Pogroms After the Second World War

Despite the enormous losses suffered by the Jewish population during the Second World War, the Soviet Union did not rid itself of antisemitic sentiment even after the horrors of the Holocaust. A grim testimony to this was the attempted organisation of pogroms against Jews in the postwar years.

The J-Doc digital archive contains little-known information about antisemitic incidents in various parts of the USSR — episodes that were suppressed in Soviet times.

One such episode took place on the streets of Lviv in June 1945. By the summer of that year, the city’s Jewish religious community numbered around 1,800 people. It was growing rapidly thanks to the arrival of Jews from the eastern regions. Many of those who came soon continued on to Poland, but a considerable number settled in Lviv Oblast, especially in the regional capital itself.

Having resumed its activities in the city, the Lviv Jewish community chose the old Jakob Glanzer Shul on Ugolnaya Street as its place of prayer. Negotiations with the local authorities were also under way over the opening of a second prayer house on Marka Vovchka Street.

However, as declassified documents show, on 14 June 1945 Lviv found itself on the brink of a new tragedy. At ten o’clock in the morning, in a market just a few steps from the synagogue on Ugolnaya Street, an ominous scene unfolded. A local resident, Aleksei Fedik, and his accomplices suddenly began shouting, spreading a monstrous lie: that the bodies of Christian children supposedly murdered by Jews had been found in the synagogue. NKVD officers and staff from the commandant’s office immediately arrived at the scene.

They detained the instigators of the unrest that was about to break out. By that time, an agitated crowd had already gathered at the walls of the synagogue, and the authorities only just managed to disperse it.

As could be expected, a thorough inspection of the prayer house found no trace of the alleged crime. No bodies were found inside, nor was there any evidence that could support the vile accusations.

Such incidents were often connected with the return of Jews from evacuation and their attempts to reclaim their property. Thus, a few months after the events in Lviv, in September 1945, Kyiv became the scene of a new interethnic conflict that flared up around an apartment on Kitaevskaya Street. While the owners, the Jewish Rybachinsky family, had been in evacuation, their living space had been occupied by unrelated tenants.

At the demand of the returning owners, the new residents, the Grabar family, were being evicted — without being offered alternative housing.

Finding herself in a desperate situation, the mother of the family turned for help to her son Ivan, a Red Army soldier. He immediately came to Kyiv with a fellow serviceman, Guards Junior Sergeant Melnikov. The soldiers, who were on leave, were unable, however, to influence the unyielding local authorities.

Seeing no better way out, Grabar and Melnikov decided to drown their helplessness in alcohol, after which they set off in search of trouble. On their way to the city centre, they unexpectedly saw Senior Lieutenant Rosenstein, a senior radio operator in Department “B” of the NKGB of the Ukrainian SSR, returning after buying bread.

The drunken soldiers directed antisemitic insults at Rosenstein. The verbal exchange quickly escalated into a scuffle, during which Grabar and Melnikov beat the officer. Only the intervention of passers-by allowed Rosenstein to make it back to his apartment.

Once home, Rosenstein put on his uniform, armed himself with his service TT pistol, and headed to the courtyard of Grabar’s mother’s building, where Melnikov was still present. Rosenstein’s wife hurried after him, sensing that something was wrong.

The conflict that erupted took a tragic turn: it ended in gunfire with several fatalities and spilled over into disorder on the streets of Kyiv directed against people of Jewish nationality.

You can read more about how this Kyiv incident unfolded on our website.

Freddy Rotman