Russian Jews Between the Reds and the Whites, 1917-1920. Oleg Budnitskii

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      Soviet authorities did not discriminate against Jews on the basis of their ethnic heritage. When “excesses” did occur, they ran counter to the party line. However, ethnic heritage was not the only means of discrimination. Sometimes local authorities or requisition units would treat the entire local Jewish population as bourgeois, speculators, smugglers, or counterrevolutionaries.

      In the spring of 1919, in the Klimovichi uezd in the Mogilev gubernia, a Soviet canteen was distributing apples in honor of the upcoming holidays. The man in charge of the distribution announced that all Russians should get in line, while “the Jews aren't to get any. They're all speculators.” The Jewish population of Kivichi, a village in the Chernigov uezd were ordered by requisition troops to pay a tax of 500,000 rubles, while the peasant population of the entire volost' was ordered to pay only 90,000. In Roslavl (Smolensk gubernia) an emergency tax of 800,000 rubles was placed on a Christian population of 45,000. The local Jewish population (of 2,000 people!) was to pay 3.2 million.¹⁷⁶

      A Red Army soldier working for the ChON ¹⁷⁷ wrote home in June of 1919 that he was currently stationed in the village of Krasnopole, where he and his comrades had “driven out the deserters and conscripts” and had searched the homes of the local Jews, where they found “lots of goods, salt, bread, footwear, and a lot of silk.” Although the soldier in question had a monthly salary of 350 rubles, there is little doubt that his job had its perks: “there are a lot of speculators; you can take 1000 rubles worth of goods off of a single one depending on what they're carrying, sometimes more if you're lucky, and then you can sell [the goods] or exchange [them] in the village for bread and lard” (Orsha, Gomel gubernia, June 28, 1919).¹⁷⁸ Such looting was done almost in an official manner. On one occasion the writer Korolenko was on his way to the Poltava Cheka, in all likelihood to get someone out of trouble. On the road there he ran into an elderty Jew, who had just been released after his arrest. Shaking Korolenko's hand, he introduced himself: “I'm Goikhman, a bourgeois.” Korolenko remarked, “This Soviet power is seeking contributions from the bourgeoisie. He paid, and so they let him go.”¹⁷⁹

      The fundraising efforts of the Cheka were to have a deleterious effect even on those who might have supported the Bolsheviks. A well-off elderly Jewish man from Kiev, who had been arrested several times and had “ransomed” himself just as many, admitted to an acquaintance that he had earlier sympathized with the socialists, and had hoped that they would do away with injustice. Now, quotas and the Pale of Settlement seemed to him “a fantastic dream”: “Back then they only robbed you once every five or six years, and only demanded blood sacrifices once every several decades. But at least the world was open, and you could leave this inhospitable homeland. Now they rob you constantly and spit all over you. This is the long-awaited socialism, an era of boorishness and criminal behavior, when the most barbaric instincts are given free rein!”¹⁸⁰

      Of course these “additional expenditures” on the part of merchants in the form of bribes and lost goods were passed on to the consumer, which only served to further incense the local population at what they believed to be “speculation.” Not surprisingly, Jews were often the target of such animosity.

      The concept of “class warfare” was more than a metaphor during the Civil War. In the fall of 1918, a Sirotin school representative was wounded while trying to solicit contributions from local merchants with the goal of creating a Jewish school with Yiddish instruction. The Secretary of the kombed (Committee of Poor Peasants) was killed trying to collect a tax from the very same merchants. In response, the local Cheka arrested twelve people, six of whom were executed.¹⁸¹

      In Lepel, those merchants whose fortunes had been ruined by War Communism soon turned to smuggling. When they were caught, sentences were handed down that would have been unthinkable under the Tsarist regime. Five people were executed, while the rest were sent to labor camps.¹⁸² Other victims of the Bolsheviks included the Jewish merchant Okunev (from Sevastopol) and his son.¹⁸³

      Jews had a significantly smaller chance of being taken hostage by the Bolsheviks during the war. As Cheka order No. 208 (December 17, 1919, signed by both Dzerzhinsky and Latsis) explains, a hostage is defined as “a captive who comes from the society or organization that is fighting against us. Moreover such an individual has value for the enemy…The enemy won't put out anything for a country teacher, a miller, a forester, or a shopkeeper, let alone a Jew.” Hostages were to be high officials, wealthy landowners, factory owners, talented professionals, scientists, relatives of the anti-Bolshevik leadership, etc.¹⁸⁴

      One can only imagine what they meant by “talented professionals.” Apparently one of them turned out to be Ilia Ehrenburg, who, in order to escape capture, was forced to flee from Moscow to Ukraine in September 1918.¹⁸⁵ Of course, if there were no “valuable” members of society at hand, Jewish shopkeepers often proved a viable substitute, and were shot “in accordance with the Red Terror” with equal success.¹⁸⁶ Those who had served as officers during the Provisional Government, and those who were members of political parties that had fallen out of favor, were also common targets.¹⁸⁷ The assassination of the first Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, M. S. Uritsky, was largely motivated by the fact that Uritsky had ordered the death of V. Pereltsveig (a former cadet) along with twenty other hostages. L. I. Kannegiser, Uritsky's future assassin, had begged Uritsky to let his innocent friend go free, to no avail.¹⁸⁸

      On May 12, 1919, fifty members of the bourgeoisie were arrested in Kiev. All of them “happened to be” Jews. A young university student described one of the arrests in her diary. Cheka agents stormed into her home with an arrest warrant for her uncle, who was away at the time. When the agents telephoned headquarters for further instructions, it was decided that any brother would do, and they took away the girl's father. Having gathered the requisite number of captives, all of them homeowners and merchants, all Jewish, they took them to the Cheka (at this point it was already the middle of the day). On this occasion, at least, the prisoners got lucky, the authorities were unable to come up with a reason to shoot all of them, and the majority of the prisoners were released within five days.¹⁸⁹

      A number of well-off Jews from Poltava were less fortunate. Having been sent to the rear lines for forced labor, thirty-five of them ended up in the hospital with such severe injuries that even a member of the Bolshevik command ordered the following resolution to be included in his review of the matter: “Death to those miscreants who have disgraced Bolshevik power with their brutality.”¹⁹⁰ Such forays into “self-criticism” were few and far between.

      Literally hours before Kiev was captured by Denikin's forces, a Jew by the name of Gorenstein was executed by the Cheka. His crime: looking younger than the age listed in his passport, which the authorities took to be fake. When friends and acquaintances protested his arrest, and it turned out that he was who he said he was, the Cheka high command turned their attention to another matter: who was trying to protect the wealthy owner of a sugar factory. The protests quickly ceased. As Gorenstein was not among those listed as being shot, his family had hopes that he was still alive. They soon discovered that he had been executed without orders. A member of the Cheka was later seen walking out of Sadovaia 5, the building where the executions took place, carrytng Gorenstein's patent leather boots, which were perhaps the only reason why Gorenstein was murdered.¹⁹¹