Kiev pogroms (1919)
Kiev pogroms | |
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Part of White Armies and Don Cossacks |
The Kiev pogroms of 1919 refers to a series of anti-
- Skvyra, June 23, 1919: a pogrom in which 45 Jews were massacred, many were severely wounded, and 35 Jewish women were raped by army insurgents.[1]
- Justingrad, August, 1919: where a pogrom made its way through the shtetl with an unspecified number of Jewish men murdered and Jewish women raped.
- Ivankiv district, 18–20 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.[2]
Immediate reactions
The leaders of the
Escalation of hostility
The Kiev pogroms of 1919 proved the first of many such events.
Of these 53.7% were committed by Petlura's Ukrainian nationalists, the remainder by troops from White Volunteer Army (17%), the Bolsheviks' Red Army (2.3%), or local bands. 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 White Volunteer Army to be much higher, perhaps as high as 50 percent."[4][6]
Background and causes
The Kiev Pogroms of 1919 were splurges of looting, raping, and murder chiefly directed against the shops, factories, homes, and persons of the Jews.[7] Ukraine had the largest concentration of Jews in Russia (part of the Russian organized Pale of Settlement) at the time and was also the scene of the bitterest and most prolonged fighting between Jews and non-Jews. This is important because according to research there is a positive correlation on a broad scale between the number of Jews, in a given place, and an increased likelihood of pogroms, and they become more likely when long-term subordination and superordination of social groups is in dispute.[8]
The Kiev Pogroms of 1919 were not the first of their kind in Ukraine, and other instances of violence occurred and were carried out against Jews in and around Kiev in the 1880s
The tsarist regime attempted to "divert the attention of the socially and politically discontented masses in another direction, the direction of least resistance."[10] Essentially it was a way of redirecting popular discontent away from the government and onto a visible minority group. They did this by inciting the lower classes against the Jews who were largely defenseless, and who, they also proposed, were responsible for the misery of the people as a whole. The Jews were depicted as the exploiters of the people, as the leeches of society, who drained the blood of the worker and robbed him of the bounty of his economic activity.[10]
Another cause of the Kiev Pogroms of 1919, was economic difficulties and changes in the urban environment. Economic difficulties and political strife tended to increase the probability of pogroms and this was certainly the case with Ukraine which was in a state of conflict and transition during the Ukrainian War of Independence and afterwards when it had separated from Russia. The stress of changes in the urban environment also provided fertile ground for violence against Jews, stresses such as immigration, not only by Jews from other parts of the empire but by outsiders in general made the pogroms possible.[11]
See also
Footnotes
- ISBN 9781560430681– via Google Books, preview.
- Harry James Cargas, Reflections of a Post-Auschwitz Christian. On meeting Kurt Waldheim. Pg. 136 [1]
- ^ a b Benjamin Frankel, A Restless Mind: Essays in Honor of Amos Perlmutter. Published by Routledge, pg. 272 [2]
- ^ ISBN 0253338115.
- ^ Sharman Kadish, Bolsheviks and British Jews: The Anglo-Jewish Community, Britain, and the Russian Revolution. Published by Routledge, pg. 87 [3]
- ^ Manus I. Midlarsky, The Killing Trap: genocide in the twentieth century. Published by Cambridge University Press. Page 45 [4]
- ^ William C. Fuller, The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia, 2006
- ^ Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, "Pogroms in Russia: Explanations, Comparisons, Suggestions", Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 17
- ^ Elias Hiefetz, The Slaughter of the Jews In the Ukraine In 1919, 1921, preface
- ^ a b Elias Hiefetz, The Slaughter of the Jews In the Ukraine In 1919, 1921, chapter 1.
- ^ Heinz-Dietrich Löwe, "Pogroms in Russia: Explanations, Comparisons, Suggestions", Jewish Social Studies, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 18
Further references
- Harold Henry Fisher: The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919-1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration [5]
- William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921. Published 1935 by Macmillan company pg. 230 [6]
- David J. Mitchell, 1919: Red Mirage. Published 1970, Cape, 249 [7]
- Zvi Y. Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Pg. 67. [8]
- I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The Origins of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990.