The Kiev pogrom of 1881 lasted for three days. It began on 26 April (7 May), 1881 in the city of Kiev itself and spread to villages in the surrounding region. Sporadic violence continued until winter. The Kiev pogrom is considered the worst of the pogroms that swept through south-western Imperial Russia in 1881.[1] Pogroms continued on through the summer, spreading across the territory of modern-day Ukraine including Podolia Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others.[2] Notably, the tsarist authorities made no attempt to stop it.[3] However, in his detailed study Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882, John D. Klier, professor of modern Jewish History at University College, London who spent almost his entire academic life researching Jewish life in Russian controlled territory, came to the conclusion that, far from passively allowing the pogroms to take place, the Tsarist government actively and repeatedly issued orders to the police, and military to suppress them. They also published proclamations forbidding anti-Jewish riots.[4]
The direct trigger for the pogrom in Kiev, as in other places, was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 1 March (13 March) 1881, for which the instigators blamed the Russian Jews.[5] Nevertheless, the Southern-Russian Workers' Union substantially contributed to the spread and continuation of violence by printing and mass distributing a leaflet which read:
Brother workers. You are beating the Jews, but indiscriminately. One should not beat the Jew because he is a Jew and prays to God in his own way – indeed, God is one and the same to all – rather, one should beat him because he is robbing the people, he is sucking the blood of the working man.[6]
Expulsion of Jews in Kiev (1881)
The extent to which the Russian press was responsible for encouraging perceptions of the assassination as a Jewish act has been disputed.[7] Local economic conditions (such as ancestral debts owed to moneylenders) are thought to have contributed significantly to the rioting, especially with regard to the participation of the business competitors of local Jews and the participation of railroad workers. It has been argued that this was actually more important than rumours of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.[8] These rumours, however, were clearly of some importance, if only as a trigger, and they drew upon a small kernel of truth: one of the close associates of the assassins, Hesya Helfman, was born into a Jewish home. The fact that the other assassins were all atheists and that the wider Jewish community had nothing to do with the assassination had little impact on the spread of such antisemitic rumours. Nonetheless, the assassination inspired "retaliatory" attacks on Jewish communities. During these pogroms thousands of Jewish homes were destroyed, many families were reduced to poverty, and large numbers of men, women, and children were injured in 166 towns in the southwest provinces of the Empire.[9]
↑ PogromArchived 2010-02-06 at the Wayback Machine , based on Alina Cała, Hanna Węgrzynek, Gabriela Zalewska, "Historia i kultura Żydów polskich. Słownik", WSiP. (in Polish)
↑ Klier, John D. (2011). Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-112. p. 26 &foll. ISBN978-1-107-63415-2
↑ Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 1881, cited in Benjamin Blech, Eyewitness to Jewish History
↑ M. Kishkinky, "The Attitude of the Southern-Russian Workers' Union toward the Jews (1880-1881)" in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (June 1982), p. 206. Center for Israel Education, 2015
↑ Stephen M Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882 (Greenwood, 1985), pp. 54–55.
↑ I. Michael Aronson, "Geographical and Socioeconomic Factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia", Russian Review, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Jan., 1980), pp. 18–31
A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe 19th- and 20th-century attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire. Similar attacks against Jews which also occurred at other times and places became known retrospectively as pogroms. Sometimes the word is used to describe publicly sanctioned purgative attacks against non-Jewish groups. The characteristics of a pogrom vary widely, depending on the specific incident, at times leading to, or culminating in, massacres.
The Pale of Settlement was a western region of the Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish residency, permanent or temporary, was mostly forbidden. Most Jews were still excluded from residency in a number of cities within the Pale as well. A few Jews were allowed to live outside the area, including those with university education, the ennobled, members of the most affluent of the merchant guilds and particular artisans, some military personnel and some services associated with them, including their families, and sometimes their servants. The archaic English term pale is derived from the Latin word palus, a stake, extended to mean the area enclosed by a fence or boundary.
The Lovers of Zion, also Hovevei Zion or Hibbat Zion, were a variety of proto-Zionist organizations founded in 1881 in response to the Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire and were officially constituted as a group at a conference led by Leon Pinsker in 1884.
The Black Hundred, also known as the black-hundredists, were a reactionary, monarchist and ultra-nationalist movement in Russia in the early 20th century. It was a staunch supporter of the House of Romanov and opposed any retreat from the autocracy of the reigning monarch. The name arose from the medieval concept of "black", or common (non-noble) people, organized into militias.
The history of the Jews in 19th-century Poland covers the period of Jewish-Polish history from the dismemberment of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, until the beginning of the 20th century.
The history of the Jews in Ukraine dates back over a thousand years; Jewish communities have existed in the modern territory of Ukraine from the time of the Kievan Rus'. Important Jewish religious and cultural movements, from Hasidism to Zionism, arose there. According to the World Jewish Congress, the Jewish community in Ukraine constitutes Europe's third-largest and the world's fifth-largest.
The Kiev pogrom of October 18-October 20 came as a result of the collapse of the city hall meeting of October 18, 1905 in Kiev in the Russian Empire. Consequently, a mob was drawn into the streets. Among the perpetrators were monarchists, reactionaries, anti-Semites, and common criminals, proclaiming that "all Russia's troubles stemmed from the machinations of the Jews and socialists." The pogrom resulted in a massacre of approximately 100 Jews.
The Kiev pogroms of 1919 refers to a series of anti-Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by White Volunteer Army troops. The series of events concern the following districts:
A series of pogroms against Jews in the city of Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They occurred in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881 and 1905.
Elias Tcherikower, also known as Eliahu Tcherikover, Elye Tsherikover, Eliahu Tcherikower, Elias Tscherikower, and I. M. Cherikover, was a Russian-born Jewish historian of Judaism.
The Warsaw pogrom was a pogrom that took place in Russian-controlled Warsaw on 25–27 December 1881, then part of Congress Poland in the Russian Empire, resulting in two people dead and 24 injured.
Antisemitism in Ukraine has been a historical issue in the country, particularly in the twentieth century. The history of the Jewish community of the region dates back to the era when ancient Greek colonies existed in it. A third of the Jews of Europe previously lived in Ukraine between 1791 and 1917, within the Pale of Settlement. The large concentration of Jews in this region historically made them an easy target for anti-Jewish actions and pogroms.
Pogroms in the Russian Empire were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting that began in the 19th century. Pogroms began to occur after Imperial Russia, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire from 1772 to 1815. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Imperial Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live, and it was within them where the pogroms largely took place. Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia, unless they converted from Judaism or obtained a university diploma or first guild merchant status. Migration to the Caucasus, Siberia, the Far East or Central Asia was not restricted.
Częstochowa pogrom refers to an alleged anti-Semitic disturbance that occurred on August 11, 1902, in the town of Chenstokhov, Russian Partition under Nicholas II. According to an official Russian report by the Tsarist Governor of the Piotrków Governorate, the said pogrom started after an altercation between a Jewish shopkeeper and a Catholic woman.
John Doyle Klier was a British-American historian of Russian Jewry and a pivotal figure in academic Jewish studies and East European history in the UK and beyond. At the end of his career and life, Klier was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. He was a historian who challenged scholarly opinion on the Jewish community under the Tsars.
The Belostok (Białystok) pogrom occurred between 14–16 June 1906 in Białystok, Poland. During the pogrom between 81 and 88 Jews were killed by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army, the Black Hundreds and the Chernoe Znamia, and about 80 people were wounded.
Antisemitism in the Russian Empire included numerous pogroms and the designation of the Pale of Settlement from which Jews were forbidden to migrate into the interior of Russia, unless they converted to the Russian Orthodox state religion.
This article provides a list of definitions of the term pogrom. The term originated as a loanword from the Russian verb громи́ть, meaning "to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently". The events in Odessa during Holy Week in 1871 were the first to be widely called a "pogrom" in Russian, and the events of 1881–82 introduced the term into common usage throughout the world.
The pogroms during the Russian Civil War were a wave of mass murders of Jews, primarily in Ukraine, during the Russian Civil War. In the years 1918–1920, there were 1,500 pogroms in over 1,300 localities, in which up to 250,000 were murdered. All armed forces operating in Ukraine were involved in the killings, in particular the anti-Communist Ukrainian People's Army and Armed Forces of South Russia. It is estimated that more than a million people were affected by material losses, 50,000 to 300,000 children were orphaned, and half a million were driven out from or fled their homes. The Whitaker Report of the United Nations cited the massacre of 100,000 to 250,000 Jews in more than 2,000 pogroms which occurred during the White Terror in Russia as an act of genocide.
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