Politics

History, Considered Dead and Buried, Suddenly Reaches Out of the Grave

Barbarity runs deep and dark

“Humanity’s greatest political achievement has been the decline of war. That is now in jeopardy.” Yuval Noah Harari

Events are unfolding with stunning speed. As Russian troops continue to invade Ukraine, for Ukraine’s Jews and Jews worldwide, the threat of war rouses recollections of past horrors. Many American Jews trace their stories back to the Pale of Settlement. That was the western part of the Russian Empire, which contained modern-day Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, most of Poland, small parts of Latvia, and much of Ukraine.

It is worth remembering the tragedy between November 1918 and March 1921, when Russian and Bolshevik armies invaded the independent Ukrainian state established after World War I and the Russian Revolution. All civilians, whether they identified as Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, or none of the above, became victims of that conflict, commonly referred to as a “civil war.” But the three million Jews who lived in the region — about 12% of the overall population — suffered a distinct fate.

Progrom

A pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group. The pogroms in 1918–19 in Ukraine, Poland, and Russia bring to light a terrible and historically neglected series of persecutions that foreshadow the Holocaust by 20 years.

Barbarity runs deep and dark.

Ukrainian, Polish and Russian peasants, and townspeople raided their Jewish neighbors with impunity. Armed militants, with the support of large portions of the population, tore out Jewish men’s beards, tore apart Torah scrolls, and raped Jewish girls and women. And, in many cases, they tortured Jewish townsfolk before assembling them in market squares, parading them to the outskirts of town, and shooting them. On one occasion, insurgent fighters barricaded Jews in a synagogue and burned down the building.

The pogroms were public, participatory, and ritualized. They often took place in a carnivalesque atmosphere of drunken singing and dancing. Crowds allowed for diffusion of responsibility, drawing in otherwise upstanding citizens and ordinary people who might not have joined the proceedings in different circumstances. It was often the participation of these close acquaintances, trusted clients, and family friends that most horrified the victims, instilling in them a feeling of powerlessness and alienation, a trauma that outlasted their physical wounds.

Houses and shops were looted and burned. Amid all this horror — as women and children wailed and wept, as the wounded moaned, as windows smashed and furnishings were destroyed — they raped the women in front of their parents, husbands, and children.

Later, the violence became more organized and systematic, carried out by military units acting on direct orders. These repeated attacks served no military purpose but instead expressed that the Jewish civilian population was an existential threat to the new political, social, and economic order. The attacks were a great betrayal to the distressed victims, who had expected the army to defend them and restore law and order.

No clear fronts

The enemy — whose identity could shift from week to week — could be anywhere, hiding among the civilian population. Drawing upon age-old prejudices and superstitions, an entire Jewish population was systematically attacked and plundered. These attacks stemmed from several imagined grievances — the accusation of supporting the enemy, the chaos following the collapse of the old order, the aftermath of World War I, and the Russian Revolution.

Today

Despite its scarred history, Ukraine today is no hotbed of anti-Semitism. It already has a Jewish prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, and a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky. Ukraine is the only country outside Israel where the heads of state and government are Jewish. Zelensky’s securing an election while freely identifying as a Jew is a compelling sign that Ukraine has moved beyond the violence that characterized the history of the country.

One poll showed that Ukrainians positively favored their daughters marrying Jewish men — and while that may seem like the punch line to a bad joke, it would have astounded my grandparents.

Russia, likely seizing on the fact that Jews are viewed favorably in Ukraine, has made antisemitic disinformation a key component in its accompanying online proxy war against Ukraine and its efforts to galvanize support for the war among citizens at home. A reminder that in these troubling times of the early 21st century, it often feels that swaths of the population in many parts of the world are returning to the extreme nationalism of a century ago. We seem to be revisiting that world of religious extremism, with murderous attacks on immigrant communities.

Pondering on the invasion of Ukraine, renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari pontificates that at the center of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and humanity. Harari asks if change is even possible. Can humans transform the way they act, or does history repeat itself eternally, forever destined to re-enact past tragedies without changing anything? Those who deny the possibility of change argue that the world is a jungle, that the strong target the weak, and that the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force.

We must learn lessons from the past and prevent the current polarization of society from leading once again to the kind of mass violence that tore Ukraine apart a hundred years ago.

Thank you for reading and sticking with me to the end.

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