Ukrainian pogroms

Ukrainian pogroms
Name	Ukrainian pogroms
Location	Ukraine, Poland, Russian Empire
Date	19th century–20th century
Type	Mass violence, pogroms, massacres

Ukrainian pogroms were waves of antisemitic mass violence directed against Jewish communities in territories that became modern Ukraine and neighboring regions. These events occurred across changing polities including the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian People's Republic, the Soviet Union, and wartime occupations by the Nazi Germany and its allies. Historians analyze them through sources associated with political movements, armed formations, urban officials, and international responses such as those by the League of Nations.

Definition and terminology

Scholars debate the definition of pogroms, comparing terms used in contemporaneous reports such as "pogrom" (from Russian usage), "riots", "anti-Jewish disturbances", and "massacres" in studies by Solomon Asch, Salo W. Baron, Simon Dubnow, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Oleg Budnitskii. Comparative research links events to analyses by Alexander Berkman, Isaac Deutscher, Boris Aronson, Zeev Sternhell, and Timothy Snyder. Legal and historiographical definitions reference investigations by the Allied Commission, the Paris Peace Conference, and scholars publishing in journals like The Jewish Quarterly Review and Slavic Review.

Historical background (19th–early 20th century)

In the late 19th century, antisemitic violence in the Pale of Settlement and urban centers such as Kiev, Odessa, Lviv, Chernigov, Zhytomyr, and Vinnytsia intensified after episodes like the Assassination of Alexander II of Russia and the May Laws of 1882. Notable episodes documented by observers including Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Korolenko, Franz Kafka's contemporary commentators, and Leo Tolstoy's readers followed patterns also seen in the May 26–27, 1881 disturbances and the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. Political currents such as the Black Hundreds, the Constitutional Democratic Party, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and the Bolshevik Party intersected with economic crises, demographic shifts, and migration studied by demographers like Simon Kuznets and historians like Orlando Figes.

Pogroms during the Russian Revolution and Civil War (1917–1921)

The February Revolution and October Revolution produced breakdowns of authority exploited by armed units including the Ukrainian People's Army, the White Army, the Red Army, the Army of the Ukrainian State (Hetmanate), and irregular bands led by figures such as Symon Petliura, Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Nikolai Denikin, Anton Denikin, Nestor Makhno, Semyon Petlyura (often referred together in contemporary sources), and commanders referenced in the archives of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. Field studies by Martin Gilbert, Richard Pipes, John-Paul Himka, Yehoshua B. Z., and Shaul Stampfer document major outbreaks in regions including Volhynia, Podolia, Kherson Governorate, and Bessarabia. Investigations by commissions such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Allied Mission to the Ukraine, and the Jewish Historical Commission catalog casualties, displacement, and property loss during clashes involving the Polish–Soviet War, the Ukrainian–Soviet War, and the Russian Civil War.

World War II and Holocaust-era pogroms

Occupation policies of Nazi Germany, local collaborationist formations such as the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, and units like the SS, Einsatzgruppen, and allied formations such as the Romanian Army and the Hungarian Army precipitated mass killings in cities including Kiev (notably the Babi Yar massacre), Lviv (including events around the Lviv pogroms), Dniepropetrovsk, Rivne, and Kamenets-Podolski. Research by Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Christopher R. Browning, Yad Vashem, Efraim Zuroff, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in some accounts), and Wolf Gruner integrates survivor testimony collected by organizations such as the Wiener Library, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Local nationalist and paramilitary actors, wartime administrations like the General Government, and shifting frontlines during the Operation Barbarossa shaped the patterns examined in postwar trials and historiography.

Soviet and postwar responses and prosecutions

After 1944, the Soviet Union prosecuted some collaborators in courts connected to the Supreme Court of the USSR, the NKVD, and later the KGB. Trials and documentation involved prosecutors such as those working with the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs and institutions including the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. International efforts by the Nuremberg Trials, the Einsatzgruppen Trial, and later initiatives by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania and NGOs such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch influenced public knowledge. Post-Soviet prosecutions in Ukraine and Poland have involved inquiries by the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, scholars at Harvard University, Columbia University, University of Oxford, and memorial institutions like Memorial (society).

Memory, historiography, and commemoration

Memory politics involves institutions and figures including the Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Yad Vashem commemoration program, historians such as Lucy S. Dawidowicz, Timothy Snyder, John-Paul Himka, Omer Bartov, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, and cultural sites in Kiev and Lviv. Debates engage the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, municipal councils in cities like Odessa and Lviv City Council, and monuments such as the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and plaques curated by the Jewish Historical Institute. Scholarship spans archival projects at the Central State Archive of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, oral history collections at Fortunoff Video Archive, and comparative studies published by presses including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Indiana University Press. Public controversies and legislative acts in parliaments such as the Verkhovna Rada and responses by civil society groups including KARTA Center and Center for Civil Liberties shape commemoration, restitution, and education policies.

Category:Antisemitism Category:History of Ukraine Category:Massacres in Ukraine