The Central European University

Jewish Studies Program

cordially invites you to a lecture by

Mihály Kálmán

 (Central European University)

A Forgotten Jewish Army and/or Soviet Proxies? Jewish Self-Defense and Counterinsurgent Paramilitarism in Civil War Ukraine, 1920-1924.

Amidst the murderous pogroms of the Russian Civil War a powerful Jewish self-defense network emerged in Ukraine. Legalized and backed by the Soviet government, it was co-opted to suppress insurgencies on the Ukrainian countryside, thereby prolonging its existence despite increasing opposition on the part of some Soviet and Soviet Jewish authorities. This talk will uncover the history of this largely forgotten Jewish paramilitary force, and disentangle the paradoxes of the uneasy Soviet-Jewish military alliance against Ukrainian “banditism.”

Tuesday, October 18 at 6 p.m.

Gellner Room, Monument Building

Mihaly Kalman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at CEU. Arriving from Harvard University, Kalman wrote his dissertation on Jewish soldiers’ organizations and paramilitaries during the Russian Civil War, and the transplantation of self-defense activists’ experiences to Mandatory Palestine. Apart from a number of forthcoming articles on these topics, he has also published on the interwar debates around Hungarian-Jewish Olympians.

A reception will follow