Pogrom
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a Russian word which first be- gained current usage in the English 65 language in 1903, when Russian ruffians, of instigated by the higher higher authorities, ; made an attack on the Jewish quarter of "Kishinev, in Russian Bessarabia, killing fifty persons and injuring some hundreds of others. The word is almost equivalent to "massacre." Russian pogroms, however, first took place in 1881, after the assassination of Czar Alexander II., when the reactionary officials of the government, to divert the dicontent rns of the people away from the evils of the government, stimulated race hatred against the Jews. A secret propaganda was promulgated among the ignorant peasants, putting the blame for their economic sufferings on the Jews, who had monopolized most of the small trade of the towns. Out of this agitation sprang a secret organization, officially known as the Union of the Truly-Ru sian People, but more popularly called the Black Hundreds. This organization, backed by the secret support of the more reactionary officials, not only carried on a persistent anti-Semitic propaganda, , but actually instigated thousands of pogroms, of which that in Kishinew was only the first to attract world-wide attention. The result of these violent attacks was to drive hundreds of thou- , sands of the Russian Jews out of the , country, most of whom eventually found , refuge in the United States. Pogroms have also been extensively practiced in Poland, since the establishment of independence by that country after the World War, to split the radical opposition against the conservative government of the Paderewski régime.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 it treated pogroms as an essentially Russian and Polish phenomenon of the previous forty years, and stated flatly that officials had instigated them. Historians working in the tsarist archives since the 1980s, notably Hans Rogger and John Klier, found no evidence of central government organisation of the 1881 wave, though local officials' indifference and later state tolerance of the Black Hundreds are well documented. The word's meaning also widened almost immediately after 1921: the pogroms of the Russian Civil War in Ukraine, which killed tens of thousands of Jews between 1918 and 1921, were followed by Nazi Germany's Kristallnacht in November 1938, the Holocaust, and the Kielce pogrom in Poland in 1946. Today "pogrom" is applied well beyond eastern Europe to any state-tolerated mob attack on a minority.
Written for this edition, 2026.