In general usage, a pogrom is an outbreak of mass violence directed against a minority religious, ethnic, or social group; it usually implies central instigation and control, or at minimum the passivity of local authorities. The term came into widespread usage after the riots of 1881 and 1882 in the Russian Empire. While the standard Russian bureaucratic term for mass unrest was besporiadki (disorders), the occasional use of the word pogrom to describe the events of 1881 and 1882 popularized the term in the West. The Oxford English Dictionary records its first use in the Times of London on 17 March 1882 (“That the ‘Pogromen’ [riots against the Jews] must be stopped . . .”), defining the word as “an organized massacre in Russia for the destruction or annihilation of any body or class: orig. and esp. applied to those directed against the Jews.” In Soviet historiography, the word was applied to violence carried out by reactionary groups against opponents of the tsarist regime, and it thereby gained a political but lost a specifically “Jewish” connotation. In contemporary Russian, pogrom is used for violence directed against any ethnic group.
