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2 1915 and the War Pogrom Paradigm in the Russian Empire ERIC LOHR The series of pogroms and riots that occurred in 1915 represents one of the most significant pogrom waves in Russian history, yet it has often been left out of broader generalizations and conceptual discussions on this topic. Drawing upon a large collection of reports on pogroms compiled by Jewish organizations and archival sources, this article analyzes this pogrom wave. It aims to identify similarities and differences by comparing the anti-Jewish violence to that of other such waves, and to a large anti-German pogrom in the same year. How did the context of war make this particular group of pogroms different from others, and in what ways was it nonetheless similar? There has been an emerging consensus among scholars in the last several decades that, contrary to the general impression, high-level government officials were not directly to blame for pogroms in Imperial Russia.1 The government more often considered pogroms to be volatile and dangerous expressions of popular violence, and as such generally tried to restrain or prevent them.2 One of the implications of this research is that broader parts of the population appear to have had greater agency in the violence than the older concept of the governmentconjured pogroms implied. As we shall see, popular participation was a significant factor in the 1915 pogroms—whether they were against Jews in the front zone or Germans in Moscow and other cities in the interior—and the upper levels of the government registered strong opposition to them. However, the 1915 pogroms are fundamentally different from any previous wave of pogroms in one crucial aspect: the role of the army. In fact, one of the most unequivocal findings from the field reports is the central role of the army (especially Cossack units) in nearly every pogrom during that year. In addition to establishing the crucial role of the army, I will argue that the war transformed the way people thought about the Jewish and German targets of popular violence, mainly by incorporating them into a new economic nationalist discourse that had broader appeal than the kind of reactionary 42 TWENTIETH-CENTURY POGROMS antimodernism of the prewar decades described so well by Heinz Dietrich Löwe.3 Economic nationalism provided a more ideologically coherent context for violence than had been present in any prior pogrom wave. The Pogroms of 1915 The majority of pogroms during World War I were concentrated in the period of the great Russian retreat from April to October 1915, with roughly one hundred separate events that could be categorized as pogroms.4 The best available records of the pogroms were collected by the Collegium of Jewish Social Activists, a group of leading Jewish politicians and Duma deputies who collected copies of military and civilian deportation orders as well as reports from affected individuals and communities. Its collection of reports has not survived in full, but its published and unpublished records provide a large enough sample to allow for some generalizations .5 The following discussion is based on reports of nineteen pogroms in Vilna province, thirteen in Kovno province, seven in Volhynia, and fifteen in Minsk province. In this sample of fifty-four cases, pogroms began only three times without soldiers present. The army clearly initiated the violence in nearly every case. More specifically, Cossack units appear to have instigated nearly all of the pogroms. More than four-fifths of the reports explicitly identify the appearance of Cossacks in the area as the key event spurring the pogrom. The pattern became widely known throughout the front zones; by summer, reports increasingly claimed that peasants were responding to even the rumor that Cossacks were coming by appearing on the edge of Jewish settlements with empty carts, waiting for the Cossacks to begin a pogrom, ready to join the looting. According to the reports, most of the physical violence was linked to attempts to extort payments from Jews. Rape was mentioned in one-third of the reports. The pogroms in these reports were not always linked to explicit orders to expel or deport Jews from the areas where violence occurred. However, Cossack officers often used their power to order expulsions of Jews as an excuse to loot. In some cases, officers ordered Jews to leave their towns within hours or minutes, denied them access to carts, and beat and robbed Jews as they departed. The predominant role of Cossacks in the wave of pogroms is striking...

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