“If you gaze into the abyss,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886, “the abyss gazes into you” (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146). Scholars like Jeffrey Veidlinger who study the history of human violence need no explanation of this weighty sentiment, and we are deeply indebted to him for his sustained gaze into the horrific pogroms that soaked Ukraine in blood during the years of civil war following the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. His erudite work, a comprehensive analysis based on detailed archival study and a century of secondary sources written with complex entropic political tendencies, promises to be the definitive study of the period.
The great paradox of the period is the disconnect between the unprecedented nature of the pro-Jewish policies of the nascent Ukrainian experiment in statehood on the one hand, and the eruption of horrific attacks on Jews and other minorities on the other. It is noteworthy that a plurality of those attacks were carried out by forces ostensibly loyal to the very same Ukrainian government that was printing money with Yiddish inscriptions and supporting a Ministry of Jewish Affairs. Veidlinger takes us through this complex history from the late tsarist period through the Paris trial of Shalom Schwartzbard (who assassinated the Ukrainian leader Symon Petliura as revenge for the antisemitic attacks) and connects the persistence of lingering hatred to the Holocaust itself.
His focus, however, never strays from the pogroms themselves. The most challenging part of this volume is his street-by-street, hour-by-hour account of several of the most horrible examples, relying on the first-person pogrom testimonies held in the Tcherikower Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, documents in Ukrainian archives, and the secondary literature in Yiddish, Russian, and other European languages. Veidlinger provides a nuanced portrait of the varying nature of the pogroms, with qualitative differences emerging from the range of perpetrators: pro-Directory forces, the Whites under Anton Denikin, and various warlords. I would have liked to read more regarding the pogroms visited upon non-Jewish populations such as the Mennonites, but Veidlinger does an admirable job tracing the long-term impact to the pogroms on its Jewish victims, following the refugees, and sketching their experiences after leaving Ukraine as well as outlining the responses of US-based and European relief organizations. Veidlinger has a fine sense for non-textual data as well, and provides useful examples of period artwork and propaganda, from the initial memorial books (Yizker-bikher) dedicated to the pogroms to the noxious antisemitic broadsheets produced by the Whites in particular.
In the Midst of Civilized Europe is not only a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the maelstrom of post-Romanov Ukraine, it is also provides invaluable insight into the much larger violence of the Holocaust, a connection rendered explicit by the subtitle, The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. Veidlinger explains the impact of the pogroms on the local Jewish populations, specifically their attraction to the much more orderly Red Army under the Jewish Lev Trotskii, the decades of seething Ukrainian resentment against communist rule that followed, and the widespread association of Jews with that Soviet abuses that persisted long after the Stalinist purges. This hatred of the imaginary Judo-kommuna was instrumental in feeding the hatred that the Nazis exploited with genocidal efficiency.
In another century, the pogroms of 1918–21 would have received a great amount of scholarly attention. Overshadowed and overwhelmed by the Holocaust just twenty years later, they have unfortunately receded in memory. Veidlinger's masterful treatment of this crucial period has brought the pogroms back into the forefront of our vision, describing how essential these attacks were in forming the rest of the last century and its bloodlust. We owe a debt of gratitude to Veidlinger for staring into the abyss, and describing what horrors he saw there.
