It is not surprising, then, that the pogrom wave that overran the southern provinces of the Russian Empire in 1881 and 1882 was seen by many as "retribution," not only for the alleged Jewish participation in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, but more broadly for Jewish "exploitation" of their Christian neighbors, an accusation that dated back to the reign of Paul I (1796-1801).173 The fact the pogroms were largely concentrated in areas of new Jewish settlement was hardly coincidental: as in Kiev, Jews throughout the Ukrainian and especially the New Russian provinces were often viewed as interlopers, competing for jobs with Christians and "exploiting" them by taking advantage of business opportunities to open up taverns and shops.
But the Jews of the empire were shocked by the scale and intensity of the violent riots. The investigation carried out after the pogrom by Count P. I. Kutaisov claimed that there were two opinions in Kiev on the causes of the pogroms. Some were convinced that they had emerged out of centuries of hatred for Jews. But local Jews were certain that the pogroms had been stirred up by revolutionaries, because however strong Christian hate, it could not have materialized in so powerful a fashion—and in so many places simultaneously—without an organization to coordinate it.174 Whatever the validity of this assumption, it reveals that Jews in Kiev did not underestimate the extent of Christian animosity but rather doubted its ability to manifest itself in the form of physical violence. This, despite the fact that pogroms had occurred in recent memory (in Odessa in 1821, 1849, 1859, and 1871), while the horrific massacres that took place in the context of the seventeenth-century Chmielnicki and eighteenth-century Haidamak uprisings also continued to live in Jewish collective memory.175 The fact remained, however, that most Russian Jews alive in 1881 had not themselves experienced mass violence on the scale of a pogrom. Indeed, neither Jews nor most anyone else could envision the wave of violence that would engulf the Pale, even given the considerable provocation that preceded it. After the pogrom, the Hebrew writer Yitshak Yaakov Vaysberg (Weisberg) wrote to the Hebrew newspaper Ha-melits that
The rumors had been spreading in our city for quite some time that there were people planning ill for our people, but who believed that in our time
And in a city as respected as ours, with thousands of soldiers as well as government officials, something like this would happen, something out of the Middle ages?176
Hamm writes that "initially Kiev's Jews did not feel threatened by reports of pogroms elsewhere."177 Jews in other parts of the empire were apparently just as unprepared. A report in another Hebrew newspaper written before the pogroms had started but published afterward told of rumors that had been spread throughout Poland stating that "the peasants were getting ready to attack the Jews during the coming holiday [Passover]," which, although they "cast fear into the hearts of Jews living in villages. . . [were] in and of themselves unworthy of attention. . . ."178 As I. Michael Aronson has shown in his study of the 1881 pogroms, even those who wished ill to the Jews "did not expect rioting to occur as a result of the anti-Jewish newspaper campaign" or in the wake of the assassination of Alexander II; indeed, "the actual outbreak of rioting caught everyone off-guard."179 The state of panic that Kiev Jews experienced seems to have begun only after the very first pogrom in Elizavetgrad on April 16, when a pogrom in Kiev became a very real possibility.180
In the week after the Elizavetgrad disorders, rumors surged through Kiev about the upcoming April 26th, which was not only a Sunday but a feast day, with large groups of workers and artisans milling about in the public squares and markets of Ploskaia and Podol from early in the morning, many of them drinking.181 The police report on the pogroms from the Ploskaia district later claimed that "people were heard saying that the Jews should be beaten up and thrown out [vygnat’] of Kiev, since all the trade is concentrated in their hands, as a consequence of which bread and other products have become more expensive."182 Though most studies have concluded that the pogromshchiki—or at least the most active ones—were mostly unemployed migrant peasants from the Great Russian provinces (bosiaki or the "barefoot brigade"), more recent work has posited that "most pogromshchiki were from the Pale, and the majority were probably local people" — townspeople resentful of Jewish competition along with peasants residing in the city who were eager for the excitement or plunder that would likely result from a pogrom.183 The reality was probably some combination of the two: a heady mixture of local and imported animosity that combusted spontaneously in the context of rapid modernization and change, economic competition, social instability, religious antagonism, and the uneasy proximity of religious and ethnic groups as a result of migration. Gessen makes a suggestion that is not often considered but which makes a great deal of sense: at least some of the pent-up animosity that exploded during the pogroms was not directed at Jews but was a general feeling of anger and frustration caused by the rapid changes in society and the economic constraints experienced by many, especially in the lower-middle class. The Jews served as a scapegoat.184 vodka and rumors that the violence was sanctioned by the Emperor himself fueled the conflagration.185 Certainly there were no "ringleaders," ideological leaders, or secret orders from St. Petersburg, as some accounts over the decades have attempted to demonstrate.186 As to the ethnicity of the pogromshchiki, over which much ink has been spilled, it seems clear that there was a mixture of Ukrainians and Great Russians, though the former seem to have predominated (117 of the peasants arrested after the pogrom were from Kiev and the neighboring Chernigov provinces).187
In Ploskaia, the police tried to convince Jewish shopkeepers and traders at the Zhitnyi Bazaar and second-hand goods market to close up shop and go home to avoid confrontation with the mob, but according to the police report, "Jews at both markets responded distrustfully to the requests of the police to vacate the area." The violence in Ploskaia started at the Zhitnyi bazar when "the half-drunken mob started chasing after passing Jews and beating them, shouting 'Down with the bloodsucking zhids [doloi zhidov-krovopiitsev], we can't live among them any longer, they have taken everything into their hands.' . . ."188 The police and troops were not able to protect all Jews because the huge crowd was in too many places at once, or at least so went the official police account. Shouts of "Beat the zhids" began to spread along the streets and, according to another source, although police and troops tried to disperse the crowds, they had not yet been given permission to use force. A few individuals started to throw rocks at Jewish homes, and then began to loot Jewish apartments and shops.189 The pinkas of the Tailors' Synagogue noted that "they set fire to Tailors' Synagogue with [its] twelve Torah scrolls, and they tore up all the scrolls in the synagogue, after which they went into people's homes and stores."190
From the port neighborhoods with their dense Jewish populations, the mobs ascended Kiev's steep hills to the central districts, where they attached Jewish-owned shops and prominent landmarks like the house of Isaak Markovich Brodsky. But they did not get far: "at each of these places, the mob was either prevented from attacking or stopped in mid-attack by troops." In his report, Count Kutaisov found that the military served the city well in protecting "the best and central parts of the city, which remained untouched thanks only to the army." By contrast, violence raged in the suburb of De-mievka, where the mob was totally unhindered by troops.191 Some scholars have surmised that the authorities "dispersed the troops throughout the city rather than concentrating them in Jewish neighborhoods" and that "soldiers lacked the training to deal with urban disorders," but descriptions of the events in the center of Kiev seem to suggest that there were enough soldiers with sufficient training there to put down the mobs without much difficulty, while the same was not true for Podol, Ploskaia, and Demievka.192 Archival records show that powerful local administrators such as Drentel’n apparently put a great deal of effort into quelling the violence, but they were unsuccessful in the face of inertia, ineptitude, and indifference.193
A striking pattern emerges from the police reports on the pogroms submitted by individual police precincts by district after the events of April 1881. Outside of the visibly Jewish neighborhoods, the mobs almost always headed for two targets first. These places were associated with the nexus—in the minds of the masses, at least—between Jews and commerce: the markets of Kiev, fulcrums of the city economy where Jewish traders played a prominent role; and homes or buildings owned by the city's wealthiest and most visible Jews. The latter, however, were often protected by troops or policemen, while the shops, stalls, and homes of Kiev's Jewish poor were rarely defended. In Starokievskii district (the Old Town), for example, a mob of about four hundred people ascending from Podol went directly to the Haymarket (Sen-noi, also known as L’vov, Market), where they smashed and plundered Jewish stalls, and then moved on to a building owned by one Grebin’, probably Meir Grebin’, a businessman and wealthy patron of the Jewish Hospital and other Jewish causes.194 When the police prevented them from attacking the building, they headed for the Evreiskii (Jewish) Market (also known as Galitskii), where they began to destroy Jewish stalls. A mob of similar size hurtled through shortly afterward, following the same route, and attacked the houses of two wealthy Jews (both with the surname Brodsky) —but they were soon stopped by police and troops.195 Of course the markets in Podol and Ploskaia had been the original epicenters of the violence.196 In neighborhoods with considerable Jewish populations, such as the port districts of De-mievka and Solomenka, the mob then moved on (and presumably dispersed) to attack and plunder individual Jewish homes and apartments. Naturally, it was easier for the authorities to defend individual homes than to protect entire neighborhoods, but the contrast is nonetheless striking, and it must have seemed a coincidence to very few contemporaries that the homes and property of wealthy and connected Jews survived the violence mostly unscathed. Of the 896 victims recorded by official statistics, less than a third (254) were homeowners (28 percent), but this percentage would have been even lower had Demievka been taken into account.197
It is also interesting to note that the rioting mobs in Kiev were heard to cry not only the familiar "beat the zhids" (bei zhidov) but also to utter calls to expel the Jews from the city where they had taken over all the trade and pushed prices up (the reality was just the opposite: the admission of Jews into the city had brought prices down).198 Expulsion was very much part of anti-Jewish discourse in Kiev, whether in the mouths of officials, disgruntled peasants and townspeople, or even Jews considering the hazards faced by illegals in Kiev. Pogromshchiki must have been aware of the terrible consequences that expulsion meant for Jews, and this threat may have been meant to terrorize in addition to being a genuine expression of animosity.199
The scale of the destruction is attested to by some of the statistics from the official report of the Kiev Jewish Society for Assistance to Victims of the Disorders in the South of Russia in 1881, which provided emergency shelter to 2,000 Jews and emergency food aid to at least 5,000. The aid distributed to Jewish victims in Kiev and its suburbs totaled 95,000 rubles, about 60 percent of the aid that the society provided to victims throughout the southwest region.200 By some accounts, the Kiev pogrom was the most serious in scope of all those that occurred in 1881-82.201 The misery of Kiev Jewry was compounded by a large-scale expulsion of illegal residents in the autumn of 1881.202 This, in a cruelly ironic sense, brought to fruition the cries of the pogromshchiki to expel the "zhids" from Kiev.
As in other cities throughout the Pale of Settlement in January and February 1882, Jews in Kiev observed a fast day and held special penitential services (on February 1st). John Klier claims that these events "were extensively planned," and that the main service, led by Rabbi Tsukkerman at the Tailors' Synagogue in Podol, included a sermon by Tsukkerman, speeches delivered by university students, and musical pieces performed by the "celebrated Jewish opera singer, Medvedev."203 In addition to many of the city's Jews, the audience included over one hundred Jewish students (including also, possibly, gimnaziia students), "virtually the entire enrolment of the university."
In addition to giving money and providing practical guidance for the aid effort, some Jewish leaders also attempted to provide explanations for the unprecedented violence. As we have seen, some were inclined to agree with the government's initial assessment that revolutionaries were to blame for stirring up the riots, because that "served to pre-empt the accusation of Judeophobes that the pogroms were a popular defense against Jewish exploitation."204 Or at least this was the official Jewish line given in the Russian language. Quite another explanation appeared in the Hebrew press, one that highlighted Jewish-Christian tensions and the socioeconomic aspect of the pogrom's destructive dynamic. An open letter from the unnamed "Jewish nobles of Kiev" (atsilei b'nei Kiyov)—the city's Jewish aristocracy— in December 1882 reproved the prosperous Jews of the city for flaunting their wealth in the eyes of Kiev's Christian population. While the authors of the letter acknowledged that the Jews were not to blame for the pogrom, they nonetheless urged them to maintain a lower profile so as not to provoke their neighbors' envy. The letter spoke disapprovingly of Jewish mansions bedecked with costly furniture and of lavish Jewish weddings, but devoted most of its censure to Jewish women, who—regardless of their family's means and social status—insisted on dressing in luxurious garments and expensive jewelry. The "nobles" urged all Jews to lead their lives modestly, and even discouraged Jews of more humble means not to keep their children in school if they could not afford it, but rather to teach them a trade and thus ensure an honest living for them. Finally, in a passage replete with citations from the Talmud and other traditional texts, the writers discouraged all forms of cheating and fraud in business dealings, lest Christians be able to point to even one Jew's actions as an excuse for their poor impression of Jews as a group.205
Clearly, the pogrom had provoked soul-searching among Kiev's Jews. But unlike the standard narrative of the Jewish reaction to 1881-82, these Jews were not despairing of an eventual Jewish integration into Russian society, nor engaging in traditionalist self-flagellation over sins against God. In some ways it was a classic maskilic argument, advocating that Jews "fit in" as much as possible into the surrounding society: too much visible embour-geoisement without enough real integration and rapprochement between Jew and Christian could lead to disaster, as the pogrom showed. But at least one maskil found this warning nothing but an insult to the intelligence of Kiev's Jewish masses: in a response to the letter from the "aristocrats," Moshe Leib Lilienblum retorted that the pogrom mobs had spent most of their energy attacking not the wealthy or even the middling Jews, but the Jewish poor and working class of the city.206
For many Christians in Kiev, and particularly for Russian bureaucrats, there was little question as to who bore the lion's share of responsibility for the pogrom. A memorandum on Jewish residence privileges in Kiev written after the pogrom concluded that Jews had managed to settle throughout Kiev (contrary to regulations) thanks only to bribery, and Kiev residents did not generally believe that Jews had ever had the right to do so. This line of reasoning could lead only to the inference that Jews had stepped beyond all legal and societal bounds in their dealings in Kiev, and in doing so had provoked the animus of the local "native" population. Moreover, went the memorandum, Jews were the instigators of the quarrels that sparked the violence, and thus the pogrom was caused mostly [bolee vsego] by the Jews.207 This conclusion was similar to those reached by most of the provincial boards of inquiry established by St. Petersburg in the wake of the pogroms, and led eventually to the restrictive May Laws instituted by Interior Minister N. P. Ignat’ev.208
Not everyone agreed about the precise portion of blame to be apportioned to the Jews, however. A curious article in the Moscow-based Russkii kur’er, which the correspondent from Kiev claimed to have written after the first day of pogrom violence, argued that although economic exploitation by Jews was an unmistakable fact, it was hardly their fault alone—indeed, the municipal administration had actually invited Jews in certain occupations to come to Kiev in order to lower the prices!209 The writer went on to maintain that Kiev had become "zhidified" [ozhidovlen], and the process of "zhidification" was continuing; but that it was Christians as well as Jews who were responsible for that state of affairs. Apparently the writer was condemning the exploitation of the common people by anyone, regardless of religion; however, he then returned to the subject of Jews, noting that "Jews are strong where we are weak: the Jews have real community spirit (obshchest-vennost’) . . . [and] solidarity." In other words, Christians made the mistake of turning on one another while Jews continued their inexorable rise, thanks to their cohesion and unity of aims.
World History
