1880-1919 - Anti-Jewish Pogroms
At the beginning of the 19th century, there was an organized, official attempt to settle Jews on the land as farmers. Jewish agricultural colonies were created, and Jews were moved to the lands of Kherson gubernia, beginning a continuous movement of Jews east and south.
The tsarist regime endeavored to divert the attention of the socially and politically discontented masses in another direction, the direction of least resistance. This they did by inciting the ignorant and intimidated lower classes against the defenseless Jews, who, they alleged, were responsible for the misery of the people. The Jews were represented as the exploiters of the people, as leeches, who sucked the blood of the peasant and robbed him of the fruits of his economic activity.
The pogroms of the eighties correspond to the revolutionary movement of the intelligentzia organized as "Narodniki" ("Zemlya i Volya," "Narodnaya Volya"). The brutal pogroms of 1881-82 were carried out mostly in Ukraine; these atrocities and economic hardship stimulated substantial Jewish emigration from the region to the United States and other countries. In 1903, there was a particularly brutal pogrom in Kishinev (now Chisinau, the capital of Moldova.) More pogroms took place in 1905-06. The emigration to the United States began in the 1880s as a result of pogroms, but the most intense emigration took place after 1903. Jews also moved to Western Europe, Australia, and South America, but the greatest number immigrated to North America, particularly to the United States.
The pogroms in the beginning of the 20th century, to the time of the first revolution (1903-1905), correspond to the great revolutionary strikes in the south of Russia. Finally, the third pogrom wave, which came right after the revolution (end of 1905 and 1906), corresponds to the outbreak of the first revolution itself. The aim of the pogroms in the eighties was mainly the destruction of Jewish possessions. There was robbery and plunder, down and feathers were scattered to the wind, furniture was broken to pieces, valuables and money were taken away. In many cases women were violated, men beaten, but "with moderation," not to death. The pogroms, however, in Kishinev (1903), Gomel (1903) and Zhitomir (April, 1905), already began to assume a bloody course. Jews were murdered, the victims numbered many dozens. After the revolution (1905 and 1906) the pogroms expanded both in space and in time, with about a thousand victims.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Ukraine, within its current boundaries, had a population of just under 30 million. Ukrainians comprised about 72 percent, Jews- 9 percent, Russians- 8 percent, Poles over 4 percent, and the remaining groups almost 7 percent. Wars, revolutions, and famines inflicted heavy but uneven losses on all groups, and some barely survived. Western Ukraine saw World War I fighting, causing grievous, war-related losses. Revolution, famine, and typhus inflicted heavy losses in the east.
During the Great War neighborly relations were somewhat disturbed under the German occupation. The well-being of the population both Christian and Jewish had increased considerably. It was the time of unlimited speculation in goods and money, of smuggling in and out of Soviet Russia and the neutral zone. The peasants, however, could not increase their earnings in the same measure as the others. The products of the land were taken from them by force, at low prices, and carried to Germany. On the basis of exaggerated reports of "the wealth of the Jews," there developed among the peasants a feeling of envy and a desire for city products (manufactured goods, shoes), of which there was nothing in the Ukrainian village, rumor having it that the Jews in the larger centers enjoyed a superfluity of such things.
The Rada became an important political power, maintaining its independence of the Russian Provisional Government, which had not the slightest influence in Ukraine. The tendency of the Central Rada to favor separation from Russia forced the Jewish parties into opposition. The anti-Semitic agitation increased after the Ukraine was reconquered by the Central Rada with the help of German bayonets. It was necessary to find a scapegoat to bear the national disgrace and carry away on his back the anger and hate of the army and the peasants. The Jews were made the scapegoat, on the ground that they had caused the occupation of the Ukraine by German troops and were in the service of the Bolshevist government.
Gradually, step by step and at critical moments, they began to take up the method of pogroms. First they addressed threats to the Jewish leaders, warning them of the people's wrath in case they did not exert the proper influence on the Jewish masses. Then followed the actual application of the method in question, first in the form of organized excesses and demonstrations, and then at the most critical moment in the form of a systematic and uninterrupted series of organized blood baths and horrible devastations. Forced back by the Soviet government to the frontier of the Ukraine, the leaders of the Ukrainian Republic, as represented by the Directory and its responsible agents, never again let go of this bloody weapon by which they expected to secure victory.
The terrible Jewish massacres in the Ukraine in the year 1919, which set the whole land aflame, can not be compared with the pogroms in the eighties and during the first decade of the 20th century. The pogroms of the tsarist period were almost exclusively confined to the cities. There were none in the Ukrainian villages. Insurrection, robbery and violence were done by the city hoodlums in the larger centers. Not so the massacres in the year 1919. Here the Ukrainian village played the main role, the Ukrainian peasants, the bands of military insurgents as well as the more or less organized bands of insurrectionists.
Jewish families were exterminated in numerous villages and hamlets, or were killed during their flight from their ruined homes as they wandered from place to place, or were pulled out of railway trains and beaten to death, or were drowned by being thrown out of steamers, or were killed in the woods and the highways. Great numbers of those who succumbed to their injuries and fell victims of contagious and other diseases which they contracted during their imprisonment in dark rooms without food, drink or clothing.
The entire number of persons who perished during the first period of the pogroms at the time of the Directory and the Batki amounts to at least 70,000. The number of those killed in the second period of the pogroms wass 50,000. To assume that 120,000 deaths were due directly to the pogroms, would not be exaggeration. To these must be added the injured and wounded, those suffering from nervous and mental shock and the violated women. The pogroms swept the Ukraine like a hurricane, and it was impossible to undertake a census of such cases. The number, however, must be prodigious, running into the tens of thousands.
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