ABSTRACT
Russia’s pogroms mostly took place in towns and cities of the Pale, where many of the patterns witnessed in Kiev and Odessa were repeated. They resulted from the unique combination of urbanites living at close quarters and the political and cultural parochialism of a still largely peasant society, whose narrow-mindedness and intolerance continued to color social relations in Russian cities throughout much of the 20th Century. To document and analyze both the common patterns and unique features of urban pogroms, this chapter examines pogroms in several towns and cities beyond Kiev and Odessa. Orsha was a Pale town on the upper Dnepr River in Mogilev province in which the ratio of Jews to Gentiles in 1900 was relatively high, about half the town’s population of 14,000 in 1900. Ekaterinoslav’s pogrom on October 20–24 distinguished itself by incorporating most of the features that appeared only partly (or were incompletely reported) in other pogroms.
