Lega­cy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Rit­u­al Mur­der in the Lands of the Sovi­ets tells the sto­ry of the after­life of pogroms and blood libels — the two most extreme man­i­fes­ta­tions of tsarist anti­semitism — in the Sovi­et lands from 1917 to the ear­ly 1960s. Pogroms and rit­u­al mur­der were often close­ly inter­twined in his­to­ry and mem­o­ry, not least because the accu­sa­tion of blood libel — the false alle­ga­tion that Jews mur­der Chris­t­ian chil­dren to use their blood for rit­u­al pur­pos­es — fre­quent­ly trig­gered anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence. Such events were, and are, con­sid­ered cen­tral to the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence in late impe­r­i­al Rus­sia; for exam­ple, the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, the 1911 Beilis Affair in Kiev with a blood libel accu­sa­tion that spi­raled into a pogrom in Kishinev, and a rit­u­al mur­der accu­sa­tion against Men­achem Beilis which almost led to a pogrom. The Sovi­et regime boast­ed its break from Tsarist Rus­sia, and proud­ly claimed to have erad­i­cat­ed these forms of antisemitism.

But as I have dis­cov­ered research­ing and writ­ing this book, life was much more com­pli­cat­ed. The phe­nom­e­non and the mem­o­ry of pogroms and blood libels in dif­fer­ent areas of inter­war Sovi­et Union, includ­ing Ukraine, Belorus­sia, Rus­sia and Cen­tral Asia-as well as, after World War II, in the new­ly annexed ter­ri­to­ries of Lithua­nia, West­ern Ukraine and West­ern Belorus­sia, are a reminder of con­ti­nu­ities in the midst of rev­o­lu­tion­ary rup­tures. The per­sis­tence, the per­mu­ta­tion, and the respons­es to anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence and mem­o­ries of vio­lence sug­gest Sovi­et Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohab­it­ed with a lega­cy of blood that did not vanish.

Let me dwell on the pogrom thread of the book, a term that has cast a dark shad­ow over Jew­ish his­to­ry, and tell you how I came to explore the lega­cy of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence in my research. The pow­er of the archives, the extent to which the mate­r­i­al we uncov­er in our jour­ney through these spaces shapes the nar­ra­tives we cre­ate as his­to­ri­ans, inspired me to write Lega­cy of Blood. A few years ago, thanks to the sup­port of a fel­low­ship, I spent a year off from teach­ing and was able to devote some time to one of the most extra­or­di­nary archives on twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Jew­ish life in East­ern Europe (and beyond); name­ly the Elias Tcherikow­er col­lec­tion held at YIVO, the Insti­tute for Jew­ish Research. While look­ing for snip­pets from the Sovi­et press, specif­i­cal­ly pub­li­ca­tions in Ukrain­ian and Russ­ian that could shed light on the every­day life of Jews in the Sovi­et Union, I found the pogroms. Jew­ish his­to­ri­an Elias Tcherikow­er had made it his mis­sion to col­lect and record the mate­ri­als about the pogroms of the Russ­ian civ­il war, an unprece­dent­ed wave of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence that fol­lowed the Bol­she­vik rev­o­lu­tion of 1917 and end­ed in 1921. Tcherikow­er defined the pogroms of the civ­il war as ​“one of the worst cat­a­stro­phes that has ever shak­en the fate of the great­est Jew­ish cen­ter in the world…which was dev­as­tat­ed, shat­tered into pieces, and bro­ken in its eco­nom­ic foundation.”

More specif­i­cal­ly, I found the pogroms in the wit­ness accounts and mate­ri­als col­lect­ed by one woman: Yid­dish writer Rokhl Faygn­berg. She was born in Liuban (today Belarus), moved to War­saw, and then set­tled in Odessa right before World War I. She had expe­ri­enced the hor­ror of the civ­il war pogroms. In the sum­mer of 1919, when the vio­lence reached its peak, Faygn­berg fled in haste her home in a shtetl, locat­ed between the cities of Bal­ta and Odessa, in south­west­ern Ukraine. Hold­ing her new­born son in her arms, she went into hid­ing among the peas­ants of the near­by vil­lages. A woman helped her dis­guise her­self: she gave her a folk dress with the nation­al col­ors, and a lit­tle cross to put around her child’s neck. Faygn­berg even­tu­al­ly reached Odessa. As she lat­er wrote, “[J]ew-murderers were still roam­ing around the Bal­ta roads, and sign­posts were still hang­ing from the tele­phone poles, call­ing on peo­ple to kill all lit­tle Jew­ish boys, because when they grow up they will all be communists.”

There was some­thing new and unpar­al­leled in these pogroms com­pared to pre­vi­ous waves of anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence. As a refugee, Faygn­berg record­ed the expe­ri­ences of oth­ers who, like her, had suf­fered dur­ing the civ­il war. She chron­i­cled the bru­tal­i­ty of the pogroms by zoom­ing in on the destruc­tion of a num­ber of small towns. More than the authors of oth­er accounts, Faygn­berg cap­tured the inti­ma­cy of vio­lence in these pogroms. She reminds us that they orig­i­nat­ed not only with­in the mil­i­tary car­ried out by troops fight­ing or loot­ing on behalf of the White forces — the Ukrain­ian Direc­torate, peas­ant bands, Pol­ish troops, anar­chists or Red Army troops — but that they were also the con­se­quence of neigh­bors killing neigh­bors. n the after­math of World War I, new forms of extreme bru­tal­i­ty tapered the inhi­bi­tion to kill and wit­ness murder.

In the archives I found Faygnberg’s chron­i­cle of the pogroms in Dubo­vo, a shtetl locat­ed a few kilo­me­ters from the city of Uman; the father of Hebrew writer Micha Josef Berdy­czews­ki had served as rab­bi of Dubo­vo for decades before being mur­dered in the 1919 pogrom. Faygn­berg inter­viewed sur­vivors and described how the shtetl’s pop­u­la­tion was wiped off the map of Ukraine; she also cap­tured how, at the end of the civ­il war, the mem­o­ry of Jew­ish Dubo­vo was com­plete­ly erased, as the local peas­ants destroyed the Jew­ish ceme­tery, ploughed up and sowed it, tear­ing down its grave­stones. Faygnberg’s account in Yid­dish was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in War­saw into a book in 1926. I was sur­prised to find out that the book was lat­er trans­lat­ed into Russ­ian, and pub­lished in the Sovi­et Union in 1928. Read­ing the Russ­ian ver­sion of the chron­i­cle of Dubovo’s destruc­tion guid­ed me to pon­der the lega­cy of these pogroms for Sovi­et Jews, the sec­ond largest Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in pre-Holo­caust Europe. How did the extreme vio­lence of the pogroms, of the Russ­ian Civ­il War, affect the choic­es made by those Jews who could not — or did not want to — flee the new Com­mu­nist regime? How did the mem­o­ry of the pogroms affect their iden­ti­ty and inter­act with the mem­o­ry of pre-rev­o­lu­tion­ary anti­se­mit­ic vio­lence? And how was this vio­lence com­mem­o­rat­ed by the Sovi­et state and its citizens?

While thou­sands of Jews, like Faygn­berg her­self, man­aged to get out of the ter­ri­to­ries that would come under Sovi­et rule, most of those who expe­ri­enced the 1,500 pogroms of the civ­il war remained, and cohab­it­ed with the trau­ma of 150,000 Jews mur­dered, hun­dreds of thou­sands wound­ed, 300,000 chil­dren orphaned, thou­sands of women raped, and prop­er­ty loot­ed or destroyed in its entire­ty; his expe­ri­ence of vio­lence had not been inte­grat­ed into the study of the Sovi­et Jew­ish expe­ri­ence, into the study of the ways in which Jews accul­tur­at­ed, assim­i­lat­ed, and Sovi­etized under Com­mu­nism. This trau­ma left an indeli­ble imprint on Sovi­et Jews’ rela­tion­ship with the Bol­she­vik state, with their neigh­bors, and shaped new com­mu­ni­ties of vio­lence and com­mu­ni­ties of mem­o­ry. This expe­ri­ence remained a found­ing one for Sovi­et Jew­ry espe­cial­ly against the back­drop of a new soci­ety that saw the vir­tu­al dis­ap­pear­ance of pogroms.