THE ODESSA POGROM
Frankel (p.135) says, rather sloppily, that 800 Jews were killed in Odessa on October 18th and later (p.149) he adds: 'In Odessa alone, the number of dead and wounded was alleged to have reached 6,000.' According to the historian Robert Weinberg: 'the police reported that at least 400 Jews and 100 non-Jews were killed and approximately 300 people, mostly Jews, were injured, with some 1,632 Jewish houses, apartments and stores incurring damage.' A contemporary Jewish paper, Voskhod, reported that 'over 800 were killed and another several thousand were wounded.' The lawyer Maxim Vinaver, an important member of the Constitutional Democratic Party ('Cadets'), 'wrote in 1907 that over 400 were killed and approximately 2,000 were wounded.' (2)
(2) Robert Weinberg: 'Workers, Pogroms, and the 1905 Revolution in Odessa', The Russian Review, Jan., 1987, Vol. 46, No. 1, p.53 Robert Weinberg is Professor of History and International Relations in Swathmore College, Pennsylvania and author of books on the Beilis blood libel trial, the project for a Jewish national territory in Birobidzhan and the events in Odessa in 1905.
In addition, although Odessa was by far the worst, there were throughout the Russian Empire, over 600 pogroms between October 1905 and January 1906. According to another account:
'S.A. Stepanov, using data from police investigations, reckoned that during the October pogroms 1,622 people died and 3,544 were injured. Determining nationality was only possible for 75 percent of the murdered and 73 percent of the injured; from this Stepanov concluded that Jews accounted for 711 of the murdered and 1,207 of the injured; Orthodox Christians (Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians) accounted for 428 murdered and 1,246 injured; Armenians 47 of the murdered and 51 of the injured. Shlomo Lambroza, not trusting police sources, used data from opposition materials; only among Jews, he counted 800 deaths in Odessa alone and 3,103 for the entire country during the 1905-1906 pogrom waves. Victims were often random people and not at all revolutionaries. During the horrible Tomsk massacre, when pogromists burned a railroad officers' building and killed all who tried to escape the blaze, 68 people died, of whom only one, according to the police, was linked to the revolutionary movement; most of the rest had not come to attend a revolutionary intelligentsia meeting (as the pogromists thought) but simply to receive salaries.' (3)
(3) Sergei Podbolotov: '"... and the Entire Mass of Loyal People Leapt up": The attitude of Nicholas II Towards the Pogroms' Cahiers du Monde russe, Jan.-June, 2004, Vol. 45, No. 1/2, p.195. Podbolotov is a Professor in the 'Independent not-for-profit' European University at St Petersburg.
According to Podbolotov, while attacks on Jews were concentrated in the Pale of Settlement in Northern and Central Russia the pogroms were directed against 'students and the intelligentsia.' The impetus of the violence, then, was against what were seen as the forces that were behind the 1905 revolution, forces that were seen as having rejoiced in Russia's humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese and that had then triumphed with the proclamation of October 17th.