Recently, the transitional phase form World War to peace in 1917–23 has attracted increased scholarly attention as a research field on its own. Irina Astashevich's book on the mass rape of Jewish women in the course of hundreds of pogroms in Ukrainian-speaking lands thus comes at the right time. It is the author's declared intent not merely to wrest this suppressed dark chapter of east European history from oblivion, but to meticulously analyze the structure, underlying mechanisms and implementations of the pogroms, thus countering recent trends in the history of violence to see it as merely perpetrated by armed men in so-called “violent spaces” which “enable” them to loot, rape, and kill arbitrarily. Instead, Astashkevich reads meaning and intent into the pogroms in Ukraine in times of revolution and civil war, and she does so convincingly.

In its first chapter, the book structures and narrates very comprehensibly a story that is extremely difficult to tell in a nutshell: Ukraine in World War, revolution, and civil war, with its ever-changing coalitions and confrontations of armies and governments, and the as complex situation and agency of the Jewish population in this part of the former Pale of Settlement. Drawing on the findings of recent pogrom studies, in the second chapter the author describes the notion of the “pogrom script” as a succession of meaningful, repetitive patterns which preceded, accompanied, and succeeded pogroms in the Ukrainian lands roughly in first half of the twentieth century, making them “the perfect vehicle of genocidal violence” (20) that aimed not only at the physical, but also the social death of Jews as alleged “Bolsheviks.” It is important to note that the violence was not yet genocidal in late 1917, but became so in a deadly crescendo when pogroms mushroomed all over revolutionary Ukraine in 1918/19, as a pre-stage of the Holocaust. There were, though, important circumstantial differences, for example in terms of the perpetrators and chains of command: in the case of the “Volunteer Army” of General Anton Denikin, the driving forces were officers and well trained soldiers, whereas in the case of Symon Petliura's “Ukrainian National Army,” it was local thugs and peasants, and thus neighbors of the pogrom victims (36, Chap. 4), a finding which matches with William W. Hagen's latest research (2018) on the pogroms that took part simultaneously in the Polish-speaking lands.

Chapters 3, 5, and 6 deal explicitly with the mass rapes that accompanied the pogroms, and thus form the core and the really innovative part of the study. To trace these tragic events and their aftermath, Astashkevich has systematically exploited the records of contemporary commissions on pogrom violence that hold thousands of testimonies of victims, witnesses, and medical personnel. She can prove that with the increasing extend and brutality of the excesses, mass rapes became an increasingly common public spectacle, a “strategical weapon” (47) that physically and psychologically destroyed the Jewish communities in Ukraine. Consequently, the study does not limit itself to the staging of the pogroms as such, but to the way they were recorded—not surprisingly, male narratives differed from female ones—and their aftermath as well. The stigma of gendered violence produced the paradox that in the post-pogrom shtetls, “everyone kept secret that [sic] everyone knew” (91), and Astashkevich shows emphatically how the trauma of silenced and suppressed suffering haunted the living through generations. This dense and rich description is without the shadow of a doubt an important contribution to the studies of gendered violence.

This said, it cannot go unmentioned that the book often drifts in empty space where connections could have been made. Absent from the book's discourse are not only the recent seminal monographic works of Robert Gerwarth (2017), John-Paul Newman (2015), and others that have crucially enlarged our knowledge of the paramilitary postwar violence in 1917–23; but also the work of the late Alexander V. Prusin (2005) on ethnic—and especially antisemitic—violence in these very borderlands in this very period; of Felix Schnell (2012) on ataman army violence in Ukraine against Jews and others in 1917 and the following years; of Stefan Wiese (2016) on pogrom violence in tsarist Russia; of Thomas Chopard (2015) on revolution, terror and antisemitism in Kiev in 1919; or even of Victoria Khiterer (2015) on pogroms in Ukraine 1918–20 (which by the way contains a foreword of Astashkevich's academic advisor). Given the relatively small size of this treatise (the text without annex is roughly 150 pages long), there surely would have been enough room for more.

As the first author, Astashkevich masterfully illuminates the circumstances and immediate and long-term effects of the systematic mass rape of Jewish women in Ukraine in the wake of the Great War; directs our attention to a long-neglected pogrom wave that killed probably more than one hundred thousand Jews; and gives us deep insights into the symbolical meaning of these horrible events. She leaves it for future authors to contextualize her highly interesting findings within the framework of arguably one of the most productive research strands of the past decade.