Pogrom

Where the word comes from

The word comes from the Russian verb gromit' (громить), "to destroy, wreak havoc, demolish violently." It was first recorded in English in 1882, and some accounts have it entering other European languages through Yiddish as well. What carried the Russian word abroad was the anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire in 1881-1883; since then it has also been applied to similar collective violence against non-Jewish minorities. The Russian Short Jewish Encyclopedia explains that the word entered most European languages through the Jewish pogroms of southern and western Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Korean also uses a Sino-Korean rendering, daebakhae (大迫害).

The Pale of Settlement and the conditions of violence

The Russian Empire had very few Jews until the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795 brought it territories with large Jewish populations. Catherine the Great's Pale of Settlement, established in 1791, confined most Jews to one region; families expelled by decree from St. Petersburg, Moscow and other large cities were also required to live inside it. The 1821 Odessa pogrom is counted as the beginning of the 19th-century pogroms, with four more in Odessa before the century's end. The pogroms of the Russian Empire are usually divided into four periods: sporadic outbreaks in 1821-1871, the wave of 1881-1884 after the tsar's assassination, the intensification during the revolution of 1905-1907, and the Civil War.

The waves of 1881-1884 and 1903-1906

After Narodnaya Volya assassinated Alexander II in 1881, anti-Jewish events turned into a wave of over 200 pogroms by their modern definition, lasting several years. Researchers disagree about the degree of planning by the tsarist authorities and about their motives.

The first large pogrom of 20th-century Russia was the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, in which 49 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, 700 homes destroyed and 600 businesses pillaged. It followed a newspaper's promotion of a blood libel, the false claim that Jews murdered a boy to use his blood in a ritual; local authorities backed the perpetrators, and Nicholas II excused the killings. Pogroms also occurred that year in Gomel (Belarus) and in Smela, Feodosiya and Melitopol (Ukraine), marked by extreme savagery including the mutilation of the wounded. The Zhitomir pogrom (29 killed) and the Kiev pogrom of October 1905 (about 100 Jews massacred) followed. Between 1903 and 1906 about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and Bessarabia and a few more in Belarus, carried out with the Russian government's complicity. Around that time the Jewish Labor Bund began organizing armed self-defense units, and the pogroms subsided for several years.

The Civil War pogroms, 1918-1921

Pogroms exploded on their largest scale during the Civil War after World War I. From 1918 to 1920 there were 1,500 pogroms in over 1,300 localities, with deaths estimated at 35,000 to 250,000. All armed forces operating in Ukraine took part, in particular the anti-Communist Ukrainian People's Army and the Armed Forces of South Russia. Jewish sources of the time estimated that over a million people suffered material losses, that 50,000 to 300,000 children were orphaned, and that half a million were driven from or fled their homes.

Accounts of who did the killing differ. Nahum Gergel counted 1,236 incidents of anti-Jewish violence in 1918-1921 and classified 887 of them as mass pogroms: about 40 percent by Ukrainian People's Republic forces led by Petliura, 25 percent by the Ukrainian Green Army and various nationalist armed groups, 17 percent by the White Army, above all Denikin's forces, and 8.5 percent by Red Army soldiers. Other estimates give Ukrainian nationalists 50 percent, the Whites 17 percent and the Bolsheviks 9 percent. The Red Army's pogroms were not sanctioned by the Bolshevik leadership: the high command condemned them and disarmed the guilty regiments, and Kalinin denounced them in a speech at a military parade in Ukraine. Yet in the spring of 1918, retreating Soviet forces in Chernigov Governorate committed pogroms under the slogan of fighting the bourgeoisie, and about 400 Jewish residents, including many children, were murdered within two days at Chernihiv and Hlukhiv on 7-8 March.

The killing was not confined to Ukraine. In Lwów (Lviv) in 1918 a Polish mob that included Polish soldiers killed 72 Jews. When Polish troops took Minsk in August 1919, they killed 31 Jews suspected of supporting Bolshevism and looted 377 Jewish-owned shops. Pogroms were also reported in several cities of the new Second Polish Republic during the postwar independence conflicts. Across Eastern Europe this violence drove westward a Jewish migration of about 2.5 million people.

Extension of the term, and the debate over it

The term later spread beyond the Jewish experience. In Nazi Germany Kristallnacht of 1938 was called the first pogrom; during World War II there were the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, the Iași pogrom in Romania, and the Jedwabne pogrom in German-occupied Poland. After the war came the Tripoli pogrom of 1945, Kielce in 1946, Aleppo in 1947 and Istanbul in 1955. Other ethnic and religious minorities have also suffered this type of violence, with the 1984 Sikh massacre and the 2002 Gujarat pogrom cited as examples. For the Armenian massacres, the events of 1894-1896 are generally classified as slaughter rather than pogrom, and those of 1915 as genocide.

There is no universally accepted set of characteristics defining a pogrom. Werner Bergmann proposes defining it as a unilateral, nongovernmental form of collective violence initiated by a majority population against a largely defenseless minority, occurring when the majority expect no assistance from the state. John Klier warns that applying the word indiscriminately to events in Eastern Europe can mislead. The 1919 Morgenthau Report avoided calling the events in Polish cities pogroms and used the word "excesses" instead, on the argument that the term presupposed an antisemitic rather than political character. Which features should define a pogrom remains a live scholarly dispute.