Pogroms are riots committed against ethnic communities with the intent of destroying them. Historically the term "pogrom" has been applied to Jews. Pogroms began early in the 1880s in Tsarist Russia, lasting for decades. They spread west to Germany and continued through until the Holocaust.
The word originates from Russia, with a combination of the prefis po- and the verb gromit. The first major pogroms occurred in what is now present-day Ukraine and Poland. Another much bloodier wave of attacks left more than two thousand dead in Odessa. Other pogroms occured in Kishinev, Limerick, Kyiv, Siedlce, Adana, Tredegar, Sarajevo, Lwów, Guba City, Pinsk, Vilna, Tulsa, Hebron, and Iaşi.