Pogrom Read online

  “Even Hell is preferable,” proclaimed Kishinev’s Jewish communal leader Jacob Bernstein-Kogan at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in the summer of 1903.26 This slogan was soon adopted by those supporting the prospect of Jewish settlement in East Africa, an idea proposed by Theodor Herzl and now floated by the British. Elsewhere the insistence by Russian apologists after the massacre that pogroms in the empire’s southern region were no more containable than lynching in the American South prodded Jewish radicals in the United States, in particular, to take a much closer look at the persecution of blacks. The confluence of Russian pogroms and antiblack riots would become one of the age’s most formative lessons in American Jewish radical circles. An eventual by-product would be the formation in 1909 of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was launched in the New York City apartment of Yiddish-speaking Anna Strunsky and her husband, William Walling, who became the NAACP’s first chairman. At much the same time as they were galvanizing support for a national organization to protect African Americans, Strunsky was struggling to complete a manuscript that she would describe in letters to her family as her “Pogrom” book.27

  A still greater influence than the pogrom itself was the document that would cement Kishinev as a catastrophe unlike all others. This was the letter signed by the Russian minister of the interior, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve, that surfaced a few weeks after the pogrom. Plehve was known for his antipathy toward Jews, whom he undoubtedly loathed, and his letter, dated just before the pogrom’s outbreak, instructed Kishinev’s authorities to avoid all use of force once the massacre erupted. Hence the proof that Russia was unsafe for Jews set it apart from all European countries—except, perhaps, for Romania.

  This document was deservedly shocking, and yet there is little doubt, as we will see, that it was a forgery written by those—whether Jewish or not—who sincerely believed its sentiments to be true if impossible to substantiate conclusively. No evidence exists that Plehve wrote the letter, and there is considerable evidence that he did not. (Russian conservatives like Plehve shared an intense distrust of Jews—of their economic rapacity, their radicalism, their incorrigible separatism—but had a much deeper fear of unrest on the empire’s streets.) Nonetheless, widely believed at the time to be true, even by some close to Plehve, the letter rapidly became the prime bulwark for Jewish distrust of conservatism, the most emphatic of all counterarguments to restriction on Jewish immigration, and the most powerful of all justifications for why Jews must flee Russia or fight to bring its government down.28

  Oddly, Kishinev’s pogrom would come to occupy a roughly comparable prominence for those on the Russian Right. For them it represented a gruesome moment far more harmful to Russians than to Jews and, like so many others, massaged by Jews for their own benefit. Because of such machinations, world opinion would turn against the regime, and moderates inside Russia would abandon it—all because, as the Right saw it, of outright lies set in motion by Jews and their allies in newspapers throughout Europe and the United States. Shocked by this unprecedented outcry, Krushevan, Kishinev’s most prominent antisemite, rushed into print (in a newspaper he owned) the first version of what would eventually be called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Scholars now concur that the text was almost certainly his own handiwork in cooperation with a small clutch of far-right figures close to him, nearly all from Kishinev or nearby. Linguistic fingerprints unique to Bessarabia and adjacent regions are studded throughout the original text, though all of these were excised from the better-known, book-length versions published soon afterward. Much as the pogrom proved to Jews and their supporters that the long, wretched arm of the Russian government was behind it all, The Protocols provided no less conclusive proof to antisemites of the limitless power of worldwide Jewry.29

  With its imprint so multifaceted, Kishinev’s memory continues to be widely embraced, in contrast to that of tragedies far more murderous that have faded into oblivion, pertinent to few beyond survivors or their relatives. Reviewing in 1923 the first of a projected two-volume work on the pogroms of 1918–20, the Yiddish literary magazine Bikher-velt (Book World) insisted that the book was all the more welcome since these massacres, so devastating at the time, were then disappearing into the mist of history.30 In contrast Kishinev stood there on its own, hugging the beginning of a new century, unmoored to the constitutional crisis of 1905–6, and with its many lessons believed to remain relevant—an unforgettable ingredient of Jewish culture and politics.

  How is it that an event so resolutely enters into history that it defines the past and how to behave in the future? What we see here is an inverse relationship between the sheer quantity of available information and a veritable mountain of teachable lessons, many of which at best are only sketchily based on the events themselves. Kishinev’s pogrom may well be the best known of all moments in the Russian Jewish past and the one most persistently, lavishly misunderstood.

  Moreover, despite its vaunted standing in contemporary Jewish memory and elsewhere, it was made of so many moments so random, so circumstantial. Had the early-morning rain—which stopped at around six in the morning on the riot’s second day—persisted, the pogrom almost certainly would have ended before the worst of its violence. (Pogroms, like revolutions, occur almost invariably in temperate weather.) Kishinev’s location at the most porous edge of the Russian empire—Bessarabia was the easiest of all places from which to smuggle goods or, for that matter, information—meant that the world was informed of the pogrom’s atrocities with rare dispatch. Had the same events occurred a few hundred miles to the east, it is unlikely that they would have had a comparable impact; the details would have been reported on fleetingly and peppered with fewer updates, and the tragedy, like others then and later, would have almost certainly been mourned locally without much resonance beyond the town itself.

  The pogrom revealed Russian Jewry’s inner recesses on the front pages of the world’s press, distilling a coherent set of beliefs about modernity itself. And much of this was the by-product of half-truths, of poetry read as journalism, and of “facts” passed from generation to generation with little basis in fact. The uncanny longevity of beliefs that tumbled from Kishinev’s rubble are crucial to its story; this mix of mythology and countermythology was inspired by a riot in a city barely known of before and rarely spoken about since except as a synonym for devastation.

  For example, in the grand, lyrical autobiography of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, published in 1949, he describes how as a student and Zionist activist in Geneva in 1903 he had been so crushed by news of the Kishinev pogrom that he rushed immediately to Gomel (in present-day Belarus), where that September he organized the town’s widely lauded Jewish self-defense effort. But in fact it was radicals associated with the Jewish Socialist Labor Bund, with the help of Marxist-Zionists, who organized those efforts. At the time Weizmann was in Geneva, having just returned from Russia. His letters to his fiancée, postmarked Geneva, attest to his whereabouts. Even if Weizmann was not intentionally lying, he told the same story for much of his life. For Weizmann, eventually a towering figure in Russian Jewry, it likely felt quite natural to insert himself into what was the most defining of all contemporary Russian Jewish sagas. He returns time and again in the book to lessons learned from Kishinev—for instance, how to recognize the imprint of mendacious officialdom: “Just before the [1937 Palestinian] riots broke out I had an intimate talk with the [British] High Commissioner. He asked me whether I thought troubles were to be expected. I replied that in Tsarist Russia I knew if the Government did not wish for troubles they never happened.”31

  For Noam Chomsky, too—the distinguished linguist and outspoken anti-Zionist who would have agreed with Weizmann on very little else—Kishinev’s lessons are all but identical and no more accurate. In a 2014 National Public Radio interview, he lambasted the Kahan Commission’s comparison of the Sabra-Shatila catastrophe to Kishinev’s pogrom for its f
ailure to take it far enough: “The Kahan Commission, I think, was really a whitewash. It tried to give as soft as possible an interpretation of what was in fact a horrifying massacre, actually one that should resonate with people . . . who are familiar with Jewish history. It was almost a replica of the Kishinev pogrom of pre–First World War Russia, one of the worst atrocities in Israeli memory. . . . The tsar’s army had surrounded this town and allowed for people within it to rampage, killing Jews for three days. . . . That’s . . . pretty much what happened in Sabra-Shatilla.”32

  Yet, contrary to Chomsky’s account, the army never encircled the city protecting rioters. For him, much like for Weizmann, the pogrom’s details were part and parcel of common knowledge, an immediate reference point for the widest range of teachable moments.

  Ari Shavit’s 2013 best-seller, My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, places no less than the entire weight of the Zionist enterprise on the shoulders of the Kishinev pogrom, relating it to the story of the expulsion of the Arabs of Lydda (later Lod), the book’s explosive epicenter. He tells of a Lydda that flourished in the Mandate period partly, as he sees it, because it was the site of a Jewish school established for the care of Kishinev pogrom orphans, trained there to become farmers. Once it failed, the school’s buildings were occupied by a full-throated humanistic endeavor launched by a liberal Berlin Jew with a worldview shaped by Martin Buber and the anarchist Gustav Landauer. (The book’s critics insist that the school was actually located in nearby Beit Shemesh, not Lydda.) A generation of displaced German Jewish youth was trained there, schooled in the need for peaceful coexistence with Arabs. At odd hours the students participated in military training as well.33

  Then, with the onset of the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, those same students figured among the soldiers who, in July, expelled the nineteen thousand Lydda Arabs, who were forced to walk in suffocating heat, with not a few infants and elderly dying on the long road to the Jordanian border. Shavit writes: “Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could bear Lydda.”34 Still, he feels contempt for “those bleeding-heart Israeli liberals . . . who condemn what they did in Lydda but enjoy the fruits of their deeds.” Their politics is all the more absurd “[b]ecause I know that if it wasn’t for [Lydda] the State of Israel would not have been born. If it wasn’t for them, I would not have been born.”35 In his view the saga is all the more poignant because at its heart is Kishinev’s pogrom:

  Forty-five years after it came into the Lydda Valley in the name of the Kishinev pogrom, Zionism instigated a human catastrophe in the Lydda Valley. Forty-five years after Zionism came into the valley in the name of the homeless, it sent out of the Lydda Valley a column of the homeless. In the heavy heat, through the haze, through the dry brown fields, I see the column marching east. So many years have passed, and yet the column is still marching east. For columns like the columns of Lydda never stop marching.36

  Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s late-life historical excursion into Russian Jewish history, Dvesti let vmesti (Two Hundred Years Together), devotes almost an entire chapter to Kishinev’s deleterious impact—on Russians, not Jews. Solzhenitsyn’s argument is that the blanket distrust it created of Russia in the international community and among Russia’s own political moderates and intelligentsia rendered the regime incapable of withstanding the eventual Bolshevik onslaught. Much like Shavit, who draws a straight line from Kishinev to Lydda, Solzhenitsyn situates Kishinev no less emphatically as a station on the road to Bolshevism.37

  The pogrom’s durability, its ready slippage into today’s politics, is also made explicit in Benjamin Netanyahu’s frequent comparisons of the Jews of Israel and the massacred of Kishinev. In response to events as varied as the 2012 Toulouse school massacre and the murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank (which was the prelude to the 2014 Gaza war), the Israeli prime minister has referenced Bialik’s Kishinev poetry, long a mainstay of Israel’s school curriculum. Always sidelining in these statements the poet’s warnings of the corruptive impact of violence on all those singed by it, Netanyahu has cherry-picked from this work its apparent calls for reprisal. At the Toulouse memorial service, citing Bialik’s “On the Slaughter”—“The vengeance for a small child’s blood / Satan himself never dreamed”—he chose to overlook the words that come just before: “And cursed be he who cries: vengeance.”38

  Finally, comparable to the importance placed on the pogrom in Israel—while drastically different in its details—is its place in the raw, nascent politics of Transdniestria, or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, a separatist enclave with a population of five hundred thousand at Moldova’s eastern edge. With its spotlessly clean streets (a sharp contrast to the hurly-burly and cracked sidewalks of today’s Chişinău), sparse markets, and reigning ideology made of old-style Communism and Russian ethnic nationalism, Transdniestria has held on since the early 1990s with its economy in the hands of a clutch of megabillionaires.

  History weighs heavily on this place, readily dismissed as one of the world’s last Soviet-style anachronisms. In its effort to claim legitimacy, it holds high among its heroes Krushevan, whose stalwart Russian allegiance, prominence as a Moldavian intellectual, and commitment to what admirers call his “Christian socialism” offer a powerful alternative to the embrace of Western liberal globalism. So argues Transdniestria’s now assistant foreign minister, Igor Petrovich Shornikov—son of one of Moldova’s leading pro-Russian activists—who in 2011 completed the first sustained study of Krushevan’s sociopolitical thought in more than a century.39

  Written as a doctoral dissertation at the Shevchenko Transnistria State University, Shornikov’s Russian-language study depicts a Krushevan who had nothing to do with the pogrom or the writing of The Protocols. Jews themselves, in the employ of the Russian secret police—which they assiduously infiltrated—produced the document that Krushevan was somehow persuaded to publish. The pogrom itself, Shornikov argues, was a minor affair blown out of all proportion by Jews who managed to claim far more money for their property than it was worth; the massacre was entirely justified by their economic stranglehold, their outsize political radicalism, and the understandable hatred of those oppressed by them.

  All these claims are recycled from the arsenal of Russian conservative and right-wing accounts. Shornikov’s insistence that it was the rapacity and the brashness of Kishinev’s Jews that caused the pogrom cleanses Krushevan—and still more important, all Moldavians—of culpability. As portrayed by this young leader of a Russian-dominated rump state in one of Europe’s most explosive corners, the Kishinev pogrom was a justified, even righteous exercise in self-defense. This is a tale long misconstrued—much like, indeed, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic itself. Krushevan, long excoriated as a rabble-rouser, is thoroughly rehabilitated as a patriot, a lover of all things Russian—which, as Shornikov argues, is consistent with the staunchest Moldavian convictions. Krushevan’s anticapitalism (interlinked with a relentless hatred of Jews), his insistence on liberalism’s incapacity to challenge either cultural decadence or economic oppression, and perhaps above all his ability to embrace a simultaneous allegiance to both Bessarabia and Russia have managed to transmute the long-forgotten reactionary into a bracingly contemporary influence.

  Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History explores how history is made and remade, what is retained and elided, and why. I examine how one particular moment managed to so chisel itself onto contemporary Jewish history and beyond that it held meaning even for those who never heard of the town, know nothing of its details, and nonetheless draw lessons from it. It was a moment that cast a shadow so deep, wide, and variegated as to leave its imprint on Jews, on Jew-haters, and on wounds licked ever since. Studying Kishinev provides the opportunity to cut across standard barriers separating Russian and Jewish, European, Palestinian Jewish, and American Jewish history and to wade through the pogrom’s residue in many different, oddly mismatched corners. Its gruesome stories wou
ld frequently outdistance the sufficiently gruesome events themselves. It took weeks for the press to disprove, for example, the widely reported rumor that the bellies of pregnant women had been cut open and stuffed with chicken feathers.40

  From the start of my research for this work, it intrigued me that Kishinev’s violence—the worst of it lasting some three to four hours in a cluster of intersecting streets—would come to epitomize this community to a far greater extent than any other moment in Russian Jewish life. These alleyways, especially Aziatskaia, or Asia Street, immortalized now in countless newspaper reports, would become the best known of all Russian Jewish locales, its humble dwellings soon the most telling of metaphors for the impoverishment and grim tenuousness of Jewish life under the tsars. The impact of these impressions, reinforced over the course of the past century, on Jewish perceptions of the world, the designs of gentiles, the exercise of Jewish power, and the immorality of what Netanyahu has derisively called “turning the other cheek” are among the questions that have kept me fixed on this moment and its resilience.41