Kishinev was the site of one of the world's well known and meticulously documented pogroms. The urban disturbance left an extensive paper trail in a variety of different languages: administrative, police, and judicial records; reportage (local, national, and international); first-person witness accounts; poetry by Hayyim Nahman Bialik; and a wealth of visual imagery such as postcards and photographs chronicling the pogrom's carnage. The anti-Jewish riot began inconspicuously on a sunny afternoon on Easter Sunday, just as the Passover holiday was coming to a close. On April 6, 1903, a large, jovial crowd gathered near an open market square and started to attack Jewish-owned property, including shops, taverns, and liquor stores. Rumors that the Jews had murdered a Christian boy for ritual reasons played no small role in igniting the violence. In the first hours of the pogrom, a mob of rioters—comprised mainly of rowdy youths and neighborhood drunks—pelted Jewish windows with rocks and smashed-down courtyard doors. The mayhem, fueled by declarations that “Jews are drinking our blood” and “Death to Jews!” continued to escalate with extreme ferocity, affecting nearly the entire city. All in all, the Kishinev pogrom lasted some forty-eight hours, resulting in the murder of forty-nine Jews, the rape of dozens of women and girls, injuries to more than 500 town residents, and the destruction of grocery stores, small businesses, and residential neighborhoods.

Scholars of anti-Jewish violence have long found it challenging to make sense of the frequency and complexity of the historical events placed under the rubric pogrom. Pogroms, as Steven Zipperstein observes in the opening pages of his riveting new book, would “come to be seen as the most transparent of ways in which” contemporary observers and an entire generation of scholars (writing mainly before the Holocaust) described the condition of the Jews of Russia (9). The Kishinev pogrom was no more dreadful than other similar urban disturbances that broke out in the last years of the Russian empire. But Zipperstein makes a compelling argument that the violence quickly took a life of its own. Situated on the southwestern edge of the Russian Empire, along the Romanian border, Kishinev was one of the most fertile regions in the empire. The city was also plagued by poverty, endemic corruption, and lawlessness. By the turn of the twentieth century, Kishinev's multiethnic population surpassed that of Kiev, but its infrastructure lagged far behind other large urban centers and its economic growth was painfully slow. Moldavan peasants dominated much of the countryside, while Jews, comprising a significant number of small-scale traders and petty merchants, controlled the commerce. Zipperstein pays attention to these and many other social, religious, and economic forces that contributed to the eruption of local Jewish animosity. He also devotes much space to explaining why some of the empire's most extreme far-right circles found a home in the remote borderland province of Bessarabia.

Shortly after a wave of pogroms erupted in the southwestern regions of the empire in the spring and summer of 1881, journalists, communal activists, and scholars voiced the belief that the anti-Jewish violence was orchestrated from on high: by men in Russia's most powerful governing circles. How else to explain why the news spread so quickly and efficiently along railroad routes, highways, and rivers to dozens of provincial towns? The power of conspiracy theories was in full display in Kishinev. Rumors circulated that Jews were plotting revolution and that Kishinev, according to Zipperstein, was the “testing ground for such designs” (183). In fact, one month after the riot broke out, a letter allegedly written by one of Russia's highest-ranking officials, the minister of the interior, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich Plehve, appeared in the London Times. Significantly, the letter was dated two weeks before the Kishinev pogrom. Most likely, Plehve's letter was a forgery, but when it first appeared the document provided a convenient explanation why authorities did so little to stop the massacre and why the violence grew so quickly and with such intensity. Based on a judicious review of the sources, Zipperstein concludes that a group of local activists with close ties to the newspaper Bessarabets—and not officials in St. Petersburg or elsewhere in the empire—“managed to stir up the riot's start amid the barrage of newspaper articles charging Jews” with ritual murder (97).

The most original parts of the book are devoted to a historical reconstruction of three personalities with direct ties to the events in Kishinev: the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik who penned the highly influential “In the City of Slaughter”; the radical Irish journalist Michael Davitt whose articles on the pogrom in the New York American enjoyed worldwide readership; and Pavel Krushevan, the enigmatic editor of Bessarabets and leading voice of Russia's Far Right. At the turn of the twentieth century, Krushevan was a household name in far-right circles. He peddled conspiracy theories, calling out Jews for exploiting Christian neighbors, and printed xenophobic pieces in Bessarabets against Jews and other ethnic minorities. Krushevan, as Zipperstein suggests in a fascinating reconstruction of his life and work, was also the publisher—and most likely either the author or coauthor—of the first version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Zipperstein makes a solid argument that Krushevan first published the Protocols in nine installments in the right-wing St. Petersburg newspaper Znamia, which he owned, before the pogrom broke out in Kishinev, in either 1901 or 1902. At the time, Krushevan and other right-wing ideologues were obsessed with Zionism's entrance in revitalizing Jewish political life and, more importantly, its perceived quest at world domination. In his depiction of Zionism's terrifying political ambitions, it appears that Krushevan was inspired by the people and places around him. Jacob Bernstein-Kogan, for instance—who did so much to transmit news of the pogrom's devastating impact to the international community—turned out to be a central villain in the Protocols and, according to Zipperstein, “the most terrifying Jew on the planet” (182).

Zipperstein is not the first scholar to explore the Kishinev pogrom. Edward Judge's Easter in Kishinev (1992) is an expert analysis of the massacre and its repercussions on Kishinev's Jewish community. Zipperstein's achievement is to show how the pogrom reverberated far beyond the confines of its time and place. Readers looking to learn about the pogrom from a bottom-up perspective—that is, based on a close reading of police, trial records, and other similar sources—would need to look elsewhere. Drawing on both published and newly discovered archival documents such as Krushevan's personal papers, Zipperstein moves beyond a microscopic analysis of the pogrom to illuminate how the event entered the world of Jewish politics and modern communication networks, how it was used as a political tool by Russia's Far Right, and how it ultimately influenced the political agendas of a wide-range of American institutions in the first decades of the twentieth century, including the NAACP's promotion of black civil rights. Ultimately, this slim volume, which is intended for a wide readership and can be digested in two or three sittings, is a highly enjoyable, panoramic cultural history of a moment that, according to Zipperstein, turned into “the inspiration for some of the most powerful—and resilient—metaphors in Jewish life, ones that have seen little diminution in their timeliness or ferocity” (xiv).