(This takes approximately nine minutes to read. Yes, I am afraid that it is going to be one of those threads.)

The European pogroms from 1917 to 1923 were the deadliest series of antisemitic massacres until the Shoah, and somewhere from 115,000 to perhaps even 200,000 people died from them. While most Herzlians insist that the Shoah was so unique that it was incomparable to anything else in history, it would be utterly baffling if they explicitly included this catastrophe as something else incomparable to the Shoah, which is possibly another reason that they almost never discuss it.

This violence, which I have termed the proto-Shoah, has a good deal in common with its successor and most likely influenced it to some degree, hence why a few writers have called it a ‘dress rehearsal’ therefor. That being said, the two tragedies have some significant differences. Some of them are obvious: the Shoah was much wider in scope, involved more participants, involved millions more deaths, and involved more killing methods (most infamously chemical weapons). However, in comparison with its successor, the proto-Shoah was more informal, more disorganised, and it is less clear if any large businesses profited directly from it.

While anti-Jewish violence was already phenomenal in Eastern Europe long before 1917, it is clear that there was a spike in such during and a little after the late 1910s, which is why I set 1917 as the starting point even though there is some continuity between the anti-Jewish violence from then and earlier.

Symon Petliura, the head of one of the several anti-Jewish armies polluting the East, peddled a legend that bears an almost striking resemblance to the hypothesis that the Germanic folks were descended from Aryans. Quoting Jeffrey Veidlinger’s In the Midst of Civilized Europe: the Pogroms of 1918–1921, pages 50–51:

Petliura skillfully deployed the “Cossack” myth—the idea that modern Ukrainians were descendants of the freedom-loving horsemen of the steppe who had overthrown the Polish magnates in the seventeenth century and established their own independent state, known as the Hetmanate. This state ultimately merged with the Russian Empire, and the Cossacks themselves were recruited into the tsar’s service, where they were recognized as among the most lethal forces in the Russian military.

Petliura dressed his peasant soldiers in the papakha, the fur Astrakhan hat of the Cossacks, and named his military units after Cossack bands or historical heroes. He adopted the Cossack title otaman (also seen as ataman or hetman) as a military rank, called his soldiers “Haidamaks” after the eighteenth-century Cossack insurgents, and would later crown himself the “Chief Otaman.”

It would be all too easy to liken this to referring to an anticommunist dictator as Führer, who issued his troops to wear helmets loosely based on sallets, and whose chief of police remodelled the Schutzstaffel after the Teuton Knights, but these are all arguably superficial similarities rather than significant ones.

On the other hand, one indisputably important similarity was the tendency to go after passersby who merely ‘looked Jewish’: a phenomenon that sometimes occurred in Germany before the Judenstern’s introduction. Page 193:

According to the final report on the pogrom prepared by the Red Cross, “they killed not only Red soldiers, but anybody who looked like a Jew. The Jews who were taken in the field were immediately shot.”²¹

As with the Fascists, many of Eastern Europe’s protofascists were petty bourgeois goyim eager to enrich themselves by despoiling Jews. Page 195:

Throughout the pogrom, as Grigoriev’s men arrested and shot Jewish men, they encouraged onlookers—Christian women and children—to raid the apartments of their victims and scavenge for any goods left behind. Nunia Krasnopolsky, who was mistaken for a Christian, described how one soldier handed her a sack and said, “Go and loot.” V. Petrov, the former chair of the city council, noted that “the local petty bourgeoisie, women and children, readily took part in the plundering, pointed out Jewish houses to the soldiers, etc.”³⁰

Marusya Ukrainskaia, who was at the station, also recognized locals mingling with the drunken soldiers: “Boys and girls from the Cherkasy high school, officers, and people who had social standing. All this assembly was dancing to the sound of a gramophone. Shouts, tumult, and the most unrestrained merriment.”³¹ Several witnesses noted in their testimonies that many members of the professional classes who joined the insurgents had parents and relatives who had been arrested by the Cheka.³²

Many early anticommunists also misappropriated Bolshevist recommendations, slogans, and occasionally even aesthetics, not out of any solidarity with us, but as a means of hoodwinking and confusing the lower classes, as well as appealing to other petty bourgeois who had ‘anticapitalist’ sentiments. Page 54:

In Kyiv, the Central Rada refused to recognize the [October Revolution] and responded on November 20 with its “Third Universal,” proclaiming the establishment of a Ukrainian People’s Republic still within a “democratic” and “federated” Russia. The new republic claimed for the Rada all power to establish order and promulgate laws within the Ukrainian provinces until the promised convocation of the Constituent Assembly.

The proclamation adopted many aspects of the Bolshevik program—it declared all land the property of the working class and the peasants, introduced the eight-hour workday, declared the nationalization of industry, and promised an end to the war—but sought to implement them through a democratic process rather than dictatorial fiat. It accused the Bolsheviks of hurling the country into an “internecine and bloody struggle” and of spreading “chaos, disorder, and ruin.”

Page 106:

Freshly armed with equipment foraged from the retreating [Central Powers], forces from this disorganized local garrison now had the run of the town.³ These peasant soldiers had only the vaguest notions of what they were fighting for: some called themselves Revolutionaries instead of Republicans, not fully understanding the difference, but latching on to whatever slogan they had last heard.

Many were inspired by the Bolshevik slogan of “peace, land, bread,” but also understood from their officers that the Bolsheviks were the enemy. Bolshevik ideas were fine, some believed, but the Bolsheviks themselves were Jewish traitors.

Page 209:

Struk’s anti-Jewish rhetoric […] now branded Jews as capitalists and speculators, and at times accused them of being both Bolshevik and bourgeoisie, capitalist and communist simultaneously. In Hornostaipil, in April 1919, he issued an appeal to “those villages, towns and cities where Communist-Capitalist Jews and their dishonest servants and employees hold power and authority.”¹⁰³

Such incoherence is typical of the petty bourgeoisie, which sometimes proclaims anticapitalism but often wastes everything fighting serious anticapitalists: lower-class rebels.

That being said, it is also true that many Jewish adults were stuck operating microbusinesses (as was true before and during the Shoah). For byspel, page 218:

Before the war, the Jews of Slovechno were mostly petty traders, leather workers, or small shop owners.

This provoked resentment among petty bourgeois goyim, who hated their competition and used the proto-Shoah as an opportunity to devastate it. This undoubtedly drew many formerly petty bourgeois Jews into the arms of the Bolshevists, now that they no longer had anything to lose.

And keep in mind that no Jew is born with an instinct to start a microbusiness. The main reason that this was common among Jews was so that they could set their own schedules and always take Saturdays off, thereby not having to violate the Shabbat. In contrast, capitalist goyim never cared about Shabbat; they wanted their employés to work as often as possible.

Of course, that was not the sole reason; there are other traditions in Jewish cultures that gentiles ignore, and starting a microbusiness was a way to circumvent those. For example, the main reason that tailoring has always been a popular profession among Jews has to do with the Pentateuchal commandment to avoid wearing wearing mixed fibres, a rule that we never cared to follow as it never applied to us. Thus, Jewish tailors could make their own clothes, knowing with certainty that it was kosher.

I could spend several more paragraphs explaining the Jewish attraction to tailoring and other stereotypical professions, but I digress. The point here is that it was the need to respect sacred Jewish traditions (and not ‘race’) that lead so many Jews to start microbusinesses, where they could set their own rules. Unfortunately, analysts tend to skip over the explanation for the correlation between these people and microbusinesses when they note it, which has undoubtedly lead some readers to wonder about said analysts’ racial prejudices.

As in the Shoah, the proto-Shoah also had some ‘righteous among the nations’ who were not necessarily communists, but these particular gentiles were, sadly, exceptional.

Pages 148–149:

Klimenty Kachurovsky, the archdeacon of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Cathedral, stands out as an exception to the general indifference displayed by local officialdom. Witnesses report that Kachurovsky pleaded with the soldiers to have mercy on the Jews. He was holding a child, yelling, “Christians, what are you doing?” when soldiers attacked him with spears, killing him. Dr. Serhy Polozov is also credited with providing medical assistance to Jews during the pogrom and even hiding several families in his house.⁵⁵

But such acts of sympathy were rare. Multiple witnesses reported that Kiverchuk’s police and even civilian nurses sometimes accompanied the soldiers in their raids on Jewish households; the police stood guard at the door while residents were massacred, and nurses helped expropriate medical supplies.⁵⁶

While there were a few good Christians who saved their fellow Abrahamists, many other Christians were extremely sinful: the Whites and their allies, much like the Fascists, sometimes excused their atrocities by appealing to religion. Page 191:

Grigoriev […] plastered every town he occupied with manifestos that drew upon classic antisemitic tropes, characterizing his erstwhile Bolshevik allies as Christ-killers, foreign lackeys, and bloodsuckers. “Instead of land and freedom, they have forcefully imposed upon you a commune, special police, and commissars from the Moscow gluttons and the lands where they crucified Christ,” declared one.¹⁰

Unfortunately, I can’t possibly hope to adequately convey the sheer scale of carnage without testing your patience, so I shall limit myself to three examples. Pages 146–147:

In a few cases, Jews seem to have been targeted for religious reasons. In a house on Sobornaya Street where twenty-one people were massacred, for instance, a survivor reported that “before the murder, the Cossacks demanded that the Jews cross themselves. In the event of a refusal or indecision, they killed with the cry, ‘Die, Jew!’”⁴¹

Soldiers also massacred some Jews at prayer. About twenty people were in the synagogue later in the day for a study session when soldiers barged in. Leyb Kozovy, who was present, described how the worshippers insisted that they were simple pious Jews at prayer and had no interest in politics. “The soldier near me smiled,” Kozovy recalled, “and drove his bayonet into my neighbor.” Kozovy was wounded in the back and survived by pretending to be dead; all the other worshippers were killed in the attack. Kozovy spent the next six months in the hospital.”⁴²

Page 191:

Rousing anti-Jewish hatred was Grigoriev’s most potent weapon. Along the railway lines, his troops singled out Jewish passengers, robbed and stripped them, and threw them off moving trains. As his men moved through the districts of Cherkasy and Elizavetgrad, they massacred the Jewish populations they encountered; nearly sixty incidents were documented in approximately forty villages and towns. The total death toll in these encounters has been estimated at six thousand.¹²

Pages 214–215:

At dusk, a couple of mounted men entered the home of the local rabbi, Pinkhos Rabinovich, and shot him dead. The memorial book explains: “People think that the bandit leader had heard from the local gentiles that the presence of this righteous leader protected the town. For that reason, the murderers were sent to eliminate the rabbi before they attacked the town.”¹²³ With the rabbi out of the way, Zelenyi’s fighters began plundering the village.

The next morning, they rounded up 143 young Jewish men, locked them inside the synagogue, and demanded the sum of one million rubles to release them. Terrified representatives of the Jewish community went door-to-door to collect money.

When they were unable to come up with the funds after two hours, the insurgents took ten men out of the synagogue and shot them, promising to repeat the action every hour. By late afternoon, when it became clear that the ransom was not forthcoming, Zelenyi’s men took the hostages toa bridge on the outskirts of town, shot them all with machine guns, and tossed their bodies into the river.

(Emphasis added in all cases. Most of Jeffrey Veidlinger’s book is worth reading, but he could not resist decontextualizing violence from the Soviet soldiers who went rogue. I can briefly comment on that by saying that a Soviet killing even one person for being Jewish is a disappointment and a tragedy, and understanding the exceptional and unauthorized nature of such violence is not going to be of consolation to everyone, but I can still address it for anybody who cares to know the details. Click here for more.)

Quoting The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. VIII, page 395:

The pogroms carried out by the Soviet army occupy a special place. Although the total number of 106 pogroms and excesses is an impressive one, the Soviet army can by no means be classified with the other pogrom-making groups. Quite the contrary, the Soviet army took all means at its disposal to protect the Jews from pogroms.

Even in the places where such pogroms occurred the Jewish inhabitants in these places remained, nevertheless, sympathetic to the Soviet army, knowing that these pogroms were carried out against the will of the authorities and that the guilty ones were being severely punished.

The pogroms made by Soviet soldiers were exceptions and accidental. They were made, in the main, by detachments of other armies that had gone over to the side of the Soviets. These troops, under the stress of civil war, broke the military discipline and started making pogroms in the same way they had carried on under anti-Soviet leadership.

(Emphasis added.)

Now the question is, how do we prevent this tragedy from falling back into obscurity? What can we do to promote this catastrophe from a historic curiosity to a catastrophe with a lasting impression in public memory?

The most effective means would be to publishing either a wildly successful film or a miniseries like NBC’s Holocaust: The Story of the Family Weiss, which had one hundred twenty million viewers. It is no exaggeration to say that without that series, Shoah memorialization would not be where it is today. Of course, since none of us has either the budget or the time to make a production like that, we have no choice but to rely on grassroots methods.

If your friends or loved ones don’t mind the occasional history discussion, you could mention this topic in a conversation starting out with something like, ‘Have you ever wondered what the worst anti-Jewish incident was before the Holocaust?’ or maybe ‘I was reading a topic the other day about this little-known series of horrific pogroms…’ It would be awkward to bring this up with an acquaintance whom you barely know or an outright stranger, but bringing it up with people whom you trust to be nonjudgemental is safe and can have a lasting impact.

A good day to remember the proto-Shoah would be March 26, which was possibly the deadliest day from that era. I plan to take that as another opportunity to discuss it with some of my colleagues, but either way I’ll be mentioning this disaster—every once in a while—because I can’t let my inability to create media or monuments prevent me from spreading awareness.

Further reading: The Pogroms in Ukraine, 1918–19: Prelude to the Holocaust

‘Ukrainian Neighbors: Pogroms and Extermination in Ukraine 1919–1920’ (mirror)

‘Frontiers of Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Revolutionary Ukraine, Belarus, and Western Russia, 1918–1922’