which was confiscating grain and closing churches. Anti-Jewish riots and
vandalism increased in frequency and intensity, reaching a high point in
- In 1918, there were 30 pogroms and 50 riots in Ukraine; in 1919,
there were 685 pogroms and 249 riots.
In December 1920, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended fighting between
Poland and Ukraine, and brought Ukraine into the newly forming Soviet
Union, thus ending the civil war. By the end of the civil war, Ukraine was full
of homeless Jews and Jewish self-defense units. Moreover, the civil war
brought the collapse of traditional Jewry in Ukraine, and prompted a steady
migration of Jews, initially into the Russian interior and eventually from
small Ukrainian villages to larger cities such as Kiev and Lvov.
By 1920, most Russian and Ukrainian Jews supported the new Soviet
regime. This regime had no specific Jewish policy until the end of the 1930s.
Until then, Jewish policies grew out of overall policies, much as in pre-1881
Russia. The broader Soviet antagonism to all vestiges of the old regime, and
the new regime’s overall aim of revolutionizing social and economic struc-
tures, resulted in a brutal campaign against pre- and counterrevolutionary
society, such as attacks on Ukrainian churches, culture, and language.
Regarding Jews, this meant a frontal attack on Judaism and Jewish commu-
nal organization, and all Jewish political movements: Zionism, Bundism, and
Autonomism. It also meant the seizure of synagogues, the arrest or deporta-
tion of rabbis and ritual slaughterers, confiscation of religious items, and a
massive antireligion campaign – putting holidays and rituals on trial.
At the same time, the regime honestly opposed and persecuted all manifes-
tations of anti-Semitism. In addition, Stalin revolutionized Jewish economic
organization, transforming some Jews into agriculturists, but, more important,
incorporating Jews into the Soviet industrial proletariat. This meant new
opportunities for Jews, even as other ethnic minorities such as the Ukrainians
languished under Stalin. Most important, thousands of Soviet Jews became
bureaucrats and managers; by the end of the 1920s, one-third of Jews were
managers, one-fifth of university students were Jews, and half of the Jewish
population was in the upper economic stratum. This upward mobility was
available to Jewish women as well as men, and Jewish women reached manage-
rial positions at a greater pace than non-Jewish women.
In contrast to the Russian Revolution, the communist revolutions in
Germany and Hungary were short-lived enterprises that were defeated by anti-
communist reaction. Revolution in Germany broke out during the final days
of the war. Until January 1919, this revolution proceeded along socialist lines.
In January, the Spartacus League, a German communist party, attempted a
coup. Prominent among the Spartacist communists was Rosa Luxemburg
(1870–1919). Born in Russian Poland near Lublin, she was the daughter of a
timber merchant. As a teenager, she moved to Warsaw and attended a
gymnasium. In 1886, she joined a local communist party, and later the
Spartacus League. She was eventually executed by anticommunist forces.
208 From renewal to devastation, 1914–45