The anti-Jewish violence that spread during the Russian Civil War was unprecedented in scale — even conservative estimates put the number of dead at over 50,000. Most of this violence was perpetrated by the nationalist armies which emerged amidst the breakdown of the old tsarist regime, who also painted the postrevolutionary Bolshevik government as “cosmopolitan” and foreign. 

Yet as historian Brendan McGeever’s new book Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution shows, antisemitism was not limited to monarchist or nationalist circles — or just a hangover of tsarism. Rather, antisemitic vitriol against “outsiders” was also rife among parts of the peasantry and working class, including in a certain populist discourse that blurred the lines between “the speculator” and “the Jew.”

Long having identified pogroms only with the tsarist regime, the Soviet state did in summer 1918 launch its own focused campaign against antisemitism. But as McGeever shows, the move to confront this problem decisively relied on the intervention of non-Bolshevik, Jewish socialists, who demanded a state response to the pogroms being perpetrated even by some Red Army units.