The Pogroms as Soviet (Jewish) Sites of Memory

Abstract

Chapter 3 explores the Soviet politics of memory of the pogroms of the civil war. It does so by examining instances of trials of pogromists; the impact that the reports about the assassination of Symon Petliura and the Scholem Schwarzbard trial had on the memory of violence; pogrom memorials; memoirs, literary accounts, exhibitions, and other visuals about the violence; and the place of the pogrom in Soviet Jewish historiography and in the Yiddish school curriculum. This chapter captures the encumbered memory of violence and the emergence of two distinct narratives largely competing with each other: on the one hand, the pogrom became a universal Soviet site of memory, on the other hand it remained a particular Jewish site of memory. As the Soviet politics of memory imposed its qualitative choice on anti-Jewish violence, it elected which pogroms to remember and publicly discuss and which ones to ignore, and eventually forget.