Russian expulsions of Jews from the front zone

At noon on 18 May 1915 (5 May under the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) the deadline expired by which the Jews of the western part of Kovno province had to leave their homes. Notices posted on the orders of the army command required the expulsion of all Jews living west of a line running from Kovno through Jonava, Ukmergė and Panevėžys to Bauska in Courland. People were given a day, two days or even less to leave, and the order spared neither the sick nor the old. According to the accounts of those expelled, anyone who stayed behind was threatened with death. The festival of Shavuot began the next day. Ten days earlier, from 8 May (25 April Old Style), the army had been expelling Jews from neighbouring Courland province. According to the historian Semion Goldin, about 200,000 people were driven out of the two provinces in May. In the Duma the figure of about 150,000 was given for Kovno province alone. It was the only deportation of Jews on such a scale during the war, but not the first.

Suspected of treason

From the first days of the war Russian commanders accused the Jews of disloyalty, of helping the enemy and of espionage. The most hostile to them was the chief of staff of the Supreme Command, General Nikolai Yanushkevich, with the consent of the commander-in-chief, Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaevich. Martial law gave the military authorities in the front zone wide powers over the civilian population, and the army used them against the Jews: it expelled them from one place after another, restricted their freedom of movement and took hostages who were to answer for the loyalty of their co-religionists. In January 1915 the Stavka adopted these measures officially, in a published statement that listed the charges against the Jews. It made no distinction between Jews who were subjects of the Tsar and Jews from Galicia, which the Russians had occupied.

The Polish lands, through which the front had run since the autumn of 1914, suffered first. After the January statement the Russian command tried several times to expel the entire Jewish population from the front zone, above all in Warsaw province and Płock province and in Galicia. According to Goldin these attempts failed. A mass deportation required cooperation between the army and the civil authorities near the front, who were to carry it out, and in the rear, who were to receive the deportees, and civil officials at various levels opposed it. The army nevertheless drove Jews out of individual towns and small towns. In Galicia, at the end of September 1914, Russian soldiers carried out a pogrom in Lviv, and in April 1915 the authorities deported thousands of Jews into the interior of the empire from Przemyśl, taken after a siege, by some estimates about 17,000.

Kovno and Courland

In the spring of 1915 the Germans advanced into Lithuania and Courland, and at the end of April they took Šiauliai. The Russian command was looking for someone to blame. The pretext was the village of Kuži near Šiauliai. According to a Russian communiqué that went round the press, on the night of 10–11 May (28 April Old Style) the local Jews had been hiding German soldiers in their homes. According to Goldin, the expulsion from the two provinces was carried out by the 10th Army of General Nikolai Radkevich with Yanushkevich’s support. The deportees were sent far to the east, mainly to Yekaterinoslav and Poltava provinces, and also to Chernigov province. Many set out on foot or by cart, others by train. According to one account, thirty railway wagons of deportees left Kėdainiai alone.

The army itself paid a price. According to Goldin, the crowds of deportees blocked roads and railways and disorganised the rear in the most difficult months for the Russians, the summer of 1915, when after the breakthrough at Gorlice the front was retreating along its whole length. Members of the government, among them the Minister of the Interior, Prince Nikolai Shcherbatov, complained that their efforts to persuade the staff “remain in vain”. At the turn of July and August members of the Duma, among them Alexander Kerensky, showed from the rostrum that the story of Kuži had been invented. According to the deputy Fridman, the Jews had left the village before the alleged attack.

Hostages and the refugee exodus

From May 1915, under the command’s directives, the taking of hostages, which was easier to carry out than expulsions, was to replace them as the main means of enforcing Jewish loyalty. Local expulsions nevertheless continued. According to Goldin, between 1914 and 1916 deportations and expulsions affected at least 189 Jewish communities in the Russian Empire, Galicia and Bukovina. Overall figures cannot be established precisely. Some historians estimate that during the Great Retreat the Russian army deported about half a million Jews into the interior of Russia. In the summer of 1915 the expelled Jews joined the millions of refugees, Poles, Belarusians, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, whom the retreat drove east in the bezhenstvo.

The expulsions and hostages became a symbol of the Russian military authorities’ policy towards the Jews. They were discussed at meetings of the Council of Ministers, in the Duma and in the press, in Russia and abroad. In August 1915, faced with the influx of deportees and refugees, the Russian authorities allowed Jews to settle in towns outside the Pale of Settlement, except for the capitals. The Pale, to which the empire’s Jews had been confined since the 18th century, in practice ceased to apply. In September the Tsar removed the Grand Duke and Yanushkevich from command of the army.