The moral economy of anti-Jewish violence in the Kyiv region, 1917–21

This article examines the wave of anti-Jewish pogroms that swept Kyiv province between 1917 and 1921, arguing that where these pogroms were carried out by or in conjunction with peasants and townspeople rather than by armies acting on their own initiative, they constituted a form of social regulation undertaken in conditions of state collapse. Extending William Hagen’s concept of a “moral economy of violence” from the partially contracted state of 1918–19 Galicia to the wholly collapsed state of revolutionary-era Ukraine, the article makes three claims: that the unsolved land question was the structural engine of peasant radicalization; that the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism functioned as instrumental rhetoric rather than political ideology; and that the village skhod, the customary form by which Ukrainian peasants had always made collective decisions, became the institution through which they deliberated atrocity. Drawing on testimony preserved in archives, the contemporary print culture of every faction, and the diaries of witnesses, the article recovers a peasant logic from below that top-down accounts cannot reach.