People's War Commissariat of the Ukrainian SSRIntroduction
From 1918 to 1920, Russian Jewry1 suffered persecution and devastation on a scale that had not been seen since the Khmelnitskii Uprising in the seventeenth century. Of all the tragedies in the annals of Jewish History, only the Holocaust would surpass this period in savagery and wanton murder. To this day, experts still differ as to the total number of Jews who perished in the pogroms, the bloodiest of which took place in Ukraine in 1919 and 1920. Literature on the subject places the total number of victims anywhere in the range of 50,000 to 200,000 killed or mortally wounded.2 Not included in this number are countless other victims who were robbed, raped, or permanently disfigured.
Perhaps due to the shadow of the Holocaust, the causes, conditions, and consequences of these events have yet to be sufficiently studied. At the same time, a number of scholars have attempted to draw comparisons between the Holocaust and the pogroms that had occurred some twenty years earlier. Avraam Greenbaum, for example, claimed that “in some ways—especially since killings were sometimes carried out as a kind of “national duty” without the usual robbery—they bear comparison with the Holocaust some twenty years later.”3 David Roskies deemed the mass murder of Jews during the Civil War to be “the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jewry.”4 Richard Pipes, writing much in the same vein, claimed that “in every respect except for the absence of central organization to direct the slaughter, the pogroms of 1919 were a prelude to and a rehearsal for the Holocaust. The spontaneous lootings 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: the deadly identification of Communism with Jewry…in view of the role this accusation had in paving the way for the mass destruction of European Jewry, the question of Jewish involvement in Bolshevism is of more than academic interest.”5
Though these contributions are valuable, the pogroms of 1918–20 and the role of the “Jewish question” in the larger context of the Civil War have hardly been examined in the detail they deserve. Still, the goal of the present study is not limited to investigating the tragic events of the pogroms themselves in isolation. Though any study of the period would be remiss to ignore these events, the suffering of the Russian Jewish population was but a part of the larger tragedy of the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Civil War.6
In this tragedy, Jews played the role of both victim and executioner. Like many of the peoples of the former Russian Empire, the Jewish population found itself fragmented into a number of different groups and organizations during this “new time of troubles.” These groups, each having its own world-view and set of priorities, often came into conflict with one another. In the given historical context, it is impossible to talk about the Jews “in general.” Instead, this study will focus on those groups and individuals who were important participants in the political and social development of Russia as a whole, as well as those who participated in the numerous Jewish national movements.
This does not mean that I will be focusing exclusively on prominent politicians and social activists. Jewish privates who served in the Volunteer Army during its Ice March to Kuban, Jewish members of the Red Army, Jewish tailors and accountants who would go on to become Chekists, the “bourgeois” Jews who were persecuted by those very same Chekists, and the large number of Jews who were not involved in any sort of political activity would all come to play vital parts in the historical events of 1918–20, and their stories deserve to be told as well.
Of less concern for my investigation are the “internationalists” who rejected their Jewish heritage, and the Zionists who tried to distance themselves from the political events inside Russia. They will not, however, be completely ignored. Trotsky (who once claimed that the Jews interested him as much as the Bulgarians) will make an appearance, as will a number of Zionists who were unable to stay completely “above the fray” due to varying circumstances (including, on occasion, the Cheka). It is worth bearing in mind throughout that for the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population, the central goal during the Civil War was survival and escape from the violence that was taking place all around them. In this they differed little from the non-Jewish population, who faced similar challenges. It should be noted, however, that surmounting such challenges was particularly difficult for those of Jewish heritage.
I would like to emphasize that this study is concerned not only with Jewish history. It is rather about the history of the Civil War in Russia. At the same time, writing a full history of the Jewish experience of the Russian Civil War, or examining all aspects of the “Jewish question” during the Russian Civil War, would be an impossible task. I will focus instead on two main themes: Jewish participation in the struggle between the Reds and the Whites, and the role of the “Jewish question” in the internal politics of these central participants of the Civil War.
In order to better understand the events at hand, I will provide a brief summary of the history of the Jews in Russia during the imperial period, paying particular attention to those aspects that would prove to be influential in the years to come. Furthermore, the events of World War I were to play a greater role in the following years for Russia's Jews than for any other nationality in the former Russian Empire. With this in mind, I will occasionally include details from 1914–17 and earlier historical periods in order to provide a clearer historical context for the events at hand.
Among the numerous topics to be addressed are Jewish participation in the White movement, and the attitude of the Reds and Whites towards Jews in both their internal and external politics; the attempt by the leadership of the Russian Orthodox church to prevent the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine; the pogroms of the Civil War period; the role of Jews in the establishment of the Soviet state; and the role played by Jewish socialist parties in Red Army recruitment, including attempts to create Jewish units within the Red Army.
Nearly all of the Jewish political parties, socialists included, severely disapproved of the Bolshevik coup. The Jewish population at large likewise found little good in the Bolsheviks' program of liquidating private property and religious institutions, and the Red Army was hardly without sin when it came to pogroms against Jews. These stances were to change radically over the course of the Civil War. In this study, I will attempt to show how such a marked change was made possible.
A significant part of the current monograph is dedicated to problems that have thus far remained nearly untouched, such as Jewish participation in the White movement and the Whites' attitudes towards the “Jewish question.” The very posing of such issues might at first seem surprising, given that the White movement
