Pogrom

Pogrom (Russian for “devastation”), a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, on the property or lives of religious, racial, or national minorities; more specifically, the term refers to the organized massacre of Jews. The first pogrom occurred in tsarist Russia in 1881, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by revolutionary terrorists. A massacre of Jews took place in 1903 in the Bessarabian city of Chişinău. After the failure of the Revolution of 1905 in Russia, pogroms occurred in about 600 villages and cities; thousands of Jews were slaughtered, and the property of many of the victims was looted and destroyed. Ostensibly, these pogroms were spontaneous uprisings of Christians outraged by alleged Jewish religious practices, especially the supposed ritual murder of Christian children in connection with the festival of Pesach, also known as Passover. As established by documentary evidence, however, the pogroms were deliberately organized by the tsarist government to divert into channels of religious bigotry and ethnic hatred the Russian workers' and peasants' discontent with political and economic conditions. During the civil war that followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (see Bolshevism), pogroms, which claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, were organized in the Ukraine by the White Guard leaders. An extensive pogrom, known as the Kristallnacht (German for “Night of Broken Glass”), took place in Germany in 1938, as a response to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish man. Undoubtedly the worst of all pogroms was the genocide perpetrated during World War II (1939-1945) by the Nazi government of Germany, which systematically exterminated between 5.6 million and 5.9 million Jews. See Holocaust; National Socialism.