also can be counted among their combatants, financiers, supporters, and ideologues.

Less narrative than thematic in scope, Budnitskii examines these years through a variety of angles in ten highly detailed chapters, including a history of the Jews within the Russian empire (with an emphasis on their political and economic status). Other topics are the role of Jews in the 1917 revolutions; Jews' relationships within the Red, White, and liberal movements; the role of antisemitism within the various camps; the anti-Jewish violence that occurred throughout the war; the effect of that violence on the Whites' propaganda abroad; and the Russian Orthodox Church's campaign against the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. While some chapters are not as central as others to the main theses of the work (especially those that follow Chapter 6, which provides a harrowing account of the pogroms of 1918-1920), as a whole they nevertheless provide a full portrait of the place of Jews within the Civil War. They show that, initially, most Jews were reluctant to side with the Bolsheviks. The Party had refused to respond to the specific conditions of Jewish workers, who faced not only the indignities suffered by all workers, but also the antisemitism of the state and their fellow proletarians. Jewish parties such as the Bund, Labor Zionists, and the newly formed Fareynikte were unable to mount a unified resistance and instead remained divided on how best to respond to the rapidly shifting landscape. As battle lines became clearer, many Jews initially supported the Whites as their best hope to defeat the Bolsheviks. Following in the footsteps...