Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  The Russian army’s earliest pogrom on Galician soil took place in mid-August 1914 at Brody, a town on the north-eastern border in which Jews composed over two-thirds of the 18,000 residents. Cossacks, who were the most anti-Semitic troops in the army and perpetrated many of the worst outrages, rode in, looted homes and shops and burned down 162 Jewish houses, factories and mills. The unlikely claim that a Jewish girl had shot at Russian troops was used to excuse the destruction; an insult, for the implication was that Jewish men were not manly enough to protect their own homes. Three Jewish men, two women and a Christian woman were killed.87 As Tsarist forces advanced deeper into the Crownland they perpetrated similar outrages. Robbery and rape were integral to the violence. Jews in the small town of Jaryczów Nowy, situated just east of Lwów, testified that they ‘did not stop for a full three months’. In Zabłotów, 200 kilometres south of Brody, Russian troops robbed townspeople and raped three Jewish women on 29 September. At Nadwórna, 60 kilometres to the west, six other Jewish women died through sexual assault and one later killed herself. The international law expert stationed at Russian military headquarters confirmed the existence of many other similar cases, some in which young girls were the victims.88 Murders were also committed. In the town of Głogów, in western Galicia, for example, a Jewish family of four was massacred after the father tried to protect his daughter from attack. Other people died from beatings or arson.89 The bloodiest and most notorious of the Russians’ atrocities took place in Galicia’s capital, Lwów, on 27 September, three weeks after they entered the city. After shots were heard and blamed on Jews, Cossacks rode through the Jewish quarter shooting. Subsequently, no one was sure of how many people were killed, but the most plausible estimates suggest that around forty-seven died. About 300 Jews were arrested.90

  Despite the half-hearted orders of some senior Tsarist commanders to stop the pogroms, troops who perpetrated outrages could be confident that they would not face punishment. There were officers who even welcomed the violence, for besides inflicting pain on the despised Jews it also served the pragmatic function of winning over Polish or Ruthenian peasants, who were often encouraged to participate in the looting. Many Jews were beaten up and robbed by their neighbours.91 Not everywhere was this the case, however. Joachim Schoenfeld recalled that in his shtetl, Śniatyn, many Jews found safety with Christian families when Cossacks rampaged through in August 1914.92 Much depended on the example set by community leaders. In Jesierna, a town of 7,000 souls in Zborów district, the priests, one Polish and the other Ruthenian, helped the Jewish mayor to protect his fellow believers. Both warned their flocks against harming Jewish townspeople. The Catholic priest sheltered Jews in distress in his own lodgings and distributed material aid. When Russian troops broke into Jewish shops and threw their wares onto the streets, the Uniate cleric chased off a crowd hoping for a share of the loot, gathered up the goods, and took them for safekeeping to the town council’s office.93

  The Galician Jewish population had received some warning of the danger, for before heavy fighting began in the second half of August, Russian-subject Jews started to pour across the border, running from violence meted out by the Tsar’s army as it concentrated in preparation for the campaign. As in East Prussia, the wealthy were first to leave, but once the Russians invaded poorer Galicians also departed, blocking the roads as they struggled westwards. Terror of the Russians was such that half of Galicia’s Jewish population, around 400,000 people, fled.94 Germans, the other group most in danger, also set out on the road. Often, whole communities travelled together. Georg Faust, the pastor of Dornfeld, a German village situated 6 kilometres south of Lwów, described his flock’s surprise and alarm at the speed of the Russian advance. They had thought their region would be staunchly defended, given the proximity of the Crownland capital in the north and the Mikołajów bridgehead over the Dniester River to the south, but when Habsburg troops fell back through their village shouting at them to get out, they suddenly realized how little time they had:

  What to do now? . . . Anyone who went through the last hours of tormenting uncertainty will never forget them. What it means to abandon house and farm, to relinquish to the enemy the harvest just brought in, to give up one’s home patch – that’s difficult to understand . . . At eight in the morning on 1 September, a long procession moved out of the village. The old people, weak from age, the ill, [and] women with infants on their breasts [sat] on the farm wagons, which were loaded with food, fodder and bedding. Between them was driven the bleating cattle.

  Altogether, there were 1,000 people, 500 head of cattle, 200 horses and 80 wagons in the column. The Dornfelders travelled for weeks, but in adverse weather ‘already after a few days several infants died, the old followed them gradually’.95

  The Habsburg army’s unwillingness to warn civilian authorities of its withdrawals was not unique; German commanders embraced the same misguided secrecy during East Prussia’s first invasion, making civil-military coordination impossible and causing much unnecessary panic among the population. Galician civilians’ plight was worse, however, due to a lack of civil leadership. In Germany, Landräte, the district administrators who were the key figures in local government, and civil servants below them were obliged by instructions issued in 1891 to stay at their posts in an invasion. Although this rule was made less stringent during the 1914 invasions and some officials caused scandal by fleeing prematurely, the emphasis remained very much on staying with and guiding the unfortunate population.96 In Austria-Hungary, possibly reflecting the greater distance of imperial authorities from their peoples, very different rules applied. Instructions to the Bezirkshauptleute, the district administrators in Galicia, and to other civil servants ordered them to evacuate just before enemy troops arrived. Cooperation with an invader would be contrary to the oath of officials to Kaiser and state, the instructions stressed, and the benefits of a functioning administration to civilians must ‘yield in the face of these considerations’.97

  The result of the Habsburg instructions to civil authorities was predictable: officials fled, leaving the population without guidance. Some abandoned communities panicked and, like the Dornfelders, set out on the road without making adequate preparations. Those people who remained lost all respect for the Habsburg administration. Dr Alfons Regius, a court official in the city of Czernowitz, expressed the disgust and bitterness felt by many in the invaded Crownlands of Galicia and Bukovina at the start of September. ‘The postal directorate, the Land President, but also the police directorate, the parliamentary representatives, most councillors, the rector (of Czernowitz University) with almost all professors and naturally all rich Jews have fled,’ he fulminated in his diary. All these authority figures, Regius noted with disgust, had apparently departed without ‘even only for a moment considering that it might be their duty to hold out with the citizenry’.98

  Swelling the flood of refugees fleeing eastern Galicia and Bukovina were people forced to evacuate the great fortress cities of Przemyśl and Cracow. The Habsburg army evicted residents for their own safety, in the case of Ruthenes for its own security, and above all to preserve garrisons’ food stocks. It also made many inhabitants of the surrounding countryside homeless, as it demolished villages in order to allow unobstructed fields of fire for the forts. Przemyśl’s evacuation began on 4 September 1914, when all but 18,000 of its 57,000 citizens were removed. Around the city, twenty-one villages were cleared against the protests of their inhabitants.99 Cracow presented greater difficulty, for although its fortress girdle, at 50 kilometres, was only slightly longer than that of Przemyśl, the population of the city and its suburbs numbered 183,000 people.100 The first evacuation took place in mid-September, just after the Habsburg army sounded its general retreat. Initially, only enemy civilians were obliged to leave, while Austrian subjects not engaged in essential tasks were merely encouraged to depart. Those determined to stay were told to stockpile supplies for three months and warned that if before a siege it was discovered tha
t they were inadequately provisioned, they would be ‘forcibly expelled’.101 The mood in the city darkened as rumours of military catastrophe circulated in early September and it worsened considerably when residents realized that Tsarist forces were approaching. Jan Dąbrowski, a historian living in the city, observed ‘an ever greater greater pessimism’ taking hold of his neighbours. ‘People are already counting on the possibility of a Russian government.’102 By 18 September, 50,000 people had left, around a third of Cracow’s population. To municipal authorities’ dismay, many leaders of the city’s large Jewish community were among those who departed. The President, Vice-President and numerous members of the local Jewish Council, as well as the administrators of the Jewish hospital and shelter for the terminally ill, all evacuated, leaving no funds to help their poorer and more vulnerable co-believers. When the respected Liberal Rabbi and head of the city’s Temple Synagogue, Dr Osias Thon, abandoned the city too, outrage gripped the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz.103

  The Austro-Hungarian army’s advance and the relief of besieged Przemyśl on 9 October ended the emergency, but only temporarily. At the start of November, the Russians again pushed forward, this time to within just 12 kilometres of Cracow.104 Panic gripped the city: ‘people are anxious about a siege,’ Dąbrowski recorded in the middle of the month. ‘It is possible to see even the most esteemed men fearful.’ Defensive preparations added to the unease. Seemingly never-ending columns of soldiers marched grimly through Cracow and, as at Przemyśl, new emplacements were dug in front of the forts and villages on the perimeter were burned.105 Cracow’s fortress commander, General Karl Kuk, pressed citizens to depart. The poor, among whom rumours were circulating of horrendous refugee camps, steadily resisted. Appeals were ignored and most free evacuation trains departed empty.106 This time, therefore, evacuation was made compulsory. The military planned to move 80,000 to 90,000 people out of the city.107

  On 6 November posters appeared on Cracow’s streets warning that residents without three months of provisions had five days to leave. Twenty commissions circulated houses to check citizens’ stocks of food. Evacuation trains, each capable of carrying 1,500 people, were organized.108 Already three days later, soldiers started to herd poor people to the railway station. Yet ensuring that they departed proved impossible. Once their military escort had left them on the platform, those designated for compulsory evacuation turned around and scurried home. Some hid or locked themselves in their apartments. Others fooled the commissions tasked with checking their supplies. Barrels, chests and sacks containing a sprinkling of sugar, flour or potatoes on top and padded underneath with cardboard were presented for inspection.109 Neighbours pooled their resources; supplies were borrowed, shown as evidence that the ‘owners’ could feed themselves for three months and, once permission had been granted to remain, those same supplies were passed to another family to put before the commissions.110 Desperate to reduce the city’s population to just 40,000, Kuk resorted to violence. On 12 November town officials, police and six companies of soldiers were gathered to drive out the poor ‘with armed force’. The troops were instructed to ‘proceed ruthlessly’ and ensure that those without permission to stay were left beyond the fortress defences.111 Even this failed, however. The fortress commander admitted despairingly that ‘whole regiments would have to be used’ in order to clear the city. Most evacuees would have to walk and, he fatalistically predicted, the operation would ‘doubtless be the most serious calamity’.112

  Fortunately, the Russian army’s advance ended outside Cracow. Residents listened anxiously to the thunder of artillery throughout the second half of November, but at the start of the following month a Habsburg offensive south of the city forced a Russian withdrawal. By the end of 1914, the front stretched along the Dunajec River 70 kilometres to the east and along the Carpathians bordering Hungary.113 Cracovians could breathe a sigh of relief. Despite another scare in March 1915, when the fortress of Przemyśl fell to the Russians, their city would not be threatened again during the First World War. However, for their fellow Habsburg subjects languishing under Tsarist occupation further east, the ordeal was anything but over. Indeed, for Galician Jews, life was about to become much, much worse.

  LIFE IN GREAT RUSSIA

  In April 1915 on a visit to subjugated Lwów, the Russian Tsar Nikolai II made a proclamation which, though for him an incontestable truth, was in reality a radical vision of a new order: ‘there is no Galicia, rather a Great Russia to the Carpathians’.114 Governor General Count Georgii Bobrinskii and the military occupation regime installed under him in September 1914 had the task of bridging the gap between the multi-ethnic Habsburg reality and the Tsar’s imagined Russian future for the Crownland. The Governor General was a moderate, at least by the extreme standards of pan-Slavic imperial Russian officialdom. His first speech eight days after taking office promised religious tolerance to Galicia’s population and he showed himself willing to cooperate with local elites, if only to ensure smooth administration. Nonetheless, Bobrinskii’s regime was anything but benign. Ominously for its inhabitants, the occupied territory was reorganized on the administrative model used within the Tsarist Empire, with three provinces established around Lwów, Tarnopol and Czernowitz, along with a fourth around Przemyśl after its capture in March 1915. From the start, the Governor General made clear that eastern Galicia and the Lemko region were ‘native Russian lands and should be ruled according to Russian principles’.115

  Bobrinskii favoured a course of cautious state-building in Galicia. Russian control was to be established but inhabitants should not be antagonized in wartime with more drastic initiatives. Government ministers, fearful of attracting negative press in the liberal western European allies on whom their empire was dependent for financial support, agreed. However, military commanders, above all the army’s anti-Semitic Chief of Staff, General Nikolai Ianushkevich, were much more radical. At Stavka, the Russian High Command, war was regarded as a unique opportunity to implement dramatic change under martial law, before peace returned civilian oversight and greater international scrutiny. The generals’ views mattered, as they retained considerable power in Galicia. The South-West Front’s Quartermaster General, Lieutenant General A. Zabelin, was Bobrinskii’s superior. Moreover, the Governor General’s authority in the occupied territory was not absolute, for the Third and Eighth Army commanders controlled their own rear areas, possessed independent hierarchies answering only to them, and frequently issued orders affecting the civilian population. Hyper-patriotic activists of the Galician-Russian Benevolent Society with connections at the Tsar’s court and in Stavka agitated tirelessly for radical assimilationist measures. Lower officials transferred to help administer the occupied territory also often shared army officers’ Greater Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Consequently, even when Bobrinskii sought to avoid or curb abrasive treatment of civilians, his orders were not necessarily followed.116

  The Russians embarked with alacrity on the project of remaking, or as their officials preferred to present it, restoring eastern Galicia to its ‘primordial’ Russian state. When Lwów fell on 3 September, the occupiers set about erasing all awkward evidence of its Habsburg past or inconvenient multiculturalism. The city hall’s clock was reset to St Petersburg time and the Julian calendar introduced to mark the end of the Austro-Polish era. Habsburg eagles were torn from public buildings and shopkeepers were ordered to display Cyrillic signs. Lwów’s Polish street signs were eventually covered over by new Russian ones, although the Polish municipal authorities stalled on this for many months. Russian festivals were also imposed. On 19 December 1914, the Tsar’s name day, military police went from house to house to ensure that all displayed suitably coloured decoration.117 Bobrinskii did make some concessions. Lwów’s Polish-dominated municipal council was permitted to continue functioning under its Vice President Tadeusz Rutowski. In accordance with international law, the Austro-Polish civil administration, including the courts and police, was kept in operation an
d Austrian law continued to be dispensed, although now ‘in the name of the Russian emperor’.118 State offices were permitted to continue using the Polish language, as under the Habsburgs, but ‘only temporarily’, and Catholic clergy were permitted to devote public prayers for ‘the Emperor’, without specifying whether the Habsburg Monarch or Romanov Tsar was meant. Some among the Polish elites sought to ingratiate themselves with the occupier. A few nobles fearful of losing their property became friendly once the Russians started to sequester the estates of absent aristocrats. Polish National Democrat leaders also offered support, although in their case on ideological grounds: they believed the promises of a united and autonomous Poland in the event of Tsarist victory. Few among their followers were convinced, however, and the party newspaper’s circulation plummeted from 13,000 to 3,000 during the occupation. For most educated Poles, it was clear that the Russians posed a mortal threat to their political hegemony in eastern Galicia.119

  The stakes were still higher for Ruthenes, who under Russian rule faced the prospect of cultural annihilation. The Tsarist regime denied the existence of any such entity as the Ukrainian people, and had long striven ruthlessly to suppress all nationalist stirrings within its own Ukrainian minority. In eastern Galicia, it began the occupation by imprisoning Ukrainophile leaders, whose numbers had already been decimated through internment by Polish Galician authorities and misguided persecution by the treason-obsessed Habsburg army at the war’s outbreak. Some 173 were taken as hostages to Russia, among them forty-five Uniate priests as well as directors of Ruthenian schools and economic institutions. The most prominent prisoner was the respected and influential Greek-Catholic Metropolitan of Lwów, Archbishop Andrei Sheptits’kyi, whose combating of Russophile Orthodox missionizing in Galicia and secret proselytizing in Russian Ukraine before the war had made him a marked man for the Tsarist army. The Chief of Staff, Ianushkevich, had promised to bring him in ‘dead or alive’. In September 1914 he was personally arrested by General Brusilov, commander of the Eighth Army, and deported across the border to Kiev.120