ABSTRACT
This chapter examines pogroms in the Empire’s and the Pale’s two great, southern metropolises, Kiev and Odessa. In Kiev and other large cities, the harbingers of the October upheaval were the railroad workers and the university students. These were often the two most active and highly motivated groups struggling for substantial change in 1905, and the dynamism of the fall’s events was due to the coincidence of new offensives by each of them. Not surprisingly, one of the more costly and destructive pogroms in the 1881–1882 period occurred in Kiev. Kiev’s 1905 pogrom proved even more lethal, costly, and destructive. In 1905 the supreme authority in the city of Kiev was the Governor General of Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia provinces, General N. V. Kleigels. He was in overall command of all police and military forces within the Kiev general-governorship, the region’s ruler and chief policeman.
