Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Budnitskii Oleg
Title : Russian jews between the reds and the whites, 1917-1920
Year : 2012

Link download : Budnitskii_Oleg_-_Russian_jews_between_the_reds_and_the_whites_1917-1920.zip

Introduction. From 1918 to 1920, Rus sian Jewry suff ered persecution and devastation on a scale that had not been seen since the Khmelnitskii Uprising in the seventeenth century. Of all the tragedies in the annals of Jewish History, only the Holocaust would surpass this period in savagery and wanton murder. To this day, experts still diff er as to the total number of Jews who perished in the pogroms, the bloodiest of which took place in Ukraine in 1919 and 1920. Literature on the subject places the total number of victims anywhere in the range of 50,000 to 200,000 killed or mortally wounded. Not included in this number are countless other victims who were robbed, raped, or permanently disfi gured. Perhaps due to the shadow of the Holocaust, the causes, conditions, and consequences of these events have yet to be suffi ciently studied. At the same time, a number of scholars have attempted to draw comparisons between the Holocaust and the pogroms that had occurred some twenty years earlier. Avraam Greenbaum, for example, claimed that “in some ways - especially since killings were sometimes carried out as a kind of “national duty” without the usual robbery - they bear comparison with the Holocaust some twenty years later.” David Roskies deemed the mass murder of Jews during the Civil War to be “the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jewry.” Richard Pipes, writing much in the same vein, claimed that “in every respect except for the absence of central or ga ni za tion to direct the slaughter, the pogroms of 1919 were a prelude to and a rehearsal for the Holocaust. Th e spontaneous lootings and killings left a legacy that two de cades later was to lead to the systematic mass murder of Jews at the hands of the Nazis : the deadly identifi cation of Communism with Jewry... in view of the role this accusation had in paving the way for the mass destruction of Eu ro pe an Jewry, the question of Jewish involvement in Bolshevism is of more than academic interest.” ...