In August 1914, the city of St. Petersburg was hastily renamed Petrograd.
The reason was extremely simple: World War I was underway, and anti-German sentiment had surged sharply in the Russian Empire. Subsequently, the authorities passed numerous laws targeting Germans. Domestic turmoil and military defeats at the front further fueled anti-German sentiment. In addition to rallies, pogroms began to break out across the country…
The most well-known incident was the Moscow pogrom, which took place from May 26 to 29, 1915. At that time, a wave of terror swept through the capital, targeting the German population: according to various sources, between 50,000 people took part in mass riots, destroying 475 businesses and 207 apartments and houses. According to the most widely accepted account, 113 German and Austrian subjects were recognized as victims, as well as 489 subjects of the Russian Empire with foreign surnames and 90 with purely Russian surnames. The damages amounted to more than 50 million rubles. The number of victims remains unclear to this day (after all, it’s not exactly a popular topic).
Descriptions of the pogrom and recollections of it can be found, in particular, in the book by Vladimir Ruga and Andrei Kokorev, *Everyday Life in Moscow: Essays on Urban Life During World War I*.
Another bloody tragedy unfolded at a neighboring factory owned by Robert Schrader. According to N. P. Kharlamov’s account, it unfolded as follows: “…Some of the workers, who had been demonstrating with portraits of the tsar and national flags, first broke into the apartment of the factory’s managing director—who had already been evicted from it— the German subject Hermann Jansen, and then into the neighboring apartment of the Russian subject, hereditary noblewoman Betty Engels, whose two sons served as ensigns in the Russian Army. Hiding in the Engels’ apartment were Jansen’s wife, Emilia Jansen; his sister, Concordia Jansen—a Dutch subject; and his mother-in-law, Emilia Stolle—a German subject. All four women were captured; two of them—Betty Engels and Concordia Jansen—were drowned in a drainage canal, while the other two were beaten so severely that Emilia Jansen died at the scene of the beating, while 70-year-old Emilia Stolle died in the hospital, where she had been taken by the police who had beaten her…
…The crowd ransacked Schrader’s factory and set Engels’ apartment on fire; moreover, they prevented the fire department from extinguishing the blaze and the police from removing the bodies of the murdered women. According to police officer Dievsky, who had survived the horrors of the 1905 armed uprising in Moscow, he “had never seen such ferocity or such rage in the crowd—neither then nor at any other time in his life—as it had reached by the evening of May 27. They were practically madmen, hearing and understanding nothing…” The only thing the mayor was able to do that day was to issue an order to remove all Germans from Moscow’s factories. As for the rioters, he described them as follows: “…A good, cheerful, patriotic crowd.” General Adrianov assessed the events in the city as “ordinary street rioting, which has now come to an end.”
…On the morning of May 28, work came to a halt at all factories in Moscow. Dense crowds filled the streets. On Nikolskaya Street, the Ferrein Partnership’s pharmacy—which, among other things, supplied Moscow hospitals with medicines—was ransacked. Five puds of alcohol retrieved from its basements were drunk on the spot. Police action was limited to “taking into custody” the German businessmen—they were taken to prison behind its sturdy walls… By two o’clock, the people’s anger began to erupt in concrete actions. The first to be ransacked were the “Eynem” and “Zindel” stores in the Upper Shopping Arcades. Then the wave of pogroms swept through all the central streets. In a short time, eight stores and seven offices were smashed to pieces. In addition to Germans, the victims included Russians, French, and even P. P. Wortman, the honorary consul of the Colombian government…
…Certain principles were also evident in the way the protests themselves were carried out. Stores and offices were not looted, but simply reduced to rubble: windows were smashed, furniture, counters, and shelves were broken; merchandise was damaged and thrown onto the street. A. P. Martynov, head of the Moscow security department, wrote about what he saw: “When I was riding down Neglinnoy Passage two days later, my horse was stepping over piles of Knebel’s art publications. The situation was no better on many other streets.” During the ransacking of Knebel’s firm, the manuscripts and illustrative material for Igor Grabar’s *History of Russian Art* were destroyed. From Zimmerman’s music store, grand pianos and upright pianos were being hurled onto the cobblestone pavement from the second-floor windows.
…Before long, the pogroms were accompanied by looting. On Varvarka Street, at the main office of the Vogau & Co. trading house, fireproof safes were broken into, and all the money disappeared. The rioters did the same to the goods in the warehouses. Finally, the company’s building was set on fire. And there were many such places throughout Moscow. By the night of May 29, the “patriots” had stopped distinguishing between who was German and who was not. For example, on Bolshaya Spasskaya Street, a printing house owned by Praskovya Dmitrievna Grosse, the “widow of a Prussian subject,” was attacked by a crowd of several thousand people. Despite the presentation of documents proving that the owner was a second-guild merchant and a Russian subject, the business was ransacked and set on fire. The fire destroyed all finished products: sheet music printed for the Rumyantsev Museum, the Bolshoi Theater, the Conservatory, the Synodal School, and Sergei Rachmaninoff.”
The pogrom also affected the young Boris Pasternak, who recalled those events as follows:
At that time, over two separate periods with breaks of about a year in between, I served as a private tutor in the household of the wealthy merchant Moritz Philipp, acting as a governess to their son Walter, a charming and affectionate boy. That summer, during the anti-German riots in Moscow, Philipp’s office and private mansion were also ransacked, along with the offices of major firms such as Einem, Ferain, and others. The destruction was carried out according to a plan, with the police’s knowledge. The employees’ belongings were left untouched; only the owners’ property was targeted. Amid the chaos, my underwear, wardrobe, and other personal items were spared, but my books and manuscripts were swept up in the general turmoil and destroyed
. B. L. Pasternak, “People and Situations”
However, it was not the loss of his archive that horrified Boris Pasternak. What horrified him at the time was something entirely different.
Namely—the police’s callous inaction, the mob’s brutality, and the defenselessness of the innocent, long-assimilated Germans, of whom there were already so few left in Moscow. The Filippov family found refuge with their eldest daughter (she was married to a Russian and went by the neutral surname Kotlyarevskaya). Pasternak suggested to the Filippovs that they entrust Walter to him so that he could live peacefully in Molodye—Leonid Osipovich had once again rented a dacha there; the factory owner agreed, and Boris left with his ward for the Stolbovaya station. He stayed there throughout June, and in July he left Walter in the care of his family.
There were no German pogroms in Kharkiv (and thank God for that). However, by law, male German and Austrian citizens between the ages of 18 and 45 living in our city were subject to arrest and deportation—since they were formally considered prisoners of war. People could also be arrested for speaking German in a public place, expressing joy at the victory of German troops, or, for example, for showing a movie in a theater about how good life is in Germany.
The numerous German colonies in the Kharkiv Governorate (which, believe it or not, we actually had) attracted considerable attention from both local and central authorities.
It is clear that the attitude toward them was more than just biased. An excerpt from a speech delivered on June 14, 1915, by a deputy of the 1915 Kharkiv Provincial Zemstvo serves as an illustration of the anti-German sentiment in the Kharkiv region “On the Elimination of German Land Ownership in the Kharkiv Province”:
…At a time when the entire world is fighting a treacherous enemy, there is widespread doubt and apprehension within the country regarding the success of our struggle against the “internal German,” his dominance in economic life, and especially in the field of agriculture. The enemy is not only ahead of us but also behind us. It has become apparent that German settlements are situated in a position advantageous to an advancing enemy, and that these settlements are virtually forts, fortified positions…
On January 14, 1916, Stepan Petrovich Beletsky, Comrade (now Deputy—Ed.) Minister of the Interior, sent a telegraphic inquiry to Kharkiv. The senator wished to be provided with information about all German colonies in the Kharkiv Governorate, as well as the number of colonists and their sentiments.
And so, telegrams and reports from district commissioners began to arrive at the Kharkiv Provincial Administration from various districts. For the most part, they read as follows: “There are no German colonies in the district.”
However, there were indeed German settlements in the Zmiiv, Izium, and Starobil’s’k districts—and quite a few of them.
In their reports (many of which, incidentally, were marked “confidential”), the district governors described the German colonies in great detail. Among other things, the documents noted: “The mood in the colony is peaceful.” Everyone did this—except for one.
In a typewritten report by the Zmiiv County Magistrate on the German colony of “Horokhivka,” following the phrase “the mood is calm,” a chilling handwritten note in ink reads: “But, apparently, they desire German rule.”
Did this man realize that, by doing this, he was essentially signing a death warrant for 86 men and 89 women of the Lutheran faith who had arrived in Sloboda Ukraine from the Taurida Governorate? After all, given the anti-German sentiment at the time, these people were doomed after such an act.
The village of Horokhivka, which was formerly a German colony, still exists today. It is located in the Lozovsky District of the Kharkiv Oblast. According to information posted online, as many as 2 people live there…
The chilling handwritten note on the document “but, apparently, they desire German rule” speaks more than eloquently to us about the sentiments that prevailed at that time in Sloboda Ukraine and the “dark chapters” in the history of our region, which must be discussed and remembered.
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