Reviewed by: In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust by Jeffrey Veidlinger Jeffrey S. Kopstein Jeffrey Veidlinger. In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2021. 480 pp. Attacks targeting Jewish civilians in the cities and towns where they lived had gathered steam in the Russian Empire during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. The scale and scope of this violence increased dramatically in the chaos of collapsing imperial orders in the eastern [End Page 219] borderlands with the end of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and multiple nation-building projects that fought for control of the territory from 1918 to 1921. Jeffrey Veidlinger’s beautifully written and thoroughly researched study of these pogroms helps us make sense of what is an extraordinarily confusing, even dizzying set of circumstances. Armies, gangs, warlords, and revolutionaries repeatedly conquered and then lost the same towns and cities. In each round, Jews were targeted, sometimes as capitalists, but most frequently as “Jews” who were seen as having sided against Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians, or depicted as allies of rival nations. Most often they were tarred as Bolsheviks as well. The perpetrators’ motives included politics, greed, personal animosities, counter-insurgency, revenge, and pure depravity. Tens of thousands of Jews died and hundreds of thousands were injured and rendered homeless. Rape was common. Veidlinger explains why the pogroms occurred and he connects them to the even deadlier anti-Jewish violence of the Nazi extermination effort twenty years later. The book is divided into five parts. The first deals with the history of anti-Jewish violence and the impact of the Great War, especially with the Russian mistreatment of Jews during their occupation of Eastern Galicia, the revolutions of 1917, including some exceptionally clear accounts on the quest for Ukrainian statehood and the clash with Poles in Lviv that led to a pogrom carried out by Polish military units against Jewish civilians. The second part moves to an analysis of 167 pogroms in Volhynia and Podolia in the first three months of 1919 and does so with telling detail, by focusing on three cities that experienced a level of brutality that shocked the world: Ovruch, Zhytomyr, and Proskuriv. Each of these pogroms (Zhytomyr experienced two) highlights different elements. In Ovruch, Veidlinger introduces us to a half-crazed officer and his rampaging men; in Zhytomyr we encounter betrayal of friends and neighbors; and in Proskuriv we witness local violence reaching its deadly crescendo in a few hours as military and civilian perpetrators reinforce each other. The story is in all cases one of weak central authorities unable or unwilling to control the violence in outlying areas. These chapters left me wanting to know more about why some communities experienced different sorts of violence and whether Veidlinger found communities that avoided pogroms altogether and why. Part 3 of the book drills down into the pogroms in Ukraine as the Bolshevik Red Army gained ground against the retreating Ukrainian People’s Republic. In this territory, large pockets were sporadically controlled by warlords motivated by avarice and hunger for power. This section of the book, along with the next section, part 4, on pogroms committed by the Whites’ Volunteer Army and regular units of the newly reborn Polish Republic, highlight the dynamics of rivalry and revenge. Preexisting identities and antipathies facilitated pogroms when public authority broke down. The allegiance of some Jews to the Bolshevik cause made them targets and soon enough the entire notion of “Jew” and “Bolshevik” became conflated in the popular mind. Even so, if identities generated violence, violence also created new identities and hardened existing ones. Jews who may have been ambivalent or even hostile to the Bolshevik cause before 1919 frequently joined [End Page 220] the Red Army in search of revenge for the atrocities committed against their loved ones. In fact, as Veidlinger shows, antipathy toward the Jews was probably the most effective appeal available to the leaders of virtually every cause. The fifth part of the book addresses the aftermath of the...
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