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National Antisemitism in Russia
during the ‘Years of Crisis’,
1914-1922
Ulrich Herbeck
Free University Berlin
Abstract
In the period between 1914 and 1922 Russia experienced
an enormous upsurge of violent antisemitism. In just one
year, an estimated 60,000 to 200,000 Jews were killed in
the wave of pogroms that swept through the Ukraine in
1919. Antisemitism must be considered as key element
of an emergent nationalism which, in the phase of crisis
and breakup of the Russian empire, was on the verge of
replacing the imperialist ideology of the old Russian ruling
elite. During this period, anticommunism and antisemitism
merged to form the imagery or myth of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’.
Russian nationalist ‘White’ officers, an important part
of the Russian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian nationalists
and various peasant movements were united in their
opposition to what they called ‘Jewish rule under the guise
of Bolshevism’. ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ must be analysed as a
crucial aspect of Russian nationalist ideology of the time.
Analysed from the perspective of a long term historical linkage between
Russian nationalism and antisemitism since the beginning of the twentieth
century well into the early years of the Soviet Union, the following paper
discusses the development of antisemitism in Russia’s ‘Years of Crisis’,
1914-1922. Within this framework the paper focuses on the imagery of an
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Ulrich Herbeck: National Antisemitism in Russia during the ‘Years of Crisis’, 1914-1922
enemy of the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, which began to emerge in the summer
of 1917.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, antisemitism in Russia
developed from a more general anti-modernist ideology closely linked
to the landowning class and the tsarist ruling elite into a political weapon
of different political actors against the perceived threats of modernity.
Especially designated to deal with the danger of a socialist revolution,
this transformation included changes in ideology as well as in the role
antisemitism played in society. Thus, antisemitism increasingly became part
of nationalist and bourgeois politics. This was mirrored in the development of
the attitude of bourgeois politics vis-à-vis the so called ‘Jewish Question’.
Support for Jewish emancipation dominated liberal bourgeois politics until
and including the time of the February Revolution of 1917. Nevertheless,
as Jews during the first years of World War I felt increasingly isolated from
their earlier partners in their aspirations for equal rights before the law, a
change in attitude can be sensed already before this period. The steady move
of bourgeois politics to the right during 1917 and in the years of the Civil
War eventually led to a de facto endorsement of the view of a dominant
position of the Jews within the Bolshevik party and the acceptance of this
line of argumentation as an explanation for the 1919 pogroms.
Traditionally, antisemitism in Russia has been seen as a pre-modern
phenomenon, which was also the opinion held by the nineteenth century and
early twentieth century Russian Intelligencija. Primarily because an overt
racist, antisemitic ideology could only be found at the fringes of Russian
rightwing radicalism, historians shared this thesis. In this sense, the Russian
development differed from that of Central Europe and, in particular, the
German experience, where since the 1870s antisemitism developed as a
modern ideology or Weltanschauung seemingly based on quasi-scientific
findings of racial and biological differences.
More recent research has looked at antisemitism more in the sense of a
cultural phenomenon, linking the rise of modern antisemitism to the rise of
the concept of the nation or nationalism and its built-in necessity to define
and construct who belongs – and who does not – to a national group, i.e.
citizenry. With his study on the linkage of nationalism and antisemitism,
Klaus Holz (2001) has made a significant contribution to the sociological and
analytical application of antisemitism within the framework of nationalism
studies.
1
As to Russian antisemitism of the late Imperial period, Alexander
Orbach analyses its beginnings in the context of the nationalist discourse
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which developed during the Balkan Wars of the 1870s in a process of
ingroup-outgroup differentiation: ‘Rather, the issue that really counted was
that of “belongingness”, of cultural unity and the threat that the Jews posed
to it’ (Orbach 1991:206).
Nationalism studies have given some attention to the development of Russian
nationalism during the time period we are dealing with. Over the last several
years, a variety of studies on Russian history have been published which
reconsider the political and social upheaval between 1914 and 1921 in the
light of the development of a strong Russian nationalist ideology that served
as the basis for action for various political forces of the time (governmental
and societal). These authors insist that the Russian Revolution of 1917 and
its aftermath be reconsidered within the framework of a European history
of crisis and revolution triggered by the catastrophe of World War I (Eley
1988; Holquist 2002). Nevertheless, the parallel rise of antisemitism, which
developed as an integral part of Russian nationalism, has not been given
the same attention. With these theoretical remarks on the framework of my
paper in mind, I would now like to sketch the development of antisemitism
during World War I and the Civil War in Russia.
Antisemitism experienced an enormous upsurge in Russia between the years
1914 and 1922. The high level of widespread violence committed against
Jews during this time, which climaxed in 1919 in waves of mass annihilation
in the Ukraine, is one important indicator of this development.
At the outset of 1914, the situation had not been quite so bleak. Further, it
was not predetermined that the crisis which culminated in World War I should
be accompanied by a simultaneous upsurge of antisemitism. Well before
the war began, antisemitism had been part of the official state ideology of
the Russian Empire. Antisemitism rallied the population’s support for the
government and became most visible in the Beilis ritual murder case of
1911-1913.
2
There were, however, no anti-Jewish riots at that time, perhaps
because the tsarist state had the power to prevent this from happening and
seemed determined to use it.
As the masses began to be mobilised for the war effort at the start of World
War I, open antisemitism was dropped from the public discourse, and the
different minorities, including the Jews, were offered the opportunity to join
the patriotic cause. Nevertheless, because many people continued to imagine
the Jews as a potential enemy from within, this proved to be only a short-term
alleviation. The preconception of the Jews as unreliable and possible traitors
to the Russian war effort was present from the initial stages of the war. This
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became increasingly visible as the war drew on and a scapegoat was needed
to explain the defeats and failures on the front (Dubnov 1918:208-212;
Gor’kij 1986:197-205; Gor’kij et al. 1917).
Army policy turned out to be the driving force that brought antisemitism
back into the political theatre. In recent years, much research has been done
regarding Russian military policy toward the Jews, placing it within the
perspective of the new war-based requirements of mass mobilisation, which
the army had condoned (Gatrell 1999; Lohr 2001). Already in the fall of
1914, the Russian army began a policy of forced deportation of what they
called ‘Jews and other unreliable elements’ (Dubnov 1918:216) from the
territory behind the front. This was accompanied by a spy mania involving
the threat Jewish spies could pose to the war effort and the hostage taking
of hundreds of Jewish dignitaries—a method devised to secure the obedient
conduct of local Jewish communities on the whole.
During the war years, more than 500,000 Jews were deported from regions
close to the theatre of war to the interior of Russia. (Lohr 2001:404)
Deportations were often accompanied by robbery and destruction of
property on a massive scale. Moreover, Cossack soldiers
perpetrated dozens
of pogroms, most of them in 1915.
3
Following that year, the momentum of
anti-Jewish aggression in the western theatre of war quieted down somewhat,
but the anti-Jewish policies of the army stayed in place and deportations,
hostage taking, and the scapegoating of Jews as spies continued until the
end of World War I.
In the aftermath of the 1917 February Revolution, antisemitism continued to
motivate public disturbances, albeit during 1917-1918 on a lower scale than
would prove to be the case both before and after. Reasons for the decline of
antisemitic violence against the background of heightened political tensions
can be found in the breakdown of the antisemitic tsarist state system and a
general opposition to antisemitism by democratic and revolutionary forces.
The immediate aftermath of the February Revolution led to the Jewish
emancipation laws and included a readiness on the part of the revolutionary
militias (which had replaced the tsarist police apparatus) to strongly suppress
any kind of street violence motivated by antisemitism.
Nevertheless, in various provinces street antisemitism did indeed play
a role, for example in several blood-libel charges throughout 1917 and
various instances of food rioting, mostly during the summer and fall of
1917 (Evrejskaja
Žizn’ 1917; Čerikover 1923:31-32, 62-63; Čchartišvili
1997; Hasegawa 1992). It is interesting that in these instances, antisemites
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disassociated themselves from their imperialist past. It was no longer the
Imperial State, but the Russian people, who in their view now fell victim
to Jewish war profiteering and the hoarding of grain by Jews, whom they
blamed for rising food prices. During the summer of 1917, a discourse also
emerged on ‘Jewish politics’, i.e. the Jewish prevalence in socialist parties,
Jews hiding behind revolutionary pseudonyms, etc. (Gor’kij 1972:57, 65-67;
Poliakov 1988:47-51.) In the beginning, at least, this discourse did not yet
lead to public violence.
More serious anti-Jewish violence started with the slide toward the Civil
War in 1918. A first wave of pogroms occurred in the spring of 1918, when
several hundred Jews were killed by former tsarist troops turned Red Guards
during their withdrawal to inner Russia as German troops forced them out of
the Ukraine (Èerikover 1923:143-153). With the breakdown of the German-
sponsored puppet regime of Skoropadskij in the Ukraine, pogroms began
once again towards the end of 1918, though this time in the context of the
Ukrainian nationalist grasp for power in the former ‘pale of settlement’—
the heartland of Jewish life. In the course of 1919, this developed into an all
out killing of Jews. Whereas conservative estimates speak of 50,000-60,000
murdered, more recent studies estimate approximately 150,000-200,000
Jews died as a result of these waves of pogroms in the Ukraine (Budnickij
2005:7). In the first half of 1919, these pogroms were committed mostly by
Ukrainian nationalist forces.
With its advance on central Russia during the summer and fall of the same
year, the anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ army of General Denikin followed in the
Ukrainian footsteps, his army instigating pogroms in nearly every town
which they passed, killing tens of thousands of Jews (Šechtman 1932).
Pogroms continued as peasant uprisings targeted the local Jewish population
as symbols of Bolshevik rule. Most of these bands of peasants had themselves
been strong supporters of Bolshevism in the immediate aftermath of the
October revolution, favouring Soviet power as the agent of the redistribution
of the land to the peasants. Through the pogroms on the Jews, they were
trying to make the public forget their own earlier support of Bolshevism.
The indiscriminate killing of Jews only began to diminish at the end of the
Civil War in 1922 as the central government began to tighten its control over
the territories on the periphery of the former Russian Empire.
This mass violence against Jews committed by different military and
paramilitary groups cannot solely be considered a result of the general
situation of crisis during World War I and the Civil War. Furthermore,
contrary to the research carried out by Henry Abramson (1999), anti-Jewish
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violence cannot be limited to explanations of a sort of general, regional-based
inter-ethnic strife during the break-up of the Russian Empire, with various
ethnic groups fighting against each other (Jews vs. Ukrainians, Cossacks vs.
Ukrainian peasants, etc.). Indeed, even if the bulk of the pogroms occurred
in the area of the former Jewish ‘pale of settlement’, where the majority
of Russian Jews had lived for centuries (a situation which, thanks to the
discriminatory policies of the government, was maintained well into the
twentieth century), the phenomenon was by no way limited to one specific
region.
During the time of the Civil War, antisemitism was strong throughout the
former Russian Empire. The singling out of the Jews as the foe that stood
behind Bolshevism was part of the wartime propaganda of nearly every
anti-Bolshevik military endeavour. Pogroms occurred during the Civil War
in places as far to the east as by forces of White Admiral Kol
čak and Ulan
Bator by Ataman Ungern-Šternbergs troups (Kuz’min 2004:89, 169-173,
212, 246).
Jews were targeted in the Civil War pogroms as the real enemy behind the
façade of Bolshevism, while all other anti-Jewish perceptions played only
a secondary role for anti-Jewish violence in this time period. Pogroms often
started because the local Jews were—wrongly—identified as the organisers
of a pro-Bolshevik uprising that needed to be suppressed (as in the case of
the famous Proskurov pogrom, perpetrated by Ukrainian Petljura troops
with several thousand dead in the spring of 1919) (Gusev-Orenburgskij
1983:41-45; 50-55). Moreover, Jews were seen as the ones who had not long
ago celebrated the ‘liberation’ of a given town given up to the Bolsheviks
(as in the case of the Kiev mass pogrom, perpetrated by Denikin troops in
October of 1919) (Denikin 2002:120). In order to gain a better understanding
of anti-Jewish violence during the Civil War years, it is necessary to take a
closer look at this imagery of the enemy of the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’, whose
roots clearly lie within the traditions of Russian antisemitism. Thus, we
must turn to ideology, more specifically to nationalism and its linkage
with antisemitism at the given time, and the perception of the Jews which
developed during the Civil War in the minds of people who considered
themselves or started considering themselves as ‘Russians’, ‘Christians’,
‘Ukrainians’, ‘Cossacks’, ‘peasants’, and ‘locals’.
In the following section, I will analyse antisemitism as a key element of
an emergent nationalism that, in the phase of crisis and dissolution of the
Russian Empire, was on the verge of replacing the imperialist ideology of Old
Russia. Although much of the given analysis may also pertain to Ukrainian
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and other minority nationalisms of the Russian Empire at the given time, I
will exclusively concentrate on Russian nationalism.
I will look at three aspects that highlight the development of national
antisemitism in Russia in the given time period. First, as Russian
antisemitism joined forces with Russian nationalism, a modernisation of
antisemitism took place already before World War I. Second, as part of the
drive for mobilisation and control of the general population during World
War I, antisemitism became integrated into the national project of total
war. Finally, during the Civil War, the imagery of the ‘Jewish Bolshevik’
developed within the confines of the confrontation between nationalism
and communism.
Prior to 1914, Russian nationalism had already grown stronger. Although
the tsarist government to some extent considered it to be a danger to its
rule, nationalism nevertheless gained ground both outside and inside the
ruling government elite in the years leading up to World War I. For instance,
journalists and writers such as O. Menšikov and V. Rozanov promoted
the growing influence of a conservative nationalist discourse and several
conservative nationalist parties were founded. A discourse of self-definition
as ‘Russians’ and the definition of the Jews as the ‘other’ played an important
role within these conservative circles.
The most important upsurge of antisemitism prior to 1914 is connected
to the failed revolution of 1905. The widespread pogroms following the
tsarist manifesto of 17th October 1905 are the origin of the myth of a
people which rose to defend the traditional rule of the Tsar against a Jewish
inspired revolution. This is a reactionary myth. Nevertheless, the inability
of the regime in the following years to reconcile the populist rhetoric of
the radical right with traditionalist tsarist rule points to the modern, even
nationalist content of the radical antisemitism of lower and middle class
based extremism.
It was the Russian people (not the Imperial state) who the ‘Sojuz Russkogo
Naroda’ saw threatened by Jewish politics/intrigues/lawyers/capitalists/
socialists. Even these right-wing radicals of the ‘Sojuz Russkogo Naroda’
started targeting the Jews less as a religious group and more as a hostile
nation. With Markov and Puriškevi
č, at least two leaders of this party
propagated the idea of the deportation of Russia’s Jews to Siberia in the pre-
war period (Mindlin 2002:14, 20). Likewise, the discourse on the economic
domination of Russia by the Jews—a very traditional antisemitic theme
since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—clearly took on much more
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nationalistic overtones, developing a premise which became very important
during the war: the necessity of the Russian nation to form its own business
and entrepreneurial class.
The development of army policy in the pre-war years is yet another
important terrain for the ‘nationalisation’ of Russian antisemitism. In 1912,
the traditional ban on Jews to join the officers’ corps of the tsarist army
was tightened, and the provisions were changed to include anybody with
a Jewish father or grandfather (Sanborn 2003). This made ‘Jewish blood’
the distinctive issue and made it impossible for Jews who had adopted the
Christian Orthodox faith to join the officers’ corps, which had until that
time been possible.
The Russian army proved to be the major agent of antisemitic policies
during World War I, not because of its reactionary, monarchist, traditionally
antisemitic orientation, but because of its modern nationalistic leanings and
its willingness to mobilise the nation against internal and external enemies.
Not only notorious antisemites like Januškevi
č, but also ‘moderates’ or
‘progressives’ like General Brusilov were leading protagonists in the routing
up of the Jews until the end of World War I, even after the tsarist government
had put a brake on such activities.
In his analysis of answers to a questionnaire on Russian antisemitism during
the war, Maksim Gor’kij, the famous writer and political activist, placed the
issue of Jewish ‘dominance’ (zasil’e) even before Jewish responsibility for
rising prices and spying for Germany as the most important theme of Russian
antisemitism of the time (Gor’kij 1986:197-205). Not only the Jews as the
inner enemy, unreliable subjects per se, but the more concrete nationalist
conception which aimed for a nationalisation of the Russian society and
against the involvement of ‘foreign’ elites in commerce and administration,
proved to be the main rallying point of antisemitism during World War I.
Another subject of discussion was the involvement of Jews in democratic,
socialist, and communist politics. Within the short time period during the
years of 1917-1918, this quickly developed into the myth of the ‘Jewish
Bolsheviks’ as the driving force behind the Russian revolution. In June-July
of 1917, nationalistic officers around Denikin and parts of the Kerenskij
government spread rumours about the modalities of the passage of Lenin
and other Bolsheviks to Russia a few months earlier as part of a German-
Jewish-Bolshevik plot against Russia, and Jewish and foreign-sounding
names of the involved Bolsheviks were made public (Denikin 2002; Poliakov
1988:45, 49-50). From that point on, the suspicious and prominent role of
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Jews in the Bolshevik party became a constant theme of Russian politics.
It was a direct result of the wartime propaganda regarding ‘Jewish traitors’
that permitted the focus on ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ to develop so fast and strong
in the time thereafter.
Although Russian nationalists played a fundamental role in the construction
of the idea of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, it is important to note that the Russian
nationalist camp was not the only sector of society responsible. In the
first half of 1918, the then divided Orthodox Church joined forces in a
campaign against the Bolsheviks as embodiment of the (Jewish) Antichrist.
In a statement decrying the Bolshevik position regarding the separation of
church and state, the Orthodox Church issued a decree in January 1918
demanding the reinstatement of a Christian state and denouncing the rise of
demonic forces in politics, symbolised by ‘godless people neither Russian
nor orthodox’ (Vorob’ev 2000:817). While official Church announcements
only hinted at the Jewish background of the ‘commissars’, more radical
leaders of the campaign, like father Vladimir Vostokov, talked openly about
the enemy being part of a Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy.
Following the Bolshevik assassination of the Tsar and his family on 17th
July 1918, rumours soon spread that certain ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ were the
main culprits of the killing. The Commission of Inquiry set up by the White
military to investigate the death of the Tsar’s family served to strengthen
the belief that the murders were indeed a ‘Jewish deed’. The two leaders
of the inquiry, Sokolov, a liberal nationalist, and Diterichs, a general and
ultra-orthodox extremist, both added to the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in
their distinct manners (Chejfec 1992).
There was a strong reactionary and apocalyptic touch to church activism
against the Jewish Antichrist as well as all conspiracy charges regarding the
propaganda about the so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which had
been reprinted during the Civil War in countless editions. Additionally, the
White war machinery and its propaganda apparatus refined the conspirator
and apocalyptic vision of the reactionary forces, giving their discourse a
nationalist mould while simultaneously and repeatedly reminding the public
of the Jewish activists amongst the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Another
running theme was the anti-orthodox orientation of Bolshevik occupational
policies, which was nearly always linked in propaganda texts of the Whites to
the presence or even predominance of Jewish activists among the Bolshevik
revolutionaries (Fel’štinskij 1992; Denikin 2002). Following the war, the
leader of the White ‘Volunteer Army’, Denikin, and other nationalists tried to
portray antisemitism as a phenomenon more closely linked to the extremist
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supporters of tsarism than to themselves. This is not true. During the years
of the Civil War, Russian nationalism needed and used the imagery of the
so-called ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ as the antipode of their self-identification as
Russians.
Before 1917, progressives opposed to antisemitism had dominated bourgeois
politics. The position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party before
1917 had been clearly in favour of Jewish emancipation. Following the
Bolshevik Revolution, conservative nationalist politics gained ground and in
the years of 1918-19 played a leading role in the White movement. It was not
only the long-time antisemite Vasilij Šul’gin who justified the 1919 wave of
pogroms such as referring to the ‘Marxist leanings’ of Russian Jewry in his
famous ‘Torture of Fear’ article of October 1919 (Šechtman 1932:368-369),
but the same Kadet Party at their 1919 party congress in Char’kov. In a
resolution on the ‘Jewish question’, they absolved the White army and
administration of any blame for the pogroms and instead demanded from
the ‘leading circles’ of Russian Jewry an effective struggle against ‘those
elements of Jewry, who through their active participation in the Bolshevik
cause engage in a criminal and bad matter’ (Šechtman 1932:270; Rosenberg
1974:426; Budnickij 2005:344-367).
Russian nationalist as well as monarchist ‘White’ officers, important parts of
the Russian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian nationalists, and various peasant
movements were united in their opposition to what they called ‘Jewish rule
under the guise of Bolshevism’. On the one hand, this shows that antisemitic
motivations of the struggle against the Bolsheviks extended beyond the
(Russian) nationalist camp. There is something similar, however, regarding
the role antisemitism played in these very different political movements,
civil war armies, and religious groups: regardless of whether these groupings
followed elaborate ideologies or had simple followers who just swallowed
catch phrases about the threat of the ‘Jewish revolution’, they all constructed
the (revolutionary) Jew as a counter symbol to their own conceived identity
as Russian, peasant, Christian, or Ukrainian.
In his analysis of ‘national antisemitism’, Holz (2001) describes this as the
common denominator among otherwise opposed (national) movements and
as a typical trait of ‘national antisemitism’. He proposes calling it the ‘figure
of the third’ (‘Figur des Dritten’). Nationalism, Holz argues, always leaves
the possibility of other nations/groups existing next to their own. ‘The Jews’,
meanwhile, are constructed as the common enemy of all other nations, as
the non- and anti-national, non-identical, anti-communitarian ‘other’—the
counter-symbol of all other nations of the world.
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This is a very good description of the Russian nationalist’s imagery of the
Jews at the time of the Civil War. Thus, whether the perpetrators were the
various White armies, Ukrainian forces, or bands of peasants, Russian
nationalism could not set up any line of defence neither against the wave
of pogroms of 1919 nor those of the following years. The myth of ‘Jewish
Bolshevism’ provided the motivation for these pogroms. As such, it must
therefore be analysed as the crucial aspect of Russian nationalist ideology
that it was.
Notes
1
The title of this paper has also been borrowed from his study.
2
A charge of ritual murder brought against a Jewish clerk in July 1911 and tried before a
Kiev jury in September 1913. It was the last ritual murder case brought to trial in Europe.
Beilis finally was acquitted for lack of evidence.
3
The cavalry of the Russian army consisted mostly of Cossacks. There are different
explanations as to the dominant presence of the Cossacks in the pogrom waves of World
War I and the Civil War. Some authors have denied a strong antisemitism among Cossacks
(Pipes 1994) and have pointed to looting as being the main goal of Cossack pogroms (Klier
2005:64; Pipes 1994:105). I cannot specifically deal with this question, but there is good
reason to believe (as has been argued by Kenez 1992:303) that the Cossacks were at least as
much as the regular soldiers of the Russian army influenced by the antisemitic propaganda
of the army leadership, which I see as the decisive motivation for anti-Jewish pogroms.
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Ulrich Herbeck: National Antisemitism in Russia during the ‘Years of Crisis’, 1914-1922
Ulrich Herbeck received his doctorate from the Free
University Berlin in 2006 for a study on ‘The “Judeo-
Bolshevik” enemy. Study on the History of Russian
Antisemitism before and during the Russian Revolution’.
For his dissertation project he has been awarded the Felix
Posen Scholarship of the Vidal Sassoon International
Center for the Study of Antisemitism from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. He has published various articles
on antisemitism in the Soviet Union, e.g., ‘Antisemitismus
seit Beginn der Sowjetunion?’, in: Jens Mecklenburg und
Wolfgang Wippermann (eds), “Roter Holocaust”? Kritik
des Schwarzbuchs des Kommunismus (Hamburg, 1998)
pp. 142-157. He is currently preparing his doctoral thesis
for publication.
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