[lbo-talk] Pogroms and the (Russian) Civil War

[Chris Doss]

There was a thread on this here several months ago.
Anyway, I've been reading Alexander Shubin's excellent
book Desyat Myfov Sovetskoi Strany (1o Myths of the
Soviet Country). Shubin was BTW head of the Union of
Anarchists in the 1980s and is close to Kagarlitsky --
they both come out of the Soviet socialist reformist
milieu.

According to Shubin, notwithstanding Soviet myths
about murderous White Bandits and Makhnoites, in fact
the majority of pogroms (anti-Jewish and otherwise)
during the Civil War were carried out by units of the
regular army. Shubin attributes this to a feeling on
the part of the soldiers that they could act with
impunity, both to general conditions of small-a
anarchy and to a (typically peasant I might add)
interpretation of the idea of the Workers' and
Peasants' Government as meaning the workers and
peasants could do whatever the fuck they wanted.

Which is not to say that the Whites and the Anarchists
didn't do it too, which they did.

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