Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets

Based on witness accounts, memoirs, the press, and secret police reports from the archives and libraries of Kyiv, Lviv, Vilnius, Jerusalem, Washington D.C., and New York City, Legacy of Blood explores the afterlife of the two most extreme manifestations of tsarist antisemitism—pogroms and blood libels—in the Soviet Union, from the Revolution of 1917 to the early 1960s.

Legacy of Blood analyzes the role of the genocidal violence unleashed during the pogroms of the civil war in shaping the relationship between Jews, central and local authorities, and their neighbors. It traces the persistence and permutation of the blood libel in the atheistic Soviet Union throughout the interwar period and into the postwar period. It reassesses the interplay between official and popular antisemitism in the USSR from 1917 to the early 1960s. By dissecting the phenomenon and the memory of anti-Jewish violence under the Bolsheviks, this book sheds light on the ever-changing and at times ambivalent relationship between the state and the Jewish minority group in modern times.