Pogroms: What, Where, How, and Why?

 

History is full of words that carry the heavy weight of human suffering. One such word is pogrom.

While many people associate this term broadly with the tragic history of antisemitism, its specific roots, mechanics, and devastating global impact are lesser known. To ensure history does not repeat itself, we must look closely at the past.

Here is an educational guide breaking down the what, where, how, and why of pogroms.

What is a Pogrom?

The word pogrom is derived from a Russian term meaning “to wreak havoc,” “to demolish,” or “to smash violently.”

Historically, a pogrom is a mob-led, violent riot targeting a specific ethnic or religious group. While the term can apply to other targeted minorities throughout history, it is most definitively associated with the state-condoned or state-tolerated massacres and destruction aimed at Jewish communities in Europe.

A pogrom is not a sudden, formal war between two armies; it is an outbreak of civilian and paramilitary violence directed at vulnerable neighbours.

Where and When Did They Happen?

While anti-Jewish violence existed in medieval Europe, the term “pogrom” specifically entered the global vocabulary during three massive waves of violence within the Russian Empire (modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Russia) between 1881 and 1921:

1. The First Wave (1881–1884): Triggered by political instability, sweeping across over 200 Jewish communities.  

2. The Second Wave (1903–1906): A much bloodier period, including the infamous Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which sparked international outrage.  

3. The Third Wave (1917–1921): Occurring during the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, where an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered.

The phenomenon was not isolated to Russia. The concept culminated in Central Europe during the Nazi regime, most notably with Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) in Germany and Austria in November 1938 — a massive, state-organised pogrom that served as a prelude to the Holocaust.

How Did They Happen? (The Anatomy of a Riot)

Pogroms rarely happened completely by accident. They followed a predictable, terrifying pattern:

- The Trigger: A political crisis, a sudden economic downturn, or a superstitious rumour (such as a “blood libel” — the false accusation of ritual murder) would spark public anxiety.  

- The Agitation: Antisemitic groups, local right-wing press, or religious extremists would weaponise this anxiety, pointing the finger at local Jewish communities.  

- The Violence: Mobs would descend upon Jewish neighbourhoods, destroying homes, looting businesses, burning down synagogues, and committing mass assault and murder.  

- The Inaction: Local police and military authorities would frequently stand by, slow-walking their response, giving the rioters a “green light” to commit atrocities with impunity.

Why Did They Happen? Case Study: The 1881 Russian Pogroms

To understand why these horrific events occurred, we can look at the watershed moment of 1881, when a massive wave of violence reshaped global history. The catastrophe was fuelled by four distinct factors:

1. Political Scapegoating  

   On 13 March 1881, members of a revolutionary socialist group successfully assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Although the assassin group was overwhelmingly non-Jewish, one minor conspirator, Hesya Helfman, was of Jewish origin. The Russian press heavily weaponised this fact, falsely framing the assassination as an inherently Jewish conspiracy against the Crown to divert public anger away from the government.

2. Malicious Rumours  

   In the shock following the Tsar’s death, agitators spread a highly effective rumour: that the new Tsar, Alexander III, had officially authorised Christian citizens to attack Jews as a form of reprisal. This false “imperial permission,” combined with religious prejudices heightening around Easter, mobilised ordinary citizens into violent mobs.

3. Economic Dislocation  

   The Russian Empire was undergoing rapid, highly uneven industrialisation. Many poor peasants moving into crowded urban areas carried deep-seated rural prejudices with them. Local economic hardships and bad harvests left many in debt. Corrupt agitators redirected this financial anger away from systemic empire-wide issues and toward Jewish shop owners, traders, and moneylenders, using the riots to wipe out local debts by destroying properties and financial ledgers.

4. Institutional Antisemitism 

   While modern historians agree the central Russian government did not actively engineer the 1881 pogroms from the top down, local authorities and police were intensely antisemitic. Their passive inaction signalled to mobs that the violence was condoned. Following the riots, the Tsarist administration blamed the Jewish victims themselves for “provoking” the violence through “economic exploitation,” using the chaos as an excuse to pass the discriminatory May Laws of 1882, which stripped Jews of basic rights.

The Lasting Legacy: From Ostjuden to Global Migration

The pogroms fundamentally altered global demographics and the course of modern history. Before these riots, millions of Eastern European Jews — often referred to in Western Europe by the German term Ostjuden — lived traditional, Yiddish-speaking lives in small market towns called shtetls.

The terrifying reality of the pogroms shattered any hope for safety under the Tsars. Between 1881 and 1914, over two million Jews fled the Russian Empire. This massive exodus completely reshaped the cultural fabric of countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina, while fundamentally fuelling the early Zionist movement that sought to establish a safe refuge in the Jewish people’s historical homeland of Israel — an area of the Middle East that old colonial empires had taken to calling Mandatory Palestine in an attempt to eradicate any connection to the Jewish people.

This was also the reasoning behind the British-organised invasion of Judea and Samaria and the subsequent renaming of the invaded land as “the West Bank.” Although, as they have since discovered, it is not quite so easy to wipe out thousands of years of history with a simple name change.

By understanding the mechanics of the pogrom — the toxic blend of political scapegoating, economic anxiety, and state-sanctioned indifference — we learn to spot the warning signs of mass violence in our world today.