Jewish Communists and the Soviet Response to Antisemitism, May–December 1919

Abstract

After the full extent of antisemitism within the Red Army came into view in the summer of 1919, a renewed campaign emerged from the peripheral apparatuses of the Soviet state. Just as in the spring of 1918, it emanated not from the Party leadership, but from a group of non-Bolshevik Jewish socialists who had recently joined the Soviet government. As before, these activists elevated and singled out the fight against antisemitism as a separate sphere of Party work. The Soviet confrontation with antisemitism in late 1919 was the product, therefore, of a distinctly Soviet-Jewish political project, and to understand it, we must first account for the trajectory of the Jewish socialist movement in Ukraine between 1917 and 1919.