All this argues against efforts to find a single definition of the causes and meaning of pogroms. At the same time, we are not left with the prospect of treating every pogrom as a unique event. These essays suggest instead that anti-Jewish violence can be most accurately understood in specific historical contexts, be they Klier’s world of relations between government policy, personnel, and Jewish leadership, or the clash of East European new nationalisms with native Jewish populations, or Frankel’s diachronic study of Russian-Jewish nationalist and socialist politics coming to birth in a failing empire beset by revolutionary oppositions. All three of these contexts were present in microcosm in Kiev, where Jewish leaders interacted with the city’s political and business elite, where Jews became political scapegoats for a rising nationalist movement, and where they responded with new political movements of their own, both moderate and radical.

The studies of Meir, Hillis, and Petrovsky highlight other historical aspects of anti-Jewish violence, other differences that time and place have made in its quality and effect. Whether Kiev’s Jews represented some kind of Jewish metropolis, their history of both success and trauma was clearly the product of the specific restrictions and opportunities that their unique position in Kiev presented them. By contrast, Petrovsky’s study of the smaller towns and settlements in Kiev’s hinterland suggests that the violence Jews suffered in those locales was tempered by greater routine and stability and a simpler rivalry with a gentile population that shared their shtetl residency and most of the same rural hardships. Although this did not rule out violent treatment by gentile neighbors, it was part of a social arrangement in which Jews stood on a more equal footing with them than was possible in large, impersonal places like Kiev.

Taken together, the works considered here signal a new approach to the history of Russian Jews in the late imperial period. They argue that the growing intensity of anti-Jewish violence in the 1880–1914 period was due to much more than the preachings of antisemitic ideologues and that pogrom histories need to be constructed on the basis of a more detailed and more holistic consideration of specific events.[216] They suggest greater recognition is due the fact that Jews took an active hand in providing for their own defense and well-being and, while certainly not deserving of the violence visited on them, were not wholly passive and innocent victims of hostile Slavs and Christians. They show that the origins of anti-Jewish violence should be sought in the interactive relation between Jews and gentiles, however asymmetric and dysfunctional, and not exclusively in the hostility of Judeophobic rioters, even though their prejudice, phobias and violent overreaction made them the usual, principal initiators of the violence.

That the strains and trauma of the First World War contributed to the collapse of the tsarist monarchy is a truism that leaves unanswered several interrelated questions. Why did the collapse of old regime occur so suddenly in the capital and then spread so rapidly throughout the rest of the country; and why did it fail to generate any visible measure of support from its erstwhile defenders to restore it? Finally, why did Provisional Government collapse so rapidly in its turn, giving way to a complex