Oleg Budnitskii. Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920

This is a faithful translation of Oleg Budnitskii's Russian-language book of the same title published in Moscow in 2005. Budnitskii provides the most comprehensive account so far of the experiences of Russia's Jews during the revolution and civil war, and he analyzes the role of the “Jewish Question” across this period. In doing so, he makes a major contribution to the study of Russia's Jews and of the Russian Revolution more generally. Budnitskii details the immense cost of the civil war to Russia's Jewish population, estimating that pogroms directly affected up to a million Jews, killing between fifty and two hundred thousand, and harmed the economic, social, and cultural activities of hundreds of thousands more. Jews were caught between two sides, the “Red” Bolsheviks and the various anti-Bolshevik “White” forces, both of whom committed shocking atrocities. Indeed, the deeply rooted nature of antisemitism on both sides leads Budnitskii to place the roots of the violence in imperial Russia. The tsarist regime's rejection of Jewish-Christian coexistence and determination to integrate Jews into the empire as Christians accounted for its tolerance of popular antisemitism and pogroms. Popular antisemitism was exacerbated by World War I, which spread fears of Jewish conspiracies, gave greater prominence to an antisemitic military, and fostered increased savagery during pogroms. It was hardly surprising that Jews welcomed the revolution and in many cases worked to facilitate it, seeing an opportunity for equality. Budnitskii stresses, however, that 1917 was a Russian revolution and provides evidence to prove it, especially with regard to the minor position of Jews in the Bolshevik party. Yet contemporaries exaggerated the role of Jews and, as material conditions worsened, antisemitism re-emerged.

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