Another pogrom occurred in Kishinev in 1905. By this time, Kishinev had become a rallying cry for the early Zionists, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky. A native of Odessa, Jabotinsky formed the Jewish Self-Defense Organization after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, encouraging Jews to protect their own communities. Others decided that the best defense was to leave, and Shalom Aleichem was among those who left for the United States.
Yet as tragic as these early pogroms were, they were just a foretaste of what was still to come.
War and Revolution
Of course, there were some Ukrainian Jews who felt that running away wasn’t the solution. Believing that radical change was both necessary and possible, many young Jews joined socialist revolutionary movements and even formed their own socialist parties, such as the Bund.
World War I brought chaos and more attacks on the Jews. Because the Tsarist government feared that Jews would aid the advancing German army, about 600,000 Ukrainian Jews were uprooted from their homes and moved eastward, which caused both emotional trauma and economic catastrophe for these exiles. Between the years 1917-21, the region also experienced the Russian Revolution and a civil war fought between Ukrainian nationalists and the new Soviet government in Russia. For a short while, some Jewish socialists joined politically with Ukrainian nationalists, who promised to give Jews communal and individual rights. But while the Ukrainian politicians were promising increased rights, Ukrainian soldiers went on a rampage. Between 1918 and 1921, there were 1,236 violent incidents against the Jews of Ukraine, and between 30,000 and 60,000 were killed, although some place the number even higher.
The reason for the attacks: the suspicion that Jews were on the side of the Soviets. The outbreak of pogroms did, in fact, convince many young Jews to join the Red Army—which further fueled Ukrainian suspicions and violence.
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became part of the USSR in 1922. After fifty years of pogroms and a decade of war and revolution, the Jews who remained in Ukraine were probably hoping for better times ahead. It was not to be.
Famine and More War
When Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s, he embarked on an ambitious program to turn Russia’s primarily agrarian society into an industrial power. Instead, his economic measures resulted in the famine of 1932-33.
Ukraine, which had always been primarily agrarian, was one of the areas hit especially hard. While no one knows exactly how many people died—the Soviets tried to suppress the information—it’s estimated that anywhere between 6 and 8 million Russians perished during the famine. Some 3 to 5 million of them were Ukrainians. Because Ukraine’s Jews were considered pro-Soviet, the famine increased the already tense relations between Ukrainians and Jews.
The Stalin years also saw a clamp down on religious and cultural activities. Yeshivos and Jewish schools were closed, forcing Jewish religious activists to go underground. Writers and artists who dared to speak out against the regime were silenced.
World War II brought more misery to the area. The Nazis liked the Slavs about as much as they liked Jews. Part of their Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) called for exterminating 65 percent of the Ukrainian people and deporting the remaining ones for slave labor.
Jews living in western Ukraine were the first to experience the Nazi occupation. They were forced into ghettos and later deported to the death camps, where most of them perished. The Nazi occupation of the rest of Ukraine occurred in 1941. Nazi death squads, or Einsatzgruppen, aided by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered about one million Jewish souls between the years 1941 and 1944. Jews in countless towns and cities were forced to dig their own graves, before being executed by the death squads. One of the most famous of these mass executions occurred outside Kiev, at Babi Yar, where almost 34,000 Jews were killed on September 29-30, 1941.
