Kiev Pogroms (1919)

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The Kiev pogroms of 1919 refers to a series of Jewish pogroms in various places around Kiev carried out by Cossacks and the White Armies.[1]

Pogrom victims in Alexandrov Hospital, Kiev, 1919. Credit: Elias Tcherikower.
Pogrom victims in Alexandrov Hospital, Kiev, 1919. Credit: Elias Tcherikower.
  • Skvira, June 23, 1919: a pogrom in which 45 Jews were massacred, many were severely wounded, and 35 Jewish women were raped by army insurgents.[2]
  • Justingrad: In August, 1919, a pogrom made its way through the shtetl. An unspecified number of Jewish men were murdered and Jewish women raped.
  • Ivankiv in the Kiev district: Between 18 and 20 October 1919, in the pogrom carried out by Cossack and Volunteer Army troops, 14 Jews were massacred, 9 wounded, and 15 Jewish women and girls were raped by units under the command of Struk in three days of carnage.[3]

Contents

[edit] Reactions

The leaders of the White Army issued orders condemning the pogroms, but these were largely unheeded due to widespread anti-Semitism.[1]

Lenin had spoken out against pogroms in March, and in June, the Bolsheviks assigned some funds for victims of pogroms. However, the events received little coverage in the Bolshevik press.[1]

[edit] Aftermath

The Kiev pogroms of 1919 proved the first of many such events. [4] It is estimated that a total of 1,326 - or up to 2,000 - pogroms took place in the Ukraine alone, in which between 30,000 and 70,000 Jews were massacred. The pogroms were marked by utmost cruelty and face-to-face brutality. Thousands of women were raped. Hundreds of shtetlekh were pillaged, and Jewish neighborhoods were left in ruins. According to some estimates, overall, in the pogroms of 1918-1921, half a million Jews were left homeless. [5] According to historian Manus I. Midlarsky, "It has been estimated that between 1918 and 1920 as many as 150,000 Jews were murdered by Bolshevik armies (2.3 percent), Petlura's Ukrainian nationalists (53.7 percent), and Denikin's Volunteer Army (17 percent). The remaider was killed by local bands of renegade soldiers and other anti-Semites. These estimates include deaths due to massacre-induced disease or starvation. More recent estimates based on newly available Russian records judge the percentage killed by the Volunteer Army to be much higher, perhaps as high as 50 percent." [6][4]

The new communist ideology of tolerance (see: Lenin, "On Anti-Jewish Pogroms"[7]) was very short-lived, [8] and "as early as 1918 the Jews were victims of several vicious attacks."[9] The scourge of pogroms which erupted in January 1919 in the northwest province of Volhynia spread during February and March to the cities, towns, and villages of many other regions of Ukraine.[10] After Sarny it was the turn of Ovruc, northwest of Kiev. In Tetiev on March 25, approximately 4,000 Jews were murdered, half in a synagogue set ablaze by Cossack troops under Colonels Kurovsky, Cherkowsy, and Shliatoshenko.[11] Then Vashilkov (April 6 and 7).[12] In Dubovo (June 17) 800 Jews were decapitated in assembly-line fashion.[10] According to David A. Chapin, the town of Proskurov (later Khmelnitsky), near the city of Sudilkov, “was the site of the worst atrocity committed against Jews this century before the Nazis.” In 1919, during the Russian Civil War, Petliura and his band of nationalists under Hetman Semossenko exterminated a large percentage of the Jewish district of Proskurov, where more than 10,000 Jews were massacred on Shabbat (parashah Tesaveh) from three p.m. till next Sunday.[13] [14] [15] Massive pogroms continued until 1921.[16] In 1921, a large number of Russian Jews emigrated to Poland, as they were entitled by a peace treaty in Riga to choose the country they preferred. Several hundred thousand joined the already numerous Jewish minority of the Polish Second Republic.[17]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c Benjamin Frankel, A Restless Mind: Essays in Honor of Amos Perlmutter. Published by Routledge, pg. 272 [1]
  2. ^ Michael L. Brown, Our Hands Are Stained with Blood. "More Tears". Published by Destiny Image, Inc. Pg. 105. [2]
  3. ^ Harry James Cargas, Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian. On meeting Kurt Waldheim. Pg. 136 [3]
  4. ^ a b Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Pg. 70. [4]
  5. ^ Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain, and the Russian Revolution. Published by Routledge, pg. 87 [5]
  6. ^ Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: genocide in the twentieth century. Published by Cambridge University Press. Page 45 [6]
  7. ^ Lenin's March 1919 speech On Anti-Jewish Pogroms («О погромной травле евреев»: text, audio (help·info))
  8. ^ Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science. Published 1983 by Yiddish Scientific Institute, pg. 241 [7]
  9. ^ "The Pogroms: Victims of a pogrom in Ukraine, 1919" at grossmanproject.net [8]
  10. ^ a b Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: genocide in the twentieth century. Published by Cambridge University Press, pg. 46-47. [9]
  11. ^ Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap (ibidem), pg. 46 [10]
  12. ^ Elias Tcherikower, "The Pogroms in Ukraine in 1919" originally in Yiddish, YIVO Institute, 1965 [11]
  13. ^ Grossmanproject.net: The Pogroms [12]
  14. ^ For more information on the Russian pogroms against the Jews: I. Michael Aronson’s book, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.
  15. ^ Й.Петровский, ОБЩЕСТВО "ЕВРЕЙСКОЕ НАСЛЕДИЕ". Серия "Еврейский Архив": Выпуск 5, Москва, 1996 г. [13]
  16. ^ Arno Joseph Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions. Published by Princeton University Press, pg. 516 [14]
  17. ^ History of the Jews in Russia

[edit] References

  • Harold Henry Fisher: The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration [15]
  • William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921. Published 1935 by Macmillan company pg. 230 [16]
  • David J. Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage. Published 1970, Cape, 249 [17]
  • Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Pg. 67. [18]