Tsar Wars

Russia is involved in a disastrous war on its western frontier that has dragged on far longer than anyone expected, at enormous human cost, devastating large swaths of the countryside, producing floods of refugees, and imposing enormous strain on the national economy. Antisemitism is on the rise everywhere, with increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories proliferating, often tied to new and unfamiliar technology. Vast national and international humanitarian efforts are underway to help the homeless and the refugees, but large quantities of food gathered for these poor souls are left unused because of logistical problems in distribution. Armed units have recently stormed Jewish communities, slaughtering, raping, and maiming with exceptional cruelty. Other Jews have been taken hostages.

Although this might sound like a collage of headlines from the past several years of war in Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza, it all happened in Russia during the First World War. The refugees were Russian Jews, nearly half a million in number. Some fled deeper into Russia from their homes near the front lines; others were brutally expelled by the Russian Army, whose soldiers raped, kidnapped, and murdered many of them in the chaos. And the worldwide humanitarian efforts were also on behalf of Russian Jewry, as Polly Zavadivker relates in her excellent new book, A Nation of Refugees: Russia’s Jews in World War I.

Although most people today associate World War I with the deadlocked trench warfare on the Western Front, the fighting in the east was every bit as bloody while being spread over a much wider territory. The front lines separating Russian forces from those of Germany and Austria-Hungary swung back and forth across vast areas, including most of the Pale of Settlement. In addition to being in the line of the enemy’s fire, the millions of Jews who lived there bore the brunt of the animus with which their own country’s leaders regarded them.

The tsarist government’s attitude toward its Jewish subjects was bad enough; the army’s was worse. It had long viewed all ethnically non-Russian subjects living in the western borderlands as suspicious and foreign, and Jews were the most suspicious of all. Shortly before the war, Zavadivker reports, “Several Russian army generals submitted reports to the Ministry of War in which they described Jews as ‘enemies of Russia,’ as ‘alien and even hostile to the interests of the state,’ and as a people ‘lacking patriotism.’” When the war broke out, the army was under the command of Tsar Nicholas II’s favorite uncle, the untalented and antisemitic Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. His number two, Nikolai Yanushkevich, was no more distinguished as a military mind but every bit as antisemitic. Thanks to the War Statute of July 1914, these men possessed nearly unlimited authority over the war zone, which included virtually the entire Pale of Settlement.

When things started to go badly for them, after their defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in August 1914, Russian commanders and their troops looked for someone to blame. And since everywhere they looked, they saw Jews, they concluded that they were losing because of them. Outlandish reports about rabbis describing Russian troop movements to Germans using secret telephones in synagogue basements began to spread. Sporadic violence against Jews followed. In a few instances, commanders within Russia used their authority to expel Jewish populations from areas of operation. When Russian troops occupied Austrian-ruled Galicia, they wreaked havoc on the local Jewish communities, massacring and raping thousands of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more to flee to Vienna and other parts of the Habsburg Empire.

The situation got even worse in the spring of 1915, when more capable German forces joined their Habsburg allies in turning back the Russian invaders in Galicia and launching a major offensive into Poland, which eventually captured Warsaw. A second offensive in the summer pushed deeper into the tsarist empire, forcing the Russian Army into what was called the “Great Retreat.”

Even before the retreat began in earnest, the Russian high command decided to take concerted action against the supposed source of its troubles: the Jews. In May, it issued orders to expel the entire Jewish populations of the Courland and Kovno provinces as well as some nearby districts; Zavadivker puts the number of expellees at a minimum of 230,000 and as high, perhaps, as half a million.

The expulsions were often accompanied by brutal violence, and it grew more brutal yet in the summer and fall, as retreating Russian forces vented their frustrations on Jewish populations. The worst instances occurred in the small shtetl of Smorgon, now located in northwestern Belarus. Zavadivker writes:

On September 7, [1915,] a handful of Christians complained to the soldiers that Jews had hidden food and enemy troops in their homes. That night, as one witness ruefully recalled, the soldiers went looking for “hidden Germans” in Jewish homes, searching especially carefully in “dressers, men’s pockets, and lady’s bosoms.” Their aggression intensified over the next five days. Soldiers ransacked the main synagogue, shared stolen property with neighbors, beat men on the streets, and raped women in their homes.

On the morning of September 11, as Russian forces prepared to retreat a second time, orders came to burn the city and expel the population. . . . All that day, soldiers searched the town for Jews, ordered them to leave at gunpoint, and torched their houses. Several witnesses claimed that they saw soldiers push people into burning buildings. The father of the Sobol family lay bedridden at home and unable to walk, and when a Cossack officer entered and saw that Sobol’s sons refused to leave him, he shot their father and coolly informed the sons they were “free to go.”

Contemporary reports did not give precise counts, but descriptions of witnesses suggested that dozens of people were killed and similar numbers of women raped.

These episodes are often described as pogroms, but the term isn’t quite right. The pogroms that Russian Jews suffered between 1871 and 1908 were instances of mob violence in which loosely organized groups of townspeople and peasants attacked Jews and destroyed property. The attack on Smorgon, and comparable incidents, were carried out by armed troops serving in military units, sometimes acting on their own initiative but more often carrying out orders to drive out Jews.

In November 1914 the high command had also authorized hostage taking “to secure the army from the harmful activities of the Jewish population.” As Zavadivker explains, hostages were often rabbis or prominent laypeople, who were slated for execution “if any acts of spying or aiding the enemy were discovered among members of their communities.” Such executions were in many cases actually carried out.

In statistical terms, however, the biggest problem for Jews was their displacement. The expulsion decrees constituted a dramatic reversal of Russia’s Jewish policy: Since the 1770s, the Russian state had aimed to confine Jews to the western borderlands; now the policy was to drive them in the other direction. The refugees concentrated, at first, in neighboring provinces within the Pale, some of which would soon fall under German military occupation. But they were too numerous to absorb, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, “realizing the practical impossibility of confining hundreds of thousands of deported Jews to a narrow strip of land,” opened the door out of the Pale, if only provisionally. It is the story of these refugees, and the efforts of their coreligionists who tried to care for them, that is at the heart of Zavadivker’s book.

The restriction of Jews to the Pale had never been absolute. There were always exceptions, not to mention those who skirted the law, and the 1860s and 70s in particular saw a relaxation of restrictions. By 1914, cities like St. Petersburg, Samara, and Orel had sizable Jewish communities. As a rule, the Jews of these cities were more likely to speak Russian, less likely to wear distinctive Jewish clothes, more likely to have secular educations, and overall less religiously devout than Jews in the Pale. They also tended to be better off economically. Hence the arrival of the refugees was somewhat akin to the mass influx of Eastern European Jews to New York in the late nineteenth century—or, more aptly, to the influx of Eastern European Jews to Vienna around the same time. Along with the antisemitism of the locals, this led to friction with the established Jewish communities. There was also a culture shock for the refugees themselves.

Still, friction or no, the local Jews behaved heroically. The entire Russian Jewish elite mobilized to care for the refugees. This was a massive undertaking: The refugees needed housing and food, and their children needed schools. They had come with few possessions and little money; finding work, especially as the wartime economic collapse worsened, was difficult; even if existing schools had room for the refugee children, they often knew no language other than Yiddish and couldn’t easily be integrated into Russian-language schools.

At the head of all these efforts was the Jewish Committee for Aid to War Victims (known by its Russian acronym EKOPO), founded in St. Petersburg by members of the Russian-Jewish economic and political elite. This group included such figures as Genrikh Sliozberg, the lawyer who just a short time earlier had successfully defended Mendel Beilis against the charge of ritual murder; Aleksandr Gintsburg, scion of one of Russia’s wealthiest and most prominent Jewish families; and every Jew who had served in the Duma since its establishment in 1906. EKOPO grew to employ an army of workers and volunteers, operating across the empire and doing everything from providing legal aid to establishing soup kitchens and schools. Among them were committed socialists, Zionist activists, and liberal diaspora nationalists. Probably the most famous of them was the Social Revolutionary Shloyme Rappoport, better known by his pen name, S. An-Sky, and for his famous Yiddish play, The Dybbuk. He tirelessly roamed the war zone recording the horrors and dispersing funds to needy communities (as he reported in his 1915 diary, which Zavadivker has translated and edited, and then in his masterful The Destruction of Galicia).

“EKOPO and dozens of its affiliated regional committees,” Zavadivker writes, “provided vital support to nearly a quarter of a million war victims in a region that stretched from the eastern edge of Europe to the Trans-Baikal.” To obtain the funds necessary to do so, the organization appealed to the Jews of Russia and also garnered support from Jews overseas, above all in the United States. But its main source of funds was, ironically, the same Russian government whose armed forces were generating the very problems it struggled to address. The government’s attitude toward EKOPO typified the contradictions of its entire wartime Jewish policy. On one hand, the regime allowed EKOPO to operate, provided half of its budget, and, as Zavadivker explains, came to see it as a partner. On the other hand, EKOPO was initially forbidden from establishing branches in other cities, creating hurdles to the very cooperation it was meant to facilitate.

EKOPO was a new kind of Russian Jewish organization, which mobilized progovernment Jewish grandees, committed socialists, Zionist activists, and liberal diaspora nationalists. Even as members of these disparate groups managed to work together, the relief efforts brought to the surface internal fissures: Was it necessary to provide refugees with kosher food? Should the cheder to which most refugee children were accustomed be re-created for them, as Shalom Dov-Ber Schneerson, the fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, and Rabbi Hayim Ozer Grodzienski, the chief judge of the Vilna beit din, argued, or should they be given the opportunities that came with modern schooling? Should instruction be in Hebrew, Yiddish, or Russian? At the end of the day, what was most remarkable was not the arguments but that the fractious Jewish community came together as successfully as it did—and despite a suspicious and often hostile government.

Of course, there were failures, frustrations, and inadequacies, but EKOPO’s accomplishments were extraordinary. As, indeed, were those of the refugees. Zavadivker relates how the eight families comprising the Jewish community of Bogorodsk, a town in the Russian province of Nizhny Novgorod, “absorbed somewhere between 2,000 to 3,000 Jews,” a plurality of whom were refuges from Smorgon:

Indeed, Bogorodsk became known as a “small Smorgon,” for the fact that more than 2,000 refugees recreated their renowned hometown industry there. Within a few months after settling, they established over 200 artisan workshops and 50 leather workshops and factories that cumulatively employed 700 Jews and 100 Christians as tanners, finishers, and cutters of unprocessed hides. Within a year, the Smorgon refugees were helping to power a provincial leather industry that supplied nearly two-thirds of Russia’s entire market and produced stock worth up to 1 million rubles each month.

Unfortunately, this did nothing to redeem the Jews’ reputations. By 1916, the government and military had given up on blaming Jews for the disasters on the battlefield, shifting instead to holding them responsible for the ever-growing economic disaster. Although Zavadivker describes this as an effort “to deflect popular anger,” it seems at least as likely that Russian officials actually believed this anti-Jewish propaganda, which is why it can be found even in internal memos circulated around government offices.

Zavadivker writes clearly and avoids the jargon and theoretical excurses that cloud so much academic prose, while drawing on an extraordinarily deep well of research. This is an ambitious book that covers a broad geographical sweep and much relevant background and looks at its subject matter from a variety of different angles, usually with admirable acuity, but not always.

In her chapter “Women without Men: Jewish Women in Wartime Russia,” she deftly handles the particularly difficult issues of rape and prostitution—difficult in themselves and difficult because the sources rarely speak of them frankly. But here Zavadivker does lapse into such unhelpful phrases as “subaltern groups” and the “constructed category of the idealized war victim” and treats the wholly understandable concerns of Jewish leaders and writers worried about the fate of refugee women and their children as benighted obsessions:

The documented rise of hunger, disease, the separation of refugee mothers from children during expulsions, the turn of women to prostitution in greater numbers, and reports of psychological breakdown—all these fed fears that Jewish female refugees could irreparably damage the integrity of Jewish family life. Wandering, homeless, and broken families appeared as proof that traditional gender roles—the ideal order of the Jewish family, and the nucleus of Jewish peoplehood itself—were at risk.

Those writing about these issues at that time may well have had outmoded ideas about the roles of the sexes, but how could homelessness, sex trafficking, mass immiseration, and the breaking up of families as some members were expelled and others remained, were killed, or died of disease not threaten family life? And what person concerned with the fate of the Jews, regardless of their attitudes to gender roles, would not worry about this crisis?

In 1917, the revolution came: first, the overthrow of the tsar in March and then, in November, the Bolshevik coup. For the Jewish refugees, these events brought a roller coaster of expanded freedoms and then new forms of persecution, all compounded by growing economic deterioration as prices soared and goods became increasingly hard to find. The new Soviet regime also secured peace with Germany in 1918, and when the German empire itself collapsed at the end of that year, many of the refugees began to return to their homes, especially as it became clear that conditions might be better in newly independent Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia—despite widespread antisemitism—than under Soviet tyranny.

Although this is where A Nation of Refugees ends, it’s worth remembering what happened next, which was even worse than anything that had happened previously. In the wake of World War I, the Russian Civil War broke out between Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik forces at the same time as the Polish-Soviet border war. And then there was the Ukrainian War of Independence, which combined both conflicts with the fledgling state’s struggle for survival. Everyone took out their rage on Jews. The Ukrainian and White (anti-Communist) Russian armies were by far the worst actors, and the number of Jews slaughtered was somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000.

The violence unleashed on Jews in the postwar period was worse than anything the tsar’s army had inflicted on Jews during the war, but it was similar in kind. These were not pogroms but deliberate attacks by soldiers on civilians, often carried out with special sadism. If there is a historical precedent, it lies not in Kishinev but in the devastation of Jewish communities carried out by the forces of the Cossack leader Bogdan Khmelnytsky during his 1648–49 uprising.

By 1918, it was clear to any Jew in Eastern Europe that the war had been the great Jewish tragedy of the era. This became even clearer a few years after the slaughter and destruction of the postwar period. “This war has changed the world’s order,” said one of S. Y. Agnon’s characters. The Yiddish stage actor Joseph Buloff, in a memoir written well after World War II, put it even more dramatically: On Yom Kippur of 1914, God’s “judgment over the people of the old marketplace and over those of the synagogue complex and those in the whole world had been proclaimed not only for one year, but for a hundred and perhaps a thousand years to come.”

Had it not been for the Holocaust, the enormity of which dwarfed all that had come before, World War I would be the great dividing line in twentieth-century Jewish history. It remains a critical chapter of the modern Jewish story and one that has largely been forgotten. In A Nation of Refugees, Polly Zavadivker takes an important step toward helping us remember it.