The “Bloody Election” in Drohobycz: Violence, Urban Politics, and National Memory in an Imperial Borderland

Abstract

AbstractOn 19 June 1911, dozens of Jews and Ukrainians were killed by the Austrian militia in Drohobycz at the command of the Jewish leader of the city, Jacob Feuerstein, to ensure the victory of the Jewish assimilationist candidate, aligned with the Polish elite, over the Zionist candidate. While dominating news at the time, reaching front pages around the globe, this event remains relatively unknown today even among specialists. This study for the first time explicates the history of this remarkable event while challenging the nationalist narratives that successfully shaped Jewish, Ukrainian, and Polish collective memory in its aftermath. It questions the extent of the role nationalism plays in violent political conflict, even in a seemingly hypernationalized environment, and demonstrates how nationalist rhetoric masks other motivations of actors. This microhistory builds on recent efforts to locate national indifference in the modern period, in the eye of the nationalist storm. At the same time, the success of nationalists to reframe this event in nationalist terms demonstrates how nationalism could shape historical memory and successfully push back against this indifference. The massacre demonstrates that nationalization was a gradual process, during which other identities persisted and other factors guided political events, while exposing how nationalist leaders paradoxically used such moments to obfuscate this reality and advance their own agendas.