This is an article from the July 26, 1918 edition of The Sentinel newspaper reporting the spread of pogroms throughout Russia. The article reports that the organised Jewish community, represented by the Jewish National Council of Russia, was protesting against the pogroms and alleging that the state authorities not only weren’t helping to protect the Jews but were even participating in the pogroms and accusing the Jews of supporting the counter revolutionaries. The article reports a discussion about the violent events in the city council of Petrograd, today St. Petersburg, made up of the city’s soldiers and workers. It seems that each group was accusing the other: the Bolsheviks blamed the counter-revolutionary movement, the Revolutionary Socialists and Mensheviks blamed the Bolsheviks, and the Commissioner for Jewish Affairs claimed that the pogroms did not happen on Soviet- controlled areas but blamed the Ukrainian Revolutionary Socialists for the violence.
The word pogrom is a Russian term used to describe an attack on Jews by their Christian neighbours. The attacks included looting, murder, and rape. Pogroms took place in the Russian Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The violence spread for a variety of reasons: classical anti-Semitism, economic problems, and social upheaval. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Jews suffered, yet again, from a wave of pogroms, the most significant being the Lwow Pogrom that took place a few months after this article was published and the Kiev Pogroms that took place the following year.
