‘Kishinev’s pogrom may well be the best known of all moments in the Russian Jewish past and the one most persistently, lavishly misunderstood,’ writes Steven J Zipperstein at the start of this book. His gripping account of the great Kishinev pogrom of 1903 tells a story that has never before been related in such detail. It has uncanny parallels with Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide, a brilliant account of the slaughter of Jews in the Polish (now Ukrainian) town of Buczacz during the Second World War.

Zipperstein has gathered horrifying testimony of the three days of murder, rape and bestiality at Kishinev (now Chișinău, capital of Moldova) at Easter 1903. The events there heralded a new reality in European history. The primitive level of the mob violence and the terrible