The Russian Revolution was blessing and curse for the Jews of Eastern Europe. On the hand it promoted the Jews from second-class subjects to citizens, on the other hand it brought waves of pogroms and anti-Jewish violence on a hitherto unknown scale. Emancipation, however, did not come with the end of anti-Jewish sentiment in large parts of the former Romanov Empire. On the opposite, implicit emancipation was prone to provoke and reproduce antisemitism. After all, where the Jews obviously won something other groups were at loss, if only in their imagination. Yuri Slezkine once masterly captured all these dialectical moments in his “Jewish Century”. Brendan McGeever does not show much interest in his famous colleague’s work, despite of the fact that he ploughs the same soil. To be sure it is a smaller and lesser known part of it, the campaign against antisemitism in the Russian Revolution.

To begin with the strengths of the book it has to be said that in its empirical parts it is well researched, and that it sheds light on people and institutions which will not be too familiar to most readers. While Semen Dimanshtein is not unheard of, other activists like Kheifets, Davidovych, or Fridliand do not have starred in historical accounts and remained in relative obscurity like the “Jewish Commissariats” in Petrograd and Moscow, a Jewish section of the Bolshevik party, the “Evsektsiia”, or the short-lived “Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism”. The author shows in great detail how largely non-Bolshevik activists tried to address and fight the phenomenon of antisemitism, and that the campaign began outside of the Bolshevik party some time before the Soviet government finally made its first declaration against antisemitism in July 1918.

While the Bolsheviks in principle were anything but an antisemitic force, their agents and the Red Army as a matter of fact were responsible for a large number of pogroms in those days. The author illustrates this well-known fact with many detailed examples. There were simple and rather well-known reasons for that the author reveals in the later chapters of his book. To wage revolutionary war on the fringes of the former empire like Ukraine the Bolsheviks had to take in whoever subscribed to their cause in whatever loose form. If even peasant warlord Grigor’ev/Hryhor’iv and his men for some time were listed as Red Army unit, then, there is little reason to be surprised about “red pogroms”. Given the fact that the Bolsheviks fought for survival during 1918 and most of 1919 one should not be surprised that anti-Jewish violence was not their greatest concern; that Bolshevik party and Soviet state were reluctant to take a firm stance against antisemitism, that they quickly dissolved the “Committee for the Struggle against Antisemitism”, or that Lenin even engaged in some kind of “victim-blaming” and aimed to reduce the visibility of Jews in Ukrainian Soviet institutions. Probably for reasons of political correctness the author displays more surprise about all this than sober analysis would justify.

After all, antisemitism on the ground and on the countryside was a strong force to reckon with, and this was the reason for the Bolsheviks’ ambivalence. Bluntly spoken the Bolsheviks did not have to win the Jews (who anyway had no better camp than the Bolsheviks), and the Jews were not crucial to win the revolutionary war; the peasants, however, were. The Bolsheviks had to neutralise them, or to win them over, not least in Ukraine, and the peasantry there tended to hold strong anti-Jewish attitudes. Those were reinforced by the fact that many Jews who acted as innkeepers, middlemen, merchants and the like could easily be identified as “non-proletarian”, and therefore as “bourgeois”. From “beat the bourgeoisie” to “beat the Jews” was too small a step for too many peasants whose horizons did not reach far beyond the closest market place. Even Jewish activists realized that under the given circumstances pro-Jewish action could backfire as alleged evidence of Jewish favoritism as the author rightly points out. In other words, there were plenty of reasons for the Bolsheviks to brush the problem under the carpet, why pragmatism trumped moralism during civil war, and why the party would only take action against antisemitic acts when they threatened the revolutionary Soviet state. Only later when the regime was consolidated the party took more determined measures to tackle antisemitism, only to reverse this policy again in the 1930s.

It is a simple, straightforward, and unsurprising story the author has to tell. But by withholding some basic and well-known socio-cultural conditions of the former “pale of settlement” and Ukraine from the reader in the beginning and revealing them only in the later chapters he artificially creates an arc of suspense. This comes to a price. A book with the title “Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution” should say something more about the background, about the concept of antisemitism, its relationship to popular and partly religious anti-Judaism, and, since the author operates with the term, the relationship of the historical phenomenon with our contemporary concept of “racism”. However, one sees why the author does not do what most readers would expect from an introduction. It would give the punch line away. Consequently, the introduction is little more than an anticipating summary that sounds like an advertising blurb. Repeated over and over again, the title of the book is brought home to the reader like medicine against ignorance. At the same time, however, the title is slightly misleading, since it claims more than the book actually delivers. “The Bolsheviks and Antisemitism During Revolution and Civil War (in Ukraine)” would render more accurately what happens in the book, since it does not deal with anti-Jewish activities of any other political force during the Russian Revolution.

Tying into more recent and current debates and discourses on racism may demonstrate the topic’s relevance for today, but does not contribute to the historical analysis. Even worse, the language from today may distort the understanding of the past. Antisemitism and religious anti-Judaism are not necessarily the same, both may be forms of racism, but they do not simply fall together. Not that the author would claim the latter, but thanks to his silence the reader simply cannot know. According to the author the Bolsheviks had an “anti-racist” strategy, but having a class-based approach to politics which does not ask for nationality is certainly not the same. It matters, whether something is done by agenda, or by default. And with regard to the Bolshevik perspective on “backward” populations of the former empire and Stalinist colonialism in the 1930s one might ask, whether the Bolsheviks really deserve the compliment. This very well researched study would have deserved a better conceptual framework.