When Lenin decreed on July 27, 1918 that the new Soviet state would consider antisemitism to be counterrevolutionary and vowed to tear it out “by the roots,” Jews across the USSR celebrated. The decree appeared in the midst of a Civil War that saw as many as 150,000 Jews murdered and entire Jewish communities destroyed in the worst violence they had ever experienced. With Lenin's decree, and the fact that the Red Army was the only military force in the conflict that openly disavowed antisemitism (in spite of having also engaged in it at times), Jews looked to the Bolsheviks as their protectors and often gave their allegiance over to the new regime. Following the Soviet victory, the belief arose that the most pernicious expressions of antisemitism—the blood libel (the accusation that Jews require the blood of Christians for ritual purposes) and the deadly pogroms that often came in the libel's wake—were vestiges of the tsarist past and would have no place in communist society. As historian Elissa Bemporad demonstrates convincingly in this compelling new study, however, both the blood libel and pogroms did not disappear following the Bolshevik seizure of power. Rather, the often intimate link between the two was severed and both were transformed in ways that matched Jews’ changing fate under communist rule the over subsequent decades.

Drawing upon a deeply impressive range of Yiddish, Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian sources, Legacy of Blood tells the story of the “afterlife” of the blood libel and pogroms in the lands of the Soviet Union, with particular attention to the decades between the two World Wars and with an emphasis on the ways that these manifestations of antisemitism expressed themselves locally, rather than from a top-down perspective. In this period, Jews for the first time could turn to central authorities to combat the antisemitism that still persisted at local levels. Jews learned that they could get some measure of justice for the horrific murders that took place during the Civil War and even reclaim some of the property that had been stolen from them. For the first two decades of the regime, as Bemporad explains, they were able to have antisemitic acts investigated—often by investigators who themselves were Jewish—and see their victimizers prosecuted by the state. Even as authorities subjected Jewish businesses, political movements, and their religious institutions, beliefs, and practices to often brutal Sovietization campaigns, the repression of antisemitism combined with the end of tsarist-era restrictions on their movement, housing, and occupations allowed Jews to experience a unprecedented level of social mobility. The presence of Jews in positions of authority, however, “provoked unease because they blurred borderlines and upset familiar pre-revolutionary categories” and had the effect of accelerating the pre-existing over-identification of Jews with communism (9).

As Bemporad persuasively argues, the memory of blood libels and pogroms outlasted the Soviets’ efforts to vanquish them. By the late 1930s, the rise of radical antisemitism elsewhere in Europe (and beyond) left its mark on the country. Appeals to central authorities went largely unanswered, especially following the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and antisemitism increasingly went unchecked. Following the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews throughout the Soviet borderlands found themselves subject to horrific massacres, very often at the hands of their non-Jewish neighbors. (Attacks on Jews occurred within the Soviet interior as well, even in the absence of German forces, the book reveals.) Although these killings are a relatively new subject area within Holocaust Studies, Legacy of Blood demonstrates that they are best understood both as a continuation of the waves of modern pogroms that date back at least to the late nineteenth century as well as a consequence of the over-identification of Jews with communism that had occurred in part because of the Soviet Union's earlier repression of popular antisemitism. Following the war, sporadic pogroms continued as Jewish survivors of the Holocaust sought to return to return to their homes and reclaim their property, only to find that central authorities no longer cared to the same degree about defending them. Following the rise of the Cold War and the establishment of the State of Israel, the blood libel once again reappeared in modern form, with antisemitism rooted as strong as ever in Soviet society.