Brendan McGeever. Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution

Before the Nazi assault against European Jewry, the most violent antisemitic outbursts occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution on lands that had formerly been part of the Russian Empire. Estimates of Jewish fatalities range from fifty thousand to two hundred thousand in the period 1917–21. It is to that period and to those atrocities that Brendan McGeever directs our attention. However, his focus is on not the assaults but the responses of the revolutionaries to what was decidedly a direct threat to their efforts. While McGeever begins with an examination of the March Revolution and covers the months between March and November, the center of the study is the post-November period and the Bolshevik understanding and response to this wave of violence focused on Jews as both agents and beneficiaries of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Given that antisemitism and pogroms had been a tool of the political Right in Russia since 1903, Bolshevik leaders should have been strident in confronting pogromists and swaying their own supporters and allies away from “the socialism of fools.” McGeever demonstrates that even though the revolutionary leaders recognized that threat, they did not take the initiative to combat it energetically. Rather, it was a handful of Jewish political activists who had joined the Bolshevik movement after 1917 who immediately took the lead in confronting the deadly antisemitic assaults that were decimating Jewish communities in the former Pale of Settlement

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