"A Dishonor to You and to the Church": Patriarch Tikhon, Pogroms, and the Russian Revolution, 1917–19

Abstract

In the summer of 1919, the Russian Civil War was in its bloodiest phase. The Volunteer Army, a faction of the anti-Bolshevik White Army, had steadily gathered strength over the spring. It had won a string of victories in the southwest region of the former Russian Empire, gaining territories that had previously been conquered by the Bolshevik Red Army.1 The chaos that had overtaken huge swaths of the former empire was magnified in these months as White Army troops began taking reprisals against the inhabitants of the territories formerly occupied by the Red Army. By August, antiBolshevik forces, including White Army units and Ukrainian nationalist forces, had begun perpetrating mass pogroms in Ukrainian territories that were quantitatively and qualitatively different from the anti-Jewish violence that had previously taken place in Russia or Europe as a whole.2 In July 1919, even before the outbreak of organized pogroms, Patriarch Tikhon, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, strongly condemned both the violence of the Civil War in general, and the pogroms specifically,