While revolutions were shaking Europe and civil society with equal rights and duties was emerging along with nation-states, in Tsarist Russia the serfs remained serfs, and Jews were blamed for everything bad.
Russia, reaching far beyond Warsaw, enriched the world's vocabulary with the word pogrom, and the Russian pogroms of the late nineteenth century were as bloody as those of the Middle Ages in our country. Not surprisingly, most of the adherents of Zionism, the Jewish national movement promoting the establishment of a Jewish state for Jews in which they could live in safety and without fear of pogroms, came from the territory of Tsarist Russia.
When Austrian troops failed to hold the eastern front in Halych during World War I, the Jewish population there began to flee westward in panic terror of Russian barbarism. Although Austrian and German troops protected the Jewish population from the excesses of the local population, the Tsarist army advanced. The authorities ordered the evacuation of civilians of all faiths, and refugees, including Jewish ones, were gradually placed in smaller settlements in the interior of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Jewish Soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Galicia, 1914.