The Afterlife of the Beilis Affair

Chapter 2 explores the place that the claim of Jewish ritual murder held in interwar Soviet society. The Bolsheviks dealt a blow to the blood libel tradition by confronting aggressively the legacy of the Beilis Affair, and prosecuting those responsible for orchestrating the trial. But ritual murder accusations did not wane in Soviet society. In fact, there were numerous cases of criminal investigations of blood libels that involved investigative commissions, medical experts, the press, and the secret police. If for the Bolshevik state, the Beilis case remained the symbol of the tsarist corrupt system, written and oral references to Beilis echoed through the instances of blood libel in the Soviet Union and validated ritual murder. This chapter also examines the Jewish responses to the blood allegation, showing the assertiveness to denounce the ineptness of local authorities at bringing to justice those responsible for spreading the lie.

The Pogroms of the Civil War and the Soviet-Jewish Alliance

Chapter 1 dissects the genocidal impulses that emerged during the Russian Civil War, in reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, through a series of case studies in the ethnography of violence. The close-up examination of anti-Jewish violence in one place helps underscore the rationale for the Jewish alliance with Soviet power. This chapter sheds light on the long-term effects of these pogroms—in particular on the legacy of sexual violence against Jewish women and girls, a common feature of this violence. These pogroms triggered the redistribution of the Jewish population away from the former Pale of Settlement. But aside from a geographic resettlement, the pogroms also prompted an emotional resettlement: many responded to the trauma of destruction and rape, searching for anonymity, assimilation, and Sovietization through a symbiotic relationship with the state. A foundational experience for Soviet Jews, the pogroms hastened their process of urbanization, encouraging ideological and cultural choices and erasures.

Myth and Reality

Chapter 5 maps out the social life of the myth (and reality) centered on the absence of pogroms. It captures the use of the term in calls to reject Jewish political agency and resist Stalin’s policies. While the state stigmatized this form of violence, pogroms did occur on rare occasions. They were an exception to the rule until World War II, which drastically changed the habits and discourses of violence: pogroms reappeared in the context of collaboration with German forces. The return of the unthinkable was triggered by the idiosyncratic contingencies of war: in 1945 a pogrom broke out in Kiev. The myth of Soviet Jewry was temporarily shattered. During the postwar years the state reasserted its monopoly over violence. And while it promoted antisemitism and ignored the complaints of Jews bewildered by the change, it never crossed the line of tolerating eruptions of spontaneous violence against them.

How the Ritual Murder Accusation Persisted in the Soviet Landscape

Chapter 4 explains the endurance and permutation of the ritual murder accusation in the Soviet landscape of the interwar years. The occurrence of the blood libel epitomizes some aspects of the nature of the Bolshevik experiment, and becomes an indicator of the limits (and triumphs) of the Soviet attempt to modernize society. Ritual murder accusations grew out of the power of slander and denunciatory frenzy that enveloped Soviet society. But the accusation also resulted from the encounter between Jews and peasants in the context of a system that violently promoted urbanization and new socioeconomic structures. The intensity of the anti-religious propaganda inadvertently played a role in maintaining this powerful anti-Jewish myth, as the attack on circumcision and kosher slaughtering reinforced anti-Jewish stereotypes. Finally, the transformation of ritual murder echoes the process of Jewish women’s empowerment: only in Soviet society could Jewish women become perpetrators of ritual murder.

Conclusion

The conclusion chronicles the present-day landscape of the memory and the oblivion of the different chapters in the history of ritual murder and pogroms discussed in this book. The official inquiry by the Russian Federation into the real nature of the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, alongside some contemporary versions of the ritual murder myth, are a reminder of how deep-seated the memories of dangerous imagined Jewish rituals still is. Similarly, the memory and oblivion of anti-Jewish violence in contemporary Russia and Ukraine sheds light on the legacy of the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. The recollection of a Jewish alliance with communism comes across the monuments and the memory of “national heroes” like Symon Petliura and Anton Denikin, and of “anti-heroes” like Leon Trotsky. Finally, the memory of the pogroms is still exploited today by Russia, and used as a means to exert social and political control in the brutal war waged against Ukraine.

From Cannibalism to Political Murder

Chapter 6 reveals the permutations of the blood libel and the emergence of a new notion of Jewish murder. Nazi propaganda exploited the blood libel theme in conjunction with the Judeo-Bolshevik myth. This link persisted also in the aftermath of World War II, but under a more secular vestige. In the midst of a postwar crisis of identity and political power, memories of blood libel could intersect with fears of cannibalism, as it happened in the city of Lvov. Reinforced by the Cold War context, the blood libel then shifted from cannibalism to political murder, and found its shell in the Doctors’ Plot. Not unlike the interwar period, blood libels that occurred in Lithuania, Central Asia, and the Caucasus, intensified in the midst of the anti-religious campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. The recrudescence of antisemitism in the postwar years made it difficult for Jews to rely upon authorities for protection in countering these accusations.

The Pogroms as Soviet (Jewish) Sites of Memory

Chapter 3 explores the Soviet politics of memory of the pogroms of the civil war. It does so by examining instances of trials of pogromists; the impact that the reports about the assassination of Symon Petliura and the Scholem Schwarzbard trial had on the memory of violence; pogrom memorials; memoirs, literary accounts, exhibitions, and other visuals about the violence; and the place of the pogrom in Soviet Jewish historiography and in the Yiddish school curriculum. This chapter captures the encumbered memory of violence and the emergence of two distinct narratives largely competing with each other: on the one hand, the pogrom became a universal Soviet site of memory, on the other hand it remained a particular Jewish site of memory. As the Soviet politics of memory imposed its qualitative choice on anti-Jewish violence, it elected which pogroms to remember and publicly discuss and which ones to ignore, and eventually forget.

Introduction

The genocidal impulses that erupted during the pogroms of the Russian Civil War (1917–21), together with the recurring claim of Jewish ritual murder and its multiple permutations, became necessary components for the events that unraveled in the so-called Bloodlands. The persistence, the permutation, andthe responses to anti-Jewish violence and memories of violence suggest that Jews (and non-Jews alike) cohabited with a legacy of blood that did not vanish. It is in fact difficult to fully grasp thedynamics of violence unleashed during World War II in the region of Eastern Europe, which comprised present-day Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, without integrating the historical violence and memories of violence that earmarked Jews. The blood legacies played a central role in the carnage of European Jewry and made the Bloodlands likely. Under the Soviets, who from the beginning outlawed antisemitism, violence against Jews did not supersede entirely, and even when it was forbidden (like in the case of the pogroms), it was not forgotten. There is an unexplored history of antisemitism in the Soviet lands that sheds light on the complicated experience of concurrent Jewish empowerment and vulnerability in Soviet society.