ABSTRACT
The October pogroms were not only contestations involving Jews and antisemites, police and self-defense groups, or army troops and urban rabble, they were also a part of the broader civil disorders that broke out in 1905 and, in some cases, opened the way to express other issues and grievances, engaging the residents of entire towns and regions. The outbreak of pogroms was part of a larger collapse of civic order that empowered the most deprived and desperate parts of town populations and mobilized peasant looters in immediate hinterland of towns, all of which posed a threat to property owners, and not just Jewish ones. Town leaders and residents responded in a variety of ways to the turmoil that arose in 1905 from the strikes, demonstrations, and collapse of autocratic authority. Town populations were in most cases left to their own devices due to the usual neglect by central authorities and to the malfeasance, or even outright complicity of local police.
