Pogroms in the Russian Empire () were large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish riots 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 forced to live. The Pale of Settlement primarily included the territories of Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Lithuania as Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of European Russia (including Finland), 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.
Early pogroms
Early pogroms took place in the city of Odessa, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) during the 19th and early 20th centuries. They occurred in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, and 1905.
1881–1882
The use of the term "pogrom" became common in the English language after a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots swept through southwestern Imperial Russia (present-day Ukraine and Poland) from 1881 to 1882; when more than 200 anti-Jewish events occurred in the Russian Empire, the most notable of them were pogroms which occurred in Kiev, Warsaw and Odessa. Pogrom , based on Alina Cała, Hanna Węgrzynek, Gabriela Zalewska, Historia i kultura Żydów polskich. Słownik, WSiP. They changed perceptions among Russian Jews and indirectly gave a significant boost to the early Zionist movement.Leon Pinsker (1882) AutoemancipationYitzhak Maor, The "Sufot Banegev" as a Factor in the Rise of Nationalism among the Jewish Intelligentsia / "הסופות בנגב" כגורם להתעוררות התודעה הלאומית בקרב המשכילים היהודיים, 1981
To circumvent censorship, these pogroms were referred to in the Jewish press as the "Storms in the South" or "Storms in the Negev" (, Sufot BaNegev).Chapter 13 ‘‘Storms in the South,’’ 1881–1882 () from the book: Israel Bartal (Translated by Chaya Naor), The Jews of Eastern Europe, 1772-1881, 2005 The names are a reference to the prophecy in Isaiah 21:1.The Diary of Rabbi Rozenblum, Section "The Pogroms 1882 -- Sufot BaNegev" Variants of the translation of the prophecy: "...As storms in the South pass through, So it comes from the desert, from a terrible land." or: "Like whirlwinds sweeping through the Negev, an invader comes from the desert, from a land of terror", and so on, with "Negev" meaning "South" in Biblical Hebrew and the pogroms in question happening in the south (south-west) of the European part of the Russian Empire.
The event which triggered the pogroms was the assassination of Tsar Alexander II on 13 March [1 March, Old Style], 1881, for which some blamed "agents of foreign influence," implying that Jews committed it.The Jewish Chronicle, May 6, 1881, cited in Benjamin Blech, Eyewitness to Jewish HistorySankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti newspaper №65, March 8 (20), 1881 One of the conspirators was of Jewish origins, and the importance of her role in the assassination was greatly exaggerated during the pogroms that followed. Another conspirator was baselessly rumored to be Jewish.Arthur Morius Francis, Nihilism: Philosophy of Nothingness (2015), p. 64. The right-wing Russian press engaged in an anti-Jewish campaign and spread rumors of an impending pogrom. Rumors and antisemitic blood libels were spread that Jews had been responsible for the tsar's murder or the ritual murder of children.
Local economic conditions, such as debt owed to Jewish 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. Russia's industrialization caused Russians to be moving into and out of major cities. People trying to escape the big cities carried their antisemitic values with them, spread the ideas throughout Russia, and caused more pogroms in different regions of Russia. That has been argued to have been actually more important than rumors of Jewish responsibility for the death of the Tsar.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 Those rumors, 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 rumors, and 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 south-western provinces of the empire, such as Ukraine.
There also was a large pogrom on the night of 15–16 April [27 April new style] 1881 (the day of Eastern Orthodox Easter) in the city of Yelizavetgrad (now Kropyvnytskyi). On 17 April, the Army units were dispatched and were forced to use firearms to extinguish the riot. However, that only incited the whole situation in the region and between April 15 and April 28, 48 anti-Jewish disturbances occurred in Kherson Governorate.
On 26 April 1881, an even bigger disorder engulfed the city of Kiev. The Kiev pogrom of 1881 is considered the worst one that took place in 1881. The pogroms of 1881 continued on through the summer, spreading across the territory of modern-day Ukraine: (Podolia Governorate, Volyn Governorate, Chernigov Governorate, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, and others). During these pogroms the first local Jewish self-defense organizations started to form—the most prominent one in Odessa, which was organized by the Jewish students of the Novorossiysk University.
For decades after the 1881 pogroms, many government officials held the antisemitic belief that Jews in villages were more dangerous than Jews who lived in towns. The Minister of the Interior Nikolay Pavlovich Ignatyev rejected the theory that pogroms were caused by revolutionary socialists, and instead he adopted the idea that they were a protest by the rural population against Jewish exploitation. With this idea in mind, he promulgated the notion that pogroms had spread from villages to towns. Historians today recognize that although rural peasantry did largely participate in the pogrom violence, pogroms began in the towns and spread to the villages.
The new Tsar Alexander III initially blamed revolutionaries for the riots and in May 1882 issued the May Laws, a series of harsh restrictions on Jews.
The pogroms continued for more than three years and were thought to have benefited from at least the tacit support of the authorities, although there were also attempts by the Russian government to end the rioting.
The pogroms and the official reaction to them led many Russian Jews to reassess their perceptions of their status within the Russian Empire, and so led to significant Jewish emigration, mostly to the United States.
Casualties At least 40 Jews were killed during pogroms between April and December 1881. 25 Jews and 25 rioters were killed in 259 pogroms from 1881–1883 in Imperial Russia.
British reaction British responses to pogroms in the Russian Empire varied. The leaders of the Jewish community in London were slow to speak out. It was only after Louisa Goldsmid's support following leadership from an anonymous writer named "Juriscontalus" and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle that action was taken in 1881. Public meetings were held across the country and Jewish and Christian leaders in Britain spoke out against the atrocities.
1903–1906
A much bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, leaving an estimated 2,000 Jews dead and many more wounded, as the Jews took to arms to defend their families and property from the attackers. Particularly, the 1905 pogrom stands as one of the most severe incidents of anti-Jewish violence in Russia at the time, both in terms of property damage and human casualties. In comparison, the pogrom wave that occurred between 1881 and 1882 resulted in fewer fatalities. According to police records in Odessa, a minimum of 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews lost their lives, while around 300 individuals, predominantly Jewish, were injured. Additionally, an estimated 1,632 residential and commercial properties owned by Jews sustained damage. These numbers are considered by some to be conservative estimates, particularly regarding the number of injured individuals. The violence against the Jewish community was extreme, and involved acts such as physical assault and other forms of harm against men, women, and children who were not engaged in opposition to the government at the time. Reports also indicate instances of individuals being thrown from windows, sexual assault against women across age groups, and fatal violence against infants witnessed by their parents.Weinberg, Robert. The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps. 1993, p. 164.Avrutin, Eugene M., and Elissa Bemporad, eds. Pogroms: A Documentary History. Oxford University Press, 2021, p. 90.
In 1903, the Kishinev pogrom occurred after a newspaper promoted a blood libel (a false claim that Jews had murdered a boy to use his blood in a ritual). The perpetrators of the pogrom murdered 49 Jews, wounded around 500, raped 600, and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. Local authorities supported the perpetrators, and Tsar Nicholas II excused the murders they committed.
According to a cable dispatch from St. Petersburg printed by the Jewish Daily News:
The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia [modern Moldova], are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Orthodox Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews", was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 [Note: the actual number of dead was 47–48Hilary L. Rubinstein, Daniel C. Cohn-Sherbok, Abraham J. Edelheit, William D. Rubinstein, The Jews in the Modern World, Oxford University Press, 2002.] and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babies were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews."Jewish Massacre Denounced", in The New York Times, 1903 April 28
This series of pogroms affected 64 towns (including Odessa, Yekaterinoslav, Kiev, Kishinev, Simferopol, Romny, Kremenchug, Nikolayev, Chernigov, Kamenets-Podolski, Yelizavetgrad), and 626 small towns (Russian: городок) and villages, mostly in Ukraine and Bessarabia.
Historians such as Edward Radzinsky suggest that many pogroms were incited by authorities and supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police (the Okhrana), even if some happened spontaneously.Nicholas II. Life and Death by Edward Radzinsky (Russian ed., 1997) p. 89. According to Radzinsky, Sergei Witte (appointed Prime Minister 1905) remarked in his Memoirs that he found that some proclamations inciting pogroms were printed and distributed by Police. The perpetrators who were prosecuted usually received clemency by Tsar's decree.