The Kiev pogrom of 1881 lasted for three days starting 26 April (7 May), 1881 in the city of Kiev and spread to villages in the surrounding region. Sporadic violence continued until winter. It 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]
It has been said that the tsarist authorities made no attempt to stop it.[3] However, professor John D. Klier 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 (in his detailed study Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882) 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 {{Citation needed}} 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. Retrospectively, similar attacks against Jews which occurred in other times and places also became known 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. Pale is an archaic term meaning an enclosed area.
The Kishinev pogrom or Kishinev massacre was an anti-Jewish riot that took place in Kishinev, then the capital of the Bessarabia Governorate in the Russian Empire, on 19–21 April [O.S. 6–8 April] 1903. During the pogrom, which began on Easter Day, 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, a number of Jewish women were raped, over 500 were lightly injured and 1,500 homes were damaged. American Jews began large-scale organized financial help, and assisted in emigration. The incident focused worldwide attention on the persecution of Jews within the Russian Empire, and led Theodor Herzl to propose the Uganda Scheme as a temporary refuge for the Jews. A second pogrom erupted in the city in October 1905.
Vyacheslav Konstantinovich von Plehve was a Russian politician who served as the director of the police from 1881 to 1884 and later as the minister of the interior from 1902 until his assassination in 1904.
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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.
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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:
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Elias Tcherikower was a Ukrainian Jewish historian and co-founder of the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO).
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Nahum Gergel was a Jewish rights activist, humanitarian, sociologist, and author in Yiddish. Nahum Gergel is best known for his thorough statistical studies of anti-Jewish atrocities (pogroms) that took place in Ukraine in 1918–1921.
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. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Bessarabia, Lithuania and Crimea. 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 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 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 about 80 people were wounded.
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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.
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