Pogrom

by Steven J. Zipperstein

  This, then, is a microhistory as well as an international history of an event that was surely vile but less murderous and less catastrophic than so many others occurring soon afterward—that yet would overshadow nearly all. “The time and place are the only things I am certain of. . . . Beyond that is the haze of history and pain”; this is how Aleksandar Hemon begins his novel The Lazarus Project, built around a bizarre, widely reported 1908 incident in which nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch was shot to death in the home of Chicago’s police chief. Why Averbuch came to the house—he had never before met the policeman—and whether or not he actually threatened the chief’s life, as was reported, remains unclear, but Averbuch’s behavior was irrevocably linked at the time to his having been a witness to the Kishinev pogrom. Hemon writes: “Lazarus came to Chicago as a refugee, a pogrom survivor. He must have seen horrible things: he may have snapped. . . . He was fourteen in 1903, at the time of the pogrom. Did he remember it in Chicago? Was he a survivor who resurrected in America? Did he have nightmares about it?”42

  My book, too, explores history’s nightmares. And much like the Averbuch tale, it is a story of the uneasy interplay of truth and fiction—of fiction so unreservedly believed that it would become more potent than most truths. I revisit it in an effort to sort through it so as to better understand the tragedy itself and what was made of it over the course of more than a century. Whether cited explicitly or not, the Kishinev pogrom continues to provide a well-thumbed, coherent road map, one that retains the imprimatur of history. Such accounts are bolstered by the use of evidence recalled endlessly, but such evidence is at best imperfect and—at its worst—not evidence at all.

  Kishinev map.

  Photograph of Lower Kishinev in the 1880s.

  2

  Town and Countryside

  Most legends spring from facts.

  —A. J. P. TAYLOR, introduction to John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World

  Humdrum, rusticated, distant from anything world-important: Kishinev in the first years of the twentieth century—despite its handsome city center, a cluster of good schools, and a healthy commercial life as Bessarabia’s main agricultural depot—continued to be thought of beyond its immediate region as the dusty spot the young Alexander Pushkin had so savaged in the early 1820s. Compelled to live there because of political indiscretions, he captured it dourly:

  Cursed town of Kishinev!

  My tongue will tire itself in abuse of you,

  Someday, of course, the sinful roofs

  Of your dirty houses

  Will be struck by thunder,

  And—I will not find a trace of you!

  They will fall and perish in flames,

  Both Varfolomey’s motley house

  And the filthy Jewish booths.1

  After repeated pleading Pushkin was permitted to decamp to Odessa, less than a hundred miles to the east. Comparisons between the two cities were thus inevitable, nearly always to Kishinev’s detriment. Never could it match Odessa’s inescapable vitality—nor, certainly, the storied pedigree of Kiev, some three hundred miles away—with Odessa architects designing Kishinev’s best streets, the trees planted on them inspired by Odessa’s acacia-shaded boulevards, and nearly all of its banks branches of Odessa firms. All this strengthened the belief that Kishinev’s urban qualities were only superficial and that it was little more than a satellite of the larger, better, far more colorful Black Sea port. After all, at the century’s turn, farms still existed just around the corner from Kishinev’s fancier streets. Whereas Odessa’s admirers, the Francophiles especially, liked to compare their city—with a whimsical piety—to Paris, Kishinev’s reference point was Odessa, to which it seemed at best a third cousin. When Kishinev’s longtime mayor, Karl Schmidt, spoke of his city’s goals, the grandest yet most unattainable of all was to surpass Odessa.2

  Map of region showing proximity of Kishinev and Odessa.

  If Kishinev was susceptible to mythmaking, it was because so few facts were known about it. In contrast to Odessa, with its host of associations (Odessa’s famously beautiful women were described in Yiddish, for instance, as “Odessa moons”), Kishinev was a blank slate. So much so that, in May 1903, the New York Times ran an article whose stated goal was to fill this gap: “So great has been the intent of the public in the recent massacre in Kishineff that little or no attention has been given to the physical characteristics of the place.” The newspaper provided bits and pieces of institutional and cultural data, a portrait of a really rather inviting place—the reporter seemed surprised by what he had found—blessed with benign weather and surrounded by pleasant topography. If the city was similar to anywhere, the Times suggested that the most reliable comparison was sunny, temperate Southern California.3

  The reporter’s pleasant surprise was, of course, a by-product of the fact that Kishinev was now widely known as among the world’s most hellish places. Still, even before then it had been undervalued. This was primarily because of its inaccessibility (there was not even a direct train route linking it to its sister city, Odessa, and the region’s roads were among the worst in the empire), the rapidity of its very recent growth from an overgrown village into the empire’s fifth most populous city (its population in 1903 was larger than Kiev’s), and the sense, by now intractable, it seemed, that it was rather more akin to the California city of Fresno, sprawling perhaps, but a dusty, dull, cow town.

  By the time the New York Times piece appeared, Kishinev was among the best known—and most infamous—of the world’s cities, a place where, much like in the darkened scenes of a Frankenstein film, mobs with pitchforks and knives roamed its streets searching for victims. And the remains of those two days would soon define not only Kishinev but—for many both inside Russia and beyond it—the larger contours of Jewish life in Russia’s Pale of Settlement.

  Bessarabia came late to the Russian empire, with its eastern edge acquired from the Ottoman Empire in 1812, its southern region lost after the Crimean War in 1856, and Russian rule consolidated over the region wrested from Romania in 1878. It was a mutt of sorts, little more than a sliver of land, less than six hundred miles long from its northern point on the Austro-Hungarian border to its southeastern tip nudging the Black Sea. Nearly all of it was landlocked, with no substantial port and with Kishinev at its geographic center.4

  Map of Bessarabia.

  Bessarabia was the region with the highest infant mortality and illiteracy rates (barely 39 percent were literate at the turn of the century) in the empire, the fewest doctors, and the fewest paved roads—in 1914, a total of 144 miles. Yet it was blessed with balmy weather and known for the casualness of its mores, a lethargic peasantry, and a highly diverse mix of ethnic and religious groups—Russians, Germans, Swiss, Cossacks, Turks, Bulgarian-speakers, Serbs, and Old Believers (the Russian Orthodox sect that refused to accept seventeenth-century liturgical changes) as well as Moldavians and Jews. All these groups were said to live largely segregated but also amicably peaceful lives, with less-encumbered relations between them than elsewhere. A mark of the region’s diversity, and the paucity of assimilatory pressure, was the persistence of Swiss wineries in Bessarabia’s south and the German colonies at its north (named for Leipzig and Wittenberg), which remained largely ethnic enclaves even generations after their founding.5

  On the surface Bessarabia seemed quite beautifully sylvan, a land of rolling hills and pastures full of grazing sheep, wooded in its north, with fewer trees in the south. Forests in northern parts consisted of beech, oak, and ash trees that provided the building materials for much of the construction in southern Russia. The Carpathian Mountains lay just across the Austro-Hungarian border, shielding Bessarabia from cold winter winds. Its weather in spring and summer was warm, often parched. (Just south of Kishinev, summer temperatures sometimes rose as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit.) It was bounded on its east by Ukraine and the Dniester River, with the Prut and Danube Rivers on its western border with Romania. Its roads, especially those on
its western rim, were poorly maintained; authorities likely resisted improvements to them and the railway system—despite the premium placed on the region’s agricultural exports—out of the constant fear of a Romanian invasion.6

  Such fears were not fanciful. Romania remained irate at having had to cede western Bessarabia after the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. Russia’s hold on Bessarabia felt tenuous: Carved out only since 1812 by conquest, the countryside was overwhelmingly Moldavian, where the language was all but identical to Romanian. The Russianness of the region’s towns felt almost fraudulent, like its desire to eclipse Odessa. Most of the people listed in its census reports as Russians in its officially designated urban centers (often little more than villages) were Jews, whose population had soared in the late nineteenth century, with newcomers arriving mostly from the nearby Black Sea region in search of economic opportunity. Provincial administration tended to be haphazard here; the northern boundary with Austro-Hungary was known to be especially porous, with smuggling all but openly conducted thanks to the ubiquity of bribery. Salaries of minor officials were astonishingly low, bribery barely frowned upon, and smuggling mostly in the hands of Jews.7

  Despite being overwhelmingly poor, Bessarabia also happened to be extremely fertile—perhaps Russia’s most potentially lucrative agricultural region. Its southern region had some of Russia’s most prized pastureland, and hides were among its most lucrative exports. Staple crops included maize (more than 30 percent of Bessarabia’s agricultural yield in 1910), spring wheat, barley, and grapes; more than 164,000 acres of vines crisscrossed the region. Large quantities of dried fruit and fish were also exported. Gardening was universal, with the province’s large number of monasteries boasting particularly opulent gardens full of fruit trees. Industry was sparse; factories were mostly of modest size—nearly all with no more than thirty or forty employees—producing agricultural machinery as well as flour mills and sawmills. Bessarabia was also known for its skilled carpet makers who used rare dyes, the by-product of vegetable matter. However, no more than three thousand workers there made their living from industrial work at the turn of the twentieth century.8

  Commerce was concentrated almost entirely in the disposal of agricultural goods—grains, flour, wine, brandy, and timber—with Jews owning most of these businesses. Jews, in fact, dominated nearly all its towns—Kishinev, Akkerman, Bendery—and the countryside, too, where they bought and sold much of Bessarabia’s grains, manure, and wine. Thirty-two million gallons of wine were sold there at the turn of the century, with as much as half of it shipped to Odessa or Kiev. Bulgarian and German colonies bred livestock, pigs, and sheep; fishing was crucial to the economy of Bessarabia’s seacoast and lagoons.9

  Still, except for Kishinev, much of the region felt immutable, with little having changed since the mid-nineteenth century, when Kishinev, too, was no more than a ramshackle, haphazard cluster of villages. Bessarabia’s population would double between the 1860s and the turn of the century, increasing to 2.4 million—a growth of six hundred thousand in the span of just four decades. Internal commerce languished because the bulk of the population was almost too poor to buy anything. In comparison with other parts of the tsarist empire, travel was cumbersome: Most of Bessarabia’s roads were made of sand and thus impassable in winter. With a seventy-mile coastline intersected by waterways, Bessarabia had no real port, and Odessa dominated its commercial life as the region’s seaport.10

  Yet by the early twentieth century, Kishinev had grown into a prosperous commercial entrepôt, its vibrancy the product of the region’s agricultural bounty, a lively black market, and a superb mayor who bludgeoned local businessmen to contribute to the city’s improvement—he made them share, for instance, in the cost of the beautiful trees that continue to shade its main street to this day. Nevertheless, orchards stretched well into the edge of town, chickens could be seen walking its streets, and there was still no direct rail service between Kishinev and Kiev or Odessa; passengers had to change trains en route. Rafts continued to serve throughout the province as an indispensable mode of commercial transport, because barely 550 miles of train track—a paltry number and all single-track—covered its full expanse.11

  Waterways would dominate the commerce of the region well into the first years of the twentieth century. River barges, rafts, ships, and boats—many the kind seen on the Mississippi in the early nineteenth century—transported Bessarabia’s timber, wool and lambskins, sacks of wheat, barley, oats, corn, dried plums, honey, garden fruits, wine barrels, and nuts, mostly to Odessa. Shlomo Hillels, born in Soroki (some eighty-five miles north of Kishinev) in 1873, lovingly describes in his 1930 Hebrew novel Har ha-keramim (The Mountain of Vineyards) the home of his youth. He evokes a vast, bountiful land of burned wine (a local delicacy), a milieu crisscrossed by water, the rhythms of its economic life the by-product of sharply disparate seasons, huge casseroles, dockworkers dancing at night on sacks of wheat stacked on riverboats, harmonica music, and Gypsies.12

  These goods were amassed in the spring by Jewish traders, each of whom had their own peasants to whom they had given money the previous winter as a down payment on their produce or hides. By the fall barns were full of provisions, ready for the heavy rains of winter, when roads became impassable and largely Jewish-owned wine and liquor bars were packed with porters, pimps, and seasonally employed artisans. Jews in Hillels’s rather romanticized depiction were simple folk, with the social life of its men revolving around Sabbath afternoons in an empty lot in the town center, where they discussed the price of animals and Jewish communal concerns, conversations that started peacefully and that slid, as often as not, into shouting and curses.13

  “A dark-skinned race of middle height” is how a British Foreign Office memo in 1920 described Moldavians, who made up the bulk of Bessarabia’s agrarian population. With increased migration in the region, their proportional size declined; census takers in 1897 tallied them at 48 percent, which may have been an underestimate. The countryside remained overwhelmingly Moldavian, though towns were packed with Jews who likely seemed more populous than their numbers alone might suggest because so many streets were lined with stores sporting Yiddish signage, and with Jews concentrated mostly in or near city centers. Unlike the many other Bessarabian ethnic groups that clustered in specific regions, Jews were found in large numbers throughout the province. In general the densest concentration of Moldavians was in the north, with Germans and Swiss in agricultural colonies near Akkerman, and Greeks in the Izmail region (now in Ukraine).14

  Russian discomfort with the province’s widely disparate ethnic mix was a matter of concern for decades. It was exacerbated in the late 1870s with the acquisition of southwest Bessarabia by Russia, a move that fanned apprehensions of Romanian meddling. Mandatory instruction in the Russian language was then introduced in the region’s mostly church-sponsored schools, and eventually nearly every church school was shut. Prayer in Moldavian was outlawed in the 1870s, though this was impossible to enforce.15

  Despite efforts at leveling differences, Bessarabia remained stalwart, a land of largely unassimilated groups. In 1897 no more than 4 percent of Moldavian women and 17 percent of men in the region were literate, as compared with 81 percent of German women and 83 percent of men there; literacy rates for Jews were 41 percent for women, 65 percent for men. Such vast differences, coupled with the fear of Romanian nationalism that trumpeted a reunited Bessarabia, nurtured an increasingly influential and xenophobic Russian nationalism. Several of its leading figures hailed from Moldavian, Serbian, or Polish backgrounds, often from the ranks of lesser or impoverished nobility who were all the more preoccupied with the prospect of social or economic slippage. Bessarabia was fertile ground for the recruitment of—often mutually recriminatory—far-right groups known as Black Hundreds. This inchoate conglomeration of the empire’s most extreme and often most unprincipled defenders was feared by conservatives and leftists alike for their calls for violence against the empire’s enemies. Here at Ru
ssia’s edge, their belief in the insidious designs of Romanians, Austrians, Moldavians, and above all Jews provided an especially explosive focal point for mounting anxieties.16

  Thus a cauldron of pressures simmered beneath the surface in this largely slow-paced wedge of Russia, with tensions between town and countryside, Romania’s historic claims and the reality of Russian hegemony, and the overwhelmingly agrarian norms of a long-backward, fertile region and the increasingly vigorous pull of urban life. Turks and Romanians continued to see the area as historically their own, and Austria-Hungary butted up against its sparingly policed northern rim. Moldavians dominated much of the countryside, with Jews crowded ever more densely into its towns, especially Kishinev. By the turn of the twentieth century, the city’s population was well over one-third Jewish—indeed, according to some polls, as high as 47 percent. The city had no particular Jewish neighborhood: Jews were concentrated closest to its largest markets as well as in large numbers in a neighborhood in Lower Kishinev near the river Byk, with the largest of Kishinev’s synagogues a few miles away. Except for a few residential strips that housed almost exclusively Moldavians or poor Russians, Jews could be found throughout the city. Long having been viewed as a somnolent Turkish-like town, Kishinev was in the midst of rapid if also perhaps haphazard change, welcomed by some and loathed by others. The city’s ever-expanding Jewish community was—as was true elsewhere, too—the most significant sign of these tumultuous changes.17

  To understand the social forces that were converging to make Kishinev a tinderbox of sorts, one must delve deeper into its past. “A small market-town of slight importance,” is how one writer described Kishinev, then known as Chişinău, in 1717, in one of the few, fleeting references to the place before the nineteenth century. Evidence of the city’s origin is vague; the first mention of it gives a slightly different location in the early fifteenth century. Burned down by Russians during an invasion in 1748, it was rebuilt on land owned by a monastery. Well into the first decades of the nineteenth century, Kishinev remained under the control of a small group of noble families and one large, highly influential monastery. In a line drawing dating back to the century’s start, it is pictured as clustered around narrow streets, numerous churches, and tiny shops, with a particularly generous sprinkling of church properties. Its streets bordered on fields of wild asparagus, Indian corn, and very large cucumbers. In the 1830s and 1840s, 20 percent of the city’s inhabitants continued to make their living from agriculture or cattle.18