Antisemitism and Class Conflict: Notes on a Pogrom in a Ukrainian Beet Factory

• In Event: Pogroms: Memory, Politics, and Economy

Abstract

The period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War witnessed an unprecedented explosion in anti-Jewish pogroms across the western borderlands of the collapsing Russian Empire. Recent literature on the pogroms of the Civil War period have understandably focused on the national, ethnic, religious and racial dimensions of anti-Jewish violence. Without dismissing those claims, this paper seeks to complexify this period of horrific violence by focusing on an obscure pogrom in the central Ukrainian village of Sablino-Znamensk, a beet-sugar factory town, on May 19-20, 1919, during which the neighboring peasantry seized the factory and slaughtered most of the Jewish workers in the factory. Based on a fragmentary document about a largely unknown pogrom, this analysis will interrogate the dynamics of this pogrom by foregrounding the beet-factory as location of violence. By focusing upon the mediating location of the sugar-beet industry – among the first industries in the Russian empire to be transformed by the emergence of the wage-labor form in the early 19th-century – this paper seeks to reframe the emergence of the pogrom as an historically-discrete form of violence structured by the arrival of nascent capitalist relations in the Russian Empire prior to, and following, the emancipation and abolition of serfdom in 1861.

Author

• Andrew Sloin, Baruch College / CUNY Graduate Center