Periods of disorder are particularly bad for the Jews. The 1905 Revolution resulted in pogroms. Well, of course we mentioned it before. The killing of Alexander II in 1881 resulted in some pogroms. But the great outbreak of violence is the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Now this is a transformative experience. In the case of the Russian Civil War, more Jews were murdered than any other time in modern history aside from the Holocaust, of course. We are talking about between 100 and 200,000 people, really unparalleled. However, let us go back for a moment to their outbreak of the war, which in itself made a major change in Jewish life. In as much as the leaders of the Russian Empire were afraid that the Jews who were living in the border regions because after all that was the Pale of Settlement might not help the Russian cause and cooperate with the enemies and consequently, they were moved into the Russian Empire and thereby the Pale of Settlement, if not in theory, in fact, was undermined. The war actually took place in territories in which the Jews lived and consequently, the war which was going on in the Eastern Front from 1914 to 1918, in itself resulted in a large number of victims. Interestingly, both the Germans and the Russian military distrusted the Jews. The antisemitic laws were not abolished. A Jew could not be an officer in the Russian army. They were drafted into the army, but they could not serve as officers. But then came the collapse of the Empire and the establishment of the provisional government in February or March, if you will, 1917. The Kerensky government, ultimately headed by Prime Minister Kerensky, abolished the anti-Jewish laws and that was the first movement to the emancipation of the Jews in the Russian Empire. Then that was followed by the Civil War. The Civil War took place in territories which the Jews were heavily represented, primarily in the Ukraine where now that the Empire broke down. We are talking about the million and the half Jews in the Ukraine and those suffered especially. Now the Civil War was made up by a number of competing forces. Ukrainian nationalists, Polish nationalists, the Bolsheviks, of course. The anti- Bolshevik movement, about which I want to talk about in a minute and anarchists bands. All of these competing forces struggling against one another, carried out pogroms to a larger and smaller extent. What is remarkable is that each competing side could project on the Jews a vision of the enemy. From the Bolshevik point of view, the Jews were traitors. From the point of view of the White movement, the anti Bolshevik movement, which was the most significant military force against the Bolsheviks, were, of course the Jews and communists were the same, Jewish Communists. Indeed in the Bolshevik movement. At this point, the leadership in the Jews, in the most prominent leaders such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov were Jewish. So this made it easy for the White movement the anti-Bolshevik movement, to depict their enemies as controlled by the Jews. Jewish and Bolsheviks is one of the same. This would have long-term consequences. Because once the Bolsheviks were defeated and some of them ended up in Germany, they brought this notion with them, and indeed, this notion which was created at the time of the Civil War never died to this day. Jewish Communists and Jew and communists are the same, is really entertained in a large number of different places. So the Civil War was a formative experience. After all, with the Bolshevik victory, with the establishment of the Soviet regime, circumstances in every way changed. The Bolshevik leadership for the first time unambiguously denounced antisemitism. Now, during the Civil War, they can be measured to stop the pogroms. Well, not necessarily this was not very high on their list of priorities. But antisemitism was depicted by Lenin and by the Bolshevik leaders as a hostile ideology which aims to undermine the working classes ability to see the real enemy, namely the capitalists. This is in the Bolshevik view of things, antisemitism is a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie to deflect hostility from their exploiters to the Jews. So once the Bolshevik regime was established, antisemitism as an officially propagated and officially supported idea indeed disappeared. Now, of course, the people of the ex-Russian Empire did not overnight cease to be antisemitic. But the change in official ideology had some results. I have an interesting means of comparison. Namely, during the Second World War, when the Germans occupied a large part of Russia, they occupied part of the Ukraine, part of Belarus, and of course Poland. Part of it which was not under Soviet rule, but were independent Polish, Belarusian States. The degree of cooperation with the Nazis in murdering Jews in territories which had not been under Soviet rule was greater than under Soviet rule. In as much as the Belarusian peasants, the Ukrainian peasants, to a larger extent realized that in fact, the Soviet regime was not controlled by the Jews and consequently were less willing to go along with the Nazi idea of Jews and communists are the same. So the problem from the point of view of the Jews was two points, two-fold. One is that the Bolshevik state was of course against every religion and that included Judaism and consequently as churches were closed down, so were the synagogues, that is, the Yiddish language, was allowed, and indeed propagated. On the other hand, the use of religious symbols, religious organizations, the teaching of Hebrew was frowened upon. The Bolshevik regime established actually a part of the party hierarchy called the Yevsektsiya, the Jewish section, which had the role of maintaining Jewish education in Yiddish. But it was closed down in 1930, now under Stalin's influence. The goal was to integrate and consequently the special Jewish character was to be de-emphasized. Nobody talked about it before, namely the question of styling this point of view, namely from the Stalinist ideologies, what is a nation? One of the prerequisites for a nation was a territory. Of course, with the Jewish point of view that territory was Palestine, Israel. But that of course would not go and so consequently, Stalinist regime established Birobidzhan, a small entity in the far East, which was supposed to be a Jewish autonomous region which was a complete failure in as much as the percentage of Jews in Birobidzhan remain small and the idea that the Jews will want to go to Birobidzhan and become farmers didn't go very far. Now one more question which I would like to bring up, namely the percentage of Jews who became victims of the purges and they were disproportionately large. But it is fair to say that they were not picked up on because of Jews, but because of their extraordinary role in the Bolshevik leadership. The Jews who played such a major roles in the time of the Civil War and in the time of the 1920s, one after another disappeared and by the mid 30s there was only one Jew who remained in the leadership, Kaganovich, and of course, the prominent Jews that both in the matter of artistic life, such as Barbus, such as Mandelshtam and so many others, and also the political leadership, all became victims of the purges. Thank you, Peter, you have described quite accurately the situation of the Jews in the Civil War and that they were the largest communities destroyed in the Civil War. First, when the Soviet authority moved the Jews out of their traditional Pale of Settlement areas and then by the counter-revolution. We have here a situation which the Jews were blamed for being modern and they were identified as modern bringers of modernity and in which they were blamed for being Bolsheviks. In neither of these cases, were the majority of Jews, modernizers or Bolsheviks. There is a lesson that the Jews learned that those in power will scapegoat us and use us for their own purposes and the only answer to that is self power, national power for the Jews. There is, at this point a young man in Odesa named Pinsker and he writes a pamphlet that becomes hugely important in the rise and success of modern Zionism. The pamphlet is called Autoemancipation. That the Jews have to free themselves from the repression, the colonialism, if you will, that has defined who they are and strike out on their own and this becomes a major part of the Zionist awakening. I should mention that the Odesa experience, including that of Benya Krik, the gangster groups is a education, if you will, in why you need to be in charge of your own autonomous community. You can't rely on everybody else because they will always turn it to their own purposes. Auto-emancipation, and in this sense, there's a great story by Babel that we looked at last time, and that bears looking at again, Gedali. Where he talks about Gedali at the end. As part of an impossible international, of Jewish people, and you can think of that as an image of the Bund. You can also think of that as a reinterpretation of Jewish history. That's what the Jews were all along, but were not allowed to be anything else by the great empires who ran things including the Russian Empire. So what we have is at the end of the establishment, by the establishment of the Soviet Union, we have destroyed all the Jewish communities of the Pale. We've been offered a piece of Birobidzhan. The Jewish realized that auto-emancipation was the only way they could manage to have better lives, and in the United States, for example, when the George Floyd killing happened, Black Lives Matter became a symbol as everywhere. Nobody in Europe had a comparable thing about Jewish Lives Matter. In fact, the rest of the 20th century was all about Jewish lives don't matter. Jewish lives are disposable, are to be turned into dust and ashes. Except for the people who had adopted the notion of self-emancipation. I would propose that Odesa was a little model for how you could do this. Think about the story of the wedding you heard a little passage of it. Benya Krik is having, celebrating a wedding for his sister, and somebody comes and says, by the way, there's a new policemen, head of the police, who's going to disrupt this, and Benya Krik says, "oh really?" This is a mock epic, if you will, in terms of literature. This is something that is played against in the Sholem Aleichem moment in "Fiddler on the Roof" when there's the dancing and the wedding, and it's interrupted by a pogrom. But in Babel's mock epic'. Benya Krik's, boys have taken care of the police station. Rather than the police coming to interrupt the wedding, the police station suddenly is on fire, so they have exercised their power as an organized group, and they have from the Moldavanka, granted they're just a gang. But it's part of Benya Krik, a 'Robin Hood' for his people who is taking care of business and making the police understand they are not in charge. It really becomes a matter of who defines who you are and what you are, and who defines what your future will be. It seems to me that the 'Odesa' story is one small example of what was going to happen in the 20th century and the 21st. In Western culture.
