Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites is the English-language translation of Oleg Budnitskii's extensive 2005 investigation of the role of Jews in the Russian Civil War. It is a role that Budnitskii argues Jews played both passively—as scapegoats—and actively, as soldiers and backers of various sides of the conflict.
Budnitskii should be commended for bringing the pogroms of the Civil War back to serious scholarly attention. The nature of the anti-Jewish violence of the period was unprecedented—between fifty thousand to two hundred thousand Jews were murdered in some twelve hundred separate incidents throughout what had been the western territories of the Russian Empire. The impact of the pogroms on Jewish emigration and demographic patterns was enormous. Budnitskii also argues that by creating the framework for mass anti-Jewish violence in the region, the pogroms laid some of the groundwork for the Holocaust. Contemporaries recognized the mass violence of the Civil War pogroms as a novel phenomenon—distinct from the various anti-Jewish riots that had periodically broken out throughout the region. Nokhem Shtif, Elias Heifetz, Elias Cherikover, Joseph Schechtman, Leon Chasanowitch, and Isaak Babel rank among the many contemporary writers who examined the pogroms in the 1920s and early 1930s. However, since then scholarly attention has for the most part shifted to the pogroms of 1881–1882, which were significantly less violent, but arguably equally transformative in their impact. With a few exceptions, the radical transformation of the Soviet revolutionary era has overshadowed research on the direct impact of the Civil War.
Budnitskii's most important contribution in this impressively detailed volume is to complicate the narrative that associates the Jews with the Reds and the Whites with antisemites. He demonstrates convincingly that such divisions are overly simplistic. In fact, many prominent liberal Jews supported the Whites in the hopes that they would restore the freedoms extended to Jews by the Provisional Government; they collected donations to support the White movement, they helped spread White propaganda, and some even served in the Volunteer Army. Perhaps most surprising are the apologetics issued by some Jewish liberals both within Russia and abroad that sought to absolve the Whites of responsibility for the violence that ensued under their command, and instead put much of the blame for the violence on their fellow Jews who were active among the Bolshevik leadership. Budnitskii argues that elements of the White leadership were less hostile to Jews than the rank and file. Denikin denounced pogroms in January 1920, albeit after his troops had carried out more than two hundred pogroms. General Pyotr Nikolayevich Vrangel, in particular, sought to clamp down on antisemitism in the parts of Crimea under his control.
By 1919, the hostility of many ordinary soldiers and officers in the Volunteer Army was making military service difficult for Jews. The violence of the pogroms further disillusioned many Jews, as did the blatantly antisemitic attitudes that were widespread among Volunteer troops. Budnitskii cites numerous Volunteer songs, bulletins, pamphlets, speeches, and posters that drew upon medieval anti-Jewish tropes to criticize the Bolsheviks. Leon Trotsky, in particular, was presented as a metaphor for the entire Bolshevik experiment, and his Jewish background was an essential element of anti-Trotsky satires. Although there were some among the White leadership who opposed equating all Jews with Communists, the powerful propaganda impact of associating the two—of combining anti-Jewish stereotypes with anti-Communist messages—was too great to let go. Anti-Bolshevik propaganda was overrun with antisemitic imagery.
Budnitskii sees the mass violence of the pogroms not only as a result of anti-Bolshevik propaganda that equated Jews with Reds, but also as a continuation of the violence of the First World War. Accusations of Jewish spying and treachery that fueled pogroms during the Civil War had also been common before the Revolution. The tsarist military leadership had actively spread antisemitic propaganda among the troops, the effects of which continued during the Civil War. As a result, many Jews, including members of the Bund and Po‘alei Ẓion, ultimately came to support the Red Army as the only institution willing to defend the Jews from violence.
Jews, however, were still not safe under the canopy of the Red Army. Budnitskii cites several instances of Red Army soldiers perpetrating pogroms, most notably Budennyi's First Cavalry Army, whose violent escapades were immortalized by Isaak Babel. In Gaisin, Red Army soldiers even slaughtered Jewish soldiers who were serving with them. The major distinction between Red and White violence against the Jews, though, was that whereas the White leadership sometimes spoke out against anti-Jewish violence, it was unwilling for the most part to punish the perpetrators. The Bolshevik leadership, on the other hand, executed perpetrators and disbanded units that participated in pogroms.
Budnitskii's volume is a significant study of this period, and presents several revisionist corrections to the historical record. He is right that blame for the anti-Jewish violence of the era can be spread widely, and few actors came out of the Civil War with their hands clean. The passages on the debates over the creation of Jewish units and about responses to the Balfour declaration are particularly interesting asides. The book is clearly written and well translated, save for a few awkward transliterations — “Egupets” (256) for Yehupets and “Ieguda” (258) for Yehuda, to mention two. Although it is based predominantly on published material, some new archival documents help shed additional light on the topic. Budnitskii has packed over four hundred pages of text with immense detail. It is a daunting read, but one that historians of Eastern Europe should not shy away from.
