Soil
Prejudice against Jews in Russian Empire had deep roots. Pogroms scarred the empire in 1881-1884 and 1903-1906. The slogan Beat the Jews, Save Russia! became popular at the beginning of the XX century.
Discrimination persisted under Soviet rule: unofficial quotas limited Jewish access to universities and top jobs. Even the Soviet state’s own campaign against antisemitism in the 1920s and 1930s barely changed how ordinary people treated Jews. They remained underrepresented among local Soviet deputies while overrepresented at the republican and Union level, and from the mid-1930s prominent Jewish communists were encouraged to adopt Russian pseudonyms.
Critical Circumstances
After the Second World War, returning Jewish survivors competed with neighbors for scarce apartments in ruined cities, and stereotypes of Jews as wartime profiteers spread widely. In July 1945, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Rubtsovsk, Russia, during a football match; authorities did nothing.
The postwar Kyiv was ruined and overcrowded. Shortages created direct conflict between returning Jews and residents who had taken over their apartments. Authorities offered no consistent remedy.
Spark And Pogrom
On September 4, 1945, Ivan Grabar, who had occupied a Jewish family’s Rybchinskys apartment during the war, lost it when the family returned. He and his friend Nikolai Melnikov tried to get it back. Drunk, they beat a passing Jew, Iosif Rosenstein. Rosenstein went home, came back armed, and shot both men when they refused to go with him to the police. A crowd gathered around and beat Rosenstein, his wife and another Jew, Boris Spektor, who lived nearby. Rosenstein was arrested and soon executed.
The funeral of Melnikov and Grabar three days later turned into an attack on Jews by around three hundred rioters. Dozens were hurt; five to sixteen died.
Consequences And Memory
An appeal to Stalin from Kyiv’s Jews got no public response, and the pogrom was erased from memory for decades.
No pogrom this large happened again, but Soviet policy toward Jews only hardened: the state dissolved the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (1948), secretly executed its leaders (1952), and fabricated the Doctors’ Plot while cutting ties with Israel (1953).