The bloody pogrom of 1905 was adumbrated by the threat of a pogrom two years earlier, in the wake of the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. In mid-April, several days after the events in Kishinev, rumors spread that there would be a pogrom in Kiev. A telegram from local authorities to the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg on 14 april read, in part, "Panic among Jews, packing up belongings, leaving Kiev. The city is still quiet."107 The local Social Democrats, who had originally planned a large demonstration for 20 April, soon cancelled that event because—as they wrote in a proclamation that was distributed throughout the city—they feared that it might, "thanks to the police and the enormous unorganized army of idle populace [prazdnogo naseleniia], turn into a pogrom."108 According to a report of the procurator of the Kiev high court tribunal (sudebnaia palata), the Kiev Committee of the RSDRP called a meeting at the Polytechnical Institute on 18 April, which was attended by both students and local Jews. According to the report, the Jews demanded that the students present a request to the director of the institute that in the event of a pogrom, the building be made available as a refuge to Jews. Confirming the telegram of four days earlier, the procurator wrote that the Jewish population of Kiev was in panic, many of them leaving the city after depositing their valuables at banks and pawnshops, and that others had moved from their apartments into hotels.109 (Clearly, these were among the most affluent of the city's Jews; the poor could not leave at a moment's notice, let alone move into a hotel.) A report in Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda in early May described a "commercial stagnation"—a noticeable downturn in economic activity—in the wake of the panic engendered by the Kishinev pogrom.110 Kishinev also helped to radicalize Kiev's Jewish students and to push some of them toward the Jewish nationalist camp.111 The archives reveal that the Kiev branch of the okhrana (secret police) was aware that representatives of revolutionary groups were planning self-defense activities in case of a pogrom; a certain Dr. Lev (or Leiba) Ovseev Mandel’berg, a member of the Poalei-Tsion, hosted such a planning meeting in his clinic in March of 1904.112 In his autobiography, Nokhem Shtif recalled that he and other radical leftist Jewish student responded to Kishinev "with a self-defense group and with revolutionary proclamations," and in autumn 1903 they and Jewish students from other cities convened the first conference of the Vozrozhde-nie (Rebirth) group, later to become the non-Marxist, socialist-autonomist Sejmists (Sotsialisticheskaia evreiskaia rabochaia partiia, or SERP).113
Despite the events of April-May 1903, the 1905 pogrom, a by-product of the revolution, apparently took most of Kiev's Jews by surprise, as it followed a time of optimistic chaos.114 As with the 1881 pogrom, the pretext was an attack on the tsar: in 1881, Jews had been linked to the assassination of Alexander II; in 1905, Jews were said to be playing a disproportionate role in the revolutionary movement. In Kiev, the sparks that set the pogrom off on 18 October were rumors spread by ultraconservative forces that Jews were desecrating portraits of the emperor at a demonstration celebrating the handing down of the October Manifesto.
In Kiev as throughout much of the empire, the strikes and disorders of the 1905 Revolution surged several times: early in the year, following Bloody Sunday; in the heat of summer, when many of the confrontations between strikers and revolutionary youth and the police "appear to have involved Jews" (a July strike by dressmakers and shoemakers and an August demonstration in Lybed likely included many Jews); and in October.115 By September, crowds were forming "more or less continuously" in Kiev's Jewish neighborhoods."116 Conservatives saw in the city's Jews a potential threat, as was the case in many other localities with large Jewish populations. This was especially true because it seemed to them that, as Senator E. F. Turau would later state in his report on the pogrom, "some of the most zealous attendees and organizers of the local antigovernment organizations and meetings are young Jews and Jewesses."117 There was certainly a kernel of truth to this perception, but the numerous citations of Jews as leaders and ringleaders of the revolutionary movement in Turau's report seem calculated to inspire in the reader some kind of understanding of the subsequent anti-Jewish violence as a "measure-for-measure" reaction to the "impudence" of the Jews. As tensions continued to mount through September and into October, the stage was being set for a confrontation between progressive forces and Jews, on the one hand, and the authorities and the conservative masses, on the other.118 The large antigovernment "people's demonstrations" (narodnye mitingy) held at St. Vladimir's University and the Polytechnical Institute, attendance at several of which numbered in the thousands, were attended by students, workers, nationalist - and revolutionary-minded professionals, and Jews.119 Again, Turau's report, based on the eyewitnesses that he interviewed, maintained that, other than the workers present, the attendees at some of the meetings were largely Jewish, a claim that is impossible to verify.120 Claims of bias and distortions in these reports go back to the days immediately following their publication; Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda, for example, commented that the Russian Telegraphic Agency's "Judeophobic tendencies" led it to describe the crowd attending the people's meetings and demonstrations in Kiev as "mostly Jewish" and "riffraff."121 It is abundantly clear that the reporting of RTA and other right-leaning organs, as well as the reports and memoranda written by local officials—to which Turau had access—influenced the senator's report as well as subsequent histories and impressions of the days and weeks leading up to the pogrom.122 Kievlianin, for example, characterized one of the demonstrations at St. Vladimir's University as a "Jewish meeting," with speeches on Zionism and the Jewish question. Patently aiming to pass the revolution off as an attempt by Jews to inject their parochial issues into the life of the nation, the newspaper wondered aloud why the attendees could not have held the meeting in a synagogue or prayer house instead of bothering the professors and students.123
On 2 October, a funeral procession for a member of the Kiev Committee of the Socialist-Revolutionary party turned into a confrontation with police that left one protester dead—a young Jewish woman, who was subsequently memorialized in Yiddish at another revolutionary meeting held at the university.124 According to reports in Nedel’naia khronika Voskhoda, some of the meetings in early October included or focused on issues relating specifically to Jewish students, such the demand for the elimination of separate admissions standards for Christians and Jews and the abolition of Jewish quotas.125 The empire-wide railroad strike began in Kiev on 11 October, and was followed by the largest people's meeting yet, with a reported attendance of 10,000, where speeches were made by local leaders of the Social Democrats and the Bund, including assistant attorney Mark Ratner, who would soon play a leading role in the revolution within the Kiev Jewish community (discussed in chapter 7).126 One of the main topics of the meeting was the organization of a general strike in Kiev, for which the revolutionary activists began to plan.127 As a result, martial law was declared on 14 October. A joint revolutionary committee was established that crossed ethnic and religious lines, with "equal representation for Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, SRs, Bundists, Polish Social Democrats, and the leaders of [the Ukrainian] Spilka."128
On 18 October, celebrations of the tsar's manifesto granting limited civil and political rights apparently became muddled with revolutionary rallies.
Turau claimed that unsuspecting Kievans who gathered to show support and reverence for their tsar were shocked as they witnessed workers and students desecrating portraits of Nicholas II and statues of Nicholas I and alexander II. He describes the revolutionary crowds marching toward Kreshchatik, shouting, "Down with autocracy! Down with the bloodsuckers!" (doloi krovopiits), as well as individual Jewish "agitators" insulting a priest (snatching his hat off his head to force him to pay respect to their red flags) and a group of soldiers—actions which aroused the indignation of passers-by.129 Whether or how these incidents actually occurred is less important than the perception that Jews were playing a prominent role in the anti-tsarist demonstrations, which was apparently fairly widespread.
Later in the day, a large crowd "gathered in front of City Hall to listen to political speeches and celebrate the news of the October Manifesto," but things began to get ugly when the patriotic flags on the building were replaced by red banners and the flags of socialist parties.130 In Turau's account, revolutionary activists flooded into city hall, and a young Jewish man even tore out the tsar's head from a portrait, stuck his own head through, and declared, "Now I'm the Sovereign." Again, what is most significant here is the perception that the revolutionaries, with Jews prominent among them, were bent on taking over the city and, indeed, the entire empire.
The crowd was dispersed by troops, and mobs with violent intent quickly formed, perhaps sparked by rumors that Jews had damaged or mutilated portraits of the tsar.131 (There is some evidence that there were also rumors circulating to the effect that the tsar had given permission to attack the Jews.)132 The mob was heard to shout, "Blood!"—was this a signal, agreed upon beforehand, that the pogrom was to begin, as some later surmised?133 The local civilian and military authorities did little or nothing to stop the pogrom until 20 October—by which time entire neighborhoods had been sacked. One military man in charge of troops in Kiev, Major-General Bez-sonov, was reported to be very clear in his support of the pogromshchiki, maintaining that the Jews had played too large a role in the revolutionary movement and deserved the attack; Senator Turau noted that Bezsonov and Police Chief Tsikhotskii went so far as to "actively encourage the mob."134 There are numerous reports of soldiers and policemen taking part in the looting and violence, and even those who did not take active part did not, for the most part, attempt to put down the riot or defend Jews.
As in 1881, the mobs set upon Jewish stalls in the markets (starting with the Troitskii Market in Lybed), and then Jewish stores and homes, smashing and stealing; however, they did not confine themselves to the Jewish neighborhoods, as before, but included Jewish-owned shops in the very heart of the city, on Kreshchatik, where they carted away loads of booty in wheelbarrows as the police stood by and watched.135 In another departure from 1881, the violence went further than incidental injuries sustained in the course of confrontation over property: when they came upon Jews, po-gromshchiki set upon them with often deadly force (and sometimes upon the Christians who defended or hid them). Zionist and Hebraist activist Moshe Rozenblat claimed that the mobs shouted not only "Beat the zhids" but also "Death to the Jews!"—a new escalation in the rhetoric of pogrom violence. As the pogrom was occurring, Rozenblat wrote, "Just now a Jew dared to set foot on the street, and the hooligans set upon him like wolves and killed him."136 Jews feared for their lives; in the words of Sholem Aleichem, who witnessed the pogrom, there was "a general panic which does not lend itself to description. The lives of forty or fifty thousand Israelites hang by a hair."137 By the third day, wrote A. Brusilovski from Kiev, "all the Jews of the city are hiding in holes and cracks and waiting. . . ."138
Dozens were killed and hundreds hurt, with millions of rubles worth of property either stolen or destroyed. Nor were Kiev's wealthy Jews spared, as they had been in 1881. Indeed, Rozenblat reported that when a large group of Jews holed up in a Kiev hotel tried to telephone the Brodskys, Zaitsev, and other grandees to implore them to speak to the governor-general about putting a stop to the pogrom, they discovered that they, too, were hiding in cellars and that their houses had been looted.139 Sholem Aleichem wrote in a letter to his daughter,
They have beaten our millionaires—the Brodskys, the Zaitsevs, the Baron [Gintsburg], Rozenberg, and the others. . . . The Brodskys tried to hide with good Christians, and many others did the same, but the good Christians. . . refused them hospitality. . . . Jewish converts, men and women, spent the night in Jewish cellars.
He described affluent Jewish women hiding in stables and attics; Lev Brodsky and his daughter climbed over a fence to the Institute for Noble Girls, but were refused entry. Other members of the Brodsky family tried to take refuge with the director of the state bank, but to no avail.140 Sholem Aleichem's own apartment, however, was saved by his Christian cook, who placed icons and crosses in the windows.141 In addition to attacking the Brodsky home, the mob also looted and destroyed the Brodsky Trade School, a lavishly outfitted institution that had been in operation for only a few years.142
Despite Tsikhotskii's account that as the mobs fell upon Jews, they shouted, "This is your freedom! Take that for your Constitution and revolution. . . ," Hamm argues convincingly that "Kiev's October pogrom was not a mass upheaval. . . . There was nothing popular or patriotic about it."143 Rather, right-wing agitators and sympathetic police and military men stirred up drunken mobs to plunder, destroy, beat, rape, and kill. With little time or wherewithal to organize self-defense of any kind, Kiev's Jews were at the mercy of "small bands of thugs incited by agitators"; large groups of people took advantage of the chaos to steal and loot.144 The Hebrew newspaper Ha-zeman reported that the cruelty and hatred of the pogrom mobs could be clearly seen in their actions: when they entered a Jewish house, they smashed and destroyed every last item.145 Whereas the masses in 1881 had been mostly leaderless, disorganized, and intent on stealing and looting what the Jews had "stolen" from them, in 1905 members of the antisemitic Black Hundreds clearly had a hand in organizing and directing the violence, and perhaps even in whipping up its lethal side. The investigators who compiled the two-volume Die Judenpogromen in Russland found that the gangs consisted mostly of doormen, porters, servants, elementary school pupils, traders and market-women, tram workers, and sometimes also Russian workers. People also came in from outlying villages (such as Boiarka) to take part, some apparently egged on by implausible rumors: a Jew had killed a Christian woman; Jews were attacking monks; Jews were desecrating a Christian holy place; thousands of armed Jews were marching on Kiev.146
At the height of the violence, on 19 October, right-wing organizations coordinated "patriotic" demonstrations with the active participation of local priests, which appear to have given some kind of encouragement to the pogrom mobs, though one account has Bishop Platon of Chigirin attempting to fight the tide and exhorting the crowds to stop attacking Jews.147 (There is evidence that the Caves Monastery, Kiev's hoariest and most celebrated holy place, may have played a role in the printing of a leaflet urging Russians to "defend the fatherland" against revolutionaries—and, by implication, Jews.)148 The next day, the pogrom continued in the city's main markets, whence the mobs continued on to Jewish homes and apartments.
A telegram of protest sent to chairman of the Council of Ministers S. Iu. Witte by a collection of leaders of civil society on 19 October suggests that at least some Kievans were horrified by the breakdown of order in their city and the authorities' refusal to step in to stop the atrocities—and in some cases even demonstrating complicity with the violence.149 Many others, however, were clearly content to watch on the sidelines without taking sides. The majority conservative city council also displayed indifference during the pogrom, showing little remorse or attempts at making amends afterwards, and rejecting a proposal to provide 5,000 rubles in aid to pogrom victims.150
The violence came to an end on 20 October, when the military finally took decisive action and used force to disperse the mobs, arresting more than one hundred people. In addition to the human casualties, the Kiev Central Committee for Assistance to Pogrom victims estimated that damages were sustained by over two thousand shops, warehouses, workshops, and private apartments, and by more than seven thousand households. The sum total of damages to Jewish property was estimated at 7 million rubles, and to all property in the city at anywhere between 10 and 40 million rubles.151 There was hardly a Jewish home, store, or workshop that had not been attacked during the pogrom.
World History
