Jews, Pogroms, and the White Movement:

A Historiographical Critique*

Oleg Budnitskii

During the Russian Civil War (1918–20) Russian Jewry1 suffered a tragedy
comparable to the period of Hetman Bohdan Khmel¢nytskyi and surpassed only
by the Holocaust. Historians differ in their estimates of the number of victims of
anti-Jewish pogroms, the bloodiest of which occurred in Ukraine from 1919 to
the beginning of 1920. No statistics were kept, of course, and the numbers put
forth in the literature range from 50,000 to 200,000 dead.2 To these we should
add tens of thousands who were maimed, raped, and robbed.
Despite the magnitude of these events, their circumstances and consequences
have been insufficiently studied. The tragedy of Russian Jewry in 1918–20 has
tended to exist “in the shadow” of the Holocaust. Some historians, not without
basis, see connections between the pogroms in the era of the Russian Revolution

* The author is grateful to Peter Holquist and Ben Nathans for comments on an earlier version of
this article. It has benefited as well from discussion during the Maryland Workshop on New
Approaches to Russian and Soviet History, “Occupations and Liberations from 1812 to World
War II” (University of Maryland, College Park, 25–26 March 2000). I am also indebted to Peter
Holquist for his efforts in editing the English-language version of this text. Support for the work in
this article was provided by the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism.
1 In discussing “Russian Jewry,” I mean the Jewish population of the former Russian empire,
including Ukraine, Belorussia, etc.
2 Salo Baron calculated that the number of victims “easily” exceeds 50,000 (The Russian Jew under
Tsars and Soviets, 2nd ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1975], 184); Nora Levin gives the figure of
50–60,000 (The Jews in the Soviet Union since 1917, vol. 1[New York: New York University Press,
1988], 49); Shmuel Ettinger estimates 75,000 (in A History of the Jewish People, ed. Haim Hiller
Ben-Sasson [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976], 954); Nahum Gergel (“The Pogroms in
the Ukraine in 1918–21,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 6 [1951], 251) and Sergei
Ivanovich Gusev-Orenburgskii (Kniga o evreiskikh pogromakh na Ukraine v 1919 g. [Petrograd:
Izdatel¢stvo Z. I. Grzhebina, n. d.], 14) both speak of about 100,000 fatalities. Finally, the number
of 200,000 victims is given in Iurii Larin, Evrei i anti-Semitizm v SSSR (Moscow and Leningrad:
Gosizdat, 1929), 55. See also Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1995), 112. Gergel considered it possible to document 50–60,000 Jewish dead due to
pogroms, but noted that, considering the lack of precise data, the actual number could actually well
be twice that figure. The author of a recent study accepts the relatively lower figures (Henry
Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], 110).
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2(4): 1–23, Fall 2001.
752 OLEG BUDNITSKII

and the Nazi genocide. “In some ways,” writes Abraham Greenbaum about the
pogroms of the Civil War epoch, “especially since killings were sometimes car-
ried out as a kind of ‘national duty’ without the usual robbery – they bear com-
parison with the Holocaust some twenty years later.”3 Richard Pipes writes, pos-
sibly with some exaggeration, that “in every respect except for the absence of a
central organization to direct the slaughter, the pogroms of 1919 were a prelude
to and rehearsal for the Holocaust.” The accusation of Jewish “involvement in
Bolshevism” and the “deadly identification of Communism with Jewry” paved
the way for the mass destruction of European Jewry, and in this respect the
“spontaneous looting and killings left a legacy that two decades later was to lead
to the systematic mass murder of Jews at the hands of the Nazis.”4
It is true that Fedor Viktorovich Vinberg and other Russian rightists emi-
grated to Germany and there disseminated to a German audience the “Protocols
of the Elders of Zion,” and Alfred Rosenberg had a distinct influence upon the
emergence of Nazi ideology. However, the influence of certain Russian anti-
Semites on the German scene should not be denied, and their influence should
not be treated as decisive. Pipes’ claim, following Walter Laqueur, that “the ra-
tionale for Nazi extermination of the Jews came from Russian right-wing circles”
is greatly overstated.5 Ultimately, the notion that the involvement of Jews in
Bolshevism (or, more precisely, the indissoluble link between Judaism and
Bolshevism) led to the destruction of European Jewry during World War II is no
more than a variation on the theme of Nazism as a “response” to Bolshevism.6
The importance of the “Jewish question” in the history of Russia’s Civil War
cannot be overemphasized, and the events of these years had an even greater sig-
nificance for the fate of Russian Jewry (and, indeed, European Jewry in general)

3 Abraham Greenbaum, “Bibliographical Essay,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Rus-

sian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 380.
4 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 112.
5 Ibid., 258; Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965), 115.
6 For a critique of these views, formulated most clearly in the works of the German historian Ernst
Nolte, see Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). As Evans rightly
notes regarding the origins of Nazi anti-Semitism, “Nazi anti-Semitism was gratuitous: it was not
provoked by anything, it was not a response to anything. It was born out of a political fantasy, in
which the Jews, without a shred of justification, were held responsible for all that the Nazis believed
was wrong with the modern world” (40). Everything else was just Nazi attempts to rationalize the
irrational. A study of events, and particularly of pogroms in the period of the Russian Civil War, is
surely of more than “academic interest” – not so much because the Nazis learned anything from
the Whites, but rather because the sources of the Whites’ anti-Semitism, its ideological
justifications (thereby providing it with a quasi-rational foundation), and the methods for “solving”
the “Jewish question” may be comparable to the Nazis. It is precisely the degree to which this was
the case that should, in my view, become the subject of specific historical investigation.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 753

in the 20th century. Before investigating this problem further, we must first ana-
lyze the existing historiography on the “Jewish question” in the Russian Civil
War. This article critically explores the literature concerning one of its most im-
portant aspects – the history of the relationship between participants in the
White movement and the Jewish population of the former Russian empire. Anal-
ysis of several of the more significant works demonstrates that these relations
were much more complex than has been hitherto recognized. They cannot be re-
duced simply to a duality of executioners and their victims. I of course do not
mean to “whitewash” the White movement; its participants so besmirched its
name that no objective historian could bleach it clean. Rather, my task is to for-
mulate, on the basis of the existing literature, the essential questions that con-
front historians examining the “Jewish question” in the Russian Civil War. I
wish to emphasize that my goal is not to cover all the existing literature on the
topic, but to consider those works that are both most significant and
representative.
However, the number of works devoted to these events is surprisingly mod-
est. The vast majority were published in the 1920s and 1930s, and were primar-
ily documentary collections rather than works of history.7 In addition, research
tended to localize its topic in both geographic and chronological terms: as a rule,
studies focused on Ukraine in the years 1919–20. The reasons for this localiza-
tion are easy to explain: the bulk of the pogroms occurred in 1919, and most of
the Jews of the former Russian empire resided in Ukraine (and Poland). It was
natural for authors of the first works dealing with Russian Jewry during the Civil
War – in particular, those preoccupied with the problem of how anti-Bolshevik
forces related to the Jewish population – to focus primarily on the history of the
pogroms. The major task of these historians, who themselves were mostly Jewish,
was to tell the world the truth about the pogroms and their perpetrators.
The White army – often termed “Volunteers,” a title derived from the
army’s first military contingent, the Volunteer Army – occupied an “honorary”
position among the pogromists. Il ¢ia Mikhailovich Cherikover [Tsherikover] was
not far from the truth when he calculated in 1932 that “in relation to the total
number of pogroms in the Ukraine in those years the pogroms by the Volunteer

7 For example, Elias Heifetz, The Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919 (New York: Seltzer,
1921); Gusev-Orenburgskii, Kniga o evreiskikh pogromah na Ukraine v 1919 g.; idem, Bagrovaia
kniga: Pogromy 1919–20 gg. na Ukraine (Kharbin: Izdatel ¢stvo Dal ¢nevostochnogo Evreiskogo
Obschestvennogo Komiteta Pomoschi Sirotam–Zhertvam Pogromov [“Dekopo”], 1922); Nahum
I. Shtiff, Pogromy na Ukraine (period Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii) (Berlin: Izdatel¢stvo “Vostok,” 1922);
Il¢ia Mikhailovich Cherikover, Anti-Semitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917–1918 gg. (K istorii
ukrainsko-evreiskikh otnoshenii) (Berlin: Ostjudisches Historisches Archiv, 1923); Joseph B.
Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii na Ukraine (k istorii antisemitizma na Ukraine v
1919–1920 gg.) (Berlin: Ostjudisches Historiches Archiv, 1932), and others. For greater detail, see
Greenbaum, “Bibliographical Essay,” 380–82.
754 OLEG BUDNITSKII

Army constitute just one fifth.” But his total is for all the years from 1918 to
1921, while the pogroms by the Volunteer Army lasted only several months. In
those few months the Volunteers broke all records. Their pogroms were more in-
tensive than the others, their blows sharper, and their numbers greater.8
These pioneering works attempted not only to register these tragic events,
but also to find an adequate explanation for them. In March 1920 Nahum I.
Shtiff, a member of the editorial board for collection and processing of materials
about the pogroms in Ukraine, wrote the first “chronicle.” Two years later it was
published in Berlin in an augmented edition under the title Pogromy na Ukraine
(period Dobrovol¢cheskoi armii) (Pogroms in Ukraine: The Period of the Volunteer
Army). Shtiff pointed out that one part of his work was descriptive, based pri-
marily on the stories of surviving witnesses of the pogroms, while the other part
sprang from the innate necessity to comprehend past events, to find a
key to the origin of the described events … It was necessary to demon-
strate the inherent organic connection of the pogroms, as a part of the
military life, to the military, social, and political program of the Volun-
teer Army … Its sociopolitical part manifested all the signs of restora-
tion, a return to pre-revolutionary Russia. This affected the Volunteers’
attitude towards the three main constituencies of Russian life: the peas-
ants, workers, and peripheral nationalities. The return of the land to
estate owners, the suppression of the workers’ movement, and overt
Russification, contempt for the national needs of inorodtsy [non-Russian
inhabitants of the Russian empire] – such were the three major parts of
that program. The denial of rights to Jews and their enslavement were
an inalienable, organic part of the program.9
In his introduction Shtiff set forth his views about the causes of the pogroms:
“Pogroms were the reaction of the restorationists to the civic emancipation of
Jews that had been obtained during the hated revolution; they were the first step
towards the enserfment of the Jews. Such is the main view, developed in the sec-
ond part of my work, regarding the origin of the Volunteer pogroms.”10
Shtiff did not set himself the task of discerning different trends in the White
camp, or the nuances of White ideology. His work was simultaneously a testi-
mony and an indictment. At the same time, Shtiff noted the attempts of the

8 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Pogromy Dobrovol ¢cheskoi armii, ed. Schectman, 26. By
Gergel’s estimates, which Abramson accepts, Whites were responsible for 17% of the total number
of pogroms in the Ukraine in 1919, killing 5,235 individuals, or 16.9% of the overall total of
victims. Given these figures, it is obvious that each tenth of a percentage point represents several
human lives (Abramson, Prayer, 115, 120).
9 Shtiff, Pogromy na Ukraine, vii–viii.
10 Ibid., viii. Emphasis in orig.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 755

Volunteer command to put an end to the pogroms. However, as he correctly

observed, these attempts were “languid and insincere.”11
Semen Markovich Dubnov [Shimon Dubnow] interpreted the Volunteer
pogroms somewhat differently in his introduction to Cherikover’s 1923 book
Antisemitizm i pogromy na Ukraine, 1917–1918 gg. (K istorii ukrainsko-evreiskih
otnoshenii) (Antisemitism and Pogroms in Ukraine, 1917–1918: Towards a History
of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations). In his introductory article, bearing the telling title
“Tret¢ia gaidamakshchina” (“The Third Haidamak Period”), Dubnov wrote:
Many nations have inscribed their names into the Jews’ millennial mar-
tyrology, but not many would measure up to such a prominent and, of
course, unenviable position as the Ukrainians. Since the middle of the
17th century, this nation in times of disturbances has undertaken the
“mission” of exterminating Jews with more zeal than its predecessors in
the centuries of the Crusades.
Dubnov made the reservation that when contemplating the “pogromist mission”
of the Ukrainians in Jewish history, he meant “people” in a relative rather than
absolute sense, i.e. “relatively large masses of people of a certain level of spiritual
culture, exclusive of the layers of society that rose above that level of culture.”12
It is not hard to see that the “Volunteer” pogroms do not fit into Dubnov’s
schema. The great Jewish historian realized this and tried to reconcile the con-
tradiction. A footnote indicated that
“Denikiia” [Denikin’s domain], or the pogroms by the anti-Bolshevik
Volunteer Army, the most monstrous of all the pogroms of that time,
seems to constitute an exception from our general thesis. Among the
perpetrators were heterogeneous ethnic elements of Russia, from the
former tsarist Guards to Caucasian inorodtsy. But here the following cir-
cumstances should be brought to mind: 1) the theater of military en-
gagement was the territory of Ukraine; 2) the instigators of the butchery
against the Jews were for the most part Cossacks, who since the 17th
century had been the precursors of the Haidamaks in such feats; 3) just
as in the previous epochs, hard on the heels of the Cossack military po-
groms follows “civilian” peasant butchery – the Haidamak looting, and
transport of the plunder from the cities to the countryside, etc.13
In this instance Dubnov’s thesis does not stand up well to examination. One has
only to recall the extermination of the Jews by Konstantin Konstantinovich
Mamontov’s cavalry units during his famous raid through the rear of the Red

11 Ibid., 88–90.
12 Semen Markovich Dubnov, “Tret ¢ia gaidamakshchina,” in Cherikover, Anti-Semitizm, 9.
13 Ibid., 14. Ironically enough, in Russian the word “civilian” also denotes “peaceful.”
756 OLEG BUDNITSKII

Army in the fall of 1919. In this case, the massacre of the Jews occurred on Great
Russian territory (Elets and other cities), and thus Ukrainian territory could have
had nothing to do with these slaughters.
The predominantly “Ukrainian” quality of the pogroms had earlier been
noted by one of their first chroniclers, Sergei Ivanovich Gusev-Orenburgskii,
who compiled his 1922 Bagrovaia kniga (Crimson Book) from the materials of the
Committee for Assistance to the Victims of Pogroms under the Russian Red
Cross in Kiev. Gusev-Orenburgskii, like Shtiff, first wrote his book in Kiev, and
then moved to Rostov when the Whites were fleeing in panic. Gusev-
Orenburgskii also incorporated descriptions of the Volunteers’ actions, yet he
stressed that “the history of the Ukraine is a chronicle of anti-Jewish pogroms.…
Before our very eyes passes the fifth [such] Ukrainian mass, bloody action – a
horrible bloody tide, surpassing all horrors of past times.”14
In 1932, ten years after the appearance of Shtiff’s book, Cherikover wrote an
introduction to a work Joseph Schechtman published in Berlin devoted to the
same topic, entitled Pogroms of the Volunteer Army in the Ukraine: Towards the
History of Anti-Semitism in the Ukraine in 1919–1920. The work that Cherikover
introduced was based upon a wider range of sources than earlier publications on
the same topic. Over the preceding decade numerous memoirs about the Civil
War had been published which touched upon the pogroms and Russian Jewry.
Schechtman published some of the more important documents in his appendix,
which amounted to a third of the book. In the introduction, Cherikover specifi-
cally addressed the problem of the White movement and the Jews:
It is hard to understand the viciously anti-Semitic ideology and the po-
gromist actions of the Volunteer Army without realizing beforehand the
nature of the Volunteer White movement and its effective forces, the
army and government in particular, without sizing up the roots of that
regime. The appearance in the emigration of a very rich memoir litera-
ture enables this issue to be well illuminated. But it is also important to
shed light upon it from the Jewish perspective, from the standpoint of
the ordeal Ukrainian Jewry underwent under Volunteer authority. 15
Cherikover emphasized that the founders of the Volunteer movement were “the
generals of the tsarist army Kornilov, Alekseev, Kaledin, and Denikin, who man-
aged to summon to the Don a large military force consisting of Russian officer
volunteers, imbued with hatred not only for the October, but also for the Febru-
ary, not only for the Bolsheviks, but for the Revolution altogether.”16

14 Gusev-Orenburgskii, Bagrovaia kniga, 3.

15 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 7.
16 Ibid., 8.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 757

Cherikover’s interpretation, however appealing, does not correspond well

with the facts. The generals he listed had certainly served in the tsarist army – in
Russia there had been no other – but it was precisely those generals who, to a
large extent, can be considered the “creators” of the February Revolution, quite
possibly to a greater degree than some “professional revolutionaries.” It was these
generals, among them Alekseev and Denikin, who pressed in February 1917 for
the abdication of the emperor (who at the time was also their unsuccessful com-
mander in chief), and their intervention largely determined the demise of a 300-
year-old dynasty. In addition, all the generals Cherikover lists could boast very
“democratic” social origins, since they had peasant or Cossack roots.
Nor did these generals ever manage to gather a “large military force” on the
Don. From its formation in November 1917 through February 1918, when it
was forced by Bolshevik pressure to abandon the region, the Volunteer Army
numbered a paltry 4,000 men, including a student battalion and civilian follow-
ers. According to Denikin’s own memoirs, among those Volunteers who partici-
pated in the army’s first campaign, the storied “Ice March” from the Don
through the Kuban steppes, there were several dozen Jewish officers.17 The Dec-
laration of the Volunteer Army, published in November 1917, was written by
Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov, one of the leaders of Russian liberalism. Miliukov
was a prime actor in the February Revolution, and was broadly identified as
having Judeophilic views.
All these circumstances seem to rule out any intentionally restorationist and
pogromist nature to “Volunteerism.” Indeed, Schechtman himself noted this fact
in his 1932 work, stating that anti-Semitism did not initially manifest itself in
Volunteer circles. However, as the army expanded and inducted new officers,
anti-Semitic tendencies grew. Had anti-Semitism, or in any case “official” anti-
Semitism, been inherent to the White movement from its very beginnings, how
are we to explain the “active gravitation” Schechtman observed “in certain Jewish
circles” towards the Volunteer Army in June–July 1918? Still, even in this early
period, Jews were frequently refused admission not only into officer ranks or
medical positions, but even as soldiers.18
Schechtman relates a rather revealing episode. A renowned Rostov public ac-
tivist, Abram Al ¢perin, met on 8 September 1918 in Ekaterinodar, then the seat
of the White leadership, with General Mikhail Alekseev. He “had to draw the
latter’s attention to the facts of the refusal to accept Jews into the army and other
manifestations of anti-Semitism in the Volunteer Army. General Alekseev, how-
ever, replied firmly: ‘I and all of the high command stand firmly on the grounds
of equality for all citizens, and anti-Semitism is foreign to us. So long as I am

17 Anton Ivanovich Denikin, “Ocherki russkoi smuty,” Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1994), 104.
18 Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 54.
758 OLEG BUDNITSKII

head of the Volunteer Army, there will be no anti-Semitism in it.’ But,” stresses
Schechtman, “right after this … assertion followed an equivocal additional
phrase which in effect nullified the meaning of that programmatic statement:
‘But, of course, history has its weight, and the sentiments formed over the years
cannot be overcome at once.’”19
Unfortunately, it seems evident that the former tsarist general had a more re-
alistic understanding of the situation and public opinion at the time than the
Jewish historian did 15 years later. Not all White generals countenanced anti-
Semitic sentiments, and even more so anti-Semitic actions, regardless of whatever
personal opinions they might have held regarding Jews. Thus, Maksim Moisee-
vich Vinaver recalled an incident that occurred while he was at Denikin’s staff
headquarters in Ekaterinodar in November 1918. He received a telegram from
the Crimea about the fear of pogroms by Volunteers occupying the territory, and
about the panic reigning among the Jews. He went to General Abram Mikhail-
ovich Dragomirov, one of the primary figures of the Russian anti-Soviet move-
ment, and showed him the telegram. At that time, there was discussion of
publishing a declaration clearly laying out the objectives of the Volunteer Army
to the population of Crimea. “Dragomirov himself,” recalled Vinaver, “proposed
including a point in the declaration unequivocally warning against any national-
istic ‘excesses’ and edited it in ‘the most decisive manner.’” The text of the decla-
ration was sent by telegraph to the highest ranks of the Volunteer Army, and to
Vinaver as a member of the Crimean government, on 7 November 1918. Its
third point read: “The Volunteer Army is highly indignant at the attempts to pit
one nationality or one class against another.”20 Dragomirov was certainly no lib-
eral. Most contemporaries considered him an outright anti-Semite. If Drago-
mirov warned the “ranks of the Volunteer Army” against nationalistic excesses,
and subsequently ordered the trial of several pogromists in Kiev, it was for purely
pragmatic reasons. The general was a sensible man and realized that pogroms led
to the decomposition of the army. Had leaders of the Jewish communities be-
lieved Denikin was conducting a deliberately anti-Semitic policy, they surely
would not have asked him during a meeting on 26 July 1919 not only to clearly
and resolutely condemn pogroms, but also to insist that Jews be accepted into
the Volunteer Army.21
Cherikover in 1932 correctly stressed that orders against pogroms always
contained qualifications and were issued too late. Such orders were certainly im-
plemented in a lukewarm manner. The mere fact that orders were issued,

19 Ibid., 54–55.
20 Ibid., 35–36; Maksim M. Vinaver, Nashe pravitel¢stvo (Krymskiia vospominaniia 1918–1919 gg.)
(Paris: Imprimerie d’art voltaire, 1928), 52, 53.
21 Denikin, “Ocherki,” 108.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 759

Cherikover contended, did not matter much. Even so, Denikin issued fewer such
orders than, say, Simon Vasil ¢evich Petliura, whose supporters in Paris even re-
published a whole volume of them in a 1927 French translation. 22 Yet was there
a government that cared about its image abroad that did not issue such decrees?
Cherikover, who insisted on the restorationist and reactionary character of
Denikin’s regime, wrote that “the public groupings on which General Denikin
leaned directly and that participated in his government were the Sovet gosu-
darstvennogo ob≤edineniia [Council of State Unification] … headed by former
tsarist minister Krivoshein, and especially the Natsional¢nyi tsentr [National Cen-
ter], whose soul was the Constitutional Democrats.”23 In point of fact, the “gov-
ernment,” or, to be more exact, Osoboe soveshchanie pri glavnokomanduiushchem
(Special Conference under the Commander-in-Chief), was coalitionist. Krivo-
shein did not participate in it. The Constitutional Democrats (Kadets) did in-
deed play a decisive role in the Special Conference, but one can hardly accuse
members of that left-center “liberal” party of “restorationism.” Moreover, adver-
saries considered the Kadets to be a “Jewish” party. The Kadets consistently
spoke up for Jewish civic equality, and there are no grounds for suspecting them,
at least in the pre-October period, of anti-Semitism.24
However, it is difficult to refute Schechtman’s assertion that the Volunteer
Army’s pogromist anti-Semitism “did not incubate in the special conditions of
the Ukrainian environment, but they brought it to the Ukraine prefabricated.”25
The allegations cited above by historians writing in the 1920s regarding the mys-
tical effects of the Ukrainian “soil,” which somehow provoked the pogroms, are
unsound. So are the reflections of one recent Russian historian, Sergei Aleksee-
vich Pavliuchenkov, who writes that while the Denikinites “were still within the
boundaries of the Don, Kuban, Crimea and even Kharkov, everything was more
or less calm for the Jews …. But as soon as the White armies set foot in Ukraine
proper and encountered the prepared ground (gotovuiu pochvu), they joined the
pogroms fully and enthusiastically.”26 Other than the incomparable modifier
“more or less calm,” what serves as this author’s criteria? It is most implausible
that advancing several dozen or even hundreds of kilometers – even on that
magical “Ukrainian soil” – could in the course of several weeks turn a regular

22 Cherikover, “Beloe dvizhenie i evrei,” in Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, ed. Schechtman, 17;
Documents sur les pogromes en Ukraine et l’assassinat de Simon Petlura à Paris (1917–1921–1926)
(Paris: Comité Commémoratif Simon Petlura, 1927).
23 Ibid., 12.
24 See Oleg Budnitskii, “ V. A. Maklakov i evreiskii vopros,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta
[Moscow and Jerusalem], no. 1 (19) (1999), 42–93.
25 Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 33.
26 Sergei Alekseevich Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm v Rossii: Vlast¢ i massy (Moscow: RKT-
Istoriia, 1997), 258.
760 OLEG BUDNITSKII

military unit into a band of pogromists and murderers had there been no
preconditions, first and foremost ideological and psychological ones.
The American historian Peter Kenez devotes special attention to the place of
anti-Semitism in the ideology of the White movement. Proceeding from the
study of “secret reports and contemporary correspondence of participants of the
White movement,” he came to the conclusion that “anti-Semitism was neither a
peripheral nor an accidental aspect of White ideology; it was a focal point of
their world view.” As he elaborates,
the Russian officer corps had long been anti-Semitic in Imperial Russia
… [Officers] identified Jews with liberalism and socialism, ideologies
which they loathed. The great majority of them had no trouble at all
condoning tsarist policy, which regarded Jews as a hostile and alien mi-
nority, whose very existence was somehow threatening to the Russian
people … Yet their “normal” anti-Semitism was mild compared to the
murderous obsession, which they developed in the course of the Civil
War. Seeing Jews in important positions in the Soviet regime no doubt
contributed to their hatred, but this cannot be the full explanation, for
obviously most of the Soviet leaders and most of the workers of the
Cheka were as Russian as themselves.27
In other treatments Kenez writes even more boldly, comparing Russian White
officers to the Nazis:
They always disliked Jews; now their anti-Semitism reached pathological
proportion. This new and passionate anti-Semitism was born out of the
need to explain, not so much to others, as to themselves, why the revolu-
tion had occurred. In the view of the reactionary officers it was the alien
Jews who were primarily responsible. They were the microbes that de-
stroyed the healthy body politic of old Russia. As the officers became
even more frustrated by the confusing world around them, their anti-
Semitism became increasingly pathological. They murdered more and
more Jews and it was necessary to justify themselves by thinking up sin-
ister Jewish conspiracies. Perhaps paradoxically, participation in po-
groms increased anti-Semitism.… It alone enabled them to make sense
of a world that to them seemed senseless. In this respect, at least, the
White officers were precursors of the Nazis.28

27 Peter Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1977), 176–77.
28 Peter Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier
and Lambroza, 310–11.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 761

Kenez’s assertion that Denikin and some of his generals, like the notorious anti-
Semite Vasilii Shulgin, were concerned with the pogroms primarily in the sense
that they undermined the military discipline is undoubtedly correct. “On the
other hand, anti-Semitism was a trump card in the hands of White propagan-
dists. Associating Bolshevism with Judaism harmed not only the Jews, but also
Soviet power.”29 The Whites never managed to find a more effective means of
propaganda.
In opposition to Kenez, Pipes considers i t absurd “ t o depict t h e White
movement as proto-Nazi, with anti-Semitism the “focal point of [its] world-view.”
As discussed above, Pipes contends that the pogroms helped cement an influential
association of Jews with Bolshevism, not that the Whites paved the ideological way
for Nazism. In Pipes’ opinion, this “focal point” w a s nationalism, not anti-
Semitism. He agrees, of course, that “the White officer corps, not to speak of the
Cossacks, was increasingly contaminated” with anti-Semitism a s the Civil War
unfolded. “Even so,” h e writes, “it would b e a mistake t o draw any direct link
between this emotional virulence and the anti-Jewish excesses during the Civil
War.” On the one hand, notes Pipes, “most of the massacres were perpetrated not
by Russian White troops but by Ukrainian irregulars and Cossacks.” On the other
hand, “the pogroms were inspired far less by religious and national passions than
by ordinary greed: the worst atrocities on the White side were committed by the
Terek Cossacks, who had never known Jews and regarded them merely as objects
of extortion.”30 Following one of the authors of the renowned collection Rossiia i
evrei ( Russia a n d t h e Jews), I o s i f Menassievich B i k e rman [Joseph M .
Bikermann],31 Pipes contends that t h e anti-Jewish pogroms, despite having
“certain unique features, in a broader perspective” were b u t a part of t h e all-
Russian pogrom initiated b y t h e Bolsheviks. “Once pogroms a n d razgromy
[destruction of property] became the order of the day, i t was inevitable that the
Jews would be the principal victims: they were seen as aliens, were defenseless, and
were believed rich.”32 Pipes takes t h e momentary, contagious spread o f anti-
Semitism following the February Revolution to be the result of a fatal confluence
of circumstances, including the effective liquidation of the Pale o f Settlement
during World War I and the appearance o f the Jews i n the Russian hinterland.
Then, after 1917, the widespread appearance of Jews in the halls of power created
the impression that “whereas everybody else h a d lost from the revolution, the
Jews, and they alone, had benefited from it.”33

29 Ibid.
30 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 105.
31 Iosif Menassievich Bikerman, “Rossiia i russkoe evreistvo,” in Rossiia i evrei: Sbornik pervyi
(Berlin: Osnova, 1924), 61.
32 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 106.
33 Ibid., 101.
762 OLEG BUDNITSKII

On the whole, these observations are indisputably correct, although it seems

to me that Pipes underestimates the historical and religious roots of Russian anti-
Semitism. The picture that he draws is too schematic and some of his statements
too categorical. For instance, it is hard to agree that “[t]he White movement in
the first year of its existence was free of anti-Semitism, at any rate, in its overt
manifestations,” and that everything changed in the winter of 1918–19 when
“hostility towards the Jews … emerged in the Southern White Army.” There
were, in Pipes’ opinion, three causes for this development. First, he points to the
active role of the Jews in the Cheka, which carried out the Red Terror. Second,
he emphasizes the consequences following from the evacuation of the German
troops. Contrary to White expectations, the Bolshevik regime, which in their
opinion was holding onto power due solely to German support, remained in
power after it had ended. Russian anti-Bolsheviks, naturally, searched for a new
scapegoat, and found one in the Jews. Finally, the murder of the imperial family
“was immediately blamed on Jews, who in fact played a secondary role in it.”34
It is hard to imagine that “the hostility towards the Jews,” which supposedly
emerged in the winter of 1918–19, could erupt so abruptly into monstrous po-
groms as early as the spring–summer of 1919. Moreover, why should one sepa-
rate the Southern Army, the supposed incubator for the Volunteers’ anti-
Semitism, from other units in the Armed Forces in the South of Russia, which
was the official title of Denikin’s troops? In any case, the population itself made
no distinction between discrete White military formations – they were all termed
“Volunteers.” In attempting to distinguish the Southern Army from the Volun-
teer Army, Pipes is in fact following General Denikin’s own “instructions” re-
garding Shtiff’s book: “Identification of the Volunteer Army with the Armed
Forces in the South of Russia, which also included the Cossacks and the moun-
taineers, sometimes causes awkwardness. Shtiff’s book portrays the case in a very
biased manner. Besides, he mixes together the Volunteer Army with the South-
ern Army – the organization of Duke Leikhtenberg, Akatsatov, and Semenov, as-
signing to us the anti-Semitic declarations of the Southern Army.”35 Denikin
seems to forget here that he had in fact been the “Commander in Chief of the
Armed Forces in the South of Russia,” which encompassed the Southern Army.
Soviet historians of the Russian Revolution and Civil War cautiously or
bashfully avoided the “Jewish question,” but it is now being fitted into its legiti-
mate place in scholarly works. Pavliuchenkov, author of the highly acclaimed
monograph on War Communism, goes so far as to state that “without the Jewish
question there is no history of the Revolution.” In his opinion,

34 Ibid., 105.
35 Denikin, “Ocherki,” 120.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 763

[a]ny serious analysis of the Russian Revolution and of the history of

communism in general invariably raises the so-called Jewish question. Its
significance in the course of the revolution and the Civil War … was ex-
ceptionally great, and there is no issue of any importance that was not
tied to it to one or another degree. The attitudes of the peasantry and
the working class, terror, struggle in the highest levels of communist
leadership, the speculative free market, etc. – all these problems focus at-
tention on the Jewish question in the years of establishment of Soviet
power in Russia and its union republics.36
Pavliuchenkov attributes such prominence to the Jewish question that it is
even the subject of the essay that forms the conclusion of his book, “The Jewish
Question in the Revolution, or the Causes of the Bolsheviks’ Defeat in Ukraine
in 1919.” 37 However, it remains unclear why the author, who attaches such
prominence to the Jewish question, does not deal with it in other chapters of his
work. His limited knowledge of the historiography is also surprising.
Pavliuchenkov seems not even to suspect the existence of several books specifi-
cally devoted to the history of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Ukraine during the
Civil War, or to other aspects of the history of Russian Jewry.
Pavliuchenkov justifiably sees the reasons for the Jews’ active participation in
the revolutionary movement in the disabilities imposed on Jewish people “by
tsarist legislation and Russian society,” restrictions that “clearly did not corre-
spond to the cultural level, ambitions, and financial-economic power of a signifi-
cant part of the Jewish community.” The author stresses that “the Jewish milieu
during the revolution was subject to a deep schism” between well-to-do, estab-
lished traditionalists and “pretentious” younger “neophytes” in the shtetl.38
Pavliuchenkov’s reflections on the existence of divisions within the Jewish com-
munity are in themselves not contentious. However, one can hardly state with
such assurance that the split was determined by the degree of economic well-
being and “establishment.” Indeed, most revolutionary leaders of Jewish descent
came from a relatively prosperous background, particularly from among families
that had managed to escape from the Pale of Settlement. One has only to recall
the son of nearly the sole Jewish estate owner, Lev Davydovich Trotskii (Bron-
stein), or the children of the prominent Moscow entrepreneurs, the brothers
Mikhail Rafailovich and Abram Rafailovich Gots, or Il¢ia Isidorovich Bunakov
(Fondaminskii), Iulii Osipovich Martov (Tsederbaum), etc. Evidently, the shtetl
Jewry was more conservative than the largely assimilated Jewish environment of
large cities outside the Pale of Settlement. However, it was the Ukrainian me-

36 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 251.

37 Ibid., 251–63.
38 Ibid., 252–53.
764 OLEG BUDNITSKII

stechko Jews, often greeting their future tormentors and executioners with bread
and salt as the bearers of order and liberators from the Bolshevik lawlessness, who
had to pay with its blood for others’ real or illusionary sins.
Pavliuchenkov correctly notes that the attitude of the peasantry was a crucial
factor in the Civil War. Speaking of the causes of the Red Army’s reverses in
Ukraine in the spring and summer of 1919, particularly the loss of support for
Soviet power in the Ukrainian countryside, he points out that the decisive factor
was not only the agrarian policies of the Bolsheviks, who attempted to transform
the former noble estates, objects of the peasants’ longing, into collective farms.
Possibly an even more important cause, he asserts, was the preponderance of Jews
in Soviet structures of authority. In January–February of 1919, when the Red
Army took over Left-Bank Ukraine and proceeded to create a Soviet and party
apparatus, the only source of “cadres” for the new ruling institutions were the
Jewish shtetl youth. The Ukrainian peasantry was illiterate and very negatively
disposed towards the idea of “kommuniia.” The Russian population of the cities
was either fighting in Denikin’s ranks or also had a negative attitude towards
Soviet power. Thus, the only group that remained loyal to Soviet power was the
Jews, and they comprised about half of the urban population of the former
Western borderlands of the Russian empire.
On the basis of reports and letters to the Central Committee of the Russian
Communist Party, Pavliuchenkov depicts “Jewish dominance” and the growth of
mass anti-Semitism not only among the Ukrainian peasantry but also among the
Red Army soldiers and party and soviet cadres. The documentary fragments he
cites, most of them found in the former Central Party Archive, are rather dra-
matic. For example, a high official in the Moscow soviet’s department of food
supply, N. Materanskii, wrote after a trip to Ukraine that a population with
longstanding negative sentiments about the Jews was now certain that all power
was in Jewish hands, and protested against subjection to “Yid authority.” Mater-
anskii continues: “In addition to the aforementioned reasons, hatred for the Jews
is inflamed by a whole array of other causes, one of them being the role of Jews
in food speculation. In Ukraine Jews have been predominantly occupied in trade,
and now almost all of the remaining private [trade] apparatus is in their hands.”
Cagily, Materanskii observed:
I have no idea for what reason, but they are protected by the authorities to
a great degree, and this gives them an opportunity to play a dominant
role in food procurement, purchasing and shipping of goods, raising
prices, and in the food supply problem (prodovolstvennyi vopros) in gen-
eral … it is understandable that all the blame for the crisis falls on the
same unfortunate Jews, especially those in power, whom the population
for the most part accuses of the most vicious speculation. Anti-Semitism
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 765

is well developed in all layers of the population. It can be observed

among the peasants, in the intelligentsia, and among the Red Guards,
who accuse the Jews of unwillingness to go to the front and ability to
“settle in” in the rear. Curiously enough, even among Russian Commu-
nists the bitterness of some sort of enmity and unfriendliness towards
the Jews is breaking out.39
On the basis of Materanskii’s report and “a whole range of other” sources (which
he unfortunately does not cite), Pavliuchenkov concludes that “by the beginning
of 1919 communist power had created favorable conditions in Ukraine for the
formation of a kind of alliance between the structures of authority and specula-
tive circles on the basis of nationality (po natsional¢nomu priznaku).”40
Possibly for the first time in the Russian historiography, Pavliuchenkov di-
rects attention to “Soviet anti-Semitism.”41 In particular, he refers to two dra-
matic documents: a 22 April 1919 dispatch by G. S. Moroz, a member of the
collegium of the Cheka, to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist
Party after a trip to the Ukraine, and an appeal to the Central Committee of a
former member of the Ukrainian party of borot¢bisty, G. Klunnyi, who consid-
ered the root cause of Judeophobia in the countryside to have been the tradi-
tional Jewish sphere of activity – trade. He wrote:
The countryside primarily knows the Jew-trader as someone who ex-
ploited it by all means possible, especially by trade in grain. When a
peasant fed the Jew with his produce, the Jew did nothing in return: the
Jew-artisan served the bourgeoisie (panstvo) and meshchanstvo [petty
bourgeoisie] … and the Ukrainian countryside has almost never seen the
Jewish proletariat. Because the peasant does not consider trade to be la-
bor, all Jews are not considered laborers. Such views of the Jews explain
the embitterment of the peasantry with “the commissar Yids” and a
popular Ukrainian phrase: “Zhydy z nas ranish[e] tiahly, ta i teper khotiat¢
sisty na shiiu.”42 The nation that stands aside from both the culture of

39 Ibid., 255–56, citing Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 1235, op. 94, d.
143, l. 8. Emphasis in orig.
40 Ibid., 256.
41 In modern Russian historiography, the first to write about the pogroms carried out by the
famous First Cavalry Army in the period of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 was V. L. Genis, who
also employed sources from RGASPI, the former Central Party Archive. See his article, “Pervaia
Konnaia armiia: Za kulisami slavy,” Voprosy istorii, no. 12 (1994), 64–77.
42 “The Yids have long taken advantage of us, but now they want to run us into the ground [lit: sit
on our neck].”
766 OLEG BUDNITSKII

the masses and the labor principle of economic construction becomes

the enemy of the masses, [and] is enlisted in the class of oppressors.43
In 1919, concludes Pavliuchenkov, “it was vain to hope that the Ukrainian peas-
antry, armed almost to the last man, would tolerate the syndicate of Soviet func-
tionaries and bourgeois speculators on its ‘neck’ … [I]n the space of a couple of
months of Soviet power the Jews managed to pit the Ukrainian muzhiki against
them to such an extent that their vengeance was terrible.” In May–June 1919,
writes the historian – evidently assuming he has at last uncovered their true
causes – a wave of severe pogroms broke out, but “the literature on the topic as a
rule simply establishes the fact of their occurrence and does not delve into their
origins or the circumstances behind their outbreak.”44
Pavliuchenkov evidently follows his sources (almost all of them originate in
the archival collection of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party), but
fails to provide any analysis of such issues as, for example, the identification of
trade with “speculation.” Following the logic of War Communism, any trading
at all was regarded as outright speculation. On this point, the views of the ideo-
logues proclaiming the dawn of a bright new future for mankind coincided with
the archaic views of the peasantry. Regular features of anti-Semitic rhetoric in
tsarist Russia included depictions of Jewish exploitation of peasants, or of Jewish
tavern-keepers seducing naïve and good-natured peasants into drink. The fears
this rhetoric provoked even predetermined such “defensive” measures as the pro-
hibition against Jews residing in the countryside and engaging in agriculture. The
ideas of the newly-minted Communist Klunnyi were not new at all.
On the whole, I find Pavliuchenkov’s treatment overly indebted to a form of
socio-economic and political determinism. In reality, the Jewish masses within
the Pale of Settlement were materially destitute. Vladimir Prokhorovich Bulda-
kov, the author of one of the most interesting recent books on the Revolution
and the Civil War, Krasnaia smuta (Red Time of Troubles), notes that the average
income of a Jewish artisan in the beginning of the century was one-and-a-half to
two times lower than that of a peasant (150–300 and 400–500 rubles respec-
tively), and that 19 percent of the Jews “found themselves in the position of
paupers who owed their existence to the charity of their fellow Jews.”45 Thus,
the most significant factor shaping the attitude of the Ukrainian peasantry

43 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 256, citing Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial¢no-

Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI) f. 2, op. 1, d. 1190, l. 6.
44 Ibid., 257.
45 Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta: Priroda i posledstviia revolutsionnogo nasiliia
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1997), 33; Sbornik materialov ob ekonomicheskom polozhenii evreev v Rossii
(St. Petersburg: Izdanie Evreiskogo kolonizatsionnogo obshchestva, 1903), vol. 1, 35–39; vol. 2,
226.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 767

towards the Jews was not the Jews’ actual economic role but myths about that
role.46
Furthermore, it is hard to imagine that “a couple of months” of Soviet pow-
er, together with the presence of a considerable number of Jews serving it, could
lead to such an outburst of bestial hatred towards them on the part of the local
peasantry. “The cruelty with which the rebels got even (raspravlialis¢) with Jews
who were Soviet and party functionaries was exceptional even for the Civil War,”
writes Pavliuchenkov. A “communist soup” was made from Jewish Communists
“boiled alive in a huge boiling pot on the central square of the shtetl,” which
those Jews left alive were forced to eat. Others were buried alive or drowned,
while those who tried to stay afloat were “put to rest by rifle butts,” or were “laid
in rows on rails and then run over with a locomotive,” etc. Of course, among the
victims of such unprecedented cruelty and sadism, “functionaries” were a negligi-
ble minority, all the more so in that, as the author himself notes, many of them
hastened to escape to the Great Russian provinces, “closer to Moscow.”47
Buldakov to a certain degree agrees with Pavliuchenkov. In discussing the
abominable acts of anti-Jewish violence cited by Pavliuchenkov, he writes that
“the horrors of both the Red and the White Terror pale in comparison to the
fierceness of the peasant masses…” Neither Whites nor Reds – or any movement
that set its sights on power on an all-Russian level – were “capable of such sadis-
tic tactics of terror.” But Buldakov justifiably concludes that the atrocities cannot
be explained exclusively as retaliation for the consequences of Bolshevik rule in
the Ukraine. “In the Civil War one must distinguish between authorized (vlast-
nyi) terror and the psychopathology of elemental (stikhiinyi) mass sadism. There
were more victims of the latter.”48
Buldakov’s Krasnaia smuta is specifically devoted, as its subtitle indicates, to
“the nature and consequences of revolutionary violence.” The history of the Rus-

46 It would be wrong, of course, to deny the socio-economic roots, or, rather, the socio-economic
component of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. Henry Abramson tends to overemphasize the role of the
economic factor. Yet even he writes that “premodern anti-Semitism in Ukraine, which extended to
the beginning of the twentieth century in many regions, was primarily social and economic in
nature, reflecting the pressure points in the castelike division of labor as market forces were
increasingly brought to bear in Ukrainian society. With the Ukrainian revolution, however, the
conflict takes on unmistakably political overtones” (Abramson, Prayer, 32 [emphasis in orig.]). At
the same time, it seems to me that Abramson has not sufficiently accounted for the religious roots
of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. The fact that the Ukrainian language lacked the terminology
employed in Western European anti-Semitic literature (the author of a 1919 anti-Semitic pamphlet
had to explain the very term “anti-Semitism” to his readers, notes Abramson), does not in itself
demonstrate the absence of religiously-based anti-Semitism. Similar concepts could be expressed in
different, oral forms.
47 Pavliuchenkov, Voennyi kommunizm, 257–58.
48 Buldakov, Krasnaia smuta, 237.
768 OLEG BUDNITSKII

sian Revolution, Buldakov writes, “is first and foremost the history of a drastic
change in relations of people to authority, to those like them, and to those
around them, i.e., the history of violence from below.”49 The question, however, is
how spontaneous that violence was, and what role ideologists and leaders played
in cultivating it.
Buldakov’s general conclusion is unquestionably true: “the most atrocious
side of the ‘White Terror,’ and of all the mutually repressive acts of the Civil
War, were the anti-Jewish pogroms.” I suppose he is also right in suggesting that
were even “one-tenth” of the data about the Whites’ perpetration of anti-Jewish
pogroms in the Ukraine 1919 true, it would still prompt the conclusion that the
Whites “had no chances at all for victory in the struggle for Russian statehood
(rossiiskuiu gosudarstvennost ¢).”50 Bestial anti-Semitism led to the demoralization
and disintegration of the army, and definitively stained the already doubtful
purity of the “White cause.”
However, I think the explanation for the phenomenon of anti-Jewish vio-
lence is simpler and more frightening than the one offered by the author of
Krasnaia smuta: “that perception of one’s own powerlessness, the transcendence
of which requires sadistic forms of self-affirmation.”51 In this case the matter is
not simply centuries-old traditions of anti-Semitism, heated up by the indisputa-
bly active role of revolutionaries of Jewish origin in Russia’s second great Time of
Troubles. The massacres were ideologically prepared. As Peter Kenez convinc-
ingly demonstrates in his works, aggressive nationalism, most intensively mani-
fested as anti-Semitism, became the surrogate ideology of the White move-

49 Ibid., 8. Emphasis in orig.

50 Ibid., 236–37. In this respect, I find unconvincing Evan Mawdsley’s assertion that “pogroms
had no effect on the outcome of the Civil War, although they perhaps turned some public opinion
in the West against the White cause” (Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War [Boston: Allen and Un-
win, 1987], 210). In addition to the loss of moral “credit” abroad, pogroms also caused the demor-
alization of the armed forces, transforming battle-capable and relatively disciplined units into bands
of thieves and murderers. Perhaps the most glaring example is the infamous “Mamontov raid,”
pushing deep behind the Red Army’s lines in the late summer and autumn of 1919. Instead of ex-
ploiting this success by moving west, along the Kursk-Orel-Tula-Moscow axis, Mamontov’s corps,
weighed down with wagons of plunder, turned south, occupying Voronezh. After returning from
the raid in the autumn of 1919, at the moment of the Civil War’s decisive battles, Mamontov re-
leased many Cossacks home on leave. By 2 December 1919 the erstwhile hero was removed from
his command in the corps by General Wrangel for his “criminal negligence” (Petr Nikolaevich
Wrangel, Vospominaniia, chast¢ 1 [Moscow: Terra, 1992], 437–38. As noted above, Mamontov’s
troops executed Jews they came across in these central Russian provinces with the same enthusiasm
as their compatriots in Ukraine. Judging by the amount of plundered goods, they looted everyone
they could.
51 Ibid., 237.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 769

ment.52 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was republished from Taganrog to
Khabarovsk, and the idea of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy as the initial cause
for all of Russia’s troubles traveled as far as Cossack villages on the upper Don,
the population of which had never before encountered a single Jew. 53
The pogroms carried out by the Volunteers were the most organized. There
was almost no chance of surviving them: while one could fight off or evade
armed bands, it was next to impossible to hide from a massive regular army. Of
course, no one had any interest in the actual involvement of the shtetl population
with Bolshevism. For tradesmen and artisans in the Pale of Settlement, the
Bolshevik regime was particularly burdensome. As noted earlier, the tragic para-
dox was that mestechko locals not infrequently greeted the Volunteers with bread
and salt as liberators. In certain cases, the delegations sent to welcome these “lib-
erators” were the first to fall under their sabers. Kenez is absolutely right to note
that the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine in 1919 was extremely “modern” and
entirely consistent with the “tradition” of the 20th century.54
Clearly, there are good reasons to situate the pogroms of the Civil War pe-
riod in the historical perspective of earlier outbreaks of violence against the Jews
in Russia. The anti-Jewish violence of 1917–21 was at very least the third wave
of pogrom violence directed against Jews in the late imperial period. The volume
edited by John Klier and Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in
Modern Russian History attempts to survey the entire phenomenon. Curiously,
however, this valuable work devotes the least attention to the most bloody period
of pogroms, that of the Civil War. The relevant section contains an article by
Peter Kenez that, while significantly expanded and revised, nevertheless remains a
reworking of his earlier studies. This is indicative of the current state of research
on the topic. In Kenez’s view, pogroms carried out by White forces “were the
best organized, carried out like military operations, and the most ideologically
motivated.”55
Henry Abramson has also recently attempted to compare the pogroms of
1917–20 with the preceding period. In his view, “comparison of the violence in
the revolutionary era to earlier pogroms reveals elements of both continuity and
discontinuity,” although “elements of discontinuity are perhaps more striking
than elements of continuity.” Abramson considers the similarity with the earlier

52 In addition to Kenez’s works cited above, see also his article “The Ideology of the White Move-
ment,” Soviet Studies 32: 1 (1980), 58–83.
53 Oleg Budnitskii, “The Jews in Rostov-on-Don in 1918–1919,” Jews and Jewish Topics in the
Soviet Union and Western Europe, no. 3 (19) (1992), 23–26.
54 Kenez, Civil War in South Russia, 1919–1920, 166–77.
55 Kenez, “Pogroms and White Ideology in the Russian Civil War,” in Pogroms, ed. Klier and
Lambroza, 302.
770 OLEG BUDNITSKII

pogroms of 1881–84 and 1905–6 first in terms of their geographic localization:

the majority occurred, as in earlier times, in Ukraine. One rule of thumb – the
more Jews, the more pogroms – remained unchanged. This concept, however, is
not strikingly original. Abramson views the main feature distinguishing the first
two waves of pogroms from those of 1917–21 as the colossal rise in the number
of victims. As he notes, “the scale of the pogroms of 1919 dwarfed previous vio-
lence.”56 Indeed, when we are speaking of dozens or hundreds (or, in relation to
1905–06, perhaps several thousand) victims, on the one hand, and tens of thou-
sands, on the other, this is already a qualitatively different form of violence. If in
the former case we can speak of disorders that are accompanied by the loss of
human life, in the latter we must speak of extermination. Of course, not all po-
groms in the period 1917–21 resulted in large-scale murder of Jews, regardless of
age or sex. But this new type of “pogrom” appeared for the first time in modern
Russian history, and indeed for the first time in 20th-century Europe. Abramson
emphasizes that a characteristic aspect of the revolutionary period was the ex-
tended absence of central authority, leading to anarchy and violence.
Despite the importance of this observation, I would also emphasize another
feature of this period. For the first time, the authorities – or, rather, those forces
aspiring to the role of central authority – began to initiate anti-Jewish violence.
For the first time, pogroms were conducted by units of a more or less regular
army (the White troops more, and the Directory troops less). It is telling that
between them the Whites, the Directory, and its allies were responsible for more
than 50 percent of the total number of Jewish victims. 57 Army units proved to
be much more “capable” at the task of mass killing.
One should note that in pre-revolutionary Russia anti-Jewish violence always
originated from below. (An exception was the deportations of the Jewish popula-
tion during World War I, but that was a special case.) Police and army units
might have been passive, and even might have sympathized with those conduct-
ing the pogrom, but they themselves rarely participated in them. Indeed, the
authorities always restored order eventually. 58 By 1919, one could no longer ap-

56 Henry Abramson, Prayer, 109–10.

57 Peter Kenez was undoubtedly mistaken when he wrote that “the Volunteer Army succeeded in
murdering as many Jews as all other armies put together” (“Pogroms and White Ideology,” 302);
Directory troops and their allies in this case definitely took first place. The reason why “Volun-
teers” were judged so severely lies in the fact that they were viewed as a regular army and were led
by graduates of the General Staff Academy.
58 See Stephen M. Berk, Year of Crisis, Year of Hope: Russian Jewry and the Pogroms of 1881–1882
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1985); I. Michael Aronson, Troubled Waters: The
Origin of the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia (Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press, 1990);
Edward H. Judge, Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York: New York University Press,
1992), esp. 68–69, 139–40; Klier and Lambroza, eds., Pogroms.
 J EWS, POGROMS, AND THE WHITE MOVEMENT 771

peal to the authorities. More precisely, there was only one authority to which one
could appeal: Soviet power. The tragedy of the situation was that, at the very
least, the White high command was opposed to pogroms – in principle. How-
ever, White leaders wished to avoid any “disagreements” with their units, and
took no decisive measures for preventing pogroms. Nor did they seriously punish
those who committed them. Indeed, it is unclear whether the White command
would have found forces that were both reliable enough and sufficiently free of
pogromist sentiments to carry out that task. Later, in 1920, Wrangel appeared to
demonstrate that it was possible to prevent pogroms if one showed sufficient po-
litical will to do so. However, he was in a special situation, with control over
nothing more than Tauride province.59
Finally, anti-Semitic propaganda of a type hitherto unprecedented in Russia
emerged during the Civil War as a discrete phenomenon. This propaganda built
upon both the recent, officially-sanctioned participation of the armed forces in
violence against Jews during the 1914–15 deportations, as well as upon tradi-
tional, primarily religious anti-Semitism, which was further incited during the
Civil War by certain church leaders and popular preachers. Such propaganda
provided thieves and murderers with a quasi-ideological justification for their
actions. 60
We are thus confronted by a paradox. The White movement began with
Jewish participation. Its leaders, former generals of the tsarist army, rarely made
openly anti-Semitic declarations. On the contrary, they frequently declared (in
more or less resolute form) their repudiation of pogromist anti-Semitism. The
ideology of the White movement, moreover, was to a large extent shaped by the
Constitutional Democrats – a leftist, “liberal” party that consistently advocated
equality for the Jews. Kadets were well represented in General Denikin’s retinue
– indeed, it was initially Kadets (at first Nikolai Elpidiforovich Paramonov, and
then Konstantin Nikolaevich Sokolov) who headed Denikin’s Propaganda
Agency. It would seem that the Jewish population should have expected less
trouble from the Volunteers than from any other anti-Bolshevik formation.
A series of questions thus present themselves for future research. Why, dur-
ing the initial stage of the Civil War (and to some extent later as well, after the
onset of the Volunteer pogroms) did a segment of politically active Jewry support
the White movement and even participate in it to varying degrees? How and why
did the Whites, who began their struggle against the Bolsheviks under slogans
that were quite liberal, turn en masse into pogromists? What was the role of the

59 See the documentary publication “The Russian Ambassador in Paris on the Whites and the
Jews,” introduced by Oleg Budnitskii, Jews in Eastern Europe, no. 3 (28) (1995), 53–66.
60 See Schechtman, Pogromy Dobrovol¢cheskoi Armii, 78–85, 105–07; “The Russian Ambassador in
Paris,” 61–64.
772 OLEG BUDNITSKII

Russian liberal intelligentsia – and especially the Kadet Party – in terms of ideo-
logical support for the White movement? How did some members of that party,
who were traditionally considered advocates of Jewish equality, ultimately come
to an effective acquittal of anti-Semitism?61 We could formulate a range of other,
more specific questions, which ultimately converge into one: did Russian Jews
have a choice between the Reds and the Whites? Or, in other words, was there
any “proper” response for the Jews in a country split by internal contradictions,
in which they were an unwanted and unloved minority?
To my mind, to begin to answer these kinds of questions requires, first and
foremost, to cease viewing the Jews only in the capacity of victims. Jewish figures
were active political participants not only in the Red camp, as is well known, but
also on the other side of the lines. It is characteristic that the Jews on the Red
side as a rule were internationalists and denounced their Jewishness, as did Trots-
kii, while the Jews in the White ranks included practically no apostates. Alas,
most of the fatalities were suffered by the shtetl Jews who adhered to neither side.
Second, the “Jewish question” must be viewed in the context of the Russian Civil
War. More broadly, it must be viewed in the context of the Russian Revolution
as a whole, of which the Civil War was both an immediate continuation and an
integral part. Third, the problem of relations between Jews (I stress once again
that I mean Jewish political and public figures) and the leadership and ideologists
of the Whites should be viewed as dynamic, and examined from the outset of the
anti-Bolshevik movement. Of course, a deeper understanding of the events of the
Civil War – the part that pertained to the Jewish population of the former
Russian empire – is possible only inasmuch as new sources are uncovered. In the
post-Soviet period, this requirement for advancing scholarship on a neglected set
of historical problems has become eminently possible to pursue. Finally, these
events should be subjected to revision in light of the historical experience of the
entire 20th century.

Trans. Eugene Budnitsky

Institut rossiiskoi istorii

Rossiiskaia akademiia nauk
Ul. Dmitriia Ul¢ianova, 19
Moscow 117036 Russia
obudnitski@yahoo.com

61 See the brief discussion of this issue in William Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution:
The Constitutional Democratic Party, 1917–1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),
426–27; Natal ¢ia Georgievna Dumova, Kadetskaia kontrrevoliutsiia i ee razgrom (Moscow: Mysl¢,
1982), 313–14; Oleg Budnitskii, V. A. Maklakov i evreiskii vopros, 60–63.