The year 1917 transformed Jewish life, setting in motion a sudden and intense period of emancipation. Just days after the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the formation of the Provisional Government, all legal restrictions on Russian Jewry were lifted. More than 140 anti-Jewish statutes, totalling some 1,000 pages, were removed overnight. To mark this historic moment of abolition, a special meeting was convened by the Petrograd Soviet. Symbolically, the meeting happened to fall on 24 March 1917 – the eve of Passover. The Jewish delegate addressing those in attendance immediately made the connection: the February Revolution, he said, was comparable with the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt.1 Formal emancipation, however, was not accompanied by the disappearance of antisemitism. In 1917, the spectre of pogroms once again returned to Russia, prefiguring the dramatic escalation of antisemitic violence that would erupt during the Civil War in 1918 and 1919.