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disruptions of traditional Jewish life in history.
    In the minds of Europeans, the Russian deportation altered the Jewish question. Tens of thousands of Jews fled the Russian Empire, creating an impression in European cities that Jews from the East were suddenly everywhere. The deportations shaped the lives of many of the major Jewish revolutionaries of the twentieth century, both of the Right and the Left. As very young boys both Menachem Begin and Avraham Stern, later right-wing radicals, were displaced. Within the Russian Empire, Jews deported from the front made for the major cities, such as Moscow, Petrograd, and Kyiv, where they were often shunned as spies and denied employment and shelter. After the February 1917 Revolution, as the empire lurched towards becoming a republic, the Jews were formally emancipated and became citizens. Of the sixty thousand or so Jews in Moscow at this time, about half were refugees. Many of them joined Lenin in his second Russian revolution that November. Lenin thanked Jews for their decisive support in the city that he would make his capital.
    As of November 1917, Jews were suddenly equal members of a new revolutionary state rather than a repressed religious minority in an empire. The vast majority of Jews tried in 1918 to return to their homes, only to find them, very frequently, inhabited by other people. The Jews’ neighbors did not want to return what they had taken, and often attacked the Jews instead. As one regime gave way to another, Jews were targeted by everyone involved. The first pogroms after the revolution were carried out by the Red Army; but the ideology of their commanders was internationalist, and officers usually tried to stop anti-Jewish violence.
    The other side generally did not show such restraint. The men who took up arms against Lenin’s revolution represented no coherent movement; the closest thing to an ideology of counterrevolution was antisemitism. Opponents of the new regime, seeking to draw support from the population, wed traditional religious antisemitism to a present sense of threat, portraying the Bolsheviks as a modern Satan. As the civil war ground on, killing millions of people, journalists and propagandists who opposed revolution developed the Judeobolshevik myth. They drew some of their ideas from the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The notion of global Jewish power seemed to explain the double catastrophe of revolution and military defeat. It transformed the victory of a universal over a national idea into a plot of an identifiable group of people who could be punished.
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    Germany backed the revolutionaries in 1917, only to find itself on the side of the counterrevolutionaries not long thereafter. During the chaos that followed Lenin’s revolution, Germany was able to build a chain of client states between the Baltic and the Black Sea. The most important of these was Ukraine. The German plan for 1918 was to recall troops from the east to fight a final battle on the western front while feeding Germans from Ukrainian grain. The Germans called the treaty they signed with the Ukrainian state in February 1918 the “Bread Peace,” and it was very popular in Germany. German troops quickly drove the Red Army from Ukraine. But the scheme to exploit the country to win the war failed, not least because of the resistance of Ukrainian peasants, militias, and political parties. Nevertheless, much of Ukraine was, for a memorable six months in 1918, something like a German colony. The image of a Ukrainian cornucopia penetrated German minds at a time of blockade and hunger.

Once Germany was defeated on the western front and forced to sign an armistice in November 1918, Lenin’s commissar for war, Leon Trotsky, turned his attention to Germany’s abandoned client states in what had been the western reaches of the Russian Empire. In Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, German officers and soldiers remained to fight against Trotsky’s Red Army. Ukraine