Russian seeds of the Shoah
In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918-1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
By Jeffrey Veidlinger Picador, £30), (PB £16.99)
The scholarly detail in Jeffrey Veidlinger’s brilliant new book, in which he describes the massacre of over 100,000 Jews across parts of what are now mostly Poland and Ukraine during the years following the Russian Revolution, makes his narrative at times almost unbearably painful to take in. His overall thesis is that these pogroms, scarcely known of today, paved the way towards the Nazi Holocaust a mere generation later.
Veidlinger — Canadian-born professor of history and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan — tells a complex and disturbing tale. Essentially, the chaos following the 1914-18 Great War, and the collapse of the various multinational empires of Europe, helped bring about a series of often fragile, locally-based political aspirations, many of them ideologically led and often crudely nationalistic. Thus, while post-Tsarist Russia was supposedly replaced by Bolshevism, it was in practice torn apart by a vicious civil war between “Reds” and “Whites” while its western borders saw successive attempts, often violent, to forge a Ukrainian “People’s Republic” and some kind of viable Polish state.
Veidlinger’s writing demonstrates clarity of vision and breadth of scholarship, but what remains in the mind above all is the microscopic detail: in particular, the many instances of sadistic cruelty towards Jews (especially, but not only, by the anti-Bolshevik “Whites”). Jews were variably derided as pro-Soviet spies, selfish capitalists or historic outsiders eager to set up their own separate state. And Jews became the standard victims of numerous pogroms across the frontiers of old Tsarist Russia, some committed almost on a whim and even cheered on by local crowds.
Veidlinger provides authentic, detailed statistics and cites his sources. You won’t remember everything and, while you may know of some of the historic figures he mentions (Isaac Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, Mikhail Bulgakov or the Polish pianist and political leader Ignacy Jan Paderewski), Veidlinger also does his best to make us at home with terms like
Rada, Otaman, the Hetmanate and “the Joint”. The book is long, action-packed, and contains 70 pages of notes and references. Many of the maps it contains are too small to absorb the detail. But the fundamental argument — that these largely forgotten pogroms of 1918-21 helped lead directly to the Holocaust of the 1940s — is powerfully convincing.
Some pogroms across the frontiers were carried out almost on a whim and even cheered on by local crowds
Daniel Snowman’s books include a study of the cultural impact of the ‘Hitler Émigrés’.
His memoir, ‘Just Passing Through’, was reviewed in the JC on January 21