The Role of Civil and Military Commanders During the 1905 Pogroms in Odessa and Kiev

The 600-plus pogroms following the Manifesto of October 17, 1905, could have been prevented or interdicted by timely actions on the part of the police and army. Instead, soldiers and policemen are widely seen to have favored the pogrom's perpetrators, and their commanders have been seen as complicit in that behavior. Older pogrom narratives viewed this as a centrally planned conspiracy to drown the revolution in Jewish blood. Contemporary narratives have transferred this explanation to the local level, merging rank-and-file and command-level motives and relying heavily on anti-Jewish animus and ideology to explain the pogroms. A close examination of the mid-October actions of the civil and military authorities in two key southern Russian cities reveals structural and conjunctural complexities underlying the apparent parallels between official and crowd behavior.