Article:3.1.1

The Jews Under the Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina During the First World War (1914–1915)

     The Jews Under the Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina During the First World War (1914–1915)

Semion Goldin

       Topics
       Jews and Their Surrounding - Anti-Semitism and Pogroms

       Period
       1914-1918

       Region
       GaliciaBukovina

       NLI Code
       997013604470905171

Related Personalities

• Person:Weisselberger

Related Entries

• Article:3.1.2

Map

• World War I Front Lines in Galicia and Bukovina, 1914–1917

The Jews Under the Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina During the First World War (1914–1915)

Semion Goldin

The Beginning of the Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina

With the onset of the First World War on July 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian territories of Galicia and Bukovina immediately became an arena of active warfare between armies of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. In August–September 1914, Russian forces inflicted a series of serious defeats on the Austro-Hungarian Army, occupying much of Galicia and Bukovina including the major cities of Lviv and Chernivtsi. This offensive set in motion an enormous wave of refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands, of whom Jews apparently comprised about 40 percent. Thus, at the end of 1915, even after the retreat of the Russian forces from Galicia allowed some refugees to return to their homes, Austro-Hungarian statistics registered over 187,000 Jewish refugees from Galicia remaining in other Austro-Hungarian territories. In Vienna alone, there were over 70,000 Jewish refugees.

At the beginning of August 1914, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich, issued an appeal “to the Russian People of Chervonnaia Rus’.” In this document, he presented the conquest of Galicia as the reunification with Russia of historical Russian lands and the completion of “the work of Grand Prince Ivan Kalita, ” prince of Moscow in the 14^th century. This designation of Galicia as Russian land since time immemorial determined the nature of the military administration in the region, which aimed at rapid and uncompromising Russification. Concurrently, in August 1914, it was decided to create a military general-governorship to administer the occupied territories. Lieutenant-general Count Georgii Bobrinskii, subordinate to the head of supplies on the southwestern front, was appointed Military Governor-General of Galicia. The territory of the governorship was divided into three and later on into four gubernias (provinces): Lvov, Tarnopol, Chernovtzy, and Peremyshl’. The Russian occupation lasted until June 1915, when an offensive by Austro-German forces compelled the Russian forces to leave Galicia and Bukovina hastily.3.1.1-WW1-1

Jews as a “Problem” for the Russian Army

The Russian military authorities were well aware of the ethnic composition of Galicia and Bukovina. From their point of view, the local Ukrainian population, which they considered simply as “Russian,” should have become the new rulers’ natural allies. At the same time, they thought it necessary to severely suppress the Ukrainian national movement. Russian authorities called representatives of the Ukrainian national movement mazepinitsy after the hetman [military commander] of the Zaporozhian Host, Ivan Mazepa, who had switched to the Swedish side during the Northern War between Russia and Sweden in 1700–1721. The Polish population of Galicia was considered potentially hostile but the Russian authorities valued its neutrality and therefore recommended not to offend its national sentiments.

By contrast, the Russian authorities viewed the Jews in occupied Galicia as an intrinsically unfriendly or directly hostile element. Thus, one source found that “all Jews are ill-disposed toward the Russians and do not cease to hope for the return of Austrian troops.” Concomitantly, Russian authorities took seriously all sorts of largely fanciful accusations of Jewish espionage on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian forces. Thus, Russian gendarmes reported in January 1915 that in Husiatyn, twenty Jews had hired a porter to smuggle Austrian newspapers from Hungary through the Carpathian passes for them. On May 24, 1915, the head of the gendarmerie department of Galicia, Colonel Alexander Mezentsov, reported to the Governor-general Bobrinskii that Lviv Jews were buying up copper, which they received ostensibly from streetcar conductors, for transfer to Austria. According to other reports to the authorities, the Jews in Hrymailiv were demanding payment from the customers in Austrian currency. The Russian gendarmerie department of Galicia opened cases for each of these allegations and investigated them seriously. The titles of similar cases in the archive of the Russian gendarmerie department of Galicia speak for themselves: “On the buying up of bread by Jews,” “On the buying up of copper by Jews,” “On Jews’ transporting copper out of Galicia.”

In a declaration published in January 1915, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief defined the attitude of the Jewish population to the Russian Army as “clearly hostile.” The declaration was supplemented by a secret circular ordering Jews to be expelled in the wake of the retreating enemy or to locations in the Russian interior at least 200 versts [ = 132 mile or 220 km] from army headquarters in a gubernia on the left bank of the Dnepr River. Individual and mass deportations of Jews from the first days of the war were a patent manifestation of the Russian military authorities’ repressive policy toward Jews at large. Data about such mass deportations of other nationalities are unknown. Commanders at the local level did not have the formal authority to deport people. In the event, however, they evidently arrogated this authority to themselves. Thus, in the winter of early 1915, Russian troops expelled large numbers of Jews in the course of fighting. 3.1.1-WW1-2 During that winter, around 10,000 Jews, expelled from different localities “without a specific charge of espionage or disloyalty,” were evicted to the command of the Galician Governor-General. Bobrinskii considered it too difficult to expel such a significant number of Jews to Poltava Gubernia, as had been envisaged in the circulars of the command. The senior officer responsible for supplies on the front rejected the possibility of leaving the deported Jews in Galicia. Moreover, he did not consider the dispatch of the evacuees to Poltava Gubernia difficult “given the presence of empty trains heading toward the border” from Lviv. The Governor of Poltava, Alexander Baggovut, however, upon receiving notice from Bobrinskii about the dispatch to Poltava “soon” of the first group of Jews, not only balked at settling a considerable number of the evacuees in his gubernia (he was prepared to accept no more than 2,000 people) but also, apparently, turned to the Ministry of the Interior with a complaint against the military authorities that were flooding the interior regions of Russia with Jews, meaning foreigners.

The Police Department, in turn, in order not to disperse Galician Jews across Russia, proposed keeping all of them in prisons. As a result, the head of Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Yanushkevich, who received “information from the Interior Ministry about the expulsion of Yids [sic] from Galicia to the interior of Russia,” sent a sharply worded telegram: “This is inadmissible; even without that, there are too many of them with us. It was ordered to drive them forward after the Austrians.”

The deportation of ten thousand Galician Jews to Poltava Gubernia was thus canceled. Supreme Headquarters determined that instead of being deported into the Russian interior, they should be expelled to the enemy side. This direction of future expulsions was first mentioned as an option in the January 1915 directives of the Supreme Commanded-in-Chief. It was frequently also mentioned in orders to the troops on the southwestern front from February to May 1915. The sole known attempt to carry out the deportation of Jews across enemy positions occurred in March 1915 in the Nadvirna region of Galicia (in the 9^th Army’s sector of the front). The Russian command sent out a Russian parliamentarian bearing the announcement that 1,500 Jewish families would be “transferred” “beyond the Russian lines toward the side of Austro-Hungarian troops.” The Austro-Hungarian command, however, refused to allow the Jews to relocate to their side “for military reasons, despite the deepest sympathy for the poor victims of barbarianism.” 3.1.1-WW1-4

Given the enemy’s unwillingness to let the Jews cross their positions and its own apprehensions that the Austrians could easily receive operative information from the deportees, the Russian command rejected such a method of getting rid of the undesirable presence of Jews in the battle zone. It followed that the expelled Jews could be sent neither into Russia nor into Austro-Hungary. Given this logic, the military administration saw only one viable option: to resettle them in the Skalat, Ternopil and Zbarazh districts, the parts of Galicia that were farthest from the front and the closest of all to the prewar Russo-Austrian border along the Zbruch River. Concurrently, some expelled Jews were resettled by local authorities without being relocated to the eastern part of Galicia. Thus, several thousand evacuees were sent from Dobromil’ District to Sambir (Those expelled on February 16, 1915, were permitted to return to their homes on March 29, 1915, at the request of the head of the Sambir District). Some 4,000 Jews who had been expelled from Bukovina on May 7, 1915—mostly women and children—were settled in Chortkiv and Jews expelled from Przemyśl on April 28, 1915, were sent westward and were resettled in Jarosław.

The Russian generals, realizing that the chaotic and often-changed instructions and local decisions had led to this impasse in regard to the deported Jews, sought unconventional options for the future expulsions. General Dmitrii Shcherbachyov proposed the adoption of “special measures”—the total expulsion of all Galician Jews to a strip of land in Galicia on the border with Romania. The formation of such a reservation would make it possible to solve “a painful issue of enormous military and administrative importance […] to spare not only Russia but also the areas it has newly occupied from an undesirable and extremely harmful element.” At this time, Austro-German forces crossed into Galicia in a decisive offensive and, on the northwestern front, massive deportations of Jews were carried out from Kovno and Kurliand gubernias. Shcherbachyov considered that the Jews expelled to the proposed reservation would cross Romanian territory to settle in Austria, “which is so dear to them.”

The Governor-General of Galicia agreed with Shcherbachyov: “Of course, there cannot be any doubt about indications of the existence of extreme hostility of the population of Galicia toward our army’s troops.” In his judgment, however, expulsions would not attain the goal. Bobrinskii also considered the proposal of a reservation unrealistic and “unsatisfactory” due to technical difficulties, property issues, and daily living conditions. Bobrinskii’s reply is dated May 27, 1915, when Russian troops suffered a serious defeat in Galicia, retreating headlong to the east (Lviv was surrendered by the Russians on June 9). Bobrinskii added in his letter that the Galician Jews would not relinquish their great influence and far-reaching rights without a stubborn fight and that Romania, which was unfriendly to the Jews, would not let them pass through its territory.

Southwestern Front command instructed Bobrinskii to settle the deported Jews in regions of eastern Galicia, “in special camps […] of tents, dugouts, [and] light sheds,” to have them guarded by police and national guardsmen, and to give them rations of “one pound of rusks per month per person.” The administration of the Governorship-General opposed the creation of such camps, justly remarking that “on the grounds of malnutrition, they are fraught with the danger of epidemics, which easily could be transmitted to the troops.” 3.1.1-WW1-5

The hasty retreat of Russian troops from Galicia in June 1915 gave urgency to the issue of the future fate of the deported Jews. The military authorities unambiguously tried to prevent them from resettling deep inside Russia in the Russian forces’ wake. Their instructions state that Galician Jews “are not to be let inside our borders; those who manage to infiltrate into Russia […] when possible, return them to Galicia.” How many Galician Jews turned up in the Russian Empire nevertheless? According to a query to the Governor of Kiev in July 1915, there were 1,164 Galician Jews in Kiev. The governor asked the headquarters of the Kiev military region how to deal with the evacuees insofar as, because of the retreat, it was impossible to return them to Galicia “as would be desirable.” Apparently, the Jews were sent to Penza Gubernia. According to the data of the “Special Commission for Review of the Matter of Hostages and Administrative Evacuees from Galicia,” there were 4,680 expellees from Galicia, of all nationalities, in sixteen gubernias in November 1915. The motivation for the expulsions were utterly vague: “loafing close to our positions,” “loafing aimlessly,” or “expelled for further expulsion deep into the interior of Russia.”

Thus, expulsions of Jews from Galicia by Russian occupation authorities did not attain significant proportions in comparison with the infamous mass deportations that occurred in the Kovno and Kurland gubernias on the Russian-German northwestern front. In Galicia, the Russian military’s inclination toward mass deportation of Jews reached an impasse in connection with the unwillingness of Russian authorities to send Jews—foreign citizens—deep into Russia and with the limited possibilities of deporting them in other directions (toward the enemy, inside Galicia itself, and so forth).

Jewish Hostages in Galicia and Bukovina

The Russian Army adopted the practice of taking hostages from the Jewish population as, in many ways, a substitute for deportation. By September 1914, having occupied Galicia, the Russian forces already declared hostage-taking a security measure meant to deter the Jewish population, in particular, from engaging in treason and espionage.

In the part of Galicia occupied by the Russian forces, the practice of hostage-taking from the local population (a legitimate measure under the generally accepted methods of warfare at the time) was extended not only to Jews. The calculation of the historian Vladimir Liubchenko sheds light on the ratio of Jewish and non-Jewish hostages taken by Russian authorities in ten districts of Lvov Gubernia and the city of Lviv from March to June 1915. A total of 353 hostages were taken during this period, among them 174 Jews (49 percent). In Zlochiv District, sixteen of sixty-six hostages were Jews; in Stryi, twenty-eight of forty-eight hostages were Jews. In Zhidachiv District, however, all forty-seven hostages were Jews. Russian authorities took as hostages people who seemed influential to them, including members of the local self-administration and representatives of the clergy. In particular, the Jewish Mayor of Chernivtsi, Salo Weisselberger (1867-1931), was taken hostage and exchanged in 1916 for hostages seized by the Austrians. In general, hostages from Galicia and Bukovina were liberated by Russian authorities after the February 1917 revolution.

The Ban on Jewish Suppliers

In January 1915, Russian command announced that “[to protect] our troops from espionage, in which the Jews engage on our front, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief prohibits the presence of Jews in the area of the Army.” This ban was soon implemented. By decree of the Governor-general of Galicia, Bobrinskii, promulgated on February 13, 1915, the entry of Jews from Russia was completely prohibited, as was the crossing of Jews from one region of Galicia to another; the injunction against entry included suppliers of the Russian military in Galicia. Bobrinskii’s report to Southwestern Front headquarters on May 1, 1915, describes the situation of deliveries after this ban. The governor-general noted that from the moment the ban went into effect, the question of Jewish contractors had been arising constantly. At first, the Commander-in-Chief of the Southwestern Front indicated that Jewish suppliers working before March 1 could remain until May 1. After 9^th Army headquarters complained about problems with supplies for the troops, the front headquarters clarified that even after May 1, 1915, Jews could be suppliers but would not be entitled to enter Galicia; instead, they would have to operate through agents. Ultimately, however, the Governor-General of Galicia determined that it was almost impossible to implement these rules because the Jews controlled all commercial and industrial life in Galicia and the southwestern territory as well as 75 percent of all supplies to the Russian Army, and real competition with them was impossible.

Anti-Jewish Violence

The hostile attitude toward the Jews, shared and repeatedly articulated by Russian military authorities at all levels, was paralleled by violent anti-Jewish sentiment in the ranks of the Russian Army. The hostility in the ranks apparently stemmed from some combination of pre-existing antisemitism, wartime brutalization, and express anti-Jewish agitation on the part of higher-ups. From the first days of the war in Galicia and Bukovina (as also in other sectors of the front), Russian soldiers and officers alike committed acts of violence against Jews, from beatings and looting to pogroms organized by military units.

A report apparently prepared in the autumn of 1914 by the Jewish ethnographer, author, and relief activist S. An-sky (1863–1920) gives a sense of the plight of the Jews in the zone of military operations in Galicia. An-sky noted massive looting by the troops and also incidents of the murder of Jews. On the whole, he concluded: “Officers do not have control over the soldiers on the field of battle.”

Throughout Galicia, troops “plundered, burned, destroyed Jewish goods […] [and] raped and murdered Jews. I heard this from many soldiers—simple witnesses of events.” The pogroms followed “one pattern [in all locations]: a provocative shot or something like that, and then shooting, fires, looting.” An-sky describes an incident that occurred in broad daylight in the Jewish part of Lviv: “A shot rang out and, as if in response to this, on various streets inhabited by Jews, shooting and looting began that continued around two hours. There were 19 victims of the pogrom (of whom 17 were Jews).” 3.1.1-WW1-6

In the city of Brody, occupied by Russian forces, An-sky observed traces of fire and destruction in the city center, shattered glass, the ceiling of the large synagogue riddled with bullets—all as the result of a pogrom, not of battles. Six Jewish men, twelve Jewish women, and one Christian woman were killed by gunfire in the city. The alleged reason for the shooting and the pogrom was that a Jewish girl had killed a Cossack officer and the Russian troops had thus “taken revenge.” At the time of An-sky’s visit, Christian homes in the city still had crosses and icons placed in the windows as a means of signaling to the pogromists that theirs were Christian rather than Jewish homes. According to An-sky’s evidence, after occupying cities, Cossack units of the army, as if in search of enemies in hiding, would search Jews’ homes, take items that pleased them, and let the local peasants loot the rest. Rear units, upon entering a city, would gather up what survived the pogrom. Fires flared up not during the fighting but during the pogroms.

According to data of the Austrian authorities who investigated the complaints, local Ukrainian peasants frequently took an active part in the looting and thus exploited the Jews’ defenselessness.

An-sky’s data are confirmed by information about pogroms from other sources. In November 1914, Russian troops carried out a terrible pogrom in the reoccupied city of Jarosław (western Galicia). From 9:00 in the evening until 5:00 the next morning, Cossacks and soldiers plundered, raped, and murdered. They dragged women from their homes and raped them on the streets. The wife of a local lawyer was raped and killed because she refused to make the sign of the cross. A Cossack waved a five-year old girl in the air and then slammed her against a panel. By the morning, 250 people had been murdered and 189 seriously wounded in Jarosław—70 percent Jews and the rest local Polish residents. All this transpired even though the 3^th Army command and its commanding general, Radko-Dmitriev, were quartered in the city’s town hall. Thus, the army leadership could not have been ignorant of the enormous pogrom that occurred in a city of no more than 20,000 inhabitants.

The pogrom in Sambir occurred in a similar manner. Bursting into the synagogue, the Cossacks “defecated as if on command, in various corners […] yelling that silk is soft.” At the dressing station of the medical train, as a result of the pogrom treatment was given for seventeen fractured skulls, eighteen broken limbs, four severed tongues, one severed ear, and seven mutilated bodies. An explosion at the Freundel distillery (occasioned by drunken sailors who threw matches) caused over 100 people to be burned to death. This put an end to the pogrom; after this incident, the officers, who until then had watched the pogrom indifferently, began to establish order.

The End of the Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina

The end of the Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovina in summer 1915 put an end to Russian military control over local Jews, who then returned to their prewar status of citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The second Russian offensive in Galicia in the summer of 1916, the “Brusilov offensive”, during which Russian forces reoccupied a small part of Galicia, did not lead to a wave of anti-Jewish violence comparable to the events of 1914–1915. This may be related to the fact that the Jewish population had left the battlefront én masse and to the Russian command’s attention to the prevention of new “excesses,” which had harmed Russia’s international standing greatly. In planning to move Southwestern Front headquarters to Ternopil’ in August 1916, however, there was discussion of deporting from the city over 5,000 Jews located there, who had been expelled by the Russian Army from other regions more than a year earlier.

Select Bibliography

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Bakhturina, Alexandra. Politka Rossiiskoi Imperii v Vostochnoi Galitsii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny. Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2000.

Goldin, Semion. [The Russian Army and the Jewish Population, 1914–1917]: Libel, Persecution, Reaction. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism, 2022.

Graf, Daniel W. “Military Rule Behind the Russian Front, 1914–1917: The Political Ramifications.” Jahrbűcher fűr Geschichte Osteuropas, no. 22 (1974), 390–411.

Hagen, Mark von. War in a European Borderland. Occupation and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine, 1914–1918. Seattle, WA: [of Washington Press], 2007.

Hagen, William W. Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland, 1914–1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Holquist, Peter. “The Role of Personality in the First (1914–1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina.” In: Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History, edited by Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010, 52–73.

Lohr, Eric. “The Russian Army and the Jews: Mass Deportation, Hostages, and Violence during World War I.” The Russian Review 60 (2001), 404–9.

Prusin, Alexander Victor. Nationalizing a Borderland. War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Rozenblit, Marsha L. Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.