All events · The World Wars

The Anti-Jewish Pogroms of the Russian Civil War

1918–1921 · Europe & Northern Eurasia

Displacement Mass Killing Sexual Violence Killing was the defining act

Displaced

500,000

Several hundred thousand Jews were driven from their homes in the shtetls of Ukraine and Belarus by the pogroms and by the destruction of their livelihoods; contemporary Jewish relief organisations registered hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless survivors, and the violence contributed to renewed emigration to Poland, western Europe, the United States and Palestine. Figures rest on the records of Jewish relief committees, the Kyiv-based investigating commissions and the material collected by Nokhem Shtif and Elias Tcherikower.

Share of the population affected

31%

of the Jewish population of the Ukrainian lands during the Russian Civil War, 1918

Killed

50,000–200,000

direct killing

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What happened

Between 1918 and 1921 more than a thousand pogroms were recorded across Ukraine and Belarus as authority collapsed and armies moved back and forth. Nicolas Werth, in the Sciences Po Mass Violence encyclopedia, records approximately 150,000 Jewish victims, 125,000 in Ukraine and 25,000 in Belarus, with 1919 the deadliest year; other counts of those killed outright are lower, in the range of 50,000-100,000, with the remainder dying of wounds, hunger and epidemic. The perpetrators included the White Volunteer Army, whose Ukrainian campaign of 1919 was accompanied by systematic pogroms, detachments nominally under the Ukrainian People's Republic, independent bands under warlords such as Hryhoriv, and, less often, Red Army units, some of whose members were shot for it. Communities were robbed, houses burned, women raped and entire shtetl populations killed. The violence was documented at the time by Jewish investigating commissions whose archives were later published, and it is widely regarded as the largest killing of Jews in Europe between the Chmielnicki massacres and the Holocaust.

Parties

White Volunteer Army units, Ukrainian People's Republic detachments, independent warlord bands and, in a smaller number of cases, Red Army units attacked Jewish towns and villages in Ukraine and Belarus

Disputed

Responsibility is politically contested, above all the degree of responsibility of Symon Petliura and the Ukrainian People's Republic, an argument that ran through the 1926 assassination of Petliura and the acquittal of his assassin in Paris in 1927; the death toll ranges in serious work from about 50,000 to 200,000 depending on whether deaths from wounds, hunger and epidemic are included.

The denominator

The 1897 census counted about 1.9 million Jews in the nine Ukrainian provinces and the 1926 Soviet census 1.57 million in the Ukrainian SSR, bracketing a wartime population of roughly 1.6 million. Estimates of those killed in the pogroms range from about 50,000 to 200,000, with several hundred thousand more left homeless, orphaned or destitute across more than a thousand recorded pogroms.

The affected figure counts people made homeless or refugees rather than killed, and the two are often conflated in the literature.

Where the baseline comes from

Pogroms during the Russian Civil War — Wikipediaopen-edited
History of the Jews in Ukraine — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Werth gives approximately 150,000 Jewish victims for 1918-22. Counts restricted to those killed outright in identified pogroms are lower, commonly 50,000-60,000; totals that include deaths from wounds, exposure, hunger and the typhus that followed the destruction of communities reach 150,000-200,000. The disagreement is between narrow and broad definitions of victim and between the different investigating commissions' records.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingSummary ExecutionSexual ViolenceDestruction of PropertyCultural Destruction

Killings, mass rape and the burning and looting of Jewish quarters were documented contemporaneously by Jewish investigating commissions in Kyiv whose archives underlie Shtif's account and Werth's summary.

Movements mapped

Jewish communities of Podolia and Volhynia -> flight westward into Poland and beyond

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Ukraine, Poland

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.