Rostov Undone: Telling the Story of Conspiratorial Antisemitism Through the Eyes of One City’s Jewish Community
Determining how, when, and to whom violent group pathologies spread is critical not only to Holocaust and Genocide studies as an academic field, but a vital national security interest as well. Civil institutions can better minimize the risk of mass violence and genocide by looking back upon history and identifying patterns between the violent social, religious, and political movements of the past. Doing so enables state actors to react accordingly when similar patterns unfold in the modern day. Because such phenomena are the result of an extraordinarily complex network of social systems, the academic inquiry necessary to accomplishing this goal, to develop concrete warning signs, must necessarily take an integral, transdisciplinary approach. History, politics, psychology, and sociology all examine various components of a broader, dynamic system from which mass violence emerges, and it is at the intersection of these disciplines that it ought to be studied.
Although it may seem like a distant, obscure part of history, the tale of Eastern Europe’s Jewish community is one that we all stand to learn from today. The story of one city’s Jews, Rostov-on-Don, helps us understand how conspiracy theories, tribal mentalities, and political “otherness” can lead to the worst sides of humanity: pogroms, wars, and if we’re not careful, genocide. From their tumultuous integration into the Russian Empire to their slaughter in the Holocaust, the transformation of the Jewish community’s identity from an ethno-religious minority into threatening political conspirators planted the seeds of the ideologically-motivated, antisemitic violence of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is this shift in public perception that the violent anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany and the contemporary political landscape are rooted.
The pogroms against the Jews of the Pale are most accurately labelled not as a form of genocide, but of democide, which is broader in scope than genocide and encompasses the social and political motivations that the pogromists used to justify their violence in addition to the ethnic and religious dynamics at play.
When anthropologists examined instances of violent atrocities throughout history, they revealed four major correlates. First, a majority social group’s economic prosperity or social prestige is on the decline. Second, political and business elites exacerbate intergroup frustration and aggression, primarily through information media. Third, civil or imperial conflicts further divide communities along ethnic, religious, or ideological lines. And fourth, unstable autocratic regimes feel threatened and seek to consolidate their power. Imperial Russia not only possessed all four correlative preconditions throughout their integration of Eastern European Jewry, but also revealed a fifth correlate between many contemporary instances of genocide and democide: a politically-driven belief in the existence of a powerful, conspiring outgroup. Understanding what ideological conspiratorialism is capable of producing and why it is so effective as a tool of social and political polarization is necessary to understanding how and why it has resulted in multiple large-scale atrocities.
Birth of a Conspiracy: Judeo-Russian Relations from Catherine to Nicholas II
Catherine the Great partitioned the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and established the Pale of Settlement between 1791 and 1793. In a very short amount of time, the Russian Empire faced the challenge of integrating and governing what was at the time the world’s largest Jewish population. They had to incorporate the newfound Jewish community not only as political subjects, but as fellow citizens to all the other ethnic groups in the Russian Empire, and in particular, the majority ethnic Russians. The integration of the Jewish community was seen not only as a threat to their civilizational, Christian orthodoxy, but to the stability of the expanding Russian Empire and its autocracy as well. Ever since the days of Kievan Rus, the concepts of Slavic blood, Christian identity, and territorial expansion have been at the heart of Russian political affairs. In addition to being religiously and ethnically divided from the Orthodox Slavs, Russian policies further divided Jews from Russians along political and economic lines as well, pinning yet another distinct outgroup status on the Jewish identity. The restrictions placed on Jewish occupational choice and political activity caused pronounced divisions between the newly incorporated Jews and their Slavic neighbours. In the eyes of many Russians, the Jewish community challenged Russian orthodoxy and hegemony throughout the empire in a broader sense than religion or ethnicity alone.
Far-right elements of Russian society used the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 as an opportunity to scapegoat Jews as anti-Tsarist revolutionaries. As a result, far-right organizations saw significant growth during this time. Historian John Klier writes — “Russian Judeophobia was largely transformed from a simple, primitive hatred based on a view of the Jews as deicides into a set of more sophisticated, modern myths, encompassing a view of the Jews as participants in a conspiracy directed against the very basis of Christian civilization.” Note Klier’s use of words such as “myth” and “conspiracy” to describe the feelings many Russians held towards Jews. When one believes they and their group are being plotted against, they often become extremely paranoid, and are possessed by visions of cruel puppet masters.
The psychological theory of the positivity effect contends that we often perceive any troublesome state of affairs not because of our own group’s mismanagement, but because of some uncontrollable, external force. As a result, we are quick to scapegoat and self-victimize during times of political or economic instability. Its counterpart, the negativity effect, contends that we view the behavior and actions of people outside our own group as consequences of their individual, dispositional selves. Conspiracies strongly engage the positivity and negativity effects, and allowed many to be bought into otherwise ludicrous, hateful anti-Semitic conspiracies.
The positivity and negativity effects play an even greater role in the Russian context. Language shapes the way that a people make sense of the world, how they divide it up, string it together, and find meaning in it. The Russians hold dearly the idea of русскость or народность (Russianness). This idea is centered around Russian righteousness in a world of contrasting, oppositional forces in which there is very little grey area. The Russian perception is one that divides the world into свой и чужой (our own and their own), друг и недруг (friends and foes), and святые и бесы (angels and demons). Without total acquiescence, Jews could never be neutral actors in a Russian world. Indeed, they were limited to being the “others” in a society where to be an “other” was to be a foreign, unfriendly demon.
These conspiratorial, self-victimizing perceptions of the Judeo-Russian relationship bear a remarkable resemblance to the ideological mindset underlying both National Socialism and other contemporary anti-Semitic movements. For example, the solution to the civilizational problem according to Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Tsar-appointed supervisor to the Church under Alexander III and Russian-Right icon, foreshadowed the genocidal conclusion this mindset inevitably reaches: “A third [of Jews] will die out, a third will emigrate, and one third will wither away without a trace into the surrounding population…”
However, it would be semi-independent groups of pogromists, not formal state military forces, that first attempted to cleanse Russia of Jewish influence. The Russian Right viewed the Jewish community not only as socialist revolutionaries, but contradictingly, as capitalist oppressors of the peasant working class as well. The violent elements of the Russian Right movement consisted mainly of young Russian men who had left peasant lives for unskilled, industrial work in the cities. These men viewed Jews not only as a threat to their political hegemony as bearers of the Russian identity, but as exploitative economic competitors in the lending-heavy imperial economy.
Religion was not the primary cause of the pogroms — political and economic dominance over the Russian civilizational territory was the foremost concern of anti-Semites. If purifying the territory of any Jewish presence or influence was the goal of the pogromists, then they were partially successful, as a wave of roughly 200 pogroms between 1881 and 1884 caused a significant flight of Jewry from Eastern Europe. These pogroms led to the rise of local Jewish self-defense organizations and produced a significant surge in early Zionist and Socialist support among the Jewish community. In a terrible feedback loop, the pogromists would use the formation of these groups as further evidence of Jewish political aspirations and conspiracy, justifying their frustration and violence towards the Jews whom they viewed as dangerous revolutionaries.
A Tale of One City: Rostov 1905
Looking at how inter-factional conflict and aggression generate on the macrocosmic, national level is critical to understanding how they produce violent action on the microcosmic, local level. The history of anti-Semitic violence in the city of Rostov-on-Don demonstrates how ideological conspiratorialism undoes social civility, and produces democidal activity at the local level. This city is distinct not only because of its sizeable Jewish population, but also because it lays on definitively Russian territory outside of the Pale of Settlement, that existed primarily on territory now belonging to Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Poland.
News of the 1905 October Manifesto — a decree from the Tsar that granted increased freedom to political dissidents, Jews, and other oppressed groups — first arrived in Rostov-on-Don along the railroad, having circulated outward from Moscow mainly by word of mouth. The manifesto was read to the largely illiterate Russian peasantry in public, inside Orthodox churches and outside courthouses, as it circulated around the empire. In Rostov, demonstrations quickly erupted through the center of the city nearby the train station, prison, and several major roads.
Consisting primarily of liberal students, factory workers, social democrats, and Jews, the demonstrators at first called for the immediate release of political prisoners to whom the manifesto had promised amnesty, but had yet to be released by the local authorities. Meanwhile, Rostovian city officials called a meeting and closed themselves off from the swelling crowd. Rumours began to spread that Jewish demonstrators around the empire were burning pictures of Nicholas II and attacking ethnic Russians in displays of celebration. Regardless of whether or not these rumors were true, individuals are more likely to process ambiguous information in a way that bolsters their presently held beliefs, leading many to the conclusion that Jews did do what was being purported. In their minds, this rationalized and justified their angry, violent reaction.
The rumors sparked counter-mobs and riots within the city of Rostov. Supplied with nationalist, anti-revolutionary literature and signage, Black Hundreds began to gather openly in the city. They became increasingly violent towards the Jewish residents, assisting Tsarist loyalists and “hooligans” in leading a so-called defense against the demonstrators. They led a large crowd that had assembled near the Church of the New-Intercession towards the pro-Manifesto “revolutionaries”. Black Hundreds began throwing stones at the protestors in order to provoke the dense crowd into a frenzy. A small Jewish self-defense militia formed to resist the rioters, but in a matter of fifteen minutes, pogromists overran their barricade. This was largely because of the assistance and leadership that the rioters received from mounted Cossack units who only two years earlier were tasked by the Tsar with protecting the Jews of Rostov.
Instead, the Cossacks fired upon the defending crowd and charged through them on horseback, beating and trampling the protestors that quickly found themselves caught in the middle of a pogrom. The local authorities not only failed to stop the violence, but actively promoted the enmity. The Rostovian mayor, important councilmen, and leading businessmen were said to have personally inspired much of the Black Hundreds’ activity in the city. A community or civil leader often led roving bands of pogromists, consisting of several grown men.
According to those who witnessed it, the pogromists were “drunk and angry with human blood”, the pogrom “an orgy of senseless destruction” with a “wild pogrom ecstasy” One man stomped on the keys of an old concert piano on the street, making animalistic noises while he did it. Meanwhile, pogromists guarded by Cossacks looted and burned the city’s known Jewish shops and residences. Onlookers, smiling and laughing, enjoyed the firelit scene while the city’s Jews sat hunkered in the cellars of compassionate Russians, or hid among the chaotic crowd itself. 150 were killed and some 500 others wounded before authorities decided to put an end to the violence that had begun to circle back and affect ethnic Russians. Although the Odessa pogrom was the largest of the 1905 wave in terms of sheer numbers, Rostov suffered the largest pogrom proportional to their Jewish population.
The Protocols and the Power of Conspiratorial Literature
Circulating around the empire between 1903 and 1906 was an anti-Semitic canard entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (in Russian, Протоколы Сионских Мудрецов) . Although the author is unknown, some historians suspect the book was a forgery commissioned by the Tsarist secret service to scapegoat Russia’s Jews for their political and economic problems. Others believe it to have originated as a satirical text. Conveniently, the tumultuous state of the empire provided plenty of fodder with which Russians could confirm and reinforce biases towards their Jewish boogeyman. In order to increase the legitimacy of the text, it was formatted and distributed as though it were stolen notes from a council meeting of plotting Jewish elders in an ominous Prague cemetery — a conspiracy that played well into the negativity effect.
The ideas within the text paint an excellent picture of how politicized the Jewish identity had become. One English copy of the manuscript reads that: “They [Jews] also constitute a state; that they are nationally conscious, not only, but consciously united for a common defense and a common purpose” and that “[The Jewish Question] is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world question.” The Protocols depicted Jews as a subversive and dangerous political threat to the stability of the Russian state and the livelihood of the ordinary, Russian citizen. Due to their state of беспочвенность (without soil/territory), Russia’s Jews were suspected to be prone to disloyalty, their allegiance being directed not towards Russia, her soil, her people, and the continuation of the Empire, but to the Jewish nation and community worldwide. The widespread publication of the book likely contributed to the outbreak of anti-Semitic violence in 1905, and might explain why many individuals became complicit bystanders or willing executioners in the pogroms.
The political significance of the Jewish categorization was foremost to the Nazis, just as it had been to the Imperial Russian regime. The ideological pathologies responsible for the pogroms were exported Westward, influencing and enabling a more systematized, bureaucratized genocide on the Eastern Front. After the collapse of the Russian Empire and its descent into civil war, fleeing Whites and Slavic nationalists transmitted the conspiratorial anti-Semitism outlined in The Protocols westward to Germany, France, Britain, and the U.S.
Translations of The Protocols became critical reading for many Nazi ideological elites, with the party publishing 23 editions prior to the Second World War. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that, “To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. . . For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken.” What National Socialism took away from the Protocols was that disinformation, conspiracy, and identity politics are incredibly effective tools at preparing a citizenry to be complicit in mass violence. Even though the Nazis often used racial pseudoscience and corrupted Darwinist thinking to justify their brutal policy towards the Jews, it was the underlying notion that they were a nationally, and perhaps even civilizationally threatening out-group that both fueled and rationalized their anti-Semitic dogma.
The Ravine of Snakes: Rostov 1941–42
The German military first occupied the city of Rostov-on-Don on the 21st of November, 1941. Within a week, Jewish “prisoners of war” were being systematically rounded up and shot. One young Jewish resident of the city recalled, “… [We] were brought to their headquarters. There were already many prisoners there. Separated, a large group of Jews stood against the wall — about 30 of them… On the command of a German officer, the soldiers shot us each with a carbine… I fell and lay silently. Those who moved, the Germans finished off with pistols. Come nighttime, I pulled myself out from underneath a mountain of bodies.”
The first occupation of Rostov did not last, and before their attempts at extermination could be completed and covered up, the Red Army pushed the Nazis out of the city. Upon retaking Rostov, the Soviets documented the atrocities that the Nazis had managed to complete during their brief occupation. However, the Soviet press concealed the ethnic identities of the casualties, electing to use the common and neutral term “peaceful Soviet citizens” instead. This is in spite of the fact that top-ranking Soviet officials all the way up to Stalin himself referred to such atrocities against Jews on Soviet soil as “pogroms,” harking back to the Tsarist campaigns of anti-Semitic violence that plagued Russia at the turn-of-the-century. This shows a deep relationship between the pogroms and the Nazi atrocities decades later.
By July of 1942, the Germans recaptured Rostov, reimplementing their policy of racial extermination, this time with greater success. Nazi occupation forces immediately forced Jews to wear the “Yellow Stars of Death” — large, yellow cloth Stars of David that made clear their Jewish identity. The stars were an immediate signifier not of a religious or cultural identity like the traditional yarmulke might be, but a signifier of a political identity and social status; to wear the star was to be of the lowest caste, marked for death.
In the early days of August, Nazi officials commanded the city’s Jews to report to various collection points around the city and register themselves with officials. Jewish elders formed a council to advise the city’s Jews.This council urged the city’s Jews to “obey the Germans unquestioningly.” A few days later, the Nazis posted a second series of flyers throughout the city. It ordered all Jews to report to the collection points at which they’d originally registered. The Nazis claimed that they had to evacuate the Jewish residents for their own safety and relocate them outside of the city. Rostovian Jews were lured to their places of extermination upon false premises of protection from “irresponsible acts of enraged elements [of the city].” In other words, the Germans claimed they were saving them from pogroms.
Although the scenario may seem ludicrous in hindsight, to the Jews of Rostov it very well could have been a credible threat — the pogrom of 1905 was but a few short decades ago, and the collective and individual memories of it still remained in the city’s Jewish conscious. Additionally, news of pogrom-mongering at the hands of ethnic Ukrainians and Lithuanians had reached Rostov. From their point of view, there was good reason to fear their own fellow citizens just as much as the occupying Nazis. Regardless of whether or not the threat was credible, the appeal succeeded in that it manipulated many Jews into believing that there was a conspiracy against them, plotted by their fellow “peaceful Soviet citizens”.
One of the leaders of the newly formed Jewish council of elders in the city, a doctor by the name of Lurye, is quoted as telling concerned Jews on the day of the evacuation that, “[The Germans] won’t do anything to you. What are you panicking for? They’ll take you to a designated territory where you’ll work like you did before.” While it is impossible to say whether Dr. Lurye actively lied in order to help mediate the impending massacre or not, the words of comfort he spoke to his fellow Jews nevertheless ended up being untrue. 27,000 individuals, 16,000 of whom were Jews, were rounded up, gassed, shot, tortured, poisoned, or buried alive in the Ravine of Snakes outside of Rostov. Although it was 60+ years ago, the seeds of that violence remain sown into Russian and Rostovian soil and politics.
A New Conspiracy: Rostov 2015
Shortly after midnight on June 13th, 2015, a group of roughly 50 individuals gathered around the Ukrainian consulate in Rostov-on-Don. Their identities hidden, the mob armed with sticks and stones broke windows, vandalized the building, smashed computer equipment, set off fireworks, and blared nationalist, anti-Ukrainian chants. The first to arrive on the scene were not police officers, but reporters armed with cameras. None of the participants were ever detained by law enforcement. The Russian media referred to the attack, interestingly enough, as a “pogrom”. The Ukrainian government shut down its consular operations because of both the property damage and the fear of further pogroms — for fleeing Ukrainian refugees, this meant no more help and no more passports even if they reached the border-city of Rostov.
The following day, approximately 100 Russians began protesting outside of the shattered consulate. However, they weren’t picketing those who had committed the act, they were picketing Ukrainian officials. The protesters claimed they were demonstrating in response to the government in Kiev denouncing Russian aggression and “discrediting (their) country in the eyes of the world.” The demonstrators insisted, however, that they were not continuing the violence of last night, and had no knowledge of the previous night’s events.
While the crisis of territory, identity, and power in the Russian borderlands had revolved around solving the Jewish question for much of the early 20th century, the ethno-political question of the early 21st century appears to be Ukrainian. The striking similarities to pogroms is what earned the attack in Rostov its comparison to the anti-Jewish violence of the previous century. More importantly is the fact that a self-victimizing, scapegoating mindset against Ukrainians inspired the attack.
Much like the pogrom violence of the early 20th century, the ideas of Russian supremacy over subordinate peoples finds much of its inspiration in provocative, nationalist texts that found favor among the political and economic elites: Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics and Fourth Political Theory. The texts lay out how Russia and Russians are to combat a global cabal of Atlanticist conspirators who are hell-bent on degrading both Russian territory and Russian status. Yet again, this sort of literature finds tremendous success in the Russian context, playing strongly into the positivity and negativity effects; this time, however, the “politically-correct version of the tsarist-era Protocols of the Elders of Zion located the global conspiracy of chaos not in a Prague Cemetery, but in the corridors of ‘Atlanticism’ in Washington and London.” It is not only the politicization of the Jewish or Ukrainian identity that makes them susceptible to violence, but also their polarization to the Russian identity that rationalizes tribalistic violence toward any other threatening group.
Takeaways
Mass violence, anti-Semitic or otherwise, arises out of a need to maintain orthodoxy over heterodoxy, to preserve hegemony over plurality. The omnipresent possibility of conspiracy against ones in-group creates an illusion of a zero-sum game: if the in-group is not actively vying to maintain their political power, surely the other must be plotting to advance theirs.
The Jewish experience in Russia is one that begins and ends with their politicization. Jews like those in Rostov were subject first to integration, then persecution, and shortly afterward, execution. Making political identity superordinate to individual identity doesn’t just prime a compliant, willing, violent citizenry to organize on their own volition as the pogromists did, but also justifies bureaucratized genocide like the Nazis. Jews, Russians and Ukrainians alike are incapable of operating solely as ethnic or religious actors in this day and age. The 20th and 21st centuries begin the era of ideology, in which political identity is central to determining relationships and interactions with others.
This timeline, when brought to light, reveals how quickly politically motivated lies, and rumours of conspiracy and deceit, can descend into violence. As famed Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “…[violence] is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.”
There is no easier way to empower ideological radicalism, justify violence and bigotry, and prime a movement for democide, than through disinformation and conspiracy.
